by Shirl Anders
“’Kay,” she whispered, then more awesome appeared because Officer Finn smiled and he went from hot to smoking hot.
Then she did quiver.
In delight.
In pure, lovely delight.
A man like he was didn’t ever flirt full out with a woman like she was. It was impossible.
Finn leaned back slowly, but his gaze was all for her. “Say my name, bella, so I know you get me.”
“Finn,” she said, trying to unclench her purse and sit straighter.
Lordy, he’d called her “beautiful” by saying “bella” in that sinfully delicious voice of his. Her? He was like rough and rugged and she was like suburban chick; how could those two be interested in each other? She must be reading him wrong. Maybe he was a natural flirt?
“What’ll it be?” a woman demanded.
At the sound of the very loud voice, Finn turned, and Coco straightened so she could look beyond Finn’s big body, where she saw a platinum-blond waitress with black roots and an overly endowed chest. A chest that put Coco’s to shame, and it was all wrapped in a Harley tank top. The blond had smoky makeup and a deep frown.
“Lady, you look like you need a shot,” she announced, looking at Coco. “I take you for a Snake Bite or Wet Clit.”
Thirty minutes later, Coco slurred, while Finn watched her across the table. “Gordon, my snake of a husband, he doesn’t like my chocolate truffle cake with creamy ganache.”
She stopped to sip from the shot glass in front of her like she’d done for each of the three shots before that. Those tricked-out nails of hers, gripped around the small glass, were shiny pink and elegant, while her glossy light red lips pursed, just as if she might be getting ready to suck on the tip of a hard cock.
And fuck him, Finn could watch her do just that sipping thing a hundred times more, even though being irritated that she didn’t just slam the shot. Yeah, two hundred times, with her saying that word he didn’t know what the hell it was, “ganache.” Man, he wanted to taste it, though. She was sweet and she could fucking cook, if he had any guesses about it.
“Rumm,” she slurred in a whisper after her sip. “The secret’s I put rum in it, and what person wouldn’t like that?”
“Don’t know, babe,” he offered her, and he got rewarded again by her smile.
Beautiful went to exquisite when she smiled. And her damn name made him hard. Coco. Man, just kill him, because it was a perfect name for a hot babe. What he totally didn’t get was why he thought she was such a turn-on. Maybe it was the curvy, sultry style she had going on, without really being aware of it. But tits and ass? He’d never looked hard at that particular feminine combo before, except when he’d met—
Tess.
Then he knew. Coco reminded him of Tess, in a darker, sultrier way, but more innocent compared to Tess’ sass. What he did know for certain was Coco Maxwell wasn’t involved with her husband in a human-trafficking ring. On first look, Gordon Maxwell’s crime seemed to be cheating with Finn’s fucked-up ex. How crazy was that. But something wasn’t sitting right, because Coco claimed Gordon had been missing for weeks and she’d been in town trying to find him for several of those.
She’d said Gordon had just disappeared out of their marriage, and that sounded damn well suspicious.
“Babe, how’d you think he was here?” Finn asked, while he kept glancing down to read a few updated texts off his phone.
His team also wondered where the hell he was, because he’d given his life for those busts, and the sting wasn’t just at Rowdie’s, it was multi-location and multi-state. So he had to decide what to do with pretty Miss Coco so he could get back to his job and the fucking reward he deserved for being undercover and working the cases.
“I got a call,” she whispered with a slur.
Finn’s head snapped upright and his gaze cut to her as a gnarly bad feeling started in his gut, warning him immediately he was not going to like what he heard.
“Details, bella. Give me every word.”
Coco had the sleekest dark hair; it shone like silk and was long with waves and a few curls leading toward that sultry, voluptuous babe look. She was decked out in white ... what looked like a fancy tank top ... that hugged her nicely full and big breasts, which were partially covered by a shirtwaist dark blue blazer.
