The Last Victim (39 page)

She also knew that there would be an “after him.” She was alive and he was not. It was only by the most random of chances that they had connected at all. But she knew ghosts. Ghosts were ephemeral. Ghosts didn’t stay.

She kissed him anyway. Kissed him like she would die if she didn’t, like every dream of a happily ever after she’d had was right there in his arms, like there was no yesterday and no tomorrow and no world beyond that moment and the two of them.

She kissed him like she was crazy in love with him.

Just for tonight …

Drawing back, taking a breath, she looked up at him, only to discover that he was looking at her, too. For a moment, as his warm breath feathered her lips, their eyes met and held. Charlie absorbed every detail of his to-die-for good looks, of the sculpted planes and angles of his face, of his height and the width of his shoulders and the sensuous line of his mouth. His pupils had dilated until his eyes looked almost black. A dark flush rode high on his cheekbones.

“Tonight’s all we’re ever going to have, isn’t it?” Until the words were out of her mouth, Charlie hadn’t realized she was going to say them aloud.

His eyes flickered. His lips tightened and his jaw went hard.

“I want you.” His voice was low and gravelly.

Charlie went all soft and shivery inside. All her common sense, all her instincts for self-preservation, vanished in that instant. “I want you, too.”

He smiled at her, a slow, sexy smile that thrilled her clear down to her toes. Then he bent his head, and Charlie quit thinking entirely as his lips found hers again. Her eyes closed, her lips parted, and then she tightened her arms around his neck and put her tongue in his
mouth and kissed him back like he was the embodiment of every erotic dream she’d ever had.

Oh, wait, he was.

His mouth was hard and hungry. Possessive. Demanding. His hands slid down her back, the size and warmth of them sensuous through the silkiness of her pajamas, tracing the arch of her body, molding her to him, making her tremble, making her cling. Heat radiated through his clothes. The urgency of his arousal was impossible to mistake. The sexual charge he gave off was as electric as the lightning that flashed through the night outside. It sizzled between them, igniting the air. Suddenly dizzy, Charlie pressed even closer and kissed him back just as fiercely as he was kissing her, abandoning herself to the moment, to the darkness, to the way he was making her feel. He kissed her breathless, kissed her stupid, kissed her until her heart pounded and her blood raced and her body melted.

“We’re in your house, right?” he asked in a husky murmur as his mouth left hers to press burning kisses across her cheek.

“Mmm.” So turned on she could hardly think, Charlie managed a nod.

“Ah.” It was a sound of satisfaction, uttered as he bent her over his arm and dragged his mouth down the sensitive side of her neck. His hand found her breast through the thin camisole, and her knees practically gave way right there. She made an involuntary sound of pleasure as her nipple puckered instantly and her breast surged against the hardness of his palm. His hand tightened, caressed, and then was gone, leaving fire in its wake.

Bereft at the sudden withdrawal, Charlie opened her eyes in protest as he scooped her up in his arms and started walking.

“What? Where …?” Her voice failed her. She was so bedazzled by lust, by the steam the two of them were generating, she couldn’t get the rest of the question out.

But he knew what she was asking. His eyes gleamed down at her, dark and hot. “Upstairs.”

Knowing what his answer meant, knowing where he was taking her, Charlie felt an explosion of desire so intense, so hot and clamorous, that it raced through her in undulating waves. Her heart pounded. Deep inside, her body pulsed with need.

He reached the bottom of the wide, old-fashioned staircase and started up.

“I can—” she began with determination, battling to keep from losing her head completely, meaning to protest that she could walk, because the idea of him carrying her up a steep flight of stairs with an eye to screwing her senseless at the top had way too many Neanderthal-esque connotations for her, but he stopped her voice with his mouth. The point that she had meant to make, that she was a grown woman, absolutely responsible for her own sexual pleasure, and certainly not the type who ever needed or wanted to be swept off her feet, was lost in the torrid eroticism of that kiss. It was drugging in its sensuality, in its promise of unspeakable pleasures to come, of dark, erotic vistas waiting to be explored.

