Because You Love Me ; Journey to My Heart

by Terra Little

  “I wouldn’t know, because I live in Tennessee, Miss Carrington. But tell me, are all of the women here in Missouri so feisty and obnoxious, or are you the only one? And for the last time,” he barreled on without waiting for a response. “It’s Special Agent in Charge Talbot. Get it right, would you? As a matter of fact, it’s Doctor Cooper Talbot, to you.”

  “Oh, doctor, whoo-hoo,” she drawled mockingly. “So you really are a nerd. I wondered about that.”

  Cooper sucked his teeth as his gaze flicked over her from head to toe. “Yeah, okay, I’ve got your nerd,” he said, stepping back and taking a hand out of his pocket to reach for the doorknob. “Let’s get this interview done, shall we? I’m sure you need to get back to taking selfies of yourself doing absolutely nothing, day after day, and posting them to your Instagram account.”

  She sucked in a mouthful of air and nearly choked on it. “You know what, Agent Talbot? I don’t think I like you very much.”

  “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” he snapped back, yanking the door open and stepping aside. “Are you coming or would you like to go clothing shopping?”

  “Please,” Olivia purred dismissively as she picked up her clutch and tucked it underneath her arm. “Your comment is so shallow. I think you’ve just done bow ties and pocket protectors everywhere a grave disservice.”

  “Hmm, I must’ve missed that in the nerd handbook. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why are you so flushed? Are you nervous?”

  “Dealing with you makes my pressure rise. Which reminds me,” she said, smiling sweetly. “I accidentally smeared my lip gloss on the back of your jacket. I was going to offer to have it dry-cleaned for you, but now I hope it stains permanently.”

  He chuckled darkly. “Oh, now that’s a low blow, Miss Carrington. Even for someone like you.” With a flick of his wrist, the door closed again. “And here I was, just about to suggest that we stop taking shots at each other and let bygones be bygones. I was just thinking that I’d hate to leave Missouri tonight, knowing that I made an enemy while I was here.”

  “You made an enemy the second that you arrested my friend, whom I refuse to leave here without.”

  “Good, because I’m only holding Shannon Bridgeway on a material-witness custodial order, which means that after I’m done interviewing her, she’ll see a judge, who I’m sure will release her under her own recognizance. So it’s actually a good idea that you do stick around. She’s going to need a ride home and I have a plane to catch. And to answer your earlier question about my ethnicity, I’m half black and half Irish.”

  “Oh.” She blinked. “Well, that’s a relief. About Shannon, I mean. Not about your ethnicity—”

  “I know what you meant.”

  They stared at each other.

  “So, what do you say, Miss Carrington? Are we cool?” He extended a huge hand to her, palm up.

  “We’re cool,” she said, reluctantly reaching for it.

  “Good. Let’s kiss on it.”

  God, I hope so, she thought just as her palm met his and he used the leverage to bring her skipping toward him. Halfway there, the tip of his tongue peeked out from between his open lips in a silent invitation that she went up on her tiptoes to greedily accept, sinking into his mouth so deeply that she felt his tongue touch the back of her throat. It was the wettest, thirstiest, most invasive kiss that Olivia had ever experienced, so raw and uncivilized that her face flamed with embarrassment even as she gripped his shoulders and let him take her head back on her neck. He gripped her waist possessively and groaned into her mouth, and a rush of liquid pleasure drenched her thong. He glided a hand up her back to press her closer, and she purred.

  A knock at the door had them springing apart like guilty teenagers. “Sir, we’re ready to begin whenever you are,” Bearden called through the door.

  “We’ll be right out,” Cooper called back. He took off his glasses long enough to drag a hand down his face and pinch the bridge of his nose. Then he put them back on, cleared his throat and buttoned his suit jacket. “Here,” he said, producing a neatly folded handkerchief from an inside jacket pocket and handing it to her. Touching the pad of his thumb to the center of her bottom lip, he watched his finger and then his gaze flickered up to hers. “Fix your lipstick,” he suggested, reaching for the doorknob and pulling the door open. “I’ll see you next door.”

  * * *

  The interview was already underway when Olivia joined Cooper in the small conference room next door. He was alone, standing in the middle of the tile floor, frowning intently at the one-way glass panel in the wall in front of him, while the other two agents interviewed Shannon in an adjoining room. Glasses pushed up to the top of his head, suit jacket flung open and his arms crossed, he was watching them like a hawk.

  Relieved to see that Shannon was sans the handcuffs and that she appeared significantly more relaxed than she had just a few minutes ago, Olivia closed the door and stepped up beside him at the panel, subconsciously mimicking his pose. They watched the interview progress silently for several minutes.

  “They’re still in training,” Cooper eventually explained, nodding his head toward the glass. “But I think they’re doing pretty well and look, ma, no handcuffs.”

  “I can see that, and I can also see that someone was nice enough to get her a Coke, but for all the trouble you went through, it doesn’t seem like she’s very much help to your case.”

  He shrugged noncommittally. “Maybe, maybe not. I’ll know more after I review the tape,” he said, glancing at her. “What took you so long? What were you doing in there, taking selfies?”

