Guilty

by Karen Robards

  Yes. That was exactly what it had done: broken his heart. And it had hurt so much that he wasn’t about to ever put the damned vulnerable thing at risk again.

  “I survived.”

  “I’m so very, very sorry, Tom.”

  He wasn’t mistaken: Tears were puddling in her eyes as she looked up at him. His gut clenched at the sight. As he watched, they spilled over to slide silently down her cheeks.

  “Damn it, are you crying?” His voice was unexpectedly harsh. “For me?”

  Her chin lifted defiantly. “Yes. Yes, I am. Is there some reason why I shouldn’t?”

  That was it. He couldn’t stand it. The pain for him he saw in her face was absolutely tearing him apart. His hands slid around her upper arms, and he pulled her up against him, hard.

  She didn’t resist. Instead, she melted against him. He could feel the soft warmth of her with every nerve ending he possessed.

  Their eyes met. Hers were still overflowing with tears.

  It was a mistake, he knew it was a mistake, and he did it anyway.

  He covered her mouth with his.

  Chapter 24

  HIS MOUTH WAS HOT and hungry and urgent and tasted of beer, and she caught fire from it. Wrapping her arms around his neck, closing her tear-filled eyes, she kissed him with feverish intensity, taking his mouth as thoroughly as he took hers. He pressed her back against the wall, trapping her there with his weight, and his hand found her breast through the white Hanes T-shirt she wore with her suit. It was big and hard and sure of itself, and as it flattened over her, she made a tiny mewling sound in her throat and arched up against it and felt her bones melt.

  He pulled her T-shirt out of her waistband, slid his hand inside, over her waist, up her rib cage. It was warm and faintly abrasive and unmistakably masculine, and the feel of it made her heart pound so hard that its drumming was all she could hear. She was wearing a simple white cotton bra, nothing fancy, but when his hand moved over it the cloth felt as sheer as the finest silk. His thumb found her nipple, rubbed it, and she went dizzy. Then he pushed the bra up and out of his way. His hand was on her bare skin, on her breast, on both breasts, caressing her until her nipples were tight and her breasts were swelling into his hands, until she burned and moaned and pressed up against him with an urgency that turned her blood to pure steam. Even as she recognized that this was crazy, that she was doing something she had sworn she wasn’t going to do, he kissed her with a fierceness that robbed her of even the tiniest bit of caution that remained.

  What he was doing to her simply felt so good that it was impossible to resist.

  She could feel the hardness of him against her, pressing between her legs, the strength of his desire obvious even through the layers of their clothes. He rocked into her, then tore his mouth from hers to press hot, wet kisses to each of her exposed breasts, drawing the nipples into his mouth, sucking them until her head fell back against the wall and she whimpered, mindless with need.

  He kissed her mouth again, deeper, harder, with a fierce, hot urgency that made her tremble and quake and feel as if all her muscles were dissolving with the heat of it even as she kissed him back with a flaming hunger of her own. She felt his hands at the small of her back, unbuttoning her skirt. He got the button free, and the zipper made a tiny sound as he pulled it down. Then he pushed her skirt down over her hips and it fell to the floor with a silken whisper.

  She still had her arms around his neck when he pulled his mouth away from hers again and then broke free of her grip entirely to pull her pantyhose and her panties with them down her legs. Leaning back, eyes still closed, panting, heart pounding, she pressed her hands flat against the cool plaster as he painted a hot, wet trail with his mouth down her right thigh, and then her left, on the way. One at a time, he guided her out of her shoes, pressing tiny, wet kisses to her knees as he did, and then he tugged her pantyhose and panties off each foot so that she was naked except for her blazer and the T-shirt and bra twisted up above her breasts.

  He stood up and pushed her blazer off her shoulders and pulled her T-shirt and bra over her head.

