by Stacy Gail
A fiery curse blistered out of him a scant moment before he turned, grabbed her silk-covered hips and pulled her blatantly to the stiffened thrust of his manhood. “You tell me. Do I feel disgusted to you, Sara?”
Again, her mind blanked out. “You’re, uh... Wow.”
“Lady, wow is what I want to say when you ask something that stupid.” And with a groan that sounded as tortured as if he were in the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, Gideon’s mouth captured hers.
The sense of unmitigated completeness sang through Sara. She didn’t question it, because there was nothing to wonder at when his kiss was as right and natural as the sun rising in the east. The uncertainty that had plagued her all morning drained away under the burgeoning hunger she could feel in him, not just in the undeniable thrust of his iron-hard erection, but also in the edgy tension thrumming through the body he pressed against her. It was both amazing and humbling, this overwhelming need that she’d somehow managed to inspire. Somehow, she had to make sure he never regretted taking this chance.
The fusion of his lips against hers was a hot welding of two halves into a whole. His tongue danced with hers with such open eroticism it was as though he was on a quest to make the kiss an act of sex itself. With each alluring stroke of his tongue, her excitement grew until she forgot the need to breathe, and the thunderous beat of her heart rocked them both. His pulse echoed hers, wild and racing with the molten rush of blood. With only her sense of touch to guide her, she found the edge of his T-shirt and pulled it up and over his head, desperate to eliminate even that thin barrier.
His torso was nothing short of a living masterpiece, lean and elegantly sculpted with sinew and bone. His shoulders were broad and sprinkled with a dusting of freckles that enchanted her. The sweep of his defined clavicles were so graceful in their symmetry it filled her with a ravenous need to taste him there. His chest tapered down to a waist made that much more sigh-worthy thanks to the muscle-padded rib cage any jarhead would have been proud to have. His pectorals were a well-defined playground for her to explore, and she couldn’t resist the flat male discs of his nipples. Her mouth found his once more as she slid her greedy palms up to chafe them, and at her touch they stiffened like the rock-hard staff rubbing against her pelvis.
A low moan of pleasure rumbled deep in his chest. “Do that again, and I’ll show you what else we can do on that table.”
A pulse of urgent, needy heat bloomed deep in the dampening cleft of her thighs. “That sounds good.”
“Not to me. This time we do it right.” With one last hard kiss, Gideon took her by the hand and headed for the stairs.
“Do it right?” Hand in hand they entered her bedroom, with Gideon absently kicking the door shut even as he reached for her once more. “I’m no expert, but I thought we did it right the last time.”
“Trust me, I can do better.” He sifted his fingers through her hair as if fascinated by the feel of it. “That was your first time, wasn’t it, Sara? Your first time was a hit-and-run job with me up against that garage wall, am I right?”
“Who cares where it was? It felt...right.” And the sun is a bit warm. Just call me Captain Obvious.
“It’s always going to be right when it’s you and me.” He kept his eyes open as he kissed her again, and a big hand dropped to pull on the robe’s sash. A whisper of fabric was the only sound as the robe fell at her feet, and for a moment his blazing-hot gaze drank her in as if he wanted to imprint this moment on his memory forever. Then he moved, his mouth claiming hers in an invasive kiss while his hands slid up to palm the rounded globes of her pink-tipped breasts. A flush of heat rushed like invisible wildfire along her skin, and everywhere he touched, her nerves tingled as if branded. She arched, stretching so that she could wallow in the sensual sensation of her torso fusing against the hard nakedness of his.
That single motion of innocently hungry friction sparked off a ferocious reaction in him. With one sweeping move that made her gasp out loud, he picked her up and laid her down on the unmade bed like a conquering barbarian eager to claim his spoils. A fluttery laugh escaped her, but it quickly evolved into a breathless moan as his mouth plundered the curve of her neck, his tongue swirling patterns over her heated flesh as if he couldn’t get enough of the taste of her. Her name threaded through every breath he took, as if it were the one word that stitched his world together. The heavy, masculine weight of him was a fantasy she had never dared to dream, and it was the most natural thing in the world to settle him into the cradle of her thighs.
