by D. D. Ayres
“Okay, she. I know how easy it is to distract a man.” She reached out playfully and ran her fingers up his thigh until he grabbed them to stop their progress.
She chuckled and pulled free. “But, honestly, I’ve hauled your unconscious weight around. Getting you in and out of a vehicle, and into that store without causing attention? My bet is on your attacker being a he. But how did he render you unconscious?”
Noah scowled. “I was roofied. They found evidence of it in my blood. I could have been walking and talking for a short time without having any memory of it.”
Her mouth fell open. “Isn’t that proof you couldn’t have started the fire?”
“Unfortunately, no.” He explained Durvan’s theory about drugging himself to avoid the pain of dying in the fire.
She shivered. “But that’s insane.”
“Many professionals think people who attempt suicide are at least momentarily unbalanced. But you were telling me about this guy Wise.”
“Right.” She cast a long look at the remaining half of the pie before handing it over to him. “Wise is too cheap to have his cameras monitored. He says the cameras and signage are deterrent enough. But, what if someone knew he didn’t have them monitored? And knew the store was empty. That would be additional reasons to choose that place.”
“Who would know about the phony cameras?”
“No that many. The tenants, though I don’t remember being told about them. And whoever installed them.”
Noah thought long and hard about what she’d said. It was dusk now. The bright red orange glow on the western horizon rendered the rolling terrain of upper Hill Country in soft charcoal black silhouettes. “You’ve got a theory, Carly, and are trying to find facts that fit it. That’s not how a detective works. We discover facts and then develop a theory from the actual hard evidence.”
The rebuke hurt, he could tell, but she shook it off. He liked her better with every second. “Are you a regular at the Brewery?”
“No. A going-away party was being held there for one of our guys who’s moving.”
“Did invites go out?”
“Nothing that formal. A few text messages with the date and time made the rounds of the firefighters, and a few other friends.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “So then, the arsonist might have heard about the party before deciding to act. He would have set things up ahead of time, knowing when and where to find you.” She gasped. “Oh, Noah. What if it’s someone you know?”
He glanced at her with knowing eyes. “That’s been a given from the first. Hell of a thing.”
“Yes.” Her voice was small as she reached across the console to again lay her hand on his thigh. This time there was no attempt at playfulness. This was a touch of sympathy. He’d take it. “What about other possibilities? Any enemies? People you’ve arrested?”
He reached for her hand and curled his thicker fingers over her slender ones. “Already checked them out. All but one is still in prison. He got out last year and promptly left the state.”
“What about unsolved arson cases? Maybe there’s someone you’re looking for who’s afraid you’re close to catching him.”
“You’re scaring me, Carly.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you think too well for my peace of mind.”
She smiled. “I’m catching your train of thought?”
She was derailing it—with her touch, her interest, her intensity—but she couldn’t know that.
“What if I went back and asked Mr. Wise—ow!”
He’d gripped her hand hard. “Dammit, Carly. We’re dealing with a killer. Get that through your gorgeous head. He could be a colleague, or even a casual acquaintance. He could be the last person I’d suspect. Now do you understand why you need to stay away from me? I can’t trust anyone.”
“You can trust me.” She squeezed back, added her second hand as reinforcement.
Muttering a curse, Noah flipped on his turn signal, and jerked the wheel right, sending them fishtailing off the highway onto a two-lane country road and out into the darkness of the spring night.
Carly yelped and grabbed the console with both hands a few minutes later, as they bounced off the blacktop and onto the gravel shoulder. Harley barked loudly in protest, pushing his nuzzle forward over Noah’s shoulder.
“Harley. Down.” At the sound of his handler’s voice, Harley subsided back onto the backseat. But his vocal mutterings were eloquent in their protest of Noah’s driving.
Noah braked, slowing the truck to a stop on the edge of the road.
Carly turned an angry face to him. “What the hell do you—?”
Before she could finish her protest, Noah put the car in park, unsnapped his seatbelt, and surged across the console to pin her between his body and the door.
“I’m done talking, Carly.”
He slid one hand behind her head and released her seatbelt with the other. She only had time to catch a breath before he covered her mouth with his.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It had been humming in the air between them. Carly had been fighting her own feelings so hard she hadn’t registered Noah’s fierce hunger. Or maybe he was just better at masking his feelings when it counted. But now the pretense was over. The simmering heat between them burst into full flame when his mouth covered hers.
There wasn’t a lot of space with the console dividing the front but Noah seemed to have decided that the lack of space was the console’s problem, not his. He sprawled across it to get to his goal. How he managed it, she couldn’t guess. But it really didn’t matter.
She closed her eyes as the kiss went on and on, the better to just feel. The heat of his mouth seeped into her. The muscular rasp of his tongue tangled wetly with hers, tasting of French fries and cherry pie. It was a full body contact kiss, no urgency greater than the need to be lip to lip. It took her a moment to realize she was only touching him with her mouth. It seemed so much, so intimate, but ultimately not enough.
Her arms slid around his torso, careful not to touch the weapon holstered under his left arm and then she was holding handfuls of his shirt, trying if possible to get closer. The heat of his body lit fires along her nerve endings, making her shiver with desire.
