by Mallory Kane
And you’ve taken over mine. But Jack had to be twice as careful. He was walking a tightrope as thin as a spider’s silk and as high as the Empire State Building, and he had no net. Not only did he have to convince the killer he was in love with Holly, he had to keep himself from becoming emotionally tangled up in her life.
It was a problem he’d never had before. Why was it so easy, in unguarded moments, to believe that he and Holly could really be married? When had he become so interested in family, in home, in community? Things he’d never even considered before suddenly seemed important. Like sitting across from her in the kitchen late at night and talking. Falling asleep listening to her soft breathing. Cooking dinner with her at her great-uncle’s house.
He was just going to have to work harder at keeping his mind on his job and off his vic. He caught her arm. “It won’t be much longer. We’ll get him, I promise.”
She made a small, distressed sound. “Can you really promise that? I mean, look what happened tonight. You could have been killed. Danny was a cop and it didn’t keep him from being murdered.”
Jack had an overwhelming urge to promise her the moon and the stars and the Milky Way if it would take the sadness from her golden-brown eyes. He’d seen that haunted look too many times, in too many victims.
But his rational side knew hollow romantic promises wouldn’t keep her safe.
He forced a laugh. “Trust me, Holly, I don’t want to die. I’m doing everything possible to make sure nobody else dies because of your stalker. We’re not in this alone. There’s an entire division of the FBI working on figuring out who the killer is. And what happened tonight is what we want, what we need. The whole point of my being here is to draw him out. He’s getting desperate, and desperate men make mistakes.”
Her gaze held a look that Jack wasn’t willing to analyze. Her eyes welled with tears and her lower lip trembled until she bit it. She blinked and a single tear escaped down her cheek. “So we just wait? I can’t go through this again. I keep thinking if I’d realized what was going on, Danny might still be alive.”
Regret and sadness slammed into him, as it did every time he thought of his friend. He knew what she meant. He felt the same way. But he knew that neither he nor she was responsible. An obsessed killer was.
He relaxed his grip on her arm and ran his fingers along the delicate curve of her biceps. “You’re not to blame for anything that’s happened. That’s one of the hardest things for a stalking victim to accept. It’s not your fault. And we’re not just waiting, Holly. Every move he makes brings us closer to him. Every mistake he makes gives us more of an advantage. I need you to be tough, to do whatever it takes to psyche yourself. You have to be convincing as a woman madly in love with her husband.”
Holly’s eyes widened and that thread of awareness that was stretched to the breaking point between them zinged like a guitar string. His words hung in the air. Madly in love.
It took a huge effort to remove his fingers from the fascinating, soft firmness of her arm. He used the act of peeling off his soaked jacket to avoid looking at her.
Whatever it takes. He was giving her advice he wasn’t willing to take himself. Because he knew what would work. If they made love, then both of them would be convincing. He hadn’t needed Eric to remind him that a man and a woman who are intimate act differently around each other.
He closed his eyes. The one thing that would cinch their cover story was the one thing he couldn’t do. He was an FBI agent and Holly was the victim of a crime. He’d sworn to protect her. He would not take advantage of her fear and vulnerability.
HOLLY WAS RELIEVED that Jack had stepped away from her. She couldn’t stand the way he touched her, sometimes in impatience, sometimes with an achingly sweet tenderness that made her want to believe he was everything he seemed to be—including attracted to her.
“Well, that’s simple enough. Be tough and act like we’re blissfully happy while we wait for him to try to kill you again, is that it?”
“Basically, yes.” He held the jacket in one hand. His shirt was plastered to his skin and his lightweight khaki pants were so wet they were translucent.
Holly could see his boxers, and more, outlined under the wet material.
Averting her eyes, she bit her lip. “Give me your coat. I’ll hang it up in the laundry room. You need to get out of the rest of those wet clothes.”
