One Tough Texan

by MJ Rodgers

  Matt stopped in front of the third house. “This is it.”

  Jamie did a double take when she realized it was an enormous, imposing, Tudor-style home set back off the street on lush, expansive and beautifully manicured grounds.

  “If this is where Tony lives, why did you give the driver the wrong address?”

  “Because he has to report the address he takes his passengers to for the official record.”

  “And you didn’t want him to report that we went to Tony’s. Why?”

  “Just a precaution.”

  Jamie’s eyes took in the impressive Tudor home. “The cleaning business is apparently a profitable one.”

  Matt made his way casually over to the Mercedes that was parked in front of the garage. The license plate read Clean One. He rested his hand on its hood as he took another slow and careful look around.

  “The engine’s still slightly warm. Jamie, I want you to stay close to me. Don’t leave my side.”

  Jamie heard that deadly serious sound in his voice. She looked up at him and nodded.

  Matt strode slowly, nonchalantly toward the house. But he didn’t directly approach the sixteen-foot stone archway that marked the impressive double-door entry to the Tudor.

  Instead he headed for the right side of the house, an area hidden by a long, vibrantly healthy and beautifully manicured hedge.

  “Are we going in the back way?” Jamie asked.

  “We’re going to admire the grounds from every angle,” Matt said. Jamie understood that he was not admiring the grounds but checking them for something or someone who shouldn’t be there.

  “Do you think the FBI agents tracked us here to be sure we weren’t followed?”

  “We weren’t followed.”

  When Matt said it that way, Jamie felt quite certain they weren’t.

  They were halfway down the side of the house headed toward the back when Matt suddenly stopped. His left arm immediately circled around Jamie in a gesture that was becoming familiar. She felt the tension in him escalating. He stood perfectly still, just like a wild animal sniffing the air.

  Jamie looked around, trying to see what had alerted him, trying to listen for a wrong sound.

  “Matt, what is—”

  Jamie never got a chance to finish her sentence. Matt picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, whirled around and sped away from the house at full and emphatic speed.

  The house whizzed by like a blur on one side of Jamie, the hedge on the other. And beneath her she felt the pounding of Matt’s muscles like iron pistons plunging up and down.

  She had no idea what had warned him. But she understood soon enough why he ran. They had just made the front yard when it happened.

  One second Timothy Palmer’s beautiful palatial home stood shadowed and still beneath the heavy overcast Reno sky. The next second the walls were thundering and crumbling, the roof flying into the air in a cacophony of roaring noise and exploding fireballs that spit their hellish light into the heavens.

  An enormous hole had been blown right in the center of the house.

  Chapter Twelve

  The percussion wave of the explosion’s force slammed into them like a moving wall, knocking them to the grass. Matt had kept his body between Jamie and the house, taking the worst of it. But what Jamie felt was more than enough to whip the strength and wind right out of her.

  She lay on her back, gasping for breath, weak as water. Matt lay across her, balancing his weight on his arms and legs so as not to crush her while his massive body hovered over hers like a shield.

  Jamie stared at the house through the open arch of his side in a vague sort of stunned horror. Black plumes of billowing smoke blew out of the hole in the center, filling the sky. Charred debris was falling all around them. A burning piece of roofing landed nearby on a dry wood bush. It burst into flames.

  She felt Matt’s body jerk above her, hard. She knew instantly that he’d been hit by something.

  Jamie’s heart gave a huge, hard thump. She put her palms against his chest, pushing to get up.

  “Matt—”

  “I’ll let you up when it’s safe.”

  “But, Matt—”

  “Stay still!” He kept her imprisoned beneath him for another full minute. Jamie counted every second against the thinning sheath surrounding her nerves. Then an unearthly stillness seemed to suddenly settle all around them. Matt rolled off her onto his side. Jamie scrambled to her feet.

  She dropped right back to her knees beside him when she saw the jagged piece of glass sticking out of the back of his left thigh. Blood was oozing from out the sides, rolling down his jeans.

