“No, that’s my way of asking if you’re all right.” He searched her face for any telltale signs that would answer his question, since he was fairly certain that she wouldn’t. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
Defensive, flippant words all crowded on her lips, ready for release. But she didn’t find what she expected in Tom’s eyes or in his expression. He didn’t look cocky or full of himself. Instead, he seemed genuinely concerned.
Maybe she’d been wrong about him. Maybe he wasn’t like all the others.
Yeah, and maybe pigs really do fly when you’re not looking
.
“Why would you think you hurt me?” she challenged, raising her chin.
The chip on her shoulder was back, Tom thought. But now he didn’t just suspect, he
knew
that there was a different woman beneath all that bravado and that leading-with-her-chin anger. The woman he’d made love with was soft, vulnerable and, unless he’d misread the signs, in desperate need of love.
“Because I went at it a little aggressively and a little too fast,” he replied.
Did the man have amnesia? They
both
went at it that way. If anything, she’d been even more aggressive than he’d been because her clothes weren’t torn from her body the way she had torn his clothes away from his. Her sudden, intense eagerness to make love with him had eaten up her common sense and control.
“I’m not complaining,” she retorted, then pointedly asked, “are you?”
Tom looked at her as if she just wasn’t making any sense. “Why would I complain about being allowed a quick jaunt through the gates of paradise?”
She wouldn’t have thought that he was the type who could lay it on. “Paradise, huh? And the earth moved for you, did it?” she asked, upset that he was making fun of her.
She wanted to bait him, to pick a fight again, Tom thought. Why couldn’t she just accept things at face value once in a while? Why couldn’t she enjoy them? Just how destructive had those years in foster care been for her? He had to bite his tongue to keep from asking.
“The earth, the sky, the sea, take your pick. None of it remained stationary.”
“That good, huh?” This time, he noticed, the edgy, sarcastic challenge was, for the most part, gone from her voice.
He watched her, wanting to take her back into his arms, wanting desperately to revisit the mind-blowing terrain they had just covered. But he knew that this time he would have to go slower. And, he had to get her to trust him for more than a couple of moments.
His voice low, serious, he answered her question by echoing her words back to her. “That good.”
What kind of power did this man have over her? She knew he was just making it all up, feeding her lines so that maybe he could get in a second quickie before he went off to his room.
And yet…
And yet she wanted to believe him. More than that, his words aroused her, made her not just want to believe him but made her want him, as well. The heat, the desire, the fire, they were all back. And he hadn’t even so much as touched her again.
At least, not physically. Emotionally was a whole other story.
“You’re cold,” he noted.
There were goose bumps on her arms, she realized, but it wasn’t the cold that had caused them.
She didn’t want to come across as the eager one, not again, so she murmured in agreement, “Maybe just a little.”
What happened next caught them both off guard. He reached for the colorful throw that had fallen off the sofa when they had engaged one another in that race to the top of the summit. But as he stretched out his arm for it, the movement threw him off balance and off his precarious perch on the sofa, as well.
Tom started to fall and reacted automatically without thinking. He made a grab for something. That something turned out to be Kait. And suddenly, they were both falling.
He landed on the floor with the rug at his back and Kait at his front. Twisting, she had managed to land right on top of him, her body sealed to his in a close approximation of the erotic dance that had just transpired minutes ago.
“Sorry,” he apologized, stifling the laugh that bubbled up in his throat. “I wanted to grab something to make you warmer.”
He watched in fascination as a smile blossomed on her lips and spread to her eyes. She’d never smiled with her eyes before. It made her even more beautiful.
“And you thought you’d accomplish that by grabbing me?” she asked, amused, though she was trying hard not to be.
“That was an accident,” he told her honestly. “I was trying to reach the blanket for you.”
Why did something so simple mean so much to her? It wasn’t as if he had to outrun a cheetah to get it for her. And yet, his thoughtfulness got to her. And definitely raised his stock in her eyes by two hundred percent.
