Strictly Lonergan's Business

by Maureen Child

  “I know.” He held up one hand to stop the rest of her explanation and gave her a half smile. “I’ve never done it before. But then, never really had to, did I?”

  “No,” she mused, thinking about how she was usually the one taking care of him. She’d worked so hard for so long to make herself indispensable to him, it had never occurred to her that maybe she’d done too much. “I guess not.”

  He nodded and stuffed both hands into his jeans pockets. “Oh yeah, you didn’t have another nightgown that I could find, so I put one of my T-shirts in there for you to wear while your nightgown gets washed.”

  She glanced down and saw his neatly folded white T-shirt. He’d even thought of this. She’d been in her nightgown for nearly three days now and she could hardly wait to get out of it. “More laundry?”

  He shrugged and smiled. “Think I’m getting the hang of it.”

  “Thanks,” she said, “for thinking of it.”

  “No problem,” he said, backing the rest of the way out of the bathroom. “And if you get dizzy again, while you’re taking a shower, for God’s sake, sit down.”

  “I will.”

  He stopped. “Maybe I should just stay in the room with you, just in case…”

  Oh, that’s all she needed.

  “Go away,” she said, laying one hand on his chest and pushing him out of the room.

  She closed the door and leaned back against it for a long minute or two, trying to keep from opening it again and inviting him inside. Then she heard his footsteps moving off down the hall and she sighed. In disappointment or relief…she wasn’t sure.

  Then shaking her head, she peeled off her nightgown and headed for the shower.

  In the darkness, Cooper sat alongside the bed and watched Kara sleep. Moonlight spilled across the mattress illuminating her in a silvery light that made her already pale skin glow like fine porcelain. Her eyelashes were long and lay curved on her cheeks in a smudge of darkness that was vulnerable as well as tempting.

  He sucked in a breath of air and blew it out again while leaning forward, forearms braced on his thighs. He couldn’t seem to stop watching her and he wondered why he’d never noticed before just how beautiful she was. She sighed and shifted in her sleep, the quilt sliding down, baring her shoulder and the plain white T-shirt that covered her.

  Damn, who would have thought a woman could look that good in a man’s shirt? He could still see her, coming out of the bathroom. The hem of the T-shirt hit just beneath her bottom, baring her long, lean legs to his gaze. Her hair, freshly washed and dried, drifted around her shoulders in thick, tempting waves and her eyes, though still shadowed, looked clear for the first time in days.

  His fingers itched to stroke her skin again as memory after memory rushed into his brain, crowding it with the images and sounds and scents of their lovemaking. Only a few nights ago, she’d opened herself to him and he’d discovered a depth and passion he hadn’t expected.

  His body stirred, tightening with a hunger that clawed at his insides until he wanted to howl with need. And he called himself all kinds of a bastard for wanting her when she was so clearly exhausted.

  He leaned back in his chair and then jolted upright when an unearthly howl erupted from the bowels of the house. Jumping to his feet, he stared around the room, but it did no good. The wailing came from nowhere and everywhere. It seemed to seep from the walls as if even the house itself were keening in misery.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, swallowing past the knot lodged in his throat. It had been a couple of days since the ghost had made itself known. Cooper had almost begun to think that it had decided to leave them the hell alone.

  Now though, it was back and louder than ever.

  Another heartrending wail sobbed around him, sending a chill washing through him. Outside, a wind kicked up out of nowhere, rattling the window panes. Bits of dirt and pebbles were thrown high, pinging off the glass like eager fingers tapping, tapping, demanding entry.

  The temperature in the room dropped suddenly and as the sobbing continued, cold gathered. Cooper moved closer to the bed, standing with his back to Kara, so that he stood as a sentry, between her and the growing cold.

  Even as he did it though, he fought down a sharp laugh. What the hell could he do to a ghost? What he should do was grab up Kara and get her somewhere…else. But he’d be damned if he was going to be chased out of his own house by the psychic energies of one long-dead woman and her erstwhile lover.

