by Lois Greiman
I tried to stop him. Tried to pull away, but the kiss was burning a hole straight through my lips to my pituitary gland. And that’s where I keep the command center for my hormones. They were coming alive like Pop Rocks in battery acid by the time he pushed me away.
“God dammit, McMullen! What the hell are you trying to do to me?”
My mind was a jumble. My knees felt unhinged and my emotions were roiling like the Red Sea. That’s the only explanation I have for my next action.
I slapped him. That’s right. I slapped him across the face like a wide-eyed starlet in a grade-B movie. One minute I was standing there, limp as a lettuce leaf in his arms, and the next I was cracking him across the cheek with all the force made possible by terror and estrogen toxicity. The strike of my palm against his face sounded like a gunshot in my tiny kitchen. He didn’t even flinch. I slapped him again. Nothing changed. He didn’t step back, didn’t turn away. If anything, his eyes just burned a little brighter.
Rage ripped through me, exacerbated by disappointment, guilt, and a shitload of emotions I wasn’t prepared to address.
“What am I trying to do to you?” The words were raspy. I was leaning toward him as if braced against a bungee cord.
That muscle in his jaw jumped again. “I didn’t plan to come here.”
“Then why did you?”
He stared at my lips, then let his gaze slip lower. I was conservatively dressed in a baggy T-shirt and frayed denim shorts, but I might as well have been wearing a blood red corset and thigh-gripping garters. I swear he could see through my shirt all the way to my breast bone. And my breasts. Which were unfettered. I said I was dressed conservatively. I didn’t say I was crazy enough to wear a bra in triple-digit temperatures. But my nipples were puckering despite the heat. I’m sure it had nothing to do with Rivera, though he seemed to have come a step closer somehow.
“Why do you think, Chrissy?” he asked, and raised his dark mocha eyes to mine. They were steaming. Swear to God, steaming like a sweet demon’s.
I swallowed, cocking back my head a little. I was getting that feeling again. That horrible weak-kneed feeling that had nothing to do with released criminals or unbridled fear. But I checked my wobbling instincts and made a play for a snappy comeback.
“I think you must have had a slow day at the precinct,” I said. “Run out of jaywalkers to waterboard?”
“That’s right,” he said. “So I came to torment you.”
“Well, you can just go find someone else to play with. I don’t need you making—” Just then he took that tiny step that separated us. Every nerve ending sizzled like Jimmy Dean’s finest. And that was even before he kissed my neck.
My knees tried to buckle, my head tried to pop off my neck and roll onto the floor, but I was ready for their traitorous ways and braced myself against the weakness.
“Making what?” he whispered. His breath felt cool against my overheated skin.
I tried to think. Tried to move away. Neither attempt was wildly successful. In fact, I may have gone catatonic and somehow slipped even closer to him. “Making a mess of my life,” I breathed.
He slid his fingertips up my arm. “Doing okay with that on your own?”
I stifled a shiver, but my voice sounded funny when I spoke. “I’m not on my own,” I said. Or maybe I croaked. I hate like hell to admit it, but it might very well have been a croak.
“That’s right.” His gaze shifted to mine, somber as a dirge, sharp as a firecracker. His hand slipped into the baggy sleeve of my shirt. “What’s the lucky bastard’s name again?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but just then he brushed his thumb across my left nipple and I was entirely too involved in remaining upright to form any sort of articulate answer. My lips felt dry. I licked them.
“McMullen?” The whisper washed against my face. “What’s his name?”
I wanted to answer, but my larynx seemed to have forgotten how to function. He had slipped his hand out of my sleeve and by some kind of forbidden magic seemed to be stroking my belly beneath my shirt.
He tilted his head at me. His devilish lips cocked into the semblance of a grin. “You haven’t forgotten, have you?”
“Of course I haven’t forgotten.” Turns out my larynx worked after all, but only in a manner that issued a grating sort of demonic sound.
His mouth hitched up a little farther, highlighting the narrow scar that sliced through the right corner of his lips. “Who is he?” he asked.
My shoulder blades were pressed up against the wall now. We were skin to skin. “Why do you want to know?”
His knuckles bumped down my midline, over my navel, lower. I suppressed a shiver and refrained from closing my eyes and passing into delirium.
“I want to make sure he’s good enough for you.” His fingers slipped into my waistband.
“He’s good,” I rasped.
His lips may have jerked just a little, but his diabolical fingers didn’t stop their downward quest. “Does he make you squeak?”
“What?” The word was little more than a breath against his face. He tightened his jaw and took a steadying breath.
“You squeak,” he whispered. “High pitched and almost silent when you come.” His fingers flicked open the button on my shorts.
I closed my eyes and chanted the rosary to myself. “I do not.”
“Maybe not with him.” He moved a fraction of a millimeter closer. I would have sworn there wasn’t that much space between us.
“Not with anyone.”
“There are others?” His tone was gritty, his body hard as hell against mine.
My mind was beginning to spin like water twirling down a toilet. He had moved his hand around my waist and was trailing his fingers down my spine. I arched my back, involuntarily pushing my breasts against his chest. “I don’t need any others.”
