“I…I bought some wine. Red. I know, um, how much you like red.” At the time he’d thought it would help wash down the food if it hadn’t turned out right. Now he realized how stupid the idea was.
His gaze was riveted on the outline of her soft, shapely breasts as he poured the ruby-colored liquid into two different-size tin cups. The wine spilled over his hand and splashed onto the coffee table.
“Mel…”
“I’ll only have a sip or two.” She avoided his gaze as she hesitantly took the smaller of the cups. “Yes?”
He watched her lips purse to sip, then her throat worked as she swallowed. Just beyond his vision, he saw her breasts sway against the nightgown. He kept his gaze glued to her face as she picked at a piece of green lettuce on her burger, then nibbled on it. A dollop of mayonnaise clung to her upper lip. Her too pink, too wet tongue dipped out to slowly lick it off.
Marc felt a groan grow deep in his chest. She didn’t have a clue what she was doing to him. As far as she was concerned, she was merely sharing a meal with him. Nothing more. Nothing less.
He should have bought one of those granny gowns, and to hell with the heat.
No longer able to help himself, he allowed his gaze to travel south.
Talk, McCoy, talk.
As much as he hated to broach it, there was one subject that would throw cold water onto his libido, but quick.
He folded his paper napkin. “Do you love Craig?”
Marc cursed himself up one side and down the other. He had meant to discuss her relationship with Craig, but not in that direct way. He vigorously rubbed both hands over his face. But that particular unasked question had been haunting him all night. It was just as good it was out.
He chanced a look at Mel to find she had finally lifted her gaze to his. Her green eyes were dark in the candlelit room.
“I…” she said, then quietly cleared her throat, apparently struggling for an answer. “Yes, Marc. I do love Craig.”
But not the way I love you, Melanie thought.
Melanie was half-afraid she’d said the second part aloud. But as she searched Marc’s face, taking in his sexily disheveled brown hair, she knew she hadn’t. And she would likely never tell Marc she loved him ever again.
“I see,” he said, looking entirely too crestfallen.
She’d never known a man as irresistible as Marc. Even now, despite her hurtful confession. He’d taken off his T-shirt, apparently trying to beat the heat. The sight of his bare chest alone was enough to notch up her body temperature. She pulsed all over as her gaze followed the length of his hair-sprinkled chest—she longed to feel the crisp dark hair between her fingers—down to where his jeans hugged his well-toned waist.
She blinked and looked into his dark, shadowed eyes, longing for him to say something silly or make a wisecrack. Something, anything to break the growing tension, to slow the rapid beat of her heart. But he didn’t.
She wasn’t sure if it was the decadent feel of the silky nightgown against her clean skin or the sight of him looking so hurt and completely appealing, but she knew then exactly what she wanted. One more night with him. A few intimate hours to remember in the years to come. Quiet time before she told him she was pregnant. Before she married someone else.
She watched his gaze flick to her hands. She worried her engagement ring, then skimmed the clingy lines of the silk. But rather than avoid his gaze, as she had earlier, she sat up a little straighter, stretching her neck as a shiver started at the very tips of her toes and shimmied all the way up her spine. She felt, rather than saw, her nipples harden, and she opened her mouth to pull in more of the humid air. Marc might have failed Relationship 101, but she had plenty of proof that he had aced the course on body language.
Marc wasn’t sure what had changed in Mel in the past few minutes, but he knew for a fact something had. He could tell by the way she sat up a little more provocatively, looking at him in that way that said so much. He’d never been able to refuse her. Never. It hadn’t mattered where they were—in a restaurant, in the car—all she had to do was look at him that way, and he was all hers.
That hadn’t changed.
Pure, primitive need filled him as he grabbed the edge of the table. He gave up trying to gain some leverage and instead tipped the table out of his way. The crash of tin, glass and plates was barely audible over his hammering heartbeat.
