by Maggie Price
He relaxed only slightly when Spurlock pulled out a slim cigar and solid-gold lighter from his pocket.
Spurlock dipped his head; with a flick of his thumb a flame flared, highlighting the silver at his temples. Watching the flame, Alex pictured the crime-scene photos of Emmett Tool's charred remains that required dental records to make ID. Had Spurlock used that same gold lighter to burn his traitorous accountant alive?
Expelling a stream of smoke, Spurlock turned and examined the artfully lit flower bed that snugged against the front porch. "You've planted the Madame Pierre Oger rose," he said after a moment.
"Why, yes." A look of total fascination glinting in her eyes, Morgan settled a hand on his sleeve. "Are you an admirer of roses, Mr. Spurlock?"
"Carlton," he said, looking back at her. "I inherited a love of the blooms from my grandmother."
"I got my green thumb from my aunt." As if warming equally to him and the subject, Morgan slid a hand into the crook of his arm. "She had a huge yard, crammed with every type of flower and shrub you can think of. Growing up, I spent summers with her and my cousins. Every day before we could go swimming, we had to help in the yard and gardens. I never really minded, though. My aunt made me realize there's something fascinating about patting seeds into soil, then watching them grow. Thrive."
"Yes, exactly." Spurlock's smile spread as he looked deeply into her eyes, holding the moment. "Your aunt sounds like my late grandmother."
"She liked to work in the garden?"
"With roses. She grew them, bred them. They were her passion. As they are mine."
Morgan gestured toward the flower bed on the opposite side of the porch. "Then you maybe recognize the La Reine Victoria bush I planted there? That's the rose named for Madame Pierre Oger's mother. I thought it would be nice to have the bushes paired along the front walk. Sort of a tribute to mother and daughter."
"An enchanting gesture," Spurlock commented, brushing a casually intimate hand over hers.
The frank male interest in the bastard's gaze sent a spike into Alex's brain. Narrowing his eyes, he pondered if he would have enough time to bash in Spurlock's aristocratic face before Colaneri could sprint over and jump him.
Alex flicked a quick look across the driveway. Light from the carriage lamps glinted in Colaneri's eyes, giving him the feral look of a sleek, deadly jungle cat. He still stood with one hip against the limo's hood, his black suit coat unbuttoned, his arms relaxed at his sides. Alex knew the stance allowed for quick retrieval of a holstered weapon.
"I have several hundred rose bushes planted in my gardens," Spurlock commented. "They're in bloom now. Perhaps you and your husband would like to see them?"
"I'd love to. Alex?" Morgan turned, gave him a speculative look. "I know you're not much for looking at flowers, so maybe you'd rather I go alone?"
Alex knew she'd made the comment because he had cautioned her about their acting too eager to accept any invitation Spurlock might offer. Still, knowing that didn't do anything about easing the primitive instinct to keep what was his—if only on a temporary basis—at a safe distance from Spurlock's murderous grasp.
Strolling to Morgan's side, Alex slid a hand beneath the heavy fall of her hair and settled his palm against the back of her neck. When he nudged her around to face him, the movement eased her hand from Spurlock's arm.
"Darling," Alex murmured, his body brushing lightly against hers. "I can look at plants all day, as long as I'm with you."
"So smooth," she said, her low, smoldering laugh drifting on the warm night air. She settled a palm against his bare chest and gave him a saucy look from beneath her blond lashes. "I wonder if you'll say things like that after we're married a whole year?"
"I'll not only say them, I'll still mean them." Telling himself he had a duty to play the scene as convincingly as she, he dipped his head, brushed his lips over hers.
And felt his heart stumble. His mind blur.
With the air backed up in his lungs, he fought to think like a cop and not a man suddenly trapped between infatuation and something deeper. He reminded himself it was all an illusion. An act. His and Morgan's lives depended on convincing a killer they were nothing more than a happily married couple who happened to have moved into the mansion next door. Logic, however, didn't make the need stirring in Alex's blood any less real. Or any less of a danger.
