Beckett's Convenient Bride (14 page)

Next he eased the shirt over her head and discarded it. Clasping her face between his hands, he searched her eyes in the indirect light as if to read any lingering doubts there. It was all she could do not to beg him to get on with it. Not to blurt out words she knew instinctively he didn't want to hear. If she hadn't been certain before
this—and she hadn't, because there'd been too much else crowded into the past two days—she knew now that she could never get enough of this man. The taste of him, the feel of him—the way he tried to protect her even when she suspected that all he wanted was to be rid of her and her problems, that had nothing to do with him.

If that wasn't love, it was too close for comfort.

And if this was all she could ever have of him, then she would take it and live on the memory.

“Kit? Where are you, sweetheart? Don't disappear on me now.”

“I'm right here,” she breathed.

“If you don't want this, then say so. I'll live. Might be a while before I can walk upright, but I'll survive.”

If she didn't want it? She was little more than a molten puddle of liquid desire, couldn't he tell? “Do you have a thingee?” she asked, trying to sound suave and experienced.

He leaned up onto one elbow and stared at her. “A what?”

“You know—a condom.” Oh, lord, woman, don't blush now!

He collapsed onto the pillow, and for a minute she thought he was laughing. But then he slipped out of bed, retrieved his wallet from the khakis he'd tossed across the chair, and within seconds he was back again.

But not before she'd had time to enjoy the view. Men were built so different from women. Their hips cupped in on the sides. Hers, even as skinny as she was, went out. Like a snake that had just swallowed an egg. Make that one egg and two raisins, because she had breasts. They might be small, but they were all her own.

Lifting the cover, he eased back underneath. “Honey, I don't want to rush you, but…”

She laughed, and if there was a slight edge of hysteria in the sound, then it was hardly any wonder. If she'd written the story of everything that had happened these past forty-eight hours and tried to sell it to a publisher, they'd have laughed her off the planet.

“Go ahead, rush me,” she said, opening her arms.

He came down to her then, holding his weight up on both arms while he searched her face once more, as if needing to reassure himself that she hadn't changed her mind. Not in a millions years, she wanted to tell him, but had sense enough for once to keep quiet.

He said, “I'm so hungry for you I'm afraid I might hurt you. It's, uh—been awhile for me.”

“Me, too. I won't break.” As if to prove it, she pulled him down on top of her. He began to kiss her again, parting her lips, thrusting—taking all she had to give and hungrily demanding more. Then he nibbled a trail down the side of her throat, paving the way with his hands until he reached her breasts.

At the hot rasp of his tongue on her nipple, an explosion of pleasure so sharp it was almost pain streaked through her. Searching with her fingertips, she combed through the crisp hair on his chest until she encountered the twin nubs of hardened flesh.

A shudder racked his body. “Sweetheart, I'm on a short fuse, and it's burning fast.”

It was all she could do not to cry out her own fierce need as, easing her thighs apart, he positioned himself between them, the hair-roughened texture of his skin strangely exciting against her sensitive inner thighs. Unable to stop herself, she reached down between their bodies and touched him there. Lightning stabbed her again as her hand closed around hot steel, sheathed in velvet.

She snatched her hand away, and then she felt him
brush against her entrance. She was embarrassingly wet. Had he noticed? Why was he hesitating? She was about to explode and he hadn't even entered her yet. Was it possible for a woman to climax before a man was even inside her? Never in her wildest dreams. Certainly not in her limited experience.

And then he pushed inside her and she bit back a scream. Colors—she saw it in colors, like a pulsating rainbow magnified a thousand times. Frantically, she sought words to describe it, because she was a writer, after all, and words were her tools.

Right. It felt so
right.

Then he began to move, and it felt even more right. She was acutely aware of every inch of her flesh—and of his.

His eyes were closed, his face harsh, almost masklike. His shoulders were trembling, and she sensed he was fighting against the inevitable. She didn't want to fight, she wanted to let it happen. Let it wash over her, like an enormous neon-colored surf.