“Gideon.” She buried her mouth in his dark blond hair while her restless fingers snagged on the obstacle that was the waistband of his jeans. “You’re overdressed.”
A huff of laughter feathered across her chest as he worked his way down. “Be thankful for that. Otherwise I would already be pumping into you like a madman.”
“Why should I be thankful for...” Sara lost the thread of the conversation when the greedy suction of his mouth closed over a straining nipple. Her back arched off the bed even as slick heat surged between her legs, and she rubbed against the wall of his chest in a wordless demand for more voluptuous pleasure.
Gideon answered her demand with a sweeping caress down her belly to the soft triangle of curls between her thighs. Her eyes widened, then squeezed shut as he touched her in a way he never had before. Her feminine flesh swelled and throbbed, verging on the sweetest pain of hyper sensation.
“Wait.” Shooting sensation overwhelmed her, a glimpse of purest pleasure within its depths. “Gideon—”
“Trust me.” His mouth came back to hers to both soothe and silence, and he looked down into her eyes with a hot smile as he started up a relentless rhythm against her most sensitive point. In an instant her world rocked with his masterful caress, and a floodgate of dizzying rapture burst within her so completely she dissolved into mindlessness. “See? I knew you’d like this.”
That was like saying water was a little damp. She would have told him as much but speech was now an impossibility as an almost tangible bliss caught her in its velvet clutches. Her lower belly spasmed with the rippling pleasure, her hips undulating in helpless urgency as she sought more, more, her legs tangling with his as the wet heat his caresses spawned nearly broke her in two.
A whimper ripped out from between her clenched teeth, and he seemed to take that as some sort of long-awaited signal. He pushed away from her just long enough to pull his wallet from his jeans for a foil packet of protection; then he shed the remainder of his clothing in quick, efficient moves before he returned to her. She reached for him at the same time, her hand closing around the thick, red-hot length of him even as he drew her knees up and spread them wide. A harsh groan of pleasure rumbled out of him, and together they sheathed him in her slick depths.
Shudders moved between them as the echo of their past merged and made peace with the present. Then she shifted her hips, her body already quivering on the precipice of insanity at the sensation of him filling her, and he groaned again as if in surrender. Blindly his mouth found hers, his breath matching hers gasp for gasp as his hips began a slow, smooth rocking motion. Sara met each thrust with her own, a delight of euphoric sensation ebbing and flowing through her, and she never wanted it to end. But the tightening in her innermost core had already begun, a sweetly excruciating madness she wanted to seize all at once just as much as she wanted to prolong it. Small cries ripped out of her as the waves grew, buffeting her in an ever-increasing rhythm even as his hard body began to shake uncontrollably. He cried out her name even as her fingers dug into his shoulders, and he pistoned into her with a fury that released the tension deep in her belly into an explosion of piercing, perfect ecstasy.
Chapter Eleven
Truth be told, taking it easy had never been one of Sara’s strong suits. It wasn’t that she was a bad patient. She never questioned a doctor’s orders, and she certainly didn’t have a chip on her shoulder when it came to proving how tough she was. She just had profound iss
ues with inactivity.
The one thing her system wasn’t able to handle was boredom.
Luckily for her, when it came to wiling away the rest of the morning, Gideon seemed to be flexible on his definition of “taking it easy.” As long as she was in bed, he seemed perfectly content to keep her company. And if that turned out to be more exhausting than restful, at least it wasn’t boring. Even if she was newborn-kitten weak, she still felt fabulous. As far as she was concerned that was all that mattered.
Since she felt so good, she saw no reason why she couldn’t put herself to good use.
