by Susan Sey
He gave her a lazy grin, something slow and easy and somehow southern despite the fact that he’d been born in Iowa and had never spent more than a few weeks at a pop below the Mason-Dixon. “What now? Are you going to offer me some sweet tea? Because busting into your house all afternoon surely was a thirsty job.”
His breath backed up in his chest when she laid her small, cool palm against his jaw and smoothed her thumb over his cheekbone.
“You had a little something,” she said. “Just there.”
His entire system surged to attention, making the space between their bodies suddenly supercharged and electric. But a part of his brain hung back, wondered. She’d sounded like the Liz he knew, all brisk and direct, so why was she touching him like the Liz of his dreams? Something was off.
His body didn’t much care. It was still hung up on the part where Liz was six inches from his mouth and looking suggestible. He forced himself to speak, had to really dig for an appropriately amused tone. “Liz. Darling. What are you doing?”
She leaned in, eyes wide, the faintest hint of calculation still swirling in the deep, deep blue. “I’m saying yes,” she breathed.
Then she kissed him. If he hadn’t already been leaning up against the wall, he’d have sagged there for sure. He’d kissed Liz enough lately to anticipate the punch of it, to know that it would be sweet, sharp and addictively hot, that it would have him dancing perilously close to the edge of control. How could he have possibly known she’d been holding back all this time?
But she had been. Must have. Because this kiss was like nothing he’d ever experienced. It was like being there for the birth of a star. Blinding light, incinerating heat and a merciless gravity that had him helplessly circling her like a planet in orbit. He felt his arms band around her, his mouth open to the demand of hers. The edges of reality blurred, and his entire world narrowed to her. Just her. A curvy little angel with a gun and a badge who was pressed up against him and kissing him like the fate of the free world depended on making him happy.
And she was doing a damn good job, because he was extremely happy. He tried to loosen his grip on her, show a little finesse, but she wriggled against him and said it again. “Yes.”
He lost track of his thinking. He didn’t know exactly which of them had opened the buttons of her ugly suit coat, but he slid his hand inside to find her breast. She made a hot little noise against his mouth and arched into his hand until he could feel the jut of her nipple through her shirt. Lust pounded through his veins in a steady, accelerating pulse, and he brushed his thumb over her nipple until her head lolled forward and her breathing went ragged.
Which was nice, because his own wasn’t so steady, come to think of it.
“Yes,” she said, her forehead against his shoulder, both hands fisted in his shirt. Patrick glanced toward the living room, dismissed the curvy lady couch and the hardwood floor. That wouldn’t do. He wanted a bed. A big one. He slid his hand from her shirt, vaguely disturbed at how difficult it was for his body to process the command from his mind to let her go.
“God, Liz,” he said, shaken. “I want—” He broke off. He couldn’t define exactly what he wanted. Her body, yes. And Lord, that mouth. Everywhere. But more. There was something primal and possessive racing through his system. Something that made him want to mark her, own her, claim her.
“Yes,” she said again. “Yes, yes, yes.” She chanted it like a mantra, her eyes closed, her pulse beating like mad in the delicate hollow of her throat. And it pierced the fog of desire just enough for a chilling note of doubt to creep in.
It was all she’d been saying, yes. It was all he’d wanted to hear from her for years. So why did it feel wrong?
He turned her slowly, put her back to the wall, watched her eyes flutter open. They were heavy, hot and dazed with passion. But not lost. Patrick knew what lost looked like. He knew what it felt like to spin beyond reason’s reach, carried helplessly away by lust or desire or greed. He hadn’t stolen for a living without learning a thing or two about lost. It chilled him to his very core that he could still see the remnants of calculation there.
Liz had a plan. Screwing him was part of it.
“What is this, Liz?” he asked, very carefully.
