The Honeymoon Assignment

by Cathryn Clare

  He wrapped his big hands around her waist and lifted her on top of him. Kelley shook her damp hair out of the way and looked down into his face, loving the taut, handsome lines of his features and the velvet black of his eyes in the dim light. When she shifted her bare legs against his, both of them cried out at the same moment, hungry for the same closer union.

  “You’re still so beautiful.” Sam’s voice was low and shaken with desire. “So beautiful…”

  She felt his gaze covering her like a silken veil. He smoothed his palms over her shoulders, lower, across her breasts, then clasped her waist again and settled her more tantalizingly against the hard evidence of his need for her.

  Passion took over what was left of Kelley’s mind as she moved against Sam. She leaned her palms into his muscled chest and felt the dark, springy curls send racy messages to nerve centers all over her body. It was impossible to stay still, impossible to resist the urge to slide her hips from side to side, imitating the timeless rhythms of lovemaking so perfectly that it made both of them groan in unison again.

  She lowered herself over him, meeting his kiss with a hunger that was quickly speeding out of control. She felt him growl against her mouth and felt herself spinning off into a swirl of physical sensation as Sam closed his arms powerfully around her and reversed their positions, pressing her down into the bed that was already warmed by the heat of their bodies.

  She took advantage of the shift to wrap one hand around the length of his arousal, stroking him until he moaned her name in a voice raw with need.

  “Kelley… if you don’t stop that…”

  She didn’t plan to stop. But Sam’s questing hands had found the liquid well of pleasure inside her now, and suddenly he wasn’t the only one hovering on the edge of something he couldn’t control.

  His fingers were more knowing than they had any right to be. Kelley arched her spine as he slid in and out of her, and felt his long, strong legs wrapping themselves around her in an all-encompassing embrace.

  “Sam, please…”

  Through the haze of barely curbed desire that masked his features Kelley could see the faint gleam of a smile.

  He’d been waiting for this, she thought.

  He’d wanted to hear her calling his name with that note of longing in it, wanted to know that she was being torn apart by the same overpowering need she could see in his face.

  She wanted to tell him not to look so satisfied, but the words wouldn’t come out.

  Her own impatience made her even bolder as Sam reached over the edge of the bed to the back pocket of the jeans he’d stepped out of. Kelley slid her whole body along the length of his and heard him groan again.

  The low sound of his voice seemed to be caught in the noise of the howling gale outside the cottage. And their joined cries of satisfaction, as Sam finally slid inside her, felt like part of the tempest, too,

  It was as though the turmoil of the sky and sea had somehow found its way inside them, lifting them higher and higher on waves they couldn’t possibly hold back. Kelley was being swept into the darkness of the roiling storm around them, oblivious to anything but the way they were moving together, rising and falling with every renewed roar as it slammed into them.

  Passion carried them on, far into the night.

  And when it finally crested, there were no words left over, no way to tell Sam what she was feeling, no way even to understand it herself.

  When she drifted into sleep at last, held close in Sam’s arms, she had only enough awareness left to wonder where all the tumult and rage had disappeared to.

  It must be the eye of the storm, her sated, sleepy mind told her. They must have stumbled into the center of the hurricane, where, for this merciful interval of quiet, no winds blew.

  Still wrapped in this sudden sense of peace, Kelley let herself fall asleep.

  “No…”

  It was Sam’s voice. But she hadn’t been dreaming about him. She hadn’t been dreaming about anything at all, as far as she could tell.

  “No, don’t…”

  The sharp edge of protest in his words hauled Kelley back to consciousness. She blinked and heard the wind still buffeting the cottage in the gray predawn light.

  “Don’t leave me…”

  Sam was mumbling, his face half-turned toward his pillow, but the words were clear enough.

  And so was the panic in them.

  Kelley pushed her tangled hair out of her eyes and rolled over. Sam had moved away from her in the bed. She could see his broad shoulders now, and his profile pressing into the pillow, facing the faint light that was reaching in around the edges of the curtains.

  “Don’t leave me…”

  Panic had turned to pleading, and by now Kelley was fully awake and sliding her arms around him.

  “Sam, it’s okay.” She held him close, trying to ease the anguish she could see etched in the lines cut across his brow. “You’re all right. You’re just dreaming.”

  He surfaced from sleep all at once, like a drowning man coming back to fresh air.

  “Kelley?” There was amazement in his voice.

  And the fear was still there, too.

  “Shh, Sam.” She wrapped her arms more tightly around him. “You were dreaming. You’re okay.”

  “It wasn’t a dream.” He sounded angry and disoriented. “I was—” He shook his dark head and looked at her with eyes still clouded by sleep. “I was all alone.”

  The phrase was childishly simple, and at first Kelley wasn’t sure why it affected her so strongly. She smoothed a hand over his forehead, unraveling the dark brown hair that had dried itself into unruly patterns overnight. Why were Sam’s words tugging at her heart this way?

  And then, suddenly, she understood.

  I was all alone…

  She’d seen that silent message in his eyes ever since she’d met him. It was one of the things that had kept drawing her quietly toward him even during the years when the pain of their breakup had forced them apart.

