Liberating Lacey (20 page)

“Wait!” she gasped.

“Not a chance in hell,” he said, the raw edge in his voice proof his control was gone.

She squirmed under him, riding the painful edge of pleasure, but he just gripped her hip to hold her still. Soft, faded denim slid against her inner thighs and stockings as he thrust forward until he was as far inside her as he could get.

Hard. He was so hard inside her, his rigid abdomen pressed against her soft belly.

While one elbow bore some of his weight, his muscular chest and shoulders flattened her into the mattress.

“Say it,” he demanded, flat, unrelenting tone of his voice contrasting sharply with the slight quiver in his fingers as he brushed her hair back from her face.

She searched his face, finding her implacable rogue cop in strained line of his jaw, but a touch of softness in the depths of his green eyes. “Please,” she said. Different words trembled on the tip of her tongue, but they weren’t what he wanted to hear.

He shuddered hard, once, then began and oh, she liked this, the way he single-mindedly sought satisfaction in her tight, wet heat. A maddening friction built with every thrust, until she could think of nothing else, focus on nothing but all-consuming, 146

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fierce pleasure coalescing between her legs. Arching under his heavy weight, she fought to keep her eyes open, watching his agony build with each thrust. A shudder. Air sucked in through his teeth. A quick clamp of his jaw. Always, always, he kept his eyes open and locked with hers, the clench of his teeth and tightness of his jaw vivid evidence of his own need.

When his rhythm began to falter his eyes slid closed for a moment and his head fell back before he pulled it together. But it was too late for Lacey, long stretched between agony and ecstasy. Watching him as he came undone pushed her over the edge into sobbing ecstasy.

As the peaks softened she went limp, the cuffs clattering against the brass post as her arms relaxed. Eyes closed, she heard shallow, hard breaths as he fought for control and the soft groan when he lost the battle. His hard abs jumped against her belly and his grip tightened once again on her hip as he buried himself inside her for the last time, his cock pulsing as he came.

He gave a final shudder, sweat trickling off his jaw line to fall on her collarbone, then he melted against her. The buttons of his jeans pressed painfully into her thigh, the tender flesh already abraded by the denim, but she had other things on her mind.

As the pounding in her ears receded she heard once again the patter of rain on the windows, the wind in the wet leaves. She added another moment to her list of unforgettable memories, the moment she realized she loved Hunter. Twenty-eight-year-old-chameleon-workaholic-protective-but-wary Hunter, the man she couldn’t, shouldn’t give her heart to.

There was nothing romantic about her realization, no moment of joyous shared epiphany, just the heat in his eyes, the slick shift of their skin everywhere they touched, their bellies moving in rhythm, the length of the breaths slowly matching while the knowledge settled into her soul. Stupidly, imprudently, against all good advice and common sense she loved him and romantic or not, this was the moment. She was quaking, flushed and sweaty, handcuffed to her own bed. She loved him.

She had no idea how he felt.

* * * * *

That was beyond intense.

Hunter knew he should lift his weight off Lacey and uncuff her, but her feel of resilient body, the fight transformed into soft, limp satisfaction, kept him sprawled on top of her as the tension drained away.

She took hitching little breaths. Long quivers ran through her muscles and her thighs trembled around his hips. Sweat glued them together, breathing in unison as their heart rates thudded and slowed. He turned his head and pressed a kiss into the corner of her mouth.

“Are you okay?” he rumbled, his voice a sandpapery rasp from the exertion.

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“Yes,” she said, but with an odd hitch to the reply.

The answer he expected, but not the typical relaxed pleasure. Startled, he pushed back and reached for the key to his cuffs to release her. When she brought her arms down she winced and put the opposite hand to each shoulder, then winced again as she pushed herself into an upright position, her back to the headboard.

“Sure you’re okay?” he said, looking over every visible inch of her body as he automatically folded the cuffs away. Damn, damn, his scruff had scraped her neck and collarbone. Dark red marks were forming around her wrists. Worse, she was
shaking
and it wasn’t just jelly-legs from really extreme sex.

What the hell?

Now wasn’t the time for a real interrogation, not with her eyes unfocused, distant.

Without quite meeting his gaze she gave him a tremulous smile. “I’m fine. Really,” she said as she massaged her shoulders. “Just…not used to that position.” Okay. He could work with that. “How’s a hot shower sound?” he asked.