“What does it look like?” she asked, her lips damp and well kissed. Looking at them did unnerving things to his resolve, so he watched her hands instead. But then they went to the hem of her blouse, starting at the bottom, slowly freeing buttons as she worked her way upward. A strip of pale, smooth flesh appeared in the V of her shirt and Patrick swallowed hard. He reached out, put his hand over hers. For an instant, he didn’t know if he was trying to stop her or trying to take over the work himself.
“It looks like a seduction.” He forced the words out of his very dry throat.
“You said once that you could make me want things I didn’t even know existed yet. I want you to prove it.” She slipped her hands out from under his and slid them up under his T-shirt instead, smoothed them over the planes of his abdomen. Patrick’s entire gut clenched with unthinkable pleasure, and he trembled with the effort it took to step away.
“And I’d love to. I’d really, really love to. But, Liz, why?”
She stepped forward, coy invitation curling her lips, a hint of irritation in those revealing eyes. Patrick latched on to the irritation. He wasn’t falling in as easily with her plan as she’d hoped. That was good. Wasn’t it? His head thought so, but his body was more of the opinion that he was a raving lunatic.
“Because I want you to,” she said. God, was she pouting ? That mouth was killing him. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Normally, yes.” Patrick forced himself to take another step back. “But not from you. A week ago you weren’t even prepared to be my colleague, and now you want to be my lover? I don’t think so, Liz. Especially not when you’ve got master plan written all over your face. Somehow, sleeping with me has become an asset in your twisted little mind. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, and trust me on this, I’m sorely tempted not to care and just toss you onto the nearest flat surface and stop thinking for the next twelve hours or so. But I’m not going to. Not until you tell me what the hell happened.”
She banded her arms over her waist, her face going rigid and blank. “Nothing happened.”
“Bullshit.”
“I had a hard day and wanted a good fuck, all right?” She cocked a hip and glared. “You were here, you were handy, you’ve expressed an interest. Simple as that.”
He stared at her, taken aback. “A hard day?”
She shoved past him. “Listen, I’m offering you the chance to get busy on that revenge fuck you’ve been after since, oh, the minute you arrived in town, all right? If you don’t want it, just say so. But will you please make up your mind? Because I’m in no mood for conversation.”
“I don’t do sex without conversation. It’s a little quirk of mine.”
She glared at him. “Go home.”
Patrick stared after her as she stalked down the hallway to her bedroom and slammed the door. Liz was a damn good liar. The innocent face, the diminutive stature, the aura of earnest justice seeker that surrounded her like a heavenly glow. But Patrick was a good liar, too. That’s how he’d learned to recognize another.
Everything Liz had just said was one big lie. That was the easy part. The hard part was going to be figuring out why.
HALF AN hour later, Patrick walked into Mara’s kitchen just in time to see his niece streak through it, bare-ass naked and soaking wet. She disappeared around a corner, cackling wildly.
“Huh.” He headed to the fridge for a beer.
He twisted off the cap and pushed through the French doors onto the balcony. The dark wrapped around him like a comfortable blanket as he lowered himself into one of the rattan chairs. He sipped the beer and tried not to think for just a minute. He’d been thinking for days now and just wanted to turn it off. Wondering if Liz knew that he knew that Villanueva was in town—alon
g with why the bastard might be playing hard to get—was making him crazy.
The temptation to lay all his cards on the table and let Liz make sense of them was nearly overwhelming, but so far he’d resisted. This was no time to play by the book and Liz didn’t seem to know any other way to play.
Or so he’d thought. Patrick slouched farther into his seat and scowled into the night. What the hell had gotten into Liz tonight?
Evie bolted out onto the balcony, still naked but considerably air-dried, with a piercing shriek. Her father snatched her up, wrestled a nightie on over her head, then dropped her to the ground and backed away, hands aloft like a world-champion calf roper. Evie giggled and bolted back into the house.
Patrick looked at Jonas. “You’re back.”
Jonas grinned at him. “You, too.”
Patrick took a deep pull from the bottle. “Not on purpose, believe me.”
“Mara said she’d asked you to visit.”
