Touching Evil (26 page)

His arms came around her then and pulled her closer.  His lips opened and his tongue went in search of hers.  He knew how to kiss a woman—hot, deep and devastating.  With a  single-minded intensity that had the rest of the world fading.  Inner fires flaring.  She pushed aside a persistent niggling doubt and dove into the flames.

His flavor was dark temptation, lethal to her senses.  Her hands played over the muscles of his shoulders, her fingers stroking in remembered pleasure.  She’d always loved the contrasts between them when they’d lain naked and entwined, his sinewy strength against her softness.  And she’d enjoyed stripping him of that strength, torching his control until desperation turned his breathing ragged, his hands hard and frantic.

The warm water cocooned them in its spray and the moment spun out, wrapping them in a dark intimate heat.

When he lifted his mouth, it took an instant for Sophia to remember to breathe.  Her bones were lax, hot molten wax and she leaned heavily against him.  Nor did her strength return when she opened her eyes and saw him watching her, his gaze slitted.  His eyes were antique gold when washed with desire, and that’s what she saw in them now.  But it was what she noted in his face that had her heart turning over.

There was passion there, yes, but also the signs of exhaustion he had successfully kept at bay for almost eighteen hours.  He was a protector to the core, a cop, that ex-Army ranger toughness as much a part of him as his eye color.  Perhaps that was why his unexpected tenderness could be so devastating.

It was that gentleness as much as his passion that had been responsible for tripping up her normally safe decisions.  Caused her to want too much.  Feel too deeply.  She’d walked away from him then.  Run actually, from him and from her own feelings.  For all intents and purposes Sophia had lived her life between the lines.  And Cam not only was outside the lines, he shouldn’t have even been in the picture.

But he was.  He
was
the picture and although he’d let her flee, she hadn’t been as successful leaving behind the feelings he’d elicited from her.  She allowed herself the indulgence of studying him.  His dark brown hair was painted a shade darker by the water, and kept a shorter length favored by most of the agents.  She’d seen a picture of him last month in which his hair had been longer, sporting what he’d called an unmanly wave.  She’d decided on the spot that she preferred it grown out, but doubted she’d ever see it that way.  

His jaw was stubbled, his eyes shadowed and she felt a sudden ache of tenderness.  He’d push on until he dropped, or until he put Baxter behind bars.  And he’d do so without considering the physical cost to himself.

But it was what she saw in his golden brown eyes that had her pulse stuttering and conscious thought draining away. Unvarnished desire.  Smoky tendrils of heat suffused her.  She’d spent her life neatly compartmentalizing her life, weighing risks, skirting threats to her equilibrium.  To her heart.  He represented the biggest risk she’d ever taken.  And she was through running from the possibility of heartbreak.

Their gazes tangled. He stroked a lazy path up her spine, and she shuddered in response.  An alarm shrilled in the distant recesses of her mind.  She’d heeded it once, and regretted her cowardice.  If there was one thing a brush with death had taught her, it was that moments were meant to be seized.  

His head dipped and his teeth closed over the cord of her neck, testing not quite painfully.  The uncertainty of their future had once frightened her until she’d learned what true fear was.  But this.  
This
was worth taking a chance.

 Thoughts grew foggy.  Reason clouded.  She dragged her lips across his jaw, felt his whiskers lightly abrade her mouth and the sensation cemented her decision. He was the only one who could make her believe that these feelings, wild and primitive, were more important than a relationship of shared interests.  He shattered her safe risk-averse world and all too easily became the center of it.

It wasn’t the frankly carnal passion between them that had frightened her so much.  It was finding herself wanting more. His lips moved over hers then, and there was a flare in her belly, hot and immediate.  

He cupped her face in his palms, and his mouth devoured hers, their tongues tangling, breath mingling, teeth clashing.  He walked her backwards a few steps until she felt the shower wall at her shoulders, and still he didn’t lift his mouth from hers.  She softened against him.  Here was the hunger she craved.  The hint of savagery that called forth an answering wildness she would have once denied existed.

He urged her legs apart with his knee then stepped between them.  His erection pressed against her belly, and she squirmed against him, wanting to feel him where she was empty and aching.  As if aware of her frustration, his hands went to her butt and he lifted her.  With her legs wrapped around her hips, she rocked against his hardness, feeling his reaction even if she couldn’t drag her eyes open to watch it.

