Shadow Dance

by Susan Andersen

  Amanda went wild. Writhing beneath him, she wound her arms around his neck, head thrown back and tossing from side to side on the pillow. In order to have more of him inside her, her pelvis tilted and her knees drew back farther and farther until her shins were wedged in the angle of his armpits, his steady rocking causing a soft friction where silky shinbone met tufted hair. But although Tristan emitted a ragged growl at his deeper access to her, he still didn’t accelerate the pace of his thrusts. He was thorough and he was silent, except for his harsh breathing, blasting hot against her ear.

  Amanda couldn’t stand it any longer. She opened her eyes to beg him please, to make him stop, for she simply couldn’t sustain this level of intensity without losing her mind. Oh, God, she wasn’t a robot.

  Looking into his face, she saw that neither was he.

  It was hard to determine where ecstasy left off and agony began in Tristan’s ravaged countenance. Sweat poured from his body, and his eyes stared straight ahead, tortured and out of focus. His head was thrown back, his lips drawn back from clenched teeth, and his Adam’s apple rode up and down the column of his throat as he swallowed convulsively, over and over again.

  He looked like a man viewing a glimpse of heaven from his own private hell.

  “Tristan?” Amanda pressed her lips against his throat. It was hot and wet, and she dragged her mouth up and down its length. “Love me a little harder. Please, harder?”

  He gripped her head and pulled it back until he could stare into her eyes. “No,” he said adamantly, through clenched teeth. “Not yet. Soon. Just…not yet. Got to…make it…last.”

  “Please,” she panted. “I can’t…please.” She saw the intent in his face as he lowered it to hers again, and she snapped her head back into the pillow, shoving at his shoulders with her hands. “Don’t! Dammit, don’t you try to shut me up by kissing me. You’re not going to get away with manipulating me that way, Tristan MacLaughlin. Not again.”

  Tristan stared at her blindly and continued his slow, steady thrusts. “Oh, God,” she whispered, lifting her hips higher. “Oh, God, I love you, Tristan. I love you, oh please…” And he cried out as if she’d suddenly touched electric wires to his damp skin.

  She was as surprised to hear the words issue from her mouth as he was, but in a long-protected corner of her heart, she knew she spoke the truth. She didn’t know how, she didn’t know why, but she knew with bone-deep certainty that this domineering, taciturn man had somehow burrowed his way into her heart and taken up residence. And the words were magic in more ways than one, because finally—finally!—his iron control broke and his hips began to pump into her with more speed and force, harder and rougher, and those blood-rich nerves deep in her body detonated their withheld sensations like fireworks in a midnight sky, sizzling and flaring, clenching and contracting. “Oh, God, Tristan! Oh, G…uhh!”

  Grasping a handful of Amanda’s hair, Tristan dragged her head back and wrapped his lips around hers, swallowing all her frantic cries. Suddenly, he stiffened and cried out also, groaning into her receptive mouth as with one final, powerful surge, he drove into her and let the muscular, milking spasms of the tight sheath gripping him rob him of the remainder of his control. With a heartfelt, attenuated groan, he came.

  When the last jump and shudder of Tristan’s release died away and he slumped heavily upon her body, Amanda experienced a boneless sort of euphoria. But an instant later the events of the day caught up with her and silently she began to cry. She was exhausted and confused, and she couldn’t take much more of this emotional roller coaster that she’d been riding, keeping her sensibilities swooping and soaring from one extreme to the other. In the space of one day, she had experienced just about every emotion imaginable, and suddenly it was too much. Even the exquisite pleasure Tristan had just given her had nearly been more than she could bear.

  And dear God, had she really told this harsh, authoritarian man that she loved him? She was under too much stress to trust any of her emotions. Lord, she didn’t actually even know the man. Amanda cried harder.