  “Oh, Matt!”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks, Jamie. I’ll take care of it later. We’ve got to get out of here now. Another explosion could be going off at any moment.”

  He got instantly to his feet and pulled Jamie to hers. Jamie looked to his face. His eyes were steady. His hand felt warm and hard and strong in hers.

  “Hey, I don’t know about you two, but I’m getting out of here!”

  Jamie looked over to see the taxi driver had backed down the street. He was gesturing frantically out his window at them.

  Matt was already on the move toward the taxi, pulling Jamie beside him. How he managed to take a step with that glass in his thigh, Jamie had no idea. But he had the door open for her when she reached the curb.

  Jamie jumped inside and Matt jumped in right behind her. Before he’d swung the door closed, their driver was gunning the engine.

  They were halfway down the block when the second explosion blew the chimney off the house and sent a fireball into the sky. A second later, literally a ton of bricks was raining onto the patch of grass where Jamie and Matt had been lying.

  Jamie shivered when she thought of how close they had come to being buried beneath those bricks.

  Their driver let out a muttered oath and crossed himself.

  “I’ve been driving this cab for twenty years and I’ve never seen anything like that. The fire department is going to have their hands full with that one.”

  “Have you called them?” Matt asked.

  “Right after the first blast. I have a brother on the force. What a fireball that one was. You guys okay back there?”

  Jamie looked over at Matt. He was perched on the side of his right leg, his arm extended over the seat, balancing himself in order not to have to put pressure on his left thigh. His expression was calm, but there was a sheen of sweat on his skin. When she thought of the kind of pain he must be enduring so stoically, she could have wept.

  “Take us to the nearest emergency room,” Jamie said.

  “No,” Matt contradicted. “The nearest telephone. Then a drugstore, followed by the kind of motel that doesn’t mind renting a room for cash to a Mr. and Mrs. Smith for a few hours.”

  Jamie watched Matt slip the second half of the hundred

  dollar bill to the driver and then add three crisp new ones.

  “And remember that you didn’t have a fare when you came back to the Flamingo Hilton,” Matt added.

  “Yes, sir,” the cherub said with enthusiasm, quickly pocketing the money.

  “Matt, what can you be thinking?” Jamie asked.

  “I’m thinking we just walked into an ambush, Jamie. And I don’t intend to walk into any more.”

  AS SOON AS MATT LIMPED into the new motel room after

  Jamie, he made sure the door was closed and bolted.

  “Why won’t you go to a doctor?” Jamie asked.

  “Because they’d know the only way to get a piece of glass embedded in a leg like this is through an explosion. These kinds of injuries get reported, Jamie. I don’t want to be answering questions from some wet-behind-the-ears police officer who hasn’t the faintest idea of what’s going on.”

  “What is going on, Matt?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Jamie exhaled heavily. “You can’t doctor yourself.”

 
; “Private investigators are trained for this sort of thing.”

  He took off his denim vest and laid it carefully across the nightstand. He picked up the first-aid supplies he’d instructed Jamie to buy at the drugstore while he was on the telephone. He carried them into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

  He dumped the supplies on the floor in front of the tubshower enclosure and tried to get a look at the back of his thigh. He couldn’t see the wound, but he could sure feel it. It throbbed and burned like hell.

  The blood had stopped dripping into his boots, so at least the bleeding had stopped. Shame he was going to have to start it up again. But it was time he got that glass out.

  He kicked off his boots, slipped off his socks, removed his shirt and stepped into the shower. He waited until the water was running as cold as a rattlesnake’s eyes.

  Then he took a deep breath and got a firm grip on the edge of the glass. He wasn’t looking forward to doing this twice. With one powerful pull, he yanked it out.

  A wave of pain and blood came gushing with it. Matt threw the glass into the trash can beneath the sink. He trained the full force of the shower nozzle at the wound. The icy spray against the burning flesh gave him the seconds of pain relief he needed. As fast as he could, he unzipped his jeans, shucked them and his briefs over his hips and pulled them off.

