Into the Night (45 page)
"No."
Sam knew when to shut the fuck up, and that had been definitely one of those times.
Over at the pool table now, Cosmo was staunchly ignoring some pretty obvious body language that those two girls were giving him. If he wanted to, he wasn't going to go home alone tonight. But it sure as hell seemed as if he didn't want to. Although, really, who knew what went on inside of Cosmo's head. Maybe he was purposely playing hard to get.
Across the room, the main entrance opened and...
"Mike," Sam said. "Heads up."
Muldoon looked over his shoulder and saw Joan DaCosta picking her way through the little tables that dotted the floor, heading directly toward him. Shaking his head, he turned back around. "Shit," he said on a sigh, closing his eyes briefly.
Muldoon's giving her his back didn't slow down Joan. In fact, she slid onto the barstool next to him and ordered a glass of white wine from the bartender.
She waited until it was delivered, until after she took a sip, to speak.
"Are you okay?" she asked Muldoon.
"Me? Yeah, I'm just great. Thanks."
Whoa, sarcasm coming from the King of Polite. This was a night full of firsts. Sam knew he shouldn't be listening and he tried to focus his attention on the pool table.
"I'm really sorry," Joan said to Muldoon, loudly enough so that Sam couldn't help but overhear. "About everything."
"Fine," he said. "Apology accepted. Conversation over."
She was silent then, but only for a minute or two. "I'm pretty sure I owe you a bigger apology than that," she said. "At least an explanation. I really feel awful—"
"Yeah," he said. "That's great. Because that's what apologies are all about, right? Making the person who's giving the apology feel better—feel less guilty?"
"Ouch," she said.
"Sony."
"No, you're right. I'm wrong. Again. I've been wrong about an awful lot lately. I was wrong about you and me. Really wrong."
Well, that caught Muldoon's full attention. He turned to look at her—a real, long look, not just a quick glance this time.
"So I guess what I need to know," Joan said quietly— almost too quietly for Sam to hear, but not quite, "is whether or not you now think so poorly of me that there's nothing I can do or say to bring us back to where we were before. Well, not exactly where we were before, but..."
"How could you even think I'd agree to going along with that crazy scheme—to actually announce my engagement to the President's daughter?"
What the fuck.. . ? It took everything Sam had in him not to turn and look at Joan and Muldoon. But if he looked, then they'd know he was listening. He stared at Cosmo, who was making an intricate bank shot, sinking not one but two balls in opposite corner pockets. It was a beauty, but Sam's real attention was on Joan.
"I don't know," she admitted. "I thought you might have slept with her and, I don't know. Become enthralled. I thought if that had happened, maybe you wouldn't mind spending the next two months with her. She's beautiful, and she's funny and brilliant—I mean, at least she is when she's sober."
"Yeah, well, she's too old for me," Muldoon said.
Joan laughed—a sharp burst of noise—but then got serious again, right away. "We had this meeting before we came into Brooke's room, and you can ask anyone who was there— I was opposed to the engagement announcement idea. And it wasn't because I was afraid of getting caught in a lie. I only said that because I was trying to present an alternate reason for them all to just leave you alone—a reason that Myra would understand. She's, um, pretty moral-free, I guess is one way of saying it." Her voice got soft. "Mike, I really hate the idea of you thinking poorly of me."
"I'm not so keen on the idea of you thinking I would tell you what I told you—that I was crazy about you—and then kind of randomly go and have sex with someone else," Muldoon countered.
"I thought you were angry with me," she said. "I thought you were going to try to make me jealous. Which worked."
"Yeah?" he asked.
She nodded. "Yeah."
They just sat there then, looking at each other for a long time.
"You were really jealous, huh?" Muldoon finally asked.
"I wanted to punch Brooke in the nose. You, too," Joan added. "God, I thought maybe you got her drunk on purpose."
"Yeah, right," he scoffed. "Nothing turns me on like a woman who's completely slobbering drunk."
They were both silent then, and it was a silence that was loaded with some cryptic meaning. Muldoon wasn't looking at Joan anymore, and she cleared her throat.
"Well, yeah," she said. "It's understandable that ... I mean... it probably happens to a lot of guys, all the time. It's a common enough problem, right?"
Muldoon closed his eyes and laughed, then turned to face her. "Look, maybe I'm an old-fashioned guy, but pathetic, scotch-soaked, revenge-inspired groping doesn't do a thing to rev me up. There's no problem. I don't have any kind of a problem."
"Okay," she said. "I hear you. Absolutely. I believe you."
"Jesus, you're humoring me."
"No, I'm not."
"You don't think I know when I'm being humored? Do you really think I have some kind of a problem?"
"It's not that big a deal to me," Joan said. "I mean, in this day and age, with a little Viagra..."
Sam nearly choked on his beer. Oh, this was just too good.
Muldoon stood up.
"Where are you going?" Joan asked, but he wasn't going anywhere. He took her hand and pulled her out of her seat, too.
And then, right there, at the bar in the Ladybug Lounge, Muldoon put his arms around Joan DaCosta and kissed the living shit out of her.
It was like something out of a movie. Sweeping music with lots of violins should have swelled. Instead Travis Tritt wailed on the jukebox. Hello, T-R-O-U-B-L-E...
On the other hand, maybe old Travis was the perfect sound track to this moment.
That was no "I'm kissing you because it seems like a nice way to pass the time" kind of kiss. Instead it was a "If I don't kiss you right fucking now, I just might die" kind of kiss.
