Fade To Midnight (24 page)

Hah!
If he only knew. “I'm great,” she said briskly. “Just need to hook up with my ride to the hospital.”

“I'll take you!” he offered hastily.

“No, thanks. Bye, Des. You were a prince.” She backed away, knocking into one of the caterers. The woman's tray of glasses tipped, tumbled. Glasses crashed, tinkled. Clattering, cursing, shouts. Glares of outrage. Business as usual. She was so out of this madhouse.

She loped for the exit, wobbling on the terrifying peep-toes.

“Edie? One last thing,” Des called out.

She turned, exasperated. “Yeah?”

“You look amazing tonight,” he said. “Never better.”

The look in his eyes. As if those blue depths had flashed an ardent red, like a burning coal. She felt an urge to cover her cleavage. Wrap the shawl around herself, hide her bare shoulders and throat.

There she went again, with her silly fits and fancies. As if Des, who could have any woman he wanted, was going to seize her in a fit of fiery passion, after totally ignoring her all her life. Puh-leeze.

“Ah…ah thank you,” she said. And sprinted for the exit.

Kev was waiting outside the door. He caught her when she barreled through, and it was like running into a wall. But not many walls were so warm and resiliant and sexy. And well dressed, she noted, when she lifted her face from his snowy white shirtfront.

No longer. It was now streaked with brownish smears of mascara.

“Oh, no!” she cried. “I got makeup on your shirt! I'm so sorry.”

“It's OK,” he said. “I offer myself freely up as a mascara rag.”

She giggled, almost hysterically. “It's too bad! You look so nice.”

“Ms. Parrish?” It was Paul. “Stop, please! I have to talk to you!”

“Oh, God,” she whispered. “Quick, get me out of here.”

They were moving before she finished speaking. She sprinted beside him at a speed she'd never dreamed of. She heard Paul's bellowing pursuit over the pound of her heart, the gasp of her breath.

Kev beeped open a shiny black Jeep Wrangler. “Jump in.”

S
he dove into the passenger seat. He leaped in, started the motor with a snarling roar. A few deft maneuvers that tossed her all over the cab got them out of the tight parking place. Tires squealed as he sped toward the exit. Paul pounded after them, yelling. His gun in his hand.

Holy bejeezus. Everybody needed to lighten up a little.

She buzzed down the window when Kev braked, before pulling out into the street. “Don't worry, Paul!” she yelled back at him. “It's OK! I've got my own ride to the hospital. See you there!” She flopped back onto the seat as the car surged onto the street and picked up speed.

“What's this about a hospital?” Kev asked. “And this crazy shit about locking you up? Jesus, Edie! You scared me!”

“I'm scared too,” she said. “It's a long story.”

“Let's have it,” he said.

So she told him. By the time she was done, her eyes were streaming, and his face, in the light of the storefronts and streetlights, was grim and hard. He pulled off the main strip and into a residential area, thick with trees. He pulled into a narrow alleyway that divided a block of modest houses. He parked the Jeep between an untrimmed rhododendron bush and a garage, and killed the engine.

She mopped at her goopy eyes with her hands. “Where are we?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “Just a house my brother owns. He keeps meaning to renovate it and rent it out, but he's too busy. It's empty.”

The dark and calm were disorienting, after all the action and drama. She was starting to shiver.

“I wanted privacy,” he said. “No one followed us. I made sure of that.” He reached out to her. “Get the hell over here.”

She scrambled into his arms. “I should never have gone to that stupid banquet. I should have predicted how he would react.”

“It's a mistake you won't make again.” His voice was steely.

Edie lifted her head. “But I have to go to the hospital—”

“Why? They're jerking you around. Threatening you, abusing you. Walk away. Don't look back. What the fuck do you owe them, anyway?”

“But…but my little sister is—”

“They don't let you see her anyway. You burn yourself at the stake for nothing.”

She struggled with that. “But my father is in danger,” she said. “Someone tried to poison him. And someone has to tell his doctors, because nobody believed me at the banquet.”

“Use the phone.” His voice was uncompromising.

Kev had a point. No, more along the lines of an irrefutable argument, and all she had to counter it was dread. And duty.

She tried to frame it so that he would understand. “If I just disappear, they'll assume that you've kidnapped me,” she said. “That's how it'll look. To them, I'm just the spoiled, mentally unbalanced heiress who's uncompliant with her meds. They've put me in the mental ward more than once, so they have precedent. They'll have pieces of paper proving I'm incapable of being responsible for myself. They'll assume that you're using me to punish my father. They'll come after you with everything they've got. Which is a lot. Believe me.”