That little jacket did a backdrop to her chest and the creamy slops of her cleavage showing over the top of the table across from him. She had on some piece of white gold jewelry that dangled nearly down into her cleavage, and drew every male eye right there. Those nails, those lips, that makeup, that hair; she was put together and she worked it.
At first glance, he might have thought she worked it too much and would be self-absorbed, but that was until her first smile hit him, which proceeded to blow him away and blow away any doubts he had that she was anything but sweet.
Her brow furrowed and her cute nose scrunched, while her full lips pouted.
“The man on the phone wouldn’t tell me his name, but he said if anybody asked me, and if I told anybody anything, Gordon would be dead, so I better keep my mouth shut and it’d be best if I left town too. Left so no one could ask me any questions I could get Gordon in trouble for.”
“Damn it,” Finn said, before she was finished.
Finn saw the look of fear in her brown eyes and he knew she was smart enough to be afraid of that phone call, but loyal enough to override it to go after her man ... fear or not.
“So,” she drawled out. “I checked his cell phone records from Erma May’s grandson, who works for a major carrier.” She leaned forward, giving him a stellar cleavage shot that he had the intense urge to lick. “It was kind of illegal,” she whispered.
Finn really wondered why Coco Maxwell saying the word “illegal” did things to him. But he growled under his breath, because once again he could not get into it right then, so he made a quick decision, the only one he could see making.
“Safe house,” he muttered.
***
Coco found out Officer Finn “bad boy” O’Neil’s idea of a safe house was a multilevel log home on a beautiful lake outside of town about ten miles. Maybe it was because she was tipsy, but she’d never thought about disagreeing with him. All she’d really done was keep looking at him from the passenger seat of his Jeep, because he was hot.
Amazingly, super hot.
It was as if her eyes couldn’t stay away from the hotness now that they were drunk eyes. Nothing like it had ever happened to her ... she kind of wanted it to not end. She definitely didn’t want it to end in the part where she was the clueless wife who had gotten dumped over a hot younger woman.
She still couldn’t get that the woman she’d seen plastered to Gordon had been Officer Finn’s wife. They really didn’t fit one another. Not like she and Gordon did. Gordon and she were a typical suburban couple, and really, that blond probably fit there too.
So Gordon kind of fit the blond, expect Gordon was not sexual and it was astonishing to see him being so. But the one person that didn’t fit being together with any of them was Finn ... he needed a biker babe or a Penthouse pinup.
“That would so work,” she slurred, watching his really nice goatee move as he talked on his cell phone.
His arm was thrown up over the top of the steering wheel and he had a tattoo, which looked like black flames licking up over his muscular forearm. It was about the most attractive and manly thing she had ever seen.
Just that forearm.
Lord, it turned her on.
Then she blushed and got flustered about it. That made her mad. She was not a flustered kind of woman! She tugged her short jacket across her chest with mild irritation. She really was good enough for Officer O’Neil, even if she was a bit tame and a bit plump.
That didn’t make her out of his league, and she better stop thinking that way, because her momma brought her up to charm, and she could throw her feminine charm around with the best of them. She was not an old married woman.
&n
bsp; Well, she wasn’t freaking one anymore.
“Sugar, I need to get my things, at least,” Coco started to say, and she had a lot more to say.
But instantly Finn growled, “No.”
She turned to look at him, while the Jeep bounced them further up the driveway toward the spectacular log home. She squinted at him. He couldn’t just say “no” to her.
“But I want you to keep calling me sugar,” he said in his deep voice that sounded kind of like an order, but she didn’t care, because—
He was flirting with her.
Coco felt the heat in her cheeks, which she willed away with a slight toss of her head.
“You be good, and maybe I will,” she sassed.
She’d flirted right back at him. His dark eyes did amazing things that she felt all the way to her toes, then he looked out the Jeep windshield and she saw a slight smile on his face.
She loved that little smile. That meant smoking-hot Officer Finn had accepted her flirt. Wow.
