by Linda Howard
I pinched the bridge of my nose, thinking. Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly—gee, wonder why that was—but it seemed to me I couldn’t leave Lynn in the lurch again. She had a life outside of Great Bods, and though she’d been great about covering for me, I couldn’t take advantage of her or I’d end up losing a top-notch assistant.
I wrote all of that down, explaining it to Wyatt as best I could. I was getting tired of all that damn writing.
To my surprise, he read my explanation, then simply studied my face for a while. I don’t know what he saw there, maybe that I really needed to go to work, or maybe on reflection he agreed with me that the risk to Great Bods might not be that high. “All right,” he finally said. “But I’m going to put someone with you at all times. Sit here, and I’ll go clear it with Chief Gray.”
He could have pulled a fast one on me, he’s done it before, but I sat there. When he came back, he got his suit jacket from the hook on the back of the door and said, “Let’s go.”
I got my tote and stood, my expression asking the question for me.
“I’m your bodyguard for the rest of the day,” he explained.
I was happy enough with that.
Chapter
Twenty-three
Lynn was mightily relieved when I showed up for work not only on time, but a little bit early. Wyatt hadn’t mentioned my lack of a voice when he’d called her that morning, and she was concerned enough that I couldn’t even whisper that when she left work she went to a health-food store and brought back a selection of teas that were supposed to help soothe an inflamed throat. She even offered to stay late and help me, but I sent her on her way. Wyatt was there if I needed anyone to talk for me.
All in all, it was a nice, normal day at Great Bods. No white Malibus parked across the street; no blond psychos pitched firebombs through the front door. It was my kind of day, just the buffer I needed to help me get my feet back under me. Still, I felt as if I were balanced on the edge of despair, and I kept giving myself pep talks, pulling myself back. Yes, my home had burned, but no one had been killed. Yes, I’d lost all my personal possessions, but, hey, my hair hadn’t caught on fire. Yes, the viciousness of my unknown stalker and would-be killer was frightening, but now I knew what she looked like and I was majorly pissed at her, so when I saw her again I intended to go for her—unless Wyatt had me locked in some stinky squad car again.
I had a hard time letting go of my resentment over that.
He prowled around like the cop he was, constantly checking the street, the parking lot, walking around the building. I commandeered one of my second-shift instructors to answer the phone for me and that turned out to be a godsend, because when I mentioned, via pen and paper, that we were looking for an assistant assistant-manager, she became very excited and asked if she could train for the job.
Well, who knew? She, her name was JoAnn, was actually my least popular instructor, because her attitude was all business. On the other hand, she was also one of my most knowledgeable instructors. She had no office experience at all, but I really liked her manner on the phone. When she didn’t know what to do, she sounded as if she did, kind of like a politician. I would definitely talk to Lynn about her.
Whether it was the herbal teas or giving my voice a complete rest, by the end of the day swallowing seemed to be easier. I was so hungry I was nauseated, though, so JoAnn went to a hamburger joint and picked up a burger and fries for Wyatt, and a nice thick milk shake for me—strawberry, my favorite. The cold felt just as good on my poor throat as the hot tea had.
It was Thursday, almost one week to the hour since my first run-in with the wacko on wheels. I was supposed to have gotten the stitches out of my hairline today, I remembered. I reached up under my wing of hair and felt them. They felt stiff and dry, and the skin surrounding them was prickly with the new growth of hair.
How hard could it be to remove stitches? I’d had them removed before and it didn’t hurt, at the most stinging a little, so it couldn’t be any big deal. I had manicure scissors in my office, and tweezers in the first-aid kit. I needed those stitches out. I needed to put that episode behind me. Yes, I’d gotten a great new haircut out of the deal, but overall it had been a bummer.
I took my supplies into the ladies’ room with me, only to discover my hair wouldn’t stay back out of the way; it wanted to swing forward in that great curve Shay had shaped it into. I didn’t have any hair clips but I did have a couple of scrunchies in my office. I zipped out of the ladies’ room into my office, grabbed a scrunchie, and zipped right back out. Wyatt saw me and called out “Hey!” but I waved at him and kept on going. He probably thought I had an urgent need for the ladies’.
