Officer out of Uniform (Lock and Key Book 2) (8 page)

And then he was gone.

Alone in the bedroom, Sasha was left with a deep awareness of how hard and fast her heart was beating. She tried to calm herself but with Wolf barking and Henry leaving her to wait while he did God knew what with his gun, calming down was easier said than done. She thought of her knife and wished she hadn’t left her overnight bag in the living room. Without a weapon of her own, she felt naked.

Which she was. Halfway, anyway.

Finally, she moved, scrambling to pull her shirt over her head. She didn’t dare take the time to put her bra back on – the last thing she wanted was to be caught tangled up in the straps if a murderer charged in. Hopefully, she wouldn’t have to run for her life. If she had to take so much as an especially enthusiastic step, the girls would be out of control.

Wolf’s barking finally stopped, but the silence was just as scary. Sasha couldn’t hear any noise – not so much as a footstep. Henry hadn’t left the house, had he?

The thought was horrifying. She grabbed a pillow and held it to her chest, squeezing it until her knuckles went white. God knew Henry kept his doors triple-locked and his curtains shut, so whoever or whatever Wolf had been barking at was probably outside. It hadn’t escaped Sasha that the warden’s house wasn’t too far from Henry’s. For all she knew, the warden’s killer was lurking in the nearby woods right now.

If Henry charged needlessly into a situation like that and survived, she’d kill him herself. Problem was, she could actually see him doing something reckless like that. It was obvious that he was eager to rejoin the search for Randy Levinson. What if he took this as an excuse to go out into the woods with his gun?

“Henry?” She called for him, unable to resist. She needed to hear his voice and know that he was still in the house.

She didn’t move from the bed, though. Mostly because she was afraid of being shot if she rounded a corner at the wrong time and he mistook her for an intruder.

He didn’t answer.

The sound of Wolf’s toenails clicking against the floor came briefly from somewhere else in the house – the kitchen, probably. But no reply from Henry.

Sasha’s ire started to rise, fueled by his silence, by the idea that he might be endangering himself by doing something stupid. For all his talk about curtains and peep holes and security, she wasn’t convinced that he wouldn’t do something stupidly brave.

“Henry? You’re scaring the crap out of me!”

After a few more quiet seconds, she seriously considered flopping onto her belly and army crawling out into the kitchen, where she’d be safely out of range of any flying bullets – hopefully. She wasn’t exactly built for tactical maneuvering though, especially without a bra.

She ended up sitting alone and fuming on the bed for another full minute before he appeared in the doorway.

She glared at him as a wave of relief swept through her. “I was afraid you’d left the house!”

He seemed unfazed by her expression. “I wouldn’t leave you like that.”

“Well…” She jumped up but couldn’t think of what to say first.

“Not without a weapon, anyway. Do you know how to shoot a handgun?”

She scowled. “No.”

The skin between his eyes creased, like her answer troubled him. “I’ll teach you. We can go to the shooting range the next time we both have a day off work.”

“How romantic.” Exasperation swept over Sasha like high tide. She couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm for learning how to shoot a gun right now – all she wanted was for Henry to stay close. “So what was Wolf barking at?”

Henry frowned. “I don’t know. A person or animal must’ve been moving around somewhere outside the house. He doesn’t bark unless something like that’s going on.”

“Are you sure?” She really didn’t want to believe that’d been the case.

He nodded. “I’ve had him for the past five years, since he was a puppy. Trained him myself. He’s a good dog.”

“Maybe it was just a cat or a loose dog,” Sasha suggested, because any other possibility was beyond creepy.

Henry didn’t stop frowning. “The house is secure. We can’t get careless, though – for all we know, Randy Levinson could be out there.”

She wasn’t surprised that his thoughts had gone in that direction. And she couldn’t put up much of an argument when the same thing had occurred to her. After all, whoever had killed the warden – whether it’d been Randy or someone else –
was
out there somewhere.

“I wish you’d put down that gun and come over here.”

He crossed the room and laid down the gun on the nightstand, but sat on the edge of the bed where the weapon was just an arm’s length away.

When she settled down next to him, he put one hand – the one that wasn’t near the gun – on her thigh.

“Sorry I had to leave you.” A low note entered his voice, and he breathed a ragged sigh. “I was so close.”

He was still hard – his jeans were still strained over his erection, barely covering him.

“Why don’t we pick up where we left off? It doesn’t look like it’d take you long to get close again.”

He made a sound that was half moan, half sigh. “I can’t let my guard down like that. Not now.”

“So what, we’re just supposed to sit here all night ready to shoot someone?”

“You go to sleep. I’ll stay up.”

She wrapped her fingers around his and squeezed, running her other hand suggestively up the inside of his thigh.

He sucked in a breath when her fingertips brushed the bulge tenting his jeans.

“We can wait a little while if you want to make sure Wolf doesn’t freak out again. But you can’t stay like this all night, and I think we’ve established that it’s not going to take long.”

He just shook his head. “I want you, but I can’t. Liam let his guard down and fell asleep and look what happened to him and Alicia. That’s not going to be you and me.”

His mouth was set in a firm line and she could practically feel stubbornness radiating off of him. As exasperating as his refusal to pick up where they’d left off was, she had to hand it to him: he had an insane amount of self-control. More than she had, to be sure.

Glancing down, she saw that he’d put on boots. They looked like the same ones he wore with his work uniform. The shirtless with boots and jeans look was hot, but knowing he wouldn’t take off those jeans was torture.

“I think you’re going overboard,” she said. “Maybe Wolf was barking at a raccoon trying to get into your garbage or something like that. If you expect me to just lie here and try to go to sleep, you might want to get the fire extinguisher out of the kitchen. I’m afraid my panties will actually catch on fire, or I’ll spontaneously combust or something.”

She tossed down her pillow and gave him a stubborn look, knowing the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra was obvious. If he was going to be like this, she wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

His gaze did linger on her chest – curves that couldn’t be hidden by a mere cotton top. “I want to pick up where we left off just as badly as you do. Worse.” He lowered his gaze to his lap. “You know it’s true. Lie back.”

“What?” A tentative sense of satisfaction flared to life inside her. Was he really giving in, just like that?

“Lie back,” he repeated.

With as good as he looked and as turned-on as she felt, she was prepared to let him boss her around. In fact, she liked it. She reclined on the bed, but only after pulling her shirt over her head and tossing it aside first. Without a bra, there was really no point. Besides, she wanted to give him a good reason to stop being so stubborn.

The feel of his hand on her breast was heaven after the sudden deprivation Wolf’s barking fit had plunged them into. And when he let his touch trail lower…

A thrill arrowed through her when he unbuttoned her jeans, then unzipped them.

“You know what?” she said. “I think I’d be better off without these.”

She began to shimmy out of them, but he stopped her. “I’ll do that.”

Another thrill hit her as he finally laid both hands on her again, stripping her jeans off of her, and then her panties. For a few seconds, he just looked at her, his gaze so heavy she could actually feel it on her body. Then he slipped his hand between her thighs and went straight for her clit.

She practically saw stars, it felt so good when he finally gave her what she wanted: contact so direct, so deliberate, that it felt like a climax was just at her fingertips. Of course, what she wanted most was for him to be inside her, but there was still time for that. They had all night, and she was way past caring that she had to get up early in the morning.

His fingertips slid against her slick skin, and she sucked in a quick breath as he came within a hairsbreadth of slipping into her. Everything inside her seemed to shrink, and the world around her became smaller too, narrowing to just her and Henry and what was happening between them.

Before she could so much as exhale, he did press inside her, deliberately this time. Two of his fingers were enough to have her counting silently backwards from 10, enjoying the hell out of it but resisting an orgasm she could feel drawing closer and closer by the moment.

It wasn’t something she usually did, but she wanted to draw it out, wanted to linger on the edge a little longer. Henry made the edge an appealing place to be, and when she was this close, it was all she could think about – there was no danger, no worrying about him or anyone else.

She wanted that to last longer, because the second her mind began to clear, she’d be back to practically making herself sick with what-ifs. With his fingers buried deep inside her and his gaze burning trails up and down her body, it was hard to imagine anything happening to him. In that moment, he was her entire universe, and that made it impossible for him to disappear.

“You’re so tight,” he said, drawing his fingertips down her inner wall and then pushing deeper inside her again. “Wish I could be inside you.”

She opened her mouth to tell him to make that happen, but a gasp came out instead. Just like that, and she lost her tenuous hold on restraint. Her climax crashed down on her, and she writhed against the bed, her bare thighs brushing his jeans, making her ultra-aware of how tense his muscles were beneath the denim.

He kept sliding in and out, fucking her with his fingers, and rubbed her clit with his thumb, adding another layer to her pleasure.

Even with his dick trapped inside his jeans instead of where it belonged – inside her – she came hard, incapable of anything less when he was the one pushing her to climax. His fingers weren’t as thick as his cock, but they were thick enough, and he touched her with a deliberate directness that hit her where it felt best. Every time he laid hands on her, it was like he cared more about making her come than anything else in the world.

When she regained the presence of mind to do so, she placed a hand on his thigh and brought it quickly upward, pressing her hands against his erection, feeling the flawless shape of it beneath his jeans. For a few moments, that was all she did – his perfection demanded time for sheer admiration – and then she touched the brass button that was keeping him from her.

He stopped her, wrapping her hand in his, trapping her fingers in the shelter of his own.

She looked up at him and he just shook his head, his mouth set in that stubborn line again, his brow lined with what she imagined was pure, self-inflicted anguish. “Go to sleep, Sasha. You’ve gotta get up early in the morning.”

She groaned and flipped onto her stomach, tipping back her head to meet his eyes. “You’re serious, aren’t you – you’re really going to do this to yourself?”