Her head lolled against the wall, fingers on a tactile journey, dancing over the hard planes of his chest, the hollows beneath his ribs.  The ridges of sinew and bone.

There was something exquisitely sensuous about focusing on touch alone.  She mapped a journey along his biceps, across his shoulders, while he followed the streams of water along her skin with his tongue.  He sipped at the drops collected in the hollow beneath her neck.  She shivered each time his mouth found a new inch of skin to taste.  To savor.

This rollicking of her pulse was familiar, but no less heady for it.  Every brush of his lips, every teasing slide of his tongue was a dark promise of things to come.  It fueled a quiet desperation in her system.  He was pressed close.  She wanted him closer.  Seamed against her.  Buried deep inside her.  So close even the pulsing water couldn’t dribble though.  And then closer yet.  And she wanted him quaking, too.  Wanted to release the primitive nature that he kept so tightly harnessed.  She wanted, quite frankly, to strip him of every defense as easily as he’d crumbled hers.

To that end, she relaxed her fingers, went on a quest designed to unleash his control.  Her senses scattered when his tongue circled one nipple, teasing it tauter and then took it in his mouth, drawing strongly from her.  It took all the strength she could muster to concentrate on the places that made him shudder.  The soft velvety skin beneath his arm.  A fingernail scraping over one male nipple.  Her fingers lowered.  Over taut muscles in his belly that jumped and bunched at her touch.

He raised his head, the sound of his hissed breath was its own reward.  Her reach was constrained by the closeness of their position but she was thorough in her investigation.  She brushed her fingers over his back, feeling the flesh punctuated by vertebrae.  The muscles beneath her fingers quivered under her touch like an impatient stallion.  

Sophia felt seared by his gaze.  It painted her face, her breasts, causing her nipples to tighten even more. She knew from experience that he’d take pleasure and return it tenfold,  and the knowledge sparked comets of heat through her veins.

Eyes locked on him she arched her back, a carnal invitation and watched the color slash over his cheekbones.  His jaw tightened, and she knew intuitively he was battling against the urge to rush the ending, an urge she wouldn’t protest.  But she saw the moment he won the battle, saw the slight curve to his lips as he reached out a finger to brush it across her swollen and tender nipples.

She jerked against him in involuntary response, and her reaction seemed to ignite something inside him.  He slid a hand up to cup one of her breasts, capturing the taut bud between thumb and forefinger before lowering his mouth to take the other nipple between his lips.

Kaleidoscopic colors wheeled behind her eyelids.  Sophia leaned back while pressing closer to his lips and he responded to her unspoken demand by suckling strongly from her.  The whisper of teeth against her flesh had hunger leaping forth,  an uncaged beast.  Her earlier plan to make him ache, make him need was forgotten.  Her fingers twisted in his wet hair, urging him to take more.

He lifted his mouth, and the cooling water tightened her nipples almost painfully.  She met his lips with hers, all pretense stripped away.  She felt alive in his arms, color returning to a world that violence had washed gray and sepia.  And the heat careening through her veins warmed a place left icy and cold from her time at Vance’s mercy.  

A more logical part of her wanted to backpedal.  There was danger here.  Of feeling too much.  Offering more, much more than Cam could ever return.  But to live was to risk.  A heart intact was also one that hadn’t felt the depth and breadth of emotion.

Sensation heightened unbearably everywhere they touched.  Pulse points were sharpened to razor-edged keenness.  Everything else dimmed.  Her flesh came alive under the stroking of his healing palms, hot and demanding over her curves, gentle on her injured wrist.  The contrast kept her off-kilter, swinging from lust to tenderness and back again.  Cam trailed a finger along her thigh, circling teasingly around the heat centered between her thighs, and the inner warnings were silenced.  

He leaned in for a kiss.  Hot.  Wet.  Rawly carnal.  His palm covered her mound, which was damp and aching.  His tongue searched out hers even as he parted her slick folds and entered her with one exploring finger.