Except he walked in while I was snipping through the third stitch.
“Holy hell!”
I jumped, which is not a good thing when you have sharp little scissors aimed at a newly healed laceration. I scowled at his reflection in the mirror, then tilted my head again so I could see exactly where the next stitch was.
“Oh, fuck,” he muttered, coming to stand next to me. “Stop, before you stab yourself with those things. I would ask what you’re doing, but I can see what you’re doing, I just don’t know why. Weren’t you supposed to see a doctor for this?”
I nodded, and went for that stitch again.
He closed his hand over mine. “Give those to me. God. I’ll do it.”
I let him have the scissors, but smirked and shook my head.
“You don’t think I can do it?” he asked, challenged.
I shook my head again, absolutely certain he couldn’t.
He found out why a second or two later, when he realized there was no way his big fingers would fit into the small holes of the scissor handles. Frustrated, he stared at them, and in triumph I retrieved them and went to work again. Okay, so it was a very small victory. It felt good anyway. I hadn’t had many victories lately, and I was feeling deprived.
So I snipped the stitches, and he used the tweezers to gently pull the pieces of thread out. Tiny beads of blood formed here and there, so I opened one of the antiseptic pads from the first-aid kit and blotted them off. They didn’t reappear, and that was that. Removing the scrunchie I’d used to hold my hair back, I swung my hair and beamed.
“Whatever it takes,” he muttered, then reverted to cop and pushed open the door of each empty stall in turn, until he had inspected all six stalls. He just couldn’t help it, I guess.
I closed up right on time at nine, and JoAnn stayed to see what was involved in securing the place for the night. With her help the process went, well, twice as fast—duh—and we were ready to leave at nine-twenty. Wyatt checked outside before we left.
Once again I took a circuitous route, with Wyatt following me. But I wasn’t going home, I thought with a pang. I would never go there again, or at least it would never be home again. I would have to go see it, something in me demanded I do that. I guess it’s like viewing the body at a funeral, to build a final memory, a closure. You’d think our brains would understand death and let it go at that, but nope, we need to see that dead person and replace the live memory with the dead memory. Or something like that.
If Wyatt and I got married, his house would be my home from this very day on. If we weren’t going to get married, I needed to know pretty damn quick so I could make other arrangements. When I could talk again, we had to have that conversation.
Damn, I had to get things moving! If we did get married, it would be in twenty-two days. Just three weeks! And I hadn’t even picked out the fabric for my gown yet! Plus I still had to talk to Monica Stevens, and Sally, and get Jazz and Sally back together, and somehow replace my lost stuff—I didn’t have enough days left!
As some friendly advice, I don’t ever recommend trying to organize a wedding while dealing with a homicidal stalker. It just gets too complicated.
Wyatt had briefed me on how to shake someone following you, so before we got to a place he’d picked out ahead of time—a service st
ation on a left-hand corner—he turned off and left me alone. My heartbeat picked up speed at my sudden sense of vulnerability, but I didn’t see any suspicious vehicles behind me, which means no white Chevrolets. There was traffic behind me, though, so that didn’t mean I was in the clear. She could have swapped cars, and be in something entirely different now. MacInnes and Forester were running the registration on white late-model Malibus, but that wasn’t exactly an easy thing to do and so far they hadn’t come up with anything. In the meantime, she could now be driving a Mazda.
I had to stop at a traffic light, my left blinker on, and wait for oncoming traffic to pass. When I turned left, so did three other vehicles. But I immediately turned left again into the service station parking lot, cut across, and went back into the street from which we’d turned off, except going back the way I’d come. Anyone following me would have to do the same thing or lose me, and, well, that would be noticeable.
No one followed. Breathing easier, I drove to where Wyatt was waiting for me.
We went home—to his house—after that.
