by Karen Leabo
He was astounded—by her passion, by her reaction to it. Sorry? “For what?”
“For being crazy. I’m sure all this is your fault somehow, but I still feel guilty. You don’t even have your clothes off.”
“I can fix that.” She didn’t have to ask him twice. He ripped his shirt off over his head. Seconds later he’d shucked his jeans. Marissa’s hands never left him as he undressed. They caressed and explored, leaving trails of heat wherever they went.
When she touched his arousal with a hint of shyness, he thought he would jump out of his skin with the intensity of his pleasure.
“Marissa, if you keep doing that—”
“I know perfectly well what will happen.” Then she leaned into him, pressing her belly against him. “I want to take you inside me,” she whispered. “Please, don’t pick now to start acting like a gentleman.”
He knew it was wrong; he knew it was crazy. But he could no more stop what happened next than he could have stopped the storm that sank their boat. He braced himself against the locked door, grasped Marissa’s hips, and lifted her those few extra inches she needed to become one with him.
She sighed, then gasped as he slowly lowered her onto his rigid arousal. He couldn’t help gasping himself. Right or wrong, nothing in his life had ever felt so good. Marissa clasped her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck.
He didn’t have to do a damn thing. With seeming effortlessness, Marissa moved her body against his by mere fractions of an inch. But that was all he needed. He held on for as long as he could, wanting to extend her pleasure, but he was so wound up that his best effort at self-control wasn’t much. In what seemed far too short a time, he exploded within her and damn near passed out from the sheer expenditure of energy.
Amazingly, Marissa climaxed again, shuddering as if she’d caught a fatal fever.
Maybe she had.
As Clint regained his senses, he realized how uncomfortable Marissa must be. He bent his knees and lowered her until her feet touched the floor, then gently disengaged himself from her.
“Did we just make love in a laundry room?” she asked breathlessly, still clinging to him.
“Yeah. It wasn’t bad.”
“Aw, c’mon, Clint, you can do better than that.”
“It was the main highlight of my life so far, okay?” He softened the jibe by smoothing her hair from her face. He didn’t mean to be flip. This was something he’d never forget. But what could he say in such a situation? Undying love would be in poor taste, considering they were as mismatched a pair as any two people he could think of. A Mafia princess and a burned-out, rogue FBI agent. He wanted to put her brother in jail, and she probably would prefer it if he’d drowned the previous night. It would have saved her a lot of grief.
“That’s an improvement. Think how much better it would be in a king-size bed.”
Aw, hell. That wasn’t going to happen, nice as it sounded. As soon as he turned over his evidence to Neil, he would be gone from Marissa’s life one way or another. He decided not to take her up on her invitation to think about anything, but especially about a repeat of their recent performance.
“We better get cleaned up,” he said gruffly.
Marissa immediately pulled away, suddenly all business. “Right. Jimmy will be up and around anytime.” She busied herself searching for her hastily discarded clothes.
Clint was wishing he could see her face. Had he hurt her feelings? That wasn’t what he’d meant. He had a genuine fondness for the woman. No, it was more than fondness. An attachment. An illogical connection to her, given they’d known each other less than twenty-four hours. But he realized, perhaps better than she did, how disastrous, if not downright impossible, a relationship between them would be. He represented everything she’d spent her whole life trying to escape, deny, and when denying wasn’t possible, despise.
He was a lowlife, married to the Bureau and his damnable job more securely than he’d ever been bound to Rachelle. There was no way to separate who he was from what he’d done, what he continued to do.
He wasn’t the man for Marissa, and the sooner she reached that conclusion, the better.
As Marissa hastily dressed, the enormity of what she and Clint had done came home to her. Rutting in the laundry room like a couple of animals in heat! What insanity had come over her?
But, oh, how sweet it had been. For those few blissful minutes, she and Clint had been one in mind, body, and spirit. At least that’s the way it had felt to her. She suspected Clint felt different, given his current mood. Any fool could see that this soul-stirring experience had been nothing more than a lark for him, a tension reliever.