Teeth bared in a grimace, he thrust harder, quicker. She thought he spoke her name, but then the bonds of pleasure began tightening around her, lifting her up, tearing her apart. A chorus of angels could have shouted her name and she wouldn't have heeded. She tried to grasp his shoulders, but her hands slid off his sweat-slick flesh. She tried to meet his thrusts, but her timing was off, and then it was too late because she was drowning, drowning…

Somewhere inside her head, a voice whispered caution, but she was beyond heeding. Eons beyond. Wrapped in the arms of the man she loved—the man who had to feel more than mere lust for her, because Fate wouldn't be so cruel, Kit slept. And dreamed.

I
t was barely light outside when Carson awoke. One moment he was deeply asleep, the next instant he was wide-awake, partly due to training, partly due to his own nature. He had an agenda that couldn't wait any longer.

Quietly, he checked his cell phone to be sure the battery had recharged overnight. It was too early to call home, but by the time he showered and dressed, and slipped outside to see what the machines had in the way of breakfast, enough time would have passed. He had other calls to make first.

He managed to get as far as the door some ten minutes later before Kit began to stir. Turning, he gazed down at the woman who had come to mean too much to him at a time when he didn't have room for another woman in his life. He hated to leave her. Even with the note, she might misunderstand. But a man had to do what a man had to
do. What sage had said that? Someone good at rationalizing, obviously.

A few minutes later he sat in the front seat of the Yukon, sipping an orange-flavored drink that bore little resemblance to any known citrus fruit while he punched in a number that was not on automatic dial.

“Moose? Beckett here. Look, I'm sorry to—” He listened for a moment, then broke into the litany. “Yeah, I caught it, too, thanks to Mac. Not too bad, though. Twenty-four hours and I'm back in fighting form.” Sure he was. “Listen, I need you to check out a guy for me. I'm in North Carolina, in—” He glanced at the highway map and filled in the vital information. “Sheriff and two deputies. I need a line on one of the deputies, a guy by the name of Junius Mooney. Right. He's a new-hire deputy, been here about six months from what I understand. I don't know where he came from, and I'm not particularly eager to start asking around, if you know what I mean.”

After answering a few more questions, Carson clicked off and moved to his next call. Punching in the automatic dial number, he glanced toward the closed door of unit 8. No sign of activity yet. She needed her sleep. He needed her to sleep.

Deliberately fire-walling all thought of the past several hours, he waited for someone to catch the phone. His mother would still be asleep, but the nurse would be up.

So, evidently, was his father. “Hi, Pop? Listen, how's Mom?” A few minutes later he said, “No, I'm not back home yet—still in North Carolina. What I want to know is—no, I haven't heard from Margaret, but—” He broke off and listened for perhaps a full minute.

Ah, jeez. “Did she say where she could be reached?”

Well, that was that, he thought a few minutes later, after
promising to check back and let his folks know what his plans were.

At this point, he hadn't a clue. All he knew was that he couldn't leave Kit here alone. Couldn't leave her at all until this mess was cleared up. He had no obligation and even less legal authority, but as long as she was vulnerable, he couldn't walk away.

Which presented a whole new set of problems.

 

Inside the motel room, Kit opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, trying to wrap her mind around events of the immediate past. The one thing that impressed her above all else was a certain feeling of…hollowness. Emptiness, as if something she'd briefly possessed had been snatched away.

She flexed her ankles, still stiff from wobbling around on those designer shoes, the designer being the Marquis de Sade. Sliding her legs over the edge of the bed, she sat up, glancing toward the open bathroom door.

“Carson?” He could be shaving, she told herself, knowing that if he were anywhere nearby, she would have sensed it. Forcing herself to stay calm, to think logically, she murmured aloud, “Take a deep breath. Forget what happened, it's over, okay? Time to move on.”

She waited for the words to sink in.

It didn't help. Dammit—damn it all to hell and back, she didn't want to move on! At least, if she moved anywhere, she didn't want to do it alone.

I never promised you a rose ga-arden.
Words to the corny old song played over in her mind, and she bit her lip to keep from laughing. Or maybe from crying.

Instead she cursed some more, awkwardly and inexpertly, and then she flung back the covers and stood. And there on the bedside table next to the telephone, was a
can of orange-flavored drink, a packaged muffin and a sack of corn chips.

