Joel arched one red brow and took a sip of his drink. “Not bad. The manager conceals the fact that more and more merchandise is being shipped without being paid for and continues to pocket the cash the so-called customer is getting for the goods. Over a period of time, that would put one hell of a drain on any firm’s cash flow.”
Shelley grinned at him disparagingly. “You don’t have to sound so admiring!”
“Never let it be said I can’t appreciate a well-constructed—”
“Game?” she supplied before he could finish the sentence.
“Or a well-constructed game player,” he retorted easily, his eyes roving blatantly over her rounded figure.
In spite of herself, Shelley blushed, covering the temporary loss of composure with a long sip of her cool drink. “In any event, it’s over now.”
“Justice prevails?”
“Almost.” She grimaced. “Unfortunately, at about the time my staff and I were starting to get it all put together, the manager in question realized the good times were over. When I went in to Dean with the facts, it was discovered that the man behind the scheme had reported sick for the day. By the time they tracked him down, he was on a plane to Mexico. We might be able to get the supposed ‘customer’ who was in charge of disposing of the goods, but it’s doubtful. And we’ll probably never learn who he hired to make the phone call to me. White-collar crime is difficult to prosecute. The best way of handling it is to stop it at the source by having good security measures in place such as regular audits.”
“Sounds like the accounting department at Ackerly Manufacturing needs a few internal procedural changes, too,” Joel drawled.
Shelley nodded in agreement “Lots of work at Ackerly for a good consulting accountant,” she said pleasantly.
“Lots of work at Cassidy & Co., too. You’re going to be busy, Shelley.”
“I certainly will,” she said with a note of satisfaction. She glanced down at the drink in her hand. “I shall miss all the pampering after a hard day’s work, though. I assume this luxury of having my drink and my dinner ready when I get home won’t go on forever?”
He looked at her, but there was no teasing laughter in his blue eyes as she had expected. Some other emotion flickered there, an emotion that made Shelley tighten her fingers around the glass in her hand.
“I figure we can alternate,” Joel said slowly. “Some nights you can have the drinks ready, and some nights I’ll have them ready. And some nights we’ll fix them together.” He was holding her gaze in the bonds of his own, saying something much more important with his eyes than with his words. “That way the luxury could go on forever.”
“Joel—” she began tightly.
“Have you enjoyed having a husband for the past couple of days, Shelley?” he went on whimsically. “Think you could get used to the idea?”
“Joel Cassidy, this is one game I won’t play with you,” Shelley whispered throatily as she searched his face for the truth. “If you’re asking me to marry you, then you can damn well do it properly!”
“I am trying to do it properly,” he told her thickly. “It’s just that I haven’t had much practice.”
“Oh, Joel,” she said, her eyes filling with love as she shakily set down her glass. “Of course I’ll marry you. I’d live with you, I’d marry you, I’d run away with you, I’d do anything for you. Don’t you realize that?”
“Shelley!”
He was on his feet, pulling her up beside him and burying his face in the hair behind her ear as he held her fiercely.
“You don’t have to marry me, Joel. You know that,” she murmured unevenly into his shoulder as she wrapped her arms around his waist and clung. “I don’t have a particularly good track record where marriage is concerned and I—”
“Just tell me that you love me,” he ordered huskily, “and the hell with the rest”
“I love you,” she replied obediently. “I love you more than I thought I would ever love any man or any thing.”
He pulled back a short distance to cradle her face between rough palms. His blue eyes burned down at her. “Shelley, I love you. I’ve never felt like this with anyone else. I was going to wait until I had you safely living under my roof, and then I was going to systematically seduce you until you fell in love with me before I asked you to marry me. But tonight, after the past couple of days of worrying about you, looking after you, it just slipped out I couldn’t wait any longer to ask you. I had to know.”
“Had to know what?” she mumbled into his shirt, her heart singing, her tiredness evaporating.
“That when you moved in with me, you really would belong to me. Completely. With you I find myself wanting all the traditional commitments, all the words, all the vows. I’m a greedy man, sweetheart.”
“And you like to win,” she added complacently.
“With the stakes this high, I didn’t dare lose,” he confessed grimly.
“Were you ever in any doubt?” she teased.
