Fair Game (31 page)

“No, strawberry. Freckles. My brother looks like her.”

“Where does she live now?”

“With my sister. They have a two-family house in Abington. She baby-sits for Maureen’s kids a lot.”

“Do you see much of them?”

He shrugged. “Holidays.” He looked down at her. “Am I being interrogated? I feel like I should have a strong white light shining in my face.”

“I just want to know all about you.”
 

“You do. I think you knew all about me the first time you looked at me.”

She smiled. “Not quite. But I did think you were very cute.”

“Cute?” He raised his brows.

“All right. Devastatingly, overwhelmingly sexy.”

“That’s better.”

“And what did you think of me?”

“Fishing for compliments?”

“I just gave you one.”

He fixed her with his blue stare and said flatly, “The first time I saw you, I thought I was in serious trouble.”

“Why?” she murmured, watching his face and thinking that he had little gift for small talk; he was blunt. Whereas she enjoyed listening to amusing chatter from other people, she found his directness refreshing and endearing.

“I knew I would have to spend a lot of time with you,” he said. “I felt...”

“What?” she prodded.

“Drawn to you. Very powerfully. And with Dillon on the scene and the whole situation, it just seemed... hopeless.”

“It wasn’t,” Ashley said softly. “Here we are.”

He didn’t answer.

She watched his movements as he smoked, and added languidly, “I love your hands. I told Meg that I was having erotic fantasies about your hands. I’m sure she thought I was deranged.”

“Do lady lawyers have fantasies like that?”

“This one does.” She sat up and studied his face in the dim light. “Do you remember that weekend I spent on the family yacht just before the auction?”

He nodded.

“I tormented myself the whole time you were gone. I had visions of you sleeping with a parade of gorgeous creatures during your nights away from me.”

“I went to Capo’s house for dinner and played with his kid’s trains,” Martin said, laughing.

“Well, I didn’t know!” Ashley shook her hair back from her face impatiently, remembering her anguish. “I even thought you might call Carmen Hughes.”

“Now that might not have been a bad idea,” Martin said, smiling slyly. He dragged deeply on his cigarette.

Ashley punched him playfully. “So you haven’t forgotten her!”

“How could I forget a body like that?”

“I beg your pardon. You practically broke your leg trying to get away from her, Lieutenant.”

“Then why did you think I would call her?”

“Jealousy, I suppose. I certainly knew she would be receptive. I guess I was paranoid.”

“Sounds like it.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the bedside tray and pulled her down next to him. “I was the one with reason to be jealous, watching you with Dillon all the time. It drove me wild.” He buried his nose in her hair, inhaling its fragrance.

“It’s over with Jim, you know that,” Ashley said. “But he’s still a friend, and I guess I should have expected him to show up here when he heard what happened.” She pressed her lips together in distaste. “I’m so sorry about what he said to you.”
 

“Forget it. And don’t worry about that Hughes dame. I like my women a little less...”

“Forward?” Ashley suggested after a pause. “Obvious?”

He grinned.

“I know your style,” Ashley said, reaching up to trace his lips with a delicate fingertip. “You want to take a ladylike type and break her down in bed.”

“How did you ever guess?” he muttered, lowering himself on top of her.

She wound her bare legs around his hips. “After this afternoon, it wasn’t difficult.” She kissed him lingeringly. “I can’t imagine being with anyone else but you now. I feel like I’ve been branded, marked indelibly for life.”

“You have,” he said huskily. He lifted her to meet his thrust, and she arched like a cat to receive him.

“Enough talk,” he murmured.

Ashley could not disagree.

* * * *

About an hour later, Ashley rolled over and said, “I’m starving.”

“What a surprise. How long since your last meal this time?”

She propped her elbows on his chest and stared down into his face. “Can you honestly tell me you’re not hungry?”

He lifted his head and kissed her lightly. “I can honestly tell you that I am.”

“Good. I’ll call down to Elsie for a snack.”

He watched as she got out of bed and wrapped the sheet around her. She went to a phone on a small gilt table and pressed a button.

“Elsie, could you bring a tray of sandwiches and a pot of coffee up to the green suite for me?” she said into the receiver.

Martin observed as Ashley listened to the response.

“Yes,” she said. “Fifteen minutes would be just fine. Thank you, Elsie.”

“So that’s how you do it, huh?” Martin said admiringly from the bed. “So easy.”

“Do what?”

Martin ignored the question. “Do you think Elsie could come to my apartment?” he asked ingenuously. “She could make herself very useful; there’s quite a lot to do. Actually I could use a whole team of Elsies, one to cook the meals, one to wash my dirty gym clothes, maybe even one to go to the record store and get me some new tapes when I don’t have the time for it.”

Ashley came back to the bed and sat next to him. “All right, all right, I get the idea.” She took his hand and held it to her cheek. “It really bothers you, doesn’t it? The difference between us.”

He withdrew his hand; she didn’t try to hold it. “Ashley,” he said, “at my place when you want a sandwich you get up and make one. And if there’s no stuff in the refrigerator or there’s no bread, or it’s moldy, or the cheese is bad, you go down to the deli. If the deli’s closed or it’s too cold out or you forgot to cash a check, you do without the sandwich. I’m just not used to this.”

“It doesn’t have to affect us,” she said quietly. “I don’t live like this all the time. I have my own apartment in Georgetown. I work. This is my father’s lifestyle, not mine.”

“But you fall right into it when you’re here, and you did grow up with it.”

“Are you going to punish me for that now?” she asked, frowning at the unfairness of it.

