by Anne Calhoun
“I’m doing an interview with Hannah Rafferty at Eye Candy at four, then singing.”
“Security shouldn’t be too bad,” he said, not bothering to tell her about Eye Candy’s role in a major drug bust earlier in the summer. She knew Eve, so she’d be familiar with the details. Every cop attached to the Block knew about it, and kept an eye on the bar, especially because Eve was now one of their own. Eye Candy was one place she could go, and he wouldn’t need to be on full alert the entire time.
“Glad to hear it. I’m going to bed. Make yourself at home,” she said. She waved vaguely at the entire house, then padded through the living room, down the short hallway leading to her bedroom.
And his. God, this was going to be awkward. He heard the door close, then water rushing through the pipes. For a long, heated moment he let himself imagine her taking off the hoodie, jeans, those striped socks she was wearing with the boots. He let himself imagine her stepping into the big shower, tiled in a pale gray shot through with darker veins. He let himself imagine the steam rising around her body, her hair darkening as the water soaked it.
Mind on the job. Cady may have hired him because he knew nothing about the music industry, but no way was he doing LPD work without knowing her story. He could, and would, ask her, but wanted the basics so he felt like less of a fool.
Wikipedia had his back. Queen Maud (birth name Cady Marie Ward), was twenty-five, raised mostly by her mother, an accountant, after the family split up. Dad was a lawyer for an online brokerage. One sister, eight years younger, named Emily, who had a Wikipedia page of her own. The stage name came from a grandmother who was a singer in her own right in the sixties.
Chris was going to a Harry Linton concert with a friend in the music business when he spotted Cady, who had taken the initiative to make a few bucks singing for people walking from the elevated train in Chicago to the concert. He managed Cady’s meteoric rise, getting her songs in front of other artists, even flying her to L.A. to fill in for Harry’s opening act when the singer came down with the stomach flu. That led to appearances on a couple of Harry’s more popular songs, then to a record deal with Harry’s label. “She could sing,” Chris was quoted as saying, “but it wasn’t just her voice. It was her presence. Maud was meant to be a star.”
Her first album had come out over a year ago, and featured songs cowritten by some of the industry’s biggest names, none of which Conn recognized. The Personal Life section mentioned rumors of a relationship with Harry, never confirmed, and now over. Conn scrolled back and forth through the entry, committing sections of it to memory.
Then he shut it off and reached for the other folder, the one he’d swiped from Hawthorn on his way out of the conference room. He opened it and stared at the pictures. Someone had given Jordy Bettis a thorough beatdown. Two black eyes, broken nose, split lip. Missing teeth. Stitches on his forehead and cheekbone closing gashes. Bruising down his ribs and stomach, again on his back. Avoided the kidneys, though. They were going for maximum pain without permanent damage.
Conn flipped through the pictures, then focused on the arrest reports and information behind the pictures. Jordy was a known, repeat offender, his arrest reports escalating from petty theft to possession to possession with intent to distribute to assault as he aged. He was making his way up in the Strykers, a gang that controlled a significant amount of territory on the East Side. There were a dozen reasons why someone would beat the hell out of him, but why blame it on Conn? He looked at Jordy’s various mug shots. He looked familiar, but for the life of him, Conn couldn’t remember an incident out of the ordinary.
A quick scan of the arrest reports confirmed this. He’d arrested Jordy once before when he pulled over an SUV, ran the licenses of everyone inside, and found Jordy was wanted on outstanding warrants.
Conn frowned and pulled his phone out of his pocket. Normally he’d handle something like this on the job, ask around, both at the Block and on the street. But no way was he taking the Queen of the Maud Squad to the East Side, no matter how familiar she was with the neighborhood. His next best option was Kenny Wilcox, his training officer and mentor.
The shower shut off. He looked up, but her door remained closed. She was so strong, so human when stripped of the sleek hair and clothes, the contoured makeup that made her almost alien. He’d thought she was an airheaded twink.
