Too Wild to Hold (8 page)

“I have a persona here, one I’ve worked years to establish. The people in this world don’t know anything about my past and I don’t want them to. I’m not that woman anymore. I haven’t been for a long time.”

“Then why won’t you sign?” Claire challenged.

Josslyn tossed the documents back at Claire. “I haven’t seen or spoken to my ex since the divorce. I don’t think about him. I didn’t even know he was married again. Thank God he’s finally moving on.”

“But your kids can’t.”

“His kids,” she corrected. “They don’t need me. And trust me, they don’t want me.”

“Then sign the papers. Stay here with my…friend,” Claire suggested, “and I’ll run up to the house and get a stupid pen.”

Josslyn’s eyes brightened, her tongue swiping her lips.

“Or I can go,” Michael cut in.

The woman sneered, then turned to Claire, who impaled her with a
don’t even think about it, sister
look that made it hard for Michael to keep a straight face.

“Don’t bother,” Josslyn said, her tone lazy, but Michael watched her shift her weight from foot to foot, her gaze focused somewhere over their shoulders. She was playing bored and disinterested, but the act wasn’t entirely convincing. Not to a trained observer.

“You won’t sign?” Claire asked, incredulous.

“Not here. I told you, I don’t want my two lives intersecting again. Tomorrow.”

“Where?” Michael asked.

“I have a car. I’ll meet you in the city.”

“At my office,” Claire started to say, but Michael stopped her with a hand to her shoulder.

“I’d rather you not conduct business anywhere so…obvious,” he said, hoping she’d understand that while he had no problem helping her put this case to rest, he wasn’t forgetting—not for a minute—that a criminal had her in his sights. If the Bandit was staking out Claire’s usual haunts, Michael didn’t want her anywhere near them until they had a plan to smoke the guy out.

“Right,” she said, cottoning on quickly. “Where are you staying?”

“Here,” Josslyn answered, then grinned. Only those in the upper echelons of
Nouvelle Placage
remained at the main house the entire weekend. The rest scattered to nearby bed and breakfast inns or hotels. “I know important people.”

“In the biblical sense,” Michael muttered, which resulted in Josslyn smiling like a Cheshire cat.

“Precisely. And none of those important people know about my life before. I want to keep it that way.”

“Fine,” Claire said, her tone a bit impatient. “There’s a cemetery between here and the city, about twenty miles right off the main highway. It’s called St. Honoria. Meet us at the south entrance.”

“A cemetery?” Josslyn’s lip curled.

“You want to kill off Josslyn Granger for good, so why not? Besides, it’s the closest semi-public spot around here and none of the people from
Nouvelle Placage
have any reason to be there. It’s secluded, but not abandoned. There are tourists and caretakers.”

“What time?” Josslyn stretched languorously. “I intend to be up very late tonight.”

Claire rolled her eyes and sighed with impatience.

“Eleven?” Michael suggested.

He really did not like this woman any more than Claire did—and he wasn’t entirely sure why. He supposed she was attractive in an
I’ve-fucked-about-a-hundred-guys-in-my-lifetime
sort of way. Michael appreciated women who owned their sexuality, but those who treated it like a sport weren’t his type.

“That’s fine,” Josslyn said. “Eleven o’clock. And don’t forget a pen.”

She struggled with her dress a few more minutes, and once she’d finally manipulated her breasts into the material, she patted her wrecked hair and disappeared into the night.

“She’s not going to show,” Claire said the minute Josslyn was out of earshot.

Michael turned, surprised by the defeat in her voice. “Why do you think that?”

“Why would she? God, I’m so stupid. I can’t believe I forgot the pen in Aunt Clarice’s purse. I was so concerned with not getting caught, I totally screwed up.”

“You’re a lot of things, Claire, but stupid isn’t one of them. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time. But she’ll show. She wants to put that life behind her. If she doesn’t sign, her ex will keep trying to track her down.”

