Lawman Lover - Lisa Childs (16 page)

“Thank you for
saving
me.”

Somehow he suspected she wasn’t just talking about his saving her from the man in the shed or from the bullets in the alley. “Macy…?”

“Even though I moved up to Blackwoods to be close to Jed, I’ve felt so lonely there. I’ve had no one to talk to. My parents thought I was crazy to believe and support Jed. So did my ex.”

He flinched, wanting to ask her about this ex, but he didn’t want to interrupt her when she’d obviously needed to talk for a while. Three years…

“After the way they had all acted, I didn’t dare tell anyone about Jed. I was so alone.” Her breath caught and then shuddered out in a shaky little sigh as she stepped closer to Rowe. “Until I unzipped that body bag with you inside.”

“You saved me then,” he admitted. “I thought I was going to die in there.”

“If it had been zipped up all the way, you might have, but Doc had left breathing room,” she said.

A gasp slipped through his lips, as it nearly had when he’d been lying inside that damn bag. “Not enough…”

Her eyes narrowed as she studied his face. “You didn’t like the drawer either. I thought it was just because it was creepy—”

“It was creepy.” He shuddered in remembrance of the cold metal drawer.

She glanced at the high ceilings of the hangar and his belongings scattered around the place. She must have realized he spent more than a little time at the hangar. “You really don’t like enclosed places.”

“No. I spent too much time in them when I was a kid,” he admitted.

“Your fr— That security guard mentioned that how you grew up is what compels you to care so much about your job.”

She had stopped herself from calling Brennan his friend. What was Brennan? His betrayer? Or just a man who always said too much like he had in front of Macy.

But after everything they’d been through together, he didn’t mind her knowing what he’d rarely shared with anyone else. “My parents were drug addicts,” he admitted. “When I was a little kid, they’d lock me up in a closet while they and their friends were using.”

He had spent hours, sometimes days, locked up.

She gasped now. “I’m so sorry.” Her arms slid around his waist and she pressed herself against his chest. “It must have been so horrible for you getting zipped into that bag, and then me shutting you in the drawer. I’m so sorry.”

He couldn’t resist her anymore. He might have been taking advantage of her current state of vulnerability, but he wasn’t strong enough to fight his own desires.

And he had never desired anyone the way he did Macy Kleyn. She was so smart and so damn sexy. He lowered his head and really kissed her. Not just that teasing brush of lips. Instead his mouth pressed hungrily against hers. Her lips were silky, her breath warm as a moan slipped out of her. He parted her lips and deepened the kiss, sliding his tongue into the sweet moistness of her mouth.

Her tongue flicked across his, tasting him. She moaned again, and her fingers clutched his nape, tunneling through his hair.

He touched her hair too, tugging the binding free so that the soft sable strands tangled around his fingers. Then he cupped the back of her head in his hand, and he could feel the faint ridge of her old scar against his palm. Even as a kid, she had been undefeatable.

As a woman she was fierce. She pulled away from him slightly before she clutched his shirt, pulling it up and over his head. Then she skimmed her fingers down his arms until she caught his hands in hers and tugged him toward the bed.

He trapped her between the mattress and his body, holding her still for his kiss. He made love to her mouth. Then he moved to her body. Lifting her sweater, he pulled it over her head. His breath escaped in another gasp of horror when he saw the bruise on her ribs.

“He hit you.” That son of a bitch who’d run her off the road and abducted her had struck more than her beautiful face.

She shook her head, tousling her hair around her bare shoulders, and corrected him. “He kicked me.”

“He’s lucky he’s already dead.” Or Rowe would kill him again.

She shivered. And he regretted scaring her. But her fear didn’t last, because she reached for his belt next, tugging it free to unsnap his jeans. He sucked in a breath when her fingers glided over his abs then dipped inside the waistband of his boxers.

“Macy…”

She bit her bottom lip. “I really want
this.
I really want
you.
”

Was she trying to convince him or herself?

“Are you sure?” he asked, because with every touch of her soft hands, he was getting closer and closer to totally losing control.

She bit her bottom lip and nodded. “It’s about the only thing I am sure of right now.”

He understood that. With all the doubts, suspicions and betrayals in his world right now, she was the only one he could count on. The only one he could hang on to. But before he could close his arms around her, she reached behind herself.

So used to people betraying him, he braced himself for a minute, not knowing what she was reaching for. It could have been that vicious little scalpel again. But then her bra dropped onto the floor, and he realized she’d just undone the clasp. Her jeans followed, as she unsnapped and shimmied out of those and her cotton panties. She stood before him completely naked and completely vulnerable, her wide eyes dark with desire and nerves.

“It’s been a while for me,” she admitted, her voice shaky with those nerves. “But I—I think you need to get rid of your jeans, too.” She reached for his zipper.

But he stepped back. He just wanted to stare at her, to drink in every inch of her silky flesh and soft curves. It was himself he didn’t trust right now. Because if he let her touch him, he might lose all control and take her with all the passion burning inside him for her.

And she had already been handled too roughly. She deserved a gentleness he wasn’t even sure he was capable of.

M
ACY SHIVERED AGAIN, TREMBLING
at the intense look in his light blue eyes.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. Had he changed his mind? Had she totally repulsed him?

His breath shuddered out in a ragged sigh. “You are so damn beautiful…”

Bruised and battered, she felt anything but beautiful until she met his gaze. Desire heated the normal icy blue of his eyes, making them glow in the fading light.