“Great,” she said, her eyes distantly focused on something over his shoulder.

Maybe she needed a minute. He pushed back off the bed and shucked his jeans and boots on the way to the bathroom. She hadn’t joined him by the time he’d turned on the taps full blast and adjusted the water temperature, so he peered around the bathroom door to find her at the foot of the bed, staring at her comforter cover.

He came to stand beside her. Her white comforter showed through the shimmery green fabric as she fingered a four-inch rip. Somewhere in all the moving around he must have put his boot right through the material.

Shit shit shit!
“I’ll replace it,” he said. “Just tell me where you bought it and I’ll get another one.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said absently, trailing her fingers along the rip. “It’s time to get out the flannel anyway.”

He’d worry about it, but not now, not after ten on a Friday night, not with her still so quiet and distant. Instead, he guided her into to the shower. He got in first and adjusted the spray so it hit the shoulder-high swirls in the mosaic wall. Looking a little baffled when he sat down on the built-in tiled bench, she stepped in behind him and closed the glass door. He pushed back against the wall, making room for her between his legs, and reached for her hand to position her in front of him. After squeezing a big dollop of conditioner into his palm, he rubbed it between his hands to spread and warm it, then began to massage her shoulders.

The water sprayed steadily against the wall to their right, but not touching them directly. A fine mist drifted over their bodies, dampening their skin, making the coconut-scented conditioner slick under his palms. He dug his fingers into her shoulders, strengthening the touch until she sagged under his hands.

“I’ve never used conditioner for this,” she said.

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“It’s got several off-label uses,” he said, keeping his voice casual, his movements slow and soothing. It took her a minute, then she looked over her shoulder once again and shook her head, a soft smile on her face.

That was better.

She was quiet for a while, her body slack, the tremors easing, but he kept at his massage, shifting from her shoulders to her upper arms, then her lower back, until she melted back against him.

He wrapped his arms around her torso and held her close. “You want to tell me what you’re thinking?” he asked. Now there was a first worth recording, him asking a woman what was on her mind.

“That wasn’t what I expected,” she said after a minute.

Oh,
fuck
. His heart stuttered, knocked hard against his ribs, then stopped. He swallowed twice before saying, “Yeah? In what way?” She was quiet for so long he was on the verge of just apologizing for the whole scene, start to finish, when she spoke. “I didn’t expect it to…affect me so powerfully.

My fantasies only went as far as what happened in the kitchen,” she said.

“I figured that,” he said.

“I didn’t know what to expect when we were in the bedroom and the uncertainty just…heightened everything.”

It was a vague answer at best, but he let it go. She’d cut him slack plenty of times after sex that rocked him to the core. “Not even at Buff?” he asked before pressing a kiss into her temple.

She shook her head, lolling back against his shoulder. “Totally different. At Buff I was carried away, swept up in the moment. This time I was…it was just so much more intense.”

He waited a minute, trying to figure out what that meant, then gave up. “We don’t have to do it again,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she replied, rubbing her hands along his thighs. “I want to do it again.

Officer Anderson.”

That startled a laugh out of him. “You do?”

Lacey looked up at him, reaching behind her to cup his rough jaw with one hand.

“Sure,” she said, as if he’d totally missed the point. Maybe he had. This sex-in-a-relationship shit was insanely complicated. “You don’t?” He reached for the plain bar of soap and lathered his hands. “Whatever you want, beautiful,” he said as he gently soaped her breasts, then slid his fingers between her thighs. She winced. One glance down over her shoulder told him keeping his jeans on might have helped him stay in control, but the tender skin between her legs was chafed and reddened. Lesson learned, for next time.

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Next time. He wasn’t sure what spooked him more unprotected sex and the unanticipated consequence of feeling closer to her each time he was bare inside her, or the fact that he kept planning ahead with Lacey, as if they had a future together.

Maybe they did. Not marriage or anything, but maybe he’d bring over some clothes, stop acting like her house was a hotel. Call when he felt like it, rather than talking himself out of it if he thought it was too soon.

The heat and humidity of the shower must have rewired his circulatory system, his entire nervous system, because his heart seemed to beat to a new rhythm. It was like each pulse whispered a message, one he couldn’t quite understand. The knowledge danced just out of his reach, coming into better focus as he quit concentrating on it, but never quite within his grasp.