And Jesus, if that wasn't trouble ... Sam could remember kissing Alyssa like that, and look where it got him.
He scanned the room for any senior officers, watching Muldoon's six. An officer in dress uniform wasn't supposed to suck face like this in public, and Jesus Lord, Mikey still had the woman in a lip lock.
And as for Joan, well, she was very definitely kissing him back.
Unless Sam was very much mistaken, someone in this room was going to get some tonight.
Finally Muldoon lifted his head. But the way he was looking down at the woman in his arms, he might as well still have been kissing her. It was a look that sizzled, a look that was more palpable and possibly even more intimate than a touch.
Joan was definitely hypnotized, staring back up at him.
Muldoon tugged her even closer, his hands on her backside, her hips tight against his, and she laughed breathlessly.
"Okay," she said. "Point taken. I think we're both in agreement that you don't have any kind of a problem."
"Damn right I don't."
"I knew you didn't," she said. "I was really just jerking your chain. It was too good an opportunity to pass up."
"The big irony is that I've been walking around like this all week," he told her. "I think you're sexy as hell, Joan. I don't need Viagra. I just need to think about you."
This time, she kissed him.
And oh, yeah. Muldoon was definitely on his way to GetltOnVille.
Kiss number two lasted even longer than kiss number one.
And when they finally came up for air, Joan managed to ask, "Do you—"
"Yes," Muldoon said.
He threw a twenty on the bar, took her by the hand and they were gone.
Sam, on the other hand, didn't have such a good reason to leave.
He watched Cosmo line up another perfect shot, hoping to hell that Muldoon and Joan had better luck with their birth control than he and Mary Lou had had.
"Okay," Joan said to Muldoon via their cell phones, as she peered out from her hotel room doorway. "There's no one in the hall. Get your butt down here, fast."
And then there he was, coming out of the stairwell and moving swiftly down the corridor. She opened the door a little bit farther, and he was inside without anyone seeing him.
"That fast enough for you?" he said, still talking to her on his phone.
"Good-bye," she said into her phone, loving the way he was looking at her, remembering those incredible kisses back in the bar. "I can't talk right now."
Muldoon hung up his phone, too, his eyes never leaving hers.
But he didn't move. He just stood there, watching her. What was he waiting for?
"Kiss me," she finally had to say.
But he shook his head. "Nah," he said.
She laughed. What?
"I'm going to," he said. "But I want to look at you first and... think about you some more. I do want to talk. Do you mind?" he added.
"No," Joan said. "Of course I don't." He'd told her how he'd always watched for cues when he was with a woman, how he'd learned to pick up subtle hints as to what that woman wanted him to do to fulfill her fantasies.
But tonight was different, she realized with something of a jolt. She was his fantasy.
It was a rather large turn-on knowing that. But, God, the pressure was suddenly a bit intense.
"Come on in," she said, leading the way into the hotel room. "Can I get you something to drink? Are you hungry? We could order room service if you want. This hotel has a really terrific fish chowder that I for one would love to lick off your body."
Muldoon laughed as he sat down on the sofa.
"I'm not entirely kidding," she told him.
"Yeah, I know," he countered, smiling at her. "That's what makes it so nice to hear."
"I'm not sure what you want," she admitted. "I want to do this right, but you're going to have to give me a little direction."
"Just talk to me," he said. "I just... I love to talk to you, Joan, and I just want to do it knowing that in a little while I'm going to get a chance to kiss you again."
Oh, honey, that's not all you're going to do...
He was adorable. He honestly didn't realize that saying / love to talk to you made her heart pound even harder.
"It sounds kind of dumb, doesn't it?" he added sheepishly.
"No," she said quite firmly. "It doesn't."
"I've never been very good at talking to women, and ... you make it so easy." His earnestness wasn't an act. It was amazing. Somehow she'd found the last truly earnest and sincere man on earth. "You make me feel comfortable, and... I don't know. Eloquent almost. In control. And out of control at the same time." He laughed at himself, rolling his eyes. "Jeez, I'm not making any sense, am I?"
He was making significantly more sense than all of the other men whom Joan had ever invited back to her room with the intention of beginning a hot romantic fling.
Not that there had been that many of them.
"You are making sense." Her voice sounded breathless. "That's what worries me."
He laughed, and oh, God, he was good-looking, sitting there on the sofa in his gleaming white uniform. He'd changed his pants sometime between Brooke's suite and the Ladybug Lounge. He'd once told her that he carried a spare pair in his truck.
"What do you want to talk about?" she asked. This was one of the few times in her life that she wasn't sure what to say.
"Whatever you want. Whatever you're thinking."
Joan sat down on the other end of the sofa. "Well. I'm thinking pretty much nonstop about making love to you."
He nodded.
"You want that drink?" she asked.
"No."
"Yeah, me neither," she said.
"Will you say that again?"
"You want that drink?"
He just looked at her.
"I'm thinking about you, inside of me," she whispered. "I'm thinking that simply kissing you was better than the best sex I've ever had. I want you, Michael. If you want, I'll talk the entire time, but please, please, please kiss me now."
He moved toward her before the last words had left her lips, taking her mouth in a hungry kiss.
It was enough to knock her over, but she went willingly, pulling him back with her onto the couch, her fingers in the softness of his hair.
Joan had thought those kisses back in the bar were powerful, but this was unbelievable. He didn't hold back this time, because, hey, this time there was no one watching them.
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