by Linda Howard
His eyes narrowed. “Are you all right?” He reached her in two long strides, his arm sliding around her waist and pulling her into the support of his body.
“Yes,” she said, not thinking about it, and slipped her hand around the back of his neck.
He didn’t hesitate, didn’t give her time to think about it. She wasn’t certain she was extending an invitation, but he accepted it before she could decide. This time there was no careful restraint; he set his mouth over hers with open hunger, a hunger so intense and greedy that it stunned her. He caught her chin with his free hand and held her, then moved his tongue deep inside her mouth, touching her own tongue in blatant demand. She sagged against him, both frightened and tempted, and he gathered her in against his hard frame. His erection pushed against her belly. She had never been wanted before like that, so swiftly and violently. She had no experience of men like Dane Hollister, or of how he could make her feel.
But contact with that potent body was suddenly all she wanted. She put both arms around his neck, moving against him, trying to get closer. He was bruising her with the force of his kisses, and she wanted more. Her loins were tight and achingly empty, growing moist with yearning.
He put his hand on her breast, and her breath locked in her throat. His thumb rubbed over and around her nipple; at first it was a curious sensation, like a slight pricking of pins, then it suddenly intensified and pure sensation zinged from the nipple to her loins. She moaned aloud, frightened by the way her own body had so swiftly gone beyond her control.
Dane lifted his head. There was a hard, predatory expression on his face, the faint cruelty of arousal, and his lips were wet from their kisses. His hand remained on her breast, with only the very thin cotton of the robe between them. His breath was coming too fast, and she could feel the hard pounding of his heart against her. “Bed, or pizza?” he asked. His voice was so guttural, she could barely hear him. “If it’s pizza, you’d better say so now.”
She wanted to say “bed,” she wanted it so much. She had never felt desire before, and the lure of it was almost irresistible. She wanted to forget the reason he was there, the murders she had seen, and simply give herself over to the physical. She had never been able to do that before, and maybe couldn’t now, but for the first time it seemed possible.
“P-Pizza,” she managed, and closed her eyes as she fought for control. Sick dismay filled her at her own cowardice.
She could feel him bracing himself, and he took a deep breath. “Pizza it is, then.” Slowly he released her and stepped back. A huge, obvious ridge in his pants told her how difficult it had been for him to stop. Most men wouldn’t even have made the offer.
He gave her a wry, crooked smile that lit his rough features. “I guess I was going too fast for you, honey. I’m sorry. It’s just that I have a hair trigger where you’re concerned, and I’m not talking about firearms.”
Marlie stared at him, a lump in her throat and a huge knot in her chest. She felt dizzy with shock and realization. Oh, God. She had been attracted to him from the first, had recognized it and fought it, but with that smile she slipped helplessly over the edge. She had loved, but she had never been in love before, and the power of it made her actually feel faint. Swaying, she put out her hand in search of support, and he was there, solid and vital and so hot that she almost melted. His arm was around her, and her head lay against his chest.
“Shhh, it’s okay,” he crooned. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m sorry.”
“No,” she managed to croak, alarmed that he thought he had reminded her of Gleen. He hadn’t; she had been expecting it, but it simply hadn’t happened. She had always assumed that sexual fear would be a constant in her life, and now that it hadn’t materialized, she felt oddly adrift and off balance. “It isn’t you. I was just dizzy for a minute.” Somehow she formed a smile, and it was a real one for all its shakiness. “Maybe your kisses are more potent than you thought.”
“You think so?” His voice rumbled under her ear. “We’ll have to experiment, won’t we? After the pizza.”
He walked her into the living room and guided her to the couch. “Just sit; I’ll get the drinks. Do you want a plate?”
“Well … yes. Of course.”
He chuckled. “It must be a woman thing.”
“I prefer a napkin, too,” she said politely. “As opposed to licking my fingers.”
He winked at her. “I’ll be glad to lick your fingers.”
