Release (13 page)

Damn him. Max’d obviously guessed Sean’s proclivity for restraining a woman during sex. He wanted Genny so greatly that it was too tempting to just imagine that Max was a substitute for cuffs or a dildo . . . another means of giving Genny pleasure.

He looked down at her wearing nothing but her stockings and high heels, bound by Max . . . awaiting pleasure. He shoved aside all his doubts as his pulse began to throb in his cock. Her breasts looked soft and inviting, round and full, rising and falling with her breath, tempting him beyond reason.

He gathered her breasts in his hands, pushing them together until the fat, dark pink nipples were only an inch apart.

He lowered his head and began to feast on her tender flesh like the beast that he undoubtedly was.

 

 

 

As Sean replayed that heated memory while a winter storm raged outside the windows, he knew for a fact that he would have never been able to turn away from Genny that night. He could mentally flagellate himself as routinely as he brushed his teeth, but none of that mattered.

The truth couldn’t be denied, Sean admitted as he looked over at Genny huddled up in the corner of the couch.

He stood and walked toward her.

CHAPTER
NINE

G
enny’s heart seemed to hesitate for a second in her chest when Sean looked over at her and stood. She glanced down over his body anxiously. She knew he was coming to claim her in that moment just as surely as she knew her own name. What
else
could that hard gleam in his blue eyes or the delineated column of his cock pressing against the denim covering his left thigh mean?

She rushed off the couch. Her sudden movement caused him to pull up short.

“I have to go to my studio.”

“What?” he asked, his brows knitting together.

“My
studio.
My boutique. I just remembered that you said the temperature was going to drop. The plumbing there is ancient. If I don’t turn on the faucet in the bathroom, the pipes will freeze.”

He stared at her, looked out the window, and then glanced incredulously back to her face. “It’s dropping about an inch of snow an hour out there. If we take out one of our cars, we’ll just get stuck, Genny. I doubt there are many cabs operating, either.”

“I’ll walk then,” she said with forced casualness. “I brought some tennis shoes. I need the exercise.”

He halted her as she moved past him with a hand on her elbow. “You
can’t
be serious. Your feet will get soaked if you go out without boots on—”

She jerked her elbow out of his hold, feeling a little desperate. “I
have
to go to my studio.”

His mouth opened to argue.

“It’s all I have now, Sean.”

His words froze on his tongue. He clamped his mouth shut into a grim line.

“All right. I’m going with you.”

“I thought you had work to do in the office.”

“I’m going with you.”

Genevieve just stared at his retreating back. She knew better than to argue with Sean when he used that tone of voice.

 

 

 

The cool air felt wonderful on her flushed cheeks at first. It didn’t take long before desire-warmed flesh grew frigid, however.

A plow had cleared Wells Street perhaps an hour ago, but the sidewalks were thick with untouched snow. They walked on the side of the street, because there wasn’t a car in sight. The el tracks over their head and the high-rises gave them a small measure of protection against the swirling, stinging snow for the first part of their trip, but north of the loop they were more fully exposed.

They finally turned right from Dearborn Avenue onto Oak Street. Sean grabbed her hand to keep her steady as the brutal Lake Michigan wind cut through her wool coat as though it were made of tissue paper. The wind came off the lake at Oak Street Beach and zoomed between the buildings, creating one of the most unpleasant wind tunnels in the city.

While shoppers patronized Michigan Avenue for the more famous stores, the block on Oak Street between Michigan and Rush was prized for smaller, high-end fashion boutiques. When Genevieve’s father had passed away, she discovered that he’d named both her and her mother as the beneficiaries on his modest life insurance policy. Genevieve had used it as start-up money for her business.

She’d wanted to succeed in her own right, but part of what had propelled her manic hard work in those early days was the desire to show her father she’d made good on his legacy. She’d burned to make his life worthwhile . . . to make the ghost of him that resided in her brain proud.