A huge yawn made her jaw pop, so he pushed her to her feet. “Bedtime, beautiful.” She stood dreamily under the spray while he soaped and rinsed. Drying off took no time at all, then he ushered her into bed. As they curled up together his heartbeat, slower and smoother now, seemed less like it was transmitting Morse code and more like the reliable background noise he was accustomed to.

But he couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed.

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The next morning Hunter stood on Lacey’s front porch, a gym bag in one hand and his key ring in the other. Identifying her key among the dozen or so on his ring wasn’t difficult—it was old, scratched, with green mold in the grooves from years under a wet flowerpot. The question was, did he use it?

He hated to ring the doorbell if she was still sleeping. He’d woken up just after eight and slipped out, using the key to lock himself out. Back at his apartment he called his dad to get the day’s schedule, but his dad wasn’t feeling well so the work was off.

Dad pushed himself hard to finish this job in time for the homeowners to have Thanksgiving in their newly renovated kitchen. The job was a little ahead of schedule, but this was his dad’s third sick day in two months and he normally called in sick as frequently as Hunter. In other words, never.

Shaking off his worries, Hunter had showered and changed into a decent shirt and clean jeans, then gathered a few things, underwear and socks, a couple of nicer shirts, a spare pair of khakis, a razor. He’d put them in the gym bag and driven through a brilliant fall morning, the kind that came only after a heavy rain, back to Lacey’s house.

It’s just a couple of changes of clothes
, he told himself as he looked at the key.
She gave
you the key. You’ve used it, yes, to lock yourself out, but you’ve used it.

He used it again, this time to let himself into the foyer.

Lacey peered around the door at him, her brown eyes bright with curiosity. When you handed out keys like they were Halloween candy, it was anybody’s guess who might walk through a door.

He stepped into the foyer and closed the door behind him. He’d caught her getting ready to leave because she wore a tight-fitting white sweater turtleneck, jeans and black boots. Her keys and purse sat on the table by the closet. A black quilted coat hung from her hand as she looked at him, then at the bag in his hand.

“Hi,” she said, her hair falling in flaming waves against her cheekbones. “I thought you were working with your dad today.”

“Dad’s sick. We’re ahead of schedule so he’ll finish up with the regular crew on Monday.” He hefted the bag and tried to gauge her response. “I thought I’d leave some stuff here. For when I stay over.”

Her smile spread slow and sweet across her face. “Great,” she said casually as she shrugged into the coat. “I’m starving. I didn’t eat anything last night and I have no food in the house. I was about to go get some breakfast, then go grocery shopping. Boring Saturday stuff. Want to come?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sounds good.”

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He left his bag by the door and locked up behind them both. “Where to?” he said as they settled into his car.

“The Butter Knife has great eggs Benedict,” she said as she buckled her seat belt.

“What the hell are eggs Benedict? I like Gino’s Diner,” he said. “None of that stringy organic free-range bacon.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I feel like eggs Benedict.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll get sausage,” he said and kissed the smug smile off her face while they waited for the light.

Lacey bought a paper when they sat down at a table in the corner and after an unspoken discussion he ended up with the front page and sports section. The waitress took their order and hurried off. He caught Lacey looking through the auction and property announcements in the Local News section as they sipped coffee.

“Do you ever stop working?” he asked.

The paper lowered with a crisp snap. “How many people have come through the door since we were seated?”

“Eleven. Six females, four males, one juvenile. Eight people left, if you’re interested.”

She quirked one finely arched eyebrow at him. He winked. When the waitress approached, she folded the paper away to make room for the platters of food. She ate most of her eggs Benedict, which turned out to be a soft-cooked egg with ham on an English muffin. He finished everything he ordered, then polished off her fancy eggs.

A good chunk of the city’s upper middle class was meandering aimlessly through Whole Foods. Lacey shopped like she worked her BlackBerry, plowing through the aisles at a steady pace.

“I like your focus,” he commented as she tossed three boxes of crackers into her moving cart.

“You wouldn’t like me so much on Madison Avenue in New York,” she said, pausing for two seconds to choose between prepackaged salmon fillets. “Cooking for one doesn’t take much effort. Are you working tonight?”

