by Joanne Rock
“So what do you say we call some backup just to be safe?” He’d definitely made headway with her on the way over. He had to at least make the suggestion.
But she was shaking her head before the words were even all the way out of his mouth.
“And risk advertising Katie’s misstep to the whole world with a big showdown in residential Long Beach? I don’t think so.” She eyed him in the shadowy interior of the SUV lit only by a streetlight two houses up. “You can back me up better than a rookie with a patrol car. How about we go to the door together, but once we see inside the house to make sure everything is kosher, you wait outside?”
It was more of a compromise than he would have been able to make if his sister had been involved. And while Sean would feel better with a small army of protection where Donata was concerned, he appreciated her trust in him to do the job as well as any of her colleagues.
“Good enough.” He watched her check the safety on her weapon as quickly as she checked her lipstick in the mirror. Seeing the two acts in quick succession spoke to the strange nature of this encounter since they weren’t sure if they were greeting an enemy or coming to the rescue for a friend’s daughter tonight.
He damned well hoped it was the latter because he knew what he was like when the people closest to him were threatened. And if an enemy waited on the other side of the door to this crappy three-story walk-up, they were about to find out that messing with Donata had been a very big mistake.
* * *
THE HOUSE SEEMED LEGIT, Donata thought after talking to Katie for almost an hour. It hadn’t really been the home of a friend, the way she’d said on the phone. Instead, her boyfriend’s brother rented the place as a summer hangout with friends, but the apartment was vacant half the year.
Definitely not a safe place for a fifteen-year-old girl to sleep over, but it fit with her story and didn’t seem like a setup to lure Donata out. As much as Donata was sick and tired of dead ends in the case, she’d be grateful if this turned out to be one since she didn’t want Katie mixed up in any of the crap they’d been investigating.
Her stomach churned more each day with the unanswered questions and the knowledge that more girls were being taken advantage of the longer they took to make arrests.
Sean waited downstairs on the front porch since his presence had freaked Katie out. She’d spent the first ten minutes hysterical, convinced they were going to arrest her, so ultimately they thought it would be better if Sean waited outside. He’d retrieved his laptop and used a wireless connection to contact some friends about unsending Katie’s e-mail before her boyfriend opened the photos.
Now, Donata hoped they could wrap up this night of tears and self-recrimination so she could deliver Katie to her father. And once the girl was safe, Donata planned to track down Katie’s boyfriend for a little conversation unless Mick insisted on taking that privilege himself. Katie’s story of high pressure from her boyfriend—right down to insisting on a certain file size for the pictures—made Donata suspect an organized business was recruiting teenage boys to obtain at least some of the illicit footage for them.
That was one solid lead, at least.
“My friend is doing everything in his power to retrieve the photos from Trevor’s e-mail.” Donata touched Katie’s shoulder, surprised at how fragile she seemed even though her father was such a big guy. “And it’s inviting trouble to hang out in a house like this where ten different guys probably have keys to the place.”
“You think my judgment sucks where guys are concerned, don’t you?” Katie looked up at her with big brown eyes, the girl’s thick dark hair knotted in an intricate ponytail with ten different clips holding back stray pieces.
“I think my judgment about guys sucked when I was your age, let’s put it that way.” She knew it was better now. Just thinking about Sean made her feel stronger. And shouldn’t a woman be with a man who made her feel better about herself instead of a guy who dragged her down? Not that self-worth should be attached a man, but sheesh. “You might be infinitely smarter than me, yet I can’t help but look back and think how much I wanted to be the center of some guy’s world when I was fifteen. I know how that kind of thinking puts a girl at a distinct disadvantage.”
“But I don’t need to be the center of someone’s world. I just wanted to be the hot chick around school instead of the new girl for a change.” She shrugged, her simple self-awareness making Donata think the girl would be okay. And since Donata had the boyfriend’s name and contact information in her jacket pocket she figured her work here was done.
She handed Katie her purse just as a shot fired outside the house.
Glass broke in response to the shot, a thousand little pieces showering to a floor somewhere inside the apartment building.
Sean.
“Get down.” Donata yanked Katie to the floor of the apartment and rolled her under a table. “Stay down. Call your father.”
Heart slamming into her throat, Donata pulled her cell out of her jacket and handed it to the girl before she scuttled toward the door, remaining beneath window level.
“Where are you going?” Katie screeched, her voice thready with panic.
“To make sure no one gets hurt.” She’d never forgive herself if she ignored all Sean’s warnings that this might be a setup only to have him on the wrong end of a bullet.
Oh God.
A wave of sickness roiled but before she lost it, Sean’s voice shouted up from outside.
“Donata?” He sounded strong. Whole.
Thank you, God. She’d never guessed detective work would make her so nauseous, but having Sean involved in this with her added a whole new dimension of fears she didn’t want to analyze right now.
“I’m here. We’re okay.” She was amazed to realize that in her three years on the street as a beat cop, she’d never had cause to draw her weapon. The last time she’d held a gun outside of the practice range had been in that final showdown with Sergio.