He was wrong.
Hawthorn told him to stay out of it, but his family had literally written the police department’s rules and regs. He had a reputation for thinking of the department first, his officers second. Kenny had also been with the department for twenty years, which meant he knew his way through all the hidden power channels and secret societies. Either way, Conn had to be careful. He had legitimate reasons for contacting Kenny, but his phone could be confiscated any time. All contacts would be examined, and he wouldn’t drag Kenny into this. Not yet.
He got to his feet and swung his arms, pacing the length of the house from the mudroom to the bedrooms, using breathing techniques he’d learned in anger management classes to siphon off some of the emotion seething inside him.
Someone had set him up to take a big, big fall. He’d left guys in that kind of shape before, after a fight, but never on the job, and never handcuffed. That was a coward’s way out, or worse, torture. Someone thought he was the kind of person they could pin that on and get away with it.
The pressure in his chest tightened. Cady was asleep, or getting there. He needed to get some sleep himself, but no way was that happening without some kind of workout first. He spun on his heel, heading for his bedroom, where his duffle sat beside the impersonal bed. He came up short at the sight of it, yanked into a past where he’d packed in a hurry or had an aunt or his grandma pack his bag for him, shoving things in randomly, eager to get him out of her life for a few months. He was always leaving things behind, kind of like his dad. In the beginning his dad would forget clothes, shoes, sometimes an entire bag of worthless salesman junk, but he always came back for it, reclaiming his car and his son. Eventually, he left everything behind, including his Camaro. Including his son.
Cady’s bedroom door opened. Startled, he whirled around, dropping the duffle from his hand, reaching for his gun. Backlit by the lamp from her bedroom, she was just an outline, all vulnerable shoulder joints and the soft scent of her soap rising from her skin. She folded her arms and leaned against the doorframe.
“Are you sure we can’t?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Cady’s gaze flicked to the open duffle, then back to Conn’s alert face. She spent a solid six to nine months a year on the road. She knew how much a person’s packing could tell about his personality. Most people didn’t travel like she did; a few days away from home hardly warranted homey touches like pictures or mementos. She had a picture of herself, Emily, and her mom, a casual pose taken in SoMa the last time she was home, just as winter was surrendering its grip on the city. Tulips and crocuses bloomed in big circular planters. Chris had taken the picture with his phone, surprising them in the middle of a cheerful argument about the best ice cream flavor. No matter how cramped the tour bus, how dingy the hotel room, she put that picture on her nightstand. And she always wore her Nana’s bracelet.
Conn had no pictures in his apartment. Not a single one. The only thing on the walls was a gigantic television. What was in that bag?
“What?”
His tone was brusque, making her question her decision. By rights she should be blissfully dreaming by now. She’d sat on the tiled bench in the steam shower until her throat felt liquid and the last of the stage makeup and crap road food seeped from her pores. She’d slathered her face in moisturizer, her body in lotion. She’d braided her hair, gotten into the big bed, arranged the pillows into a down-filled burrow. She was past bone-tired, into a profound exhaustion that was more mental than physical.
But she couldn’t sleep. Not with her mind replaying Conn’s every glance, his eyes guarded under the black watch cap, his every
movement. She wanted to know what the planes of his chest looked like under the soft gray T-shirt, wanted to smooth her palms over his thighs and buttocks.
She should have been able to sleep. She couldn’t. And yes, she could take matters into her own hands, but that was for the tour bus, a quiet release to burn off enough energy for her to sleep.
She was home. In her own house. With a man she wanted as badly as she’d ever wanted a man before. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t feel like managing it,” she said. “There’s no reason to manage it. I want you. You want me. We’re both adults who understand the situation.”
“You don’t hook up on tour.”
A statement, a question, or a deflection? “Tour doesn’t work for me like that. Guys on the road, a groupie is just a release.”
“Keeps them from getting SRS?”
“What’s that?”
