Some things—including the direction any future involvement with Mac might take—required perspective before any rational decision could be made, and in this particular case perspective required distance.
Stealthily, not wanting to wake him until she had come up with a mature and sophisticated response to the current situation, Julie pushed his hand off her breast. She would just wriggle out from beneath him and get dressed. . . .
He stirred, lifted his head, and looked at her. Julie felt her stomach clench as she met his eyes head-on.
So much for distance.
Feeling trapped and a little panicky, Julie held his gaze. With his hair all tousled and his eyes sleepy-looking and a small smile curving his lips, he looked like a man who was content with the world. Which of course he should be. She had just given him her all.
At the thought, Julie winced.
He must have seen, because his smile vanished, to be replaced by a searching look, and then a touch of wryness around his mouth. The hand that curved around her rib cage—the one she had just pushed off her breast—tightened. Its warmth and size felt uncomfortably intimate against her skin.
Feeling more trapped than ever, Julie tensed.
“So, was it as good for you as it was for me?” There was a slightly ironic note to his voice that told her that he was aware that she was not exactly planning to wrap her arms around his neck and beg for more.
Thank God he wasn’t going all kissy-face on her, was Julie’s predominant coherent thought as she registered his tone. She might be naked and he might be on top of her, but Mac was still being Mac, and she could deal with that. Kisses and cuddles she couldn’t have faced. Not until she had her own feelings sorted out.
“It was good. Thank you very much. Now, would you please get off me?” Her tone was polite: the kind of tone she had used frequently in the past to thank the hostess of a dinner party for a well-prepared meal.
Apparently he didn’t appreciate it. His eyes narrowed at her.
“So now we’re on to the hating yourself in the morning part, are we? Jesus Christ, Julie, how predictable is that?”
22
MAC DIDN’T KNOW WHY he felt as if he’d just found the winning lottery ticket in a jumble of papers in his wallet only to discover minutes later that the damned thing had expired the previous week. He had a beautiful, naked girl in his bed. A beautiful, naked girl he’d just shown a hell of a good time. A beautiful, naked girl he’d had a hard-on for since he’d first laid eyes on her.
What was there to get bent out of shape about in that?
“I don’t hate myself, it isn’t morning, and I believe I asked you to get off me. Please.”
If she used that ultra-polite tone on him much more, he was going to lose it, Mac thought, rolling onto his side but keeping his arm around her so that she couldn’t just spring up and take off. A fleeting mental picture of her hightailing it naked down the street with him equally naked in hot pursuit had a certain appeal, but he didn’t think there was much chance of that actually happening and, anyway, if it did Mrs. Leiferman would have a field day and he’d hear about it later in spades.
“You ever hear of pillow talk?” He didn’t know why her clear desire to put the steamy little interlude they’d just shared behind her bugged him so: he would have bet dollars to doughnuts on her having just that reaction. Her skin was silky and supple beneath his hand, and he had to fight an urge to stroke it, which he had a feeling would not, just at present, be well received. Her entire right side was pressed up against him, soft and warm, and she smelled totally delectable. The elusive fragrance of the perfume she habitually wore, mixed with the scent of her skin and the unmistakable aroma of sex, was the most potent aphrodisiac ever to assault his nostrils. Probably the scent was what was playing games with his head. While he was inhaling it, he couldn’t think straight. “Something on the order of, Oh, Mac, that was just wonderful?”
“What do you want, a blow-by-blow?”
It was her snippy attitude, he decided, that annoyed him so, as well as a few other things. Her hands were covering her breasts now, he noticed, as if to hide them from his view. The truly delectable leg closest to him was raised and bent at the knee and tilted inward over her body, which pretty much kept him from seeing any other salient body part, too. She seemed to be forgetting that he’d just done a whole hell of a lot more than look at just about every square millimeter of her. By default, his gaze returned to her face. Then he wished it hadn’t. Her eyes were big and brown and shooting off sparks at him. Her cheeks were flushed a rosy pink. Her hair was a mass of shiny black waves spread out like a halo around her head. Mac frowned. Even with her lipstick all kissed off and her nose shiny and her expression peeved, she was so beautiful she grabbed at his heart.
