Scott grabbed her by the upper arm and practically dragged her into the apartment. She should have been outraged at being manhandled like that, especially coming so soon on the heels of what had been building up to be an apology, but it was the first time he’d initiated physical contact with her since their breakup.
It was impossible to go from constant touching—a gentle hand on the knee or a firmer one between her thighs, an early morning tug-of-war over the blankets ending in a late-morning tug-of-war of an entirely different type—to zero contact without there being a clear measure of intent. From the moment Scott stormed out of his laundry room holding the vest aloft, so furious he could have heated the entire block with the brimstone of his gaze, he’d made every effort not to touch her. It was if he knew even the whisper of his finger on her skin would unravel everything.
And it would. It did. It was.
“Why is it so hard for you to hold a conversation like a normal human being?” He managed to get them both inside with the door shut, but his hand was still on her arm, ruining her ability to come up with a clever and timely retort. Those five fingers pressed hard enough to make an impression but not cause pain. Those five fingers touched so much more than just her skin. “It’s like you’re trying to cause me the most embarrassment possible.”
“That’s because I am.”
“But I came here to apologize.”
“You came to apologize for yelling at me last night—not for the way you ended things between us. That gives me the right to retain my anger, should I so choose.” She glared. “I choose.”
He grabbed her other arm and pulled her close, his eyes still brimstone, his body warm enough to support an entire solar system of its own. Even though he’d come in from the cold, he only had on a long-sleeved flannel that he’d pushed up to his elbows, his jeans worn and faded in all the right places. How nice it must be to hold so much anger you walked around with a space heater in your pants.
“I’m sorry, okay? I was upset last night, and I said things I shouldn’t have. I was upset the day we broke up, and I said things I shouldn’t have then, too. I’m an asshole. You didn’t deserve to be treated like that, and I didn’t deserve you. Happy now?”
She should have been. This was the moment she’d been waiting for, the epic grovel, the man of her dreams holding her so tightly she couldn’t escape even if she wanted to. But this wasn’t real. It was a result of the voodoo magic—it had to be. She’d never seen a man less excited about either apologizing or holding her in his arms.
“I’ve been better,” she said. “I heard you apologize, but I didn’t really feel it, you know?”
He groaned and tipped his head back. “Do you want me on my knees? Is that it? Would that help speed things along?”
She pretended to consider it. “I do like you on your knees, but speed isn’t exactly the goal there.”
He dropped her arms and stepped back, a man walking away from a bomb. “Oh, no you don’t. Don’t you dare try to seduce me right now.”
“Relax, Scott. It was a joke.”
“If it was a joke, why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because that’s the normal position my eyeballs take when I’m in the same room as another human being.”
“It is not. I’ve seen your eyes around other people. You bat them and look adorable and do whatever you can to get your way—but you don’t look at them with that gleam.”
She had a gleam? Unable to help herself, she batted her eyes at him, basking in the idea that he found her adorable. She was adorable, but that was hardly the point. “I can’t help that I’m naturally alluring.”
“You’re naturally annoying—that’s what you are. Would you please let me finish apologizing now?”
“Oh, you weren’t done? By all means, don’t let me stop you. I’ve got no plans this evening. Take all the time you need.”
He glowered and tensed up even more, looking less and less sorry by the minute. “You could gloat a little bit less, you know.”
“I could, but I’m not going to.”
“This isn’t an easy thing for me to do.”
Nor was he particularly good at it. But all she said was, “If you wanted easy, Scott, you chose the wrong woman.”
“Don’t I fucking know it,” he said, and she was back in his arms. This time, he wasn’t pushing her inside the apartment—he was just pushing, period. Against her, against the foyer wall, his lips crashing into hers with the searing heat he carried inside him.
If she’d been prepared for the embrace, she might have had a fighting chance at stopping him. Not only did she possess a mean left hook when the situation called for it, but she also shared the agility of the rest of the SAR team, her body ready for situations of high intensity.
But it was too late for this particular brand of intensity. Her hands were against his chest, and she could have pushed him away, but what was the point? He was furious, and he was kissing her, and nothing was more intoxicating than those two things combined.
He knew it as well as she did. With a jolt, she found herself being slammed against the wall, her whole body tingling with the double sensation of force and desire. She didn’t have time to think too much about it as Scott’s mouth pushed deeper into hers, the red hot seething he normally kept at a simmer rushing to the surface with the slide of his tongue against hers.
It was a sensation she knew well and enjoyed thoroughly. Every ounce of his hard, compact strength had her pinned in place, his muscles so inflexible against her it was like being held by machine rather than man. It was the perfect position for him to take full possession of her mouth, his lips and teeth and tongue furious in their assault, punishing her and priming her at the same time.
“You’re such a bastard,” she said with a sound somewhere between a sigh and a moan.
And then it was her turn.
She curled her fingers in the hair at his nape, forcing his head up, and pushed one thigh between his to gain the physical advantage. Already growing hard against her, his erection finished the task it had set out to do, becoming a stalwart reminder of how much they both still felt for each other—at least physically.