  She’d never heard him put that buried anguish into words until this moment.

  “Who left you alone?” She asked the question gently, trying to hold her own curiosity in check. He was so uncharacteristically vulnerable at this moment, so fragile in spite of the hard strength of his body.

  His brief, harsh laugh made her think she’d pushed too hard and driven him back inside the armor he usually wore to defend himself against the rest of the world. But then he shook his head.

  “Everybody,” he said. His second short laugh, echoing the first, wasn’t enough to disguise the desolation in his tone. “Anybody I ever really cared about walked out on me sooner or later.”

  Kelley fought down the little spurt of remorse inside her at the thought that she had walked out on him, too, after the first time they’d made love last night. “I’ve never heard you talk about this before,” she said slowly.

  She shifted onto one elbow as Sam rolled over onto his back. He was staring up at the ceiling now, eyes focused on some distant memory. But he kept one hand clasped over Kelley’s where it rested on the warm expanse of his chest.

  “It’s not something I talk about.” He tightened his fingers around hers for a moment, and then she felt his chest rise and fall in a slow sigh.

  “I guess when I dream about it like that, it’s my father I’m dreaming about,” he said finally. “He walked out on the family when I was a kid.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Seven.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  A slight, mocking grin tilted the corner of his mouth, and Kelley had to work hard to restrain the memory of the way he had kissed her last night. Her whole body was still pulsing with the pleasure of it.

  “Oh, it wasn’t so difficult.” His grin quirked a little higher, then faded. “I just followed the old son of a gun.”

  “You followed him? Away from your mother?”

  He nodded. “I adored my dad. Thought the world revolved around him.
That was probably why we got along so well—he thought the world revolved around him, too.”

  His flippant tone didn’t fool Kelley. There was real love— and real loss—in his eyes as he spoke.

  “What happened, Sam?”

  He shrugged, then winced, as though he’d let himself get so far lost in the past that he’d forgotten the more recent injury to his shoulder. “He dumped me,” he said baldly.

  “Dumped you? Just abandoned you, you mean?”

  “We hoboed around together for a few years—great years, probably the best time I ever had—and then I guess he decided it would be better for me if I was in school, with somebody to teach me manners and stuff.”

  It was Kelley’s turn to smile. Sam caught her eye and snorted. “Yeah,” he said. “The aunt and uncle he turned me over to did their best, but I never cottoned on to etiquette much.”

  “How long were you with them?”

  “Five years.”

  He didn’t have to stop and count, Kelley noticed. These memories went deep with him.

  And so did the hurt they’d left behind. For the first time, she felt she was getting a glimpse of the reasons for Sam Cotter’s solitude, for the distance he put between himself and the rest of humanity. His father had been Sam’s first partner—his only partner, until Kelley had come along years later.

  And both partnerships had ended in unhappiness.

  She didn’t prompt him this time, and after a long pause he took up the story again. “Soon as I turned sixteen, I took off on my own,” he told her. “I’ve told you some about those days—mostly I was just moving around, trying to find something I really wanted to do. Until Wiley managed to track me down a few years ago and offered me a job as an investigator, I just did whatever came handy, for however long it lasted.”

  “Following your father’s footsteps?” she asked gently.

  Sam snorted again. “My father was a con artist with a capital C,” he told her. “And I loved the old bastard, but frankly, his business dealings always made me nervous as hell. He was like a magician—I remember the way he used to pull out his business card and flourish it at some unsuspecting dupe, like it was a rabbit he’d just yanked out of a hat. But at the same time, I knew the company name on the card was bogus. It used to amaze me, the way people would fall for any old line if it was presented with enough pizzazz.”

  He shook his head, his eyes still focused on some distant place that Kelley couldn’t see. “I was looking for some niche of my own, something where I could rely on more than just pizzazz,” he said. “It just took me a long time to find one, that’s all.”

  Kelley sat up, pulling the warm sheet over her shoulder. Her mind was putting a lot of things together now, things that had always puzzled her about Sam Cotter.

  Sam had a natural genius for sniffing out financial scams. And the news about his father explained how he’d gotten so good at it. Sam must have grown up watching financial crime from the criminal’s point of view.

  At the same time, he’d loved his dad.

  And his dad had walked off and left him.

  Was that why Sam was so quick to back off whenever a relationship threatened to go sour? Was he just trying to stay one step ahead of the risk and pain of love, refusing to take a chance on being left behind again?

  There were a lot of things she wanted to ask him, but she wasn’t sure how. He seemed to be fully awake now, and the unaccustomed openness in his face had hardened into the sharp, watchful expression she was used to seeing in his features.

  What happened to your mother? she wanted to ask. What about Wiley and Jack? What about us? She hadn’t been able to decide which question to start with by the time Sam raised himself to lean on both elbows, shrugging off her hand.

  “Damn,” he said, suddenly sounding frustrated. “Something’s nagging at me, and I can’t quite get hold of it.”

  “Something about your family?”

  “No.” He shook his head and raked a hand through his hair. “Something about the Windspray case. Talking about my father just triggered it.”

