by Meg Cabot
But she should have known. She should have known when he bent down and tugged the bottle of moisturizer from her hand. She should have known when, after setting the moisturizer down on the nightstand, he knelt in front of her, his knees sinking into the deep pile of her hotel room’s carpet. She should have known when he placed both his hands on her bare knees, still pink from her shower, and gently, but firmly, spread them apart….
…then buried his face against the damp curls between her thighs.
“Jack!” she cried, her fingers flying to his head, each grasping fistfuls of his thick dark hair. “What are you—Jack, stop it. You can’t—”
But he could. And he did. His mouth pressed against her as tightly as a hand. His hot, competent tongue laved her. His arms, moving beneath the robe, circled her hips and brought her more firmly against him, his fingers singeing the soft flesh of her less-than-fifteen-million-dollar ass.
And she could do nothing but tighten her grip on his hair and moan, her back and neck arching with each expert caress of his tongue….
Was it any wonder she fell back against the bed, all of her arguments against their doing exactly this completely forgotten? Was it any wonder that her fingers left his hair to travel along the ropelike sinews of his forearms, until she came to the hands now gripping her thighs, keeping her anchored to the bed since his lips and tongue were causing her hips to roll with each new stroke? Was it any wonder that she sank her fingertips into the backs of those hands, urging them higher, until they’d parted the robe and found her aching breasts?
It was wrong. She knew it was wrong. He was using weapons against her for which she had no defense system in place. He was bad for her, bad for womankind in general. He would hurt her, in the end, the way he’d hurt so many others. And then she’d be the fuck bunny standing in a negligee in a hotel hallway, throwing champagne flutes.
She knew all this. She knew it perfectly well.
So why did what he was doing feel so very, very right?
And then his mouth slid out from between her thighs, to burn a course over her belly and up her rib cage, with stops at either breast, teasing each of her pink nipples, while one hand slipped between her legs, where his mouth had been, his fingertips as thrillingly callused and hard as his tongue had been teasing and soft.
When his face finally came level to hers, he looked down at her, his blue eyes dark with desire, his mouth wearing a crooked smile.
“You know what your problem is, Calabrese?” he said. “You think too much. Sometimes you have to stop thinking, and just be.”
On the word be he replaced the fingers that had been inside her with something much thicker. She didn’t even have time to wonder how he’d managed to get his pants undone without her noticing. The only thing she knew was, that part of him which she’d felt pressing against her with such urgency in the hallway had found its way inside her at last, filling what had begun to feel like an aching emptiness. His weight—not to mention his erection—pinioned her to the bed, and she liked it. Look how much she liked it, if the way she was moving against him was any indication. She was lifting her hips to meet him, thrust for thrust, while his lips sought her neck and his hands, oh, his hands slipped behind her shoulders and pulled her up, so that each time he drove himself into her, he went even more deeply home.
It was madness. It was heaven. It was going to have to stop. Really, she could not go on like this, like some kind of writhing, gasping slave to desire….
But oh, how good he felt. Here at last was something that was stronger than the voice inside her head telling her none of this was going to get her anywhere good. Here at last was something that drowned out all the voices, all the words of advice she’d heard over the years, all the warnings about bad boys and men who just wanted one thing….He could have it, as far as Lou was concerned, so long as he kept making her feel like this.
And then she was there, trembling on the edge of a dark chasm, so deep she couldn’t see the bottom. At any minute, she was going to fall. All she needed was one last, final push—
He pushed her.
And then she was falling, falling down and down. And now she could see the bottom of the chasm rushing up at her, so fast she barely had time to register that it was filled with water until she’d plunged into it. Cool, silver drops kissed her bare skin all over…then, hardly giving her a chance to recover, did it again.
Oh, yes, Lou reflected, as she lay in a damp heap a few minutes later, feeling Jack’s heart drumming hard against hers. Bad boys were more fun.
“Now,” Jack said conversationally, lifting his head from one of her bare breasts. “What was that you were saying about why it is we can’t be together?”
27
Eight stories below the bed in which Jack and Lou lay, emotionally and physically spent, Frank Calabrese picked up a microphone and crooned into it.
“My love burns for you tonight,” he sang, in a surprisingly pleasant tenor voice. “Nothing ever felt this right.”
Eleanor Townsend, one of the only other customers, besides Frank, in the Anchorage Four Seasons Hotel bar, applauded merrily. She had never heard of karaoke before, and found it most surprising that a hotel the caliber of the Four Seasons offered it. But then, this was Alaska.
Besides, she found that she most heartily approved of karaoke. It was quite a lot of fun. In fact it was too bad, she thought, that Jack had been too tired to join them for dinner. He would have enjoyed it very much, especially the elk burger—really quite delicious, and so low in fat!—which she had had, along with a beer, at Frank’s suggestion. The two did seem to go quite well together. Rather like Frank and karaoke.
“And when my heart fire’s burning,” Frank sang, “you know it’s for you I’m yearning.”