  Then she was totally naked, her back pressed up against the cool plaster wall in his living room, her hands flattened against it, breathing hard, weak with passion, and she could feel him looking at her, feel his eyes moving over her breasts and waist and the soft triangle of curls between her thighs. She was trembling, knowing that he could see how aroused she was, that she was totally exposed to him in every way, but she was absolutely too turned on to move, or try to cover herself in any way. For a moment nothing happened. Then she heard him catch his breath, and his lips brushed her nipples, softly, searingly, one at a time. His hand slid between her legs, rubbing her, claiming her, and she sucked in air and went weak at the knees.

  She never opened her eyes. She never looked at him. If it was a form of denial—and she guessed it was—she was too far gone to care. Her heart was pounding and she was breathing hard and the quickening inside her was coming fast and close. She shivered and burned and arched her back and moved against his mouth and his hand.

  I want you, she thought dizzily, but she didn’t say it aloud.

  Then his lips molded themselves to hers again, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back with abandon. He picked her up, his big hands curving beneath her cheeks, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. He was naked, too, and with the small part of her mind that was still functional, she supposed he must have stripped himself at the same time that he had stripped her.

  Seconds later he tipped them both onto the big leather couch and came into her hard. He was big and hot and filled her to capacity. She gave a short, sharp cry at the suddenness of it, the sheer unexpected pleasure of it.

  The cry was swallowed up by his mouth. He kissed her fiercely at the same time as he thrust into her again and again, deep and fast, driving her wild, so that she could do nothing but gasp and moan and surge against him, consumed with desire, dizzy with it, burning and writhing and quaking with it. She clung to his broad shoulders and kissed him back with fiery abandon as he made her shudder, made her clench and convulse inside, made her arch and scream and come in long, undulating waves that finally burst into a mind-blowing, earth-shattering intensity that rocked her world.

  She was still soaring when he drove inside her one last time and, with a low, guttural sound, found his own release.

  She floated back to earth to discover that being naked and sweaty on a leather couch was not such a good thing. In fact, she could hardly move, and not only because approximately two hundred pounds of naked, sweaty male was sprawled on top of her. Her skin felt like it was fused to the couch.

  Opening her eyes, she discovered that she was looking at a broad, bronzed, muscular shoulder with a fine sheen of sweat. And a big, masculine hand that still cupped her breast. His head was out of sight, buried in the curve between her shoulders and neck. His beard felt prickly against her skin. She could feel his breath stirring her hair, and could hear the soft sound of his breathing.

  He lifted his head and looked at her. With no warning at all. His eyes were still darker than usual, still hot in the aftermath of what they had done. His hair was tousled. A faint flush rode high on his cheekbones. His mouth had a slight, sensuous curve to it.

  She was a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer, for God’s sake—and yet she still felt herself blush.

  “That was unexpected,” she said, because she was rattled, because she had to say something, because he was looking at her. Her tone was way too bright.

  His hands rose to cup her face; his thumbs moved across her cheeks beneath her lashes, wiping away, any residual dampness that remained from her tears.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was.”

  Then he kissed her, a soft, sweet kiss that quickly changed into something entirely different. And he rolled with her, so that she was on top—she was sure she’d lost a layer of skin in the process—but then things got so heated so fast that she didn’t
even care. It was slower, different, but no less intense. In the end, she was astride him, his hands on her hips, her head thrown back while he thrust up inside her with barely controlled savagery. And finally she came again—and again.

  It was about three o’clock in the morning before she stirred a second time. She knew, because somewhere deep in the house she heard the clock strike the hour. She was, she discovered, still as naked as the last time she had checked, sprawled half across his chest and half in the tiny space between his body—he was flat on his back—and the stick-to-your-skin leather on the back of the couch.

  He was snoring.

  Despite everything, the homely noises he was making made her smile.

  Her heart picked up the pace. Her hand, which was resting in the nest of hair on his chest, stroked the firm muscle beneath, strictly of its own volition.

  Bad idea. Snatching her hand away, she glanced at his face with alarm. He didn’t so much as flicker an eyelash.

  Okay, playtime’s over.