And a note. Blinking the sleep from her eyes, she scanned the few lines. His handwriting was half-printing, half-script. It looked just like the man himself—hard-edged, but with a grace and softness that was rare among men—at least the men of her acquaintance.

She read, “It's 6:47 a.m., Sleeping Beauty. I'll be back in a couple of hours with stuff we need. Change of clothes and some real food. List everything you remember that happened, everything you lost in the fire and anything else that needs listing.” In other words, she translated, keep your mind occupied so you won't panic.

Well, that was just too damned tough. If she wanted to panic, she would damn well panic. And curse while she was doing it. She might be a flake—she'd been called it more than a few times—but no one had ever called her a wimp.

She read the last hastily scribbled line. “You might want to call your folks and let them know where you are.” He signed it C. B. No Love, no Sincerely—no nothing. Just his damn-blasted initials.

She didn't start crying until she went into the bathroom and saw her panties and bra hanging over the shower rod, where he had rinsed them out and hung them to dry. She took them down—they were still damp—and rolled them in the last clean hand towel.

She might have sobbed a time or two standing under the stream of hot water, but at least she didn't gulp water and drown. By the time she stepped out and wrapped herself in a skimpy bath towel, she felt marginally better. Or if not better, at least more in command.

Lists? He wanted her to make lists?

Fine. She could start with the fact that she was staying
in a motel she couldn't pay for, with no place to go if she left, and no way of getting there even if she had a place to go. There was a single ten-dollar bill tucked into her evening purse, a comb and some loose change; a driver's license, her social security card and slim ballpoint pen. So yes, she could make a list, but of what? Her prospects? Her worldly possessions?

Ha! Short list.

And that wasn't even the worst of it. Sometime in the past few days she had taken complete leave of her senses and fallen madly in love with a man who was engaged to another woman, a man who had a sick mother who needed him—a man who claimed in his note that he'd be back, but then, why should he? He was under no obligation just because they had—

Well. He might have mentioned taking her home with him, but that had been a social lie. She knew all about those. She'd been hearing them all her life—lies designed to protect the flawless Dixon facade of old money and old family her grandfather so loved to project.

The fact that neither the money nor the family had been his didn't faze him. His father had been a greengrocer in Cincinnati, and he'd earned scholarships to get through law school.

Kit toyed with the pen, staring at the blank page on the motel's notepad. If she had to call her grandfather, she would do it. It was marginally preferable to hitchhiking. She could call Jeff, but he really couldn't afford to leave work, not when she'd left him shorthanded, and besides, Gilbert's Point was the last place she wanted to go now.

Dressed in the fuchsia satin, which was all she had to put on, with her damp, freshly combed hair woven into a lumpy braid, she was sitting on the fake leather armchair, her feet propped on the bed, with half a glass of orange-
colored liquid beside her when the door rattled and then opened. She'd started her list by drawing a big, fat number one and doodling all around it.

Doodling. The creative mind at work.

“You should've fastened the chain as soon as you got up,” Carson said.

“The door was locked.” Where have you been? I thought you weren't coming back!

“You got any idea how easy it is to get into one of these rooms?” He tossed several large bags onto the bed and carefully placed another one on the table beside her. “Chain's not much good. One hard shove and the screws pop out. Here, I brought us some breakfast.”

She had eaten half the muffin and all of the corn chips he'd left her and she was still starved. “It's my metabolism,” she said defiantly, irrationally angry because she thought he'd left her here and gone home. “Creative people burn calories just thinking.”

“Right,” he said with a quizzical lift of one crow-black eyebrow.

Kit opened the bag and took out a lidded cup of coffee, a greasy, white-flour biscuit filled with all sorts of wicked things, and a big, sugar-topped raisin bun. “Oh, I'm in heaven,” she said with a sigh, eagerly unwrapping the bun.

Not until the sweet was half-demolished did she notice that Carson wasn't wearing the clothes he'd left in. Instead he had on a new pair of jeans that were darker than the softly faded, close-fitting ones he'd worn that first day. The black knit shirt was similar, and he was wearing the same brown leather boots, minus most of the mud and soot from the night before.