Patrick snorted. “You could say that.”
Jonas gave him a friendly thump on the shoulder, the kind that men give one another only after they’ve come to an understanding with their fists. His brother-in-law had fists like cinder blocks, if Patrick remembered correctly.
“Poor bastard,” Jonas said. “Let me get a beer.”
In a few minutes, he was sprawled across the chair beside Patrick’s, long legs stretched toward the railing, beer in hand, while Patrick gave him the shorthand version of the last two weeks.
“FBI gig, huh?” Jonas shook his head. He wasn’t a much bigger fan of law enforcement than Patrick, though his feelings had less to do with a criminal past than growing up as the only Indian kid in the whitest town in Minnesota. “Fuck.”
Patrick smiled into the darkness. Women were wonderful and he loved them, but sometimes it was good to talk to another guy. “Yeah. And add in the sexual thing between me and Liz, and it only gets worse.”
Jonas sipped his beer as Evie clattered through the kitchen behind them, naked again except for her mother’s high heels. “Liz has a problem with it?”
Patrick lifted a shoulder. “Before tonight, I’d have said yes. Big-time.”
“What happened tonight?”
“Hell if I know. Girl’s got a plan, I guess. A plan that turned hell, no into do me now.”
“Interesting.”
“Well, yeah. But it’s not going to happen ’til I know why.”
Jonas’s eyebrows lifted slowly. “You turned her down?”
“Yeah.” Patrick fought the urge to snarl.
Jonas laughed. “Never going to get that offer again,” he said. “Poor bastard.”
“She spent the last two weeks insisting that she’d never sleep with me. Now she gets to hate me when I oblige her?”
“Well, yeah.”
Patrick finished off his beer. “Fuck.”
“Amen, brother.” Jonas finished off his. They looked out into the deepening night in companionable silence. Evie, nightgown on backward, streaked past them and bounced up to catch the top railing of the banister. Patrick rose and plucked her off without conscious thought. They were three stories up, after all, and everybody knew that a kid shouldn’t be monkeying around on a banister railing. He turned toward the open doors, Evie on his hip.
“Mara at work?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Jonas stayed seated, plunked his feet onto the railing and tipped his head back on the chair. “I’m on bedtime duty.”
Patrick glanced down into Evie’s eyes, which gleamed with an unholy amount of energy. He laughed. “Poor bastard,” he said, then turned his niece loose in the kitchen.
PATRICK WOKE the next morning to the insistent trill of his cell phone. He groped for it, flipped it open and squinted at his watch. “Hello?”
Christ, it was 5:30 A.M.
“Good morning, Mr. O’Connor,” a man said. “I understand you’re looking for a little instruction in the art of making money.”
He sat up slowly. “Yeah. Is this the Great and Powerful Oz?”
The man laughed delightedly. “It is. Call this number in three hours if you want a little lesson.” He reeled off a number and Patrick committed it to memory as the line went dead. He stared for a moment, then dialed Liz.
Chapter 16
PATRICK STRODE into the FBI’s Grief Creek Resident Agency later that morning, prepared for an icy reception. He hadn’t turned down many women in his day, but he knew enough not to expect hearts and flowers the next morning.
He found Liz in her cubicle, all starched up and buttoned down, her hair twisted up in a silver clip that left the nape of her neck bare. The urge to put his lips just there was nearly overwhelming and he took a moment to marvel at last night’s unthinkable self-control. How he had managed to refrain from stripping her bare and worshipping at the shrine of her body until dawn, he hadn’t the slightest clue. He must have pissed off some powerful deities this time to deserve such punishment.
She looked up before he had a chance to find his voice and smiled at him.
Smiled. At him.
What the hell?
“You’re here,” she said briskly. “Great. The sound tech wired up the phone in the conference room for us. You can make your call to the Great and Powerful Oz from there. It’ll ID as your cell, and we’re equipped with full recording capabilities.”
Patrick frowned. “Where’s Goose?”