Then she drew her lower lip into her mouth and started to chew on it, and he felt himself start to get hard all over again.
Hell. What was happening to him here was not a good thing.
“Hey,” he said. “Give the attitude a rest, okay? You had a good time. You came.”
She quit chewing on her lower lip and glared at him.
“Let me up.”
He lifted his arm obligingly, and was rewarded for good behavior by an excellent view of her shapely butt and legs as she scrambled off the bed and stood up with her back to him. Propping himself on his elbow, he rather grudgingly admired creamy shoulder blades and the delicate curve of her spine and a truly bodacious set of butt cheeks before she crouched down out of sight to retrieve the top sheet from the floor. He craned his neck instinctively, but it was no use: she was already wrapping herself in yards of dark blue cotton. As she straightened, pulling the cloth modestly around her legs and tucking one end in between her breasts, he happened to glance down at himself. What he saw sent him grabbing for the edge of the sheet—only the fitted bottom one was available, and persuading it to part company with the mattress required a vicious tug—which he dragged across his waist to hide the fact that he was now at full mast.
Once she was swathed from armpits to ankles in voluminous folds of cloth, she seemed to consider herself girded for battle. Shaking her hair back from her face, taking a deep breath, she glared at him.
“Could you get up and get dressed, please? I’ve got to get back to the shop. I’ve got an important client coming in at three.”
Mac glanced at his watch and smiled at her. Admittedly, it was not a nice smile. More on the nasty side. But hey, sweetness and light was beyond him for the moment.
“I’d say you’re shit out of luck, Miss America. It’s four-fifteen. And I thought we agreed that you weren’t going back to work today.”
“Oh, no! It was Carlene Squabb.” Her face was a study in consternation. Then her gaze fixed on him, and darkened stormily. “And if you want to talk about attitudes, yours could use some major work. I don’t know what you’re so grumpy about. You got what you wanted.”
“Me?” Mac’s gaze slid over her from the tip of her tousled black head to her delicate pink-painted toes, which he could just see peeking out from under the layers of sheet, and he felt his sense of disgruntlement increase right along with other sensitive meters of his state of mind. “I don’t think so. It wasn’t me who said”—here he assumed his Debbie falsetto—“take me somewhere where we can be alone and take off all my clothes and fuck me until I scream. All I did was oblige. And darlin’, you did scream.”
Julie’s lips tightened and her eyes shot twin beams of pure fire at him. Then she seemed to make an effort to grab hold of her temper before she lost it entirely. Her fists clenched, her eyes closed—Mac imagined her mentally counting to ten—and she took a deep breath.
When she opened her eyes again the look she gave him was far cooler. Maddeningly so, Mac discovered. He’d rather by far fight with her than have her distance herself from him.
“Look, I’m not blaming you for this, okay? You’re right, I wanted it, and nothing that happened here is your fault. I realize now that I’m
in kind of an emotional state about ending my marriage, and having sex with you was a stage I had to go through to start really getting over it. If we could just put this whole thing behind us and forget it ever happened, that would be good.”
A beat passed while that sank in. So he was a phase, was he? Mac found that he liked that less than anything that had come out of her mouth since she’d started talking—and that was saying a whole hell of a lot.
“Not a problem.” Mac rolled off the other side of the bed and stood up, keeping a firm grip on the sheet as he went. No point in letting her in on the fact that he was ready, willing, and able to go on to Round Two. He watched her gather up her bra and panties and realized that he was really, truly, royally pissed off. Which was stupid, he told himself. She’d offered him every guy’s wet dream on a platter—a mind-blowing sex session with a hot babe without any of the usual female icky-poo aftermath—and it was making him mad?
What the hell was the matter with him?
The obvious answer, of course, was that she was enough to try the patience of a saint, and he wasn’t planning to put in for canonization any time soon.