  “Amanda?” As the first scalding tears rolled into the contour of his neck, Tristan raised up and looked down at her. He pushed up on his elbows, and Amanda’s arms fell away from his neck, dropping limply onto the mattress. “Was I too rough, lass?” He tried to wipe the tears from her cheeks with his blunt fingers, but they flowed faster than he could handle. He placed kisses about her face and neck. “Shh, now…dinna cry. Did I hurt you?”

  “No.” Amanda’s head rolled from side to side on the pillow. He looked so startled and concerned, and she felt like such a fool. “No, it’s not you, Tristan. It’s…” With both hands she attempted to dash the tears from her cheeks. “God, I’m sorry. It’s…just everything, sort of catching up.” The tears finally began to abate and Amanda regarded him with weary trepidation. “Tristan, do you think my caller was the same Duke person who’s been calling you?”

  He had expected the question earlier; he wasn’t prepared for it now. And he knew it was fortunate they were no longer pressed together, chest to breast, for he couldn’t control the sudden thump of his heart against his rib cage. He’d had Edwards play the tape for him while Amanda was in her bath, and he was pretty damn certain it was Duke. But, looking down into her exhausted eyes, he assured himself he couldn’t be positive. And there was no sense letting her worry about it tonight.

  “We won’t know until the results of the voice prints come in from the lab tomorrow,” he murmured, and reluctantly disengaged his body from hers. He rolled them both over and wrapped his arms around her, pressing her head into his chest. “Don’t worry about it tonight, Mandy.” Large, tough fingers gently combed through her hair. “Just go to sleep, love. It’s been a long, hard day for you. Rest.”

  The warmth and strength of his body, wrapped around hers, comforted her and made her feel secure. Amanda was exhausted, so she let go, and within minutes she did exactly as he’d directed and fell asleep.

  For Tristan, holding her and staring into the darkness, sleep was a longer time coming.

  Chapter

  16

  Tristan was aware of the moment Amanda awakened. He felt her eyes on him, but he completed his pushups before he allowed himself to turn his head to look at her. She was sitting up in the middle of the bed with the sheet chastely tucked under her arms. One corner of his mouth quirked up as he rolled to a sitting position. He had examined every inch of her in depth last night, but ridiculously, he enjoyed her modesty. It indicated he had seen what bloody few other men ever had, and that satisfied a deep-seated possessiveness he hadn’t even realized he’d been harboring. Slowly, Tristan smiled at her. “Good morning, Amanda Rose.”

  Amanda tried to distance herself from his appeal, feeling a need to steel herself against the inevitable transition from lover back to cop. And if he was enchanted by her modesty, she was dismayed by his lack of it. How could he sit there so casually, wearing only his crooked smile, and not even attempt to shield from her the embryonic stage of what she knew would be a formidable erection? Amanda looked away. She dare not risk letting him slip past her guard again—not if it meant having to watch his transformation back into the impervious, cold-eyed cop afterward. She didn’t think she could bear it if he made love to her, slipped on his gun, and called her Miss Charles. “G’morning, Lieutenant,” she muttered, defenses slamming into place.

  Tristan’s smile disappeared and he surged to his feet. Planting one knee on the mattress, he fell across the bed to loom over her with his hands braced on either side of her hips. Amanda had to let go of the sheet and fall back on her elbows in order to avoid touching him.

  “Lieutenant?” he growled. “What happened to ‘I love you, Tristan’?” He observed her stricken expression and realized she’d hoped he wouldn’t bring that up. But why the hell would she say she loved him if she didn’t? God, he’d gone off like a rocket when she’d said that last night. A sudden suspicion made his eyes narrow.

  Maybe
that was the only reason she had said it—to get a little long-awaited satisfaction. God knows, he had gone a wee bit daft last night, trying to string it out past good sense. It was difficult, in the cold light of day, to recapture the exact emotions that had driven him to deny them both ultimate satisfaction. But he remembered the strong conviction he’d felt at the time that once he’d pleasured her, she would send him away.

  But that couldn’t actually be the reason, could it? For how could she have foreseen the results? He hadn’t known himself how badly he’d needed to hear the words from her until she had said them. No, remembering her body’s initial difficulty accepting his, he decided it was more likely a case of something she’d felt compelled to say in order to justify the way her hormones stood up and screamed whenever they got within touching distance of each other. A determined light entered Tristan’s eyes.

