Into the Fire (37 page)

“What?” He tried to understand. “What person?”

“When we were up by the cabin,” she said. “You told me…And I thought I could be who you wanted me to be. I thought I could do it, and then you’d be happy, but I suck at it and now I’ve fucked up your life—”

“Whoa, Eden, no, you didn’t. I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “Look around you at this kitchen. My life is already fucked up, and your being here is a definite improvement and I don’t want you to change who you are. I want you to be yourself.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yeah, I
definitely
do.”

“Trust me, you don’t. You should just take me back to Las Vegas.”

“I’m not going to do that,” he said. “You just…You’ve gotta cut me some slack, because I’m…scared, too. It was like it was a game until we hit the chapel. But it’s not a game, it’s real and…Eden, I want to do right by you. Only I’ve got this…devil whispering in my ear, saying that…God
damn
it.”

“What?” she asked, lifting her head to look up at him. Even with tears streaking her face, with watery eyes and a red nose, she took his breath away.

“That the ring on your finger makes you mine,” Izzy admitted softly. “Damn, Eden, I want you so bad.
You,
not this fake submissive robot you that you’re pretending to be. I want the real you. The one who kinda scares my friends.”

He didn’t lower his head to kiss her—at least he didn’t think he did, but suddenly her lips were against his, soft and sweet and impossibly tender.

She must’ve stood on her toes to kiss him, because she pulled back to look into his eyes, her fingers soft in his hair. “I think maybe everything’s going to be okay,” she whispered, tears back in her eyes.

And shit, he wished that were true. But it wasn’t that easy.

He tried to explain. “Eden, I didn’t marry you just because I want to make love to you. I married you for a lot of reasons. But the making love thing is one of them, and God damn it, I’m gonna do it, aren’t I, and I’m afraid it’s really going to ruin things between us.”

“I think it’ll make things easier,” she whispered, as she wiped her face and eyes with the heel of her hand. “We won’t have to try to out-martyr each other over who gets to sleep on the couch.”

Izzy laughed his disbelief. “Now
there’s
a butt-crack-stupid reason to have sex.”

“We’re married,” she pointed out. “You said it yourself—it’s not a game. It’s real. So…let’s be married. Let’s have a wedding night.”

“It feels wrong,” he persisted, “like you owe me. Like, I was nice to you so now you’re thanking me by having sex with me.”

“Talk about butt-crack-stupid…” She kissed him again, which was freaking distracting—and probably her intention.

This time he was the one who pulled back. “Eed,” he said. “You want to pay me back? For helping you out? Tell me
thank you.
And tell me that you want to keep sex out of this…arrangement we’ve got going here.”

She was looking at him as if he were speaking Farsi. “But we’re married,” she said again. “And I agreed that while we were married, I wouldn’t have sex with anyone else. So, if I’m not having it with anyone else, and I’m also not having it with you, then it kind of follows that I’m just…not having it. This is probably a good place in this conversation to point out that the last time I had anything close to sex was six months ago, out there,” she pointed toward his living room, “on that sofa. If you want to know what I really want—”

He tried to cut her off because he knew what was coming, and there was a good chance it would make his head explode. “Eden—”

“You,” she said, her hands in his hair again, her basketball stomach pressed against him. “I want you inside of me. I want you to make me come.”

Yep.
Boom.

With the very small part of his mouth that was left, Izzy tried again to explain. “The whole sex thing just…it feels like…payment to me and—”

“You making
me
come is…me paying you back?” She laughed, all their angry words apparently forgotten. “That’s some great deal we made. Remind me to do business with you more often.”

“Don’t be a smartass,” he said, but he let her tug him toward the bedroom. “You know damn well I’ll be right with you—and probably leading the charge.”

“So don’t,” she said. “If you’re really afraid that sex will feel too much like me paying you back, then just…don’t come.” She knew damn well that
that
was never going to happen. Amusement sparkled in her eyes.

“You can be like my living sex toy. You can just lie back and close your eyes and, you know, do math problems while I entertain myself.”