“Do you mind if I take a shower?” She was back in polite mode, which, he supposed, was no more or less irritating than anything else she’d done since she gotten her rocks off. He was fifty kinds of a fool to let her attitude get under his skin.
But he couldn’t seem to help it.
“Help yourself.” He gestured toward the bathroom, as polite as she was now, and awarded himself mental kudos for the poker-worthy cool front he was maintaining. As she headed toward the bathroom, she flicked him a sideways glance and one of her little Mona Lisa smiles. Then he was left to stare at his own bathroom door as it was firmly closed in his face.
Shit, he thought. That was just what he felt like, too: shit. Never in his life would he have imagined he could feel so crummy after such truly great sex.
What had just happened here?
Mac was still trying to figure it out as he rounded up his clothes from the floor, pulled them on, ran his fingers through his hair and headed toward the kitchen. The phone began to ring, but he ignored it. He had a pretty good idea of who it was, but he wasn’t in the mood to talk to Hinkle just yet. He’d grab a beer, then maybe, if Julie was still in the shower—in his experience, women could drag a shower that should take them five minutes out for days—take a minute or so to upload the contents of Sid’s files into his computer. After all, that was what this was all about, really. Not doing Julie. Getting Sid.
The sound of the shower followed him into the kitchen. Not imagining Julie standing naked under the spray required more effort than he was capable of at the moment. The ringing had stopped, he realized as he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and moodily unscrewed the cap. Taking a swig, he headed on into the living room, only to stop dead on the threshold.
Josephine had the telephone cord in her mouth. The instrument lay on the floor, on its side, the receiver belly-up like a dead goldfish.
“Damn it, Josephine!” he barked. The poodle, not being stupid, jumped to her feet and bolted for the bedroom, still clutching the cord in her mouth, the severed receiver bumping after her across the hardwood.
Mac said a whole string of cuss words as he picked up the decapitated phone. There was nothing to do, he acknowledged, turning what was left of it over in his hand, except toss it. The thing was definitely dead.
Fortunately the extension in the bedroom could take over until this one was replaced. He unplugged the corpse from the wall outlet, and placed it on the end table beside his gun to await a decent burial in the garbage.
Chalk the death of his phone up as just one more in a series of things, large and small, that had not gone his way today.
Mac yanked open the curtains, hoping that an infusion of sunshine would improve his mood. The room was immediately flooded with light, which made him blink and revealed his every housekeeping deficiency from the cobwebs in the corners to the dust on the coffee table. Great. He sank down on the couch, propped his stocking feet up on the coffee table, and took another swig of beer. His gaze fell on Julie’s discarded dress, crumpled into a pale purple heap near the wall. If he was not a gentleman, he would just sit here and wait until she emerged from the bathroom to fetch it. If he was, he’d pick it up, shake it out, carry it back to the bathroom, knock on the door, and yell that he was leaving her dress on the doorknob for her when she was ready.
The decision wasn’t hard. He stayed where he was, watching swirling dust motes joust in the sunlight and chugging his beer.
There was a knock at his front door. Mac frowned, and cast a glance over his shoulder out the front window. He and Julie had been inside for well over an hour. Mrs. Leiferman must be about to expire of curiosity by now. It wasn’t her usual MO—his activities were usually only fair game when he was outside the house—but it was possible that the old lady couldn’t take the suspense and had come up with the bright idea of coming over to borrow a cup of sugar or something of the sort.
But the tailored white pants leg he could see on his stoop did not belong to Mrs. Leiferman. It was definitely a male leg. It didn’t take a genius to guess whose.
He got up and went to answer the door.
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” Hinkle demanded in a furious tone the moment he opened the door, pushing past him into the house before Mac could say a word. “You got a spark plug loose, gettin’ mixed up with that shit again? You got your panties in a twist about Sid Carlson, that’s your business. But I’m not getting involved, you hear? That dude is bad, and you know it.”