She noticed as they plodded along the snow-laden street, their shoulders to the wind, that very few shops were open. She shivered and squinted at Sean. Snowflakes clung to his eyebrows and whiskered jaw. His dark blond hair had been streaked with white. He looked resigned to his frozen discomfort.

“Whose idea was this, anyway?” she asked.

He threw her a dry glance. “Had to have been some crazy girl from Gary, Indiana. Boys from N’ Orleans are too fragile to go out in a blizzard.”

Keeping up with Sean’s long legs in the thick snow had got her heart pumping. She snorted between pants. “Fragile, my ass.”

“Too smart, then,” Sean added with a rakish grin that told Genny she’d been forgiven for her foolishness.

She sighed in relief when they finally reached her canopied storefront. Her boutique and design studio were housed in a renovated limestone town house. The original structure had been built in the early nineteen hundreds. She hadn’t been completely lying when she said she was worried about the pipes freezing and bursting. It had never happened before, but it
could
happen. The building was old enough, after all.

She drew her keys out of her coat pocket. Her hands were numb. Sean was right. She
was
crazy for insisting they wander around the city in near-blizzard conditions because she was worried about whether or not she could actually measure up to Sean’s expectations of her in bed. When she couldn’t seem to work the key into the lock, Sean took the keychain from her frozen, stiff fingers and unlocked the door.

They spent several minutes stomping snow off onto the entryway floor mat and wiping flakes off each other’s shoulders and back. She glanced behind her when Sean swatted at her butt several times.

“There’s no snow there anymore,” she scolded.

“Who said anything about snow? I’m giving you a spanking for dragging us out in this mess. I’ll give you a more thorough one later.”

Their gazes met and held. Genevieve realized she’d thawed out in a second, all from seeing the heated gleam in Sean’s blue eyes as he teased her about a spanking.

He
had
been joking, hadn’t he?

She entered the showroom of her boutique and flipped on the lights, trying to seem businesslike. She turned around next to a rack of dresses when Sean called out to her, all traces of his former humor and warmth absent from his voice.

“Stop, Genny. Come here.”

She spun around.

“What?” she asked in rising confusion when she saw Sean’s rigid expression as he stared at the carpet.

“Know anybody who should be in your store who wears men’s size twelves?”

Genny stared at the muddy boot prints on the carpet—prints that were most definitely not hers or Sean’s—and met Sean’s gaze. She shook her head. He unbuttoned his peacoat and shoved his hand into the opening, withdrawing his gun. In the periphery of her stunned brain, she noticed he still carried the 9mm Beretta preferred by intelligence operatives—both ex-military and CIA. Max had also carried a 9mm Beretta.

They said he’d been murdered with his own gun.

“Get behind me. Refresh my memory. What’s in the back?” Sean asked quietly as he nodded to the door behind the checkout counter.

Genevieve blinked, chasing away the anxious memories that seeing Sean’s gun evoked.

“Genny?” Sean prodded when she didn’t answer immediately.

“My design studio and a bathroom.”

“There’s a back door, right?”

“Yes,” Genevieve replied. “It leads to the alley.”

“It’s a little chilly in here. Looks like your visitor wasn’t considerate enough to shut the door before he left.” Genevieve saw him peer around the showroom, his sharp eyes taking in everything. “Stay here.”

He followed the tracks behind the counter and disappeared down the hallway. She heard a door close, and Sean returned a moment later, his gun sheathed in his holster once again.

“Whoever it was is gone. Got your cell phone?” he asked. Genevieve nodded and held it up. “Go ahead and call the police. You’ll need to have a report made for the insurance.”

“Why?” Genevieve asked anxiously, pausing as she dialed 911. She’d never had a break-in since she’d first rented this space seven years ago. “What did he take?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to come and look. There’s nothing obvious missing, but he’s ransacked your studio.”

The call to the police took longer than she would have expected. Because of the storm, they were only sending out officers to true emergencies. Most of the information regarding the break-in had to be taken over the phone. Sean had disappeared down the hallway while she talked. She assumed he was canvassing the area, conducting his own investigation.

