Cavanaugh Watch (15 page)

“If this—hic—isn’t scary—hic—enough,” she said, referring to how quickly they had come together, “I—hic—don’t know—hic—what is—hic.”

He drew her even closer, so that their breaths mingled along with their heartbeats. “By ‘this’ you mean making love with me?”

She could feel herself heating again. Longing. Even as her chest kept heaving from the damn hiccups. “Yeah—hic.”

“Okay,” he said gamely, “then we’ll try more of the same.”

Before she could protest, he brought his lips down over hers, momentarily stealing her breath away. At first, her hiccups echoed inside his mouth as well as her body. But gradually, as he kissed her over and over again, his hands passing along her flesh, claiming her the way he had before, the hiccups subsided until they finally disappeared altogether.

She felt as if she were spinning out of her own body and into space.

“Does the AMA know about this method?” she murmured the moment his mouth left hers and began to trail along her throat. Her hiccups might have been gone, but her body vibrated like a tuning fork struck against a goblet filled with champagne.

“Haven’t had time to notify them,” he answered, his breath gliding along her skin, heightening her arousal with every passing second. “You can take the credit for it if you want.”

There was only one thing she wanted right now and credit had nothing to do with it.

Janelle had no idea what was going on or why Sawyer had this effect on her. All she knew was that she desperately wanted it to continue for as long as possible. Somehow, in the space of less than twenty-four hours, she had gotten utterly and incredibly hooked on a man she knew was bad for her.

Bad only because she knew that this would end one way. Badly. At least, for her. But it didn’t stop her from wanting to be with him. From wanting to make love with him. Over and over again until she expired.

From out of a haze, she heard his voice against her ear. She shivered even as it brought a blanket of warmth with it.

“We’ve only got fifteen minutes left,” Sawyer whispered urgently.

Fifteen minutes. The blink of an eye, or eternity. It all depended on the way it was handled.

“Then we’d better make the most of it,” she told him. Before he could digest her words, she pushed him onto his back and began to move along his body. Straddling him, she did her very best to bring him as close to a climax as physically possible before she drew back and retreated.

She did it not once, but three times. When she heard him groan, a wicked, pleasure-filled laugh escaped her lips. It was nice, just this once, to be in control. There was so little of it where he was concerned.

But as she went to move away the third time, Sawyer surprised her as he caught her wrists and pulled her down to him.

“Not this time,” he warned. There were sparks in his eyes. She could feel an electrical current pass through her. Holding her fast, Sawyer switched their positions until he was the one on top. And then he proceeded to do things to her that she could only term as sweet agony. Every nerve ending raced up to the surface, eager to take part. To feel.

Sawyer anointed her body with his tongue until she was primed and moist, ready to come apart at the seams.

Poised over her body, his hands joined with hers, he looked down at her, a grin on his face. His eyes teased hers. “Tables are turned, Cavanaugh. Tell me, how does it feel?”

She raised her head. “I won’t tell you, I’ll show you.” The next minute, she stretched as far as she could. Her lips captured his.

It was all the encouragement he needed.

Unable to resist her or the demands slamming through his body any longer, Sawyer sank down into the heated kiss. After a beat, he parted her legs with his knee. The next moment, they were joined and urgently racing toward the final moment that they had been anticipating. When they reached it, the movement kept it escalating for as long as humanly possible.

Neither wanted it to end. Or to have reality descend before absolutely necessary.

Chapter 15

V
ery slowly, but faster than she was happy about, the euphoria lifted and receded. Reality arrived to nudge her, however unwillingly, back into her everyday world. At the same moment, strains of “Tara,” the theme song from
Gone With the Wind
, intrusively elbowed its way into the atmosphere.

Confused, still a little disoriented, Janelle turned only her head toward Sawyer. “Do you have music that goes on automatically?” He didn’t strike her as the type. That kind of scene belonged to a Romeo, something Sawyer definitely was not.

“If I did, it wouldn’t be that.” Sawyer sat up, listening. At first he thought the music might be coming from a neighboring apartment. But it sounded too close, as if in the same room with them. “That’s coming from your purse,” he realized. Sawyer frowned. Didn’t she recognize her own phone? “That’s a hell of a ring tone for your cell phone.”