Pulling back control, he turned in time to catch a glimmer of envy in the gray eyes locked on Morgan.
She's mine, Alex thought with an inner snarl as he slid his hand down the curve of her spine to settle at her waist. All mine. He sent Spurlock a slow, meaningful smile, a message passing male to male. "My wife and I will be happy to take a look at your flowers."
Spurlock expelled a stream of smoke, the white column curling upward into the dark night while he made a long, careful study of his new neighbors.
"I'll check my schedule," he said, rolling the slim cigar between his manicured fingers. "Then be in touch."
Standing beside Alex on the mansion's front porch, Morgan tried to ignore the ferocious hammering of her heart while the red glow of the limo's taillights disappeared into the night. Wordlessly she turned and walked into the pink-marbled foyer, thankful she was barefoot and not trying to force her unsteady legs to maneuver in ankle-wrecking stilettos.
As soon as she heard Alex close the front door and engage the dead bolt, she put a hand to her chest. "Dear Lord."
He turned. Alarm shot instantly into his dark eyes as he reached for her. "You're white as a sheet."
She batted his hand away. "I have…to catch my breath." She pressed a palm against her chest as if to shove air out, but there wasn't any.
He took a step toward her. "You need to lean forward."
"No…I need…to breathe."
He snagged one of her arms. "You can't do that when you've got air trapped somewhere beneath your diaphragm." Placing a palm against the back of her head, he forced her to bend at the waist.
Instantly air heaved out of her lungs, then swooshed in.
"Better?" he asked, watching her intently while she dragged in another breath.
"Yes. Thanks." She straightened. Using the back of her hand, she shoved her tousled hair off her forehead. "How can you stand there so calm when we did what we just did?"
He raised a brow. "You're referring to our encounter with Spurlock?"
"What else?" She flipped a hand toward the front of the mansion. "I'm standing here, hyperventilating over it and you're not even breathing heavy."
"It's called experience, Morgan. And we got Spurlock's interest, is all. We won't know if he bought our act unless he gets back to us with a firm date and time for us to take a look at his flowers."
"I hate to think I'm about to have a heart attack if what we just did is for nothing."
"Time will tell. In the meantime you need to sit down." With his hand still gripping her arm, Alex steered her across the Persian carpet to the staircase, nudged her down on the bottom step. "Stay here. I'll pour you some brandy."
"Okay." Feeling a chill, she pulled the silk robe around her and watched him move off to the study, his pajama bottoms revealing a muscular body that looked fit beyond reason.
By the time Alex returned, her lungs were working like well-oiled bellows. "Thanks," she said as he handed her a snifter.
"You're welcome."
She took a long swallow, letting the warmth of the rich, smooth brandy course through her. "I had no idea about this."
His brows slid together. "The brandy?"
"The rush that hit me. The adrenaline surge."
Alex settled onto the burgundy carpeted step beside her. Beneath the brass chandelier's bright gleam, his tanned chest and arms looked as hard as marble. "I'd call it more an attack of nerves. Something akin to stage fright."
She nodded slowly. "You remember me telling you I read those articles by undercover cops?"
"I remember."
"One of the cops called a reaction like mine 'fri
endly fear.' Like a natural fight-or-flight response. He said in an undercover situation, friendly fear can be the early warning that gives a cop a split-second edge."
"He's right."
She shoved her hair back, lifted it off her shoulders, then took another sip of brandy. "I'm not sure I felt fear while we were with Spurlock." She narrowed her eyes, considering. "I don't really know what I felt."
"Morgan, you're talking about emotions."
"Right. I'm trying to analyze what I felt."
"You're wasting your time. Emotions aren't something you can put on a spreadsheet and logic out. It doesn't really matter what you felt out there. What matters is that you fooled the people you had to fool. Period. You did a super job."
Alex's praise joined the warmth of the brandy scooting through her. Angling her chin, she leaned in. "You really think so?"
He studied her with those unfathomable dark eyes. "I know so."
She grinned. "It's the strangest thing. When Spurlock drove up, something in my mind clicked, and all of a sudden I was a combination of Morgan Donovan and Carrie."