Gideon’s breathing was deep and even as Sara secured her robe and headed on noiseless feet down the stairs to where her backup smartphone sat in the office overlooking the postage stamp-sized backyard. The phone she usually carried was now a melted glob of plastic and fused circuitry, a casualty of the fire-bombing at Noah’s. A twinge of guilt over not following Gideon’s instructions passed through her as she unplugged the phone, but she pushed it aside. It simply wasn’t in her programming to relax when there was a job left unfinished. Now that she had her wits about her and the instinct to protect was once again bubbling to the surface, taking it easy was no longer an option.
The number she hit on speed dial was caught on the first ring. “Sara! How are you? Where are you? Are you okay?”
She smiled the moment Macbeth’s voice came across the line. “I’m feeling better, thanks for asking. I’m going to spend the rest of the day at home, but I should be back on the job by tomorrow.”
“Wow, tomorrow, huh? I guess that blows me out of the office pool. I put a ten-spot on you being out for the rest of the week.”
“Oh ye of little faith.”
“Can I talk you into not showing your face until Monday? I’ll cut you in on the action.”
“What you can do is help me out,” she drawled, not bothering to hold back an eye roll. “I feel like I’ve been gone three months instead of three days, so could you get me back up to speed on the Mandeville case in a hundred words or less?”
A loud crunching sounded in her ear, and with it came the image of Macbeth at his horseshoe-shaped computer console, a bag of CheeZee Puffs in his lap. “It’s going to take a lot more than a hundred words to get you filled in on everything. Things have been popping since you did a super-sponge on those Molotov cocktails.”
“Sounds exciting. Give me the deets.”
“First off, the Feds are now an official daily presence at the Mandeville estate. Since our client wouldn’t go into protective custody, they want to be where the action is, so they’ve pretty much set up camp on his doorstep.”
“I bet Dad’s loving that.”
“I’m just glad they weren’t around to see you when you...you know. Did your thing.”
No kidding. “They’re there now, so we’re all going to have to be circumspect in how Lynchpin executes its mission of providing protection for Noah. What about the fire-bombing? Any leads on that?”
“I did some troubleshooting on the Feds’ investigation—”
“Macbeth.”
“No worries, Sara. Come to find out, there was no need to waste my time. In the spirit of cooperation, the very next day they came right out and told us what they’ve dug up.”
Sara frowned. When the Feds climbed down off their high horse to share their toys, it was never a good thing. “Let’s hear it.”
“They found the car Carter marked about a mile away—that old coupe, remember? It had been wiped clean of all fingerprints, and the interior had been vacuumed. Even the headliner and trunk were debris-free.”
That inched her brows up. “How thorough.”
“We’re all duly impressed. With nothing to analyze forensically, the Feds then traced the clunker back to a ninety-seven year-old abuela on the south side, who didn’t even know her car had been stolen. Once they got a translator on-scene and discovered this sweet old lady has been relying on the kindness of her fellow church-goers to get around, the investigators brought the contents of the car to her for identification, more out of routine than anything. That’s when things got interesting.”
When he paused for effect, she sighed. “You do love to tease, don’t you?”
“I don’t get out much, so it’s my only entertainment.”
“Macbeth...”
“Okay, okay. The car’s only contents were found on the passenger seat. It was a shoebox containing another dead dove and—”
“Another tarot card.”
“Sort of. The last Judgment card came from a regular tarot deck. This latest card comes from a special kind of tarot deck, called the angel tarot cards, based upon the more well-known heavenly host. It was still the Judgment card, but this time the angel depicted is a white-robed, six-winged seraph.”
In the silence of the office, the bottom of Sara’s world dropped out. Her pulse pounded in her ears, and her throat went so dry it stuck together when she tried to swallow. “I see.”
Macbeth made more crunching sounds, marking him as a nervous snacker. “You sound remarkably calm.”
Lucky for her, he couldn’t hear her screaming inside. “Does anyone at Lynchpin think this is a random coincidence?”
“In a word—nope.”
That was something, at least. “What’s the FBI’s theory on the cards?”
