[Cutthroat Business 01.0 - 03.0] Boxed Set

by Jenna Bennett

  “It’s natural,” Rafe said.

  “Maybe.” Although I didn’t have to like it. “I know I should marry him. We have so much in common, and he’s my brother’s best friend and my mother loves him. But Bradley and I had a lot in common, too, and look how that turned out. Why would this be any different? I mean, what if I don’t grow to love him? I’ll be stuck in a marriage to a man I don’t love. Another man I don’t love. And not to be vulgar, but I spent two years faking orgasms for Bradley. I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life.”

  For a second, Rafe’s expression turned blank, before it melted into amusement again. I blushed, giving myself another of those mental slaps. He was so easy to talk to, and so unconcerned with proper behavior, that I found it only too easy to tell him things I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone else. All sorts of confessions fell out of my mouth when I was talking to him.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, my cheeks hot.

  His voice was uneven, as if he were trying not to laugh. “No problem. I already knew you and Bradley had problems in bed.”

  I’d told him that, in another moment of temporary insanity, soon after we met. Thinking that if he knew I was frigid, if I told him that I hadn’t been able to satisfy my husband in bed, it might make him back off. Instead he’d informed me that just because Bradley couldn’t get the job done, didn’t mean that he couldn’t.

  “And,” he added, “I told you I could help you with that.”

  “I know you did.”

  “So is that why you’re here?”

  “I don’t know why...” I said, and then I stopped. Took a breath and faced facts. “Yes. That’s why I’m here.”

  That, and because I couldn’t seem to stay away. Because my car had somehow found its way here without conscious thought on my part. Because this was where I’d gone, where I’d run, instinctively. Just like I’d run to him in my dreams last night.

  “You want...” It was his turn to stop, to consider his words. “You wanna finish what we started yesterday.”

  I nodded. I didn’t exactly agree that what was between us had started yesterday, but yes. I wanted to finish it.

  “And then what? I can look forward to the future Mrs. Satterfield thinking about me whenever it’s time to fake another orgasm?”

  His eyes were bright and intent. I opened my mouth to say that I hadn’t meant it exactly like that, but then I closed it again when I realized that maybe that was exactly what I’d meant. It was a sobering thought.

  “If you don’t want to...” I said instead.

  “There ain’t a chance in hell that I don’t want to. I just wanna know what I’m getting into first.”

  Right. “I’m not going to do an Elspeth and chase you for the rest of your life, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

  “Yeah,” Rafe said, “that’s what I’m afraid of. You chasing me for the rest of my life.”

  I took a deep breath. This was not going the way I’d wanted at all. “You know, I can tell that this was a bad idea. I don’t know what I was thinking, to come here like this. So I’m just going to pretend that this didn’t happen and leave now...”

  I turned on my heel to do just that. And before I had taken more than a single step, I was spun back around, and then pushed up against the front of the refrigerator, the cool metal against my bare back and the heat of his body against my front.

  For a second or two, I couldn’t breathe.

  He had done this to me once before. Slammed me up against a wall and kept me in place with his body. That had been in public, with people walking by; people who probably thought, from his stance and body language, that something amorous was going on between us.

  Nothing had been. Not then. He’d actually been threatening me. Intimidating me, by standing too close, leaning in, with all that tightly coiled strength just a breath away. Using his height, his bulk, the fact that he knew his easy sexuality was frightening to me, to keep me there, like a bug under a microscope.

  He was doing it again now. In a totally different way. One hand was braced next to my head and the other slipped across the satin of my dress, sliding the fabric against my skin. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. When he leaned in to nuzzle my ear, to skim his lips down my neck to the pulse beating double-time at the bottom of my throat, I caught my breath in a gasp, and felt his mouth curve. He didn’t say anything, though, just moved to slide a jeans-clad thigh between my knees and up, pushing the dress along with it.

  My legs turned to water, and I clutched at him, bunching fistfuls of that soft, blue T-shirt as my eyes threatened to roll back in my head.