“Nameless is that good?” he asked and slid his devilish fingers inside my shorts.
“He has a name.” I just wished to God I could remember it.
“Is it Francois?” he whispered.
“You wish,” I rasped. Francois just happened to be a certain battery-run appliance I keep in a drawer beside my bed. In my current overheated condition I had no idea how Rivera knew of its existence, much less its name. “I don’t need that anymore.” That was an out-and-out lie. I’d had an impromptu date with Francois less than twenty-four hours earlier. But apparently he hadn’t been quite up to the job of dousing the inferno. “I threw it out.”
“Really?”
No, I thought and prayed he wouldn’t look in my drawers.
“I kind of feel sorry for it,” he said, squeezing my ass with one long-fingered hand.
Desire sparked off in every direction like embers from a forest fire. I managed to remain earthbound. “I think you’re just feeling sorry for yourself.”
He lifted one brow.
“Because I don’t need you.” I panted.
He grinned. “What are you feeling?” he asked, and pressed his considerable length against my thigh.
I did my best not to push back. Sometimes my best sucks the big one. “Nothing.” The word was little more than a gasp as he slid his cock closer to my core.
He shook his head once, eyes never leaving mine. “You used to be a pretty fair liar yourself, McMullen.”
“I’m not lying,” I lied.
“That’s just because you prefer to do it standing up.”
It took me a second to understand his meaning. To which I shot back, “Shows what you know.”
“I know you,” he whispered.
“And you let me go.”
“Fuck that,” he said, and tightening his grip on my ass, pulled me marginally closer. “You’re the one who called it off.”
I laughed. It sounded like something between a hyena’s wail and the bray of a wild ass. “What did you expect me to do, Rivera? Shrug? Laugh? Oh, well, yeah, my boyfriend sometimes sleeps with other women. Sometimes sleeps with whores with big boobs and—”
“I was undercover!” he snarled.
“Under the covers, you mean.”
“Holy shit, McMullen, I never slept with her,” he said, and slid both hands into my shorts.
I refrained from devouring him whole.
“How many times do I have to tell you I’m not interested?” I asked, but my fingers seemed to have become twisted in the hair at the back of his head.
“Nameless have you that enamored, does he?” he asked, and sliding his hands lower, he effectively displaced my sloppy shorts.
“He has a name."
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s because you’re a psychotic narcissistic with sadistic tendencies.”
“Quit talking dirty,” he warned.
“You’re sick.”
“You’re horny,” he said, and dropping his head to my left nipple, sucked it through my shirt.
I shrieked. He snarled. Harlequin howled at the door.
Maybe it was the thought of our erstwhile love child finding us fornicating on the kitchen floor that broke me from the spell. Whatever the case, I found my head and scrambled away, bouncing along the wall like a skittering virgin. “Marc!” I yelped. “His name’s Marc.”
Rivera followed me with smoldering eyes. A dozen emotions burned in them. None looked safe. Several looked as naughty as hell. “Marc what?”
I eased around the kitchen table. “I’m not going to tell you.”
He followed me slowly. One may have been able to call it stalking. “Mark Wahlberg?”
Good God! I wished. “I’m not making him up, Rivera.”
“Mark Harmon?”
Harmon was a hottie, but I kept strictly to reality. “He’s a doctor.”
He stopped in his tracks. His expression changed from hot-charged horniness to anger in the drop of a pair of boxers. “Not another nutcase psychiatrist.”
I blinked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“If I remember correctly, your last psychiatrist friend tried to kill you with a hunting knife.”
“That’s not true.”
“He was in this house, planning to kill you with a—”
“Fillet knife.” It felt good to correct him.
He raised a brow.
“It was a…" I began, then realized the stupidity of our current argument. “Marcus is a very capable doctor.”
“Capable,” he said, and laughed out loud. “Is that what you’re settling for these days?”
“Screw you!”
“I’m game if you are.” He took another step closer.
I tried to move away, but my legs were stuck on the screwing idea.
It was then that my phone rang from inches away. I jumped, squawked, then grabbed it like a lifeline, knowing it was Elaine even before it reached my ear.
“What’s wrong?” She spoke before I had the chance to say hello.
“Laney!” My tone was desperate. My throat ached with need. “Rivera’s here.” I don’t know what I expected her to do about it. I don’t even know what I wanted her to do about it, but she didn’t hesitate an instant.
“Let me talk to him.”
I removed the phone from my ear and handed it to him, hands shaking like a heroine addict’s.
He deepened his scowl, eyes steady and onyx dark, but he took it. “Yeah?”
I could hear Elaine’s voice on the far end but couldn’t make out the words.
Rivera stood in silence for several seconds, listening, brows lowered, then, “I know.”
Laney’s voice could be heard again, slow and reasonable.
“I didn’t plan it.”
His body was taut. His lips twitched. He closed his eyes.
“All right,” he said finally and handed me the phone. “Arm your fucking alarm,” he said, and after one last smoldering glance, stalked out of my life.
Chapter 4
A true friend is one who’s happy when you do good and is ready to plan a kick-ass prank when someone else does.