“They’ve got their best profilers on it. So far their focus seems to be on the whole sitting-in-judgment aspect of the cards. The religious symbols of the white dove and the angelic images feed into their theory that the killer could be part of a lunatic fringe, possibly rooted in a Christian Science-based dogma—a belief that common medical practices such as organ transplantation are the work of the devil.”
She closed her eyes on a rough sigh. “That sounds so plausible even I half believe it.”
“Agent Tuttle has Father Vargas with him every step of the way, and this guy can go on forever about various religions around the world relying upon the healing powers of faith. He makes a good argument for the lunatic fringe, but damn, he’s a snore. Carter ducked out of the last meeting just to avoid the good padre’s droning on about some faith healer across the border whose followers believed in her powers so much they were healed.”
“Maybe Tuttle’s brought Vargas in to distract us with meaningless drivel while they go about their business.”
“I would have preferred dancing girls.”
“We might as well brace ourselves for more stall tactics.” Sara ignored Macbeth’s caffeine-fueled randomness out of long habit. “Something tells me that the longer the Feds keep coming up empty, the more paranoid they’re going to be about us mucking up their investigation.”
“That’s what everyone thinks here, but I suspect Vargas’s insights might be more useful than at first glance,” Macbeth corrected, and she could hear the faint, rapid-fire clack of keystrokes in the background. “I’m specifically referring to one last detail I was able to glean from my online troubleshooting that the Feds didn’t share with us lowly rent-a-cops.”
“You’re such a naughty boy.” Sara grimaced while a tension headache started a ravelike pulse behind her eyes. “If I ask you what you found, it doesn’t mean I condone your so-called troubleshooting, do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“What’d you find?”
“It’s the way the murder victims were found that require the expertise of the FBI’s handpicked theologian.”
“What do you mean?”
“Before I get to that, let me lay the groundwork for you. All the victims of the Organ Donor Killer have been discovered in their own homes, with no sign of forced entry. Because of this, the Feds are looking into the possibility that somehow they all knew their killer.”
“Unlikely, unless the killer is part of the organ donation chain, such as a doctor or case manager,” Sara cut in, shaking her head. “The transplant patients were scattered all over the country. It’s inconceivable they would share any ties.”
&nb
sp; “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Sara snorted. “You haven’t been watching The Princess Bride again, have you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with a guy enjoying a good chick flick.”
“Well, stop it or I’m going to have to hurt you.”
“That sounds strangely appealing.”
She sighed. “What else do you have?”
“Every person involved in the organ-donor medical company that handled this case has been investigated and cleared. This means they’re leaning toward another theory.”
“Which is?”
“They’re exploring the possibility that the killer is posing as a trusted figure of civil authority, such as a police officer or mail carrier. One way or another, though, the killer is getting into his victims’ homes without force. He then tasers them, incapacitating them. Once that’s done the killer delivers one swift stab to the heart, which causes them to bleed out in seconds. And this is where the expertise of someone like Father Vargas might be necessary.”
“I’m listening.”
“After his victim dies, the killer laces the victims’ hands over their chests, like they’re praying. Then it seems like they’ve been given a kind of...well, to put it bluntly, last rites.”
Sara frowned, trying not to think of the innocent people suffering through the madness of their last seconds of life. But it was difficult when this hit all of her protective buttons in the worst way. “Just when you think it can’t get any weirder. What kind of last rites?”
“Every one of the victims had a Communion wafer placed in their mouths, and a faint cross drawn on their foreheads.”
She frowned. “You mean like with paint, or like on Ash Wednesday?”
“From the crime scene photos, it looks like nothing more than an inconsequential smudge to the naked eye, so hats off to the forensics guys who caught it. Chemical analysis has shown that this crosslike feature is comprised of wine, sodium and ashes. Put all that into water, and you’ve got some heavy-duty holy water called Gregorian water, usually used to consecrate the most unholy of grounds.”