She shivered in response and sat, dazed and quiescent, while he puttered around in the kitchen. He seemed to know his way around in her house. How had this happened? She was bewildered by the speed and force of it. In less than twentyfour hours he had taken over; he had spent the night with her, apparently moved in with her, and with a grin made her fall in love with him. He was a one-man SWAT team, overwhelming her defenses without effort.
He was back in a few minutes with the iced soft drinks, a plate and fork for her, and a couple of napkins. He sat beside her on the sofa, turned on the television to a sports channel, and gave a grunt of satisfaction when a baseball game filled the screen. He served her a slice of pizza, got one for himself, and settled back with obvious enjoyment. Marlie blinked at him. This was what she’d gotten herself into? She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end she simply concentrated on the pizza, sitting curled beside him on the sofa, bemused that she was so content to just be close to him and watch his face as he watched the game.
Sometimes his size overwhelmed her and sometimes she was comforted by it, but this was the first time she had had the opportunity to simply sit and study him. He was definitely a big man, even bigger than she had thought, at least six two and over two hundred pounds. The feet parked on her coffee table had to be size twelves, or larger. His shoulders were so wide, he took up almost half the couch; his arms were thick and hard, sinewy with ropy layers of muscle. His chest, she knew, was rock-hard, and so was his abdomen. His long legs, stretched out before him, looked like tree trunks.
His hair was darker than hers, almost black. She eyed the blade of a nose and the brutally carved cheekbones, and wondered if there was any American Indian in his heritage. He had a heavy beard; evidently he had shaved that morning, since there was a fresh-looking nick, but already the black stubble had darkened his jaw.
He leaned forward to get another slice of pizza, and her gaze fell on his hands. Like everything else about him, they were big, easily twice the size of her own. But they weren’t thick hams; though powerful, they were lean and well shaped, with short, clean nails. She felt safe with those hands on her; not safe from him, but from everything else. She didn’t want to be safe from him. She had lost her heart about fifteen minutes ago, and she was still reeling from the shock of it.
He was a cop, a man who made his living in violence. He didn’t commit the violence, as a rule, but he had to clean up after it, he was constantly surrounded by it. Close by his right hand was a big automatic pistol. At some point during the day she had become aware of it, and now she realized that it was never far from his side. A shoulder holster was slung across the back of the couch, beside him.
There was a scar across the back of his right hand. She caught a glimpse of it when he reached for a third slice of pizza, and recognition congealed in her. “That scar on your hand,” she said. “How did you get it? It looks like a knife wound.”
He turned his hand to look at it, then shrugged and gave his attention back to the television. “It is. A close encounter of the punk kind, when I was still working patrol.”
“It looks bad.”
“It wasn’t any fun, but it wasn’t serious. It was a shallow cut, didn’t slice through any tendons. A few stitches and I was as good as new.”
“Gleen cut me,” she said. She didn’t know why she said it; she hadn’t meant to.
His head snapped around, all affability gone as if it had never been, and the expression in those hazel eyes was scary. “What?” he asked softly, putting down the
slice of pizza. His thumb moved on the remote control, and the television screen went blank. “The professor didn’t say anything about that.”
She set the plate aside and drew her knees tighter to her chest. “They weren’t serious cuts, just little slices. He was playing with me, trying to break me down with pain and fear. He got off on that; it was what he needed. And he wasn’t trying to kill me, at least not then. He wanted to keep me alive so he could play with me. He would have killed me later, of course, if the sheriff hadn’t gotten there.”
“Let me see.” The words were a soft growl and he was already reaching for her, uncurling her, his hands opening the robe. Marlie struggled briefly for control of the robe, but then he had it open, spreading it wide as he looked down at her, naked except for thin, brief panties.
The scars, six years old, weren’t disfiguring. They would, given time, probably fade completely. She had never fretted about them, because they were so unimportant compared to everything else, and she had never been vain anyway. They were just small, silvery lines, five of them: one on the inner curve of her right breast, the rest on her abdomen. There would have been more, but Gleen had swiftly lost control when the gambit hadn’t worked, degenerating to the crude force of his fists to elicit the response he had wanted.
