Hunted

by Karen Robards

  “I was making a point,” she explained.

  “By taking my gun and holding it on me? Hell of a dangerous way to make a point,” he said, tight-lipped, and finally restored the gun to its holster. Moving back a step, he rested his hips against the wide plank that served as a de facto kitchen counter, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked her up and down. The uncertain glow of the lantern light cast his shadow back against the rough board wall behind him and made him look big and tough and competent, like the seasoned cop he was. “Could have gone real wrong.”

  She made an impatient sound. “Don’t you want to know what the point is?”

  “Whether I do or not, I have a feeling you’re going to tell me,” he responded drily. She was definitely getting some antagonistic vibes from him.

  “You can trust me,” she said. “I’m on your side. That’s the point.”

  “Kissing me and coming on to me like a house on fire before stealing my gun definitely convinced me of that.”

  “Oh my God, you’re mad because I kissed you!”

  “If I’m mad, it’s because you kissed me as a way to steal my damned gun.”

  “I gave it back!” Straightening away from the table, she glared at him. “And kissing you was the only way I could think of to get my hands on it. Anyway, you kissed me first. In the car.”

  “Not with any ulterior motive.”

  “Just because you felt like it, hmm?”

  “Because you’re sexy as hell and you turn me on, okay? There, at least I’m honest.”

  “Like I’m not?” At the look he gave her, she made an impatient sound and added, “You are deliberately missing the point. I didn’t shoot you, or arrest you, when I could have. That’s because you can trust me. I believe in you. I want to help you solve this case. The two of us working together to pinpoint what’s going on with dirty cops and suspicious murders and whatever else is involved has got to be a lot more effective than you doing whatever it is you’re doing alone.”

  He gave her a derisive look. “I’m sure you think so.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I’m a detective and you’re not. So stay out of it, pischouette.”

  She knew enough Creole to translate that roughly as “little girl.”

  “Oh, wow. And how have your finely honed skills been working for you, Detective? About got the case all wrapped up?”

  “That’s not anything you need to worry about.”

  “I guess not. I mean, seeing as how I’m safe at home in my bed and all.”

  “You’ll be safe at home in your bed again as soon as I can get you there, believe me. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, the sooner the better.”

  She bristled. “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you? Despite the fact that I’m in danger whether you do or not.”

  “Nope.” He pushed away from the counter and came toward her, not stopping until he was close enough so she had to tilt her head back to look up at him. She suspected that he was doing it deliberately, to remind her of how much physically larger and stronger he was, as a kind of payback for her threatening him with his own gun, which no cop liked, ever, and which Reed in particular, under these circumstances, must have found particularly galling. She stood her ground—well, the table was at her back so she didn’t have a choice—but she met his hard gaze with a level one of her own, while at the same time doing her best to ignore her body’s instinctive response to his renewed proximity. It was as if those kisses had flipped a switch inside her, and now she was physically aware of him in a way that she hadn’t been before.

  “I should have forced it out of you at gunpoint,” she said with genuine chagrin, because, duh, she should have.

  “Wouldn’t have worked.” The beginnings of a grim smile just touched his mouth. “You know, I’m not feeling the gratitude: I’m doing my best to protect you here.”

  “Forget gratitude. I don’t want to be protected.”

  He gave a grunt of derision. “You heard how your father responded when I threatened to tell you everything I know, right? That’s because what I know is dangerous. What I know is why Holly and Ant and I are in the spot we’re in. What I know could get you killed. Even if somebody did suspect that I’ve told you everything, the fact remains that I haven’t. You don’t know squat, which means you don’t even know where to start to look, which means that when you get back home you won’t start poking around in things that can get you killed because you’ll have no idea what you’re looking for. I admit, you gave me a turn there for a minute when you suggested that whoever this is might kill you just because they think there’s a possibility that I told you something. But the more I think about it, the more I think we can count on the fact that you being the superintendent’s daughter will keep you safe unless you make some kind of overt move that says you’re a danger to them. The kind of overt move you can’t make if you don’t know anything.”