“Nope.”

“Dinner and a DVD?”

“
300
? You said you haven’t seen it.”

Not quite hiding a pleased smile, she added two steaks to the cart. That weird electric signal from his heart started up again, because if staying around for dinner and a movie was all it took to make her happy, then this wouldn’t be so hard.

She set off for the cheese section, weaving between a family of five that wouldn’t have been out of place in a commune and two perfectly made-up women, skin taut from too much plastic surgery. Lacey tried all the cheese samples before choosing two, then turned to the olives, talking to herself while she considered and discarded plastic 152

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tubs. Out of habit, Hunter scanned the crowd. More beards, braids and Birkenstocks, although several men were freshly shaved and wearing trendy dark jeans and sweaters.

One man in particular seemed to share Hunter’s fascination with Lacey. Blond hair neatly parted on the side, dark eyes, peanut-butter tan that comes from a bed, not from hours in the sun. He looked away when he felt Hunter watching him, checking his BlackBerry with studied attention. There was no ring on his wedding ring finger. Thirty seconds later the man looked at Lacey again, then at Hunter, hastily clicking and scrolling when he again made eye contact with Hunter.

Looks like a cocker spaniel…always on the BlackBerry…

“Do you eat olives?” Lacey asked, her head in the refrigerated case.

“Yeah,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “Is that your ex by the wine?” Lacey straightened, a tub of olives in each hand, and followed Hunter’s gaze, over the cheese station, through a group of bored-looking teenage girls. Although the man had turned his back, Lacey said, “That’s Davis.” Awkward. Very awkward, even if twelve hours before he hadn’t had Davis’s ex-wife handcuffed and naked for an unorthodox interrogation. But Lacey wasn’t blushing as Davis turned to them and made one of those fake “oh, I just saw you” nods, so Hunter wouldn’t, either.

For a moment he thought the exchange of nods would be it, but Davis spoke to someone beside him, then made his way through the crowd to Lacey. A couple of inches shorter than Hunter, Lacey’s ex-husband wore khakis and a button down shirt under a v-neck sweater. The blonde haired, blue-eyed woman holding Davis’s hand had on a black tracksuit that showed off her slender, toned body and the ponytail and lip gloss made her look like she’d just come from the gym, or maybe babysitting in the gym’s day care.

After setting both tubs of olives in the cart, Lacey gave Davis a professional smile, then turned to the woman he introduced as Brianna.

“So nice to meet you,” Lacey said.

“And you as well,” Brianna replied, remarkably calm for a woman meeting her boyfriend’s ex-wife. Her whole demeanor radiated the settled, confident attitude of someone who’s never worried about money, or much of anything.

Lacey introduced him to a round of firm handshakes.

“How was dinner with Shane Baldwin?” Davis asked with a sideways glance at Hunter.

Dinner with Baldwin? Hunter kept his face blank as he waited for Lacey’s reply.

“Oh, fine,” she said, but her gaze flickered to his face, then back again. Not much of a break in Lacey’s cool façade, but enough to tell him something was up.

“I hear you’re the front runner to arrange financing for his outdoor shopping plaza.”

“I can’t discuss clients, Davis,” she said with just the right touch of regret.

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“I hope you get the deal,” he said and there was nothing snarky about it.

Brianna lifted a take out coffee cup to her lips and a rainbow exploded on her ring finger as an enormous diamond caught the overhead lights. He, Lacey and Davis all focused on the ring.

This time Davis’s laugh was a little more nervous. “Brianna and I, uh…got engaged last weekend,” he said.

“Congratulations,” Lacey said, both her smile and voice sincere enough to make the well wishes sound heart felt. “I hope you’ll be very happy together.” Arms crossed over his chest, Hunter watched the scene unfold as if observing it for a report. The only thing that really stuck out to him was how freaking polite everyone was to everyone else. At least once a week he went to a domestic disturbance call where mothers screamed at fathers and children screamed at parents. Sometimes, just for fun, the extended family got involved and everyone screamed at everyone else until he got things quieted down and sorted out.