Claire didn’t say anything else. A thick silence engulfed them, one scented with the sex and sweat of people Michael couldn’t care less about. He gravitated to Claire, inhaling as he neared so he could cleanse his nostrils with her clean, sensual aromas.

“Let’s get out of here.” He offered his arm in a way that no longer felt antiquated.

But Claire didn’t accept. She stepped away and circled the dais, her brow furrowed, her stare locked on the terrazzo, still slick with fluids he didn’t need a crime scene tech to identify.

“Could you do that?” she asked.

“What? Share a woman with another dude? No way.”

When she looked up at him, her expression was devoid of humor. “Why not? She’s beautiful and sexy and wouldn’t want anything by way of commitment. Seems to me she’s any man’s dream lover.”

Michael chewed on his tongue a minute, knowing he had to say this right or he’d come off as a liar—or worse, a hypocrite. “Sharing a woman like Josslyn would be easy for most guys because it’s not hard to share something that doesn’t mean anything. They fucked hard. They got off on the mechanics—the hands, dicks, vaginas, nipples. Everyone has those body parts. Everyone can have freaky sex.”

“But everyone doesn’t,” she said.

“If I had to choose between freaky sex with some chick I don’t give a damn about and slow, sensual, me on top, her tight underneath, missionary, vanilla sex with a woman like you, I’d choose the second. Wouldn’t you?”

She stared at him, her eyes wide, her lips parted. “Yeah. Definitely.”

“Besides,” Michael said, stepping close to the dais to stop her from her mindless rotation. “If some guy tried to touch you while you were with me, I’d break his neck. I might not have four hands and two dicks, but I make the most of what I’ve got.”

She ran her hand gently down his cheek, a smile lighting her eyes to hypnotic green. “You definitely do. Still,” she continued, breaking away from him and recircling the terrazzo stage, as if she was caught up in a whirlpool, “it was hot. Watching.”

“Not nearly as hot as feeling you come undone.”

If not for the bluish tinge of the moonlight, he might have seen her blush. Instead, she chewed on her bottom lip. “Yeah, that was…intimate.”

“More intimate than what we were watching.”

She sighed. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me tonight. You have no reason to believe me, but I’m not usually so easy.”

“I don’t think there’s anything about you that’s easy, Claire. In fact, you may be the toughest woman I’ve ever had the pleasure of…being with.”

“You’re sweet.”

“I’m not being sweet, I’m being honest.”

“But still—”

Michael had had enough. In any other place, at any other time or with any other woman, he might have responded to her discomfort by apologizing for crossing the line and then asking her to forget what had happened between them. By encouraging her to pull back into her own comfort zone, he could do the same.

But Claire wasn’t any other woman—and Michael wasn’t the same man he’d been before he met her. He didn’t know if it was the family ring, the case, the setting, the lady herself or a combination of everything hitting him at once, but the place where he used to find refuge now only brought him an increased sense of longing.

“Lust is a powerful emotion,” he said, forcing himself to have this conversation.

“Clearly,” she replied, still circling, still staring, still shaking her head in confusion. “I’ve lived in New Orleans my whole life. I’ve seen a lot of salacious shit, but I’ve never—”

She was near him again—near enough to touch. He snagged her hand, stopping her from going around the dais again. He pulled her close and slid her hand up his chest, neck and chin until he could brush a soft kiss across the inside of her palm.

“Maybe it wasn’t what you were seeing that turned you on as much as the company you were keeping.”

Her shoulders dropped as a smile again lit those spectacular green eyes.

“Good comeback.”

“Thanks. Now, you’ve done all you can to work your case tonight. Think we can get the hell out of here?”

“And go where?”

“A safe house,” Michael assured her. “My unsub isn’t going to find you tonight.”

“But he will find me.”

Michael slipped his arm around her waist and guided her out of the secret garden. “Yes, but not until I say so.”