  “You would love that, wouldn’t you, Benjamin Button?” He snorted. “No, I wasn’t taking selfies, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a very offensive assumption. Not that it’s any of your business, but I was on the phone with my assistant. Thanks to you, I had to move some things around on my schedule for today.”

  “I didn’t think to ask before, but what exactly do you do...for a living, I mean?”

  “Why? Are you worried that you might’ve just kissed a criminal, Agent Talbot?” She caught the uncertainty on his face and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Seriously?” Cringing, he reached up and scratched a spot at the top of his head.

  “Weeelll...”

  “Well, you can relax, hot lips. I’m a private investigator. I run my own firm and I’m very good at what I do, which is why I have to ask if we’re watching the same interview. Shannon is all over the place. Maybe she recognizes your guy, but then again maybe she doesn’t. It could be the same guy, but then again maybe it isn’t. I’m confused just listening to her. How can this possibly be of any help to you?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Or maybe you wasted your time, in which case I hate to say it, but I believe I told you so.” She felt his gaze on the side of her face and refused to allow herself the luxury of returning it. Encouraging what could only be described as a colossal lack of judgment on both of their parts was a bad idea. A very, very bad idea, she reasoned as the memory of his hungry mouth taking possession of hers flashed across her mind and spiked her body temperature. “And stop looking at me like that.” She saw him smile in her peripheral vision.

  “Why? Does it make you uncomfortable?”

  After today they would never see each other again, so what did she have to lose by being honest? “No, it arouses me.”

  “And that’s a problem?”

  She looked askance at him. “I think it is. Don’t you?” He turned his attention back to the trio on the other side of the glass and remained silent. Uncomfortable with the void that his silence left, Olivia rushed to fill it. “I mean, if you think about it, the only reason we kissed is because we were both a little shaken up after the near-death experience we had in that elevator. Obviously I don’t make a habit of kissing co
mplete strangers, and forgive me but you don’t strike me as the type of guy who finds himself in these kinds of situations very often, either. How else would you explain what happened between us?”

  “It was complete-and-utter insanity,” Cooper readily replied.

  “Exactly!” Thank God he understood what she was saying, where she was going with this.

  “An exciting prelude to what I’m positive would’ve been some of the best sex that either of us has ever had,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, and she froze in place, with her hands clasped underneath her chin in joyous relief and her mouth hanging open. He glanced at her and chuckled knowingly. “What? You know it’s true.”

  “Th-that’s beside the point.”

  “You’re blushing,” he pointed out quietly. “I wonder why?”

  Because she could see it clearly—his mouth on her breasts, his tongue busy between her thighs, her thighs riding his hips as he thrust into her over and over again—all of it. Every frantic, sweaty, nasty second of it, and even in the land of make-believe, it felt incredible. Because it galled her to admit to herself that, had it not been for a knock at the door, she’d have likely been happily bouncing up and down on a perfect stranger’s shaft right this second, and enjoying every second of it.

  Which was how she knew with 100 percent certainty that she had temporarily taken leave of each and every one of her senses. The elevator incident had obviously traumatized her.

  Facing the glass again, Olivia cleared her throat. “It doesn’t matter why. The point is, the best thing to do in this situation is to forget that the kiss ever happened. It was a mistake, one that I’d like to put behind me as soon as possible.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. Thank you for understanding.” Stop talking, Olivia. “I mean, some men would completely misread the situation and think—”

  “That you might be interested in meeting me later for dinner and drinks and then, if we’re both drunk enough, maybe breakfast?” He shrugged nonchalantly, shaking his head. “Nah. Never crossed my mind.”

  Her eyes closed on a long-suffering sigh. “Ex-exactly. I’m glad we understand each other, because the sooner we can put this behind us, the better.”

  “We do,” Cooper said, glancing at his watch. “Sounds like they’re wrapping up the interview now.”

  She started visibly when he suddenly sprang into action, breezing past her and heading over to the door in a series of surprisingly fluid movements, given his towering height and thin build. He reached for the doorknob and pulled the door open, glancing back at her over his shoulder. “Which means that, if I hurry, I might even be able to catch a flight back to Knoxville this evening, rather than tomorrow morning. Would that be soon enough for you, Miss Carrington?”

  Chapter 7

  Over the next two days, Cooper watched Shannon Bridgeway’s interview video several times, and each time he did, he walked away from the experience that much more certain that she was hiding something. At first glance she seemed relatively stable, despite her obvious fidgeting and nervousness during the interview, but because he knew precisely what to look for, his second glance was much more revealing. Shannon Bridgeway was a good liar, but she hadn’t succeeded in making him believe half of the lies that she’d told to both his agents and the investigating agents in Missouri.

  Her body language was off, he realized after he’d finished watching the video the first time. Her eye contact was overly deliberate, he noticed during his second viewing, and during his third, he saw that her pulse was thumping erratically. By the time he had finally grown tired of watching the video, which was somewhere around the sixth or seventh time, he was convinced that something was seriously off with her and he was determined to find out what. Quietly, of course, because technically the agency’s interest in her was a thing of the past, and on his own time, because there was no telling what he might find once he started peeling back the surface.