  “Get out,” he muttered thickly, and the sobbing throbbed in the air.

  “Cooper?”

  He spun around to find Kara sitting up in bed, pushing her hair back out of her eyes and looking around the empty room.

  “She just started up,” he muttered, glaring at the shadows as if trying to intimidate the spirit into silence.

  Another howl was his answer. The sound rippled along his skin, and lifted the hair at the back of his neck.

  “She’s lonely,” Kara whispered.

  “She’s nuts,” Cooper countered.

  A disembodied moan whined around them.

  Kara reached for his hand and pulled him down onto the bed beside her. He sat down, back braced against the headboard and pulled her in close, if only to keep her warm in the bone numbing cold.

  “She shouldn’t have waited for him for so long,” Kara said, her voice almost lost in the weeping.

  Cooper shook his head, amazed that they were sitting in the dark, discussing the feelings of a woman long dead. “Hell, she’d waited two years. Maybe she should have waited a little longer. He did show up finally.”

  “Too late,” Kara reminded.

  “It didn’t have to be too late,” he said, raising his voice to be sure even the ghost heard him. “If she hadn’t curled up and died, they could have been together. He’s outside the house right now and she still won’t let him in.”

  Kara looked up at his profile in the darkness and tried not to make too much of his words. The problem was, she wanted to believe that he was trying, subconsciously even, to tell her to not give up on him.

  But if she started believing things like that, she’d only be setting herself up for the same kind of misery that haunted the woman trapped in this house.

  Better if she did what that woman had not done.

  Give up on the dream and move on.

  Nine

  Kara reluctantly woke up from the most erotic dream she’d ever experienced, to silent darkness. Apparently the ghost had given up for the night.

  So what then had woken her?

  An instant later, she knew. In her dream, Cooper’s hands had moved over her body with smooth deliberation, caressing, stroking, driving her toward a climax she knew would be soul shattering.

  Now that she was awake, she realized the dream was real. Cooper lay right behind her, spooned up along her back. At some point during the night, he’d undressed, because the heat from his naked body rushed into hers and she felt the hard, solid length of his erection pressing against her behind.

  Yet even that delicious sensation was trumped by the feel of one of his hands cupped between her thighs. Damp heat pooled in her center and her breath staggered past a knot of need lodged in her throat.

  Instinctively, she parted her thighs for him, silently asking that he touch her more surely, more deeply. Closing her eyes, she shifted against his hand, delighting in the frisson of sensations that swept through her in a rush. His fingers moved on her, dipping into her warmth, sliding over the tender, sensitive flesh.

  She sighed and his name came out on a groan. “Cooper…”

  “Right here,” he whispered, bending his head to the curve of her neck, nibbling, licking.

  “Yeah,” she said breathlessly, “I got that…”

  He smiled against her skin, then nibbled a little harder. “Sorry I woke you.”

  “No,” she said, “you’re not.” Smiling, she gulped in another breath as his fingers continued their gentle invasion.

  “Oka
y,” he admitted, “I’m not.”

  She rolled over onto her back and stared up into his dark eyes. While she watched him, he dipped one finger and then two inside her and she swallowed hard, loving the feeling of him touching her so deeply. When her nerve endings stopped frying, she managed to ask, “What’re you doing, Cooper?”

  In the pale wash of moonlight, she saw one dark eyebrow lift. “I would have thought that was obvious.”

  She sucked in a breath as he shifted his grip on her and stroked a nearly electrically charged nubbin of flesh.

  “Yes,” Kara choked out a laugh that was just the tiniest bit hysterical. “I guess I meant, why? Why are you…we…” she lifted her hips, arching into his hand, “…oh, boy, that really feels so good.”

  “Yeah,” he murmured, dusting a hard, brief kiss on her mouth. “It really does.”

  Fighting to maintain, to hold onto some semblance of her dignity—which Kara was beginning to think was way overrated—she shook her head on the pillow and demanded, “Is this some sort of sympathy thing?”

  “What?”