  He lowered his head and used his nose to nudge her hair away from her ear. “Say, ‘Good morning, Tristan,’” he ordered softly.

  “MacLaughlin, don’t.” But she didn’t have the strength to turn her head away from the warm, moist tongue delicately outlining the whorls of her ear.

  “Say it.”

  “Good morning, Tristan.” Her reward was to have him flick his tongue deeper with a growl of approval. She shivered helplessly.

  Tristan moved his head until their mouths were a hairbreadth apart. “Mandy, kiss me proper.” He held his breath. She had never once instigated contact between them.

  Amanda considered his request, her heart thumping in her chest. Refuse, her rational, analytical side demanded. Tell him to go away. But her hormones, her emotions, urged a different message, and feeling his warmth, breathing his scent, there was really no contest.

  Amanda reached up and framed his face in her hands, rubbing it with appreciative fingertips. It had that special smoothness of the newly shaven. “Lieutenant MacLaughlin, there is proper,” she whispered softly and pursed her lips, pressing them with cool primness against Tristan’s. He tried not to be disappointed with her lukewarm schoolmarm response. She pulled back, studying his face. “And then there is proper,” she informed him. And she opened her lips around his and tugged at them with a light sucking motion in imitation of the way he always kissed her. When his mouth opened, she slipped her tongue between his teeth and thoroughly explored his mouth. Tristan groaned deep in his throat and laid her back among the pillows.

  His lovemaking was fast and fierce, displaying little of the determined control he had demonstrated the night before. Amanda met his forcefulness head-on, and she was still quivering with spent passion, tiny inner muscles still clenching him with residual contractions, when he pushed up on his elbows and smoothed her tumbled hair back from her face. “Amanda, tell me how your sister Teddy died.”

  He was silent while she did so, and he kissed away her tears with a tenderness she had never before seen him display. So it was doubly shocking to Amanda when he spoke. “She sounds a right proper coward,” he stated with flat disapproval, and looking at him, Amanda saw what she had feared to see earlier—the gun-metal hard, assessing eyes of the cop.

  “How dare you!” Amanda said, and she didn’t care if the words were trite. He didn’t know the first thing…he had no right…she shoved at his shoulders, not wanting to be intimately connected to him while he criticized her beloved sister. “She wasn’t!”

  Tristan refused to move. “The hell she wasn’t,” he growled, coldly furious on Amanda’s behalf. “Where I grew up, people were dealt all manner of pain and betrayal. But they bloody well fought to survive, despite everything that was dished out to them. They didn’t give up at the first setback and settle their troubles with a handful of pills.” He pinned her wrists to the sheet when she continued to struggle with him. “And they sure as hell wouldn’t have left their little sister to cope with the grief and guilt all alone.”

  “Shut up!” she panted, shaking her hair out of her face to glare at him. “You don’t know anything about her, about me.”

  “I know that she had more than most. She had youth and wealth and hope for a better future—and you. She had you, dammit, but she was too selfish to think beyond her own pain. Well, what about your pain, Amanda? How many nights have you lost sleep, then, blaming yourself for not being able to stop her? There wasn’t a hope you could have, you know—not once she’d chosen her course.”

  “I might have! If I’d…”

  He stopped her words with a fierce kiss. Lifting his head, he said, “You say I dinna know you? Lass, I know everything there is to know about you! I know you’re loyal and you’re strong, and I know you’re not a bloody quitter. How old were you when you struck out on your own?”

  She regarded him with that mulish slant to her full mouth that made him want to shake her and kiss her at one and the same time. “How old, Mandy?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “And where did you go, then?”

  “New York. What’s your point?”

  “You have character and you have strength…”

  “I had financial help.” She threw it in his face. He had said he was raised in an orphanage, and from the tone of his words, not in a neighborhood where hope was a ready commodity. Yet he had managed to get himself out of it to where he was today. He obviously set great store in self-reliance.

