The Perfect Stranger (16 page)

“Do you know what happens to dynamite,” he asked, “when the fuse has been burning slowly…” Sliding his thumb to her lower lip, he rubbed. Very slowly. Very softly. “Sizzling…” Lowering his face to hers, he kissed his way along her jaw to her ear. “Charring its way toward the lonely stick?”

A sizzling fire ignited within her. “Tell me.”

“There’s a point of no return.” His voice was so hoarse she had to concentrate to hear him, concentrate not to lose herself in the feel of his hands and his mouth drifting across her face. “A point past which there’s no turning back.”

“And then what happens?” she asked, wondering who this man was who could speak like a poet but look at her as if she held a weapon in her hands.

“A smart person runs.”

But he hadn’t moved a muscle. “You mean a coward.”

His eyes burned brighter.

It was her turn to lift a hand to his face, her turn to touch, to skim a finger along the cleft in his chin. “And a brave person?” she whispered. “What would a brave person do?”

Deliberately he slid his hand from her face down along her neck, lower to her collarbone. There he rubbed. “Depends upon his goal. He might try like hell to defuse it.”

As he’d done. As he’d been doing from the start.

But now the look in his eyes, the hunger and the tenderness, seduced with a completeness that made her chest go tight. “It’s too late for that.” It had been too late for a long, long time.

His slow smile stole what remained of her breath. “Then it looks like the poor bastard’s going up in smoke.”

She wasn’t sure how she stayed standing. “Show me.” Need drove her. She slid her hands from his face to his shoulders, then down along the tightly corded muscles of his shoulder and back. “Show me.”

“You have no idea…” With his mouth, he traced the path of his hand, sliding his lips along her jaw, her neck, her collarbone. “I tried,” he said, “to forget you, to forget this. But you were always there, and all I could think was how it felt to touch you.” He looked up and met her eyes. “Taste you.”

The quickening started low, spread fast. “Tell me how,” she whispered, and his eyes took on a dark glow.

“Like more.”

He picked her up then, body to body. She wrapped her bare legs around his equally bare waist and aligned her mouth with his. From outside she heard the wind blowing through the trees and against the window. Cold. But in here there was only warmth, heat, the absolution of John’s kiss and the restrained power of his body as he walked with her wrapped around him toward his bedroom.

With her legs curled around his waist and her arms circling his neck, she held on, didn’t ever want to let go.

The truth stunned her. Until six weeks ago, when she’d looked into the eyes of a stranger and felt the first fissures of a thaw, there had been nothing. Now as he set her on a bed as Spartan as the one that first night, it was a rush to feel more that had her pulling him down with her. She ran her hands down the firmness of his stomach to his waist band, then slipped inside and found him, thick and long and jutting up amidst the coarse hair. The feel of him thrilled, unleashing a yearning, spreading slowly, languidly, like the warmest, sweetest of honeys.

“Show me…” She feathered the words along his chest, finding a flat mauve nipple to tease with her tongue. Then to encircle with her mouth, and pull.

His answering sound spurred her on, and in some hazy corner she realized the fear was gone. The caution. There was only desire, nudging her toward that hazy place where dreams and reality collided, and the future was born.

“Saura,” he whispered as he’d not done that first night, when they’d shared their bodies, but not their names. When she’d naively thought she could take this man once, and not crave him for the rest of her life. Not feel him, not need him.

“You were wrong.”

Her heart stuttered hard on the words. She raised her head and met his eyes.

“Last night,” he said. “About before…the night at Lucky’s.”

Somehow she breathed.

“I didn’t see a lonely woman.” The feel of his thumb, skimming her cheekbone, destroyed. “I saw a beautiful woman,” he stunned her by saying, “a woman who did the impossible…who made me feel alive.”

An inner fortification completely gave way. She blinked against sudden tears, but could do nothing about the emotion cresting through her.

“You don’t know, do you?” he asked, lifting a thumb to swipe at the single tear, just as he’d done the night in the swamp. Then he placed a soft kiss where the moisture had been and lowered his hands to her shirt. There he thumbed the buttons, until the flannel fell open and nothing remained between them except her panties and his sweats. “You don’t know what you do to me.”

