Protect Me, Love

by Alice Orr

  Probably, they should be taking off after the Wrens right now, but Delia was tired of stalking and being stalked. The cloak and dagger of these past few days had left her longing for a bit of normal human life if only for a few hours till the chase began again. She suspected Nick’s diligence would make him try to convince her otherwise. She also suspected she could distract him from that resolve, at least for tonight. The truth about Tobias and Penelope Wren, whatever that might be, would still be around for the uncovering tomorrow morning.

  By the time they got back to Nick’s hotel room, Delia was actually feeling waves of warmth ebbing and rippling through her, like water over parched earth. She’d never been even remotely close to this filled with desire, not even five years ago when she’d first met Nick and found him so irresistible. She’d been able to keep herself under control then. She had nothing like that control now. In fact, she’d decided that if Nick put up any resistance to making love with her tonight, she’d force herself on him anyway. Fortunately, she sensed that wouldn’t be necessary.

  He’d matched his dining pace to hers back at the café, then snapped his fingers impatiently for the waiter when they’d finished as much of the meal as they could force themselves to eat. After that, they’d both fumbled quickly into their coats and braved the storm with mufflers still unwound. They’d hurried, down the street toward the Tivoli despite the danger of possible slippery patches under the snow, with Nick holding her firmly under the elbow against a fall.

  Consequently, she wasn’t surprised when Nick closed and locked the door of his room then turned and swept her into his arms, all in a single motion. They kissed—his mouth over hers, her tongue seeking his—oblivious to hats and scarves and the smell of wet wool until the heat they were generating inside their cocoons of outerwear became unbearable. They began undressing each other then, unwrapping the layers from each other’s swaddled bodies with urgency, like children pulling paper from Christmas packages to get to the treasure underneath.

  Nick had less on than Delia did. Still, he was making better progress. He had her coat open in no time, his fingers sliding from one button to the next like a rapid fire. Then the wet, oversize garment was off her shoulders and sliding down her arms to the floor. Almost instantly, her sweater was lifted over her head, as well. Then her turtleneck had been pulled up across her breasts. She could apply herself only sporadically to her own task of undressing him. He kept her hands and arms too busy for that. She welcomed what he was doing all the same, and not only because the air of the room felt much cooler and more soothing on her skin than the layers of humid clothing had. Even more welcome and wonderful was the way each graze of his fingers along her flesh brought with it tingles and flashes that acted like firecrackers and skyrockets in her blood, sending it crackling and surging to the most private part of her. She could barely breathe from the intensity of the sensation.

  While Nick moved on to the button at the top of her jeans, Delia pulled down the zipper of his jacket. She knew she could never have managed buttons as fast as he had. Her hands were trembling too much for that, and her fingers were difficult to control, almost as if they belonged to someone else. Still she managed to force him to stop undressing her while she pushed his jacket over his shoulders, gasping at their hard roundness, then down his arms where she could feel the taut sinews even through his sweater. She set immediately to removing that sweater and the T-shirt underneath before Nick could get in her way by busying himself with her jeans once more.

  As she was doing all of that, he’d begun trailing kisses down her bared and highly sensitized neck, beginning just behind her earlobe and continuing in a maddening advance toward her shoulder. She gasped at that, too, and moaned deep in her throat, so low she might have thought she imagined the sound if she hadn’t felt its echo in her bones. Until his lips touched her shoulder blade and the hollow above it, Delia’d never guessed she was capable of so much feeling there. She couldn’t wait to be naked against him. She reached behind her to unclasp her bra and shrugged to help him ease the straps from her shoulders. He pulled away from her just long enough to peel the pale lace from her breasts.