—Chrissy’s brother Pete, while in high school…though the ensuing years haven’t changed his philanthropic philosophy much
I stared after him for several seconds, then dropped into the nearest chair, exhausted and numb.
“Mac?” I could vaguely hear Laney’s voice through the phone that drooped in my right hand.
I did a little more staring and blinking before I managed the Herculean task of pressing the phone back to my ear. “Yeah?”
“You okay?”
I shrugged, though I was pretty sure she couldn’t see it from where she was. Which was on location in Matamata, New Zealand. Elaine Butterfield is a kick-ass actress, my best friend since grade school, and something of a weird-ass telepath, but generally she can’t see my body motions unless she’s there in front of me. I wished rather desperately that she was there right then, but she’d gotten married about a year earlier and tended to spend a good deal of time with her husband, a dweeby little nerd named J.D. Solberg.
“Yeah. Sure.” I stared at my back door for a second and whined. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t me that sounded like an abandoned pup. It was Harley. Rising like an automaton, I trailed off to let him in. He slunk inside, swinging his boxy head left and right in search of Rivera. It’s a well-known fact that even the most neglected kids love their deadbeat dads. “I’m fine.”
“Is he gone?”
“Looks like it.” I tried to buck up. “What’d you say to him?”
“I told him the truth.”
“That he’s a jackass?” I said, but I didn’t really think he was a jackass. I thought I should think he was a jackass, but when I considered his ass I rarely had the equus asinus in mind.
“That you deserve more than a panting reunion once every few months,” she said.
“Uh huh.” I nodded dismally. “But did you threaten him with some kind of bodily harm or something, too?”
“I said he was being unfair to you.”
This was kind of a disappointment. I mean, it’s not as if I wanted Rivera hanging around or anything. But I would have preferred to know he wasn’t that easy to dissuade from the whole panting reunion thing. Although, I have to admit, Brainy Laney Butterfield has amazing powers of persuasion. She’s been convincing men to act like idiots ever since the advent of her boobs.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“That he left.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said, and snorted. It was a first-class snort despite my exhaustion. “You did me a huge favor. I didn’t want him hanging around here.”
She remained silent. I fidgeted in the quiet. I’m never comfortable lying to Laney. She could make me fidget from another solar system. Silence is kind of like her own personal truth serum.
“Well…” I paused and sat down. “Most of me didn’t want him here.”
“My apologies to those bits that did.”
“Yeah, well…” I breathed deep and rotated my neck, beginning to relax a little as I fiddled with Harley’s ear. His search for Rivera had been fruitless and he had come to plop his snout on my thigh and give me the droopy eye. “Those bits are fickle.”
“And happy with Marc, right?”
I sat up a little straighter. Harley rolled his eyes up at me but didn‘t move his head. “Of course they’re happy with Marc. They’re thrilled with Marc. Did I tell you he sold out at the bookstore in Pinsk?”
“Do you mean Minsk?”
“No.”
“Okay. Well…that’s…exciting,” she said, and for a moment I almost wondered if she was being sarcastic. Laney does sarcasm so well it’s sometimes difficult to detect. I’m not always so subtle. “I’m just not sure what that does for your fickle bits.”
“My fickle bits are unimportant, Laney. Because I’ve changed. Grown up. I’m classy now.”
“Instead of Irish?”
I ignored her. “I’ve learned to make chicken marsala.”
“Really.�
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“I wash my car on a regular basis,” I said, and didn’t bother to add that my less-than-classy automobile sometimes rebelled by popping a door an orifice open at rather surprising moments…such as when I was driving down the interstate.
“Wow.”
“And I’m reading…” I glanced toward the dog-eared romance novel on my coffee table, then searched for the classic I had begun six months earlier and lost a half an hour after that. “…The Sun Also Rises.”
“Yikes.”
“Because I now realize that cerebral stimulation is so much more important than a couple moments of gasping pleasure.”
“Just a minute,” she said, then spoke to her husband, who was, apparently, in her vicinity. “J.D., honey, send some burly guard to Mac’s house will you? I think there’s someone there impersonating her.”
I tucked my bare feet up under my bottom against the hard wood of the chair. “You’re hilarious, Laney,” I said.
“Yeah. When I’m finished with this film, I’m thinking of doing a stand-up routine in Vegas.”
“Really?”
“No. Mac, listen, are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right.” I imbued my tone with a marvelous blend of surprise and hauteur. “It’s not as if I’m languishing here alone without Rivera around to harass me.”
“I know.”
“I mean, he was always so high-maintenance anyway.”
“He did bring a certain level of excitement to the picture.”
“And now I have…” I paused. My mind had suddenly gone blank.
“Marc,” she said.
“Yes! Marc. He’s terrific.”
“Isn’t he just?”
“And brilliant.”
“I know.”
“And attractive.”
“He is.”
“And he’s sensitive.”
She sighed. “And there lies the problem.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I tried to sound offended, but mostly I really didn’t want to know what she was talking about.
“I love you, Mac, but you don’t do sensitive.”
“What? Sensitively lies at the very core of what I do. Who I am. I adore sensitive.”
“Mac, honey, think about it. You were raised with a family whose main form of entertainment involved noisy bodily functions.”