They turned toward him. One of the guards reached inside his jacket and Ronan pointed his weapon at the man’s head.
“Don’t,” Ronan said. “Just move and none of your guests here will have to tell the press how reckless security is at the Whitmore.”
The man hesitated, then moved to the side.
Someone screamed as Ronan and Julia hit the last of the stairs, Ronan’s weapon in full view of the guests in the foyer.
They scurried toward the hall as Ronan turned to face the guards, shoving Julia behind his back.
He walked backwards toward the door, leveling the gun from one guard to the other, then to the two guards who appeared in the hall behind them, guns hanging from their hands. “You have a lot of innocent people here. All you have to do is let us go.”
He continued facing them as he descended the stairs leading to the mansion, the sixth sense he’d developed in Afghanistan together with Julia’s hand preventing him from tripping as the guards converged in the doorway of the building.
Ronan waited until he hit the sidewalk next to Julia to turn around. He pulled her after him and ran.
16
She was still catching her breath as she looked across the car’s interior at his face, illuminated by the city lights as they sped away from the Whitmore. The tissue around one of his eyes was swollen, a trickle of blood seeping from a cut above his brow.
They’d raced away from the Whitmore, the guards’ shouting echoing behind them as they weaved their way through side streets and alleys before they came to the silver Audi parked on the street.
She’d assumed the car was Ronan’s from the purposeful way he strode toward it, and she’d slid into the passenger seat as he’d started the engine. They were pulling into traffic less than five seconds later, Ronan accelerating so fast the force of it pushed her back against the seat.
“What were you doing there?” she asked.
“I could ask you the same question,” he said through clenched teeth.
“I was looking for my sister.”
“So was I.”
So he’d taken the job then. She should have been relieved. Instead all she felt was annoyed, though whether by his interference or the relief she’d felt when she’d heard his voice behind Joel, she couldn’t have said for sure.
“You should have told me,” she said.
“You should have told me,” he countered, his eyes on the rearview mirror.
Her hands started shaking as the adrenaline left her body. She forced her breath steady. They could argue about who was more responsible for the shit show at the Whitmore later, when they were sure they weren’t being followed by the guards.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Your place,” he said.
“Why not yours?”
“Too many questions.”
Right. He lived with his brothers.
“I thought you said you were in business with your brothers,” she said. “Don’t they know you were at the Whitmore?”
He glanced at her. “You ask a lot of questions for someone who just escaped Joel Boylston.”
“So?”
“They know I was there. They don’t know you were there. You’re a complication I need time to manage.”
She fluttered her eyelashes. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
He met her eyes. “I can assure you, I do not.”
She couldn’t begin to read the meaning in his words, the way his eyes burned into hers before he returned them to the road.
“I could have handled Joel,” she said.
“It looked more like he was handling you,” he said.
“Why are you pissed off?” she asked. “You were working your angle. I was working mine.”
“Some angle.”
“Don’t you dare judge me.” She was surprised to feel the sting of angry tears. She blinked them away. “Wait until your sister goes missing, until you have to lay awake at night wondering if she’s alive or dead, if someone is hurting her, if she’s wondering why you haven’t come for her. Then you can talk about my angle.”
She expected him to bite back. Instead he spoke softly.
“You’re right. I understand why you did what you did. It was dangerous, that’s all. If you’d told me what you were going to do, I might have been able to help.”
You’ve lost someone. Let’s just say I know a little bit about that.
The words came back to her from the night at his house.
“Help or talk me out of going?” She had a feeling now wasn’t the time to ask for more detail about who he’d lost.
“What if they’re the same thing?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and realized she’d left the cape that went with Elise’s dress back at the Whitmore Club. “Seems like I’m the one who helped you.”
He scoffed. “That piece of meat?” he asked, referring to the guard he’d fought in the hallway. “I had him under control.”
“You could just say thank you, you know.”
He glanced at her, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “So could you.”
She pressed her lips together to hide her own smile and turned her face to the window as they pulled in front of her apartment building.
Jesus. Why did he have to be so damn sexy?
“Think they know who we are?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he said, turning off the car. “But the place is crawling with cameras. They’ll know soon enough.”
“What then?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. I’m working on it.”
They’d left the Whitmore less than thirty minutes earlier, but she had no doubt it was true. She didn’t know Ronan Murphy well, but she sensed his mind was like a steel trap backed up by a supercomputer.
His expression was unreadable in the glow of the street lamps, his jaw like a precisely cut block of ice. She reached up on impulse, touched the area around his bleeding brow.
Surprise shaded his eyes when he looked at her.
“Come in,” she said. “I’ll take a look at that.”
“It’s fine. I’ll deal with it when I get home.”
She smiled at him through the dark. “I’m not sending you back out into the night with a bleeding face.”
It was an echo of his words the night he’d tended to her leg.
He returned her smile. “You’re kind of a smart ass, aren’t you?”
