For All to See (Bureau Series Book 1) (15 page)

N
athan
, a trained observer, didn’t gawk, but also didn’t miss one inch of her lean, yet voluptuous figure before the water distorted the details. The only parts he didn’t see were the small—but important ones—covered by scraps of material. His mind explored the possibilities.

“Heaven help her. She doesn’t have a chance.” He knew his touches and flirtations affected her from the flush in her cheeks and the look in her eyes. And he wasn’t the type to give up.

Coming up for air she turned back to the boat. “FBI, can you swim?”

“Are you kidding?” He tugged the polo from his torso and tossed it to the deck, leaving only khaki shorts hanging low on his hips. He removed the gun and holster from his hip and scaled the mast.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Proving a point.”

“You’re insane. I get it,” she squealed.

Reaching the spreader midway up the queen’s mast, he took a running leap, and completed a forward double summersault into the water. He slipped smoothly into the lukewarm water. Still, the ripple of dispersing water rankled his abdomen. Showing off while battered sure as shit wasn't his brightest idea. But the look of excitement on her pretty face when he jumped paid for every ache.

He popped up inches from her disapproving scowl. “Your ribs!”

“Wanna kiss ’em and make ’em better? I’ve always had a naughty nurse fan—” She lunged at him and braced both hands on either side of his shoulders. Salty seawater covered his head.

Nathan popped up closer this time. He hooked her knees and wrapped them around his torso. The tread of his legs and the slow steady sway of his arms and hers kept them afloat, but the zap of skin-to-skin contact threatened to pull him under. Currents and waves flirted with intimate flesh. The conductive properties of water amplified the power of her draw.

Madelyn’s treading slowed. The curve of her breasts and the black triangles covering them rose and fell in time with her accelerated breaths. “I…”

He stopped breathing all together waiting for the words to come out of her mouth.
I want to kiss you. I’m falling in love with you. I could come right now. I don’t think we should do this.
Possibilities and expectation drove him mad.

“I need to get the bag to shore,” she said in a rush. Her legs unwound from his middle.

“Chicken.” He taunted with a smile.

She shoved him under again. When he came up she sidestroked furiously for the shore, pushing the watertight bag with her lead arm. He dug in. Water frothed and bubbled around him.

Madelyn’s squeal and giggles drifted back. Nathan let out a whistle for Deacon and the dog launched off the edge of the boat. He hit the surface and it rippled like an actual cannon ball had landed in his place. They raced for shore.

Nathan snagged the bag about ten meters from the break and had their lunch nearly prepared by the time she and Deacon made landfall.

“Always have to prove a point, don’t you,” she said, collapsing back on the beach blanket he’d laid out.

“Maybe.” He tossed her a bottle of water and sat next to her.

Waves lapped at their feet. Two boats, no more than specs, dotted across the horizon while they ate in companionable silence. After he stored the container, Madelyn laid down, stretching her lithe body in the sunlight.

Nathan hadn’t pushed her. Hell he’d only known her a few days, but his crazy yearning to know her pressed the matter. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes, you can ask. But the answer is no.”

He arched a brow.

She cupped a hand over her eyes and tilted her head toward him. “No, I won’t sleep with you.”

“Sure you will, but that wasn’t my question.”

Her eyes rolled heavenward, but she didn’t look away.

After a minute passed, he began again. “Do you honestly believe you don’t deserve to be happy?”

“I…what?” She scrambled off her back. “I never said that I… I’m happy.” Her knees tucked under her bottom and she pointed them in his direction. “Or at least I was before last week. You don’t know what you’re talking about?”

“I know you punish yourself. I know you didn’t want your mother dead.”

“Didn’t I? I’d wished her dead so many times, I lost count.”

“Wishing someone dead and killing them are two very different things.”

“And I did both. So…” She snatched up the metal water bottle, unscrewed the cap, and then twisted it back on without taking a drink.

“Did she hurt you?”

“She still does.” Her knuckles whitened as she attempted to strangle the metal. “Every damn day.”