Mixing modesty and pragmatism, Janelle had already slipped on her underwear while Sawyer was trying to determine the origin of the music. Getting to her feet, she grabbed her blouse and punched her arms through the sleeves. She reached for her purse, lying beside her discarded skirt. The theme was still continuing, but who knew for how long.

“That’s not my phone.”

“Phonesitting?” he guessed as she pulled a cell phone out of the bowels of her purse. The phone looked as if it had been kicked around a bit.

Janelle held her hand up to silence him as she flipped open the cell. “Hello?”

“Mariel?” the voice on the other end was male and sounded uncertain.

“No, I—”

Before she could say another word, or ask anything, the connection went dead. Frowning, she flipped the cover closed again. “Guess that answers that,” she commented more to herself than to Sawyer.

“You come with subtitles?” Sawyer asked. She turned around to see that he was behind her and had already pulled on his jeans.

She supposed he deserved an explanation and told him as much as she knew. “I found this phone in the parking lot this morning. I was going to try to find out who it belonged to, but then I got caught up doing things at work and completely forgot about it.” She looked at the item in her hand. “The cell phone belongs to Mariel. Collins,” she added after a beat.

She could see the name meant absolutely nothing to Sawyer. Why should it?

“She’s one of the assistants in the D.A.’s office,” Janelle explained. A fragment of a scene played back in her head. “No wonder she looked so upset this morning,” she realized. “Mariel was probably looking for her phone.”

Picking up her skirt, she was about to step into it when she suddenly paused. Something wasn’t right. “Then why didn’t she say anything?” Her eyes met Sawyer’s. It was obvious to her that he was waiting for her to start making sense. “When I asked her if anything was wrong—because she looked really upset and nervous about something—she said no. Why wouldn’t she tell me she was looking for her cell phone? Or ask me if I’d seen it?”

“Maybe because she had something to hide.” Slipping on his dark shirt, he began to button it. “Usually when people don’t ask for help it’s because they don’t want any attention drawn to the problem.”

“Either that, or they’re super macho and have an ego problem.”

“Wouldn’t know about that,” he commented absently. His mind juggling disjointed pieces of the puzzle, Sawyer suddenly stopped buttoning his shirt and took the phone from her. Tapping an icon in the center, he opened the menu screen and began to scroll down.

He looked like a man with a purpose, she thought. “What are you doing? Besides invading privacy,” she qualified.

The phone was tiny. His fingers were not. It was difficult getting to the right screen. “Seeing who this Marion—”

“Mariel,” Janelle corrected.

“Mariel,” he repeated, this time committing the name to memory. “Who this Mariel was making and getting calls from recently.”

Janelle made an attempt to look over his shoulder, but he was just too tall and too broad-shouldered. Giving up, she settled for looking at the phone upside down.

“Why would you want to do that?”

He swallowed a curse as he found himself on a screen he didn’t want. Going back, he tried again. This time, the icon for recent calls came up. He pressed it and moved on to a menu that gave him a choice between incoming and outgoing.

“To find out what she had to hide.”

She thought of Mariel. Glasses of water had more to hide than the mousy woman. “What if there’s nothing to hide?”

Sawyer didn’t bother shrugging. “Then no harm, no foul.” He slanted a glance in her direction. Janelle was, after all, a lawyer and probably very wrapped up in truth, justice and strict guidelines. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

It was hard to debate a person’s right to privacy when she was talking to a man whose shirt was only half-buttoned. But she still couldn’t come out and condone what he was doing, so she refrained from commenting on his last words, turned away and finished getting dressed.

“Interesting.”

“What is?” she asked despite herself. Dressed, she turned back around to face him. His shirt was still partially open and he looked like one of those brooding heroes who graced the covers of historical romances. She tried not to dwell on that.

“Mariel seems to be calling a particular number quite a lot.” He pointed it out to her.