“Now you’re just insulting me.” She reached for the door. "I am a smart ass. It’s kind of my thing.”
17
Ronan avoided her eyes while she dabbed at the gash above his brow. His brain had been screaming a red alert since the moment he stepped into her apartment.
Check that. His brain had been screaming a red alert since the moment he fell on top of Julia Berenger in the alley behind Seth Campbell’s house.
And yet here he was, sitting in her apartment at midnight, letting her minister to him with a butterfly touch that felt too tender for the steel he’d seen her exhibit in the alley and at the Whitmore.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“No.” He answered without thinking. He’d learned a long time ago that it didn’t matter if something hurt. Acknowledging it didn’t change anything. Only getting through it could do that: righting the wrong, calling it done, waiting for the pain to pass.
“Liar.” She squeezed some gel from a tiny tube of Neosporin. “You might need stitches.”
“It’ll be fine.” He’d examined the wound in the mirror hanging near the front door while Julia had assembled her supplies. The cut was bloody, but it would close on its own.
“Are you always so stubborn?” she asked, placing a bandage over the cut.
“Says the woman who snuck onto the third floor of the Whitmore Club.”
She looked into his eyes and he cursed silently. This was a mistake of epic proportions: he was in Julia Berenger’s apartment, her thigh close enough to kiss, exposed from the tea
r in her dress.
Her hands were light as a feather and hot enough to make him burn. Or was that him? His own body on fire?
Because he was on fire. He wanted to believe he had more sense than to fall under the spell of John Taylor’s granddaughter while he worked the Berenger case, but it was impossible to deny the rebellion of his body, the rigidness of his cock inside his tuxedo trousers, the desire to slide his hand up her thigh.
He felt a moment’s shame — the poor woman had just been manhandled by that animal Boylston — but she held his gaze, her eyes like amber fire in the light cast from the table lamp in her living room.
She stepped closer, straddling one of his thighs, and slid a hand through his hair. The swell of her breasts was tantalizingly close to his face, and he had to resist the urge to press his lips to her porcelain skin.
It was going to happen. He felt the inevitability of it even as he fought against it, had felt the inevitability of it since the moment she’d rolled under him in the alley, the moment she’d given him shit about knocking her to the ground.
“This is going to be complicated,” he said.
“So you’ve said.”
“We can’t undo it,” he said.
She held his face in her hands, tipped it toward hers, and left a trail of kisses across his brow, avoiding the bandage she’d just applied. “Okay.”
He thought of Boylston pawing at her, of the stricken expression hiding behind her implacable facade. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
He groaned and swept her into his arms, his mouth finding hers, already open for him, her tongue meeting his with a ferocity that took his breath away.
He wasn’t even aware of the floor under his feet as he carried her down the hall.
There was nothing but her, soft and fierce in his arms.
18
She wanted him. That’s what it came down to. Maybe it was a mistake, but she didn’t think so. It felt fated, had felt fated since she’d sat across from him in the diner, swimming through the deep sea of his eyes.
His arms were strong and sure as he carried her to the bedroom, his mouth tender and yielding one moment, urgent and demanding the next.
His tongue stirred the fire of her desire, roaring to life at her center, and she pressed her thighs together to ease the throbbing between her legs, the yawn of need clamoring for attention.
He set her down in her bedroom, and slipped his hands around her neck, into the hair at the back of her head. He kissed her face as he pulled the pins from her hair, his lips soft and warm as he touched them to her temples, her brow, across her closed eyelids, down the bridge of her nose.
He tipped her face, forcing her to look at him, and rubbed his thumb across her lips, sensitive and swollen from his kisses. “My god, you’re beautiful, Julia.”
She slid her hands up his chest and pulled the tuxedo jacket off his shoulders.
He held her gaze as he shrugged it to the floor and she reached for the buttons on his shirt. She couldn’t look away as she unfastened each one, slowly revealing a hard, muscled chest.
She slipped the shirt off his shoulders and ran her palms across his pecs, leaning in to kiss each of his nipples.
He tightened his grip in her hair and the sensation sent a rush of moisture to her core, a throb of lust as she imagined him sliding into her.
“You’re beautiful too,” she said.
He lowered his head to hers, kissed her long and slow before pulling away. “Turn around.”
There was something new in his voice. A command she didn’t want to disobey.
She turned, offering him her backside, and shivered when he touched his lips to the tender skin at the back of her neck.
She felt the pressure of his hands at the top of the dress, heard the whisper of the zipper as he lowered it, the chill of the room strangely sensual against the heat emanating from their bodies.
He let the dress sit on her hips as he kissed her bare shoulders, biting her skin just hard enough to make her drop her head forward, her moan soft and unfamiliar in the silence of the room.
She sighed when he slid his hands inside the fabric, nudging it down over her hips until it pooled on the floor at her feet.