“I’m on the line with local police now. I can see the window that took the bullet and it was definitely fired from outside so you should be fine if you stay put and stay low. No sign of anyone out here.”
Stay put while Sean remained outside with someone firing shots at the house?
Not bloody likely.
Donata had made a lot of mistakes in her life, but taking the easy way out wasn’t one of them. And after making sure Katie was safely wedged beneath a table with her cell phone in hand, Donata started down the stairs of the house to help Sean fight their unseen foe.
* * *
TWO HOURS OF SEARCHING the neighborhood brought them another dead end in an investigation that went nowhere. For every step forward they took two back and the frustration threatened to unravel inside him after tonight’s near miss by a perp they couldn’t pinpoint. After he and Donata had both given statements and Mick had arrived to personally escort his shaken daughter home, Sean drove Donata away from Long Beach.
His head was buzzing with “what ifs” after a close call. The bullet they’d found had been one floor below where Donata and Katie had been talking. Judging by the buzz around the crime scene, either Katie or Donata would be dead now if the shooter had aimed slightly higher.
And wasn’t that a sobering-as-hell realization?
“I can’t drive all the way back to the city.” He pulled off the highway without consulting her, needing to touch her more than he needed her approval or even her understanding right now.
“What are you doing?” She straightened in her seat, eyes darting over to the speedometer as he braked hard to get off the interstate.
“Pulling over. Getting a room somewhere. I don’t know.” His whole body hurt with the effort to rein himself in lately, the effort to be patient and methodical on a case he’d long approached from gut instinct.
Holding back now to wait for ballistics reports and political maneuvering between police departments on crimes that reached far outside Manhattan wore his patience thin. Add
to that the need to be with Donata, to wrap her in his arms and bury himself inside her after those moments of gut-wrenching fear following the gunfire and it was no wonder he was going crazy.
She could have died back there.
“We could be home in twenty minutes,” she reminded him, looking both ways as he sped through a yellow light.
“That’s twenty minutes too long.” He didn’t have the energy or brainpower left to explain himself at this point. He only knew he needed to touch her, to reassure himself she’d come through unscathed.
He pulled into the parking lot of a coffee shop when no hotels were immediately visible.
“What are we—”
“It’s just for a minute.” He wheeled the vehicle around to the back of the place and parked under a tree.
No streetlights back here. Just the backs of three other concrete buildings and a tree that refused to bow to the urban sprawl.
Shoving the gearshift into park, he switched off the ignition and had both their seat belts off in a matter of seconds. Only another second or two to push his seat all the way back and pull Donata across the vehicle into his lap.
Her eyes were wide with surprise until he started unbuttoning her blouse. Then, seeming to understand, her lids went heavy.
He speared a hand into her hair, cradling the back of her head with his palm. Holding her steady he kissed her, popping one button after another with his other hand.
The scent of her perfume rose from her breasts as he unveiled them. Even after a full workday, hours at the computer and a trip to Long Beach, the scent of her floral fragrance lingered, intensified by the heat of her skin.
The temperature spiked in the vehicle as fog spread across the windows and clouded them in privacy. Private by his standards anyway.
“I need you. I need to hold you, feel your body pulsing and alive around me.” He’d meant to ask her if she minded being here, getting naked in a coffee shop parking lot. But the words morphed into something else without his consent.
And damn it, he did need her. He needed to know that some stupid criminal’s bullet hadn’t landed her on a morgue slab, cold and lifeless and out of his world forever. A thought beyond contemplating.
He pulled her to him a little rougher than he intended, but she didn’t object. In fact, she seemed to echo his sentiments with nails scoring his back.
“Amen.” She barely moved her lips off his to speak the word, but Sean heard the assent in her voice and felt it in the slow roll of her hips against his.
Past the point of finesse, he leaned back to give her more room to wriggle out of her jeans. The blue denim went sailing into the back seat along with the hint of black lace she’d been wearing underneath.
How could she wear such blatantly provocative lingerie beneath her clothes all the time and not drive him totally insane? He could never concentrate on work with her around no matter how conservatively she dressed because he knew that a sexpot lurked behind the detached facade.
He had his fly undone and a condom on by the time she was undressed, but then he didn’t have to perform half the acrobatics she did for sexual access. Her blouse still fluttered open, her breasts half falling out of her bra from when he’d started working at the front hook.
“I want you all the time.” He lifted her at the waist, raising her up enough to find his way inside her, positioning himself right there for one suspended moment until he brought her down in one long stroke.
Fireworks started behind his eyeballs even though his eyes were wide open. Her hair fell in a silky stroke across his arm as she leaned over him, her breath coming in short pants as she worked her hips faster.
If they’d had more room he would have made her wait, could have exerted his own will in this encounter because he didn’t want it to end. But he’d gotten to have her here, now, in the front seat of his vehicle in a parking lot.
And holy hell, how lucky was that? He figured he owed it to her to let her call the shots on how this encounter went down. He just needed to feel her around him, warm and alive and incredible.