Craning her neck, she looked at the recent history of the calls. There
were
a lot. But that didn’t mean anything. “Maybe it’s her boyfriend.”

He shut the phone and slipped it into his pocket. “Not unless she’s going with someone from Charlie Wentworth’s house.”

The name had her doing a mental double take. She looked at Sawyer sharply, growing wary. Why had he plucked that name out of the air? That was the man Wayne had claimed was behind framing his son. “How would you know his number?”

“My life didn’t start the day I took on being your bodyguard,” he reminded her. Although, he added silently, there had been a few minutes, like just earlier and last night, when he might have felt tempted to say otherwise. “I worked undercover for three years. Let’s just say some of the paths I took led me through organized-crime territory.”

“And you remember Wentworth’s personal number.”

The expression on Sawyer’s face negated her doubts. “I’ve got total recall.”

Did that apply to things written down on a page, or to events, as well? She felt a little vulnerable. “Should have warned me earlier.”

The smile was small. Its effect was not. “Where’s the fun in that?”

She could feel herself responding to the look in his eyes. To him. Janelle struggled to bank down her reactions, but it wasn’t easy. “Why would an assistant to the A.D.A. be calling someone like Wentworth?”

“That’s the big question,” he acknowledged. “But for the time being—” he began buttoning his shirt again “—I think you might have found your leak.”

“You found my phone!” Mariel cried when Janelle got directly in front of her in the woman’s office and held the cell phone up before her.

Janelle had been in the building less than five minutes. The moment they’d walked in, she’d asked Sawyer to go to the crime lab and check on the tech’s progress with finding any fingerprints on the bags of cocaine confiscated in Anthony’s apartment. They separated at the front entrance, with her going up to the D.A.’s floor to confront Mariel.

Sawyer hadn’t seemed happy with the division of labor, but making him happy wasn’t her prime objective at the moment. Finding out what the hell was going on had taken center stage.

“Yes, I did,” she replied, studying the young woman before her. Mariel still looked harmless. Was there some mistake? “You dropped it in the parking lot.”

Mariel spread her hand over her chest, sighing dramatically. “You saved my life,” she declared, reaching for the cell.

Janelle moved the object just out of reach. “Maybe not. What are you doing with Charlie Wentworth’s phone number on your cell?”

She could have sworn Mariel paled just a little. “Who?”

“Oh please, don’t insult my intelligence. You’re not dumb, Mariel. You know who Charlie Wentworth is. Especially since Woods handed you my chair.” She’d felt a pang when she’d heard that the A.D.A. had given her position at the prosecution table to Mariel.

Mariel immediately defended herself. “You withdrew from the case.”

“And so should you.”

“Why?” she asked nervously.

It was an act, Janelle thought. All of it. The shy looks, the submissive attitude, all an act. Her eyes narrowed. “Because you’ve been keeping Wentworth apprised of everything that’s been going on here regarding Anthony Wayne’s case.”

The deer-in-the-headlights expression receded. Mariel began straightening the papers on her desk. Her laugh was forced. “Why would I do something like that?”

Leaning over her desk, Janelle put her hand down on the folders Mariel was tidying, forcing the woman to look at her. “You tell me.”

Mariel’s voice stopped quivering. “The only thing I’m doing is telling Stephen that you’ve lost your mind.” She began to leave, but Janelle put her hand on her shoulder, stopping her. She shrugged it off. “You need some time off to get back to your A game, Janelle.”

“While you tamper with evidence and get Anthony Wayne convicted for something he didn’t do for some reason I can’t fathom yet? I don’t think so.”

A flash of anger flared in Mariel’s deep brown eyes. “You’re making a mistake, Janelle.”

“You’re the one who made a mistake,” Janelle corrected. “But I’m going to Woods with this.” Janelle held up the cell phone. “Next time you try to put one over on someone, remember to get a disposable cell phone.”

With that, Janelle spun on her heel and was about to walk out. But she never made it out the door because Mariel blocked her way. The weapon in the other woman’s hand was pointed straight at Janelle’s stomach.

“Where did you get that?” Janelle asked.