Harley, feeling no doubt left out, was the first to voice a complaint. He jumped forward into the space between the front seats and landed all ninety pounds of his furry weight on Noah’s back, whining as if he thought he was needed to referee whatever game the two humans in the front seat were playing.
Noah broke the kiss to say sharply, “Harley, down.”
Reluctantly, the shepherd backed off and subsided onto the backseat.
“Stay.”
Ears twitching, Harley rested his muzzle on his forepaws. But the high-pitched whining continued for a few more seconds.
Breathing hard, Noah looked back at Carly. He didn’t kiss her again, but he didn’t release her either. As he eased back across to his side, he brought her with him until they embraced across the console. There was no caress to his touch, or even encouragement. He seemed focused on containment. Of his feelings, or hers?
“I shouldn’t have done that. But I needed to know if what I’m feeling is real. That you’re not just some fantasy I dreamed up because my life is so screwed over I can’t see my way clear.”
His gaze fixed on hers, he took her hand and laid her palm flat against his shirtfront over his heart. “You feel that?”
She nodded. “That’s just hormones racing because you’re about to get lucky.” Carly prayed her voice sounded lighter than the heavy hammering of her own heart in response. “Don’t look so grim. It’s just sex.”
“That’s not what your mouth says.” His gaze focused on the fullness of her lower lip. “It says I matter to you.”
“All that in a kiss?” She meant to sound skeptical. She sounded uncertain, and astonished. He was right. She’d never been about casual sex. One-night stands began and ended with her f
irst three experimentations with no-strings encounters. They gave her too little of what she hoped for, and nothing worth repeating. But where was her self-possession when it came to Noah? Burned up in the consuming heat of his kiss.
He was staring at her hard, but his expression said he was still fighting the raw lust between them. “Carly, I—”
“You’re right. Getting together was such a bad idea. On every level.” Her voice shook from the combustibility of her feelings as she prepared to release him.
She dragged her hand down his shirtfront, intending to pull away from the warmth of his body beneath. Instead, her fingers found his belt buckle and curled into it to hold on to him. “Does it have to have words? Can’t it just be?” There it was in her voice again, a sound desperate and breathless.
He brushed his thumb across her lower lip. He was so close she could see herself reflected in his gaze. “So what do we do?”
She turned a hand palm up and held it before him. “There’s a saying, if you love someone set them free.”
Noah cupped her hand in his, and stared into her palm. “I’m not sure which half of that sentence scares me more. I do know I don’t want you to set me free. Not until we’ve had a few meals, played Frisbee in the park with Harley, seen a few movies—ones you’ll hate or I’ll hate but we’ll watch because the other picked it, argued over … I don’t care what.”
“You want normal?” That was the scariest idea yet.
“Yeah. Normal. Whatever the hell that is.”
He hadn’t mentioned the first part of her sentence. If you love someone … Too soon, much too soon. Why had she said those words aloud? She usually kept things at bay that scared her, even when doing them.
Time to change up the rhythm.
She ran a finger back and forth along the top curve of his belt buckle. In the light from the dashboard she saw that it was made of heavy German silver with a raised gold rope edging, chased silver scrollwork, and the star of Texas in gold at the center. She hadn’t seen it before. But then she hadn’t seen much of him—well, not dressed, anyway.
“You like it? It was my grandfather’s.” His voice held pride of family and tradition.
“Hm.” That’s when it hit her. Noah was a for-real cowboy. She didn’t date cowboys. Not country boys nor urban cowboys, or poseurs.
A Texan by birth, she’d never had a thing for men who wore big-brimmed hats and wouldn’t take them off even inside restaurants and movie theaters. That was rude. Everybody worth spit in Texas owned at least one pair of boots. But she avoided men who wore boots that looked more like trophies than footwear.
Her gaze skimmed down his denim-clad legs, though she had to drag them past his package, to where his legs disappeared in to the darkness beneath the steering wheel.
She couldn’t see his feet. But did it matter?
Her gaze rose with a question. He held her look for a beat and the heat in the space between them expanded.
Oh lord, they weren’t going to stop. He was going to kiss her again and she was going to let him. In a minute, they’d be snatching each other naked, and enjoying every second of it.
The glaring headlights of a passing car followed by the sustained blare of a horn broke the moment.
Carly blinked, trying to pull back from the sexual lure of the man before her. He’d just told her that he thought the man who wanted him dead could be a colleague, perhaps someone he thought of as a friend. What kind of man made enemies like that? What sort of man was Noah? Really. Up to now she’d been operating on instinct … and lust. There was one way to find out in a hurry.
“Tell me about your ex-wife.”
He blinked. “Now?”
“Now.” Let her be a Miss Sugar Mill of Texas runner-up, maybe. Or a barrel-rider sorority girl. Something so far from her experience that the disconnect between them would be glaringly apparent even to him.
Noah moved back behind the wheel, but he held on to her hand. “Her name was Jillian Tilson. We met through mutual friends. She was fun. The life of the party. Not the most beautiful woman in the room, but no man could take his eyes off her.” He gave his head a tiny shake. “I was just an average guy. Not much for partying. But after she’d flirted with everybody in the room that night she chose me. I couldn’t believe my luck. And she stuck.”