“Do you ride?” she asked, licking the sugar off her thumb.

“Do I what?”

“You know—horses.” She took another bite and nodded to his feet.

“Oh. Horses. Yeah, I used to ride. Haven't in a long time, though. The boots are purely an affectation.”

“Ha. You're the least affected man I know. You don't even wear cologne.”

“Hey, I'm a detective, right? Hard to sneak up on the bad guys when they can smell you coming a mile away.”

She grinned and started unwrapping her ham-egg-and-cheese biscuit. And here she'd thought she would never laugh again. Given enough sugar in her system, she could conquer the world.

Or at least Currituck County. “Randolph—you remember Randolph from the party? He wears some scent that he modestly lets everyone on the planet know he had custom blended just for him.” She concentrated on her biscuit. Concentrated on anything and everything that would keep her from dwelling on the immediate future.

He didn't say a word. He was obviously going to let her wallow in embarrassment just because she'd practically dragged him into her bed.

She took a big bite of her breakfast sandwich and chewed savagely, glaring down at the fuchsia satin, cabbage-sized rose on her left knee.

“What's the matter, is it cold? I don't think they have microwaves here, but I could ask in the office.”

“It's not the sandwich,” she said with a dismissive shrug.

“Yeah, well…when you're finished eating, you might want to try on the stuff I bought. We can exchange anything that doesn't fit, but I thought you might want something else to wear while you shop for the rest of what you
need for the next few days. I'm no good at picking out women's whatchamacallits.”

“Oh, am I going shopping?” Her smile was about as genuine as a two-dollar diamond ring. Stop it. Just stop it right now. He's trying to be decent, and you're acting like a spoiled brat!

Carson hiked up his stiff new jeans and sat on the edge of the bed. “First you're going to finish eating,” he said. “Then you're going to change clothes and then we're going to talk. After that we'll go shopping.”

Before he could issue further orders, his cell phone buzzed softly. Kit pried the lid off her coffee, still steaming but weak as water, while Carson turned away.

“Yeah, Moose? You got something for me?”

Moose? She tried not to listen, she really did. Besides, he was mostly listening. Why bother to eavesdrop on someone who spoke only in monosyllables? Halfway through the one-sided conversation he leaned over and started making notes on the list she had started and forgotten.

She tried to remember what was on it. The fat number one followed by a lot of doodling. Nothing incriminating, thank goodness—she was pretty certain of that. No hearts and flowers, with the initials C.B. entwined with K.D.

“Thanks, man,” he said, and realizing that she was leaning over to see what he'd jotted down, she sat up straight. “I owe you,” he said into a phone no larger than a pack of cigarettes. “What? Probably next week, so get your butt out of my chair, y'hear?”

He punched off, laid the phone aside, thumbed up a sandwich crumb from the napkin on the table and licked it off. “I bought this ergonomic chair when I had some back trouble. Now every guy in the department wants one just like it.”

Kit's fingers crept back toward the notepad. She'd seen just enough to remember what she'd doodled there. A pair of high-heeled sandals bracketed by a pair of cowboy boots.

I'll die. I'll just crawl off somewhere and die quietly, and by the time he gets back to Charleston he'll have forgotten my name.

“Okay, you ready to talk now?”

She swallowed the lump in her throat and set aside the uneaten half of her biscuit. “Do we have to?”

“I thought you wanted answers.”

“That depends on the questions.”

“For starters, how about who shot Tank Hubble, and why? How about who torched your house, and why? But I guess you pretty well figured out that one for yourself.”

“To scare me off, you mean.”

Carson let it go at that. She didn't really need to be reminded that she and poor old Hubble fell into the same category, not after what had happened to Tank. He didn't know how serious the attempts on her life had been, or how far they would have gone, but even the dumbest perps occasionally pulled off a hit and got away with it. It happened more than the general public suspected.

As it turned out in this particular case, Internal Affairs had started closing in on their rogue deputy shortly before Kit had spotted his truck and spooked. But not before he'd had time to get rid of one witness and made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to silence the second witness.