The minute I drove into his garage, exhaustion overtook me. I’d had maybe two hours’ sleep last night, and I doubted Wyatt had gotten any more than that, plus both of us had burned a lot of adrenaline. I went to the table, scribbled If you don’t mind, call Mom and Dad, bring them up to speed. I’m going to take a shower.
He nodded, and stood watching me as I stumbled toward the stairs. At the top, automatically I turned toward the master bedroom, where I had slept with him so many times. I was actually in the master bath before I realized my error and reversed my steps down the hall to what I now thought of as “my” bathroom. After taking a quick shower, brushing my teeth, moisturizing—the usual stuff—I pulled on his robe and wrapped it around me, almost literally, before tying the belt as tightly as I could so it would stay snug. Man, I hoped there were sheets on the bed in the guest room, because if there weren’t I didn’t have the energy to make the bed and I’d just have to sleep on the bedspread.
Except he was waiting for me when I left the bathroom, patiently leaning against the opposite wall. He wore only a pair of navy blue boxer briefs, and he smelled of soap and water, telling me his shower had been even quicker than mine, but then he didn’t moisturize so in a way it wasn’t a fair comparison.
I immediately held up my hand, which he simply took and used to pull me into him. Before I knew it, he’d lifted me in his arms and was carrying me to the master bedroom.
“You’re not sleeping alone,” he said sharply when I thumped his shoulder with my fist and pushed at him. “Not tonight. You’ll have a nightmare.”
He was probably right about that, but I’m an adult, I can handle a nightmare alone. On the other hand, I believe in making things easy on myself. I stopped thumping and let him put me on the big king bed.
He pulled on one end of the belt and the damn thing came untied. Robes…you just can’t trust them. I was naked beneath it, which was no big surprise; like I’d have been wearing it if I’d had any pajamas there? He pulled it off me and tossed it aside, then stripped down his shorts and stepped out of them. Despite my conviction that we shouldn’t have sex until we had settled all of our issues, despite how tired I was, despite the fact that I was still mad at him about locking me in the squad car—okay, so I wasn’t nearly as mad as I had been—naked, he was mouthwateringly delicious, all broad-shouldered and muscled and nicely hung.
When he slid into bed, it was all I could do to stop myself from instinctively turning into his arms. He yawned, and stretched out one brawny arm to turn off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. Hurriedly I pulled the covers over me, because he’d followed his usual practice of turning the air-conditioning down low enough to form permafrost on living tissue. Snuggled under the blanket, his body heat already spreading through the bed to warm me, I turned on my side and slept.
He was right about the nightmares. My subconscious always dealt with bad situations for me, which is a handy thing for a subconscious to do. Most of the time I didn’t have real nightmares, just vivid, sort of upsetting dreams, but that night it was a real nightmare.
There was no big mystery to figure out, no symbolism, just a straightforward reenactment of my terror. I was caught in a fire, and I couldn’t find the way out. I tried to hold my breath but the oily black smoke slid into my nose, my mouth, into my throat and lungs, and its suffocating weight pressed down on me. I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, and the heat kept getting more and more intense until I knew this was it, the flames were about to reach me, and then I would burn—
“Blair, shhh, I have you. It’s okay. Wake up.”
He did have me, I blearily realized. I was in his arms, cradled against his warm body, the specter of fire fading into unreality. The lamp spilled its mellow light over the bedroom.
I relaxed with a sigh, feeling safe for the first time in days. “I’m okay,” I whispered. A second later realization hit, and I blinked at him. “I whispered!”
“So I heard.” His mouth curved in a smile. “Quiet time is over, I guess. I’ll get you some water; you were coughing a little.”
Disentangling from both the covers and me, he went into the bathroom and came back with a glass of water, which I sipped cautiously. Yep, swallowing still hurt some. After a few sips I handed the glass back to him and he drained it to the bottom on his way back to the bathroom.
Then he came back to bed, grasped my hips, and pulled me to the edge of the mattress, onto his outthrust erection.
