“I could be,” offered Grissom roughly.
“Could be what?”
“Your fiancé,” said Grissom. It wasn’t anything at all like he had been planning, but it would be worth it if Ana didn’t go into work tomorrow. Over a dizzying leap of hope – his own and Ana’s – he said, “Ana Alves, will you –”
“Don’t you dare,” Ana snarled, interrupting him. She jabbed a finger into his chest. It was surprisingly pointy. “Don’t you dare proposed to me as a way of getting your way. When you propose to me, you’d better mean it, buddy.”
“I do mean it!” snapped Grissom, frustrated. “This is the second time that I’ve tried to propose to you!”
Ana looked surprised. She felt surprised too. Then her eyes narrowed and, abruptly, nothing was throbbing down the length of the bond between them.
“Third time’s the charm,” declared Ana.
Abruptly, she lay down again, rearranging the sheets and blankets around herself; Ana rolled onto her side, effectively turning her back to Grissom.
It was low, so low that he nearly missed it, but Grissom could have sworn that he heard Ana mutter, “Or it had better be.”
Grissom blinked, nonplussed. He honestly didn’t know what to say about that.
Or do about Ana’s job. She worked the morning shift tomorrow, so theoretically, she would already be gone before the raid began on Affla Coffee. But Grissom would have felt better if she wasn’t there at all.
Maybe she’d be willing to revisit the issue tomorrow? Grissom wondered. When her temper’s cooled… and before she goes to work.
He was still trying to figure it out when Ana closed her eyes and fell quickly sleep. Grissom envied her that.
Chapter 19 – Ana
Grissom never really woke when Ana’s alarm went off. He did, however, try to hug Ana closer when she tried to escape their bed and his arms. That was always the trickiest part of the morning.
That particular morning, Grissom’s sleepy affections did a lot to soothe her hurt feelings from the previous night.
When Ana finally escaped their bed, she showered, dressed, and grabbed a package of pop-tarts. She was on her way to the door when the scattering of envelopes on the floor caught her eye. Yesterday, Grissom had entirely distracted her from her mail, and she had thought that she had seen an envelope from –
Leaning down, Ana scooped the letters up off the carpeting. She stuffed them in her purse, blew Grissom a kiss, and went out the door… where she discovered that it was lightly drizzling. Again.
Ana ducked back inside her apartment for an umbrella. Her second attempt at leaving for work, now armed with an umbrella and a package of pop-tarts, was much more successful.
Ana didn’t have a chance to actually read her mail until she was on the bus. Then Ana discovered that she had a couple of ill-advised credit card offers, a form letter from her alma mater begging for donations, and letters from not one but two of the fellowship organizations to which she had applied. They were noticeably fatter than her rejection letters had been too.
Ana’s hands were so unsteady that she nearly dropped them. Twice.
I wish Grissom was here, thought Ana, while staring down at the letters in her hands. She wished that she had opened them before she left home that morning. She wished that she had opened them last night. Then maybe they wouldn’t have had that silly argument about her job.
Affla Coffee seemed like a harmless place, and everyone who worked there was really nice. The hours were long, their schedule subject to sudden changes, and the managers were weird, but you couldn’t have everything.
But if Grissom didn’t like it, then he didn’t like it. He had certainly been hanging out there often enough to have an informed opinion. And he had had a lot of questions regarding Affla Coffee’s money-handling practices. And he was a detective. Grissom probably knew a lot of things that she didn’t about the seedier sides of life.
But she really needed this job. She wasn’t about to become some bloated leech, sucking the resources out of her nearest and dearest in an effort to survive. She could support herself.
Although, thought Ana, pressing her hand harder against her bag. Maybe I don’t need this job anymore…
If she had gotten any of the fellowships, she would have enough to live on for the next year. If she had gotten two of them, she would be making more money off of her art than she had ever made at any job. Ever.
And it would be all Grissom’s fault. Literally.