Dry-mouthed, Charlie gave up on trying to take back her personal power and tightened her arms around his neck and kissed him back. He climbed the stairs with her easily, like she weighed nothing at all, kissing her all the while. As primitive of her as she knew it was, she reveled in his strength.

God, he excites me
.

Clinging to his broad shoulders, made dizzy by the fierce possession of his mouth and the skyrocketing of her own desire, Charlie was startled enough by a clap of thunder to pull her mouth from his. Even as she registered what the sound had been, she realized that he had reached the landing at the top of the stairs. There she had one final moment of clarity.

This is a mistake
.

She absolutely knew it. Knew some kind of cosmic line was being crossed, and there would be no going back from what she was about to do. The thing was, though, she decided as he walked into her bedroom with her in his arms, right at that moment she simply didn’t care.

She wanted him so badly, she would have walked over hot coals for this.

Lightning flashed, and by its brief burst of light she drank in the fierce masculine beauty of his face, the hot glitter in his eyes as they met hers, the passionate curve of his mouth.

“I’ve been having fantasies about this bed all day.” His voice was hoarse, almost unrecognizable. His lips slid down her neck and across
her shoulder as he set her on her feet beside her bed. With its pure white coverings and the subtle gleam of the brass headboard, it was visible even in the darkness between lightning flashes.

Turning into his arms, she slipped her hands under his T-shirt, moving them up over the flexing muscles of his back, dislodging his shirt in the process. His skin was warm and smooth. She stroked it, loving the hard masculine contours. His reaction was instantaneous. His eyes flamed at her. He went tense, perfectly still, while heat radiated from him in waves. Then in a single fluid movement he pulled his T-shirt off over his head.

“You’ve really been having fantasies about my bed?” The question was meant to be coolly teasing, to keep him from realizing how very turned on she was. It was not. In the end, Charlie just tried not to sound as breathless as she felt. But now that he was stripped to the waist, there was nothing she could do. He was so sex-on-the-hoof gorgeous she could barely look away. Merely the sight of the powerful-looking expanse of his shoulders, his broad chest, the corded muscles in his arms, his sinewy abs above the low waistband of his jeans, made her heart pound. Her hands lay flat against the firm flesh right above his hip bones. She slid them sensuously upward to settle on his chest, loving the feel of the warm, smooth skin overlying sleek muscle, loving the fact that he was hers to do with as she would.

Just for tonight
.

His jaw turned to granite as his hands came up to tilt her face to his, smooth her hair back from her cheeks. She met his eyes then, and shivered at the hot blaze of passion for her she saw in their depths. Electricity leaped between them, so raw and powerful that it put the lightning streaking the night sky outside to shame.

Her arms went around his neck as his mouth found hers again. The kiss was fierce and deep and dazzling, and when he broke it off Charlie was shaking.

“I’ve been thinking about
you
in your bed,” he clarified in a rough whisper as he pressed tiny, burning kisses along the base of her neck. “About everything I would do to you if I ever got you here.”

Charlie’s breathing went hopelessly erratic as his hands slid under the hem of her camisole. It was a loose, filmy garment of silk and lace,
with spaghetti straps and tiny, useless silk-covered buttons marching down the front.

He pushed it upward, his hands stroking over her rib cage, over her back, after he bared her breasts. He lifted his head and looked down at her then, at the full round globes with their dark, eager tips, and his face tightened and his eyes burned. Her breasts swelled and lifted, yearning for his touch, but his hands didn’t go where she wanted them. Instead he pulled the camisole off over her head and let it drop to the floor. She was still sucking in air from that when he found the satiny drawstring that secured her pants at the waist, and with unerring accuracy tugged on the end that loosened its bow. As quick as that, her pants slithered down her body to the floor.

She was naked. And his eyes were touching her everywhere.

Charlie made a little sound deep in her throat. Her bones melted. Her knees went weak. She swayed against him, and was instantly dazzled by the feel of them skin to skin, by the softness of her breasts against the wall of his chest, by his warmth and solid strength. Moving against him voluptuously, she pressed her lips to the sturdy column of his neck, then opened them to taste him with her tongue. His skin was hot and tasted of salt.

“You’re beautiful.” Trailing fire in their wake, his hands slid down her back to cup her ass.