She quivered, a hot blush staining her cheeks as Dane slowly examined her. She was acutely aware of her bareness, in a way she never had been before. His mouth was a grim line as he traced the line on her breast with his fingertip, the touch as light as a breath. Her nipple tightened, though he wasn’t even touching it. She heard her own ragged breathing as he slowly touched every scar. He was shaking, too, and suddenly she realized that it was with pure fury, at a man forever beyond his reach.
She put her hand on his hair, threading her fingers into the warm thickness of it. “They aren’t important,” she said, forgetting her embarrassment. “Of everything that he did, those little cuts amounted to the least.”
“It isn’t the cuts.” His voice was thick with rage as he pulled her into his arms, cradling her head against his shoulder. “It’s knowing what you went through, how terrified you were. You didn’t know that he wasn’t going to kill you.”
“No, I expected to die. In some ways, that would have been easier.”
12
SOMEHOW SHE WAS BEING HELD ON HIS LAP, HER ROBE STILL open and his hand inside it, but instead of threatened, Marlie felt utterly safe, his warmth and strength surrounding her like a citadel. It was a delicious sensation, one she had never been able to enjoy before. She wanted to sink into him, revel in this new freedom, for that’s what it was, an entirely new vista opened up to her. But Dane wanted information, chapter and verse, and Detective Hollister was very good at getting his way. She could have resisted bullying, but not the waiting silence in which he held himself, a silence in which she could feel his tension. The tension wouldn’t ease until he knew, and so she told him, the ugly details, the guilt that she had held inside for years.
Her head was lying on his shoulder, her face turned in to the muscled wall of his chest. Somehow it was easier that way, as if she could neither see nor be seen.
“He had knocked me out,” she began. “When I came to I was naked, lying flat on my back on the floor, with my hands tied to some kind of pipe, maybe an old radiator. Gleen was naked, too, sitting astride my hips with the knife in his hand, smiling and waiting for me to wake up. Dusty was tied to a cot about five feet away, watching the whole thing. He was such a pretty little boy.” Her voice was soft and distant as she remembered. “Auburn curls all over his head, and big, round blue eyes. He was so scared. He cried the whole time.”
Dane looked down at his big hand lying on her belly, almost completely spanning her. The thought of Gleen seeing her like this, and using a knife on this slender, womanly soft body, was so obscene that he barely stifled the growl that began rumbling up from his chest. She seemed to have forgotten that she was all but naked now, her mind lost in the past, but Dane was very aware of it. Even in his rage, he looked at those soft, round breasts with their tender pink nipples, and felt the desire burning low in his belly. He controlled it, forcing it aside so he could hold her, and listen to her. Had anyone ever held her, given her comfort? He thought not, and that added to his anger.
“I don’t know why I did it,” she continued, her head lying trustingly in the hollow of his shoulder. “But something in me refused—I couldn’t give in to him. I would rather have died than give him what he wanted. He wanted me to beg, but I wouldn’t. He wanted me to be afraid, and I was, but I didn’t let him see it. I laughed at him. Oh God, I laughed. He cut me, and I yelled at him that he was a pitiful excuse for a man. He pulled my legs apart and tried to put it in me.” She hesitated uncomfortably. “You know—it, not the knife.”
“I know what ‘it’ is,” he growled.
She buried her face deeper into the curve of his neck. “He couldn’t, and I laughed at him. I made fun of him, I told him what a miserable little worm he had, and what a miserable little worm he was. He was wild with it, I could feel how out of control he was, all that hate and fury pouring out, but I just kept pushing. I could feel Dusty, too, so terrified, reaching out for me, begging me not to let the bad man hurt him again.