“She sounds like a dream girlfriend.”
“Yeah. Only the kind of dream varied with her moods. Nobody had higher days. Or darker nights.” He began drawing gentle circles on her palm with his thumb. “A few months into our relationship, I asked her how she saw us. I never believed she’d stay yet, against my better judgment, I was falling hard. She surprised the hell out of me by proposing. She said I was a rock to her river.”
“You channeled her energy and evened her out.”
Noah’s thumb stilled. “How do you know that?”
Carly nodded. “My husband said he was attracted to my American industriousness and earnestness. He was French and didn’t take life seriously. So you married.”
Noah nodded, his thumb skimming her palm. “Most folks don’t like the unpredictability in daily life of being a first responder’s spouse. Jillian said she liked that she could never be sure when I’d turn up, or even if. She thrived on the adrenaline of knowing I was risking my life every time I went out the door. She said it made her crave me.”
He looked up curiously at Carly. She shrugged, not sure she wanted to put into words what she was feeling. It felt unsafe.
“It worked for two years. But then we started fighting. About everything. She never wanted children. She even made it a condition of marriage.”
Surprised washed through Carly. She might not know many things about Noah, but she did know, without a doubt, that he was a family man. “You thought she’d change her mind.”
He nodded. “Sounds lame when you say it. But, yeah.” He expression sobered and his thumb stilled in the well of her palm. “Then Jillian turned up pregnant.”
A little chill ran over Carly’s skin. “What happened?”
“I was over the moon. Thrilled. She reacted like I had raped her. Said I’d betrayed our relationship. And then she walked out.”
He took a deep breath that shuddered through his body, as if the ugly memory was still alive, somewhere deep. “She was gone four days. I assumed she’d had an abortion. But she hadn’t. She told me if I wanted a baby so badly she’d have it. But she wanted out of the marriage after the birth.”
Carly held her breath, unable to think of a thing to say.
“She played her part. God, she was the best pregnant woman ever. Never complained, looked radiant all nine months. Had every one of our friends convinced I was the luckiest bastard on the planet. And then Andy was born.”
A softness came into Noah’s face that Carly hadn’t seen before. “Andy was beautiful, even covered in afterbirth. They handed him to me in the delivery room and he peed all over my shirt. I knew then I’d never let go. Do whatever it took to keep my son safe.”
He reached up with their joined hands and rubbed his forehead. “Can we talk about the rest of this some other time?”
“Okay.” Carly tried to pull her hand away but he held on, closing his fingers around hers. “Your turn.”
Carly took a breath. Fair was fair. “Arnaud was a top fashion photographer in Europe. He was known for telling a story with his photographs. Sometimes in a single frame. His specialty was tasteful eroticism, posing nudes where the merchandise seemed a beautiful afterthought. Female and male models threw themselves at him. Having him do a shoot with you could make a career.”
She watched Noah’s expression go remote. “The ones he took of you are exceptional.”
“That happened later. First time I was hired to be in his photos, I refused to undress for him because he wouldn’t explain why I needed to be naked. I lost the gig. It was a big job. My agent was furious, and dropped me. Said I was unprofessional. You have to understand. No one said no to Arnaud. A few months later, we
ran into one another on another assignment. He said my refusal intrigued him, and he had a proposal for me.” Her mouth curved up when Noah snorted his opinion of that. “Not that kind. Strictly business. He became my agent.”
He proposed using me in a spread intended for French Vogue. They said no. I was an unknown, and the labels were unimpressed. But Arnaud knew the value of his work. He offered to forego his fee if the spread failed. It was a huge success.” She smiled, remembering a happier time. After that, he used me in shoots that I hadn’t been booked for until he was hired. The lingerie modeling was a natural progression from that first series. I knew I could trust him not to take advantage.”
Noah watched her quietly. “You fell in love with him.”
“Oh yes. He was ten years older, and very worldly. I felt protected. When Arnaud was working he was happy, focused, intense. He didn’t like downtime. When he had it, he went looking for stimulation.”
“Drugs.”
“Yes. It isn’t uncommon in that world.”
“What about you?”
“I had two wisdom teeth out at sixteen. They gave me a codeine-based painkiller. It made me feel like my heart was going to burst through my chest. Since then, I resist anything stronger than aspirin.”
He held her eyes, steady and without apology. “I had to ask.”
“You’re a cop.”
“Why did you marry him?”
“I didn’t, at first. I told him I couldn’t marry an addict. So, he went into a clinic in Switzerland and then spent six months staying clean. When we married, we agreed to leave the fashion world because it offered too much temptation. But sober, Arnaud struggled.” In embarrassment, she heard her voice break.
Noah reached out and cupped her chin. “What happened?”
“A relapse. So trite.” Her free hand waved the thought away. “It had been a year and we were running out of money when I was offered a weeklong job in Sweden. He encouraged me to take it.” She smiled, but it was only the tightening of muscles. “While I was gone he ran into some old friends. The coroner said it was common for relapsed addicts to forget their tolerance for drugs had reset to lower doses.”