Chapter
Twenty-four
I gasped, my entire body jolted by the hard intrusion. He pulled me up and reversed our positions, sitting on the edge of the mattress with me astride him, his arms supporting me as I arched back in sheer, overwhelming pleasure.
“Remember that Tantric sex you wanted to try?” he murmured, his voice low and dark. “I checked it out. No moving…how long do you think you can go without moving?” He lifted my torso up to meet his mouth, sucking hard at both my nipples, pulling them into erect peaks before moving on, kissing his way up my chest and then clamping his mouth to the side of my neck.
Maybe it was because we hadn’t made love in over a week; maybe it was because death had come close to separating us forever. The why didn’t really matter, not when the sensations of our joined bodies and his mouth on my neck were surging through me. I don’t particularly like having my breasts touched; it’s either boring, or painful. But something about what he’d just done, that single hard, pulling suction on each nipple, made my whole body tingle. And my neck…oh, God, my neck…kissing me there always made fireworks go off behind my eyelids.
“Do you think I can make you come by kissing your neck?” he whispered, before taking a small bite just where my neck joined my shoulder, and flicking his tongue rapidly against the captured flesh. My throat was too raw for me to scream but I could moan, almost, the sound not much more than a broken whimper. My body flexed under the surge of intense pleasure, my hips arching inward to take more of his penis inside me.
He released the grip of his teeth on my neck, his breath feathering along the wetness as he said, “Uh uh, no moving. We have to be still.”
Was he crazy? My God, how could I possibly be still? But the idea tantalized and tempted. Feeling him like this was incredibly erotic. No thrusting, no rushing headlong into climax, just this…his body hard and warm against me, his penis a hard, solid presence pushing up into me, the fluidity of my body around him. I could feel his heartbeat thundering against my breasts, my own pulse beating through me. I wondered if he could feel my pulse from inside me, if his cock was surrounded and stroked by the beat of my blood.
My head drooped on his shoulder and I panted against his warm, damp skin. Instinctively I turned my head and lightly bit the side of his neck, just as he had done to me, and felt the answering throb of his penis. He groaned, a harsh sound in the quiet room.
Thoughts swam through my mind, things I hadn’t considered e
arlier when I’d been listing my immediate needs. My birth control pills had gone up in flames that morning. There was little or no chance of pregnancy right now, I knew that; my body needed to return to my natural cycle first. But the act suddenly seemed fraught with possibilities, with both power and vulnerability. My body felt oddly lush, magically female. I wanted to have his baby, wanted everything our bodies promised.
I dug my nails into his shoulders, lifted my mouth enough to bite his earlobe. “No birth control pills,” I whispered into his ear, the words not much more than a breath.
I felt his response deep inside me, a flexing, a seeking. His arms tightened around me and he sank one hand into my hair, cradling my head as he fused our mouths together, his tongue moving, probing, taking. And I took him too, took his mouth, his breath, while deep inside I tightened and flexed muscles that held him, massaged him, drew him groaning to the brink of climax.
He left my mouth and all but attacked my neck, his hand in my hair holding my head arched back so he had complete access. The fierce throb of pleasure that shuddered through me almost took me all the way, almost, so close the first hot flare shot along my nerve endings.
“Don’t move,” he groaned against my neck. “Don’t move.”
I wanted to move, I desperately needed to move, to rise and fall on his penetrating flesh and end this exquisite torture. I would need only one thrust, just one…and yet, because the torture was exquisite, I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to quiver here, just on the edge, and feel the shudders rippling through his big body as he struggled with the same need.
“No moving,” I whispered back to him, and desperately he grabbed my bottom.
Our bodies were hot, steamy. Where our skin was plastered together we sweated, but the cold air of the air-conditioning washed over my back like the breath of frost. He was kneading my bottom in his big hands, the motion pulling, opening me so that I felt the chill touch damp places that were normally protected. The contrast between hot and cold was disorienting, sending my senses spinning. His fingers slid along my bottom, down, down, until he stroked the tightly stretched skin where he entered me.
