Who Do You Trust? (12 page)

“Baby, stop. I’ve wanted you too long. I can’t hold off,” he groaned through gritted teeth, his face beaded with sweat. “I want this so bad, but I’ll lose it right now if you don’t—”

Tenderness and power flooded her. She felt like a sorceress, a quenchantment, a sexual witch who could bring this man to his knees with her hands and mouth. “Good,” she whispered, and caressed him again and again, and, lifting him out of the water, pleasured him with her tongue, just once.

With a harsh shout, he pulled her up and kissed her, hot and wet; then she felt the pulsing of his climax against her skin before the warm water washed it away. He collapsed on her, his face in her neck, tangling his legs with hers; and she ran a hand through his wet curls, feeling utterly content. A woman at last.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, when he finally had his breathing back under control. “I never meant it to go so far. I promised you I wouldn’t—”

Funny, but right now she didn’t care if that creep watched them or not, or if Mitch was a good guy or bad. She just felt—how could she describe such a feeling of total peace and happiness? “You didn’t do it, I did. And I enjoyed every second of it.”

He gave a low, sexy chuckle. “Witch. I think you wanted revenge for this morning—and you got it, all right. That was amazing. Having you touch me like that, after spending half my life fantasizing about it—”

Oh, heady stuff. He’d fantasized about her hands on him, just as she’d dreamed of his hands and mouth on her. And now she understood what he’d meant this morning: bringing him to fulfillment was enough. More than enough.

She pressed the button for the jets to start again, and spoke over the noise, needing to know just what sort of man she’d just seduced. “So who are you, Mitch McCluskey, and what is it you really do for a living?”

He shook his head, still lying on her shoulder. “Tomorrow, I promise. For now, let’s forget it all. I feel too damn wonderful to start up the tension again.”

Their position, the act they’d just shared and his acceptance of her power, made him curiously vulnerable to her. She discovered she didn’t want to know what he was, who he was. Not now, not yet. She just wanted tonight. One more night before her illusions either came to fruition or shattered in her face.

“Okay.” She lifted his face and kissed him. “Tonight.”

He smiled and pushed a lock of hair clinging to her cheek. “I used to dream of this, Liss. It was my constant fantasy, when we swam in your pool. You’d play with me, so innocent and wet and sweet and sexy, and I’d be envisioning you naked like this, looking at me like you wanted me.”

“I did.” She gave him a self-deprecating smile. “Well, I wasn’t naked, but I looked at you like this all the time—whenever you weren’t looking.”

He shook his head against her skin. “How was I so blind that I never saw it?”

“I was blind, too. I never once saw you looking at me like that, either.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you or show you. I never for a minute thought you’d ever truly want me. So many girls at school had a thing for you—the pretty, sexy girls—and I was just the girl next door. I wasn’t like them. I couldn’t risk losing our friendship by telling you or coming on to you.”

He kissed her throat, making her . “Oh, baby, I wish you had, because I was an even bigger coward than you. It was always there for me, too, Lissa—always. It always will be, till the day I die. I never so much as looked at any girl but you, until after you married Tim. Even then, even with Kerin, I felt like I was betraying you.”

With those words,
you married Tim,
the shadows came creeping back in. Specters of the past, rattling chains on their wrists and ankles, crowned and garlanded with doubts of the here and now. Taking her prisoner without a word. “Don’t. Don’t say it. No promises, Mitch. No more pretty words until you tell me what’s going on. I have to know the truth first. I can’t play the game.”

His smile faded. “Then what was this?”

A click, and the ghosts chained her. “This,” she said carefully, “was sweet revenge, McCluskey. This was me, enjoying sexual power over a man for the first time in my life. I needed to know—”

“What? What do you need to know, Lissa?” he asked, harsh and just a touch bitter. A predator after truth, and all man—a strong, naked, virile man.

And aroused again. The proof lay big and hard on her thigh.

Her nipples peaked against his skin and slid over his chest, hot and wet. With a smoldering look in his eyes he slid the other way, making her moan at the delicious friction.

She pushed him off and looked away, splashing her face, but the heated water only made her more breathless, the heat outside match the pulsing fever within. “So, do you think our good friend has finished his job in there?”

With a leisurely motion he catapulted out of the spa. “I’ll check.” Without bothering to towel himself off, he picked up the case he’d brought in and pulled an odd-looking contraption out of it, aiming it at the door, waving back and forth. “There’s no one there now, if there ever was. Maybe he hasn’t caught up with us yet.” He opened the door and padded out, carrying the case with him. He turned to her, not bothering to hide his aroused state. “Come to bed.” It wasn’t a request. It was a gauntlet thrown down, a challenge issued. Mitch, hard and hot, naked and wet, shooting from the hip.
Trust me, Lissa.

Her gaze fixed on his gorgeous body, she uttered in a strangled tone, “I’ll just stay in here a few minutes. I, um, I need to…”

Mitch smiled sadly, with just a touch of coldness, and she shivered again. He said, “Sure,” and closed the door for her.

And for some reason she felt it again. She’d won a battle, kept her pride, but she’d lost something—just a tiny piece of something infinitely precious in the process.

But this time she could identify the loss. Mitch’s heart, Mitch’s trust…and Mitch himself. He was withdrawing from her.

She was losing Mitch.
Her
Mitch. The boy she’d so blindly adored—the man she’d never been able to put behind her. The one her heart refused to forget.