His dark gaze swept her length as his words echoed in her ears. Whatever it takes. She shivered and imagined herself suggesting to him that if they made love they’d be more convincing. Even as ripples of anticipation and desire spread through her like wavelets from a drop of rain in a pond, she knew she couldn’t say that.
For an instant his eyes flared with a dark flame, then he dropped his gaze and started unbuttoning his shirt. She stared at the efficient movements of his fingers as he pushed each button through its buttonhole.
He shrugged out of his shirt and tossed it to her. When he did, she got a glimpse of a pink splotch on the back of his T-shirt.
Blood! Her suddenly nerveless fingers dropped the shirt. “Jack, you’re bleeding.”
Jack reached over his shoulder and tugged at the wet cotton. “It’s nothing. The car got a little close.”
Her heart lodged in her throat. “A little close? It hit you! I knew it! Oh God, why didn’t you tell me? We need to call Dr. Franklin. No, we’d better go to the emergency room at Forrest General.”
He shook his head, his damp hair spiked from running his fingers through it. “I said it’s nothing. I’ll just take a shower.”
Holly touched his shoulder blade where the stained T-shirt stuck. His muscles jerked.
“It is not nothing. Let me see it.”
He pulled away. “I said no.”
“Look, Agent Macho, either you let me look at that or I’m calling Dr. Franklin.”
He glared at her with those glacial eyes. “What are you going to say? ‘My husband got a scratch’? Don’t bother. He’ll just tell you to do what I’m going to do anyway. Clean and bandage it.”
Holly lifted her chin and cocked her head slightly, her heart in her throat at the site of Jack’s blood. “That is not a scratch. Now, you listen to me. Dr. Franklin delivered my mother and he delivered me. If I ask him to come over here to take a look at my husband’s back, he will.” She saw defeat glimmer in Jack’s eyes and knew what he was thinking.
Small towns.
“Now take off that T-shirt.”
Jack made a noise like a growl, but he turned his back and stripped off the wet shirt.
Raw abrasions furrowed along his ribs. The bleeding had stopped, but the scratches ran a good five inches across his back—he was going to be sore. She could already see the beginnings of a dark bruise.
“Your shirt wasn’t torn.”
“See. It’s not even a scratch. It’s more like a strawberry burn. The car just barely skimmed me as it passed.”
“Skim—” She couldn’t even finish the word. She took a shaky breath. “He could have killed you.”
For an instant, she was back there, protected by Jack’s body pressing her against her car, as Miss Emma Thompson’s Chevy sped past. Now she knew what had happened when Jack grunted and his body jerked. The car had scraped his back.
This was life and death. This stranger who had come into her life without her permission to be her bodyguard, who took up way too much of her space and stirred desires she had suppressed for far too long, was risking his life every day to protect hers.
Tears filled her eyes as she put her hand on his shoulder. His muscles flinched. “Jack…”
Jack turned around. “I told you it’s just a—”
She uttered a little cry at the sight of his bare torso. Scars crisscrossed his right upper chest and shoulder, pink against his golden skin, newly healed, like so many she’d seen in her work as a physical therapist. Her trained eye recognized them as surgical scars, the newest no more than a couple of months old.
Li
fe and death.
“Oh, Jack.”
He muttered a curse.
“You told me you’d had surgery, but this…” Holly’s throat ached, her eyes were blurry. She stepped closer to him, feeling the sudden tightening of his muscles, the guarded stance. He wanted to withdraw. She laid her hand on his chest, her fingers brushing the scars. “Two surgeries? Three?”
He winced as if her touch burned him.
“What kind of man are you that you can do this, over and over again? Court death to protect a stranger?” She felt tears spill over and drip down her cheek.
He grabbed her wrist, and she waited for him to push her away but he didn’t. He just stood there, his gaze dark and filled with the hunger she’d come to expect and crave.
“I’m just a man,” he said hoarsely.
“No,” she whispered, reaching up with her other hand to touch his cheek. “Not just a man. A hero.”