“What happened?”

“Everyone has a past, Nathan. I like to leave mine there.”

“But you don’t. It’s always with you, buffering you from humanity.”

“I’m engaged with my community.”

“Yeah, a group of people. Mostly kids. But get you alone or even in an intimate group and you draw so deeply inside yourself no one can touch you.”

“And you don’t?” She slammed the bottle onto the fabric and pointed an accusing finger at him. “I’ve seen your mask too.”

“We all have them.”

“People don't want to know where their food comes from, they just want it there. The truth of it is ugly enough to twist their stomach, to make them look at their favorite burger with disgust and never eat it again. Same thing here. You don’t want to know.”

“You don’t want me to know.” Nathan countered more loudly than he’d intended. She blinked at his sharp tone. He took a breath and forced himself to calm. “You’re afraid I’ll look at you with disgust and never want to touch you again. Or worse, that I’ll pity you. Am I afraid you’ll look at me like I’m a terrified seven-year-old when you find out I was forced to watch my mother be beaten and gang raped?”

Madelyn’s cheeks matched the color of the white sand. Her fingers interlaced and she shoved them between her thighs. But no gasp or cry of horror escaped her lips.

“Fuck yes,” he said in answer to his own question. “But I’d have told you, if you’d asked. Because I trust you.” He pulled his knees up and rested his forearms on them. “Trust isn’t a grand gesture. It’s a small, nearly insignificant, thing to the rest of the world, but to the person who deserves your trust…it’s everything.”

“I didn’t think you would tell me. So, I didn’t ask.” She twisted toward the surf, hiked her knees up, and propped her arms atop them mirroring his pose. “I’m asking now. Is that why catching the bad guys is so important to you?”

“When I started out it was the only reason. Then as I did the job the reasons—the fuck-head pieces of shit of the world—kept piling up.”

“Tell me about it?” Her whisper was almost caught in the wind and carried to the corners of the world.

“I grew up in a poor neighborhood in Miami and saw things no one should. Prostitutes on the street corners. Gang-bangers in the open. Drugs down any alley. It was all I knew, and we managed all right. We kept our heads down and kept walking. But one night my mom and I stopped at the corner store for milk and bread. When we came back to the car the men were waiting. The whole time it was happening she reassured me. She told me everything was going to be okay. She told me to look away and think of the summers I spent in Georgia. She told me to think of good things while she went through hell.”

Tears welled in Madelyn’s eyes, but they didn’t fall. “You were both going through hell.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I kept thinking they were going to kill my mother and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. Shortly after the incident my father left. The coward couldn’t handle her trauma. What a weak bastard.” Nathan grunted in disgust.

“What about your mom? How did she recover?”

“My mom is amazing. She didn’t break or fade away. The opposite actually. She went back to school, finished her degree, and became a therapist. Her practice is in the same parking lot as the old gas station where it happened. She councils rape and trauma victims, travels the world speaking on the subject.” He dusted some sand off his leg and breathed for the first time since he’d started talking.

“I focused all my effort on becoming an agent. I spent the last eight years putting bad guys behind bars. And the one thing I have learned is that there are always more bad guys.”

“Nathan, there are good guys too, and good things. You have to remember that.”

He turned to her and peered directly into her soul. “I know there are.”

“
I
want
to be strong like your mom.”

“You are strong, Madelyn. A little too strong. You don’t have to have it together all the time. Trust me, there were plenty of ugly days in our house.” He gave a wry chuckle and his chin dimple flexed, stealing another piece of her heart. “There are still ugly days…especially when I try and convince her to move to the Georgia suburbs and open up shop near my uncle.”

“You’re scared she’ll get hurt.”

“I’m scared something will happen to her, and then I’ll be that helpless boy again.”

The tears came slowly and steadily, slipping down her cheeks and onto her legs. She refused to wipe them away or hide them from his stare. “That’s the worst…the inability to make it stop.”