T
HE RIDE BACK
to New Orleans took no more than an hour, but as Claire watched the sensual Louisiana countryside with its towering oaks and draping moss turn first into a stark industrial area and then into boxy neighborhoods that ranged from high end to low rent, she found it easy to imagine that days instead of hours had gone by since she’d driven with her aunt in the opposite direction. She definitely wasn’t the same woman she’d been when she’d headed to the
Nouvelle Placage
gathering—and not because of the
ménage a trois
she’d witnessed or the orgasm she’d experienced while hidden in the dark foliage nor the fact that she’d found the woman she’d been looking for, but failed to get her signature because of a rookie mistake.

It was all of that.

It was more than that.

It was Michael.

Without turning her head, she watched his profile flash in and out, illuminated by the headlights from passing cars. His strong, dimpled chin added a quirky charm to what otherwise would have been a hard, classically handsome face. He had broad shoulders, strong hands and a chest she could imagine herself lying across naked for hours. His dark blue gaze, which twinkled with humor one minute and burned with intense drive the next, was trained solely on the road, both in front of them and behind.

He was in the zone. Full-on, FBI-honed protection mode.

It was exhilarating.

And terrifying.

In many ways, Michael was her polar opposite. He was an FBI agent, which in and of itself meant that he played by a seriously strict rule book and had standards above and beyond a private investigator like herself. She’d been booted from the local police force because she’d been unable to adopt a black-and-white outlook on law enforcement and criminal behavior. Rampaged by scandal and corruption in the past, the brass in her precinct had skewed in the complete opposite direction. Any investigation that might draw them out of a comfortable delineation between right and wrong was ignored. Any case that might put her fellow officers in a questionable spotlight was passed over for crimes that made good and evil as easily distinguishable as hot and cold.

If only life were that simple—that cut and dried.

And yet, despite his professional position, Michael’s behavior betrayed a man who would rebel if the right situation presented itself. Whatever Bureau rules he’d ignored tonight, he’d done so for the sole purpose of tracking her down so he could catch a crazed kidnapper. And at the same time that he appeared to embody every one of the basic rules of decorum—hell, the basic rules of dating—he’d touched her intimately less than an hour after they’d met.

And she’d loved every second of it.

Michael pulled off the main highway and negotiated a maze of back roads until they reached a local hotel with a blinking neon sign exclaiming No Vacancy even though the parking lot had only two cars—one of which was missing a left front tire. The maelstrom of sensations she’d experienced tonight, from fear to curiosity to invigoration to utter orgasmic release, had sapped her energy. But when Michael shoved the gear into park, she felt a renewed zing, as if she’d just spotted the finish line after a wickedly long run.

“You okay?”

Michael had turned off the ignition. With his arm draped on the steering wheel and his eyes dark with concern, she had a brief fantasy of herself climbing across his lap and curling against his chest. As it was, his concern wrapped around her like a fleece blanket on a chilly night. It was an unfamiliar experience for a woman who’d grown up in Louisiana and who had never relied on a man—any man—to give her Southern comfort unless it came in a glass with ice.

But Michael put her safety first. He’d put her case first. Her pleasure first. He’d asked how she was a half dozen times since the garden tête-à-tête with Josslyn Granger, and yet, she didn’t find his questions cloying or constricting.

Of course, she’d only answered once, insisting she was fine. The rest of the time, she’d waved away his worry, completely caught up in everything that had happened…everything she’d learned. About Josslyn. About the man who was after her.

About herself.

“I’m just exhausted,” she confessed.

“Probably low blood sugar,” he concluded, giving the abandoned parking lot a once over before he reached into the backseat and retrieved the sandwiches, beer and bottled water they’d picked up at a local deli a half mile from the hotel. “This will fix it.”

Michael insisted she remain in the car while he gathered their food and the bag she’d retrieved at
Nouvelle Placage
from his trunk. Once sure there was no one around, he led her up the open stairway that zigzagged up the side of the hotel.