"Carrie, your sister?"
"Yes. According to Grace, Carrie's been leaving men puddled at her feet since she was five. Carrie makes dealing with men look so effortless. Easy."
"Tonight you made it look easy."
Morgan leaned an elbow against the carpeted step just above the one on which she sat. She could almost feel the brandy dissolving the tension inside her, layer by layer. "You weren't so bad yourself tonight, Blade."
"Yeah?" With his hair tousled, his eyes dark, his jaw shadowed by stubble, he looked rough and reckless, dangerously and delectably male. Then there was that bare, muscled chest.
She nodded, trying to keep her mind focused. "You came off like a really hardcase out there. Like one of those guys who's going do what he's going to do and he doesn't care much what anybody else thinks about it."
"That description also applies to Spurlock."
"I know. But when things hit a snag, he snuffs people." She gave Alex a narrow, assessing look. "Does tough, dangerous Alex Donovan snuff people, too?"
His eyes glinted. "An interesting question, Mrs. Donovan. Don't you think you should have asked it before you married me?"
"Too late now." Without realizing she'd made the gesture, Morgan glanced down, saw her hand resting on Alex's knee. When she started to pull back, he entwined his fingers with hers.
"You're right, it's too late," he said quietly. "There's also something else Spurlock and I have in common."
With her hand linked in his, a flood of sensations washed over Morgan, from excitement to anxiety to desire to fear. She set the snifter aside, struggling to think while her pulse pounded in her head, echoed in her ears. "And that would be?"
He reached out, his fingertips skimming her cheek as he nudged her hair behind her shoulder. "We both think Alexander Donovan has a gorgeous wife."
Heat surged into her face along the path his fingers had taken. She knew she should pull away, tell him good-night and go up to her room. But she didn't. Couldn't. She settled for shifting the subject back on firm ground. "So, ah…do you think Spurlock bought the story about the bomb? That some enemy of yours planted it on your car?"
"I don't imagine he thinks it was a bunch of college kids practicing what they've learned in their advanced chemistry class."
Shifting her hand in his, Alex grazed his thumb over her knuckles. "If he wasn't behind that Vegas cop running the background checks on us, Spurlock will do it now. And if he was the reason for the first check, he'll have a more intensive one done. That check will show him there's more to Alex Donovan than what's on the surface."
"The pieces of the legitimate companies Donovan owns."
"Right. Spurlock will want to find out how a convicted gambler got his hooks into those legit operations. Our neighbor will be curious as to whether Donovan uses those operations to launder illegal gambling profits. If so, Spurlock will probably want to get in on the action. He'll dig into Donovan's background, which is airtight, thanks to the Feds. If, after all that, Spurlock figures you and I are the genuine article, he'll make good on his invitation for us to drop by and smell the roses."
"He has to. An invitation is the only way we'll get inside his mansion to look for whatever evidence Krystelle Vander hid in the gold bedroom."
"Even if that happens, it's going to take a measure of luck for us to find the evidence when we don't even know what it is."
Morgan nodded. The skim of his thumb across her knuckles was slowly, compellingly tying her insides into knots. "In the meantime, we continue to do what we've done for the past two weeks. We wait on Spurlock."
"Right." Alex angled his chin. "I'm usually good at waiting. Being patient for things to happen, for a bust to go down." She heard the subtle change in his voice, a thickening, as his gaze shifted, focused on her mouth. "Right now sitting here watching you, touching you, I find there's something I'm damn tired of waiting on."
His words went straight to her head to swirl with the haze of brandy. "I…"
"You smell like hot, smoldering sin." He tightened his hold on her fingers, then cupped his other hand around the back of her neck and eased her toward him. "I want a taste of you, Morgan McCall. I want to put my hands on you and have a long, slow taste of you."
"This…isn't…smart." Her hands rose, settled against his bare chest. She didn't push away. How could she when she, too, had been desperate for a taste of him? "You know it, and I know it."
"We both know." He lowered his head, caught her bottom lip lightly between this teeth. "One taste."