Threading his fingers through the hair above her ears, he suddenly stilled, holding her there, gazing deeply into her eyes. He needed to make sure this was what she truly wanted. If he saw a flicker of doubt…
Her hands encircled his wrists and slid up his arms, pulling him closer.
“Make love to me, Marc.”
Her husky voice flowed over him like the silk that covered her lush body, chasing away any chance he had of pulling away from her. With a deep groan, he slanted his mouth across hers, tentatively at first, calling on every ounce of self-control at his disposal.
She tasted so sweet. Like a ripe pear begging to be eaten. Her tongue sought and found access to his mouth even as she slid closer to him, cradling him between her silk-clad thighs, pressing her breasts against his bare chest. He’d always thought that the closest he could come to heaven was through sex with Mel, but what he was feeling now, he couldn’t begin to describe. It was like looking into the star-filled night sky, seeing all the answers to life’s questions printed there and being unable to do anything more than admire them, bask in the peace they offered, but not being able to read them.
Tilting her head with one hand, he slid his other down the impossibly long column of her neck, feeling her pulse there. There was a sense of inevitability about this, their coming together now, tonight. As if he was no more in control of his actions than Mel was. His palm moved from the silk of her skin to the silk of her gown, finding very little difference except in the way the silk moved, gliding easily against her flesh as he cupped her breast.
She tugged her mouth away from his, gasping as she rested the side of her head against his. “You always knew just how to touch me,” she rasped.
Her hands skimmed down his abdomen, causing him to catch his breath. She reached for and found the front of his jeans. Her knuckles grazed his skin as, one by one, she undid the metal buttons there, her mouth once again seeking his.
Marc drank deeply of her lips, groaning as she slid her hand inside his fly, freeing him and wrapping her silken fingers around his pulsing shaft. He nearly spilled his need into her palm right there and then. A part of his mind said it was because he’d gone so long without her. Another part told him what they were sharing was unlike anything they’d shared before.
Gliding the nightgown slowly up her long, long legs, he tried counting backward from a hundred, but lost track of the count when she flicked her tongue across his lips, then closed her mouth over his again.
Too soon. Too fast.
At the rate they were going, it was going to be over as soon as it had begun. He needed to gain some distance, and he needed to do it now.
Gently pressing her into the cushions, he ignored her needy protest, then grasped her hips and hauled her down so her rear end was even with the edge. Her lusty moan coaxing him on, he used his thumbs to part her and slowly bent to fasten his lips around the sensitive nub at her center.
Mel cried out and arched from the cushions, pressing herself against his mouth. He curved her legs around his neck, laving her with his tongue, reveling in her gasps and soul-deep moans.
She tunneled her hands through his hair, moving restlessly, both begging him to stop and pleading with him to give her the release she sought.
With his fingers, he spread her farther, running his mouth the length of her, licking, tasting her musky essence, then he slowly slid two of his fingers inside, readying her for him.
He knew her moment of crisis was near. Could tell by the way she almost desperately grasped the cushions, her hips going still. He fastened his mouth around her nub once more and gently sucked, holding on as
she bucked from the couch in a series of uncontrollable spasms, contracting around the fingers he thrust into her slick wetness.
She looked at him through drugged eyes, her hair a tangled blond mass around her face, her lips parted provocatively.
He’d never wanted someone so much in his life.
Marc made quick work of taking off his jeans, his teeth gritted so he would keep from climaxing before he claimed her the way he’d been longing to for the past three months. She sought and found his erection and led him home. As she surrounded him, he threw his head back. Damn her for making him want her this way. Bless her for showing him what it felt like to be alive again.
No…not yet…
But he couldn’t wait. It seemed like forever since he’d been able to lose himself in Mel. Three torturously long months filled with wet dreams and cold showers, haunted by memories of her needy cries and soft sighs.
She rocked against him, pulling him in deeper, and he lost all concept of time and place as he thrust into her.