Her hips arched and bucked against him at the dual assault.  Her blood was churning in her veins, frothing and crashing like white water.  There was primitive demand in his kiss.  In his touch.  In a demand that she reciprocated.

Sophia’s hands streaked over his body, tempting, teasing, reveling in the sensual warmth of skin covering bone and muscle.  He eased another finger inside her, increasing the sensual assault.  Then he found the tight cluster of nerves and started a rhythmic circling designed to send her a little crazy.

One of her hands found his rigid erection, tightening her grasp when she heard the raw guttural sound he made.  He was strength sheathed in satin and he leapt in her palm with an urgency that was telling in light of his outer control.  

There was a demand in his touch, a promise.  And while she could fight the sensual assault the conclusion couldn’t be denied.

He removed his fingers and repositioned her.  Sophia twined her arms around his shoulders.  He was inside her in one barely restrained lunge that brought a moan from both of them.  She met his demand with her own, her hips pistoning against his in a frenzied need for fulfillment.  He clutched her hips in hard desperate fingers, urging her to an even faster pace.  Her blood began to pulse, scorching rivers beneath her skin.  Need coiled in her belly.  

He was muttering something in her ear, his voice raw and urgent, but she couldn’t hear, couldn’t think.  The sound slipped away as evasive as wisps of fog.  Nerve endings spiraled to concentrate where they were fused so intimately.  The rhythm quickened.  Breaths shortened.  

The climax shattered her first, intense and tumultuous.  The eddies continued, stealing her breath, her awareness.  Her response snapped Cam’s control and he gave one last surge before following her headlong into a pleasure too long denied.

*  *  *  *

Sneaky little flickers of guilt marred what should have been a perfectly relaxing late night drive home.  Lucy had insisted on driving separately to Gavin’s hotel room.  The hours she’d spent stretched out naked over him, under him still had nerve endings quivering in memory.

Ravenous, they’d ordered pizza and devoured it like a couple of feral dogs.  Afterwards, she’d seen the change in his expression, forewarning her that he hadn’t forgotten his promise—or threat—to talk.

It was telling that the idea of a looming discussion about their relationship would strike terror into her heart.  Lucy was morally fastidious, dictated by the demand of her job and personal choice.  It was just her luck that she’d chosen the one man in the world who seemingly wasn’t satisfied with a no-strings-attached hookup.

She’d successfully managed to divert Gavin of his intentions and they’d spent another hour engaged in languorous sex.  And when he’d fallen asleep, she’d taken the opportunity to…not
sneak
.  That word was imbued with a negative connotation.  She’d left quietly.  Lucy didn’t spend a complete night with a  man.  Not ever.  Doing so would mean sleeping, eventually.  And then she’d be vulnerable.  Defenseless.

The way her mother had been twenty years ago when she’d passed out drunk with her newest ‘boyfriend’.  Leaving him to set the bed on fire, with her in it.

Lucy shoved that memory back into the vault where she usually kept all recollections of her childhood.  She didn’t need to consider where her lack of trust emanated from.  It was the way she’d operated most of her life.  And she didn’t know a man on earth who could understand it, much less accept it.

She certainly hadn’t wanted to try explaining it to Gavin.

It was with a degree of relief that she turned into the long drive next to her home.  The privacy offered by the property had appealed, as had the space.  But she hadn’t yet spent a winter here.  Lucy had a feeling she would be less satisfied with the detached garage at the back of the place once the snow to fly.  Iowa winters weren’t for wimps.  But for now the garage was fine, and the walk to the back deck was lined with solar lights that provided a welcoming glow against the nearly black night.

Except…she squinted at the light showing in her attic window.  Her nape prickled.  Had she left the light on there?  Slowing her pace, she tried to think.  She’d been up there yesterday to look through a box for more summer clothes.  But she hadn’t turned on the light to do so, had she?

She’d reached the deck.  Turning, she scanned the shadowy yard.  The security lights on the outside of her garage were still on.  Others were glowing from their mount above the back deck.  She saw nothing to alarm her.  Nerves quieting, she mounted the steps and crossed to the back door, her keys in hand.

When her cell shrilled, she made a grab for it, thinking at once of the case.  Of work.  But when she read the screen of the phone, a tendril of shame curled through her.  Gavin.