She was glad she hadn’t worn a bra. She hadn’t been sure she could pull it off — she was no A cup — but now she was grateful for one less piece of clothing between them.
She wanted to feel the slide of his skin on hers. Wanted it now.
He was right behind her, his body pressed against hers, the erect cock in his trousers nestled against the dip in her lower back as he ran his hands up her arms and across her shoulders.
He traced his way down the sides of her body with both hands, his touch sparking like a lit match across her skin.
Pausing on her hips, he moved his hands around to cup her ass, squeezing until she sighed with pleasure. Then he moved his hands down to her thighs and slid his palms between her legs.
She was leaning against him, her legs weak with the power of her need. The bare skin of his chest was warm against her back, and she leaned her head back against his shoulder as he worked his hands deeper between her thighs, his thumbs brushing against the pulsing flesh of her pussy.
She could almost feel his fingers inside her, knew how easily they’d slide into her channel, through her slickness. She was so wet her panties were soaked between her legs.
He removed his hands from between her legs, slipping them into the waistband of her underwear and tugging them off her hips until they joined her dress on the floor.
Finally she was naked. Naked and ready for him to fill her.
Her anticipation was shattered when a blast of cold air hit her back as he stepped away from her body.
She moved to turn around, wanting him against her again, but his voice stopped her.
“I didn’t tell you to move.”
She should have been pissed. She didn’t take orders. Not from anybody.
Except she wanted to take orders from Ronan Murphy — here and now at least. The command in his voice sent another surge of wet heat to her center.
“I’m going to look at you,” he said behind her. “I’ll let you know when I’m done.”
A tremble rolled through her body — desire and lust and desperation to have him against her again. He was silent behind her, and she waited, wondering what he saw when he looked at her.
“Turn around,” he said.
She followed his instructions and was totally exposed to him.
She tried to gauge his expression, but his face was hidden in the shadows of the room. He was so still she fell into the moment where nothing existed outside of this room.
Outside of Ronan Murphy.
Finally he came toward her, his features slowly illuminated by the moonlight streaming in through the windows. Then she saw his eyes, saw her need and surprise mirrored in his own, knew that whatever she was feeling, whatever power had taken hold of her, he was feeling it too.
She took a step toward him, wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her naked body against his. When she stood on tiptoe to kiss him, he closed his hands around her bare ass and scooped her into his arms.
She wrapped her legs around his waist, felt his cock through the wool of his pants, sighed into his mouth as he closed his lips over hers and took her to bed.
19
She was magnificent. Everything he had imagined her to be and more.
He laid her on the bed and stood over her. She looked up at him with clear eyes, and he let his gaze travel from the painful loveliness of her face, down her elegant neck, over the perfect curve of her breasts.
Her stomach had a slight swell he wanted to kiss, nip at with his teeth. He wanted to sink his face into its plushness and breathe her in. Her knees were bent, thighs apart and giving him a perfect view of the tangle of fair curls, tidy but not overly shaved, between her legs. Moisture glimmered on her folds even in the dim light of the room.
She sat u
p, reached for the button on his trousers, and unzipped his pants. He let her slide the tuxedo trousers from his hips along with his underwear. His cock sprang free and he had to stifle a groan when it brushed against the velvety softness of her cheek.
She ran her hands up his thighs and closed one palm around his shaft. Then he couldn’t control the hiss that emerged from his mouth.
He wanted to dive into her, to stroke and coax, to pillage and consume.
He closed his eyes as she stroked his cock, forcing himself to breathe. He wouldn’t rush this first time with her even as he knew it wouldn’t be their last. He would take his time, map her body like a verdant new land.
His good intentions flew out the window the moment she closed her lips around his swollen head.
He cradled her head in his hands and pushed her back onto the bed, stretching his body over hers with a growl. “Not this time.”
She bent her knees around his hips, thrusting her pussy, wet and hot, against his throbbing cock. “Please.”
“I need to taste you,” he said.
He dipped his tongue into the sweet pool of her mouth, swept every corner as he ran his hand down the ripe curves of her body.
She bit his lip when he tried to leave her mouth, and he chuckled as he kissed his way down her neck and chest, circling the hard peaks of her nipples with his tongue before closing his mouth around one of them and sucking.
She moaned. Her hips came up off the bed, her hands grasping the sheets on either side of her body as he moved to her other breast, licking and lapping at the nipple until she was whimpered with desperation.
He moved his lips into the dip above her stomach, then over the gentle mound he’d been dying to sink into. He turned his face, rubbing his cheek against the pillowy softness before nipping at it with his teeth.
“Please,” she panted.
“Almost there, lovely,” he murmured against her skin.
Kneeling between her legs, he pressed her thighs open and breathed in the sight of her. She was even more perfect up close, the hair that covered her pubis a shade paler than the hair on her head, barely hiding the swollen folds of her pussy, dappled with the proof of her lust.
Murphy’s Law: Murphy’s Law Book One Page 9