Eleanor had, unfortunately, been taking a sip of beer as Frank sang that line. Now, having snorted at the absurdity of the lyrics—really, that such a song could have won an award of any kind, let alone an Academy Award, was perfectly ludicrous—she felt some of the beer go up her nose. Good Lord! Laughing so hard that liquid came out her nose! This hadn’t happened to her since she’d been a little girl at her parents’ camp in the Adirondacks.
Mortified, Eleanor pressed a napkin to her nose. Fortunately neither Frank nor the bartender seemed to notice.
“When the world goes up in flame,” Frank sang, coming in for the big finish, “and nothing stays the same, I will whisper your name…”
Frank finished the chorus with a flourish. Then he bowed to her applause, laid down the microphone, and came back to their table.
“Now you do one,” he said.
Eleanor set aside her napkin and said, “Oh, Frank, no. I can’t sing!”
“Who cares?” Frank asked. “Here, here’s the songbook. You must know one of these. Here. How about this one. ‘You Light Up My Life.’ You must know that one. Everyone knows that one.”
“Oh, Frank,” Eleanor said, laughing again—but this time avoiding taking a sip of her beer as she did so. “You don’t know what you’re asking. I really can’t carry a tune.”
“This one.” Frank held up the song book. “You must know this one. ‘You’re So Vain.’ Sing ‘You’re So Vain.’ ”
“Frank, no!” Eleanor could not quite remember when she had had so much fun. Certainly not since Gilbert had died. Gilbert, for all his staid ways, had been quite amusing, when he’d wanted to be. Life had gotten dull since he’d passed away, though Eleanor had tried to keep herself busy with her volunteer work.
Still, volunteer work could only be so interesting. This, however—eating elk burgers and singing karaoke with a retired policeman from New York City—was imminently more exciting. Who would have thought that, in traveling to Alaska to look for her lost son, she would find a man who made her feel like a teenager again? Certainly not Eleanor.
“You have to sing something,” Frank insisted. “I did it, so you have to, too.”
“Oh, very well,” Eleanor said, with a mockly exasper
ated sigh. “But I will pick my song, thank you very much.”
Seizing the songbook, she began to flip through the pages, gazing at all the titles listed there. So many songs, and almost all of them about one thing—love. Well, and what better topic for a song than something that produced in otherwise sensible people such a feeling of giddy silliness, rather like….
Well, rather like what Eleanor was feeling right now.
Effervescent as bubbles in a glass of champagne was how Eleanor felt. Which was perfectly ridiculous, because it was nearly midnight Alaskan time, which meant it was close to three in the morning back in New York. When was the last time she’d stayed up until three in the morning? She couldn’t even remember. It was quite impossible that she should be in love with a retired police officer, and father of five, whom she’d only met three days earlier.
And yet Alessandro had liked him from the start. And Alessandro was never wrong about people.
Gripping the songbook, feeling as bright and as gay as she had at fifteen, Eleanor stood up.
“I’ll do it,” she announced. “I’ll sing.”
Frank burst into applause while the bartender very kindly took down the song number, then punched it into the computer.
Then Eleanor, holding the microphone very tightly, turned to face her audience of one—the bartender being too deeply engrossed in a game of solitaire to pay her the slightest bit of attention—and launched into a rendition of a song she had never heard before, let alone knew how to sing.
It was, however, the first song she’d laid eyes on after realizing she was in love with Frank Calabrese, and for that reason, in Eleanor’s heart, there would always be a special place for “Kung Fu Fighting.”
Twelve floors up from the Four Seasons Hotel bar, Vicky Lord couldn’t sleep.
She ought, she knew, to have been enjoying her first good night’s sleep since the disappearance of Jack and Lou. They were, after all, safe now. When she’d first heard what had happened—that their helicopter had gone down, and that they were feared dead—it was as if a part of her had died, too. Really, that’s how she’d felt. She’d been unable to get up out of bed for almost thirty-six hours….
But then she’d heard there was a chance they’d survived. A good chance. Her elation had known no bounds. She’d even given Lupe a hundred-dollar-a-week raise.
And now they were back. They were back, and they were safe, and for that, she was more glad than she could say. She had arranged the little welcome back party in the penthouse suite, buying out the hotel’s supply of Dom Perignon and cocktail shrimp for the occasion. The party had gone quite nicely. Both Jack and Lou had seemed appreciative of the gesture.
It was what had occurred during that party—and then later, on the eleven o’clock news—that had Vicky so wide awake that even the sleeping pills her doctor had prescribed shortly before her wedding, when she’d been so jittery, weren’t doing the trick. No, she was awake, and likely to remain so as long as her mind kept replaying the horrible, startling news Jack had told her.
And that was that he’d been shot at.
Not only shot at, but chased—chased—through the forest, by men wielding guns. Their own pilot, the one who’d died in the crash, apparently hadn’t died in the crash at all. That much had been confirmed in a late-breaking news story on one of the local channels.