Deacon quit digging in the surf. He ambled over and lay his wet back against each of them. Neither spoke for a while. She soaked up Deacon’s strength and Nathan’s support, and stared at the tiny grains of sand.

“My mom never wanted a child, but she screwed around enough that when she got pregnant at seventeen she didn’t know whose sperm had done the deed. When I was a few weeks old she stole cash from my grandfather’s safe and ran. She never called, never let them know where she was, or if she was okay. Momma Catherine told me Papps couldn’t handle the worry. He died of a massive heart attack on my sixth birthday.”

She chanced a look at Nathan, but he didn’t study her like a Rorschach blot. He stared off into the blue, intent on her words.

“Things were hard for a few years. My grandfather owned an investments company and had done all the financials since they’d gotten married. She hadn’t gone to college and hadn’t had a job outside the home since she’d been a teenager. I’d wake up most mornings and find her asleep at his desk using stock portfolios and ledgers as her pillows.”

Madelyn smiled and wiped at her tears. “A wealthy banker tried to force her to sell the business, but she showed an amazing knack for numbers. She bought his bank on my ninth birthday. Those years were the best. Just the two of us taking on the world.

“My mom showed up one Friday. We assumed she wanted money. Shock of the century, but she wanted me. She’d become a model in LA and married some rich record mogul. I didn’t want to go. Momma Catherine didn’t want me to go. She tried to pay her off, to get her to leave, but she was insistent, and the lawyer told my grandmother she didn’t have a chance of custody.”

“Even though she’d taken care of you and was your mother for all intents?”

“It wasn’t that simple. My grandmother hoped her daughter had finally come to her senses. She didn’t want to fight over me. I started school the next Monday eighteen hundred miles away from everything I knew with two strangers. I was scared and upset, but despite my best instincts, I was interested, excited to find out who my mother was, and what it would be like to have a father. Stupid.”

His finger looped around hers. She turned to find his gaze heavy on her for the first time since she’d started talking. “Not stupid.”

“Trusting,” she countered with a hitched brow.

“Young and hopeful.”

She nodded. “As it turned out, she didn’t want me...he did.”

Nathan’s eyes darkened to midnight.

“Not like that. He had my mom for that.”

“Plenty of men have women, but it doesn't stop them from…” He growled a curse.

“He liked to show his dominance with mind games and his fists. When she showed up for shoots with bruises she lost jobs and value in his eyes. So, he used me as his personal punching bag. He used her to get off.”

“And she allowed it.” He didn’t ask. So she didn’t answer the obvious.

“Sunday before school we went shopping. She bought a whole new wardrobe, but insisted on pants and long sleeves. I thought she’d joined some church that required it, but tossed the notion because she dressed like a floozy. Thankful to have any clothes to my name, I dismissed it.

“I’d been there for five days the first time he hit me. Everything had been going so well. We ate at the table like a real family, talked about our day, and then he got a call about some deal falling through. He hung up and by the time the phone hit the receiver I was on the floor clutching my chest.”

She traced a finger over the meat just below her collarbone. “His fat diamond ring left an ugly stamp. If it hadn't been for that, I’d have thought I hallucinated myself onto my side crying into the carpet.” She gave an ugly laugh. “I remember sitting in the corner of the bedroom that night waiting for an argument to erupt. I waited to hear my mom defend me and dare him ever to lay a finger on me again. There were grunts and shouts, but none in rage, and not like I’d ever heard before. Then there was quiet. I waited for her to come sneak me out. I waited until the sun came up and it was time to get ready for school.

“At first I was too shocked to say anything to a teacher, and then I was too terrified. He caught me trying to call my grandmother one night. He told me, if I ever left or tried to lie about my life there, my mother would die of a broken heart. He said, ‘She’ll throw herself off the roof and shatter into a million pieces because you left.’ So, I kept quiet.”

“How long?” Nathan’s voice ground like sandpaper on concrete.