  He chuckled. And turned me around, from the fridge to the kitchen table, boosting me up on the edge. And then his hands were there, sliding the dress up, out of his way, so he could step between my thighs.

  “Here?” I managed, more breath than actual sound behind the single word.

  His voice was husky. “I bet Bradley never made love to you on the kitchen table.”

  He’d win that bet. Bradley had been pretty traditional in bed. And we’d always been in bed when we had sex. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I could handle sex anywhere else. Sex with Rafe at all was frightening enough. But sex on the kitchen table, with the lights on, and a bag of salted cashews next to my ear...

  And what if Mrs. Jenkins got peckish and came downstairs for a snack?

  In fact, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this at all, with Mrs. J in the house. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about her in the heat of the moment.

  “What about your grandmother? She could walk in on us...”

  “I sent her to a safe-house,” Rafe said, back to nuzzling my neck. “It’s just us.”

  His fingers were skimming over my back, pushing through fallen tendrils of hair to unhook the back closure of my dress, and I barely managed to get my hands up in time to catch the bodice before it fell. He arched a brow.

  “No... um... scraps of fabric.” I blushed.

  He grinned, a flash of white teeth against golden skin. The big, bad wolf getting ready to devour Little Red Riding Hood. “You going commando?”

  “Not completely. I’ve got... um...” Panties on. Underneath. But the bra was built in. With a backless dress, there’s really no other option.

  “No wonder Satterfield proposed.” He stepped back to look at me. I was clutching the dress to my breasts, my cheeks flushed and my skirt hiked up to my hips, much like a heroine on the cover of one of Barbara Botticelli’s romances. By the time they returned to mine, his eyes were simmering with heat, and his voice rasped across my skin, raising goosebumps. “Let go of the dress, Savannah.”

  “I...”

  Can’t. I mean, how could I just drop my hands? The top of the dress would fall and I would be practically naked. In front of him. On the kitchen table. With the light on. It would be embarrassing. And unsanitary. Not to mention indecent. I was brought up to be a nice girl, and nice girls don’t undress in front of men who look at them with hot, dark eyes and think hot, dark thoughts...

  He smiled. “Would you be more comfortable upstairs?”

  I nodded.

  “C’mon, then. We can do it on the kitchen table next time. Or the time after.”

  If there was a next time, or a time after that. And there probably wouldn’t be. But I didn’t say anything, just slid off the edge of the table. My legs were unsteady, so he had to hold me, and the dress still bunched around my hips, although it started settling after the first few steps toward the door. He was hustling me along, down the middle of the hallway, until, halfway down, he turned and pushed me up against the wall and kissed me, and I forgot all about the bodice and my lack of underwear, and suddenly I was half naked and clinging to him, and I thought it was going to happen right then and there—

  And that’s when there was a loud bang and a tinkling sound, and Rafe yanked me down to the floor and rolled me underneath him, and there was absolutely nothing romantic about it at all.

  Chapter Twelv
e

  His voice was a tight whisper in my ear. “Stay down.”

  I nodded, my teeth chattering. I wasn’t going anywhere. I recognize a gunshot when I hear one, and this one had come uncomfortably close. I’d also recognized the tinkling of the glass in the window next to the front door where the bullet had pushed through. I swear I’d even heard it zoom by, although that was probably just my imagination.

  He added, “Are you hit?”

  I shook my head. “You?”

  “No.” He lifted his head. Personally, I couldn’t hear anything but the rushing of blood in my ears and the frantic pounding of my heart, but after a second, he rolled off me and got to his feet.

  “Rafe...!” I sat up and reached for him, panicked. What if the shooter—the Hispanic man?—was right outside the window, and tried again?

  “He’s gone.” He glanced down at me. I could barely make out the gleam of his eyes in the dark. He must be able to see better than I could, though, because after a second, I could see the gleam of his teeth, too, as he took in the sight of me sitting there, with my skirt twisted high on my thighs and my dress down to my waist. He could probably even see the flood of color that rose in my cheeks. I hiked the bodice over my breasts and reached up to fasten the straps.

