Thick as Thieves

by Sandra Brown

  Her hand found it and began a languorous caress.

  And though her stroking caused a fever to spread through him, he continued his exploration of her in the same unrushed manner, venturing to even more seductive terrain that he didn’t want to underappreciate because of haste.

  She purred when he brushed his fingers through the hair between her thighs. They were relaxed and slightly separated. He noticed on the inside of one what he thought at first was a birthmark. Then he realized what it was.

  “Oh, hell. I’m sorry. I didn’t know that kiss was so rough.”

  “It wasn’t rough, it was ardent,” she said softly.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Did or do you hear me complaining?”

  In the deepest, darkest, basest part of his masculine soul, he was glad he had marked her, even if it was temporary. He rubbed the red spot with the pad of his thumb. “Arden?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I’m no poet, so I’ll just say it.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I like you naked and looking well fucked.”

  She laughed. “I like it, too.”

  She put one hand behind her head and lay there, studying him. “On some elemental plane, I think I knew it from the moment I saw you.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That we, this, was bound to happen. When you turned around and pushed the safety goggles up to your forehead, I…It was like a quickening. Here.” She laid her hand on her stomach. “In spite of your being surly and trying to intimidate me.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “You were.”

  He admitted it with a rueful nod.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because my ‘quickening’ took place a little lower than yours.”

  “Here?” Her fingers tightened around him.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed out. “Yeah, there. I’d seen you, yeah, but I wasn’t ready for the stretchy t-shirt and blue jean skirt. I got instantly drive-a-nail hard. Scared the hell out of me.”

  “So your rudeness was a defense mechanism against the sudden attraction?”

  “Not the attraction itself, but the unlikelihood that anything could come of it.”

  “If nothing was to come of it, you decided not even to bother being polite, but to act like a jerk instead.”

  “Something like that, I guess.”

  Pensively, she said, “That makes sense, because it didn’t take me long to recognize in you something I’ve often been cursed with.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Loneliness,” she whispered. “Your macho posturing made me mad. But I also came away thinking that underneath the tough-guy veneer, you were a lonely person, and that possibly your loneliness was self-imposed. I believe my intuition was right.”

  She removed her hand from his cock and placed it on his thigh, just above his knee, and rubbed it tenderly. And somehow that caress was ten times more intimate than the other. She was comforting and consoling him.

  Which God knew he didn’t deserve, and which she wouldn’t be doing if she knew how badly he was deceiving her. He couldn’t allow it. He lifted her hand from his leg and kissed the palm of it.

  She touched his left biceps. “What’s this?”

  He turned his arm so she could see the tattoo better in the dim light. She traced the familiar figure eight with her fingertip. “Why the infinity symbol?”

  Even after she withdrew her finger, he continued to stare at the marking that held such meaning for him. “Whatever we do stays with us forever. We can’t shake it, can’t escape it. It’s eternal, there even after we die.”

  She frowned. “Wait. Aren’t you the one who advised me to acknowledge the past, then to turn my back on it and move on?”

  “I later said that was horseshit.”

  But she wasn’t smiling at his quip. Her expression was serious and inquisitive. “What is it you can’t shake or escape, Ledge?”

  Tell her. Tell her now.

  He looked toward the window where their bourbons remained untouched on the sill. The ice cubes had melted.

  Selfish bastard that he was, he wanted to indulge in a few more minutes of this interlude before shattering her opinion of him.

  The rain continued to come down, but not as hard as before. He said, “I have an idea.”

  “All right.”

  “You don’t know what I have in mind.”

  “Do I have to move?”

  “Not much.”

  He got off the bed and hiked on his jeans but didn’t bother buttoning them up all the way. In short order, he had Arden wrapped in the coverlet and was carrying her through the house and out onto the front porch, kept dry because of the overhang.

  He settled into the rocking chair with her in his lap, his arms encircling her.

  She squirmed a bit to snuggle closer against him. “Did you make this chair?”

  “Few years ago.”

  “Was our sitting in it together like this another of your fantasies?”

  “The only one that didn’t involve fucking.”

  She laughed and laid her head against his chest. Tweaking the hair on his pec, she said, “This is lovely. The sound of the rain on the roof. The scent of it.”

  “Um-huh.”

  After a short stretch of silence, she said, “Ledge? When you needed help tonight, you called Don, not your uncle. Why?” She must have felt him tense, because her fingers became still and she raised her head to look at him. “I know he reared you, but you don’t talk much about him.”

  He leaned his head back against the slats of the chair and began to rock slowly. “My dad was Henry’s brother, older by barely a year. My dad was in the navy, stationed in San Diego. He was about to be deployed to a ship that patrolled the Persian Gulf.

  “I wasn’t even two years old, so I don’t remember any of this, but I’m told that he and my mom went out with a group of friends for one final fling before the men shipped out. They rode home with a guy who shouldn’t have been driving. He plowed them into a bridge abutment. Killed everyone in the car.”

  She returned her head to his chest. “Unlike you, I at least have vivid memories of my mother. Although I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.”