The room he’d rented was at the end, next to a room marked off with crime scene tape.

She stared at the crisscrossed doorway apprehensively while he used his key.

“Nice digs,” she said.

He grinned at her unapologetically. “Only the best.”

Inside, the room proved, at the very least, clean. The unmistakable scent of pine disinfectant permeated the place, but once he switched on the air conditioning unit under the window, it dissipated, leaving behind the vague mustiness that only a New Orleans hotel room could possess. Michael waited for her to walk completely inside, then bolted the door behind them, dropped the food off on the pockmarked table between the two double beds and then deposited her bag next to the door to the bathroom.

“Want to eat first or shower?” he asked.

She eyed the two beds and with a snicker pictured the scene from
It Happened One Night.
There wasn’t much point in erecting a Wall of Jericho between her and Michael tonight, even if they were still relative strangers.

He might not have seen her completely naked, but he’d had open access to every part of her body. Twice.

And he’d made the most of it both times, without the benefit of a horizontally flat surface. When she started to imagine how he might utilize a mattress to his advantage, she decided to take him up on the shower first—preferably, a cold one.

She beelined straight for the bathroom.

By the time she was back in her favorite Mardi Gras commemorative T-shirt and the panties, she felt like herself again. The only thing missing was her Smith & Wesson 9mm and her jeans. The first she’d left behind so she wouldn’t arouse suspicion at the plantation if anyone rooted through her things. The jeans had been abandoned for the sake of comfort. Wasn’t like the man hadn’t already seen some of her most intimate parts. She wasn’t going to be shy now about her bare legs.

When she came out of the bathroom, he was sitting on the bed nearest the window, tapping away on a laptop, a cell phone tucked under his ear.

“Yeah, well, next time I won’t check in at all,” he quipped to the person on the other end of the phone. “Then you’ll be even more gorgeous.”

He waited for the response, snorted, then hung up the phone.

She raised an eyebrow. If he had a girlfriend—or worse, a wife—she might just have to kill him, even without her gun.

At first, he only spared her a quick glance, followed by a double-take. His stare locked on her bare legs then rose, millimeter by millimeter, up to her pale pink panties and snug T-shirt, underneath which she wore nothing but skin. Her nipples tightened under his intense scrutiny, and without wanting to, she turned around and pretended to mess with the towel she’d wrapped around her wet hair.

Behind her, he groaned. She chanced a quick look over her shoulder and saw that while his jaw hadn’t exactly dropped open at her exposed ass, there was a slackness in his chin that he neatly covered by clearing his throat.

“That was my partner,” he explained. “She said I interrupted her beauty sleep.”

“I take it you mean
partner
in the FBI sense,” she said, padding across the room.

“If you think I mean it in any other sense after what happened between us tonight, then I’m seriously losing my touch.”

“Oh, no,” she said, settling on the bed closest to the bathroom. “Your touch is just fine. Better than fine, actually.”

She masked the charged silence by towel drying her hair until she was sure she wouldn’t drip all over the pillow and comforter. With her fingers, she combed through the conditioner softened strands and hoped she didn’t look too much like a drowned rat. She’d washed away the elaborate curls she’d worn for the ball and if she had any luck, her naturally thick hair wouldn’t look too ridiculous when it dried.

Judging by the way he continued to steal glances at her, she must have looked tasty enough to eat.

Which reminded her…

She grabbed the brown bag he’d dropped on the night stand and unwrapped the muffaletta sandwich they’d bought at an all-night deli, portioned a quarter of the massive round Italian bread stuffed with meat and olive spread onto a pile of napkins.

When he didn’t accept his piece, she realized his gaze was still stuck on her lower torso. She touched his arm. The electric current between his flesh and hers made her catch her breath.

For a split second, she considered chucking the food aside and making a meal out of him instead. He curved his hand around hers, took the sandwich and set it aside, then concentrated on slowly easing the tension out of her fingers.