“She couldn’t get away.” Liz rose, tucked a pencil into the twist of her hair and nudged him gently back into the hallway and toward the conference room. “She’ll meet up with us later to review the tapes.”
Patrick followed her into the conference room where he stood next to the chair Liz waved him toward. She was wearing a skirt today rather than her usual pantsuit, and even though the hemline hit a conservative inch or two below her kneecaps, he wondered if it had been an intentional choice—if she was purposely torturing him with the smooth, bare calves and ankles he’d forsaken his chance to touch. He watched helplessly as she rounded the table, slid on a pair of headphones and fiddled with a few dials and switches.
“Okay,” she said, looking up with that impenetrable air of professional collegiality that was really starting to bug him. “Ready when you are.”
“I’m not ready.”
She blinked. “You’re not?”
“No.” He rounded the table, plucked off her headphones and glared down at her. “You’re acting strange.”
She folded her hands primly in her lap. Which bugged him even more, because Liz was a lot of things, but prim wasn’t on the list. “Strange how?”
“Strange like . . .” He twirled a hand in the air, at a loss for the right word. He hadn’t realized how fundamentally his world depended on Liz being sturdy, upright and principled, and it had shaken him, deeply, when she’d suddenly gone rogue. “Like everything is just fine and dandy between us. Like nothing insane happened recently.”
She canted her head, peered at him like a scientist with a fascinating and unpredictable specimen under the microscope. “Is this about last night?”
He sank back against the table, pinched the bridge of his nose. “You have to ask?”
She crossed her legs and he could hear the whisper of silky skin sliding over silky skin. He swallowed, prayed it wasn’t audible. God, she had him so tangled up.
“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “I didn’t realize that the idea of having sex with me would disturb you so much. I shouldn’t have offered.”
He resisted the visions that threatened to swamp his brain. He didn’t want to have this conversation while his mind was full of sweaty, tangled sheets and warm peach skin. “Then why did you?”
She made a small, amused noise. “After the effort you put into seducing me this past week or so, I thought you were interested. My mistake.”
He kept his eyes closed. “I am interested, Liz. You know that.”
He heard her rise, smelled her when she leaned into him, felt his entire body go on red alert when
she spread her hands on the table on either side of his hips. “Are you?” she murmured, her mouth bare inches from his ear. “Are you really?”
“Yes.” He shot to his feet, out of the cage of her arms, and stalked to the opposite end of the room. When he spun to face her, she looked soft, accessible and, God help him, vibrantly touchable. “Christ, Liz, you know I am. Did you really think it was all just a sham to make you uncomfortable?”
“No, of course not,” she said, moving toward him with a predatory gleam in her eyes. “There are certain things a man just can’t fake.” A smile tipped up that full mouth of hers, transformed it into a carnal invitation, and she stopped just shy of touching him. The air between them seemed to vibrate, and Patrick channeled every ounce of his energy into keeping a grip on his self-control.
“So, are we reopening the subject?” she asked.
He stared down at her, at the hint of calculation gleaming in her eyes. “No,” he said finally.
She blew out an irritated breath. “For God’s sake, why not? You survived an orgy with a dozen Russian supermodels, but doing one Midwestern cop freaks you out?”
“Yes. A girl like you starts inviting reformed felons into her bed, it’s a sure sign of the apocalypse.” He smiled at her, in spite of the repressed need still pounding through his system. “And you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the tabloids. I don’t even know a dozen supermodels, Russian or otherwise.”
She gazed at him for a long, suspended moment. “You need to make up your mind, Patrick. Either you want me or you don’t. But don’t kiss me like you’re dying for me, then turn me down when I kiss you back.” She turned away, but he took her elbow before she could stalk off.
“How many times am I going to have to say this?” he asked, not sure if he was asking her or whatever sadistic deity had put him in this situation. “I do want you, and quite desperately. I don’t mind admitting it. But before I take you, I want to know what changed. Because something did. Something important. What was it?”