  “I can’t say. My uncle Henry and aunt Brenda came out there to get me and brought me back to Penton, where they were trying to make a go of the bar. Life with them was the first one I remember. They treated me like their own. Maybe because they never had a kid.

  “When I was six or seven, thereabouts, Aunt Brenda got really sick, really fast, and died of stomach cancer three months after her diagnosis. So then, my uncle Henry was stuck with me to raise by himself. But if he resented it, he never once, not ever, showed it.

  “When I got my discharge from the army and came back, he was his same jolly self. Everybody’s friend. But I noticed that he would be in the middle of one of his bad jokes and forget the punch line, and usually it was a joke he’d told a hundred times.”

  “Oh, no,” Arden murmured. Again she lifted her head and looked into his face. “Alzheimer’s?”

  “I finally had to put him in a place in Marshall. For his own safety. It’s a nice facility. He’s well looked after. The staff—”

  She leaned up and stopped his lips with hers. “You don’t have to justify doing what is best for him and for you.”

  “You sound like George.”

  “Who’s that?”

  He told her. “He keeps an eye on Uncle Henry for me.”

  She returned her head to his chest, and they continued to rock for a time before she said, “It’s because of him that you’ve stayed here in Penton, isn’t it? Rather than pursue your ambitions.”

  “He’s the main reason. When I was helpless, he didn’t cut and run. I won’t cut and run on him.”

  “That’s very self-sacrificing. What one would expect of a hero.”

  “I’m no hero, Arden. Listen. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
He tilted her head up to look at him. “Last night when you got mad at me for ending what we’d started on the stairs, you thought it was because of Crystal. Now you know better.”

  “You stopped because of Jacob.”

  He was so focused on what he was going to tell her and how he was going to phrase it that the name didn’t immediately click. “What?”

  “Because of my pregnancy, you assumed there was, or recently had been, a man in my life.”

  He shook his head. “No. Believe me, a phantom ex wouldn’t have stopped me.”

  “Then why did you? Does it involve Rusty Dyle, Foster, my dad, all that?”

  He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yes. It’s about all that.”

  “Then can you please put it on hold?”

  “No.”

  “Just until morning.”

  “We need to talk—”

  “All right. But not tonight. Please? It happened twenty years ago, Ledge. A few more hours aren’t going to matter. This chair is already crowded with the two of us. I don’t want anyone else to join us.”

  She opened the coverlet, placed her leg over his, and straddled his lap. Sitting on his thighs, she undid the bottom button of his fly, reached in, and began to stroke him.

  “God above, Arden.”

  He should stop her but knew he wouldn’t. He wasn’t going to ruin this. To stop now would be as unfair to her as it would be to him. That was a bullshit rationalization, and he damn well knew it, but…

  He shut off his mind and just rode the waves of pleasure. Her small hand squeezed him, pumped him, mastered him. When she milked from him droplets of semen, his surrender was complete. And so was his damnation.

  He lifted her onto him. She lowered herself with agonizing slowness until he was completely sheathed by her snug heat. He kissed her mouth with unforgiving and, as yet, unfulfilled hunger, then released it to rain kisses on her brow, her closed eyelids, her cheekbones.

  When she tilted her head back and exposed her throat, he kissed his way down it and across her breasts, before eventually making his way back up. He placed his parted lips against hers, their breaths soughing in unison.

  “I’ve lied to you, Arden. So many times. Continually.”

  “You’re forgiven,” she sighed, as he began rocking the chair.

  He kept the pace languid, but with each gliding arc, he pushed in a little higher, reaching her where he hadn’t before, and when she said his name on a near sob, he gathered her against him until there was no space between them. Nothing existed except her body and his, his hard and insistent, hers soft and inviting, his inside hers, a perfect coupling.

  The chair rocked slowly; they spun out of control.

  “But tonight I told you the biggest lie of all,” he murmured against her lips.

  As she began to come, she gasped, “Confess.”

  “This fantasy did involve fucking.”

  After a lengthy shower, where hands and mouths were never idle, they returned to the bed and spooned. He put his arm across her and drew her close.

  Rubbing his face in her hair, he said, “When I called you Baby, over and over, I know better. That was my cock talking.” He raised his hand to her lips and pressed them open with his thumb. “Who could think straight with you doing that?”

  “Did you call me Baby?” She caught the pad of his tongue between her teeth and stroked it with her tongue.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I was preoccupied.”

  “Then I apologized for nothing?”

  “No,” she said, her shoulders shaking with silent laughter. She clasped his hand and tucked it with hers between her breasts. “I appreciate your chivalry. You are a hero.”

  His euphoria evaporated. Despair replaced it, pressing in on him from all sides. Against the back of her neck, he whispered fervently, “I’m no hero, Arden.” But she hadn’t heard him. Her breathing had become even and peaceful, her body soft and settled against his.

  Over her shoulder he stared through the darkness at the two full glasses silhouetted against the rain-streaked window.