The instant he heard her cry out his name, he let loose, every muscle going rigid even as he tried to keep up the rhythm of his thrusts. But it was a losing battle. His ham-strings locked and his hips drove forward one last time, spilling his need deep inside her.
For long moments they stayed like that, joined together, connected in a way that somehow surpassed anything they’d shared before. Marc felt as if he was floating somewhere above his body, lighter than the heavy, humid air around them, curiously detached yet a part of every physical item in the room.
He reluctantly withdrew from her, then laid his head against her silk-covered stomach. He closed his eyes, unsure if it was his heartbeat he heard there, or hers.
MELANIE JOLTED AWAKE, her heart pounding in her ears, fear clogging her throat. Around her, the night was black and forbidding, the bed she lay in unfamiliar and hard. It took her a moment to realize where she was.
The safe house.
She’d dreamed. What? What had she dreamed? She desperately tried to hold on to the haunting images, to examine them, to understand why she had awakened and why she felt as if her heart was going to beat right through her chest.
Hooker.
In her mind’s eye, she saw the shadowy figure somewhere twenty feet to her right near the first-floor window of the senator’s house. The window was partially open, and the figure had been halfway in when she shouted. Then there’d been the flash of reflected light as Hooker had turned his weapon on her.
She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. The staff psychologist had told her the nightmares would lessen in frequency after a week or two. But here it was, three months later, and she still saw the vivid, haunting images almost nightly.
“Maybe the dreams are trying to tell you something,” Judith Hamilton, the psychologist, had told her a couple of weeks ago.
“Yes, I think they are,” Melanie had said. “They’re telling me I did the right thing by quitting.”
A low murmur brought Melanie’s head around. Marc turned over and pulled her into his arms as naturally as if he’d been doing so forever.
For a long moment she stayed like that, trying to control her breathing, trying to enjoy the moment for all it was worth, all it signified—namely, the last time she and Marc would share a bed. But rather than wrapping herself in the warmth of his body, a bittersweet sadness gripped her from within. She burrowed against him, breathing in the smell of him, trying to ignore that he didn’t have a clue what she had in mind.
After their frenzied lovemaking on the couch, they’d managed to salvage some of the food he’d prepared. She fed him the Cheddar fries, and he gave her bites of the salad with slow deliberation and languid care. The circumstances that had brought them together were taboo, and everything but the sound of the crickets had been off-limits. Melanie looked on their silence with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight. She supposed that since Marc couldn’t say the things she had so longed to hear, there had been nothing to say.
But their bodies still had plenty to communicate.
Melanie swallowed past the emotion clogging her throat. She’d never felt so thoroughly made love to.
At least in her eyes they had made love. But she knew better than to make that mistake twice. In Marc’s eyes…well, he’d likely see it as the best sex he’d ever had.
Dear, thickheaded, love-impaired Marc.
She dragged his hand to her mouth and kissed his fingers, loving the warm feel of his skin against hers. When he stirred, she gently moved his arm around her waist and held it there, wishing the baby within her could know the touch of his father. She tightly closed her eyes, clutching the memories from the night before, holing them away the way a squirrel gathered the biggest nuts to see him through the winter. Only the memories Melanie had gathered would have to last her a lifetime.
WHAT IN THE HELL was that infernal pounding?
Marc dragged the pillow over his head and groaned, groggily trying to remember how much he’d had to drink last night. There had been many times over the past weeks that he’d awakened, convinced someone was using a jackhammer just outside his window, only to find the curtains flapping against the frame.
Then he remembered he’d had very little to drink and bolted upright in bed.
Mel.
A quick, sweeping glance told him he was the only one in the room. The pounding was someone knocking at the front door.
The significance of that hit him in the gut like a sucker punch. He leaped from the bed, pulled on his jeans and rushed the door.
“Mel?” he called, nearly tripping over a confused Brando. “Sorry, buddy.”