“Babe,” he said, pulling the Jeep to a stop. “Things are crazy, I know, but I need you to take a leap of faith with me here. I’ll get your things. We will figure this all out, but I have important things I need to do right now.”
Coco opened her mouth to argue with him. What woman just let a man she barely knew whisk her away to some unknown spot? But then she realized that for the first time in a long time that a man might be trying to have her back. And that man seemed as if he had really important things to be officially doing, which he’d given up doing just to help get her stay out of a criminal sweep.
So instead being flippant, she got soft.
“Okay, sugar. I’ll leap,” she said.
Finn’s hand reached toward her, but then it stopped and edged back. Coco just knew he’d been about to cup her nape, because the look on his hard-angled face said so.
“Babe,” he said, shaking his head slightly, while his teeth showed whiter between the rich blackness of the goatee framing his mouth. “Fucking sweet.”
Warmth spread through Coco, in a way she’d never felt, and she knew she might do a lot of things to feel it again.
And that was how she found herself standing outside Finn O’Neil’s lake house log home with the key to it in her hand, while she watched his Jeep’s rear end going back down the driveway out of view.
He’d given her the key with the orders, “Make yourself at home, babe.”
Then Coco decided that what should have been the most awful day of her life ... just wasn’t.
Three] Sexy In A Way, He Felt Deep
Finn O’Neil’s multilevel log and stone lake house was amazing. From the outside, that was. The inside wasn’t really done. The outside had stone borders and terraces, and it was landscaped with pockets of bushes, flowers, and trees. There was a three-car garage, which she only saw from the outside, thick redwood columns for a portico entrance with stone facing, and a huge wooden door.
That big door pushed open surprisingly easily. Being so amazed by what she’d seen outside, Coco felt the letdown from amazement to disappointment, because the inside wasn’t as breathtaking as she’d expected. The flooring was undone and looked like dusty cement, there were wires hanging where she supposed lights and more light sockets would go, and she suspected the place didn’t have heating or cooling installed yet.
As she circled around in the unfinished great room with no furniture, she pulled out her cell phone and called her best friend Patty Ann. She really needed some Patty Ann advice, because Patty Ann always had advice. After spilling everything, because she always told Patty Ann everything, Patty Ann latched on to the part where she’d explained how smoking hot Finn was.
“Jump him,” Patty Ann advised.
“I just found out Gordon was cheating,” Coco exclaimed.
“Yeah, so you need to jump this hot Officer Finn.”
“Yes, Patty Ann, very hot, and I’m just me; besides, why would he want to let me do that?”
Patty Ann made a disbelieving sound.
“Babe, you’re so hot you don’t see it, but let’s get past that because I know you’ll argue. Instead, why don’t you tell me why he would ask you for a date, ask you to keep calling him sugar, and”—Patty Ann let that “and” roll around before she finished—“saved your ass by taking you to his house, which I can tell you is not the standard police safe house, babe. Why? Tell me why?”
“Maybe I wasn’t exciting enough in bed,” Coco half moaned, ignoring Patty Ann’s comments, as besties did a lot.
“You put on a French maid outfit, for God’s sakes,” Patty Ann exclaimed.
“I did,” Coco muttered, while she wandered through the house.
“And he went to sleep. Then you tried reading erotica to him, and he dozed off.”
“I did,” Coco muttered again, looking at Finn’s unfinished kitchen, which had no counters, but did have a very nice polished slab wood table with matching wooden chairs. It also had a stove and refrigerator, plus sink, so basically the essentials if you overlooked no cabinets or counters.
“You did that striptease and his cell rang and he took it. You bought special oils and tried to massage them on him and he wouldn’t let you, and you showed him a book on different positions in bed and told him you would try any of them he liked.”
“I did,” Coco mumbled, with a flash of heat in her cheeks. Laid out like that, it looked very different from having it happen piece by piece.