Izzy had to laugh, but it was definitely edged with hysteria. “Sweetheart,” he said, “I struggle not to unload just from thinking about you, okay? If we get naked…”

Which, of course, was exactly what she was doing right now, her underwear following her dress onto his bedroom floor.

“If?” she asked, standing on her toes to kiss him again, but again her mouth was soft—she let him kiss her instead of coming on too fast and furious.

Damn, she was beautiful, all ripe and round and smooth, soft skin that slid like silk beneath his fingers.

“It doesn’t bother you?” she whispered. “Me being…I look so—”

“Sexy,” he finished for her, skimming his hands across her belly, her breasts. “You’re unbelievably sexy.”

She was pregnant with someone else’s baby. Izzy tried that thought on for size, hoping it would slow him down, or put him off, or maybe make him feel something other than this overwhelming desire to take off his clothes as well.

But it didn’t. He didn’t care. Pinkie was Eden’s baby—that’s all that mattered to him, too.

She smiled because she knew she’d won when he brushed aside her hands and finished unbuttoning his shirt himself. She pushed him back so he was sitting on his bed, and she pulled off his shoes and socks, kneeling before him like some kind of super-erotic variation of slave and master, which, as far as sex fantasies went, was one of his all-time favorites. The whole
pregnant
naked slave girl thing sent it soaring into all-time first place. Of course, maybe it was the fact that the beautiful naked woman on her knees before him was Eden Gillman that was giving the experience its future Greatest Hits status.

“If it’ll help you stay in control,” she said, looking up at him with her gorgeous laughter-filled eyes, “while we’re doing it, you can call me Mrs. Zanella.”

Izzy laughed his horror. “Now there’s an instant soft-on. Mrs. Zanella is my mother.”

“It’s me, now, too,” she pointed out, reaching for his belt buckle since he’d stalled out before unfastening it. He had to give the girl credit for knowing what she wanted and going for it with a single-minded determination. “Eden Zanella. Mrs. Irving Zanella—which sounds like I should be seventy years old and having lunch at the country club with all of the other doctors’ wives.”

Ah, God. Izzy surrendered, sinking back on the bed and closing his eyes as she freed him from his pants.

“Hello, you,” she said and he laughed.

“Are you seriously talking to my—
Ah, God…
”

But she didn’t answer, because she’d finally gotten what he’d wanted—and yeah, what he’d actually married her to get, guilt free.

Rumor has it I give good head.

Although, he was still working on the “free” part of that guilt.

And yeah, the rumor was definitely true, although, really, Izzy suspected there was no such thing as a
bad
blow job. Maybe something involving teeth and/or the relentless repeated playing of
Achy Breaky Heart,
although under certain circumstances, even
that
probably couldn’t be defined as truly awful.

“Don’t tell my heart, my achy breaky heart, I just don’t think it’d understand,”
he sang, just to test his theory, pushing himself up on his elbows, because really, for him, watching what was going down, so to speak, played heavily into the mind-blowing pleasure.

Eden lifted her head to smile at him. “What are you singing?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“You have such a great voice.” She touched him with hands that were almost as soft as her mouth. “I liked listening to you sing in the car.”

“I thought you were sleeping,” Izzy said.

“I was,” she said. “But then I woke up and…I was afraid if I said something you’d stop.”

She was right. He would’ve.

“It was nice,” Eden murmured. “You know the words to everything.”

“Come here,” Izzy told her. “I want to touch you, too.”

“You sure? I kind of like it down here,” she said, taking him into her mouth even as she maintained eye contact. She smiled, no doubt at the Yippee-it’s-Christmas-morning expression on his face.

“I thought my job was to make you come,” he said when he could focus his eyes again. “And can I just point out that what you just did is not something you should do again, unless you want to save the you-wanting-me-inside-you thing for later in the evening.”

“Really?” Eden said. “This?”