She tried not to feel slighted. He was a guy, after all. There had been no promises between them, only white-hot need that refused to be denied. She would count herself lucky to have experienced Clint’s lovemaking and move on.
Yeah, right, she thought as she tucked in her shirt. Right now, with her body thrumming with satisfaction, she couldn’t imagine a single second of her life going by that she wouldn’t relive and relish those few minutes she’d spent in a strange laundry room with a renegade lover. Nothing in her conservative experience had prepared her for such an event, and she doubted anything in her future would, either.
“You ready?” Clint asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” She wished he would kiss her. Just one last kiss, a sort of punctuation mark to their escapade. But he seemed to have forgotten his ardent affection for her. He cracked open the laundry room door. “Coast is clear.”
“Great. I have dibs on the shower.” She slipped past him with her head held high, hoping she could get out of his sight before she gave in to what she was really feeling.
She did. She held herself together until she was in the shower upstairs, letting the needles of steaming water pour down on her. Then she gave in to a few quiet sobs.
Why had she done it? She hadn’t accomplished anything except to give herself a taste of something she couldn’t have again. She hadn’t even used birth control. Oh, God, what if she was pregnant?
The chances were negligible, she told herself. Why worry about it? She would cross that bridge when and if she had to.
Still, an insidious little voice inside her mentioned that it wouldn’t be so bad to bear Clint Nichols’s child. They would share a lifelong bond, even if he could never bring himself to love her.
Love her? Is that what she was hoping for? Ridiculous. What would she do with someone like him, except worry every night about whether he would come home?
She scrubbed relentlessly with the sliver of strong soap she found in the shower until she was sure every last molecule of Clint was removed from her body. Feeling stronger and much more pragmatic, she turned off the flow of water, dried herself off, and climbed back into her borrowed clothes.
She encountered Clint at the top of the stairs. “Bathroom’s all yours,” she said, not looking at him.
He didn’t let her get away with that. He snagged her arm and twirled her around as she was about to put her foot on the top stair. She couldn’t help but look at him. There was something compelling in his thundercloud gaze, something she couldn’t put a name to.
He captured her lips with his, then quickly released her. “You really are something special, Marissa,” he said, his voice sounding thick.
Too stunned to respond, she stared as he turned his back and went into the bathroom.
Four o’clock in the morning was damnably early, Marissa decided as she stood arguing with Clint in the kitchen while they both downed some hot coffee out of paper cups.
“For the last time, you’re not coming with us to the Foxhunt,” Clint said in an annoyingly even tone.
“Yes, I am,” Marissa said just as calmly. “If you leave me behind, I will call the FBI the minute you leave, and I’ll get hold of your boss, and I’ll tell him everything.”
“Hah! Call the FBI on what? You won’t have a phone.”
“I’l
l go find a phone.”
“You don’t have a car.”
“I’ll walk.”
They stared at each other. Marissa had a feeling Clint was only posturing. She knew she was. No matter how angry she was at being excluded, she wouldn’t blow the whole operation by contacting the authorities. She’d get both Clint and Jimmy arrested and/or killed. Clint probably knew that.
Still, his infuriation with her was obvious. “I’ll tie you up before we leave,” he said, upping the stakes.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Jimmy broke in. “I don’t want to hear none of that, Nichols. I’d already like to flatten your nose for what you did to my sister last night, and I won’t stand by and let you manhandle her again.”
Marissa stifled a smile. If only Jimmy knew exactly how Clint had manhandled her that afternoon.
“Look, it’s not that dangerous,” Jimmy reasoned, reversing his earlier stand. “The place closes at two, and it’s a tomb by two-thirty. There’s no reason for anyone to be there at four in the morning. Deliveries don’t start arriving till after six.”