“I knew I could make you want me,” he said honestly. “And I knew I understood how your mind worked. I thought that would give me an edge. But love is something that isn’t easily manipulated. It either exists or it doesn’t, and I could only hope it would be there when I went after it”
“It’s there. I knew it was there when I realized I had no choice but to trust you. It was all bound up together in one package. I could have stood in that bar the other night and yelled that I loved you as easily as I yelled that I trusted you. Same thing.”
“Sweetheart!” He gathered her close, and for a long moment they simply stood there, luxuriating in the wonder of the moment
Then Shelley’s nose twitched. “Joel?”
“Ummm?”
“Is something burning?”
He stiffened. “Oh, my God! Dinner!”
Instantly, she was free as he raced for the kitchen.
Afterward, Shelley could not have said exactly what she ate, nor did she notice whether the food was slightly singed. The one thing she did remember was the glittering love in the eyes of the man who sat across from her. When dinner was over, they cleared the table together and walked into the living room.
“I have a wedding gift for you.” Joel grinned, dropping her hand to move toward the puzzle table. He picked up the box that she had vaguely noticed and dismissed earlier. “Here, open it”
She unwrapped the package with smiling eyes, knowing what it was from the way it rattled. “You seem determined to seduce me with puzzles and games, Joel.” She glanced down at the new jigsaw puzzle with pleasure and then back up at him. “Thank you. When ifs finished, we’ll have it framed!” Standing on tiptoe, she brushed her lips lightly against his.
He caught her around the waist and held her in place when she would have stepped back. Obedient to the darkening fire in his eyes, Shelley wound her arms around his neck.
“Shelley, if you hadn’t found out who was really behind that bribe attempt and if you hadn’t discovered what was going on at Ackerly—” he began slowly.
“I would still have been sure of you,” she told him firmly. “After all, as you keep telling me, we’ve got a lot in common. We understand each other. Bribery wouldn’t be your style at all.”
“And seduction?” he prompted.
She shook her head. “You’re much too honest in bed for that to be an effective technique for you to use!”
He smiled quizzically. “Honest in bed? I like that. That’s the way I found you, too. Honest. You gave yourself completely, and I was sure you couldn’t be doing that and trying to use me at the same time.” He bent and lifted her into his arms.
“Aren’t we going to start the new puzzle?” she murmured, threading her fingers through the flame of his hair.
“We’re going to work on one we’ve already started. I figure it’s going to take the rest of our lives to get it put together properly. Just when I think we’ve got it completed, it explodes in my hands, you see.”
“Ah, an e
xploding puzzle.” She nodded wisely. “Tricky.”
“Very. But infinitely interesting,” he whispered as he carried her into the bedroom and set her down on her feet beside the bed. “Infinitely intriguing,” he added, finding her mouth with his own as his hands went to the fastenings of her clothes.
They undressed each other in loving silence, letting the clothing fall unheeded to the floor at their feet Then they stood in the shadowy room and touched each other with a sense of wonder and joy that Shelley knew would return to them again and again down through the years. She felt her full breasts grow taut beneath Joel’s fingers, knew the planes of his chest as she ran her fingertips down to his waist.
When he picked her up again and settled her in the middle of the turned-back bed, Shelley sighed with the longing and the need he aroused in her. For a moment, he stood looking down at her as if assuring himself that she was for real, and then, with a muffled exclamation, Joel lowered himself to the bed beside her, pulling her into his arms with barely controlled need.
“Shelley, my sweet love.”
His hands moved over her, gently rasping the tips of her breasts, drawing teasing circles on her stomach, finding the sensitive area at the base of her spine.
When she arched lovingly against him, he buried his lips in her throat “Touch me, my love,” he begged.
She let her fingertips find the line of his rib cage and then the muscular planes of his hips. Slowly, she stroked the strong thighs, moaning softly when his own hands clenched abruptly into her hips in reaction.
“Oh, God, Shelley!”
He parted her legs with his hand and feathered the inside of her thigh. Higher and higher he traced the enticing patterns until she was stirring with the deepest of longings. As his fingers found the burning heart of her, his teeth gently caught hold of a nipple, savaging it with unbelievable care until it throbbed.
“Joel!”
“You take my breath away,” he whispered.
They stoked the flames in each other higher and higher, exploring every intimate place, claiming each sensual frontier. Shelley’s breath came in tiny moans of love and need, and her body arched again and again at his touch.