  “You know,” she said, pausing as his fingers once again plumbed her depths, pressing, stroking. “Wow, you’re good at this,” she said even while her brain shrieked at her to think.

  “It’s a gift,” he said, kissing her again, drawing the tip of his tongue along her bottom lip.

  Deliberately, she focused her splintering concentration even while her hips rocked, setting a rhythm she ached to give herself up to. “But Cooper—I don’t want a pity orgasm.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ve been sick and you want to make me feel better and—”

  “You’re crazy,” he said, his voice filled with wonder. “I never knew that about you.”

  “I’m not crazy,” she countered, trying not to notice that he was rubbing that sensitive spot again, “I’m just not interested in a ‘poor little Kara, let’s give her a ride’ night.”

  His hand on her stilled, his palm pressed tight against her heat. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Come on, Cooper,” she said, fighting to keep from begging him to rub her again. To stroke her inside and out. To push her over the edge into those fireworks she remembered so well from their one night together.

  Her hips moved again, seemingly of their own accord. Apparently her body was smarter than she was. It didn’t care why he was offering up an orgasm, it just wanted one.

  But Kara ignored the tantalizing rush of sensation. Fought to keep her mind focused on what she knew to be true. To keep her from allowing him to do something that would mean nothing to him and, therefore, little to her.

  Shaking her head, she met his gaze and said it, plain and simple. “You saw me sick as a dog, Cooper. You can’t be feeling attracted to me after that disgusting display, so this has got to be some warped sense of a good deed—or—I don’t know.”

  “You are nuts,” Cooper said, spearing his fingers up into her damp heat again, groaning as her head tipped back into the pillows.

  “Cooper…”

  “Look at me,” he ordered thickly, his voice a raw scrape of sound. When her gaze was locked with his, he said, “I’ve been wanting you for days. I even wanted you when you were sick. Hell, there you were, bent over a toilet and all I could think about was what a cute behind you’ve got. How twisted is that?”

  Kara ground her hips against his hand. “Really?”

  “Really.” He stroked her inner folds, driving her to the brink of desperation, only to pull her back from the edge and taunt her toward it again. “And,” he said, dipping his head to claim a kiss, “I know you’re still exhausted. Haven’t had a good night’s sleep in three nights, and am I letting you rest? Nope. I’m waking you up and hoping to hell you want me as badly as I want you.”

  “Really?”

  “Will you stop saying that?” He dropped another kiss on her mouth, ran the tip of his tongue across her lips.

  “Right,” she murmured, expelling a long breath on a deep groan.

  “So? Are you with me here, Kara? Or should I let you go to sleep?”

  “Who needs sleep?” she asked breathlessly, opening her thighs for him, reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck.

  “I was so hoping you’d say that,” he admitted, dipping his head to nibble at the line of her throat as she tilted her head back, deeper into the pillow.

  Kara finally stopped thinking.

  Stopped questioning his motives.

  And gave herself up to the pure pleasure swamping her.

  Again and again, his clever fingers worked on her body even as he slid farther down and used his free hand to push up the hem of the T-shirt she wore. When her breasts were bared to the moonlight, he took first one hardened nipple into his mouth and then the other. Over and over, he suckled her, drawing on her skin as if trying to sip her being into his.

  Dizzying sensations jolted through her and Kara could hardly keep up with them all. It felt as though her entire body were on fire and she encouraged the flames. She wanted them hotter, brighter. She wanted to be engulfed in the heat that was Cooper.

  Shifting over her, he moved down her body, trailing damp kisses along her flesh. She grabbed at him, trying to pull him up for a kiss. To feel his mouth on her own. But he neatly avoided her grasping hands and settled himself between her thighs with an anticipatory sigh.

  Opening her eyes, she looked at him and her breath caught. In the wash of moonlight pearling through the windows, his dark eyes gleamed with temptation and his tanned, hard body shone like marble.

  “Cooper…”

  “Shut up, Kara,” he whispered with a smile. Then he lifted her hips off the mattress, slung her legs over his shoulders and covered her heat with his mouth.

  She shrieked.