“Well, now that we’re here like this,” she proposed. “We might as well make the best of it.”
The grin on his lips went straight to her heart, as well as parts beyond. She was now definitely warmer. “I thought we already were,” he said to her softly, moving just enough to establish his point.
“So we are,” she agreed.
He framed her face between his hands and brought her mouth down to his. And those gates he’d mentioned earlier, the ones that led straight to paradise, opened up right before her startled eyes.
And invited her in.
Kait didn’t really remember what came next, or in what order. Only that she enjoyed it. Every second of it. Immensely.
She didn’t recall falling asleep, either. But she must have because she was opening her eyes now and in order to do that, at some point they must have closed.
Closed tightly, she deduced, because she wasn’t on the living-room sofa anymore, or even the floor next to it. She was in a warm bed. Not the one she’d been frequenting these past few nights, but a wider one.
And, now that she focused, it was definitely a masculine one.
The bed was a four-poster that looked as if it had been fashioned in the middle of some forest and shipped out the second the trees had been felled and sections had been carved out to form this massive, dark piece of furniture. The bureau could be described the same way, as could the nightstand. All made with wood as dark as midnight.
Above her, decorative beams were built into the cathedral ceiling. Definitely a place where Grizzly Adams would have felt right at home. Except the man with whom she’d made love with not once or twice but—if memory served—a total of three times last night was as removed from the persona of someone typified by the label “Grizzly” as the earth was from the moon. Tom had been gentle and surprisingly tender. More so each time they did it.
The woman who finally landed him was going to be very, very lucky, Kait couldn’t help thinking.
“’Morning, Detective Two Feathers,” he whispered against her ear softly.
Whispered or not, she jumped as if he’d just leaped out from behind a building and yelled out “Boo.” For a second, her heart almost leaped out of her chest.
“I thought you were asleep,” she told him.
The grin he sported encompassed his entire face. “Nope,” he told her. “I woke up a little more than half an hour ago.”
And he had just stayed in bed? Tom didn’t strike her as the type who was lazy and content just to while away the time in bed. He was a doer. Or had she been wrong about that?
“Why didn’t you get up?”
He pretended to be surprised at the suggestion. “And what? Miss the show?”
Puzzled, she looked at him. She hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. “What show?”
The grin grew softer, almost sentimental. That also didn’t fit in with the personality she’d attributed to him so far.
“The one right in front of me,” he told her. “I’ve been watching you sleep. You’re a lot more expressive when you sleep. You even smile sometimes. You looked almost soft that way. Made me want to ask you what you were smiling about. Except in order to do that, I’d have to wake you up, and I really didn’t want to disturb you.”
He couldn’t be that thoughtful—or could he?
Kait shook her head. “I can’t figure out if you’re really on the level, Cavanaugh, or if you’re making fun of me.”
So they were back to last names, were they? Did that mean that the party was over? The thought brought a pang to him. “Why would I make fun of you, Detective Two Feathers?”
That sounded way too formal, even if he was just kidding. “You’ve seen me naked, so I think you can keep calling me by my first name,” she told him.
Tom mulled over her words, pretending to be intrigued. “Is that your criteria for informality? Someone has to see you naked?”
She blew out an impatient breath. “Do you ever stop asking questions?” she wanted to know.
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Not often. It’s what makes me a good detective,” he said with all sincerity. And then a glint of mischief entered his eyes. “But there is one surefire way to stop me from asking questions,” he told her. Shifting so that he could easily trace the curve of her cheek with his fingertips—which he did slowly—he smiled into her eyes. “Guess what it is?”
Kait laughed, a trace of nervousness bubbling up in her throat—why, she couldn’t begin to guess. “More questions.”
She was about to show him rather than just make a verbal “guess,” but just as she raised her head to kiss him, the phone on the nightstand rang. The jarring, insistent noise broke the spell the moment had woven around them.
“You better answer it,” she told him, sitting up.