His hand tightened, then pushed hers away. “Holly, don’t—”
She wrapped her fingers around his nape, burying them in his thick, silky black hair, and pulled his head down until their lips were only millimeters apart. “Kiss me, Jack. Not because someone is watching. Because you want to. Because you almost died, and I need to know you’re real and alive.”
She felt disembodied, as if she were watching herself from the corner of the room. Was this brazen creature her? She’d never initiated anything with a man, not even a kiss. She’d always been too shy, too afraid of being rejected.
And never more than now. She had no idea what Jack would do. He’d set the tone of their relationship from the beginning. Professional, caring but stopping short of being emotionally involved. Every time they’d stepped into the privacy of her home, she’d felt it. The pulling back, the distance. He was her bodyguard, nothing more.
Her thoughts fed her insecurity and she stopped, thinking to escape with at least a smidgen of dignity before he rejected her, but he gripped her shoulders. Too late. She steeled herself for a lecture on their respective roles.
To her amazement the ice she’d expected to see in his eyes had melted into a dark flowing river and he pulled her close. She put her hands on his chest where smooth, hot skin sprinkled with soft hair overlay muscles wrapped like steel bands across his torso.
He looked at her mouth, and her insides turned to liquid heat. She’d never wanted any man the way she wanted him. He was everything she admired, everything she desired. Strength, control, determination. She reached up and touched his lips with hers, sighing softly as he angled his head.
Then he kissed her. No man had ever done the things Jack did to her with his lips and tongue. She moaned as he took her mouth in a sensual imitation of the act of love—teasing, thrusting, withdrawing, then delving again.
Holly met his erotic kiss and gave it back to him, more uninhibited than she’d ever thought she could be. She molded herself against him, losing herself in the scent and taste and feel of him, savoring his strength surrounding her.
He caressed her back, pressing her closer, until she felt the heat and hardness of his arousal against her. Her heart pounded and every molecule in her body throbbed in tandem with that steel-hard shaft that rubbed so intimately against her. She slid one hand down to touch it through his wet khaki pants, to feel for herself that it was real, that it was for her.
When she did, he gasped and tore his mouth from hers.
“Don’t,” he groaned, his jaw bulging with tension.
For an instant Holly ignored him. She was aching with need, blinded by desire. Then Jack grabbed her wrist.
“Stop it.”
Holly twisted out of his grasp, embarrassed. “I’m sorry—” she started, but he shook his head.
When she looked up at him, his face was set, his eyes heavy-lidded, but beginning to take on their glacial edge.
“I can’t…” he said, his voice choked.
Holly strained away from him, but he held her too tightly, too close. She could still feel him hot and hard against her. If they had gone much further, had he touched her the way she’d touched him, he would have known how much she was affected by him.
“Listen to me, Holly. I don’t want this.”
She cringed at his bald statement. Pulling away, she ducked her head. How foolish she’d been to think that finally, she had found someone she could trust to keep her safe. Someone strong and dependable. Someone who cared about her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have—”
“Holly, you need to understand—”
Lifting her chin, she met his gaze, hers hazy with humiliation and tears. “I do understand. You’re here to catch a killer. I stepped over the line. This…” She waved her hand, and a tiny sob escaped her lips. “This was a demonstration played out as silhouettes in the window for the viewing pleasure of the sick maniac out there.”
She swiped tears from her face with an angry gesture. “Well, good job, Agent—excuse me, Special Agent O’Hara.”
Jack didn’t move. His shoulders were straight, his head held high, his expression blank.
She searched his face. She knew what his silence meant. This time he didn’t have any comfort, any explanation for her. He’d said they needed to act like newlyweds, and acting was all he’d been doing.
A pain deeper than anything she’d ever felt, even when her husband died, stabbed her, almost doubling her over. She tore her gaze away from his face. Feeling worse than naked in her wet clothes, she stepped away.