Her hips still gyrating in ways that made his eyes cross, Donata arched in a way that dragged her breasts slowly across his chest. The combination of the quick hip action and the lush stroke of her full breasts sent the sexual fireworks into a mind-blowing finale, his fingers sinking into her hips as he held her tight to him.
I love you.
Sean thought the words even if he didn’t speak them aloud. He didn’t know that he was the kind of guy who even knew how to say them anymore, but just thinking them blew his mind.
He couldn’t speak the words now anyway since she’d think it was the sex talking. And even though the sex had been incredible enough to induce babbling in a grown man, Sean knew that he’d feel the same way tomorrow. How scary was that? He’d avoided relationships for years. Then Donata walked back into his life and after a handful of days together—bam! He suddenly couldn’t get enough of this woman.
Those tense moments back in Long Beach when he thought she might have been hit had crystallized his feelings for her in an instant. But did she think about him the same way?
He knew better than to talk to her about any of this now when they’d been through so much already today and they had to question Richie Ford first thing in the morning.
So it surprised him when she eased off him to start regrouping, her movements stilted and abrupt.
“Donata?” He thought something seemed off.
Maybe she wasn’t a fan of car sex.
But then she looked back at him with a steely determination in her blue eyes and he knew it didn’t have anything to do with sex.
“I’m sorry. But we can’t keep doing this, Sean.”
CHAPTER 15
FINGERS FLYING over the buttons on her blouse, Donata wondered why she couldn’t make smarter decisions in her life. This had probably been a really stupid time to have such a discussion and her tenuous grip on her emotions loosened every time she got next to Sean lately.
“What do you mean?” He watched her from the driver’s seat that he’d returned to a sitting position.
His rumpled hair and sweat-sheened skin only made him all the more enticing as he pulled his clothes into place. He moved with slow deliberation while she scuttled all over the car to retrieve her things.
“I mean I can’t mix work and pleasure anymore because it’s frying my ability to think.” And it was even more than mixing work and her personal life since this aspect of personal life scared the crap out of her. She’d given her whole life over to Sergio and what she was feeling now for Sean totally overshadowed anything she’d ever felt for Sergio. What if she lost herself altogether?
How could she keep her identity in the midst of such all-encompassing emotion?
Besides, Sean’s life had been at stake tonight. And wasn’t that reason enough to slow things down?
“Donata.” Sean looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. He held both her hands that couldn’t keep still.
But she shook off his touch and whatever his words might have been in a rush to share all the ways she was freaking out.
“No. Listen. Beyond the fact that you could have died tonight because I ignored your instincts to call for backup, I also happen to have a whole career riding on my talk with Richie Ford tomorrow and I don’t even have the first clue what to ask or how to handle the encounter. Do you realize the stakes for messing this up? I could lose out on an arrest. I could be responsible for keeping a predator on the streets.”
Not to mention she could lose her job.
She’d sound horribly selfish to reiterate that fact, and it truly ranked lower on her list of priorities in light of her feelings for Sean. But the truth of the matter was that she’d crossed out of the criminal world recently enough that she highly valued the one and only legitimate job she’d ever done. What would she have if she failed as a detective?
“So you can’t mix work and pleasure.” He repeated her words as he turned on
the defogger to clear the steamy windows. “And you’re choosing work.”
At no small cost to her heart.
“For now. I don’t have a choice if I’m going to pull my weight on this case.” She had to be sharp even if she didn’t feel it.
Sean didn’t say anything as he studied the small spot on the window the defogger cleared. The spot spread bigger and bigger until the windshield was clear everywhere except a thin strip along the top of the glass.
“This case is important to you.” He nodded as though it made sense to him, yet the hard set to his features told her he didn’t understand at all.
She wasn’t so sure she understood herself. But her life was a work in progress and this next phase was supposed to be about finding professional security and maybe, just maybe, peace with her past.
“I can’t afford to mess up this case, Sean. It’s the most extensive investigation I’ve been a part of and I’ve played a larger role in this one than anything I’ve done before.”
“You don’t have to explain.” He leaned over the console and kissed her on the cheek with a tenderness that made her heart stutter. “I know you’ve worked damn hard to be a detective. You’re going to knock the nay-saying buttheads on their asses when you make the arrests on this one.”
He put the vehicle in reverse and drove away from the place where they’d made love. And although he’d done exactly what she wanted, Donata definitely didn’t feel happy about it.
* * *
“YOU BROKE UP with the guy?” Mick glanced at her over the rim of his coffee mug as they turned off F.D.R. Drive on their way to Richie Ford’s place on the Lower East Side.
They had a search warrant based on the information from Sergio and Richie’s alias connection to fastgirlz, so Donata felt calmer about the meeting than she had the night before. Well, she felt calmer about work. She grew more tense by the hour as she thought about how things had grown stilted and awkward between her and Sean by the end of the night. Actually, it had been almost daybreak by the time he walked her into her apartment.