“So I kept laughing at Gleen, and kicking at him as much as I could. Somehow I managed to kick him between the legs, not really hard because my foot slipped off his thigh, but he … lost it. It was like he exploded, somehow. One second he was on me and the next he was on Dusty, and Dusty was screaming. I still hear him scream. I could feel him, the absolute terror, the agony. It was like a black wave, all over me, all through my brain, and I was screaming too. I screamed and screamed and screamed. Blood was everywhere …” She paused, and after an interminable silence that lasted only a few seconds, said simply, “I don’t remember anything else. Dusty died, and I died with him.”
Dane knew what had happened after that; the professor had told him. Her screams had pinpointed Gleen’s location to the sheriff and his men, and they had killed Gleen before he could turn his murderous fury on Marlie. But they hadn’t been in time to save Dusty, and in a way they hadn’t been in time for Marlie either. As linked to Dusty as she had been, his death had been her death, too, and it was a miracle she had survived the shock.
He smoothed her hair behind her ear, and stroked her cheek. “But you came back,” he said with controlled ferocity.
“Eventually. It was a long time before I felt anything, any kind of emotion. Before, I had felt everything, everyone else’s emotions, and after that I couldn’t even feel my own. I didn’t have any.”
“You healed, Marlie. It’s been a long time, but he didn’t win. He couldn’t break you.”
“He came damn close,” she said. She quietly rested against him for a minute. “If I hadn’t pushed him, if I’d given him what he wanted, probably Dusty would still be alive.”
Dane snorted. “Yeah, it’d be nice if we were all omnipotent.” He wasn’t going to waste his time babying the natural guilt she felt. He jostled her a little, forcing her to look up at him. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said deliberately.
She managed a fragile smile. “So am I. And sometimes that seems like the most callous thing of all, that I’m glad to be alive. I wasn’t thinking beyond the moment when I was laughing at Gleen; the only thing I knew was that I absolutely couldn’t bear for him to rape me. The thought of him being inside me was so revolting that I was willing to push him into killing me, rather than tolerate his touch. Of all the things that gave me nightmares, sex was the worst. I can watch some violence on television or in movies, but I still can’t watch a sex scene. I can’t think of it as love. I remember Gleen’s face, the smell of his breath, the way saliva sprayed when he screamed at me. I remember the feel of him against me, between my legs, and I still want to gag.” She took a deep breath. “Not that sex was ever good for me anyway,” she said honestly.
“How so?” His voice was undemanding, and
his touch almost absent as he stroked her hair back from her temple, but his hazel eyes were intense.
She had never talked about the difficulty she’d had with sex, but somehow, lying cradled in his protective arms, with the rest of the world held at bay, she could. She felt oddly dreamy, caught in a combination of fatigue and the aftermath of stress, as if nothing else were quite real. “It was awful. Mentally, I couldn’t bear it. I had to work so hard to build a shield, to protect myself from everything,” she explained. “It was the only way I could function, and the shield was at best only a partial protection. All my life I wanted to be normal. I wanted to love someone, I wanted a relationship, I wanted what normal people had. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted intimacy to be wonderful, but it wasn’t. Being intimate, physically, just blew away my mental shields. I couldn’t block out anything. The mental interference was enormous; all I could feel was his emotions, blotting out any physical enjoyment I might have felt. It wasn’t very flattering, either.” Her mouth quirked. “He wasn’t overcome by fondness for me; all he wanted was sex. And he was feeling proud of himself for daring to have sex with a weirdo psychic.”
“The son of a bitch,” Dane said softly.
She lifted one shoulder in a small shrug. “I was weird. I still am.”
“Hell, no wonder you’re skittish about sex. All you’ve ever seen is the ugly side of it; you’ve never had any romantic illusions, have you? You know about scoring, and about rape. You must think men are scum.”
“No,” she denied. “When you know what other people are feeling, the way I did, you know that couldn’t be so. There are selfish, mean-spirited women just like there are nasty men. But when it came to sex, I couldn’t close my mind and just feel. It wouldn’t have been any different if I’d been madly in love with a wonderful guy who loved me just as much; I couldn’t have enjoyed sex with all that mental static going on.