  “Shame to do that,” Rafe remarked.

  “I don’t want the police to find me on the floor with my dress half off.”

  “In this neighborhood, we’ll prob’ly have to call’em ourselves if we want’em. Although seeing you like that would make Truman’s day. It’s made mine.”

  I smiled, a little shakily. Patrol Officer George Truman is no more than twenty two, and he blushes if I look at him for too long. “Someone else will call them, don’t you think?”

  “We’ll see.” He moved toward the front door, silently, staying close to the wall. I held my breath, but nothing happened. In the distance, we could hear a car starting up and driving away.

  “There he goes,” Rafe said, not bothering to lower his voice. “Shit.”

  “At least he’s gone.”

  He glanced at me as I came up next to him. “Yeah, but I didn’t get a look at him. I wanted to see if it was the guy you told me about.”

  “That’s why the porch light was on.” I felt like a slow child trailing behind. “You expected this. That’s why you sent Mrs. Jenkins away. And that’s why you were upset when I showed up.”

  He shrugged. But he didn’t deny it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me to leave?”

  “Before or after you told me you wanted to sleep with me, darlin’?” He shook his head. “I figured you were safer in here than out there. But then I got distracted.”

  “God, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, I really wish none of that woulda happened, too.” The tone was definitely sarcastic. “I should be apologizing to you. You coulda been hit. And it woulda been my fault.”

  “He wasn’t aiming for me. He was aiming for you.” And because I’d distracted him, he might have died.

  “That’s if it was the same guy you met,” Rafe reminded me. “And anyway, we were standing kinda close together. Wouldn’t be hard to shoot the wrong person.”

  That was unfortunately true. “What do you mean, if it was the same guy? Who else could it be? How many people do you have gunning for you at one time?”

  “By now? Could be a few.” He turned to look out the broken window, the glass on the floor crunching under his feet as he shifted his weight. I looked up at him.

  “What did you do, Rafe? Detective Grimaldi mentioned a cargo heist in Memphis. Lots of merchandise worth a lot of money missing, and the TBI talked to you about it.”

  “The TBI talked to a lot of people,” Rafe said, without meeting my eyes.

  “It isn’t the first time they’ve looked at you for something like that, though. Todd was telling me about the weapons thefts at Fort Campbell military base, and the tractor trailers in Knoxville—or maybe it was Chattanooga or Jackson—and of course there was the open house robberies here in Brentwood in September, and the TBI have talked to you about all of it, and somehow you always manage to slither through their fingers and away...” While everyone else around him seemed to get arrested.

  “No doubt Satterfield told you it’s because I’m some sorta criminal genius.” He looked at me, his eyes steady. “What do you think, Savannah?”

  He only called me Savannah when he was being serious. The rest of the time he called me darlin’. So my answer right now mattered.

  “I’m not sure what to think,” I admitted. “I really don’t want to believe that you’re a criminal, but you know how to do a lot of things that normal people don’t.” Like opening locked doors with my hairpins and intimidating bad guys. He seemed scarily familiar with knives, and having guns pointed at him and shots coming his way certainly didn’t faze him for long. Nor did the sight of dead bodies or even having to stab a man to death. Like the Energizer Bunny, he just kept going. “And if the TBI keeps connecting you to crimes...”

  “There’s another reason they could be talking to me and letting me go, you know.”

  If he was innocent. I nodded. “But you’re involved. At least you were involved in the open house robberies. And Todd seemed pretty positive you had something to do with the other things, too.”

  “So...?”

  “So if you’re not innocent, you’re either a criminal mastermind, or...”

  ...what?

  He didn’t say anything, just watched me puzzle it out for myself. It didn’t take long. I’m not actually stupid, and he had given me some pretty broad hints. I stared at him, my eyes enormous and my mouth open. “You’re working for them. Aren’t you?”