Grissom’s enthusiasm for her work had been what had first prompted Ana to apply for a fellowship. His support had encouraged her to keep apply even after she was rejected. Grissom made her want to be brave and take risks.
And some of the pieces that she had submitted to these two fellowships – the ones that she might have gotten – were based on cleaned up versions of sketches that she had made of Grissom. At the time, she had told herself that it was to show her progression as an artist and give the board an opportunity to see what she was currently working on – and it had certainly done that – but it had also been a bit like clutching at her lucky charm.
And it had worked! Or, well, it might have worked. She still hadn’t opened her letters yet. Ana wasn’t even certain that she wanted to open them without Grissom. She had opened the last rejection without him, but this was different.
Aside from anything else, she hadn’t included any images of Grissom in those packages. All the fellowships with the earliest deadlines had only gotten pre-Grissom works. There hadn’t been any time for anything else. It was only the fellowships with the later deadlines that had gotten the full benefit of her intimate study of Grissom’s beautiful body.
And now, she might have won two of those later fellowships. Maybe. Possibly. If she could bring herself to open those letters…
Ana shoved them back into her purse before she lost them.
At work, the unopened letters plagued her, as did Grissom’s misgivings about her workplace. Everything seemed all right but…
Grissom showed up during the morning rush. It was his usual time, but he was unusually grumpy this morning. Ana could practically feel his unhappiness radiating from him.
“Hey,” said Ana, when it was his turn to order. “I was thinking about maybe seeing if I could leave early today? There’s something I wanted to share with you.”
Grissom’s expression brightened. “Yeah? What time?”
“After the morning rush? It’s pretty dead around here then anyway.”
“And when does that end?”
Ana gave him a rough time estimate, and Grissom nodded.
“I’ll be here,” he promised.
“It’s just a rough guess! And they might say no!”
“I’ll still be here.”
Biting her lower lip, Ana nodded.
The rest of the morning rush passed in a rush of coffee and breakfast foods, and Ana was still trying to figure out if she was going to quit – the thing that Grissom really wanted – or just ask to leave early when she grabbed her purse and went back to see the shift manager in the back office.
She forgot to knock. That was her first mistake.
Her second was staring. But in her defense, she hadn’t ever seen that much money in one place before, and her boyfriend was loaded. Several of the money stacks were stained dark blue or blood red. That… wasn’t good. None of this was good.
Across the desk, Doug and Marc and Mr. Baker all stared back at her.
“Ana,” sighed Doug. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you to knock?”
At nearly the same moment, Mr. Baker said, “I really wish that you hadn’t seen this,” so sadly that Ana instinctively knew that it wasn’t going to be good for her.
Ana bolted.
Behind here, there was the screech of chair legs against the floor and the rattle of a desk being shoved past, hard. Then Ana was out the back door and running down the back alley, her feet slapping against the pavement.
Ana had never been s
uper athletic, but she had always hoped that if it came down to it, she would be slightly faster than the person next to her. That was usually all that was necessary.
But there was no one next to her. It was just her alone trying to outrun the managers.
And someone was already gaining on her.
At the end of the alley, Ana meant to go right – further into downtown, towards enveloping crowds and the police station, if she made it far enough – but she found her feet turning left instead. She ran away from help.
Ana didn’t have the time – or the oxygen, really – to worry about that. Instead, she put her head down and tried to run faster, trusting her feet to take her the right way to – toward –
Help, Ana decided, the word conjuring images of Grissom’s warm eyes and strong jaw and big hands in her mind. Gris-som, Gris-som, Gris-som, she mentally chanted, the syllables broken up to match the pounding of her fear in her veins and her running feet against the pavement.
But Grissom wasn’t there. It was just her and them and the inexplicable, inarguable sense that she had to go this way for help.
At the end of the block Ana went straight across the street, rather than trying to go around the block and back towards the downtown.
It felt like a very long city block.