“I’m going to take a shower and go to bed,” she said, proud of her ability to control the quiver in her voice.
He let her go without a word.
Chapter Nine
Wednesday, June 25
“God,—Who laughs in heaven perhaps, that such as I
Should make ado for such as she—
‘Defiled’ I wrote? ‘defiled’ I thought her?”
It is not your fault, is it, my dearest love? He is the defiler. You the defiled. You must even suffer his lewd kisses and caresses in public. It sickens me to see him putting his hands on you.
I saw the plea in your brown eyes as you looked at me in the rearview mirror last night as I sped away. You’re ready aren’t you? To come home at last to me. We were so happy. We had such fun, long ago, before others turned your heart away. Remember your promise to me?
“Escape me? Never— Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,”
I’m so tired of waiting, my dearest love. It’s almost time.
IT WAS HOT AND MUGGY even in the shade at the roadside barbecue place where Jack and his boss Mitchell Decker had arranged to meet. Jack hadn’t wanted to leave Holly alone after their close call last night, so he’d wrested a promise from her that she would spend the morning with her aunt Bode and Debi.
He got up from the rough-hewn picnic table and paced, angling upwind from the meat smoker behind the building that belched out hickory smoke and sizzling fat. When he’d first arrived about twenty minutes ago, he’d entered the screened seating area at Wayne’s Real Tennessee Pit BBQ and asked for a bottle of water, but all the young woman offered him was iced tea or cola.
He’d opted for iced tea. The ice was only a memory now.
He contemplated another glass of the sickly sweet stuff but decided his stomach couldn’t take it. He wished he could take off his jacket and feel the faint breeze, but the weight of his service weapon pressing his shirt damply against his back was a constant reminder of his role, so he just kept pacing.
Holly had been subdued this morning. He’d tried to get her to take a run with him and had even offered her one of his special mushroom-and-ham omelettes, but nothing worked.
He knew he’d hurt her. But what she didn’t understand and what he couldn’t tell her was that he hadn’t spoken last night because he couldn’t. If he’d looked at her, if he’d said one word to her, he might have given in to his urges. And if he’d don
e that, the consequences would be far worse.
If he hoped to keep her safe, he had to keep his mind on his job—and it was taking all his strength to do that.
She could have been injured last night, and all because he’d been distracted by how sexy her bottom looked in her exercise gear rather than paying attention to their surroundings. That car never should have gotten so close.
How was Holly so thoroughly destroying the detachment he’d built his career—his life on? The thirteen-year-old boy who had lain injured and helpless while his mother was murdered had sworn that nothing like that would ever happen again as long as he was able to prevent it.
He’d kept that oath. His life was devoted to catching killers, to saving lives. But he went home alone. He’d always thought it was better that way.
Maybe he’d always been wrong.
“O’Hara? Did I miss the turn for Hell?”
Jack looked up to see his boss walking toward him. He stood and held out his hand.
Mitchell Decker was a tall, solidly built man in his late thirties. His medium-brown hair was cut short and touched with gray at the temples. His face, with its high, defined cheekbones and straight, no-nonsense mouth, revealed nothing of what he was thinking. His direct blue gaze was intimidating to all but the most honest and straightforward of people.
When he grasped Jack’s hand, Jack felt not only Decker’s strength, but his integrity, his convictions and his friendship.
Decker’s manner was gruff, his words few, but he watched over the Division of Unsolved Mysteries like a father over his kids.
“This isn’t Hell,” Jack said. “Folks from here vacation in Hell to cool off.”
A corner of Decker’s mouth quirked up, and he sat down. “What’s wrong, Ice Man?”
Jack met Decker’s gaze. “Wrong?”
“You look tired. Your new bride keeping you busy?”
Jack shot Decker a quelling glance, and quickly filled him in on their near miss the night before.
“I’ll get the local field agents to help go over the car. They won’t miss a molecule.”