But she wanted to. “Show me.” On the verge of shattering she reached for his waistband and shoved, baring the bulge beneath the gray cotton of his boxer briefs.

The sight sent a dark thrill twirling through her.

Not wanting to wait, she curved her hands around his neck and urged him down, taking his mouth with hers. He let out a guttural moan, then took over the kiss and made it his.

He made everything else his, as well. With his hands he claimed her body; with his gentleness he took her heart. She twisted beneath him, holding him to her, straining to touch as much of him as she could. Before long they shed their underwear and nothing remained to separate flesh from flesh.

His mouth was everywhere, kissing, licking, sucking. Just like that first night, hot and seeking, hungry. But different somehow, slower, more intimate. He skirted along the edge of one nipple, tracing small circles, flicking his tongue along the peak. Need arced through her; pleasure bordered on torture.

The fuse, she knew, had almost reached the stick.

She urged him fully on top of her, and when she felt the weight of him against her, she let her legs fall open in welcome. She loved the feel of him between her thighs, all hard and solid, pressed against her.

She writhed, needed him inside.

But instead he lifted his head and met her gaze, slid a hand to cup her face. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

The restraint in his voice heightened the urgency to have him inside her, again. And again.

“The only way you could hurt me, would be to stop.” She wrapped her legs around his and tilted her hips forward. “Please,” she said on a soft breath. “Don’t stop.”

She saw him swallow, saw his throat constrict with the movement. The look on his face, an expression bordering on pain, ripped at her. “Now,” she urged again. “Please.”

“My name.” His hand found hers and held. “Say my name.”

The request thrummed through her, made everything inside of her go soft and warm and liquid. “John,” she whispered, loving the sound of his name on her lips, aware of how rarely she’d used it. Another self-imposed barrier, she realized, and vowed to shatter them all.
“John.”

With his free hand he brushed the hair from her face. “I want to see you,” he murmured, then pushed inside. For a moment there was stillness as she took him and held him, adjusted to his width. Then her body relaxed and he started to move. She moved with him, lifting her hips and welcoming him, running her hands along his back and holding him as close as she could.

“I want to see you, too.” Throat tight she watched him, drank in the look on his face as he pulled out and thrust back inside, deeper each time, long, sensuous strokes.

Raw desire had punctuated that first night, but now it was something even more basic that fueled them. Now it was need. Not for a stranger, but for him. For John. And the future he’d made her see. It bled through her like an electric current, destroying the restraint and the caution. The fear.

The point of no return, she thought hazily.

Closing her eyes, she savored the sensation of him moving inside her as if he wanted each second, each stroke, to last an eternity. The fire and the wonder, the salvation she’d never expected to find, washed through her.

“Please,” she whispered. “John…”

He opened his eyes and gazed down at her through eyes glazed by passion.

“Up in smoke,” he murmured as he pulled out, then plunged back in for one last deep thrust before the world exploded around them.

The bedroom window rattled against the wind. John nestled Saura closer, pulled the sheet up to cover her back. Silently she relaxed into him and let out a soft breath. Unlike him, she slept. She sprawled over him, her head on his chest and her hair feathering against his flesh, her arm over his abdomen and a leg slung over his. He couldn’t stop running his hands along the soft warmth of her body. Couldn’t let his eyes drift shut, didn’t trust himself to drop off.

The last time he’d done so, she’d slipped from his arms and out of his life.

He could have stopped her. He knew that. He’d awakened the second she rose from his bed, had felt the slow incursion of the cold as he’d lain there and listened to her dress. To her breathe. To what he would have sworn was a soft sob.

Then he’d listened to her walk out the door.

He could have stopped her.

Now he held her, stared up at the slow-moving blades of his ceiling fan and breathed deep and steady. Slowly. Consciously.

If he let it, contentment could creep in with vicious ease.

The cop he’d always wanted to be rebelled at the thought, and for a change, the man agreed. Contentment led to complacency, and complacency made a man weak. Death had many faces, he knew. Some of them more appealing than others. But all equally destructive.