Ana was winded as she approached the next corner. Despite her fear – and every iota of self-preservation in her body – she was slowing down as she turned it. The pounding footsteps behind her weren’t slowing at all, and Ana knew – she absolutely knew with a sick sinking sense of inevitability – that they were going to catch her.
It was still a shock when a large hand grabbed her arm and cruelly wrenched her around, forcibly throwing her off balance. Ana cried out and fell backwards, catching herself with her hands. She hit the pavement hard and pain darted through her, swiftly lost in the pounding pulse of her adrenaline.
Over her loomed Marc, sweaty and furious, his usually slicked back hair now so mussed that it was falling in his eyes. Doug jogged up behind him a few moments later, looking winded and annoyed.
Marc leaned down, his hands moving as if to grab her, and Ana shut her eyes.
From behind her, there was a screech of tires and a horrible, spine-chilling snarling noise. It was like thunder being frayed apart by lightening.
Ana’s eyes popped open just in time to see an enormous blur fly over her, bodily tackling Marc to the ground. Doug, who had been standing behind Marc, went down with them.
Stunned, Ana sat where she was and watched as her boyfriend first cracked Marc’s head against the ground, stunning him, and then grabbed Doug’s ankle and dragged him back into the fray when the other man tried to flee.
It was only a matter of minutes before Grissom had both men subdued.
Another man came into view then. He was nearly as tall as Grissom, slightly wider across the chest, and nearly as handsome as her boyfriend with pale blonde hair and golden skin.
Ana yelped a warning, and Grissom looked up from where he was still enthusiastically pinning her two former pursuers to the ground.
“Ana, that’s my partner, Derek,” he said reassuringly. To Derek, he said, “It’s about time that you made yourself useful!”
“You seemed to have everything well in hand,” said the other man cheerfully. “Besides, I had to park the car.”
The other detective helped Grissom to cuff the two managers. While his partner read the two managers their rights, Grissom scrambled over to Ana’s side.
“Ana! Ana, are you hurt?” he demanded, his hands already on her and looking for injuries.
“No, I don’t think so?”
“Your palms are bleeding!”
“Are they?” asked Ana blankly. She tore her gaze away from the stark lines of Grissom’s worried face to look at her hands. Yes, that absolutely was blood pooling in her palms. Feeling shaky, she said, “I must have scraped them when I fell down.”
“When he pulled you over, you mean,” said Grissom sharply, and then he pulled on her too. He gently pulled her into his arms, and Ana found that she liked that so much better than being pulled over by her boss – her former boss. Gratefully, Ana melted against Grissom.
“There was money,” said Ana. It seemed important to tell him that. Grissom was a detective. He needed to know. “There was a lot of money stacked on the desk. Some of it looked like it had blood on it.”
Grissom’s arms tightened around her.
“Don’t worry,” he promised. “I’ll take care of it.”
Ana nodded, trusting him completely. At that moment, she wasn’t worried about anything.
Chapter 20 – Ana
Later, her hands hurt like nobody’s business. It had been a very long time since Ana had last fallen off a bike and scraped her hands up, and she had forgotten how much it hurt. In fact, her butt wasn’t feeling so great either.
By then, Ana’s various scrapes had been cleaned, disinfected, and bandaged by a paramedic – something that had happened while Grissom and his colleagues were raiding the coffee house – and Ana had given her statement to Grissom’s partner, a detective named Derek da Luz. He was also very kind in a gruff, understated sort of way.
Grissom made a big, embarrassing deal about her injuries that secretly gratified Ana immensely. She had gotten to sit on a pillow while she was being interviewed in one of the interrogation rooms, and then she and her pillow had been moved to Grissom’s desk while he and Derek da Luz finished up with all the other Affla Coffee employees. At his desk, she had read books on her cell phone while her boyfriend finished wrapping up his case.
When Grissom finally came to collect her, Ana was hungry and ready to go home. Whose home, she didn’t care. When she told him as much, Grissom took her wrist and kissed Ana’s palm, just missing her bandage. It made Ana flush with pleasure.