The charged sensation running up and down her arm was no longer shocking—but it was just as powerful.

She cleared her throat and pulled away. This wasn’t the time. It was certainly the place, what with two beds at their disposal, but they had a lot to talk about. What he’d told her while under surveillance at the plantation house had been enough to establish trust, but now, she needed details.

Lots and lots of details—particularly the type that would keep her from launching herself across the mini-divide between the beds and jumping his bones.

She popped the tops on the beer and slid his bottle across the table, avoiding further contact. She ached to find out just how hot they’d be together now that they weren’t undercover, on display or under the influence of sex so blatant and raunchy, they’d reacted without thinking. If they made love before the sun came up, it would be simply because they wanted to.

And she really, really wanted to.

“Now that we’re entirely alone,” she said, forcing her brain away from all matters sexual, “tell me everything you know about The Bandit. When and how did he first come to the attention of the FBI?”

He picked up his sandwich and chewed a mouthful, took a swig of his beer, then wiped his hands on one of the extra napkins. The muscles in his neck and shoulders relaxed, as if he too was thankful for a topic that might break the seductive spell attempting to lace them together like two sides of her abandoned corset.

“Over a year and a half ago,” he explained, “the unsub my colleagues dubbed The Bandit made the mistake of striking in the same community twice, in a relatively small town just outside of San Diego.”

He leaned back against his pile of flattened pillows, looking so comfortable in his skin, she couldn’t help but want to climb in beside him. Instead, she grabbed a bottle of water and sucked down half the contents. How weird would it be if she dumped the rest over the top of her head?

“The police force there was small,” he continued. “Four officers, two patrol cars, no resources. The first incident, to be honest, they kind of blew off. A woman claimed to have been kidnapped and kept against her will for three days. There was no evidence of rape, and because she had a history of alcohol problems, they figured she’d just gone on a bender. But the second woman got their attention. Church secretary, married, two kids. No connection to the first woman except that they lived in the same zip code. But as the town has only one zip code, that wasn’t saying much.”

“Typical,” Claire commented. “Another community where only upstanding citizens qualify as crime victims.”

“At least it didn’t take a third victim to get their attention,” he said. “Small town cops rarely want feds on their turf. But they’d recovered scarves like the one you received, black with the blood red Z’s, and they recognized a signature and called for the FBI. But it wasn’t a federal case yet, so we were only notified of the possibility that a serial rapist was working in California.”

“And you got the initial call?”

He took another generous bite of the sandwich and chewed while he shook his head. “I’m based in San Francisco. I didn’t get called until the San Diego Bureau established that the unsub had attacked across state lines. By then, there were four victims. Two in California, one in Arizona and one just outside Vegas. The more information they gathered from the women, the more it looked like the guy had some sort of Antonio Banderas fixation. That’s when I was brought in.”

“Why you? Are you some sort of Zorro expert?”

He glanced at the ceiling, chuckling. “Something like that.”

She put her sandwich down and regarded him carefully. His answer was purposefully vague. Just what was he hiding?

“You were better at bending the truth a couple of hours ago,” she said.

When his eyes met hers, she felt an added punch of intensity behind his dreamy baby blues. “Let’s just say that my superiors noticed my movie posters and memorabilia. My father was an avid collector. I’ve read all the Johnston McCulley books, seen all the movies and television shows. They decided I was the perfect agent to get inside this guy’s head.”

“And are you?”

He swiped the crumbs off his folder and into a nearby trashcan, then pulled a book out from under one of his piles of paperwork.

The leather was so battered and old that she couldn’t read the faded title on the spine, but expected it to be a first edition of
The Curse of Capistrano,
which for some reason, she knew was the first novel to detail the exploits of the man in black.

But when she tilted the book beneath the dim lamp on the side table and turned to the first page, she read,
The Amorous Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta.