Every Breath You Take (21 page)

It was this first-time defense of the boyfriend that warned Mitchell he had now run out of rope with her and he was standing precariously close to the edge of a dangerous precipice. She had too much pride and self-respect to settle for what little he was willing to offer. She wanted magic, and without it, she was staying faithful to her boyfriend. In fact, her mind was already made up to stay with him.

“What matters,” she continued in a sweet, apologetic voice as she unknowingly shoved him clear off the precipice, “is that you refuse to believe in magic, and I refuse not to believe in it. And therein lies the gap we can’t bridge. Not in this room or anywhere else.”

Mitchell felt himself plunging through thin air, sent over the edge by a beautiful young redhead with the
face of an angel and the stubborn pride of an Irish rebel. Even so, he made a manful attempt to gain a foothold and stop his fall by suggesting, “Why don’t we go to bed and see what happens there?”

She shook her head and smiled that Mona Lisa smile of hers. “Why? So I could try to make you feel magic while you try to prove there is none? One person can’t make that kind of magic. It takes two. It’s inevitable that you’d succeed and I’d end up being disappointed. If I’m going to be disappointed,” she admitted with gentle candor, “I don’t want it to happen with you. I don’t know why, but that’s very important to me.” She turned away and stepped through the balcony doorway, looking out at the water. “Let’s go sightseeing now and try to get to know each other a little bit before I pick up Max and take him back to Anguilla with me. I’ll wait out here if you’d like to change clothes.”

Mitchell experienced the full force of his renewed free fall, complete with sensations of his stomach twisting into knots and wind howling in his ears. Drawing a long, steadying breath, he gazed at the slender back of the woman he’d allowed to do this to him. His balance returned, he felt the floor beneath his feet. On the balcony was an exquisite Irish girl who touched his heart, overheated his blood, and made him laugh. She was passionate and sweet, honest and intelligent, proud and unpredictable. She sang in a choir, smiled like an angel, and adopted ugly, stray dogs with fleas. She was a fairy tale. And he was …

Completely enchanted.

Walking up behind her, he slid his arms around her and drew her back against his chest. “Let’s get complicated, Kate,” he said with a smile in his voice.

“Thank you for the offer,” she said politely, “but it’s better to leave things just as they are.”

Ignoring that, Mitchell pressed his lips to the top of
her head and whispered, “Chant your incantations and get out your amulets, lovely witch. Weave your magic spell.”

“Please stop this, or we won’t end up being friends, after all,” she warned.

“We’re already friends,” he murmured, trailing his mouth to her ear. “We’re about to become lovers.”

She shivered at the touch of his breath on her ear, but refused to relent. “I told you, I don’t want to.”

“Yes, you do, and so do I,” he said, and kissed her temple. “Put your arms around me and wrap us up in magic. I can’t do it without you.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she burst out. “What do you think you’re—”

Mitchell switched from tender persuasion to assertive action and clamped his hand over her mouth before she could finish. “Kate,” he warned in a low, implacable voice, “for the next hour, the only sounds I want to hear from you are moans of delight and the words ‘yes,’ ‘more,’ and ‘please.’”

He lifted his hand a fraction of an inch, and she said, “Stop it!”

“Wrong words,” Mitchell said, and twisted her around. “Look at me, Kate.”

Green eyes, wary and annoyed, glared at him from beneath graceful russet brows drawn into a dark, warning frown.

Mitchell heeded her expression and carefully softened his tone. “I am trying to concede. The truth is that I felt all the same things you did last night, and you
know
I did.”

Looking into his cobalt eyes, listening to the slightly husky timbre of his baritone voice, Kate sensed that he was telling her the truth as well as allowing her a glimpse beneath another of his “layers,” and she felt a sharp tug on her heart. His next explanation was equally revealing:

“The discouraging things I said to you a few minutes ago were mostly the result of my halfhearted desire to protect you from me—” He stopped, cocked his head to the side, and after a moment’s thought, he admitted with amused irony, “Actually, it may have been the reverse.”

Trying desperately not to laugh, Kate bit down on her lip and swiftly shifted her gaze to his shoulder, but looking away didn’t help. She was so hopelessly drawn to him in every way that there was no refuge. Marveling at her own helplessness, she shook her head a little. Mitchell evidently mistook that shake of her head as an indication that she was about to reject what he’d said, and he gave her a stern warning: “‘No’ is not on the list I gave you of acceptable words.”

Caught between mirth and tenderness, Kate succumbed to defeat. Smiling into his eyes, she laid her palms on his chest and softly sighed a word that was not on his list. “Mitchell …”

She saw pleasure flicker in his eyes when she said his name that way. “You may add that word to your list.”

Leaning up on her toes, eyes shining with laughter, voice shaky with awakening desire, Kate twined her arms around his neck. “Please,” she whispered, her lips almost touching his.

“An excellent choice,” Mitchell decreed, and brushed his lips back and forth over hers in a light, teasing kiss.

“More,” Kate murmured when he lifted his mouth.

“An even better choice,” Mitchell said with a grin, and gathered her tightly into his arms, preparing to leisurely savor and explore that mouth of hers. She took him from relaxed humor to raw hunger in minutes.

He maneuvered her—without resistance—to the side of the bed, and let go of her while he pulled his shirt off.
When he dropped it to the floor and reached out to help take her T-shirt off, she smiled up at him and shook her head slightly as if she wanted to do it herself for him. She tugged her T-shirt out of her waistband, caught it by the hem, and drew it up and over her head. When she finished, she stood in front of him in a white lacy bra, and Mitchell found himself smiling back at her—a warm, playful smile tinged with a challenge.

He dropped his gaze from her green eyes, and his hands went to his belt.

Kate had to take off her sandals before she could step out of her jeans, so she bent to deal with them. In front of her lowered eyes, his pants and briefs hit the floor. With shaky fingers, Kate concentrated on unfastening one sandal, then the other. She stepped out of them and started to straighten. Part way up, her gaze slid up a rigid male member, and she hastily jerked her eyes away. Looking at that magnificent chest of his was less nerve-racking than seeing him naked at the hips for the first time. His hands went to her shoulders, his thumbs pulling her bra straps down, leaving them loose on her arms, before he slid his hands around her back and unhooked her bra with the ease of man who had unhooked many.

Thinking that, she raised her gaze to his and saw a knowing expression sweep across his face, before he lowered his eyelids and pulled her bra away from her breasts and down her arms. Kate stepped out of her jeans, and his slow, languorous gaze drifted boldly over her, examining her breasts and waist and belly, then down to the curly hair at her thighs. In the way that she often sensed what he was thinking, she knew he expected her to put him through the same appraisal, but although she was ready to touch and be touched, she wasn’t quite ready to take a deliberate look at what she’d seen unintentionally moments before.

His voice was deep and sure as his hand finally reached toward her, but not for any of the places she expected him to want to touch. His hand settled under her chin, tipping it up. “Are you feeling shy?” he asked.

She met his gaze unflinchingly and said, “No, just a little … uncertain.”

He mistook her meaning. “Don’t even consider uncertainty now.”

Kate bit her lip to hide her smile, laid her palms against the muscles of his chest, and, while his hands settled on her waist, she exerted pressure. She slid her hands slowly up over his nipples, and then spread her fingers and slid them slowly back down while she watched the banked fires in his eyes begin to smolder. “Not that kind of uncertain,” she whispered back.

They stood naked, face to face. She had beautiful breasts, not large, but full, and as he trailed his hand up from her waist, his eyelids closed with pleasure at the sensation of her skin. At her nipple, he opened his fingers and captured it. He increased the pressure until he wrung the first gasp of pleasure out of her.

Her hands glided over his shoulders, while she covered his mouth with her soft lips and brought her body into full contact with his.

The lazy pleasure of moments ago exploded in a deluge of pure lust, and Mitchell wrapped his arms around her and twisted his body, sending them back onto the bed. His hips landed unerringly against the seductive curly hair between her thighs, and his hands shifted back to her breasts. She gazed at him, sultry and playful, eyes smiling warmly into his. He couldn’t believe how much intimate pleasure he felt just watching her face and knowing she was watching his.