“Let them come.” He sounded unconcerned at the prospect. “I'd welcome the opportunity to tell them exactly what I think of them.”

“Ah.” She cleared her throat. “You're very brave, but I don't think you quite realize—”

“I realize perfectly. But I'm not the one who needs to do some realizing. Your family needs to take a fucking turn at that.”

The situation was slipping in a direction that scared her to death. “You'll get in trouble,” she said, her voice shaking. “You could get hurt.”

He shrugged, his shoulders shifting in the dark. “I've been in trouble before. I've been hurt before. It passes.”

“You don't understand.” She pounded his chest. “That would hurt me! If they hurt you, it would hurt me, and I've been hurt enough!”

He went still for a moment. His arms tightened around her. “I'm sorry. I didn't know that you, uh…that you'd care that much.”

“So get it through your head,” she scolded him, and buried her face against his chest. His white shirt being by now a lost cause.

He stroked her hair, his fingers tracing lovely patterns over her back. “Call the hospital,” he said. “You'll feel better.”

“My dad took my cell phone when he caught me texting you.”

Kev let out an eloquent grunt and he dug in his coat pocket. “So that's why you texted me from a different phone.”

“Yes. Des's phone. Oh, yes. I have to tell you about that, after.” She punched in 4-1-1 for directory assistance, and got put through to the ICU unit. A tense fifteen minutes went by, intermittently waiting on hold and trying to explain to a long series of doctors and nurses that whoever was attending Charles Parrish should be on the alert for the possibility of poison. The interchanges left her with the maddening sense of not having been taken seriously. Just a hysterical, know-nothing family member who thought the medical staff on duty wasn't capable of doing their jobs. But she'd tried.

She gave Kev his phone back, and hid her face against his shirt. It felt so hot and strange and shaky. Shimmering.

“Well,” she said. “That was probably useless.”

“You try so hard to do the right thing. And they treat you so badly,” he said.

“He's still my dad,” she said. “Such as he is. He and Ronnie are all I've got, since Mom died. And I can really see how all this looks, from his point of view. He genuinely believes that he's doing the right thing.”

He didn't reply, but she felt his thought waves lapping over her mind. “What?” she demanded, testily. “Just say it, already.”

“You'll be embarrassed if I do.”

“Really? And why is that?”

“Because you don't take compliments well,” he said. “I was thinking how brave and selfless and understanding you are.”

“Oh, shut up. Don't make fun of me.”

“I'm not,” he said. “I was just thinking what a turn-on that is.”

Her fingers twisted into of the now-grubby fabric of his shirt. Her hands shook from gripping so hard. She wanted so badly to hang on to this sweet, yummy guy who said such lovely things about her. Just drag him closer, never let him go. He liked every part of her. Her eyes, her face, her body. Even her character.

Of course, he was still under the delusion that she was his angel. That was a chilling little reality check. But she still wasn't letting go.

“I'm sorry, if that's inappropriate right now,” he offered, his voice uncertain. “I know you've had a stressful time. I don't mean to—”

“Shut up,” she said. “I can't stand it any more.”

He froze. “Huh?”

She jerked him closer. “I mean, shut up and kiss me.”

She didn't even give him a chance to obey her order. She just wrapped her arms around his neck in her very best strangling kudzu vine imitation, and kissed the guy herself.

Her hasty, awkward assault was met with hungry welcome. She abandoned herself to it, hardly believing it could be real, but she could feel his heat, his hunger. He wasn't faking it. He couldn't. Not to her.

This intense, beautiful man was holding her like she was the most precious thing he'd ever touched. Worshipping her with his mouth, tasting her tears. Hungry to just lay her down on the car seat and…

Oh. Boy. Images flashed through her head, erotic, explicit. What he wanted to do to her. The way he wanted to make her feel. Writhing, begging. Offering herself to him, in total, melting, wide-open surrender.

She was tuned to the wavelength of his desire. It was so loud and clear it practically deafened her, and she wasn't even drawing. Now that she'd felt it from him, she could never be deaf or blind to it again.

It shimmered around her, a sea of warmth, marbled with a lusty, sharp male urgency that made her squirm with eagerness on his lap.

Kev threw his head back, dragging in air. “I can't do this!”

She was dismayed. “Why not?”

“We're in public, parked in an alley! I'm supposed to be protecting you, not ripping off your clothes and fucking you in my car!”

“But…what if I begged you to?” she asked, timidly. “Would that make it OK? I mean, this place, it's hardly public. It's pitch-dark.”

“Your dad's bodyguards—”

“Won't find us,” she wheedled. “They'd have made a move by now if they'd followed us, and you said yourself that they didn't.”

“No,” he said flatly. “My attention would be compromised. And that's a big fucking understatement. And besides. I don't have condoms here. “He flung the words at her, almost triumphantly.

Edie sagged forward until her forehead touched his. “God, Kev. Do you never learn?” she complained.

“I have condoms at home!” he flared. “I had, and still have, every intention of fucking you all night long, in the safety and privacy of my own apartment. With its multiple locks, state of the art alarm system, and my own personal arsenal at hand. No way am I letting my guard down like that in a car, in an alley. Fucking forget it. So
stop.
”

She reached for him again. “Please,” she coaxed. “Please, Kev.”

She scratched her unnaturally clean, French manicured nails down his chest, making his breath stutter audibly.

“You are crazy,” he said hoarsely.

She stopped short, mouth open, and started vibrating in helpless, silent sobs. Laughter, tears, she couldn't tell. “Crazy Edie,” she forced out. “Oh, yeah. That's me.”

Kev grabbed her, and squeezed. “Aw, shit. Edie. I didn't mean—”

“It's OK. I know you didn't.” She cradled his face in her hands, covering it with feverish kisses. Trying to memorize his face, like a blind woman. Committing the texture of his skin to memory, every detail. The shiny, mottled skin of his scarred side, contrasting with the supple velvety heat of his unmarred skin on the left. He'd shaved. He was smoother than he had been this morning. He'd put on some delicious smelling cream, to please her. It made her heart thud with delight.

But something kept whispering the truth. No way were they going to let her keep this. This was stolen time. Precious counted seconds, and she was goddamn well going to make the most of them.

She kissed him, feeling the tickle of his eyelashes against her cheek, her lips, feeling the sweep of his eyebrows. “I don't know how long I'll have, before they get me,” she said. “But they will get me, Kev. I have to make this count. Do it. Please. Do it right now. Right here.”

He grabbed her shoulders and gave them a sharp little shake. “I am not going to let them do that to you.”

Tenderness swelled painfully in her chest, for how valiant and well meaning he was. How innocent. He was just one guy, no matter how exceptional. He didn't have a private army, a vast network of social and political connections, a bottomless budget.

“I love you for saying that,” she said softly. “No matter how it all shakes down.”

He stiffened, outraged. “You don't believe me.”

She stroked his face. He was so sweet, it made her heart hurt. “That's not it. I just have a lot of experience with these people.”

“They don't have any experience with me. They're in for a shock.”

Anger throbbed off him, in hot waves. Different than the anger she'd sensed before. Outraged fury, bright and hot and purifying. Not toxic or festering. It was the first time that furious anger didn't close her down. On the contrary. His fierce conviction heated her blood. She could almost let herself believe that he actually could protect her, defend her. That he could fearlessly face off with Charles Parrish, and win. Just because he was such a fine and righteous dude.

But that would be foolish, irresponsible. He had no idea what he was dealing with, and she had to protect him as best she could.

Just a little more of this perfection first. One more time. Call her selfish. She slid her leg over his so that she straddled his thighs, pressing that damp, hot ache of longing against its perfect, throbbing opposite. She set her teeth to the damp skin at his throat, and licked away the savory tang of his sweat against her tongue.

He seized her hips, grinding her harder against his pulsing erection. “Believe it, Edie. I will protect you.”

She threw her head back, flaunting her cleavage, inviting him to bury his face in it. “Show me how you'll look after me, Kev,” she challenged. “Make me feel it. I need some serious convincing.”

The grinding rasp that came from behind his clenched teeth sounded barely human. “I'll give you all you want when we get home.”

“Now.” She wrenched his belt buckle loose and struggled to get her hands into his trousers, but they were cuddled into too tight of a knot. So she slid down his thigh, and petted the hard, hot length of him, trapped in his pants. Gripping it.

“Goddamnit, Edie,” he groaned.

She had him now. She could feel it. They'd topped the crest, and were tumbling down the other side. She hauled up masses of pink chiffon, and scrambled off his lap for just long enough to balance on one toe, clutching the back of his seat with one hand while she snagged the elastic of her panties and whipped them down off one leg. Almost tumbling onto her ass on the center console when the thing snagged on her stupid spiky heel. She wobbled, corrected. Left the panties rolled up around her thigh like a garter, forgotten. Climbed astride him again.

“Feel me,” she pleaded, tossing up what felt like endless, billowing yards of fabric to get to his hand and grab it. “Feel this.” She pulled his hand up between her legs. “Feel how wet I am.”

He groaned, rubbing his face against her cleavage, petting her slick pussy tenderly, as if it were a fragile, delicate thing to be protected. She waited, breathless, and tried again. “I need you.” Her voice broke.