  Chapter 35

  Arden woke up alone.

  She and Ledge had turned to each other once more during the night for a brief but hotly passionate bout; during it, they hadn’t exchanged a single word. Language would have been redundant.

  Feeling a bit let down because she had wanted to wake up beside him, she got up, showered in the master bathroom, which, in accordance with the man who used it, was large in scale. The materials were natural, masculine, and appealing.

  After dressing, she followed the aroma of coffee into the kitchen, where Ledge was seated at the table, steaming mug at hand, the pages of the investigation reports spread out in front of him. His head was down, fingers pushed up into his hair, his forehead resting in his palm.

  “What are you studying so intently?”

  He raised his head and looked at her. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes drew her toward him. When she was still steps away, he reached for her, pulled her between his legs, wrapped his arms around her, and pressed his face into her middle just below her breasts. Her fingers replaced his in the thick tangle of his hair. She bent her head over his. For a time they just held each other.

  When he released her from the hug, he tipped his head back to look into her face. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  “How was your night?”

  She shrugged, faked a yawned. “It was okay, I guess.”

  He smiled, but there was a restraint in his demeanor that she’d sensed the moment she’d entered the room.

  “Coffee’s still fresh,” he said.

  “I believe I’ll have some. You want more?”

  “More of you, yes.”

  Her tummy levitated like an untethered balloon.

  But his sexy, gravelly tone, his suggestive squint, were short-lived. The reserve, which she couldn’t account for, reappeared. “I don’t know how you take your coffee,” he said. “I’ve got real sugar and milk.”

  “That will do.”

  “Want breakfast?”

  “Not just yet.”

  She went over to the counter and filled the coffee mug he had set out for her, then carried it to the fridge and poured a dollop of milk straight from the carton.

  As she turned around, she saw through the wide window a car pulling in behind Ledge’s pickup. Instantly she recognized the whir of the motor. She set her full mug of coffee on the counter. “Ledge?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Rusty’s here.”

  He raised his head from the material he’d gone back to reading. “What?”

  She nodded toward the window as she walked toward it. Ledge left the table and joined her there. At some point during the night, the rain had stopped, but it had left puddles in the yard. Rusty navigated around them as he made his way to the back door.

  She and Ledge looked at each other with wariness, then he went to the door and had it pulled open before Rusty could knock. Arden moved up beside Ledge. It surprised her that he didn’t issue Rusty a challenge, but she supposed his hostile and territorial bearing spoke for him.

  Rusty gave them a smirking grin. “Morning, you two.”

  “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

  “I want to be invited in, Ledge. Coffee smells good.” Another smirk. “Unless I’m interrupting.”

  Ledge didn’t extend any kind of invitation, just stood there, as impassable as a concrete wall.

  “Ah, well,” Rusty sighed. “Can’t say as I’m surprised by your lack of manners. No one expects you to have any. Breeding tells, you know.”

  “Go. Away.” Ledge made the two words sound all the more menacing by how softly he spoke them. “Don’t ever come to my house again.”

  Rusty seemed unfazed. “What mischief are you up to out here, Ledge, that you would rather the district attorney not know about? I mean, besides screwing her.” He hitched his chin toward Arden.


  She took a lunging step toward him, but Ledge put out a hand to hold her back. “Don’t buy into it.”

  “You’re despicable,” she said to Rusty.

  “Me? I’m despicable? I’m not the guy cheating on his girlfriend. Speaking of whom, Crystal told me that both of y’all have been asking her all sorts of interesting questions about times gone by.”

  Arden felt Ledge tense. “When did you talk to Crystal?”

  “Did I fail to mention that? If I’d been invited in for coffee, I would’ve—”

  “When did you talk to Crystal?”

  “I dropped by on her this morning before coming here.” He leaned toward Ledge and said in an undertone, “One guy to another, just so you’re braced for it, she suspects…” He wagged his index finger between Ledge and Arden.

  “You’re lying,” Ledge said. “If you did see Crystal this morning, she didn’t divulge anything to you.”

  “No? Then maybe it wasn’t her who told me.” He scratched his temple. “But I could have sworn—”

  Ledge reached for the door and went to slam it in Rusty’s face, but Rusty stuck out his foot and caught it with the steel toe of his cowboy boot. He pushed the door back open with such impetus, it banged against the kitchen wall.

  Ledge bristled. The two faced off across the threshold, silently daring each other to make the first move. Arden held her breath.

  Rusty was the first to capitulate. He relaxed his stance. “The point is,” he said, stressing the words, “it’s been brought to my attention that you two have grown real curious about the Welch’s store burglary and all the bizarre goings-on that took place afterward.

  “Now, as the top law officer of the county, I just wondered how come y’all are showing such avid interest. Especially you,” he said, looking directly at Ledge. “Makes me question the smarts you’re reputed to have. Trips to the courthouse, getting copies of investigation reports, all that. It’s peculiar behavior, to say the least. Especially when you obviously have other, more pleasurable pastimes you could be engaging in.”

  Neither of them said anything.