At least that was visible and honest. This practiced calm angered him. They were so smooth, so polished, Lacey, Davis and Brianna all wearing identical controlled, polite looks as they smiled and chatted. No one talked about what was going on underneath the surface. It felt just like the cocktail party at the Metropolitan Club, surrounded by people whose lives sailed smoothly from birth to death, through private schools and expensive colleges, into gated subdivisions, luxury sedans and vacations in places he couldn’t pronounce. And all the while men hooked up with younger women, alcoholic investment bankers hired teenage runaways to suck them off in an alley, or mothers left their families for better pickings and everyone pretended nothing was wrong.

Lacey looked up at Hunter. “How about a baguette to go with the steaks tonight?” He jerked out of his tense reflections because he’d watched emotion come and go on Lacey’s expressive face, but this was the first time he’d seen desperation. She looked at him, Brianna looked at Davis and Davis eyed Hunter with a smug certainty that set Hunter’s teeth on edge. “Sounds great,” he said.

Lacey broke the scene by aiming her cart toward the bread section. “It was good to see you, Davis. Brianna.”

“You, too, Lacey,” Davis said. Brianna gave them a cursory smile as she began to pick through the olive tubs.

Hunter followed Lacey to the bakery. “That was polite.” And by
polite
he meant fucking weird.

“I can’t believe he’s already engaged to her,” Lacey said in a low voice.

It occurred to him that maybe Lacey’s studied calm stemmed not from some genetic response to conflict but from a real attempt to keep it together. “Did he screw around with her while you were married?” he said, fury flashing through him like a concussion grenade.

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“No,” she said quietly. “They work together but he says he didn’t and I believe him.

He’s just always liked having someone around and she suits him perfectly.” He didn’t get the special emphasis on
perfectly
, but her words were matter-of-fact, not bitter. The flare of anger melted in his veins. Some day, when emotions weren’t so high, he’d ask her about the divorce. “Brianna doesn’t look old enough to be a lawyer.” She shot him a look of sharp amusement. “She’s not a lawyer. She was his paralegal. I think she’s been transferred to another attorney with the firm, but she’ll quit working before she walks down the aisle. There are perks to marrying a partner in the best firm in town. That ring must have cost him twenty thousand dollars.” Hunter went still for a moment. Twenty thousand dollars for an engagement ring?

He looked speculatively at Lacey as she examined each loaf of French bread before choosing one and putting it in the cart. He didn’t have twenty thousand dollars. He lived pretty much paycheck to paycheck and until he started dating Lacey, he’d never thought about it.

Lacey bought the groceries. He waited until they were in the Charger and on the way back to her house before he asked, “When was the dinner with Baldwin?”

“The night before you showed up at my house with a hangover.” So when he’d been sitting with an abandoned kid she’d been dining with a multi-millionaire, probably at Le Pain or somewhere like it, pricey, fancy. And the next night he was spilling his guts on her sofa, without even knowing she’d had an important dinner. Hell, he still had only a vague understanding of what she did and how all the players and pieces fit together.

“You were invited,” she said.

He looked at her. Her eyes were solemn, soft. “To dinner?” At her nod, he went on.

“That’s why you were calling me?”

“No, I called because I wanted to talk to you, but yes, I wanted to invite you to dinner.” Her voice trailed off. “Shane asked about you. Said to tell you hello.” What did he say to that?
Maybe another time?
Would there be another time? He settled on, “That was nice of him.”

“I didn’t tell you about it because it seemed…unimportant after the day you’d had.

It was just dinner,” she said with a shrug.

He parked in her driveway and killed the engine, then draped one arm over the steering wheel as he turned to face her. “It was important to you.” And he’d missed it, didn’t know a fucking thing about it, but her ex did. If he hadn’t seen that uncomfortable exchange between the two of them, he might have thought she was still talking to Davis. More likely someone Davis knew saw Lacey with Baldwin at the restaurant and mentioned it to him.

No one he knew would have dinner at Le Pain on a weeknight, if ever. Or recognize Baldwin, a businessman who, with Lacey’s help, would probably pour millions of dollars into the city’s economy.

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“Don’t worry about it,” she said, reminding him of her response to her ruined bedding.

He’d worry about whatever he damn well pleased. She was in the act of opening her door, but he put his hand on her arm to stop her. “How did it go?”

“Well,” she said. “I’m pulling together a couple of financing options for him. Things look promising.”

He let her go. Together they grabbed the bags from the back seat, but he kept his jacket on as he helped her put the groceries away.