“Baby, I don’t want to punish you,” he said, touching her hair. “It just disturbs me. I can’t help it; I can’t see where this is going to go.”

“This?’

“Us,” he replied.

She dropped the sheet and crawled into his arms. “It will go wherever we want it to go, won’t it? We’re in control, not the rest of the world.”

“I’m afraid that’s where you’re wrong,” he murmured, his fingers trailing down her arm.

“What do you mean?” she asked anxiously.

He could see that he was upsetting her, and she had been through enough in the past couple of days. He released her and got up, looking around for his clothes. He rescued his wrinkled pants from the floor where they had landed in a heap.

“I think I’ll take a shower before the food comes,” he said. “I’ve got to get on the road soon. The bathroom’s through there, isn’t it?”

Ashley nodded, her expression withdrawn.

“Be right back,” he said, and left her alone. She heard the water begin to run next door seconds later. Her eyes roamed the familiar room, then settled on the patterned rug morosely.

Physically she was relaxed and sated, deliciously comfortable, with a subtle edge that subconsciously waited for Martin again. Now that she had experienced him, the thought of doing so again made her weak with anticipation. She was hooked; satisfaction of her desire for him had not cloyed, but rather whetted, her appetite for more of the same. In that respect, her time with him had been all she could have wanted.

But still her mind was racing with unsettling thoughts, not only about her father’s recent death but about the man who had just left her bed.

It was certainly curious. Out of all the men she had met in her life, she wound up falling for a macho cop who thought her family was effete and indulged, who actually objected to servants and mansions and yachts. Everyone else she knew would have taken those things for granted, or else been impressed by such evidence of wealth. Not Martin. His sense of fairness, or decency, or whatever it was, objected to the excesses of the haves in a world of have-nots. Whereas she could understand his attitude, and even respected him for it, she was terribly afraid that in the end it would take him away from her. She could not change what she was, where she came from and what she had been, and she feared that a part of him would always resent her background.

The water shut off as she stood and slipped into Martin’s shirt, buttoning it up the front on the wrong side and rolling the sleeves to her elbows.

When he stepped into the room, he was wearing his pants, barefoot, and toweling his damp hair. He stopped and surveyed her appreciatively from head to foot.

“You look better in that than I ever did,” he said.

“On second thought, I’ll change to my dress. Elsie overlooks a lot, but I don’t want to push it,” Ashley replied.

“What do you imagine she thinks we’ve been doing up here?” Martin asked her, smiling.

“She won’t have to guess if I answer the door in your shirt,” Ashley replied dryly.

She retrieved her dress and slipped into it. When she returned to him, he dropped his towel and zipped the dress up the back. Then he put his arms around her waist from behind.

Ashley turned her head to look up at him. His hair was curling in glistening ringlets, and his lavish eyelashes were still clumped and beaded with water.

“Mmm, you smell so good,” she said, resting her head back against his bare shoulder.

“I found some regular soap in the closet. There was a dish of seashell-shaped things in the shower, but they kept squirting out of my hands. Smelled a little swishy, too.”

“Regular soap?” she asked.

“Yeah, you know. A bar, in a wrapper, the kind you buy in a supermarket. No fancy stuff.”

“That’s my man,” Ashley said fondly. “No fancy stuff.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Elsie?” Martin said in a dramatic stage whisper. “I sure hope it’s not a raid.”

Ashley threw him a dirty look as she opened the door and took the tray from the maid. She set it on the nightstand next to the bed and poured coffee from the silver server into ivory china cups with a deep-blue intaglio border,

“Here you go,” she said, handing a cup to Martin.

He sipped from it, watching her over its rim. “Ashley, we have to talk about your father.”

She closed her eyes, then bent briskly to unwrap a sandwich. “Can’t I just be happy a little while longer?” she asked distantly, not looking at him.

“I’m sorry, but you must know this. I’m going to see Rourke tomorrow to get reinstated on the case.”

Ashley’s hand paused with half of the chicken sandwich part way to her mouth. “What do you mean? The federal people have taken it over, haven’t they?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I think it may matter to them,” Ashley said quietly, her eyes on his face. She was losing her appetite.

Martin put down his cup and came to her, taking her by the shoulders and turning her to face him.

“Ashley, listen to me. It was my case. I was assigned to protect your father, and now he’s dead. Capo was seriously injured and almost died. You may not like what Dillon said earlier today, but there is some truth in it. I’m not letting them take this case away from me.”

“I don’t think you’ll have anything to say about it,” Ashley replied, alarmed by his tone.

“I’m going to get the guy who did this personally,” Martin concluded almost to himself, as if she hadn’t spoken.

Ashley didn’t respond. She looked away, her whole being flooding with fear.

He took her by the chin and turned her to face him. “What?” he asked softly.

“I’m afraid for you. My father is already dead. I couldn’t bear to lose you too. Not now.”

He pulled her into his arms. “You’re not going to lose me. A dozen crooks behind bars at this very moment thought they had my name on a bullet. I’m lucky. I’ve always been lucky.”

Ashley was silent, her eyes filling with tears. He sounded just like her father.

“Will you change your plans and stay the night?” she whispered, clinging to him, blinking rapidly to dispel the tears before he saw them. “Please?”

Martin hesitated. He wanted to get things straightened out with Rourke as soon as possible, but the invitation to spend the night with her was far too alluring to refuse. And he could sense how much she needed him.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll drive back to the city in the morning.”

Ashley curled her arms around his neck and held him as tightly as she could.