At last he came to her in a surging rush of power and desire that brought a gasping cry from Shelley’s lips. Her body accepted the loving invasion as perfectly as if he were the other half of a human puzzle. Together they made a wondrously complete being.
The pattern of their passion built into a raging crescendo, sweeping all before it Shelley’s nails bit deeply into the hard contour of Joel’s shoulders, and he growled an answering response, then nipped at the soft skin above her breast until she thought she would lose her senses. The excitement of their union was a captivating, thrilling thing that summoned all her senses toward the inevitable explosion of delight
“Oh, Joel, yes! Yes!”
He caught her hips more tightly against his own, and she wrapped her legs around his waist as he filled her unbearably full. Her passion fired his own, and Shelley knew a primitive delight in being able to arouse him so violently, in having him take her so completely.
At last, the rippling pleasure began, unwinding with sizzling suddenness from deep inside her. Joel reacted to the tiny shivers of her body with a husky gasp, and then he, too, succumbed. Together they clung during the ensuing explosion, holding fast to each other as the universe stretched taut around them and then collapsed inward.
“When,” Joel demanded a long time later, “are you going to marry me?”
Shelley curled against him, her eyes soft and glowing. “When would you like me to marry you?”
“As soon as it’s legally possible,” he stated categorically.
“A man of decision,” she said admiringly.
He shook his head once. “Just a man who likes to get all the loose ends of a business deal sewn up completely.”
“All the pieces of the puzzle put together?” she clarified indulgently.
“Exactly.” He grinned with satisfaction. “How many times does a man have an opportunity to marry his accountant?”
“I wouldn’t know, but it does sound like a good business practice. Think of the unparalleled possibilities for keeping track of your finances!”
“Ummm. In great detail,” he agreed. “Speaking of which, there’s a hundred thousand dollars of my money for which I’m still holding you responsible.”
“I was going to mention that a bit later.”
“Uh huh.” His eyes gleamed suspiciously through the auburn lashes. “When I was feeling suitably accommodating?”
“Something like that. How would you feel about letting Ackerly sell that land to the California group and paying you off out of the proceeds? With interest, of course.”
“Don’t you know I’m a sucker for a fast little hustler like yourself?” He sighed. “You could talk me into anything. The Brooklyn Bridge, swampland in Florida—”
“Joel,” she said very seriously. “I don’t want to fast-talk you into this. If you don’t like the deal, I’ll work out something else with Ackerly. Now that we’ve plugged the leak, we can get things back on the right track without having to sell that land.”
“I don’t care what you do.” He chuckled. “Just so I get what’s coming to me. A hundred thousand dollars plus interest plus you will suit me fine, sweetheart!”
“Plus me?” she repeated, her eyes laughing up at him.
“I,” he declared blandly, “am considered a very shrewd bargainer.”
“I understand,” she murmured, lifting a fingertip to toy with the curling hair on his chest. “A real hustler.”
“Two of a kind, aren’t we?” he drawled, turning on his side with sudden intention and leaning forward to lass the peak of her breast.
“Yes.”
He lifted his head. “You agree? Finally?”
“Yes.” She smiled up at him with love and understanding. “I won’t say I like the word itself, but I suppose it’s the truth.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the word,” he told her firmly. “Being a pair of hustlers will assure us of two very important things in our old age.”
“What important things?” she teased as he lazily trailed a palm down to her thigh.
“We shall be rich, for one thing,” he said against the skin of her stomach.
“And for another?”
“We shall understand each other. Add those things to the indisputable fact that we love each other and we’ll make out like bandits!”
“I’m inclined to agree.” She drew in her breath as he nibbled deliciously at her thigh. “Joel, I do love you.”
“I know. I love you.”
“I know. Now I know. You might hustle me, but you’d never lie to me, would you?”
“No.” Then he chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded, stirring languidly beneath his increasingly intense touch.
“I was thinking about the truth in the old saying that there are three people in the world to whom a smart man never lies: his doctor, his lawyer and—”
“And his accountant,” Shelley finished on a note of laughter.
“I’m a smart man.”
“I’ve never doubted it. Darling, what are you doing?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“But we just did! I mean, so soon? Again?”
“Trust me,” he whispered, covering her mouth with his own.
Shelley did.
The end.
Green Fire Page 16