“Hey to you too,” Mac said mildly, closing the door. Natty as always in a white suit with a black shirt and tie, Hinkle stood in the middle of the living room, arms akimbo, glaring at him. Mac walked over, picked up his beer from the coffee table, drained the last mouthful, and gestured at Hinkle with the bottle. “Want a beer?”
“Hell, no, I don’t want a beer. I want to know what the hell you think you’re doing nosing around Carlson again. Soon as I figured out who I was taking pictures of, I about crapped my pants. I tried to call you, but you’re not answering your damned cell phone—again!—and when you picked up here, you didn’t say a damned word. So here I am, asking you to your face: What the fuck are you doing?”
Mac thought about explaining that it had been Josephine who picked up, not he, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. Instead, he asked, “Did you get the pictures?”
“Did I get the—” Hinkle looked like he was about to blow a gasket. “It doesn’t matter whether or not I got the pictures. We aren’t going to use them. You hear me? Are N-O-T not. Remember the last time you tried taking him on? Remember that we were cops, back then? Remember things were going pretty good for both of us? And what did you do? You got a burr up your ass about Sid Carlson. You went after him, and he nailed your ass to the wall—and mine too. I’m not making that mistake twice, and neither are you, if I can help it. Face the facts, Mac: You aren’t going to take Sid Carlson down. If you keep trying, he’ll be the one taking you down, and this time I . . .”
He broke off, looking at something beyond Mac’s shoulder, his eyes widening. Mac felt a premonition of disaster, and glanced around. Sure enough, there stood Julie, barefoot, his white bathrobe, so big on her that she looked like she was swimming in it, knotted around her waist. Her hair was twisted into a loose and fetching knot on the top of her head, her beautiful face was scrubbed clean, and her big brown eyes were questioning as they swung from him to Hinkle and back.
“Julie, meet my partner, George Hinkle.” There didn’t seem to be much else to do, under the circumstances, but make the necessary introductions. To a certain degree, anyway. No need to reveal Julie’s full identity, because if Hinkle knew exactly who she was he would freak for sure. The urgent question was, how much had she heard? Mac looked at her hard, but couldn’t tell.
“Julie—Carlson?” Hinkle choked, staring at her as if she’d been a
six-foot-tall spitting cobra instead of a ravishing babe in a bathrobe.
So much for keeping her identity to himself, Mac thought, grimacing. He was surprised his partner had recognized her at all, much less so fast. But then, the light was good in the room now, and Hinkle had just been taking pictures of Sid, so he would naturally have Carlson on the brain. Plus, he’d been working security at her wedding, too, and a looker like Julie could be counted on to be remembered by any male between ten and ninety. And he could have seen her umpteen times since, for all Mac knew. After all, he also had a vested interest in keeping tabs on Sid, if for no other reason than to stay as far away from him as possible.
“Julie’s a client,” Mac said, which was perfectly true even if it was obvious to the most casual observer that Julie was far more than that. After all, how many clients came strolling into his living room clad in nothing but his bathrobe, obviously fresh from his shower? None that he could think of.
“Hello,” Julie offered. She was unsmiling, but Mac still could not judge whether she’d heard more than she should.
“Shit,” Hinkle said, turning incredulous eyes on him. Mac met that dumbstruck look impassively. Recollecting himself, Hinkle swung his gaze back to Julie. “Meaning no disrespect, ma’am.”
Then his gaze moved to something on the floor, and his expression changed again. Following the direction of that appalled glance, Mac realized that his partner had just spotted Julie’s dress. Julie apparently realized it, too, because she stepped forward and, with praiseworthy dignity, retrieved the garment, which she folded over her arm.
“You were at my house earlier, weren’t you?” she asked Hinkle, her manner both direct and composed. Mac had to give her credit for not letting Hinkle—or him—see the embarrassment she had to be feeling. “I heard you talking to Mac over the phone. Did you—were you able to get pictures of my husband with his girlfriend?”
Hinkle gulped. “Uh—uh. . . .” His gaze shot to Mac. “Could I speak to you in private for just one minute?”
To Trust a Stranger Page 25