“Four years. No matter what he did, I never fought back. But then I turned sixteen. My peers started driving, started experiencing freedom. I knew I couldn’t endure for much longer. I knew it was me or him, suicide or murder. I’d sit in class and daydream scenarios of how I’d fight back…one day. I never thought I’d have the guts to go through with it. And I thought, if I tried, he’d overpower me and I’d die in the process.

“Self-defense. They called it self-defense, but I meant to ram the knife into his belly that night.” The brilliant day plunged to darkness and she was back in the cold kitchen. One hand gripped the handle of the industrial-sized freezer to bridle his advance, while the other reached blindly for the icy handle of the butcher’s knife. Remembered adrenaline hijacked her heart and sped it back through that horrible night.

Nathan’s arms slipped around her. In one fluid motion he lifted her onto his lap and cocooned her in his corded arms. He tucked her head in the lee of his scruffy chin. His scent and his hold grounded her in the here and now. She wrapped both arms around his middle and held on for dear life.

“I screamed with everything I had, ‘I’m going to kill you, you son of a bitch.’ My mom’s shrill voice filled the kitchen. She screamed, ‘No.’ He pushed the freezer door so hard it pinned me to the counter. I thought that was it, I was going to die, and something snapped. I arched the knife wildly, blindly around the corner. He yelled, and the pressure let up, but only for a second. I started to slide out from between the two, and then the weight forced the door back again. It slammed into my forehead. I caught myself on the counter. The knife shifted in my grip. I reared back and stabbed around the door.”

The resistance of the blade sliding into flesh and muscle still tingled her palm. Madelyn’s entire body shuddered. “I hate that I can still feel it in my hand. I can still feel her blood coating my fingers.”

“I wake up some nights,” Nathan’s voice rumbled in her ear, “and I still hear their grunts. I still hear the horrible things they said to my mom.”

“Will the memories ever go away?” she asked.

“No. Will they fade? I hope so.”

Madelyn levered back to see Nathan’s face. Her cheek nuzzled the sun-heated skin of his shoulder. Strands of her hair caught on his stubble. His hand slipped up her neck and splayed over her jaw. The light touch chased away the worst of her remembered fears. He smoothed the locks down her back. Then he urged her on with an easy nudge of his chin. And the strangest thing happened…the burden of telling the story lightened.

“She hadn’t defended me—her flesh and blood—a day in her life. But she protected a grown man—an abusive, egotistical, maniac—from her battered daughter and died doing it. When I came around the door and realized what I’d done, Glenn was gone. I called the police. Things were so crazy for so long. I’ve never answered so many questions in all my life. I’d never been so scared and conflicted. Yes, he couldn’t hurt me anymore, but I’d taken a life…my mother’s life.”

“What happened to Aldrich?”

“They eventually found him at a high class brothel. He tried to claim he hadn’t been home that night, but the evidence was there on his face and in the blood all over the house. I’d flayed open his cheek. My grandmother came out for the funeral and trial. They charged him with abuse and capital murder. My scars and old fractures along with testimony from the school district counselor and a few teachers, and the crime scene gave them all the evidence they needed to put him away for life.”

“That’s why you were so sure it wasn’t him committing these crimes.”

“Yes.”

“And your grandmother passed away…”

“I moved back in with her after the trail. We had a couple of hard years, and then she had a massive heart attack. Clogged arteries due to years of good eating. That’s what the doctor said anyway. I think my mother and I broke her heart.”

“Not you.”

“Either way. That’s my story.”

“Thank you.” Madelyn stared at his supple lips as they formed the words.

“For what?”

“Trusting me.”

She should thank him for making her talk about it. She should tell him that she hadn’t felt such peace in her entire life. She should warn him to run away because little by little she was falling in love with him. But one sentence shouted over all the others, and it was the one her mind and body agreed upon.

“Nathan, make love to me.”

His fingers bit into her hip, and then her world shifted. Thrust from the shadow of his neck, she squinted at the brilliant, streaming light. Uneven sand cooled her back. She spun from the abrupt switch. Top to bottom. A lump, too juvenile and chaste to have existed in her hedonistic body, made swallowing impossible. Deacon scrambled up from the blanket and trotted off.