She drew the blanket around her, thinking that the bedroom felt a little chilly now that her body was separated from his by this distance. Kait tried to remember just where her clothes were. She began to get up and suddenly sucked in her breath as Tom snaked his arm around her waist.
The smile on his lips, even as he was talking to someone on the phone, was meant just for her. He kept his arm where it was, intent on preventing her from getting up. She heard him agreeing with someone on the other end of the line, promising solemnly to be “there,” wherever “there” was.
“Another crime scene?” she asked.
It was Saturday, but there was no such thing as a day off if you worked for the police department. If there was a crime and your name was up in the rotation, you had to come down, even during Christmas dinner.
Not that that had been a problem of hers for the past four years. Dinner on Christmas was just like dinner any other day for her. It amounted to something that came either directly out of the freezer in her refrigerator or from a takeout place between the precinct and her apartment. Nothing fancy, just a snack to sustain her until the next meal, whenever that might come up.
Tom laughed. “Only if we don’t show up,” he told her. When she looked at him quizzically, he said, “That was Andrew Cavanaugh, making sure you and I were coming to the get-together today. He thought the invitation might have slipped our minds.”
The former chief had extended the invitation only last night. “Why would he think that?”
Tom looked at her knowingly. The woman was the antithesis of a social butterfly. “He’s a good judge of character, I hear.”
That was debatable, she thought, but she wasn’t going to get sucked into a debate she probably didn’t have a prayer of winning. So she asked the question that had been nagging at her mind.
“Why is it so important to Cavanaugh that we show up?”
That went hand in hand with the way the man felt about family. Tom tried to put it succinctly for her. “The way I hear it, family’s the most important thing in the world to the man. To all of the Cavanaughs,” he added.
She supposed there had to be more than one man like that. After all, Ronald had been like that. He’d been the only family she’d really known—and that had been completely of his choosing. He could have walked away when he turned her over to social services—but he didn’t. He kept on coming back until he could finally take her into his own home, first as a foster child and then as his own adopted daughter.
“Okay, I’ll buy that,” she conceded. “But I’m not family.”
There Tom had to contradict her. “It’s not always blood that makes a family,” Tom told her. As he talked, he paused to combine his words with gestures, lightly passing his lips along the slopes of her shoulders. “To Andrew Cavanaugh, every good cop is part of his extended family.”
“You realize you’re making it very hard for me to think when you’re doing that,” she told him, grabbing his hand as he trailed his fingertips between her breasts.
But she couldn’t quite make herself push him away.
“I’m counting on that,” he teased. He pressed a kiss to the dip of her collarbone and then progressed down farther to where his fingers had last lingered.
She struggled to focus her mind, which began to drift again. “You can’t tell me that you’re ready to do it again,” she said in disbelief.
“I wasn’t planning on telling you. I was planning on showing you,” he said quietly after a beat. “I initially set out on a very noble mission,” he informed her with almost a completely straight face.
Lord, but he was doing wonderfully arousing things to her, wreaking havoc on her thought process.
“And that was?” she asked with effort.
“I wanted to help you unwind. You were much too tense.” And then he grinned. “Mission is almost accomplished. You’re almost unwound. A couple more times should do it.”
“A couple more…” She blinked in disbelief. “Are you a man or a machine?”
“I guess we’re about to find out,” Tom theorized. He moved his lips up along her throat slowly until they reached hers.
The rest of the discussion was tabled. Indefinitely.
“You came!” Andrew declared with palatable pleasure late that afternoon. He had thrown open the door the moment Tom had rung the bell.
The only way the man could have anticipated his arrival, Tom thought, was if he had a surveillance monitor mounted somewhere on the other side of the door to go with what he assumed was a hidden camera on the outside of the entrance.
“It was a royal invitation,” Kait answered before Tom had an opportunity to reply. “To refuse seemed treasonous.”
Rather than issue a disclaimer, or frown sternly at the remark, Andrew turned his attention momentarily toward his new nephew and laughed heartily.