“Yuh…” Izzy said, and damn, it wasn’t just what she was doing with her mouth—not just once but again and again and again and
again.
It was the entire Möbius strip–like endless connection, complete with that amazing eye contact—the fact that she was so obviously getting off on watching him while he was getting off on watching
her
watching him, watching her, watching him…“Eden,
ah, God…
”

She didn’t move back. Instead, she took him more completely into her mouth as sheer pleasure ripped through him, thoroughly displacing all of his blazing guilt and making his heart pound damn near out of his chest. It felt so-ho-ho good, and the image of her perfect face, her eyelashes long and dark against the softness of her cheeks was burned into his brain as he came. And came.

And came.

Only then, after he’d barely regained control of eyes that had rolled back in his head, did she join him on the bed, laughing softly.

“No fair,” he said, when he could finally speak.

“Would you believe me,” Eden said, propping her head up on one elbow as she smiled down at him, “if I told you I used to fantasize about doing that while I was in Germany?”

Izzy laughed. “Not a chance.”

“It’s true,” she said, her eyes closing halfway as he touched and then kissed her breasts. She was still completely, sexily aroused and he was…useless. Well, partially useless. “That morning after we…You know. Danny was at the door, and you changed out of your boxers and…I caught a look at Mr. Big.”

“No,” Izzy said, pulling sharply back to look at her. “Nuh-uh. No
way
are you
naming
my dick.”

“Too late.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth as she smiled at him, her eyes actually twinkling.

“No it’s not,” he said, trying to look imposing and stern—which was impossible to do when she was laughing and bare breasted.

“
You
can call him whatever
you
want,” she told him, “and I’ll—”

“Great,” he interrupted. Him? Oh, no. No no. “I’m going to get a little boring here and call
it
‘my penis.’ Not Mr. Penis, not mister anything. No
him,
no, thank you. With the understanding that I do appreciate the ego-stroking behind the whole
big
thing. I mean, you’re the mastermind behind
Pinkie,
so it could’ve gone in an entirely different direction. But here’s the deal, Mrs. Zanella, I have an absolute no-name policy for body parts.”

Mrs. Zanella.

They both froze, nose to nose, eye to eye. His hand was filled with the decadent softness of her breast, her nipple taut against his palm. That was his wife’s nipple, his wife’s breast.

His wife.

For the next three months.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” Eden whispered again, kissing him softly, and he nodded, even though he didn’t believe it.

She smiled then and reached down to wrap her fingers around that which she undoubtedly still thought of as Mr. Big. Izzy could see the silly nickname in her eyes, clear as day. And while he could stop her from saying it, he couldn’t stop her from thinking it. And she knew it. No—she knew that
he
knew she knew it.

Which made it twice as much fun for her.

“Whoa,” she said, at his obvious response to her touch. “I didn’t think old guys could—”

Izzy kissed his wife. And, assuming that twenty-nine could be considered old, he showed her exactly what old guys could do.

S
AN
D
IEGO
, C
ALIFORNIA

Vinh Murphy was in Sacramento.

Decker didn’t quite know how to process that information. Murph had been on the dark side of the moon for so many years, Decker had subconsciously started to think of him as dead and gone.

But he wasn’t. He was very much alive. At the Methodist Hospital.

His gunshot wound was superficial. As was Hannah Whitfield’s injury. Just as they’d suspected, he’d been in the former police officer’s company when the shots were fired. She was with him right now.

Jules Cassidy, a high level agent with the FBI, had given Decker a courtesy call, letting him know that Murphy had finally surfaced. It was highly irregular, but due to his long-standing relationship with Troubleshooters, Cassidy was willing to wait to take Murph into custody until after Dave and his team made the scene—provided they could get to Sacramento, ASAP.

Of course, there was an armed guard at Murphy’s hospital room door—to keep him and Hannah from walking away in the interim.

Hannah—who reminded both Deck and Dave of Tess Bailey.

The direct line to Decker’s desk rang, and he looked at the phone’s flashing light for a moment. Dave had told him—about an hour ago, when they’d last spoken—that Jim Nash had had another meltdown.

And maybe
another
wasn’t fair, since the meltdown in the Troubleshooters’ parking lot had been Decker’s.

Regardless, Nash had lost it, telling Tess that there was another woman in his life. That he was “done.”

Something’s up with Nash, and you’re only noticing it
now? Dave’s accusation echoed in Deck’s head.