  She scowled at him. “So when you let me go, when you and Holly and Ant are either dead or in jail or on the run, I’m just supposed to go back to work and resume my nonrelationship with my father and get on with my life like none of this ever happened?”

  “Yep.”

  “No. Not going to happen. I’ll start by looking at the last case you were working on, and take it from there. What do you want to bet I can figure it out?”

  “Damn it, Caroline, let it go.”

  “Make me. Oh, wait, you can’t.”

  That felt like checkmate. He gave her an exasperated look. “Anybody ever tell you that you’re a total pain in the ass?”

  “You think you’re not?”

  “There’s a difference.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re a beautiful total pain in the ass,” he said.

  Because that last comment was so unexpected, she wound up meeting his eyes for a surprised instant, but otherwise didn’t react at all as he stepped closer and slid a hand around the back of her head.

  Well, maybe she had a split second there when she realized where he was going with that and she sucked in air and her eyes went wide.

  “I’m done arguing about it,” he told her, so close now that his breath feathered her lips.

  Before she could coordinate her brain and mouth enough to snap Well, I’m not, he kissed her. The touch of his lips on hers gave her the equivalent of an instant contact high. She was still hot from their last kiss, and this one immediately set her on fire. Her lids closed like they had weights attached; her head tilted helplessly back to give him better access to her mouth. He kissed her slowly, thoroughly, expertly, with all the heat but none of the hurry of the previous time, with a deepening eroticism that drove every rational thought out of her head, that had her melting inside, while her heart pounded and her blood turned to steam. His lips moved on hers like he meant to make this one kiss last all night. The hot, wet invasion of her mouth thrilled her down to her toes, and she kissed him back with a fierce passion of her own. She was just surging up against him, just starting to slide her arms around his neck, just starting to take things to a whole different level of intense, when he lifted his mouth from hers and let his hand drop from behind her neck and stepped back.

  Her eyes flew open. For a moment they simply stared at each other. She felt—dizzy. Disoriented. Shivery with need. He was as turned on as she was, she could tell.

  He radiated sexual tension like the sun’s rays in a summer heat wave. And the only thing he was doing about it was watching her with that dark, sexy gleam in his eyes.

  To kiss her like that and stop—

  “What the hell was that?” she demanded. Okay, so she was breathless and it showed in her voice. Being breathless in no way detracted from her budding wrath. Because she knew, knew, that there absolutely had been an ulterior motive behind that kiss.

  “I was making a point.” He echoed the words she’d previously said to him as he reached past her toward something on the table. That brought him closer agai
n, and she felt his nearness like a prickle of heat moving across her skin.

  She looked at him suspiciously. “And what point is that?”

  “You weren’t faking it earlier.” Snagging his backpack, he drew back, slung it onto one broad shoulder, and gave her a mocking smile.

  “If it makes you happy to think—” She broke off with a quick frown. “Where are you going?” Her voice went sharp with anxiety. Because he was on the move, heading toward the door, and it was obvious that he was going somewhere. She felt cold suddenly, and folded her arms over her chest as she turned to watch his progress. The idea of being left alone in this small, primitive cabin in the middle of a swamp she couldn’t negotiate while he went off to do God knows what elsewhere was, she discovered, more than a little alarming.

  He could park her here and leave.

  “To crank the generator,” he told her. “It’s out back. I’ll get wetter, but we’ll have power.” She made note of the fact that he was taking the backpack with him, and presumed there was a reason. For one thing, she guessed that he wasn’t about to give her an opportunity to grab the phone that was in there, and that would be because he still didn’t trust her, because he had trust issues the size of Texas. “If you’re hungry, groceries are in the bag on the table. Bottled water is in the lower left cabinet. Bathroom’s through the door closest to the bed. There should be a towel in there. It’ll be about fifteen minutes before there’s any hot water.” Having reached the door by that time, he paused with his hand on the knob to look back at her. “And, Caroline—you realize that if you were to do something stupid, like try to run away, if you didn’t wind up hopelessly lost or drowned in a bog or eaten by alligators, I’d track you down and drag you back before you could get out of the bayou, right?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Get it through your thick head: I’m not going anywhere.”