He closed his eyes, felt his chest tighten beneath the whisper of her breath.

Too easily he could see her as she’d been that first night, when he’d sat nursing a drink and pretending not to notice. Pretending not to see. Six days later, the night after he let her walk away, he returned to Lucky’s. But she hadn’t been there. He’d told himself it was just as well, that he’d let her go for a reason, but he’d asked the waitress about her anyway.

She won’t be back,
the waitress had said.
That one prefers the shadows.

The shadows? Why’s that?

No one can see her then. No one can hurt her.

The words haunted. All along, the man he was had resisted what the cop saw. The vulnerability. The fear. The hope. That’s why he’d let her go. But now—

She shifted against him, and her eyes opened against the darkness. “John…”

His name, damn it. That was all he’d asked for, for her to say his name. Now the sound of it on her sleepy voice tormented him. “I’m here,” he said, against a throat ridiculously tight. “Go back to sleep.”

She blinked up at him, ran her hand along his chest. “You’re real.”

Simple words, but they scraped to the bone.

Her smile was soft, trusting. “You’re usually gone when I open my eyes.”

Somehow, he didn’t wince. But nor did he say the words that whispered through him.
I’m not going anywhere.
“Then maybe you should keep your eyes shut,” he murmured. He wanted to taste her again, damn it. Again and again and again.

For a long moment she said nothing, just watched him through those amazing eyes that had once been so lost, but now shone with a contentment he’d never imagined possible. Not from her. Then she lowered her face to his and kissed him, not hard and hungry like before, but sweet and lingering.

Then she pulled back. “Why didn’t you tell me you were on leave?”

Everything inside of him tensed. Defenses flexed, but when he looked at the light in her eyes, he realized she wasn’t moving in for the kill or interrogating, she was simply a woman asking her lover a question.

He was the one imagining the noose around his neck. “It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

“I would have understood,” she said. “I know about needing to do things that everyone thinks you shouldn’t.”

He closed his eyes against the words, against her, but they both waited for his response. “I’ve violated so many rules I don’t even recognize myself anymore.” He bit the words out, opening his eyes.

Saura’s smile was soft. Her touch was gentle. “
I’m
the one who took the files,” she reminded.

But tampering with a crime scene was only the tip of the iceberg. “I didn’t stop you. I—”

She slid over him and cupped his face. “What?” she asked, her hair falling against his neck. “You what?”

He wanted to tell her. God, so much.

But he didn’t know how.

“All I could do,” he said, closing his arms around her, “all I could think about,” he added, “was getting you out of there.” Getting her safe. “And doing this,” he rasped, urging her face to his.

Then he let his actions speak for him.

The phone woke him. John came awake hard, sat up and felt the punch clear down to his soul.

She was still there.

Through the murky light of early morning he saw her sleeping on her side, curled slightly, dark hair spilling against his pillow and the sheet pulled over her body.

Then the phone rang again, and she stirred.

Heart thumping, he forced himself to turn from her and grab his handset from the nightstand. “D’Ambrosia.”

Silence.

“Hello?” he barked. “Who’s this?”

“A-are you,” came a voice so low he had to strain to hear her, “the cop?”

He sat up a little straighter. “I am. Who’s this?”

“I—I…know things,” she said as Saura came up behind him and draped her body around his. “A-about the Lamberts.”

“Who is this?” he asked again. “How did you get my number?”

“You…don’t know me,” she said. “But I’ve heard your name. They talk about you.”

Saura let out a soft breath.

“I—I’m scared.”

“Tell me where you are.” Pulling away from Saura, he stood and reached for his pants. “I can meet you, we can talk—”

“No, if he finds out—”

“I’ll protect you,” he said, reaching for his shirt. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. Just tell me where you are.”

She watched him go.

It was an odd thought, Saura knew that, but as she saw John holster his Glock, she knew the man who’d loved her through the night was gone. It was the cop who agreed upon a meeting spot with the caller, who barked out instructions.