  He might have stopped to touch her there, but that wasn’t what she wanted right now. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pulled him close, crushing her breasts against his chest and moving her body just enough from side to side to feel the tantalizing torture of his dark chest hair across her nipples. Her breasts agonized for that friction, that pleasure that was almost pain, as if they must have been longing for him for years. She pressed into him farther down, as well, maneuvering her leg between his and rubbing against his groin. He raised his mouth from her throat and groaned. Under other circumstances Delia might have been taken aback, even frightened by the animal quality of that sound. Now, she reveled in its resonance with her own low moaning. She let herself go limp as Nick lifted her, seemingly without effort, into his arms and carried her to the bed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The morning dawned glorious both in- and outside Nick’s cozy room at the Tivoli. Delia opened the curtains to a vista of pure white rooftops sparkling in the sun. The dinginess of the city had been frosted clean overnight, and she felt the same. How could she be happy at a time like this with her life in peril and so many crucial questions remaining, not to mention the threat of imprisonment or worse forever looming? Once again, just like yesterday morning at the Waldorf, the answer lay on the bed where Nick still slept. She’d truly never met anyone like him. She probably never would again. Still she knew such thoughts must wait until her future, if she had one, could be made secure. After all, some of those crucial questions were about him. He turned toward her then as if that skeptical thought of hers might have startled him awake, or maybe it was only the sun brightening through the window.

  “Good morning,” he said with a sleepy smile that nearly sent her leaping across the room to him.

  They’d made love several times last night. Delia felt very well-loved this morning, more so than ever before in her life. His smile reminded her of that, and all doubt about him disappeared, at least for the moment.

  “Are you coming over here, or do I have to leave this warm bed and bring you back myself?”

  Delia actually did a skipping step on her way across the floor. Being with him made her feel years younger, as if she hadn’t lost the past five years, after all.

  “We have work to do today, you know,” she said as she bounced into the tumble of blankets next to him.

  “We could do it later,” he teased, running his finger slowly up the inside of her thigh till she trembled.

  She’d found one of his blue chambray shirts in the closet and put it on. The cuffs hung winsomely past her fingertips and the tails were halfway to her knees. She’d fastened only two buttons in front, and the curve of her breasts was clearly visible almost to the nipples. She knew it was a provocative pose. She’d meant it to be, and she could tell by the heated look in Nick’s eyes that he was responding as she’d hoped he would. She also knew that if they started making love now, they weren’t likely to stop. The passion was that strong between them. He opened her body all the way to her soul. Her hunger burned for more of that now, but she knew she would have to wait. She pulled the chambray shirt closed with a sigh and moved her leg just in time to keep his fingers from striking the point of no return.

  “Okay,” he said, sounding a little pouty. “I get the message. But—” he raised himself up on one gorgeously muscled arm and swept her down onto the bed with the other “—you’re not getting away without a kiss.”

  And what a kiss it was. He rolled on top of her with his thighs between hers so she could feel every inch of his magnificent, naked body pressing into hers. He lifted her against him with one arm, crushing her breasts to his chest. His other hand cradled her head and held her while his mouth captured hers and his tongue invaded her so forcefully that she couldn’t have resisted if she wanted to. Of course, she had no intention of resisting.
She threw her arms around him and returned his almost savage kiss with equal hot, hard intensity. When they finally pulled away from each other, Delia lay out of breath in his arms. If he hadn’t been the one to get up finally and say they’d better get going, she would have tossed her former resolve straight out into the snow and loved this amazing man all day long.

  NICK HAD WANTED to keep Delia in his room this morning just so he could be alone with her, but there’d been another reason, too. He still possessed a cop’s instincts, and those instincts were telling him loud and clear that she could be in great danger in the day ahead, even more than she was now. That’s why he did his best to talk her into staying at the Tivoli. Unfortunately, he hadn’t succeeded.