  She levered herself off him, taking as much care as she could not to wake him. The situation was . . . awkward. She needed time to think it through. It would certainly be easier to deal with if, the next time she came eyeball-to-eyeball with him, she wasn’t naked and flushed with sex and wrapped in his arms.

  Waking him didn’t seem like it was something she had to worry about, she concluded, as, after a series of ungainly maneuvers, she managed to get to her feet at last. It was a surprise to discover that her legs were still a little unsteady, although it probably shouldn’t have been. The sex had been wild, unbelievable, far above and beyond anything she had ever experienced. Of course, the last time she’d had sex she’d been nineteen years old. Apparently, her arousal system had fine-tuned itself in the meantime. Or maybe it was because now she was a grown woman, with a grown woman’s responses. Or maybe it was just that she hadn’t had sex in nine years.

  Whatever, just remembering made her go all shivery inside.

  So she quit. With determination. Until she decided how she wanted to handle this—handle him—she needed to put how he could make her feel out of her head. Because it complicated things.

  Tom complicated things.

  Of its own accord, her gaze slid over him.

  Lying there stark naked, with one arm tucked behind his head and the other trailing down into the valley she’d just wriggled out of, he looked big and dark and utterly masculine. There wasn’t an inch of him that wasn’t, to quote Mona, “fine.” His hair was tousled, his eyes were closed so that his lashes lay in sooty crescents against his cheeks, he was sporting a considerable amount of dark stubble, and his lips were slightly parted to let the snores escape. If she’d ever thought he wasn’t particularly muscular, she saw now that she’d been wrong. His muscles were of the lean, ripped variety: honed forearms and brawny biceps, broad shoulders and wide chest, narrow hips, definitely six-pack abs that were bisected by a maybe six-inch-long white and puckered scar below and to the left of his navel. His legs were long and powerful-looking, an athlete’s muscular legs, and what lay between them was impressive despite its current, uh, sleepy state.

  Her body tightened at the thought of how impressive it was when it was awake. Then he stirred, shifting position slightly, and she hastily turned away. The last thing she wanted was to be caught staring at him.

  In fact, the last thing she wanted was to be caught naked in his living room and to have to face this thing that had happened between them before she had herself together again, before she was ready. Before she’d thought it through.

  She hastily gathered up her clothes (while trying with indifferent success not to remember how each and every piece had come off) and, following the path she’d seen him take with her suitcase, walked into the next room, which was the dining room, she discovered at a glance. It was furnished with a perfectly serviceable table and six chairs, but as far as she was concerned at the moment the best thing about it was the narrow staircase with her suitcase sitting at the foot of it. Casting a wary glance back—he was still snoring away on the couch—she picked up the suitcase and lugged it upstairs.

  Five minutes later she was stepping into the shower.

  The bathroom she’d found opened off the hall; it was old and narrow, with avocado tile and black accents and fixtures. The shower was actually a tub/shower combination, with a frosted sliding glass door to keep the water in. But the pressure was good, the water was hot, and there was soap, and that was what was important.

  With her hair twisted into a high knot on top of her head to keep it dry, she proceeded to shower—and think.

  Mario was dead. That was the good news. In fact, so far it didn’t seem to have sunk in, because she should be feeling way more euphoric than she was. But she did feel a slight lessening of tension—or maybe that was due to the mellowing effects of the hot water—as she reminded herself that the hold he’d had on her was broken forever. It was over. There was now no longer anyone else left alive who knew that she had been there at the murder of David Brady.

  In other words, all of a sudden her life had been handed back to her.

  That was the good news.

  The bad news was, someone had shot Mario in her garage. It probably had nothing to do with her personally. Probably Mario’s enemies had happened to kill him at her house because that was where he just happened to be, courtesy of his desire to surprise her with an early appearance.

  Whoever killed him would probably just fade into the woodwork now, posing no threat to her at all.

  Probably.

  Although for her money, if she were hunting the killer, the first thing she would do would be check out whoever had gotten Mario out of jail.