Somehow her body coiled around his as though it were an intrusive species of vine. Her legs wrapped behind his thighs while her bottom pillowed his crotch. He levered over her, blocking the sun with his chest. His face crowded close, much like it had the last time he had her flat on her back in the sand. Only this time, he didn’t wear a mask.

He held himself inches away. His eager breaths heated her cheeks. Or maybe the sight of him, barely contained, all bulging muscles and bedroom eyes did that. His hand plowed into the hair at her nape. Her lips arched toward his mouth. An eager moan slipped between them.

“I’ll make love to you. I’ll fuck you. I’ll make you forget the day of the week. The year. Hell, Madelyn.” His mouth quirked and his lips may as well have been on her clit for the potent effect they had on her aching lady bits. “If I really put my mind to it and some of your gadgets, I’ll make you forget the century. But, I think we need to start with a kiss.”

“A kiss?” she gulped.

He skated a finger over her lower lip, persuading her mouth open. “You make it sound so innocent.”

Saliva pooled on her tongue. Her breaths came faster.

The calloused pad skidded across the top bow of her lip. “So mundane.”

Wet heat slipped over the edge of her bottom lip. Her lids, which had fallen to seduction, exploded open. He eased back and spread the moisture over her mouth. The pliant skin shifted under his more ardent touch.

“Every great love. Every great lay. They start with a kiss.” He dropped his mouth where the barest heat of his lips brushed her. “Don’t think for one second that this is harmless.”

Her patience evaporated in the heat of their intimacy. Madelyn latched onto his shoulders and pressed into his kiss. At least, she tried. The hair at her nape grew taught.

“You have no idea how much I want to tear these ribbons from your body and bury myself inside you,” he growled. “No matter how much it hurts, I won’t rush this.” His teeth nipped lips. Madelyn ground her ass into his lap and moaned. “It seems you have no qualms about it though.”

“I did,” she moaned. “Just can’t find…a single one right now.”

Nathan lunged into the kiss. Sweet contact thieved her breath. His chest flattened her breasts and the hard ridge of his dick pushed against her bottom. Supple but firm, his lips maneuvered the bow of her mouth. Her lips molded to his, inviting and caving to his need, to her need.

His chin nudged hers. Madelyn’s lips parted wider. The tang of citrus bit her tongue as his eagerly caressed it. Her fingers explored the slopes and edges of his back, and then plunged into his hair. Their mouths danced a seductive tango that left her drunk.

Before long his hips rolled in time with hers. Each decadent surge brushed the throbbing tip of her clit down his arrogant length.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

He sucked her bottom lip into his mouth for the barest of seconds and popped it out. Tension gathered in her core. “More. Please, Nathan. I want more.”

“I said a kiss, and that’s all you’re getting, Madelyn.” His words punched her in the gut, but his fingers eased the pain. His fingers promised more. They pressed against her throat and over her abdomen. His palm flattened onto her hip, snuck under the string of her bikini, and tugged at the material. “But a kiss given in the right way, in just the right spot, should take you where you want to go.”

“Yes,” she breathed against his mouth.

“Damn, I’m going to enjoy taking you there.”

Nathan guided the tiny bottoms off her round butt. The material seared a path down her legs and fell away. He shifted her ass to the corner of the blanket. Before she could blink, his weight settled in the crook of her thighs.

What a difference a few days could make.

She arched, grinding her swollen flesh onto his crotch. The rough khakis chaffed her naked labia, but didn’t stop her thrusts. His barring grip did though.

“You are magnificently stubborn.” His gaze tightened.

Madelyn opened her mouth to protest, but Nathan opened his and clamped it around her hidden nipple. She bowed deeper off the sand. The silk of his short hair rumpled in her fists. Imposing suction knotted the ever-expanding tension that had traveled from her center to every extremity.