  His eyes swept over her.

  “One more thing: don’t ever try to manipulate me by kissing me again,” he warned softly. Then, without another word, he went out.

  She was left to scowl at the closed door. Her plan to prove to him that he could trust her had clearly been a waste of effort, because he still didn’t trust her. Worse, he was obviously still feeling all pissy because she had kissed him to get his gun. Which, in hindsight, had been a mistake on so many levels that she didn’t have the energy to count them. Like opening Pandora’s box, it had released all kinds of unexpected things into the atmosphere. First and foremost was sex.

  Simple solution: sleep with him already, said a little voice inside her head.

  The attraction between them was so strong that even while she was just standing there staring at the door, she caught herself having blazing microfantasies about screwing his brains out. If a relationship between them wasn’t in the cards—and, given the circumstances, she had to face the truth that it was a long shot—what was wrong with settling for however many sessions of really mind-blowing sex they could squeeze in?

  There were problems with that, and the reasonable part of her brain knew it, but the hot and bothered, I-am-so-turned-on part didn’t want to know.

  You’ve wanted him for ten years.

  Carpe diem. Seize the day. This is your chance.

  You might never get another.

  That was the kick-in-the-teeth thought that was the equivalent of an icy shower.

  Screw him until he was killed? Or arrested? Or forced to go on the run for the rest of his life?

  That wasn’t going to work for her.

  That complicated her body’s single-minded demand for a purely sexual thrill ride, because she realized that sex was maybe the smallest part of what she wanted from him.

  There was no easy solution, so she turned her attention to seizing the day for more urgent matters, grabbing the lantern and heading for the bathroom, where she made use of the facilities, then grabbed the lone towel and used it to quickly towel dry her hair. The room was small, maybe six by eight feet, and gave the impression of having once been a shed that had been attached to the shanty as an afterthought. The fixtures were basic, but they were all there: cheap white toilet and white sink with a standard mirrored medicine cabinet over it, molded plastic shower with frosted acrylic doors. All clean and fairly new. The floor was generic white tile, as were the walls up to about five feet from the floor. After that, the weathered cypress planks that made up the shanty rose to the ceiling. A blue plastic laundry basket in one corner was there presumably to act as a hamper. On the floor in front of the shower was a small gray rug. The bathroom looked like a do-it-yourself special, and she found herself wondering if Reed was responsible. She frowned a little as she thought about that: she had no idea if he was handy. She wanted to know, she discovered. She wanted to know every little detail about him.

  The scary truth of it was, she was developing a real thing for Reed.

  She’d had her fair share of boyfriends, but none of them had ever really gotten under her skin. Ice, ice, baby wasn’t only her professional motto.

  How ironic would it be if the exception to that turned out to be Reed? If the man she finally decided to give her heart to was the one person most likely not to make it through the next twenty-four hours?

  There has to be a way out of this.

  The problem was that he wouldn’t tell her anything, and she was almost too tired and mentally fried to think.

  A small overhead light flickered once, then blinked on, emitting a dim, pale glow. It distracted her. Glancing up at it, Caroline realized that the faint buzzing sound that now joined in with the rattle of the rain beating down on the roof was the exhaust fan, and that both amenities had sprung to life because, obviously, Reed had gotten the generator going.