  But that was a problem for Tom and his fellow cops, not her. And for obvious reasons, that was information that she had no intention of sharing with Tom.

  Let the past be gone with Mario.

  On that cheering thought, she rinsed the soap from her body, turned off the taps, and stepped out of the shower. The towel she’d found wasn’t thick, it wasn’t new, and it wasn’t particularly large. But it smelled clean, and it was large enough to dry with and then wrap around herself and tuck in while she brushed her teeth. She was in the midst of doing that when her gaze just happened to travel sideways. And that was how she discovered that the bathroom door was open a few inches, and Tom, clad in a dark toweling robe and leaning against the wall opposite the bathroom, was watching her through the opening.

  Kate almost choked on her toothpaste.

  By the time she had rinsed and thus rendered herself able to speak, he had pushed the door the rest of the way open and was standing in the aperture, grinning at her.

  “The latch is broken,” he said by way of an explanation when she narrowed her eyes at him. He propped a shoulder against the doorjamb. His arms were crossed over his chest. “The damned door never stays shut. You notice I didn’t come in, though.”

  Okay, she guessed she had to give him that. He could have if he had wanted to, but at least he had that much respect for her privacy.

  “Good call,” she said.

  “When I woke up and you—and all your things—were nowhere in sight, I thought you’d gotten cold feet and run out on me. But then I heard the shower, and when I came up, steam was pouring out of the door here, so I knew where you went.”

  He’d clearly had a shower, too, a much faster one than hers. His hair was glistening wet and brushed back from his face, and there were stray water droplets here and there in the vee of hairy chest she could see and on his bare calves and feet.

  Water droplets or not, he looked so handsome he stole her breath.

  She was suddenly way, way too aware that all she was wearing was a thin and skimpy white towel that was tucked in between her breasts and didn’t even reach to midthigh. He wasn’t ogling her—he was way too smart a man for that—but she knew he was taking in the view just the same.

  She put up her chin, figuratively speaking. “I was actual
ly meaning to put my PJ’s on and go find a bed to sleep in for the rest of the night.”

  “You got three to choose from. Two spare beds—or mine.”

  Her throat dried up. Her heart began to pound. Their eyes met. He was still leaning against the doorjamb, no longer grinning but with the hint of a smile still lingering at the corners of his mouth. He still looked totally relaxed, but she got the impression that he was watching her carefully.

  For one of the few times in her life, she was absolutely devoid of speech.

  When she didn’t say anything, his eyes darkened and the smile went away. She stood beside the bathroom sink, one hand on the counter, looking at him mutely.

  Behind him, the hall was dim. The bathroom was steamy but relatively bright. Only a few feet of space separated them.

  Heat—and not from the shower—seemed to shimmer in the air.

  She knew what he was asking. For the life of her, she couldn’t come up with an answer.

  He gave her a level look. “Okay, I know you didn’t want this to happen. I’m not exactly overjoyed that it did, either. But the thing is, it did happen. I guess we could just walk away and pretend it didn’t, but how stupid would that be? There’s something—a connection—between us that’s been there from day one. How about we give it a shot?”

  Kate realized that the thumping she was hearing in her ears was her suddenly pounding heart.

  There were so many reasons to just walk away from him, from what had happened between them tonight. Ben, for one. Did she want to let a man—this man—into his life, for however long their “connection” might last? And there was her career. Getting where she was determined to go was going to take every ounce of drive and time and focus she could muster. And there were the lies she had told him, and the things about her and her past that he would never know.

  And then—and she had to admit it, this was the biggie—there was her.

  People you loved left. And that hurt. Did she really want to prove that to herself one more time?

  Then she looked at him standing there, so sexy and strong and absolutely rock-solid in every way, and she felt her heart thudding and her stomach going all fluttery and, yes, her toes curling against the warm, slick tile, and she remembered wondering the other day if, in all this new life-building she was doing, she was maybe forgetting about herself.