  He could understand why she felt she had to come out here this morning, why she couldn’t hang out in bed with him instead. She had a mystery on her hands, a mystery that had just about consumed her life for years. If there was even a hint of a possibility she could unlock a single one of the closed doors to the puzzle of her past, she had to take that chance. And he had to take it with her, even when this sixth sense of his was telling him to grab her and run. So they’d left the Tivoli and plowed out into the snow, through sidewalks that were half shoveled or not shoveled at all. With each step they took, the warning alarms buzzed louder in Nick’s head. Yet, now that they were here outside the building on Water Street where Penelope Wren lived, all of that noise inside Nick had fallen silent. He felt nothing but dead calm.

  Developers had obviously been at work on this block. Eighteenth-century row houses that had fallen into disrepair a decade or so ago were fixed up now, with repointed and cleaned brick fronts. Restored window casings sprouted planter boxes on the ledges, filled with snow where flowers would be in a warmer season. Christmas lights were strung along the edges of some of the boxes and more in the windows. Nick looked up as they mounted the stoop and saw that the Christmas lights in the third-floor windows were lit even in the morning brightness. Something told him those lights weren’t on due to the occupant’s excess of holiday spirit the evening before. Something also told him that third-floor apartment belonged to Penelope Wren. The mailbox in the entryway confirmed that intuition to be true.

  Delia grabbed the front door handle and turned it in vain, then turned it again. Nick could tell how eager she was to get inside and on to whatever revelation this building had in store, no matter how unpleasant Nick might anticipate it to be. He could protect her. It was his job to do that, and more than just his job now. He could jump in front of her and take danger and even destruction on himself so it wouldn’t strike her. But he couldn’t shield her from the truth. He might pick her up in his arms right now and carry her out of here as fast as he could go, but he couldn’t hold on to her like that forever. Eventually she’d make her way back here despite any and all efforts of his to prevent it. Facing the reality of this building, including its third floor, was inevitable for both of them.

  “The door’s locked,” he said, though that was already obvious.

  He knew, of course, that Delia wasn’t about to be stopped by something as trivial as a lock. She turned back to the row of mailboxes in the entryway. There was a door buzzer under each. She hesitated a moment before pushing one then another. Checking the name plates and apartment numbers for those two buttons, Nick could see what Delia was trying to do. She was hoping to ring the buzzers of apartments at the rear of the building. That way nobody would lean out the window to see who was down here. There was no response for a moment. Then a voice crackled through the intercom grill set into the same brass facing as the row of mailboxes.

  “Who’s there?” The voice was hardly recognizable as male or female.

  When Delia didn’t answer right away, Nick chimed in. “Mailman,” he said.

  He knew he was helping Delia do something he thought unwise, but he’d already surrendered to the inevitability of the situation. Still, he held his breath, hoping the person attached to that crackling voice would be savvy enough not to let somebody into his or her building on the strength of such a flimsy identification. At the same time Nick guessed that his mailman charade would work. Too many people were too eager to find out what was being delivered to resist that particular temptation, especially at Christmastime. A moment later the door release buzzer sounded and he and Delia were inside.

  “We’d better get upstairs fast before whoever that was opens their door,” Delia said.

  She was already at the stairway to the first floor and climbing. Nick shrugged and followed. They hotfooted up to the first landing then down a narrow hallway to the next staircase. He kept close behind her up the next flight of stairs and back down the third floor hallway toward the front of the building again. Not till he saw the doorway of that front apartment did he grab Delia’s arm and thrust her out of his way so he could approach first. She didn’t resist, maybe because she’d seen the same thing he had and understood his concern. The door to the third floor front apartment was ajar. In New York City, an unlocked and open door to a residential space like this one more often than not signaled trouble.

  Delia tapped Nick on the arm. “Take this,” she said.

  He turned from staring at the crack in the doorway just long enough to see that she was handing him the gun he’d given her yesterday. He shook his head and took his own weapon from the back of his waistband. She did understand that there was danger, after all.

  “You stay out here,” he said softly, hoping in vain that she would cooperate for once.