"One," she whispered in hoarse agreement, her lips parting beneath his.
He took her mouth slowly, torturously. Her pulse leaped, her breath shuddered as the taste, the textures flowed around her. Into her.
With reason fading, desire spiked to the surface where she couldn't escape it. Everything inside her whirled into a mindless rush—her heart, her blood, her head—and she forgot everything but the need to be in his arms.
His mouth angled, taking hers now, hot and hard, strangling the air in her lungs, misting the last remnants of reason still clinging in her brain. He shoved the silk robe off her shoulders, down her arms, then he cupped her hips and dragged her onto his lap.
Her arms went up, twining around his neck, her fingers shoving into his hair. Mine, she thought while her mouth met his, greed-for-greed.
His hands moved, sliding up her sides to her breasts. His hard, seeking fingers stroked her nipples, already straining against the silk of her gown. A moan ripped up her throat. Her heart jackhammered, heat flashed in her veins so fast and hot that it incinerated everything. Including thought.
"Every rule," Alex murmured. He wrapped her hair around his hand, tugged her head back and gazed down into her face. The raw emotion that turned his voice to a rasp glinted in his dark eyes. "Dammit, Morgan, I want to break every rule when I'm around you."
Rules. The word drummed in her head while his mouth feasted on her throat. Not only were they breaking every rule of the job, but she had also turned her back on the ones she had carved for herself. In stone, or so she had thought. Rules meant to keep her safe, to protect her heart, her sanity.
Sitting in Alex Blade's lap while they tried to swallow each other whole was about as insane as it got.
Her survival instinct winning out over passion, she pulled back. "We…can't…do this."
"We are doing it." His mouth trailed down her throat while his fingers thrust down one of the nightgown's paper-thin straps. "Let me have you, Morgan. Here. Now. Let me have you."
"I…No." Panic skittered up her spine when she felt the last threads of her resistance ripping away. In one move she pushed back, slid off his lap. "We can't do this. I can't."
With her blood still flowing hot, she found her legs so unsteady she had to grab the banister for support. "I can't get involved with a man like you," she blurted.
"A man like me," Alex repe
ated. He remained on the bottom step, his dark hair rumpled where her fingers had been, his narrowed eyes watching her, measuring. "Want to explain exactly what that means?"
"It means…" She pressed a hand to her thundering heart while she swallowed hard, trying to catch her breath. Did she really want him to know that her thinking processes scrambled when he was around? That the instant he walked into the room, her blood stirred and heated? That she had learned the hard way a man who had that kind of effect on her was suicide? That she had too much at stake to jump off a cliff twice in one lifetime?
"It means we have a job to do," she finally said. That, after all, was the most important reason to keep each other at arm's length. Their safety, even their lives might depend on their maintaining an all-business relationship. "Certain rules shouldn't be broken. Lines shouldn't be crossed. You and I are here because of the job. Only the job. That's what we need to focus on. It's just basic common sense."
"I agree." As if utterly at ease, Alex leaned back against the banister. "One hundred percent." His gaze skimmed down her, then up. "It's just that I'm having trouble lately zeroing my thoughts in on work."
His intense, examining assessment had her suddenly imagining what she must look like, standing there with her hair tousled, her mouth swollen, her too-sheer gown with one of its straps slithering down her arm. With heat rushing into her cheeks, she snagged her robe off the stairs, pulled it on and cinched the satin belt tight at her waist.
"It's late. I'm going to bed." She knew she would get little sleep, if any. Not while she could still feel the haunting slide of his touch over every inch of her body.
She turned, her gaze slicking across one of the long-legged tables nestled against the foyer's blue linen-papered wall. When she saw the leather-bound book on the table, she froze.
"Something wrong?" Alex asked.
"That book on the table." She looked back across her shoulder to meet his gaze. "Is it one Wade Crawford brought the day we moved in? One with a camera in it?"
Before she even got the last syllable out, Alex was off the step. He swore viciously. Then again, quietly. "I didn't think about the camera. That there's a damn camera sitting right there—"