  The dried blood and torn flesh around the wound that pulled away with the fabric brought a violent curse to Matt’s lips. The water running down the drain became pink again. He gritted his teeth, watching until it ran clear.

  He pulled a towel off its holder, gave his body a once-over. He slung the towel back over the holder. The running water had helped to clean the wound, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough. He reached for the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and uncapped it.

  He twisted, trying to see the wound.

  Matt had doctored plenty of wounds in his time, several of them his own. But not on the upper back portion of his thigh, where he couldn’t see what he was doing.

  After a couple of stymieing minutes, during which most of the hydrogen peroxide ended up on the tile floor, he was cursing royally in frustration.

  A knock came at the door. “Matt?”

  “What?” he called, barely keeping the irritation out of his tone.

  When the door opened, Matt was so startled that he just had time to grab the towel off the holder again and wrap it strategically around his middle.

  Jamie stood in the doorway. Her eyes moved from his to do a quick, thorough inventory of his body. Their blue was bright with that same frank, intense approval that he remembered from the previous night when she’d walked into his room. His heart began to pound. Hard.

  “What are you doing in here?” he asked, hearing the gruffness in his voice, his only defense against her.

  She looked at the tile floor, awash in peroxide. Her eyes rose to his. They were clear and lovely and held that glow of determination he’d come to recognize.

  “We both know you can’t possibly do this on your own. I’m not leaving until I help you, so you might as well just make up your mind to take it like a man.”

  She moved to his left side, knelt beside his thigh, picking up the bandages he’d strewn across the floor.

  Her sleeve brushed the hair on his calf. The sweetness of her scent surrounded his senses. Every muscle in his body tensed. When he heard her sharp intake of breath, he knew she had seen his wound.

  “It’s deep,” she said, her normally full-bodied, husky voice a ghostly whisper.

  “I’m tough.”

  “It must hurt like hell.”

  “Real tough.”

  She paused to look at the series of white scars on his legs. Her eyes finally rested on the bruise that still purpled his left shoulder. Her sigh was shaky.

  “And I thought your job was too tame.”

  The sudden whip of sadness in her voice lashed out at him. He wanted to comfort her, to hold her so badly his hands had begun to shake. He wrapped them around the edge of the towel and held on.

  Her eyes returned to the open gash on the back of his thigh. “I should have bought some antibiotic salve at that drugstore.”

  “Hydrogen peroxide will take care of any germs I missed in the shower.”

  She picked up the bottle and braced her left hand against his knee to steady herself as she poised the peroxide over the wound.

  “I don’t know if this is going to hurt.”

  Matt never felt it if it did. He couldn’t feel anything now but the smooth warmth of her hand grasping his knee, the light touch of her breath against his skin and the deep, unrelenting want of her that had every muscle in his body screaming from the pain of it.

  When her small, gentle hands skimmed over his flesh, smoothing the large bandages over his wound, Matt’s breath came in with a ragged, rippling sound. He closed his eyes. and said a silent prayer that the sweet torture would be over soon.

  Her voice trembled as she rose. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you, Matt. Or to get you hurt.”

  He suddenly felt her lips, softly, sweetly brushing against the bruise on his shoulder. Her kiss was a match striking through his blood, setting it on fire. He opened his eyes.

  And was ambushed again. For her eyes were so close, so blue, so breathtakingly beautiful, and so full of admiration that they stopped his heart. His voice was nothing but a thick murmur as he reached for her.

  “Jamie.”

  Jamie felt herself picked up as though she weighed nothing more than air. Matt’s mouth claimed hers with a groan of hunger so deep she felt it rumbling in her blood and bones. Wild sounds of response burst from her throat as her lips

  parted beneath the demand of his. The knowledge that he wanted her like this sent her senses soaring.