  Kara heard her own voice ricocheting off the walls, but she couldn’t care. Couldn’t do anything but feel.

  His lips, teeth and tongue took her higher, faster than anything ever had before. She fisted her hands in the sheet beneath her, trying desperately to keep that one little grip on sanity as her brain fractured in a wash of fiery sparks.

  He suckled her here, too. And while his mouth did amazing things to her, he managed to slide one finger into her depths, doing to her from the inside what his mouth was accomplishing on the outside.

  “Too much,” she whispered brokenly. “All too much. I can’t. Cooper, I can’t—”

  He chuckled and her eyes went wide even as her body stiffened at the approaching climax. She felt it build at a fever pitch and wondered absently if she’d survive. Then she knew she didn’t care. She would risk anything to feel this. To have this man in this moment.

  That one sensitive bud at her core felt as though it were electrified and when Cooper lapped at it with the tip of his tongue, Kara shrieked again. His big hands cupped her behind and held her steady as she shouted his name and rocked her hips wildly in his grasp.

  Releasing her death grip on the sheets, she reached for him and as a raw, charging fury raced through her body, she held his head to her and watched him as he took her over the edge.

  Her body still trembling, still humming with the incredible power of her orgasm, Cooper knew he couldn’t wait another moment. He had to be inside her. Had to feel her body surrounding his, feel the internal tremors as her muscles fisted around his length, squeezing him dry.

  Heart pounding erratically, Cooper laid her down onto the mattress and stretched out a hand to the bedside table. Blindly, desperately, he yanked the drawer open and didn’t even blink when it fell free of the table and landed upside down on the floor. He couldn’t care about anything. Not now. Not after tasting her surrender. Not after holding her while a storm crested within her.

  Not after experiencing Kara’s climax with a force stronger than anything he’d ever known.

  His only thought now was to feel it again. To be inside her when it came, to push himself so high and so deep within her body that the climax they would share would be
incredible.

  “Cooper…?”

  “Just a minute.” He scrambled off the edge of the bed, tossed the drawer to one side and grabbed up one of the foil packets that had fallen out. Quickly, he unwrapped it, sheathed himself and was back on the bed. His only regret was that he had to wear the damn condom in the first place. He wanted, more than anything, to feel her slick warmth on his skin. To feel the matchstick heat of sensation that could only come from two bodies, sliding together, unprotected from each other.

  But he was too smart and too concerned for Kara to take that kind of chance.

  Her arms opened to him as he rejoined her on the bed and he kissed her, taking her mouth while the taste of her body was still with him. His tongue swept inside her mouth, exploring, stroking, silently demanding.

  And she gave as good as she got.

  Their tongues met in an erotic dance, twining together, twisting, caressing until neither of them could draw a breath without a struggle. Her hands dropped from his back and tugged at the fabric of the shirt she still wore.

  Groaning, Cooper eased back up and in one quick movement, had the shirt up and over her head and tossed into a heap on the floor.

  “Better,” she said, lifting her head from the pillow to claim his mouth again. She nibbled at his bottom lip and he felt an answering tug of need deep in the core of him.

  “Gotta have you,” he whispered, his lips moving over hers hungrily. Not enough, his brain shouted. Not nearly enough. He wanted to taste every square inch of her body. Wanted her beneath him, over him, under him. He wanted her every way a man could want a woman and when they were finished, he wanted to do it all again.

  And again.

  “Yes,” she said, moving to accommodate him as he shifted, kneeling between her legs.

  He entered her with one swift thrust and she gasped at the invasion. Cooper paused, throwing his head back, staring blindly at the ceiling, concentrating solely on the lush feel of his body embedded in hers. But in an instant, need crowded within him and pushed him onward.

  Bracing his hands at either side of her head, he rocked his hips against hers. She lifted her legs high, helping him to go deeper. He bent his head, tasted her nipples, rolling his tongue across their pebbly tips, one after the other. His hips pistoned, her sighs and moans echoed his. She tossed her head from side to side on the pillow. Licked her lips.