“Mine then,” he said. His gaze was very intense. Grissom had been looking at her like that ever since he had rescued her from Doug and Marc. It made Ana’s skin tingle and her belly ache with want.
His hand resting lightly against the small of her back, Grissom guided Ana through the police station and outside into the bright sunshine and warm air. Grissom handed Ana into his SUV, kissing her other palm in passing, and Ana flushed again.
On their way to his place, Grissom called for delivery from one of the most expensive restaurants in town.
Once, before Ana had met Grissom, she had gone to eat lunch there on a whim, assuming that their lunchtime menu would be cheaper than the dinnertime one. But even their lunch menu had been so expensive that they hadn’t bothered listing prices on it, and Ana had ended up going down the street to a much cheaper diner.
When he finished with the first place, Grissom called three other restaurants, all equally swanky, and ordered delivery from them too.
“I didn’t know that any of those places delivered,” said Ana, when Grissom was finished on the phone.
“They don’t,” said Grissom cheerfully, and Ana smiled.
One of their meals was waiting for them at the security gates. The man who was delivering it was leaning against the hood of his car and smoking a cigarette. Grissom paid the man for their meal and then tipped him for his services, and then did the same with the other three delivery men when they rolled up with their orders.
From the safety of Grissom’s SUV, Ana watched him fondly. She wondered if she would ever be able to persuade him that takeout from one place could be sufficient – or even that leftovers were a thing that other people ate, not just her.
Their dinner secured, Grissom returned to the car. As they drove past the gates that guarded Grissom’s property from the world at large, Ana heaved a relieved breath. Watching the flowering trees and lush green lawns roll past her window and hearing the gravel crunch under the SUV’s wheels, filled Ana with a sense of well being. She didn’t need a fence or a big lawn or a fancy security system to keep her safe – Ana relied on Grissom himself for that – but it was a relief to finally be
home again after a long and trying day.
Grissom insisted on helping Ana out of the car, kissing her neck in passing. He also carried their food inside, leaving it in the kitchen before he literally swept Ana off of her feet and up the sweeping main staircase.
Grissom carried Ana directly to the master bedroom, where he started kissing her even before the door banged shut behind them.
These kisses were hard and hungry and desperate. He nipped her lip, and then swept his tongue into her mouth, claiming Ana’s mouth as his own.
Between kisses, Grissom said fiercely, “You were so scared. I could feel how frightened you were – how much in danger.”
There, Ana pulled back – she meant to ask him how he could feel her fear – but Grissom followed her. He kissed her and he touched her, his hands seemingly everywhere: cupping Ana’s cheeks, stroking down her sides, fondling her breast, and then gripping her hips.
Ana leaned into him, clutching at Grissom and moaning at how good everything felt. She loved the feel of Grissom’s tongue sliding against her own and his hands touching her everywhere. She touched him too, stroking his chest and thumbing one of his flat nipples before running her hands down his amazing abdomen.
“I was so scared for you,” murmured Grissom against her lips. “What if I hadn’t gotten there in time? I could have lost you. You could have died.”
“But I didn’t die!” protested Ana between kisses. “You came in time. I knew you would.”
And as she said it, Ana realized that she had known that he would. She had somehow known that Grissom wasn’t very far away, and she had known that he was getting closer. She’d known that he was coming to save her. Ana had just had to stay one step ahead of them until he got there.
And he had gotten there. Grissom had come for her, like a white knight charging in on a horse.
Just then, though, her white knight was guiding Ana backward towards his bed. The edge of the mattress caught Ana behind the knees, and she abruptly sat down.
And then Grissom was on her, easing her back onto the mattress as he planted hard, hot kisses on every inch of skin that he could reach. Swiftly, he stripped Ana of her shirt and shoes and socks. Ana lost her pants and panties in one fell swoop. Her bra was the last article of clothing to go, leaving Ana naked before her clothed lover.
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