  He didn’t answer. But he didn’t deny it, either. I closed my mouth, and opened it again. “For how long?”

  He answered that, anyway. “Since I got out of prison.”

  “Todd told me you were recruited by a criminal organization while you were there.” The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is hardly a criminal organization. Not in that sense of the word.

  “I was. That’s what did it. The TBI figured I was their way in. So they sprung me early.”

  “And you’ve spent ten years undercover.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve spent ten years doing what I prob’ly woulda been doing anyway. And feeding the TBI some information about it along the way.”

  And probably making a lot of people suspicious about why he kept skating through while all around him, people were caught and arrested.

  A sound outside made us both look out the window. It was a car, turning onto the graveled drive. A black and white patrol car.

  “Here they come,” Rafe said. I nodded. “You wanna go upstairs? Pretend you’re not here? They’re not gonna search the place.”

  I hesitated. My car was parked outside, so even if the cops weren’t ones I already knew, who already knew me, they’d make a note of the fact that it was here. “They’re going to guess what we were doing, aren’t they?”

  The corners of his mouth turned up. “Anyone who looks at you is gonna guess what we were doing, darlin’.”

  “Great.” Not.

  Still, I didn’t go upstairs. Outside, the police car pulled to a stop and the passenger door opened. George Truman stepped out. After a second, Lyle Spicer’s graying head emerged from the driver’s side door. He adjusted his gun belt under his paunch and looked at the house. When he saw the two of us peering at him out of the broken window, he shook his head in resignation.

  “You two again,” he said when Rafe had unlocked the door. “What happened this time?”

  I let Rafe answer, since I wasn’t entirely sure how much the police knew about what was going on with him, and how much he’d want them to know.

  “We were in the kitchen, back there...” He pointed, “when there was a gunshot out here. Through the window.”

  “Uh-huh.” Spicer looked down at the shards of glass on the floor. “Then what?”

&nbs
p; “We hit the floor. When we heard a car drive away, we came out here to look at the damage.”

  OK, so it was a little different from the truth, but that’s essentially what had happened. With a few minor omissions. And it wasn’t like I could complain about what he had left out. I certainly didn’t want Spicer and Truman to know that when someone had shot at us, I’d been pretty close to having sex standing up in the hallway.

  “Any idea who mighta wanted you dead?” Spicer asked as Truman prowled the hall. He stuck his head through the door to the kitchen, flicking on the ceiling light, and took in the two beer bottles on the table—one empty, one half full—and the bag of nuts, along with the TV, which was still playing, sound muted. “Either one of you?”

  “Coulda been anyone,” Rafe answered with a shrug.

  “Right.” Spicer looked from him to me. “Miz Martin?”

  “What?... Oh, you want to know if there’s anyone who wants me dead? Not that I know of. Although there’s whoever broke into my apartment the other day. But they wouldn’t have known that I’d be here. I didn’t know I was going to be here until about thirty minutes ago. I had a conversation a couple of days ago with a man who wanted Rafe dead, though.”

  Spicer’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead as he glanced at Rafe. The latter’s face was carefully blank.

  “She told me about it,” he said. “I have no idea who it mighta been. The description coulda been anybody, pretty much.”

  Spicer looked back at me. “Didya happen to report it to anyone?”

  “I told Tamara Grimaldi,” I said. “She said the same thing. It could have been anyone. Hispanic man, mid thirties. Black hair, brown eyes. Some sort of tattoo on his back. Six feet tall, give or take.”

  “We can do a canvass tomorrow,” Officer Truman suggested, over his shoulder. “See if anyone in the neighborhood has seen anyone like that hanging around.”

  Spicer nodded. “See if anyone saw this car you heard drivin’ away, too. Where was it, d’ya think?”

  Rafe and I exchanged a look. “That way?” I suggested, pointing vaguely to the left. He nodded.