Physical stuff was easy. Physical stuff required nothing beyond the requisite body parts and a general understanding of how to use them—and their body parts understood each other perfectly.
He groaned against her lips, sending her whole body vibrating. “God, I’ve missed you.”
It was all he had to say to send her blood pumping and her heart soaring. With the full force of her body against his, she pushed him toward the opposite wall.
He didn’t hit hard, and he didn’t seem to notice that they’d changed positions, but Carrie knew. She knew it in the way her entire body melted against him, chest to chest, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. She knew it in the way it was her turn to kiss him, taking out her fury in the taste of him, oddly sweet, almost like Lexie’s cupcake candle come to life.
Sweet, however, was the last thing she felt about the throbbing between her legs, an emptiness that hurt almost as much as Scott leaving in the first place. Determined not to lose this moment, she ran her touch up the flat plane of his abdomen, slipping one hand under the hem of his shirt so that the heat of his bare skin left a brand on her palm. With a tug, she had the button of his jeans undone, his cock so close she could practically feel the silky head under her fingertips already.
“Carrie, I—”
She kissed him harder. This tangle of tongues and lips wasn’t going to solve anything, and this urgent need to run her hands all over his body would only end in heartbreak. But she didn’t care. She was used to it.
With Scott, it had always been this way—even in the beginning, when he’d looked at her as though she was the best thing in his life instead of the worst. Every touch of their lips had been illicit, a mad-dash goodbye that started before they barely had a chance to say hello.
Which was for the best, really. Carrie knew a thing or t
wo about saying goodbye.
Scott’s hands began taking on a life of their own, repeating her gestures so that his palm hit the soft skin of her belly and inched upward toward her bra. She moaned into his mouth and rocked her pelvis against his, encouraging him to continue along those lines, but, as always, Scott’s desires ran counter to hers.
Before he even got to second base, he groaned again. And this time, instead of telling her how much he needed her, wanted her, couldn’t live without her, he stepped back. The separation between them would have been absolute and complete, except he bound her wrists in his grip and held her there.
“Carrie, stop. You can’t do this right now.”
“I beg your pardon. I’m not doing anything.” She straightened and tried to yank her arms away, but he held them firm. His forearms flexed with the effort of keeping her in place, and she was just foolish enough to feel a shiver of delight at how easily he could ravage her, should he feel so inclined.
He frowned, decidedly not inclined. “You kissed me,” he said.
“Um, did you miss a step? I was kissing you back. You started it.”
“You wanted me to.”
She couldn’t deny it. She really, really wanted him to—so much that she’d sat alone in her apartment and culled the power of the voodoo to make it happen. But what Scott didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. “I don’t recall asking you to do anything of the sort.”
“You don’t have to ask, Carrie. I can tell when you want me.”
What? No. Impossible. “How?”
“It’s easy,” he said, and brought his lips to hers for the barest whisper of a kiss. Even though she implored every nerve ending in her body not to do it, not to give in, she whimpered and strained against his tight hold, wanting to press herself closer, to feel more than this sliver of everything they’d shared. “The answer is always. You’ve never been able to resist me.”
She held her breath as she waited for the rest…Just like I’ve never been able to resist you.
But of course it didn’t come. She could stand there until her lungs gave out, and he’d never admit to anything more than physical desire and the occasional urge to throw her out a window.
And the worst part was, he was right. She couldn’t resist him. Even after all he’d done to hurt her, all the pain he’d caused, she still wanted him to wrap her in his arms and tell her how much he cared. How pathetic was that? She was a grown woman. She was reasonably attractive. She possessed the ability to control one of the most complicated pieces of machinery known to mankind. Somewhere, somehow, that had to count for something.
Unfortunately, this was neither that time nor that place. And Scott Richardson was not that man.
She relaxed her arms. It was one of the only things her father had taught her—self-defense and how to fly were the most she’d managed to glean from the virtual stranger who’d dragged her all over the world in his lieutenant colonel wake—and she knew that if she wanted to catch her captor off guard, she needed to adopt a sudden slackness, to yield completely.
It worked, of course. Scott was only prepared for battle, never for anything more. He released her at once.
“I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you are eminently resistible.” She crossed her arms and tried not to notice the way the sudden loss of his touch affected her, making her feel bereft and lonelier than before. “So, what now? You came, you apologized, you got one last taste of everything you threw away. This was fun. We should do it again sometime.”
“Like hell we should,” he said darkly. Then, as if realizing the precariousness of his situation—he’d come to her, apologies on his lips and erections in his pockets—he sobered. “Can we sit down and talk? I need a favor.”
And there it was—the real reason he’d stopped by.
This was no act of voodoo magic. No passion of the moment. No undeniable bond between them that not even his stubborn will could break. He needed something from her, and would only come crawling back because he wasn’t done trampling on what was left of her self-respect.
“No.”
He started. “You haven’t heard what the favor is yet.”
“The answer is still no.”