  Turning to check out the medicine cabinet in a quest for soap—there was none visible—she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the sink. Her now damp and tousled hair hung in a darker-than-usual tangle around her shoulders. Her hazel eyes were shadowed with fatigue, which was no surprise given the hour. Her high cheekbones sported a hectic flush. Her ordinarily reasonably full lips looked several degrees plumper and rosier than usual, which she attributed to Reed’s kisses. Or, possibly, to the effects of the duct tape. Remembering the duct tape brought a frown to her face—she was still mad at Reed about that—and she was still frowning as her gaze fell lower and she saw, to her embarrassment and chagrin, how closely her wet blouse clung to the contours of her body. Something—probably the fact that she was soaked through and chilled now because of it, possibly her reaction to those blazing kisses—had caused her nipples to pucker and harden. They were embarrassingly visible through the wet silk, and she plucked the fabric away from her skin with dismay.

  When she’d been dressing for the date that her call out to the Winfield mansion had interrupted, which would be her second one with Ben Paxton, a very nice, handsome, thirty-year-old accountant who lived in an apartment two floors below hers in a boxlike high-rise in Kenner, she’d been going for a little festive, a little sexy, but nothing too suggestive because, while she liked Ben, and she looked forward to a Christmas Eve dinner with him and a group of friends at the elegant Le Foret restaurant, she wasn’t seeing the night ending with anything more than a good-night kiss at her door. The blouse had seemed perfectly appropriate then.

  Of course, she hadn’t foreseen that, before the night was over, she would wind up out of the chic little blazer that she had worn over it, or that she would get soaking wet. Just like she hadn’t foreseen getting kidnapped, or casting in her lot with the villainous hostage taker—or, in a word, Reed.

  That was it in a nutshell: she hadn’t foreseen Reed.

  Recalling just when the rain had started to fall, she realized that the only one who would have seen her looking like a contestant in a wet T-shirt contest was Reed.

  That’s what he had been looking at before she’d kissed him. She remembered his eyes on her, remembered the sudden sexy gleam they’d taken on, and the memory made he
r breasts tighten still more. It made her breathing quicken. It made her hot.

  Face the truth: he makes you hot.

  You’ve got it bad, she told herself with disgust, and opened the medicine cabinet to continue her search for soap. There were supplies in there, she was glad to discover. Besides a couple of unopened bars of—yes!—soap, which she immediately made use of to wash her hands and face, there were the usual first aid products, including AfterBite, which she happily grabbed on sight. She had a number of mosquito bites on her legs, which she had been dealing with by ignoring them in hopes that they would go away. This would be infinitely better. But as she looked down at her legs, she hesitated. Her ankles were gritty with the residue of the dirty water they’d splashed through, while her calves were streaked with mud.

  She was just glancing speculatively at the shower when there was a tap at the door.

  “You decent?” Reed asked through the crude panel. Like the rest of the cabin, it appeared to have been handcrafted from cypress, and it hung a little crookedly in the equally primitive door frame. It also lacked a lock, as she had noted when she entered.

  How stupid was it that just the sound of his voice made her heart beat faster? “Yes.”

  He pushed the door open and walked into the bathroom. She was standing in front of the sink, and had to take a step back to let him in.

  Despite her best intentions to remain unaffected, Caroline couldn’t help but suck in her breath—inaudibly, she prayed—as Reed entered. His black hair was slicked close to his head, he had a towel hanging around his neck—and he was gloriously, completely shirtless.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FOR AN UNGUARDED MOMENT, Caroline simply looked.

  He was built like an athlete, all long, hard muscle. His chest was deeply tanned, silent evidence of a considerable amount of time spent outdoors without a shirt. Wide and muscular beneath broad shoulders, his impressive expanse of chest tapered down to his waist in a classic, masculine vee. His biceps bulged. His forearms were honed and powerful looking. In the center of his chest, a wedge of black curling hair, not too thick, traveled downward until there was no more of it remaining than a thin line snaking over abs that were totally ripped. After that, the waistband of his pants, slung low on his hipbones, obscured her view. Realizing where she was looking, she jerked her eyes back up to his face, but not before she felt a flush of heat and her pulse picked up.