  Tristan went very still. “You took money from this family you profess to scorn?” he demanded in disgust. “You ran away from home, but they still sent you an allowance, is that what you’re saying’?”

  “I came into my trust fund on my twenty-fifth birthday.” Amanda was very much on her dignity. “Did you think dancing bought this triplex? Guess again. I’m sorry to disillusion you, MacLaughlin, but…”

  Tristan grabbed her up off the pillows and kissed her thoroughly. He smiled against her mouth and murmured, “God, you are a prize, then, lass.” Sliding off her onto his side, he draped a leg over her thighs and propped himself up on an elbow to study her face while she settled back among the cushions. She was sensuously lethargic as a result of his kiss, but she was also wary, on the alert for his next attack. Tristan refrained from smiling. She was a feisty one, his Amanda. “So, what about the seven years between the time you left home and your twenty-fifth birthday?”

  “What about them?”

  “Where was your infamous financial help then? How did you pay the rent?”

  “I shared with other dancers. I waited tables. I was a bicycle messenger and a not-very-proficient office temp. And, a bit at a time, I got legitimate gypsy work.”

  He picked up a strand of her hair and rubbed it between his fingers. Looking directly into her eyes, he murmured, “Like I said: strength and character.”

  Amanda looked up at him, trying to wade through the confusing morass of her mixed emotions. How on earth was she supposed to stay angry if he insisted on being so blessed complimentary? There was so much more to Tristan MacLaughlin than she had originally assumed. She had thought this man was so cold, yet underneath the natural reserve there was warmth and fire…and even flashes of humor. But he had said such awful things about Teddy. “I loved my sister,” she whispered fiercely. “And I miss her. I won’t let you or anyone else criticize her.”

  Tristan gave her words careful consideration. He still felt Teddy had been weak and selfish, but she’d been little more than a child when she had opted out of life’s problems. He instinctively recognized her suicide to have been a major factor in Amanda’s general cautiousness with people—not to mention her sexual inactivity. The former was by now an integral part of her, and the latter—well, he couldn’t bring himself to regret that Amanda hadn’t given herself to a lot of other men. Then, too, he was the first to admit he knew nothing about the love between siblings. What he did know, with gut certainty, was that Amanda would shut him out of her life entirely if he insisted on bucking her loyalty to her dead sister.

  “Verra well,” he finally agreed. “I won’t say another word.” His reward was her slow sm
ile and watching her relax. Unable to resist, he lowered his head.

  The phone rang, and they both froze. On the third ring, Tristan snatched it up and passed it to Amanda.

  “Hello?” she said apprehensively. Then she relaxed fractionally and handed the receiver back to Tristan. “It’s for you.”

  Even stark naked, Amanda was amused to note, Tristan managed to project an impression of unmitigated authority. But as she listened to his end of the conversation, she grew apprehensive all over again. She watched him solemnly when he finally hung up and turned back to her. Tristan was equally serious.

  “The voice prints match, Amanda.”

  Lightning zigzagged across her stomach. “It’s he, then?” she whispered. “The man who killed Maryanne and the others?”

  “Aye, it looks that way.”

  Amanda tossed back the covers, prepared to bolt, without thought or a clue as to where she’d go. She was intent only on obeying a primal urge to flee. Her flight was aborted when Tristan’s hand reached out and grasped her wrist, staying her. The fingers of his free hand tunneled into her hair and he tipped her face up until she met his eyes. “Don’t go panicking on me now, darlin’.”

  The fear hazing her eyes ate at him, and Tristan’s fingers tightened in her hair, pulling her head against his chest. He wrapped her in his arms and whispered reassurances and promises he had no guarantee he could keep. Even as he did it, he wondered at his actions. Since he’d met her he had broken damn near every rule by which he structured his life. But, conscious of her arms clinging tightly to his neck, the warmth of her, he gave a shrug. The hell with it. What was one more transgression at this point?