  Well, mostly on his own time, anyway, Cooper conceded as he jogged up the steps to the US Prison Bureau in downtown Knoxville, paused just outside the entry door to collapse his umbrella and then swung the heavy steel-and-glass entry door open. Stepping inside from out of a steady summertime rain shower, he checked his weapon in at the security desk and then took an elevator to the third floor. Earlier today an underground copy of Shannon Bridgeway’s sealed juvenile court records had fallen into his lap, courtesy of his contact in the Knoxville Child Protective Services Offices, and it’d made for some very interesting late-night reading.

  According to court records, Shannon Bridgeway’s birth name was actually Karen Lewis and she’d been raised in Peoria, Illinois, by a single father. With no other known family on record or in evidence, she had been placed in state custody after he was killed in a motorcycle accident, just a few months past her twelfth birthday. Over the next six years, she’d been assigned to live in a residential group home, but the reality was that she’d spent nearly half of that time sitting in local juvenile jail cells, either awaiting arraignment or serving out a sentence for one or another of the many theft charges that she had steadily accumulated.

  Eventually, though, by some miracle, she managed to straighten herself out about a year shy of her eighteenth birthday and convince a judge that she was a new person. Along with her custodial release at age eighteen, her request to have her record expunged was granted and she was free. Free to legally change her name and start a new life, which was seemingly exactly what she’d done.

  Except that her juvenile offender MO had almost always included the help of a co-offender, a partner in crime, who was typically another female and usually attractive. Shannon had hardly ever worked any of her many con jobs or petty thefts alone. Not then, Cooper conceded ruefully as an image of Olivia Carrington immediately came to mind. And just as likely, not now.

  He thought about the kiss that they’d shared and wondered just how far the lovely Miss Carrington would have actually gone to keep his cock hard and his attention diverted. Naturally, running into her on an elevator and then having the elevator get stuck was an unforeseen fluke, but even that seemed to have worked in the dynamic duo’s favor. It had given Olivia more time to hypnotize him with the spicy floral scent clinging to her skin and the sight of her gloriously round, jiggling butt. More time to seduce him with her mysterious, jewel-toned gaze and her masterful ability to blush like a virgin on cue.

  Ironically enough she’d had no way of knowing that, though she claimed that he wasn’t her type, she was exactly his, making him especially susceptible to her charms. But in the broad scheme of things, that didn’t really matter, either. Because, frankly, in one way or another, she was every red-blooded, heterosexual man’s type.

  Cooper couldn’t imagine any sane man being completely unaffected by her sexiness. Not even a priest was that immune. Her sex appeal was a living, breathing, palpable thing, and she knew exactly how to work it to her best advantage. So much so that if she was in fact Bridgeway’s modern-day partner in whatever criminal enterprise they were currently involved in—and he strongly suspected that she was—then she was an excellent choice on Bridgeway’s part. He hadn’t yet received the results of the background screening that he’d requested on Olivia Carrington, but when he did, he fully expected its findings to confirm his suspicions.

  If she was a professional private investigator, then he was the damn Duke of Wales.

  In the meantime, while the jury was still out on Olivia, he didn’t see the harm in shaking a few trees and seeing if anything fell to the ground.

  He had used a public-access elevator, which put him off at the entrance to the third floor’s visitor’s area. Afternoon visiting hours hadn’t yet begun, so the room was empty, which was just fine with Cooper, because he wasn’t planning on staying long. Access to inmates was restricted to a series of thick, bulletproof glass panes, with a plastic stool and a telephone headset at each wind
ow. He made his way down one long row and then another, and then took a seat on a stool at a window along the far wall. The inmate whom he’d come to see—a thirty-five-year-old father of three, who worked as a truck driver by day and then used his job to traffic underage children by night—was already seated on the other side. His name was Malcolm Johnson, this was his third offense, though unrelated, and if Cooper had his way, very soon he’d be going away for a long time.

  They stared at each other, both picking up the headset on the wall to their respective rights simultaneously and putting it to their ears.

  “Man, you know damn well that I’m not supposed to talk to you without my attorney present,” Malcolm immediately growled into the headset. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days, and there were at least two new knots upside his head. It looked as if someone or possibly several someones—if the angry-looking bruises dotting his sun-tanned face were any indication—had used his face for a punching bag.

  Cooper smiled. He detested child abuse in any form. “Calm down, Mr. Johnson,” he advised good-naturedly. “I’m not here in an official capacity. I was actually just passing by and thought I’d stop in and check on you.”

  Malcolm’s beady brown eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Yeah, right. What kind of game are you playing, Agent? Ain’t this a violation of my civil rights or something?”

  “Not at all.” Cooper’s tone was easy, laid-back. “In fact, what I’m about to tell you might just help your case in some way. You never know.”

  “Well, spit it out, then. What is it?”

  “I thought you might like to know that my witness picked you out of a lineup. She’s not positive but she thinks you might be one of the suspects who robbed that bank in Missouri a few weeks back. The one you mentioned when you were first arrested,” he added, seemingly as an afterthought. “I believe you intimated that you had some knowledge about that robbery, some knowledge that could lead to an arrest in the case. Last I heard, your attorney was interested in making a deal.”