She could see the indecision in Clint’s eyes, a tiny chink in his armor. She intended to make the best of it. No way was she letting Clint or Jimmy out of her sight until Eddie Constantine was safely behind bars. “You can use a third person,” she reasoned. “You’ll get done quicker if I’m there to help. My eyes are fresh. I don’t have the same prejudices going in as you or Jimmy do.”
“No,” Clint said.
Marissa pulled out the big guns. “Well, see if I ever save your miserable life again not once but twice.”
“And I’m still trying to figure out why you did it,” Jimmy grumbled.
“Oh, all right, fine,” Clint said. Marissa suspected that if he really thought they would be in danger, he wouldn’t have given in. He was one stubborn honcho. Then again, she was beginning to see that she had a certain way with him. She was something more than a hunk of female flesh to him, though how much more she couldn’t begin to guess.
The forty-five-minute drive to the Foxhunt proceeded in sullen silence, with Clint at the wheel of Jimmy’s car. He spoke up only when they neared their destination, and only, Marissa suspected, because he felt he had to.
“Jimmy, you’re the only one of us who could conceivably have legitimate business at the club,” he began. “I’d like you to be our lookout. If anyone shows up, give us a signal and run interference. Do you have a cover story as to why you might be there this time of night?”
“Uh …” Jimmy came up blank.
“How about you wanted to count the cash receipts?” Marissa suggested.
Jimmy shook his head. “That wouldn’t work. I don’t even have access to the cash register. I’m pretty much a figurehead, you know. I may own the place, but Eddie runs it. He pays me a salary—in cash—and I don’t worry about the business end.”
“Jimmy!” Marissa scolded him. “That’s reprehensible. You mean to tell me all those figures you supplied for your tax return were a total lie? I could go to jail right along with you for preparing that return!”
“I know, I know. I shouldn’t have involved you, but my bookkeeper quit—”
“Can we save this for later?” Clint interrupted. “Jimmy, you need a cover story. How about you had a rendezvous with one of the dancers after work, but she stood you up?”
“What? Are you kidding? Sophia would have my—”
“You’re not really going to do it, Jimmy,” Marissa reminded him. “Just say you are. Lord knows you weren’t faithful to your first two wives. No one would even blink.”
“Hey, hey, that’s not nice, sissy.”
“I calls ’em like I sees ’em,” she said.
“All right,” Jimmy said. “As a cover story, that stinks, but there won’t be nobody there anyway. If you two are going to do the searching, though, let me give you some ideas on where to start. Eddie has more hidey-holes than a squirrel.”
“Okay.” Clint pulled into the driveway of a huge, garish pink stucco building. The neon signs were turned off, but Marissa could easily read them in the city light. “ ‘The Foxhunt. Hottest girls in town’?” she read aloud. “ ‘Triple X’? Some English pub.”
“Sorry, sis,” Jimmy mumbled as Clint pulled the car around back, where it couldn’t be seen from the street. “But you would have freaked if I told you the truth.”
“No kidding.” She shook her head. Her own brother, a purveyor of smut.
“It’s a classy place,” Jimmy said. “Our girls always wear—”
“Please, I don’t want to hear it.”
Jimmy unlocked the back door. He punched in a series of numbers on the security alarm’s keypad. As soon as everyone was safely inside, he locked the door and punched some more keys. “I’m setting the alarm so no one can sneak up on us,” he said. “It’ll beep inside all the offices if anyone goes in or out.”
Marissa followed the two men inside, staring in frank fascination at the autographed pictures that lined the hallway leading back to the offices. “Chesty Drawers?” she read, incredulous. “How forward-thinking of her parents to give her a name so suitable to her looks and profession.”
The men made no reply. They seemed to be engrossed in unlocking the door to one of the offices. Burning with curiosity, Marissa wandered back down the hallway and into the club itself. She paused before a six-foot poster of a woman she presumed was the current star attraction. The photograph left little to the imagination. Marissa felt her face heating up.