Then he kissed her again, deeply. And his hands moved over her, gently, just skimming across her skin. He touched every inch of her and his mouth followed the path of his hands, kissing the curve of her shoulder, the inside of her elbow, the back of her knee…until she trembled so much with desire that her legs wouldn’t hold her weight. She fell back onto the mattress.

She lay there alone but just until he finally unzipped and dropped his jeans. She gasped at the masculine beauty of him. Since she had spent so much of her life studying, she hadn’t done much dating and had had only one lover, the man she had thought she would marry one day. She’d had her whole life planned out.

She hadn’t planned on Rowe Cusack and the feelings that he elicited from her. Just looking at his masculine perfection—all the rippling muscles under sleek skin—had her nipples peaking and an intense pressure winding tight inside her.

Then he joined her, covering her body with his. He kissed her lips and then skimmed his mouth down her throat to the curve of her breast. His lips closed over one tight nipple, tugging gently before he stroked the peak with his tongue.

She shifted beneath him as the pressure wound even tighter, unbearably tighter. Instinctively seeking to release it, she arched her hips against his. But he was in no hurry. He took his time with both breasts, thoroughly teasing each nipple.

She clutched at his head, first holding him against her and then trying to pull him away. But instead of moving his mouth up, back to hers, he shifted lower, skimming his lips down her stomach. He gently kissed the bruised skin and then moved lower, between her legs. He loved her with his mouth, his tongue stroking her until an orgasm shuddered through her.

The aftershocks rippled inside her, but then he was there, his erection pushing against the very core of her. She arched and stretched, trying to take him deeper. But he was so hard, so thick. She shifted and clutched at his back, and then his butt, writhing beneath him as the pressure built again.

He thrust in and out, driving her closer and closer to the edge of complete insanity. And finally the madness claimed her. She screamed his name as she came.

He thrust a few more times, harder and deeper, until he tensed and joined her in the madness. A groan tore from his throat as he buried himself deep inside her and clutched her close. He rolled, though, so that she was on top, lying across his slick chest, which rose and fell with his labored breaths.

His voice gruff with passion, he tried to talk. “That was…”

Beyond anything she had ever experienced before. It didn’t matter to Macy that her experience was limited; she knew that what they had just shared was special. So special that guilt tugged at her. “I’m sorry....”

His hands, which had been stroking her back, stilled. “You’re sorry?”

“Not about this,” she assured him. She had never been less sorry about anything in her life. Making love with Rowe was the last thing she would regret. “I’m sorry that I haven’t told you everything.”

He arched a golden-blond brow. “Are you married?” he teased with the knowledge that she wasn’t.

Jed had certainly told him a lot about her. Jed…

She couldn’t think about her brother right now. She would have to face those fears later.

“I should be,” she admitted. It had been part of her plan. “But my ex-fiancé…” Or almost fiancé since he hadn’t actually bought the ring yet. “My ex-fiancé dumped me when I wouldn’t turn my back on Jed.”

And worry that Rowe would turn his back on her brother was what had kept her from admitting everything to him.

“He was a fool,” he declared of a man he had never met.

Not that Macy thought he was wrong.

“He thought I was the fool,” she said. “Dr. Bernard and the warden think I’m a fool, too.” Even her own parents had thought she was.

“Well, you can’t believe anything the warden tells you,” he said. “The man’s a liar and a cold-blooded killer.”

She sucked in a breath, bracing herself for her question. “Then you don’t believe that my brother killed Doc?”

Beneath her, his body tensed. “What?”

“That’s what Warden James told Dr. Bernard. That Jed killed Doc.” She gazed up at his face, silently begging him to call the warden a liar again.

But he hesitated.

“You don’t believe that Jed did?” she asked anxiously. Because if Rowe believed, then she might begin to doubt her brother, too. He hadn’t committed the crimes of which he’d been charged. But since his conviction, he had been locked up with killers.

Had he become one?

Rowe spoke slowly as if choosing his words carefully. “If Jed thought that Doc might talk and betray him…”

“Jed wouldn’t hurt someone even to protect himself.” She knew her brother better than that; prison couldn’t have changed him that much from the honorable, protective man he had always been.

A twinge of guilt clutched her heart that she had doubted him even for a moment. She shouldn’t have said anything to Rowe, because she couldn’t have him doubting Jed either…because then he might decide against helping him.

“You wouldn’t be here if Jed was concerned with protecting himself,” she reminded him, “because he would have chosen to kill you instead of going against the warden.”

“Do I think Jed would kill someone to protect himself?” Rowe asked, and shook his head in reply to his own question. “Probably not. But your brother would do anything to protect
you
.”

That was what she was afraid of—that Jed might have killed for her. She blinked back tears of regret, that her presence in Blackwoods had forced him to protect her, and disillusionment that her brother could hurt anyone. Even for her.

Offering comfort and protection, Rowe’s strong arms closed tightly around her. “I would do anything to protect you, too…”

She didn’t know what scared her more—that men would kill for her. Or that, in trying to kill to protect her, they might die instead.

Chapter Eleven

Protecting Macy meant locking her inside a safe house so that she wouldn’t insist on putting herself in the line of fire as she had in the alley.

Rowe had waited until she’d fallen asleep before leaving her. Of course he’d had to wait and make certain that she was deeply asleep before he’d crawled out of the warm bed they had shared. He might have also been savoring the feeling of her in his arms, curled against his chest, her heart thudding in perfect rhythm with his.

Leaving her had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. But if he really wanted to protect her, he had to eliminate the threat to her safety. And
he
was nearly as much a threat as the warden and whoever had betrayed him to the warden.