“Carrie—”
She had to close her eyes against the supplication she saw in his face, the way his entire being turned soft, urging her to do the same. She didn’t want to be soft around this man. She wanted to be hard and unfeeling, to treat him with the same callous indifference he showed her.
“—it’s about Mara.”
Her eyes flew open again to find that the veneer of gruff, irritated, exasperated Scott had melted away to leave only the man behind. He was boyish and unsure, in agony over the loss of his dog, and he was reaching for her as though she were the only thing in the world that mattered.
This was the man who’d sliced his way into her heart, the man who tried so hard to pretend he didn’t exist. Her throat constricted painfully.
“I know I have no right to ask this of you, and I know I’ve done so many things wrong in our relationship, but I need you, Carrie. I can’t do this without you.”
She was done for. Without questioning the wisdom of her actions, she pulled him into her arms and held on tight, the pain of the past few weeks slipping away around them. All the other stuff—the vest and the bad luck, the crash and the banishment from her job, the feeling that in losing Scott she was losing everything—disappeared. He needed her. He wanted her.
His arms came up around her back, and he buried his head against her neck, their hearts beating against their ribcages, their bodies twining into one. This was going to be okay. They were going to be okay.
“Oh, Scott.” She curled her fingers in the hair at his nape. “Of course I’m here for you. Whatever you need, whatever it takes to get you through this. You know you can count on me.”
His relieved sigh was a warm caress on her skin. “Thank you. I hate to ask this of you so soon after the last time, but I didn’t know where else to turn.”
Her grip on his hair twisted.
“I’ve already asked Steady Pete, and he won’t do it.”
No. No, no, no. This wasn’t happening. She must have misunderstood, the sexual pulse between them rendering her hearing obsolete. Scott was asking for her help—not because she’d been raised as a pilot instead of a daughter, but because he needed her. As a lover, as a human, as his friend. “What do you mean, Steady Pete won’t do it?”
“I just talked to Newman.” His voice broke and his arms constricted around her, taking away even her freedom to breathe. “There’s a chance Mara is still alive, all alone out there and waiting for me. I need you to fly into the storm to go get her.”
# # #
Carrie hadn’t spoken in over ten minutes.
Based on past experience, Scott should have found this unprecedented lapse into silence a welcome change of pace from her normal routine of pushing and prodding and pulling out his entrails to perform a divination ritual. Unfortunately, he knew her much too well for that.
Carrie didn’t like the quiet. In fact, she did everything humanly possible to avoid it—even if it meant picking fights with perfectly complaisant boyfriends or cranking up her music before a man had a chance to drink his morning coffee. It had something to do with the way she’d grown up, military-strict and mostly on her own. She needed constant noise in order to be happy.
She wasn’t happy now.
She wasn’t happy now, and it was his fault.
“The mission isn’t as much of a long shot as it seems,” he explained. Maybe if he kept talking, she’d eventually join him. “Newman’s been in contact with the SAR team in Colville already. One of the rangers who was on the original search is willing to come along and show us the way. Mara’s handler declined, though, which says quite a bit about what went wrong in the first place, if you ask me.”
Nothing. Not even a twitch. He was speaking to nothing more than dead air and Carrie’s back, to the load of dishes
she was scrubbing with unwarranted force.
“And I think I can pull together the rest of an emergency team at the meeting Newman called for tonight. You know how willing our guys are to pitch in when things get rough.”
A spray of water and bubbles over the sink was his only response, but he didn’t know what other approach to take. He never thought he’d see the day when he wished for the Carrie he’d walked away from, the Carrie who wasn’t satisfied until every vein he had was open and bleeding.
“It’s a hell of a long shot, I know, and I’m courting disaster by pushing the issue, but I have to do this.” He waited, but still nothing. “Please. I’m begging you. I wouldn’t ask if I had anywhere else to turn, but you’re the only person I know brave enough to make the attempt.”
That finally got her attention. She spun fast enough to send a frisson of fear down his spine, but slow enough that he knew she was in control of herself. Her gaze locked on his, and for what had to be the first time since they’d met, he had no idea what was going on in those oversized brown eyes. There were no hearts. No diamonds. Nothing to indicate she cared about him at all.
The seriousness of what he’d done to cause this hit him in the solar plexus, but he didn’t have time to register the feeling before she spoke.
“You think I’m brave,” she said flatly. “Not crazy?”
“I never said—”
“Not pushy?”
“Carrie, I—”
“Not a walking, talking disaster?”
Dammit. He knew she’d overheard them last night. He couldn’t remember all the crap he’d said to Ace and Max, but she had to realize he’d been blowing hot air. He’d been a man in pain. A man pining. A man who couldn’t face the thought of being in a room with her without forgetting how to breathe.
“Forgive me if I don’t fall prey to flattery right now,” she said. “It’s funny how all those things you hate about me become virtues when you want something.”
“Of course I don’t hate you,” he said, his throat tight. After that kiss they’d shared in her entryway, was there any room for doubt? “But I understand if you hate me—in fact, at this point, it’s what I expect.”
Off the Map (Winter Rescue #2) Page 6