They were out in the middle of nowhere. It didn’t bode well that Mel was nowhere to be seen and that someone was at the door. He picked up his empty gun holster, noticed his cell phone was missing and cursed. Quickly, he checked his jeans pocket. Relief washed through him. Good. The ring was still there.
Improvising, he grabbed the leg that had broken off the coffee table the night before. He yanked open the door, then brought the leg down.
“Whoa!” Connor ducked, lifting his arms to ward off the impending blow.
Cursing, Marc tossed the leg into the overgrown grass, then stared at his eldest brother. “Jesus, Connor, I could have maimed you for life.” He dragged in a breath. “What in the hell are you doing here?”
A scowl marred his brother’s face. “I think the better question would be what the hell are you doing here?” He tried to push through the door, but Marc stopped him. “Imagine my surprise when Pops wakes me up in the middle of the night to tell me the Maryland state authorities have been by asking around for you. Then this morning I’m putting my keys in my pocket when I notice a certain one missing. Damn it, Marc, do you have any idea what kind of trouble you could get us both into by breaking and entering into federal property?”
Marc scratched his head and looked past his brother. He was relieved to see his car was still there. That meant Mel had to be around somewhere. “I’m just borrowing the place for a couple days, that’s all. I really wish I had the time to explain—”
“That’s all? Have you lost your friggin’ mind, Marc?”
Time or not, it was obvious Connor wanted an explanation and he wanted it now. But with Mel only God knew where, and with Hooker…
He took a long look at his brother. No one had known where he was until now. Even one more person having that information doubled the risk of discovery.
Oh, God.
He grabbed Connor by his shirtfront. “Were you followed?”
“Let go of me right now, little brother, or else—”
“I asked if you were followed!” Marc said.
He abruptly released Connor then started to close the door.
Connor caught the barrier. How many times when they were kids had Marc pulled a fast one on his brothers only to have Connor following on his heels? And how many doors had Connor caught, preventing his escape?
“I’m not going anywhere u
ntil you explain this to me. Now. And why don’t you start with what in the hell was going through that deranged mind of yours when you kidnapped Melanie Weber right under her mother’s nose.”
Marc ground his teeth together. “Later, Connor.”
“Damn it, Ma—”
Needing to find Mel and not knowing how to get rid of his brother, Marc tried to push Connor out of the way just as Connor was taking a step forward. Connor stumbled, all his attention on grabbing the rickety iron railing. Marc quickly reached out to control his fall, then reached into Connor’s suit jacket to slide his gun from his shoulder holster. He said, “Sorry about this, Con. I’ll get the gun back to you later.” He went inside and slammed the door. Connor dropped to the ground.
7
THE COOL SAND sucked at Melanie’s high heels, making each step an impossible struggle. She hadn’t realized that three months of inactivity would leave her so out of shape. At this rate, she’d only get twenty yards before Marc realized she was missing. He’d probably find her on her knees, gasping and wheezing and offering her soul up for a measly cup of coffee. Just one. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t had even a sip of the heavenly brew for nearly three months. She needed the caffeine jolt right now.
Marc had never been a morning person. That’s one of the reasons it had been so easy to sneak out. Another was that after waking from that nightmare, she hadn’t slept another wink. It had been all too easy to slip from the bed long before dawn to map out her escape.
Her heart gave a tender squeeze. Leaving Marc lying there alone had to be one of the more difficult things she’d ever done. He’d looked so boyishly handsome—almost vulnerable—and downright sexy. It was almost too easy to let herself believe everything would be okay. She’d tell him the truth about the baby and he’d…
She tripped over a piece of driftwood. He’d have a coronary—after he gave her the devil for keeping the information from him for so long.
Her thoughts focused on the exact reason she needed to get away from Marc, and fast. Yes, Hooker may be lurking out there somewhere, but the physical danger he presented paled in comparison to the romantic fantasies she was starting to entertain after a night of loving Marc.
License to Thrill Page 10