“You even bought lube and the cutest pink butt plug, for God’s sakes!”
“I did,” Coco said, more strongly.
That time Gordon’s excuse had been he didn’t want to hurt her. Well, she’d wanted him to hurt her, damn it ... besides, it wasn’t supposed to hurt.
“I especially liked the whipped-cream bikini you made on your body, and you so have to promise me you will do that with your hot-bodied officer when he jumps you.”
“He won’t.”
“He will, babe. He so will.”
“What will I do?”
“Let loose, Coco. Please, just let loose.”
They talked for another thirty minutes, going over what the hell Gordon was doing, and what she should do about it. By the time Patty and she hung up, Coco had been all through the downstairs, where she’d found one room with a TV and large leather couch, and then she’d made it through several rooms upstairs. She’d finally found the bedroom that had a bed, thank God, and that was where she sat finishing up her call.
“Okay, I will call your lawyer friend right away,” Coco said, then she lay back on the end of the unmade king bed, looking up at the log ceiling with more wires hanging out of it. “First thing in the morning,” she promised Patty Ann, then they cut the call.
Coco sighed as she curled sideways at the end of the bed next to her purse. She so hated to lie, but she had to lie to Patty Ann that way because Patty Ann would never understand why Coco just had to find out what Gordon was doing and confront him.
To do that, she would not be seeing a lawyer anytime soon.
Later that night, just after midnight, Finn sat in the chair facing his bed. He’d been home about twenty minutes and sitting with one motorcycle boot across his knee, while watching the woman asleep on his bed for most of that time. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a woman on his bed. Especially such a tempting one.
She had dark hair so rich he knew it would feel like silk through his fingers, and she had the kind of creamy white skin that was translucent on brunettes. Her lips were curved in a sultry pout and her lashes were long over her soft cheeks. She wasn’t young, but mature in age like he was, in a sexy way that he’d felt deeply when she talked to him with her accent and those “sugars” she said, which made him instantly hard.
But her clothes were all wrong for her. They should be tailored in a way to cup and show off her lush, full breasts. He thought short, airy skirts would look good on her with those crazy high heels she wore, which were curled up on the end of his bed. His eyes traced he
r painted toenails and the high arch of her feet in the four-inch silver heels she wore that had sexy little straps. Then his gaze moved to that gold piece of dangling jewelry she wore, which was nestled in her very nice cleavage.
Fucking attractive as hell pussy.
On his bed.
At midnight.
The thing about it was, after today, he was finally damn well free to maybe do something about that. The hell of it was, though—it was still “maybe,” because while he was free from being undercover, he was not free from the results.
One of which was curled on the end of his bed, which he liked a lot. But that in itself was an issue, because they were both still married, had just met, and while he’d gotten a little flirt from Coco and it had excited him, it still didn’t mean she was offering him an open invitation to crawl into bed with him right then. Though she was completely tempting him to do.
It certainly didn’t mean he could fuck her and then bounce her out, which was all he was ready for. There would be no more relationships in his life, before he figured out the character of the woman he was getting involved with. That meant all he was left with, for the moment, was just appreciating her being there, on his bed, and in his house.
Finn wiped a tired hand across his face; maybe he was thinking more about it than was really there. He’d been without a woman for so long, playing the undercover game, so maybe he was inventing something between them that wasn’t real.
Then, before he did something stupid like haul her up into his bed, strip her, and find out how real she was with his dick inside her, he got up and walked slowly out of the room.
Coco woke up with a bad headache and sunlight hurting her closed eyes, which was not a good sign, because she didn’t know how sunlight could hurt eyes that were closed. And while she was listing the bad things that she was waking up to, she added being sore from sleeping in a very weird position.
That was when she realized ... ohmylord, she’d slept with her makeup on!
That more than anything had her moving, and moving faster than her throbbing head wanted her to move, which meant she was wobbling on her heels toward an en suite bathroom.