“I have my ways,” Mariel replied smugly. “And I don’t know about the phone being disposable, but now you’re going to have to be.” Mariel shook her head, her dark hair shimmying around her face. “I wish you’d kept out of it, Janelle.” There was a note of genuine regret in her voice. “I liked you.”

Janelle needed to keep the woman talking until someone came in. Or until Mariel came to her senses. “No need to use past tense, Mariel. I’m still here.”

“Not for long.” Her eyes trained on Janelle, Mariel felt around along the back of her chair until she found her purse. “We’re going to go to lunch together. And then only one of us is coming back.”

Her hands raised slightly and, eyeing the weapon warily, Janelle still made no move to leave the office. “I already went out to lunch.”

“You’ll go out again,” Mariel instructed, each word tersely uttered. “Now
move.
”

The next second, there was a low
pop
and the gun flew out of Mariel’s hand. With a stunned cry, Mariel pulled her hand away and sank to the floor. On her knees, she was rocking.

All of this took less than a second. Before Janelle could swing around to see what was going on behind her, Sawyer was in the room. Drawn service revolver in one hand, he grabbed her shoulder with the other.

“You okay?”

Was that tenderness? Concern? No, she was probably hallucinating. Numbly, Janelle nodded. “Yeah.”

People began moving toward them down the hall. Mariel was still on her knees, still sobbing.

Releasing her shoulder, Sawyer backpedaled as he shook his head. “The minute I take my eyes off you…” He didn’t bother finishing. Bending over, he picked up the weapon that Mariel had dropped. He was still talking to Janelle. “Don’t you know that cowards are dangerous if you corner them?”

“I must have skipped that chapter,” Janelle bit off. And then she sobered. That had been a miscalculation on her part. Her father would have her head—if he found out. “I thought I could handle her.”

“You thought wrong,” he snapped. “Our forefathers said it best— Guns are great equalizers.”

“I didn’t know she’d have one.” Janelle pressed her lips together. She couldn’t argue with him if he was right. And he had probably just saved her life. “Thanks.”

Sawyer shrugged carelessly. As if his heart wasn’t still doing double-time. As if everything hadn’t suddenly frozen when he’d seen the short brunette pointing her gun at Janelle. He’d gotten up here as fast as he could, but when he’d seen the gun, he’d been afraid that it was already too late.

“Don’t mention it.”

“He made me do it,” Mariel cried, clawing at the side of the desk for support as she tried to gain her feet. Standing, she swayed. “Wentworth. He said he’d kill my whole family if I didn’t do what he wanted.”

Sawyer regarded her coldly. One quick background check based on a hunch had laid it all out for him. “Did he also ‘make’ you take the money that put you through law school?”

Mariel’s mouth dropped open as she stared at him, dumbfounded. He knew he’d hit a bull’s-eye. The woman had probably thought no one would ever find out or make the connection. The arrogance of the criminal mind never ceased to amaze him.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Janelle cried, grabbing his shoulder as people began to push their way into the room, firing questions that she tuned out. “How did you know that?”

Sawyer didn’t get a chance to answer. Woods was pushing his way through the crowd and into the office. He looked at the bleeding assistant, then at the gun in Sawyer’s hand.

“What the hell is going on here?” Woods demanded, looking from Sawyer to Mariel to Janelle.

“We found your mole,” she replied simply.

Mariel began to protest. Sawyer looked at her darkly. “You’ll have your turn.” The woman whimpered, but stopped talking.

Woods was completely stupefied. The information refused to process. “Mariel?”

Janelle nodded and produced Mariel’s cell phone for Woods. “She’s been making calls to Charlie Wentworth.”

“Wentworth?” Woods echoed, confused. “But it’s Wayne’s son who’s on trial—”

“We got caught in the middle of a power play, sir,” Janelle explained. “Since Wayne looked like a shoo-in to succeed Salvatore Perelli when the old man retired or died, Wentworth threatened Wayne, telling him to back off and to toe the line. When Wayne told him where to go, Wentworth played hardball, striking Wayne in his only vulnerable place—his son. The drugs were planted to frame Tony.”