She hung up, braced herself for seeing the wreckage before she followed him.

“Shit,”
she said emphatically when she stood on the threshold of her studio.

“Genny?” Sean’s voice echoed from the back of the building. He must have been inspecting the intruder’s point of entry.

She didn’t look around, although she was aware of him coming up behind her. All the despair she
should
have felt last night as she watched her house burn crashed down on her now.

She stared at the bolts of fabric, tipped over metal files, and loose paper strewn all over the floor. Everything in her desk had been spilled onto the carpet. A horrifying thought struck her and she hurried over to her desk. Her keyboard had been knocked askew, but the screen flickered to life when she touched the mouse.

“Thank God
.
I didn’t back up my work last night before I left. The computer doesn’t seem to be damaged.”

“Do you notice anything missing?” Sean asked.

She glanced around, frowning when she saw that dirt from a fern had spilled all over a bolt of muted green silk crepe de chine. How could someone be so mindlessly violent?

“A common criminal isn’t going to think most of this stuff is valuable,” she muttered as she bent and lifted the bolt; dirt and clumps of leaves slid off the exquisite fabric. “He must have been looking for money. Maybe it was some drunk idiot who wandered over from Rush or Division,” she said, referring to the restaurant and bar-lined streets just blocks away that were so popular from everyone from college kids to the affluent professionals who lived downtown.

“Whoever broke in here wasn’t a drunk college kid.”

Genevieve looked around when she heard the conviction in his tone. His firm lips were pressed into a grim line.

“What do you mean?” she asked, noticing his irritation.

“Did Max know you had that joke of a security system in your store?”

Genevieve bristled. “It wasn’t any of
his
business.” She sighed, exhaling her short-lived pique when she saw Sean’s eyebrows go up in a wry expression. She felt too overwhelmed to be irritated at Sean. Besides, he probably was right. “It was the system that was here when I took possession of the place. I rented it before I ever met Max. It’s always worked just fine in the past.”

He rolled his eyes. “That’s because you never had anyone try to break in until now. Not too difficult to have a perfect performance record when it’s never been challenged. Still, joke of a system or not, whoever disabled it knew precisely what he was doing.”

“Who would possibly want to—”

“We’d get a better handle on that if we knew what he was looking for,” Sean interrupted. He glanced at the contents of the drawers of an antique bureau, which were now dumped all over the carpet. He walked over to the table where she did her sketches and flipped back the cover of one of her sketchbooks. “Do you think one of your competitors could have hired someone to break in here and steal some of your work?”

For some reason, the question struck her as funny; maybe because it was asked by a private intelligence operative. “
Fashion espionage?
Come on, Sean. I’m not
that
big of a name.”

His sharp eyes flickered over to her before he set down the sketchbook. “What’d the police say?”

“Squad cars are only being sent out to true emergency situations because of the bad conditions. I’m supposed to call again after the streets get cleared and an officer will come over to make a report,” she said dully as she looked around her once pleasant, cozy workspace. Had it just been this morning that she was thinking how her studio seemed more like a home to her than the mansion? She blinked in surprise when Sean touched her arm. He moved as silently as a stalking wolf when he wanted to.

“We’re going back to the penthouse.”

“I’m fine, Sean. I want to get this place straightened up.”

He shook his head. “Just leave everything as it is until the police get here to take the report. The lock was busted on the back door, but I’ve jerry-rigged it for the time being. It’ll hold for now.”

Genevieve sighed, seeing his point about not altering things until the police made the report. She tightened the belt on her coat and started to walk out of the room.

“Genny?”

She turned. Sean watched her intently.

“You’re sure there’s nothing missing?”

She shrugged and glanced around the studio again. “Nothing I notice right off the bat, especially with everything being such a mess. The only things a burglar might want to take are the two computers and my stereo, and those are all still here. Marilyn went to the bank yesterday and made a deposit, since it was Friday. There was no money on the premises.”