Oh, how she wished to God she could believe all he’d told her! Oh, how she wanted to know she could trust him. But this could so easily shatter in her face—just like her marriage to T. Tim acted like he couldn’t wait to make love to her—until he married her. And she’d been trapped in a nightmare world of half-formed fears and doubts, walking in the shadows of wondering, Why? Even when she found out the truth about Tim, she still knew one thing—he’d been with almost every girl in town before her. What did more than five years of being unable to want her say about her ability to arouse a man?

If the same thing happened with Mitch, she’d want to die….

With a strangled sob she turned on the spa jets and cried her heart out.

When she came out, wearing the fresh clothes he’d put just inside the door for her, she found a different man in the room. A man wearing dark jeans and a black polo shirt—cool, elegant, almost lethally sexy. He sat leisurely on a swivel chair before the cherrywood desk. He didn’t bother to turn as she opened the door. “You like solitaire?”

Oh, this man looked like Mitch, sounded like Mitch. But this was the man with secrets; this man wore danger carelessly tossed over his shoulder like a jacket on a hot summer night. The tenderness in his voice was gone, replaced by cool unconcern, the blazing need in his face now casual concentration.

This was the man he’d been hiding from her since he came back into her life. Mitch the spy.

The mysterious case was open, a hollow showing where the small laptop computer he now used had been.

But there wasn’t a card game on the screen. The title read:

She finished reading the screen, saw the official Australian government stamp on it and nodded, squelching the small surt of guilt struggling to make itself felt. “Can anyone see us?”

He jerked his head at the window. “Lead-lined curtains. Lead in the walls. This is our safe house; all the workers here are trained operatives. I called Tim. He and the kids are fine. We’ll call again tomorrow when we have another phone. We need a clean source this guy can’t trace, just in case.”

“Then what was the point of all the pretence with the woman at the desk earlier? Why say our spy could listen in on us or break in?”

He didn’t even look at her. “You’re not the only person with trust issues. I had orders from my boss and the others here. They wanted to see if you’d follow my lead. If you could be trusted to see the bigger picture.”

She felt a slow smile curve her mouth at that. Hmmm. And Mitch was unhappy? Maybe they were checking her out for more than he was telling her right now…. “You could have called me out to talk to the kids.”

He didn’t even turn around. “I tried. You were crying too hard to hear me. I figured the kids were best off not hearing the tears in your voice, in case it scared them.”

She made no excuses. After talking to Tim, he must know as well as she did why she’d needed the release of tears. “All right. But I want to talk to them tomorrow.”

“Of course.” After a short, awkward silence he went on. “I checked the room with the heat detector. No one has been in the room but us since we got here. No one’s close enough outside to use the bugs—at least not for the next five minutes. I can’t guarantee it after that, so we have to watch what we say.”

She aimed a glimmering smile his way. “Heat detectors, huh? No carefully placed hairs on our luggage or invisible powder for fingerprint identification?”

“I don’t do Hollywood stunts. The heat detector tells me if someone’s been here in the past few minutes, where they went when they were here…and to do that, to break in here at all, he’d have to be a trained professional. So my guess is, this guy isn’t.”

His voice was terse. Withdrawn. “How disappointing,” she said with a mock sigh. “Your marvelous whiz-bang heat detector thingamajig doesn’t give you a magical computer reading telling you who it was, and who he works for?”

Her gambit worked: he gave her a slow, reluctant grin. “I’m not Tom Cruise, Lissa. I only get as high as Mission Difficult.” He waved at the screen. “Is that enough for you for now, or would you like more proof our boy’s not what he says he is?”

It was more than enough: it told her all she needed to know. The Department of Immigration controlled illegal immigrants. The gray man had lied to her. Mitch had not. The gray man had pulled a gun on her. Mitch had bolted after the man to protect her. “It’s enough. Who do you say
you
are?” she asked, soft with meaning.

The phone buzzed once and was abruptly, eerily silent.

“There’s two bugs in your bag, one directional tracker, and we don’t have time to talk. That was Mabel. She’s been watching the road for us. A car just turned into the outer ro could be our boy. He’s had time to get a commercial flight down here by now and track us.” Once more he gave her that look—and something inside her told her he was giving her one last chance. “He’d be within range now.”

The phone buzzed again once, then stopped. “The car’s slowing down outside the driveway.” He said no more, still watching her, the integrity in his deep, dark eyes damning all her doubts.

The next move was hers.

Don’t be a fool. Give him what he needs, at least until he gives you reason not to. She drew a deep breath, and nodded. “What do we do?”

Though he didn’t smile, she felt his body tension relaxing. He closed down the computer, locked it away in a safe in the wall behind the desk and got to his feet. “We go to bed.” He looked at her, hiding all expression.

She pleaded silently; he shook his head, and she sighed in relief. Neither of them could stand another performance of pseudo-sex like this morning. Not here, not now. Not tonight. This had gone way beyond games for both of them.

Thank you. She took his hand and followed him to bed, where they lay fully dressed, still, tense, unmoving. And she felt lonely—lonelier than all her years alone. Mitch was right beside her, yet he’d never seemed farther away.

Then after a few minutes he sighed and drew her into his arms. “I don’t care about tomorrow. I need you now, Lissa. Just let me hold you tonight.”

The whispered words in the dark planted a tiny bud of hope in her soul. “Me, too.” She wrapped an arm around him, laid her head over his thudding heart, and a sense of deceptive, unquiet peace touched her spirit: two children alone, huddling together in the eye of a storm, waiting for the worst to come. “Tonight,” she whispered back. “Hold me. Just hold me.”

And for the first time in years she just fell asleep. She slept wrapped in his arms, feeling safe, feeling
cherished
—for the first time in so long, not alone anymore.