“Sperm Retention Syndrome.”
“If the main symptoms are a bad temper and a total inability to think straight, then yes.”
“But not you.”
“It’s a risk that isn’t worth the reward. It’s too complicated.”
He huffed a laugh, private, darkly amused.
“What?”
He took two slow steps across the floor, closing the gap between them. “I packed a dress shirt and jacket because I thought I might have to wait in the bar of a really nice restaurant while you seduced some hipster into your bed.”
He was close enough to touch, close enough to smell, and he smelled like all the best things: hot male skin and barbecue, with a hint of sweat.
“I can do that,” she said. She reached out and rested her fingertips against his hipbone, jutting above his belt. “If it turns you on. And if you find me a hipster. At the moment I’m fresh out of bearded guys in skinny jeans and black-rimmed glasses.”
His eyes were stormy blue now, dark with an intent desire that sent sparks crackling along her nerves to pool in her core. “Over my dead body,” he said.
Her gaze locked with his, she tugged his shirt up and settled her palm over the bare skin of his hip, stroking the hard bulge of muscle above it. “Let’s add that to the list,” she murmured. “No lawyers. No dead bodies. Just live ones. Very, very live ones.”
She slid her hand from his hip to his back, fingers dipping into the groove of his spine before flattening at the base. Moving him was impossible; pulling only brought her body up against his. She inhaled quickly. He smiled, a wolfish, predatory smile that was mostly about his lips and not at all about his eyes, and she mentally revised her theory of what he’d be like in bed to include words like “implacable” and “hard” and “domineering.”
Oh, yes, please.
She went up on tiptoe and pressed her mouth to his, feeling the plush of his lips, the way he parted them obligingly enough. Heat trickled through her, lit up her entire skin. But other than a quick inhale when her tongue touched his, a tensing of muscles, Conn didn’t respond. His eyes were still stormy blue, waves churning on the surface but there was movement in the depths. Something else was going on inside him, something long buried and deeply emotional. Her gaze searched his while she waited, leaving space for him to respond.
Or not.
“Message received,” she said, remembering his comment that she could read the signs if he didn’t want her. “My mistake.”
Another kaleidoscope spin of emotion in his eyes, then they went dark, pupils blowing wide as he gripped her upper arms and bore her back against the wall. The impact drove the air from her lungs. A gasp followed as her senses kicked into overdrive, recording impressions, volatile emotion held in check by strength and power harnessed in service of control. For a second she wondered if the promise of a walk on the edgy, barely restrained side was more than she could handle. But she felt alive, more alive than she had in weeks, maybe months. Performing plugged her into the vast, creative energy swirling around her, but she’d been slowly withering away in the downtime.
She wasn’t withering now. Her body swelled with hot, saturating desire. She stretched into his grip, rolling her shoulders back, shifting against the power in his hands, all that he was using to hold her against the wall. She came up against the edge of what her body could do, felt his thumb press down into her shoulder joints. She lifted her hands, felt the constriction of movement, flattened them against his torso, and pushed.
It wasn’t “no,” or “stop,” or “don’t.” It was an exploration of how this could be between them, and a quick glance at his face confirmed this. Desire had won, the mask firmly in place. Heat infused his cheeks, and his abdomen rose and fell under her hands. He slowly took all control from her, leaning in with hips, then chest, then his mouth, his lips hot and demanding against hers until he’d stolen her ability to breathe.
She took her air from his lungs, a lingering taste of barbecue on his tongue, spicy-sweet until it faded into the pure heat of his kiss. She arched under him, straining against his hands until he released her shoulders and slid his hands down her arms to twine his fingers through hers and press her palms against the wall by her head. Bracing his forearms along hers, he leaned down, impossibly closer, his muscles shifting until all her curves melded into the angles and planes of his body.
It was gently brutal, or brutally gentle, the way his body caged her, restrained her. She wasn’t sure which, only knew that his mouth was soft, almost tender while he used his body, hands and hips and chest and thighs, to hold her exactly where he wanted her. He wanted her pinned, helpless, and completely at his mercy.