  Kelley felt the cold touch of disappointment in her chest. The Windspray case. From the moment she’d eased herself into Sam’s arms last night until just now, the thought of the case hadn’t even crossed her mind.

  And she resented it for intruding now. She’d tried to hide behind the case herself not long ago, but she didn’t want to hide anymore. And she didn’t want Sam to hide, either. They’d come too far for that now. Surely he could see—

  “Sam, listen to me,” she said. “You said yourself that there’s something funny about this case. We seem to keep coming up with dead ends no matter which way we turn.”

  He wasn’t listening to her. She could tell by the way his brows had lowered over his dark blue eyes, and by the taut outline of this mouth.

  “Let’s let Jack and his people clean this one up,” she said, more urgently now. Suddenly it was impossible to imagine plunging back into the business-first attitude she’d been clinging to for so long. Now that she and Sam were finally opening up to each other again, finally beginning to grapple with some of the uneasy ghosts that had kept them apart—

  “I’ve got it.”

  He threw the covers aside as he said the words, and Kelley’s heart tightened as she heard his decisive tone.

  Sam Cotter was back at work.

  And the man she’d been holding so tenderly in her arms, the man who’d let her into his secret dreams, his secret fears, had suddenly disappeared.

  “What exactly is it that you’ve got?”

  He looked over his shoulder at her from the edge of the bed. “Do you remember how you described Wayland Price when he gave you that list of the companies he’d worked for?” he asked.

  She had to work hard to come up with it. “I said he waved it at me like it was the answer to a challenge,” she said at last. “But I don’t see—”

  “I don’t, either. Not yet. But I’ve got a hunch. And this time I don’t intend to ignore it.”

  “Sam, wait.”

  She spoke to his retreating back, watching as he strode out into the living room in search of dry clothes. She reached over the side of the bed and discovered that her own jeans were still damp from last night’s adventure. And her white shirt was buttonless, torn apart by Sam’s eager hands.

  The little white buttons were strewn around the carpet, winking in the early morning light like crystallized tears. Kelley fought back the tears that welled unexpectedly in her own eyes at the sight of them, and got quickly out of bed and into a pair of navy blue leggings and a loose blue sweater. She was sure her shoes would still be wet, so she pulled on a pair of low pumps and hoped she wouldn’t have to do any cross-country running this morning.

  “Damn.” Sam’s frustration seemed to be building on itself. She could hear his long-legged steps as he moved around the living room.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Phone’s out. Storm must have knocked down a line somewhere.”

  The news didn’t do anything to calm Kelley’s vague fears. She wasn’t certain what was worrying her—maybe it was nothing more than regret at the lost tenderness of a few moments ago.

  Whatever was causing her misgivings, it wasn’t calmed any by the sight of Sam pulling her gun out of the drawer where she’d left it last night.

  “What’s going on, Sam?” she asked sharply. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m heading into town to see if I can find a phone that’s working.” He picked up his own raincoat as he spoke, shaking the remnants of last night’s rain out of its folds. “Grab your coat, sweetheart. If I’m right about this, it could change everything.”

  Chapter 13

  She didn’t want to do it.

  She wanted to stay at the cottage and demand that Sam listen to her, that he ignore the Windspray case for just one more hour while they tackled the more important question of what was happening between them. At the moment the mystery of who had produced
the counterfeit bills seemed remote, and not nearly as urgent as the questions her heart was demanding answers to.

  But Sam’s blue eyes were remote now, too, just as they’d been when he and Kelley had started to work on this case. And she knew from long experience that there was no getting through to him once he’d set his mind to something.

  He’d found the list of companies that Wayland Price had done consulting work for, and he handed it to Kelley as they stepped outside. “You called all of these, right?” he said.

  “Yes. And they all confirmed Wayland’s story.” She still couldn’t see where he was headed with this.

  “But they didn’t tell you anything about the financial health of those companies, right?”

  “Right, because I didn’t ask them. Why would I?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Sam, would you like to explain—”

  “I will, sweetheart. I just have to check something out first, and I can’t do that without a phone line. Once I reach Jack—” He paused before stepping into the truck and raised empty palms to the sky. “It’s a hunch, Kelley. That’s all.”

  The worst of the storm had blown itself out overnight, but the sky was still overcast, the clouds still racing in off the sea. Kelley could taste salt spray in the fine mist that touched her face.

  “A few days ago you were telling me you’d given up playing your hunches in this business,” she couldn’t help saying as she slid into the truck next to Sam. “You said it was better to—”

  “I know. To stick with ‘just the facts, ma’am.’” He frowned and turned the key in the ignition. “I guess I was trying—” The engine sounded reluctant, and Sam seemed to be concentrating fiercely on it. “I’ve been trying to make everything go the way I wanted it to. But nothing in this damn case is going right. At this point, hunches are all I’ve got.”

  He didn’t sound happy about it, either, but that seemed to be all he intended to say on the subject.

  Kelley was silent as they drove into Cairo. She trusted Sam’s instincts when it came to the detective business. Wiley had always said that aside from a few antisocial tendencies that occasionally got in his way, Sam was the best natural investigator Wiley had ever trained.