The feel of his big hands on her curves made her quake inside. She gave a slight shake of her head. “That would be you.”

She thought she saw the slightest of smiles touch his mouth. It vanished as she found his belt buckle. Unfastening it, she reached for the button on his jeans and undid that, too. Then she unzipped his pants. It was a small sound, but erotic enough to make her pulse pound and her fingers unsteady.

He had gone very still. Against her breasts, she felt his muscles turn to iron. The sudden diamond-hard glitter in his eyes was enough to curl her toes.

“You’re just what I always wanted, Doc.” His voice was thick and hot. He tilted her face up to his, pressed a quick hard kiss to her mouth. “I’m going to make you come for me all night long.”

Then he picked her up and laid her on her bed and came down on top of her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Stretching her arms above her head, Garland pinned her beneath him, kissing her like he would never get enough of the taste of her mouth. Charlie had a brief uneasy instant in which she realized that in this position she was almost entirely helpless against a man of his size and strength. A glimmer of caution, a glimmer of doubt—what if sex was the trigger that brought out the monster in him?—was swamped by a wave of fierce need. She could feel the whole long length of him pressing her into the thick softness of her comforter, feel the pressure of his muscled chest against her breasts and the hair-roughened rasp of his powerful thighs as they settled between hers and the burning weight of his manhood brushing her skin. He was big, and heavy, all rippling sinew and hot sleek skin, and the feel of him against her drove her wild. When his mouth left hers, it trailed down her neck to find her breast. Hungry and wet, it closed over one nipple, kissing her, licking her, and then moved on to the other. Shivery with arousal, Charlie arched her back and closed her eyes and gave herself to the darkness and the heat. When he shifted his grip so that one hand shackled her wrists and the other was free to slide between her legs, she quivered and moaned and moved for him and let him play. When he finally let
her wrists go, when he kissed his way down her body to lick into the delicate cleft his fingers had explored, she cried out and came for him.

After that, when he stretched back over her and started to fit his body to hers, she was warm and pliant and still pleasantly floating. Holding himself a little above her with his elbows taking most of his weight, he pushed into her slowly, letting her feel him, and her eyes fluttered open with interest as he entered that first little bit. He felt huge, long and thick and hard, all velvet over scalding steel. Sated though she was, she made a little sound of surprise and pleasure as her body got with the program again and began to clench and burn around him. His mouth was set, his eyes open and so dark they were almost black as he watched her face change, as he watched her register what he was doing to her and how it felt. She knew she must be flushed, knew her eyes must be heavy-lidded and slumberous, knew her lips were parted with anticipation and swollen from his kisses. She could sense the tremendous control he was exercising as he pushed inside her inch by deliberate inch, until she couldn’t stand it anymore, until she closed her eyes and clenched her teeth and started to move, rocking up against him, trying to draw him in deeper, digging her fingernails into his back, gasping at the sheer pleasure of it, wanting more.

“You want me to fuck you, ask me.” The low growl in her ear made her suck in air.

Charlie’s eyes opened to find that he was watching her still. The hot, fierce gleam in his eyes made her go all liquid inside. She was moving beneath him, she couldn’t help it, he was making her wild, she was on fire from wanting him. Never in her life had she been this sexually aroused. What had sprung to life between them was pure chemistry, a kind of sexual magic, an erotic intensity so potent that it sizzled in the air.

“Michael,” she begged.

At the sound of his name on her lips, his eyes blazed. Charlie saw the clenching of his jaw, felt the slight tremor in the arms braced on either side of her, heard the hoarse sound he made.

Then he kissed her, a hot lush kiss, and pushed all the way inside her. Charlie cried out, clung, writhing at the sheer fierce pleasure of it.
He pulled back, then pushed in again, hard and deep, and she cried out once more. He kept going, fast now, driving into her, his movements almost savage, kissing her all the while. On fire, Charlie wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and moved with him, matching him stroke for stroke and kiss for kiss with passionate abandon, giving herself over to the hot dark wildfire he had ignited inside her until,
“Michael,”
she gasped at last, and came in a shattering climax that rocked her world.