“In an intriguing twist involving the fatal crash of the helicopter that was carrying action-adventure star Jack Townsend and one other passenger to the set of Copkiller IV, currently being shot outside of Myra, Alaska,” the Channel Eleven news reporter had said, “the Anchorage medical examiner’s office reports that the pilot of that aircraft, Samuel Kowalski, did not, as was formerly assumed, die in the crash. Instead, it appears that Kowalski was killed by a bullet that entered his skull sometime before his remains were charred in the wreckage of the downed R-44 he piloted for a private firm hired by the film studio. The Myra sheriff’s department refuses to comment on this latest development in this bizarre case. Townsend was stranded for nearly seventy-two hours in the Alaskan wilderness with the screenwriter who penned the block-buster film Hindenburg. Mr. Townsend’s publicist reports that the former star of television’s hit medical drama ‘STAT’ and current star of the successful Copkiller films is resting after his ordeal, and is expected to continue working on his current film according to schedule. In other news—”
But Vicky didn’t hear what the other news might be. All of her attention had been riveted by one word, and one word only. And that word was bullet. Bullet. A bullet had entered the skull of Samuel Kowalski. He had not, as had been previously reported, died in the accident that had brought down the helicopter. The story Jack and Lou had told, at her little party, of basically being stalked by armed men for what turned out to have been dozens of miles, was true. It was absolutely true, and it could only mean one thing.
And it was that thing which was keeping Vicky up, seated on the couch in the suite’s living room with the television remote in her hand, flicking from channel to channel, but not seeing any of them.
Someone was trying to kill Jack. Not Lou. No, Lou was safe. It was only because she’d been with Jack that her life had ever been in any danger in the first place. It was Jack who’d been the target, Jack who was still in danger.
She had to warn him. She knew she had to warn him.
And yet there’d never been a chance. He had stayed at the party for such a brief time before his mother had whisked him away, wanting—and the sentiment was understandable—some quality time alone with the son she had thought she’d lost.
And when, after the party, Vicky had called his room, there had been no answer. She had tried calling again on the hour, every hour, since, but Jack never picked up….
She had to tell him. She had to. Before it was too late—
“Vicky?”
The voice, coming from the darkest part of the living room, startled her so badly that she nearly fell off the couch. But it was only her husband, after all, calling out to her sleepily from their room.
“Vicky.” Tim Lord, in gray silk pyjamas and a black dressing gown, came shuffling out of the shadows and towards the couch. Tim didn’t much care how he looked while he was working—in fact, he seemed to prefer jeans and his ubiquitous cowboy boots. But he also dressed splendidly for bed. That was because, as he’d once confided to Vicky, his mother, who’d raised Tim single-handedly after his father had left for parts unknown, had been able to afford food and school clothes for her only child, but very little else.
“What are you doing up so late?” Tim wanted to know. “Are you not feeling well?”
Vicky hit the power switch on the remote. She didn’t want him to see, in its blue glow, how pale she was without her makeup.
“No,” she said. “No, I’m fine.”
“Well,” Tim said. “Then come to bed, will you? You know I can’t sleep without you. And I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow. We’re shooting the mine scene. It’s the last shot, you know. The last shot before we call it a wrap and head back.”
Vicky obediently left the couch and let her husband steer her back to the room they shared.
It was a testament to her acting skills that he never knew, never even suspected, what she had discovered. He had no clue. No clue at all. Anymore than he knew that she lay awake beside him for the entire night…
…right up until everyone in the entire hotel—those who weren’t awake already—was jolted by the explosion that ripped through Jack Townsend’s room, two floors below theirs.
28
Jack Townsend wasn’t in his new room on the tenth floor when it went up in a ball of smoke and flame. He was still in Lou Calabrese’s room on the eighth floor. To be exact, he was in Lou Calabrese.
But he wasn’t having as much fun—at least then—as he might have expected. That was because Lou, against his express wishes, had answered her phone when it had begun to ring at the ungodly hour of six forty-five in the morning.
While this was not a wholly unusual situation, it was the first time it had happened with Lou.
And, happy occasion, she appeared to be stirring as well. Jack—who knew only too well that Lou wasn’t exactly a morning person, if her behavior that time in the ranger’s station had been any indication—gave her time to wake up, nuzzling only her shoulder, and that gently.
Lou opened her eyes and said, in a voice rough with sleep, “You know what? You were wrong. You do not need a bigger gun.”
“Ah,” Jack said, against her shoulder. “Ever the romantic.”
“You,” she said, “are insatiable.”
“Most women would be appreciative of that fact,” he pointed out.
Lou rolled over with a sigh, and, flat on her back, said, “Okay. Do me.”
Jack did so. Happily they were both still naked from the night before, so there was no fuss about clothing. Instead, Jack was able to fling back the sheet and set to work at once, pressing his lips to one of her pink nipples, which until he kissed it had lain sweetly dormant. At his touch, however, it sprang to life, burgeoning under his gaze to full, rosy stiffness.
Gliding a hand down her smooth, flat belly, he found the tangle of russet curls that he’d given so thorough an examination the night before. But this time, instead of his tongue, he slipped a finger there and found that she was as ready as he was for love, the way they made it.
A second later, he pulled her, squealing, on top of him, with the suggestion that she do some of the work for a change….
A task she set about fulfilling with breathtaking aptitude. She had just pulled him deep inside her—so hot, so wet, so deliciously tight—when the phone rang.