  Arms of steel anchored her hard against his chest as he carried her to the bed. She melted into them, into him. He tasted and felt so impossibly good. She had never been drunk in her life, but she was drunk now with the heat of him and the intensity of her own desire.

  He lay on top of her on the bed-naked, heavy, hot, hard.

  The sudden immense weight and size of him shocked her.

  Reflexively, she froze. He felt it.

  He tore his mouth from hers, pushing his weight to his arms. His eyes were shut tightly. A sheen of perspiration gleamed across his forehead and the magnificent, massive muscles of his shoulders and arms. Jamie panted for breath and realized Matt was battling for breath, too, and for something else. Whatever that other battle, he was losing.

  His voice was so thick and slurred, his words were almost unintelligible.

  “The gun’s on the nightstand in my denim vest. Shoot me in an arm or leg. It’s the only thing that’s going to keep me away from you now.”

  He meant it. Dear, sweet Lord, he meant it. The knowledge struck Jamie like a tornado, lifting her up and whirling her into a realm of passion that dwelt beyond reason or understanding.

  She grasped his shoulders and brought his lips back to hers with an urgency and force that made her tremble. He sunk into her with a tortured, primitive sound that she had never heard before but recognized on a deep, instinctive level that rocked her soul.

  She had never tasted or felt desire so rich, so ripe, so exposed that it could bring pain. But she was tasting and feeling it now because she was tasting and feeling him. It seared her with such force that she felt her insides might shake apart.

  When he finally broke off the kiss, she gasped for breath. And then lost it all over again when his hot lips and tongue branded her neck with hard kisses that sent knives of need down her spine. His impatient hands fumbled with the buttons on her blouse. He cursed like a madman and gave up the attempt, pulling up the hem.

  He paused for a fraction of a second to stare at her swollen breasts, her taut nipples poking through the thin fabric of her bra. The heat in the look he shot her burned through every inch of her body like a branding iron.

  He pulled down her bra and
sucked her nipples with such greed that it fired streamers of sensation straight through to her core. Her hands tangled in his hair as she arched her back, feeding her body to him with hungry, incoherent sounds.

  He pulled up her skirt with impatient haste, his mouth like steam as he cursed against her breasts at every inch of the fabric that fought him.

  His hands felt like molten lead on the cool skin of her thighs. Hot, eager fingers slipped inside her panties to stroke her wet heat.

  A deep, eager moan tore from her throat as she arched beneath his touch, wanting, needing, crying out for more.

  He was pulling at her panties, desperate to get them off. But they were anchored beneath her garter belt. When he ripped the crotch, she was astonished at how excited she was by the intensity of his need and the sudden rush of cool air against her bare flesh.

  And then his hot mouth and tongue replaced the cool air between her legs and her breath caught in her throat. His fingers milked her nipples in ruthless, seductively sweet, torturing pinches as he thrust his tongue into the limits of her self-restraint.

  Whether she had been under any semblance of control up until this time, she had no idea. But she did know that she possessed none now. She moaned and panted in a mindless ecstasy as every nerve cell in her body was fused on the sensual pleasures wrought by his mouth and hands.

  She began to shudder uncontrollably and then the spasms hit her, strong and racking and almost too intense to be endured. She soared into a mindless pleasure beyond belief. Then her body fell back against the bed, boneless beneath the aftermath of the onslaught.

  She reveled in the full, hot length of him as he once again lay on top of her. His tongue dipped thirstily into her parted lips and he thrust himself against the soft, wet center between her legs. Eagerly, she opened for him. He pushed inside. She wrapped her legs around him, sending him deeper. Her hands grasped his shoulders.

  He filled her to overflowing and it was glorious. She moved her hips in a rhythm to the increasing power of his thrusts. The world tilted and turned and spun in streamers of sparkling flashes and the new sensual heat rushing through her.

  And then she felt his heavy, powerful body going rigid on top of her, an anguished, crazed cry breaking from his throat into hers as he pulsed warm and wet inside her.