She gave a hitching little sigh that could have been a sob if he’d let her breathe, then surrendered.
“There you go,” he murmured. “There you go.”
He kissed her for far longer than she thought he would. On so many levels, she’d been wrong about Connor McCormick, mistaking size and an obviously tightly reined temper for lack of feeling, mistaking his hard body for a typical muscle-bound player, someone who’d be easy to sleep with, and easy to leave.
She’d been wrong. He kissed like he loved it, like he luxuriated in the competing sensation of teeth against slick lip, tongue on a long day’s rough stubble, the undeniable intimacy of sharing breath, noses rubbing. He didn’t move, just kissed her and let her feel his cock hardening between their bodies, shifted his hips in a subtle parody of sex, let her delve into him and get a little breathless from the weight of his body against hers, get a little panicky from the futile effort before pulling back. He was reading her reaction like … well, like a trained observer who routinely used his body to manage situations and control people.
Heat pulsed through her, liquid and thick and stinging her nerves, pooling in her nipples, between her legs, rising in her belly each time his abdomen brushed hers. Needing more, she wrapped one leg around his thigh, then hitched it to hip height and brought her other leg up to cross her ankles.
He didn’t even grunt, or shift his weight. She laughed at the realization she could climb him like a tree and not even faze him. He was that strong. That immovable.
The bulk of his solid weight rested on his elbows and forearms, she discovered, because she was able to wriggle her hands in his until he let go, very reluctantly. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, and suited her actions to her words by looping her arms around his neck. She pulled his T-shirt to the side, mouthed at his neck, his ear, his jaw, luxuriating in the edge where soft skin met stubble and the hard angles of his jaw. Teeth on his earlobe made him shiver. Tongue against his pulse made him wrap one arm under her hips and hold her still so he could thrust forward.
“Really?” she asked. Such simple kisses never spurred that kind of reaction from a man before, like a barely tamed animal discovering it was okay to arch into a touch. Delighted, she did it again.
He growled, a rough sound she felt as much as heard, and tipped his head to the side, the male lion demanding more from his lioness. She clasped the back of his head, digging her fingertips into his scalp, making even m
ore of a mess of his hair, and applied herself to her task, stopping just short of sucking a mark into skin visible to anyone. But it wasn’t easy, because the way he was breathing, each exhale vibrating through his vocal cords, and the way his grip tightened on her bottom made her want to respond in kind. She bit down on the straining tendon on his neck, and felt him wince.
“Sorry, sorry,” she whispered, and soothed the spot with a lick.
“No, damn, I like it, but … ow, Jesus, yes, there … but not tonight.”
She almost asked him if there was an agenda for this, a schedule she hadn’t gotten for this thing they both agreed was a bad idea and shouldn’t do, but settled for yanking on the back of his T-shirt until he got the message, lifting his arm so she could pull it over his head, then shifting his weight from hips to his other arm so she could drop it to the floor.
And stare.
“Oh my God,” she said, getting the words out before she got lost running greedy hands over planes of muscle. He was put together like a rough sketch of a superhero, maybe the Hulk, sloping rectangles of all sizes overlapping each other to form pectorals, abdominal ridges, shoulders. Dark ink swirled in interesting patterns over his shoulders and down his side, and wiry hair covered his chest. She combed her fingers through it to find his nipples, drawn in to tight, hard buds. The hair tapered at his navel to a single line dead center between his hipbones, disappearing into the elastic band of his underwear, visible above the looser waist of his jeans.
“I think I just regressed through thirty thousand years to the caveman days.”
He huffed out a laugh that made his abdominals flex in interesting ways. “If you’re still talking, I can do better.”
She looked up at him, saw his stark lines, all anger and tattoos. His hair had been molded to his forehead by the watch cap. He looked brutal. He looked wounded.