Her hands smoothed slowly over his back and down his buttocks, holding him tight to her. She opened her legs, and he reminded himself that this was too soon, the
preliminaries having barely begun. But he let his body touch the entrance to hers, experiencing the delight of finding her already wet. He edged inside of her just an inch, smiling a little at her hazy expression. He moved his hands to her hair. He shoved his fingers into it and, lowering his mouth to hers, slowly, deliberately forced her lips to part, opening them wide, while his hips lifted and forced her to open wide. He intended to ease just a little deeper into that tight, enclosing warmth, except that just then, she tightened her hands on his buttocks, arched her hips as much as his heavy weight would allow, and whispered an aching, imperative “Please.”

He drew back, deliberately resisting the invitation.

“Please …”

He rammed himself into her, burying himself full length into her arching body, and his own body began to move without his volition, capturing her and forcing her to move with him. With the last ounce of willpower he possessed, he rolled onto his back, putting her astride his hips to slow them both down. Pressing her palms against him for support, she forced herself into a sitting position, her rumpled hair falling down her sides. She began to move on him with a rhythm that became a part of his breathing, of the coursing of blood through his veins. He could have continued pleasuring her by forcing his body higher into hers, except that she lifted her head and gazed straight into his eyes, looking as aroused as he was but a little baffled.

“Take your time,” he whispered—an act of almost suicidal unselfishness given the urgent state of his body.

Her answer explained the bafflement in her green eyes. “I can’t,” she whispered, and with a groan of anticipation and defeat, Mitchell tossed her onto her back and began driving into her with long, deep, slow strokes. She clasped him to her and buried her face in the curve of his neck, her fingers biting into his back, her body straining
and moving with his. She cried out and clung to him tighter while spasms rocked her, and Mitchell slammed forward, climaxing with her.

Afterward, she lay in his arms, looking into his eyes, her fingers idly smoothing the hair at his temple. “More?” she said hopefully.

Mitchell burst out laughing and tightened his arms around her. “That is my
favorite
word.”

D
ETECTIVE CHILDRESS TOSSED HIS SUITCASE ONTO ONE
of the beds in room 102 at the Enclave. “Did you see that damned bellboy trying to arm-wrestle me for my suitcase?”

“He was hoping for a ten-dollar tip,” MacNeil replied as he pulled a lightweight laptop computer out of his own suitcase.

“You know what pisses me off about being here?” When MacNeil didn’t reply, Childress explained, “We’re surrounded by gorgeous women who are prancing around in string bikinis, and we look like we’re a pair of fags.”

MacNeil glanced up at his partner, whose desire to look like an ordinary tourist had translated into a pair of Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt with the words
St. Maarten
intertwined among palm trees, a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a camera slung around his neck. “It’s your Bermuda shorts,” MacNeil said.

Childress’s thoughts had already skipped on to other issues. “I don’t like being this ‘up close and personal’ when I’m working surveillance. It triples the probabilities of Wyatt spotting us.” As he spoke, he wandered over to the door and studied the room rates posted there. “One night in this place costs more than the down payment on my last car. The DA is going to have a coronary when the bill for this place comes in.”

“I’ll tell him the truth: There was no place to park on
the main road or on the private road into this place where we could spend day and night waiting for Wyatt to leave. The guard at the gatehouse would only give us a one-hour pass, and when that expired, a hotel employee appeared and tried to run us off. We had to register here.”

“Yeah, I know all that, but I’m glad you’re the one who has to explain it to Elliott.”

MacNeil glanced at his watch and reached for his cell phone. It was time for his daily check-in call.

“Mr. Elliott?”

Gray Elliott looked up from the photographs spread out across the credenza in his Chicago office, a frown on his face. “Yes?”

“Detective MacNeil is on the phone.”

“Close my door, will you?” Gray said. Swiveling in his chair, he waited until the door closed behind his secretary before he picked up his telephone. “Hi, Mac,” he said.

“Did you get the report and pictures we e-mailed to you last night?” MacNeil began.

Too restless to stay seated, Gray stood up and turned to the credenza. “I got them,” he said shortly.

“Wyatt picked up the redhead at her hotel this morning, and they’ve just checked into a hotel in St. Maarten. We still don’t know who she is, but her hotel room in Anguilla was registered in the name of a guy named Bartlett. Sooner or later, she’ll use a credit card here or produce a driver’s license, and we’ll get a make on her—”