  He raised his gun next to his face and slightly forward in quick-response position, then pressed his left palm flat against the apartment door and pushed. He peered at the space revealed by the gradually opening door, but could see nothing unusual. He pushed the door open wider. Still nothing. Both the hallway into the apartment and the room beyond were brightly illuminated, and that made him as uneasy as the Christmas bulbs in the third-floor window had done.

  He motioned for Delia to stay put while he darted across the space in front of the open doorway to the opposite side. He peered through into the apartment from this new angle. Again, he saw nothing suspicious.

  “Are you going in?” Delia whispered.

  Nick signaled her to be silent, then nodded. He was definitely going in. He had no choice. He remembered experiences like this one back when he was a cop. This moment outside the door to possible danger was the longest and scariest of all. That was one reason for making the entrance fast, like ripping off an adhesive bandage before you could think too much about how much it was going to hurt. Nick took a deep breath and wished he didn’t sense that Delia was right behind him.

  DELIA WASN’T about to stay in the hallway. She had to know what was going on here. She followed Nick as he crept along the hallway wall. She couldn’t help but be impressed by how formidable, even deadly, he looked with that gun in his hand. She could all but see every muscle in his body, tense as steel and on the verge of a spring-to-action at the slightest provocation. If there was peril in one of these rooms, Nick was obviously ready. It occurred to her that he would have been a real asset to PEI all these years she’d kept him off her roster of operatives. Maybe all of that could change now. Yet she didn’t feel comfortable thinking in terms of the future where Nick was concerned. She still had too many questions about him for that.

  The question of the moment concerned why he was taking so many precautions now. The total silence suggested that there was nobody in this apartment but the two of them. As they passed one empty room after another, his military-alert pose began to appear a little dramatic. Delia was tempted to rush on ahead of him to confirm her suspicion that they were entirely alone here. Then she could get down to searching for anything she might find out about Penelope and Tobias Wren—what they were doing in New York, how long they’d been here, what their connection was to the events of these past few days. In fact, a search might turn up more such information than a face-to-face interview with the Wrens ever could. For that reason Del
ia was almost glad to find the place empty. Then they got to the bathroom.

  The first sign of trouble was a smudge, so small Delia would later wonder why she’d even noticed it right off like she did. The mark was on the edge of the door just above the lock plate, and in the dimmed light from the hallway she couldn’t even see what color it was. Her heart started thumping anyway, even before Nick eased the door open and they both saw what waited inside. Penelope Wren was on the floor, halfway in and halfway out of the bathtub, as if she might have been trying to crawl in there to escape her terrible fate.

  Suddenly, for Delia, it was five years ago and she had just awakened to find poor Morty Lancer’s body cold and dead next to her in her bed. All she could think about was getting out of there. She stepped away from the bathroom door and slammed her back against the opposite wall so hard one of the pictures was shaken from its hook and fell to the floor with a shattering sound. Delia didn’t look at the picture or more than peripherally register its fall. She was riveted on Penelope and Nick leaning over her body, taking her pulse, listening for her heartbeat. How useless all of that was. There is nothing as still as the stillness of death. Delia had never had that thought before or even realized it was true, but she did so now. She didn’t need to lift Penelope’s wrist or listen to her chest to know without the tiniest shadow of a doubt that the woman would never stand up from that floor on her own again.

  “She’s dead,” Nick said.

  Delia wanted to shout, I know. I know. You don’t need to tell me.

  She stood silent instead, pressed against the wall, wishing she could dissolve into and through it and be out of here. The doorway beckoned. Down the hall, just a few yards and she’d be gone. She’d clean out her accounts and be on a plane leaving the country before even Nick could catch up to her. Maybe that’s what she should have done five years ago, left the country altogether. Mexico, the Islands, maybe Greece—didn’t Greece have some kind of nonextradition policy? Of course, that probably didn’t include murder. All of these thoughts and more raced through her head in the seconds it took for Nick to rise from where he’d been crouched on one knee next to Penelope.