Suddenly Clint appeared by her side, grabbing her arm. “Don’t wander away like that! You said you wanted to help, so let’s get to work. We’ll start in Eddie’s office. I don’t suppose you’re any good at cracking safes.”
When they entered Eddie’s inner sanctum, an opulently appointed office with artistically arranged nude sculptures and paintings everywhere, Marissa saw immediately why Clint had asked her that question. A safe with a key lock sat atop the filing cabinet. “Darn. If he’s got anything worth finding, it’s in that safe. We might as well go home.” She was starting to feel creepy anyway.
“Not yet. Jimmy told me that when this place was being built, he remembers some sort of chamber being put in beneath the floor here. Eddie told him he’d planned to put a safe there, then changed his mind. Let’s see if that’s really the case. Help me move this desk.”
“Shouldn’t we be wearing gloves or something? We’re leaving prints all over the place!” Marissa asked as she took hold of one end of the massive mahogany desk and heaved. It took several tries before they were able to scoot it off the oriental carpet. Marissa leaned against a sculpture, realized what she was touching, and jumped back.
“We’re completely within our legal rights,” Clint reminded minded her. “Jimmy owns the place, and he let us in and gave us permission to search. Don’t worry about it.”
Yeah. As if she wasn’t going to worry. She was worried about everything, including why Clint had been treating her like a stranger since that last, hurried kiss at the top of the stairs. She knew he was preoccupied with this mission, but—
“Help me roll up this rug,” he ordered her.
She saluted crisply. “Yes sir.”
“You said you wanted to help, so help.”
“Man, you get testy when you’re stressed.” She started rolling the carpet from her end. When the floor was cleared, she stared at it, trying to make out any telltale seams or cracks in the gleaming hardwood.
Clint pulled out a pocket knife and started testing the seams one by one. “This might take a while. You could start going through the desk, but make sure you leave everything the way you found it.”
“Okay.” She’d wanted to be useful. Here was her chance.
The desk proved to be a hodgepodge of invoices, receipts, checkbooks, pink message slips, business cards—any one of which could lead Clint to the Big Boss. If she’d had something to write with …
Then she spied the copy machine in the corner of the office. Quickl
y she gathered up the message slips, trying to remember the approximate location of each before she removed it.
Clint looked up when the copy machine came to life. “What are you doing?”
“Copying stuff so you can look at it later. These names don’t mean anything to me, but maybe they’ll help.”
“That’s a good idea. Copy anything you can drag over there.”
She did just that, systematically copying every piece of paper she could find, then artistically re-creating the original chaos when she was done.
“How about check stubs?”
“Yeah, great. You never know. He could be—” Clint fell suddenly silent.
“He could be what? Clint?” Marissa stopped what she was doing and looked over. He was staring. Concerned that something was wrong, she walked to the other side of the desk, which blocked her vision. Then she saw what had reduced him to silence.
Money. Cash, great gobs of it in a compartment beneath the floor. Stacks and stacks of bound bills. “Omigosh,” she shrieked. “How much is there?”
“I don’t know,” Clint said. “There must be at least a million dollars here. There are only a couple of reasons he would stockpile cash like this, neatly counted and bound. Either he’s planning to buy a one-way ticket to Argentina, or he’s getting ready to make a record-setting buy. I’m banking on the latter.”
“What are you going to do? Is this the evidence you need? Can you call your boss now?”
Clint sat back on his haunches. “No. What we need to know is when and where. And ten to one what we need is in that damn safe.” He pawed through the stacks of green. “There’s nothing here but the money.”
Marissa watched, fascinated, as he took a tiny camera out of his shirt pocket and photographed the money from every imaginable angle. “Another fibbie toy?” she asked.
“Nope. This one’s my own personal toy. I bought it out of the back of a magazine when I was twelve. Best twenty-two bucks I ever spent.”
She fidgeted as he took his time over the photos. They’d been there over an hour now. Jimmy swore nobody showed up till daylight, but what did he know? He probably wasn’t ever there at this time.
