Bait (27 page)

Maddie startled awake. For a moment, she lay blinking up into the darkness, her heart pounding, her breathing coming in shuddering gasps. The dream—of course it was the dream. Would she never be rid of it?

Then it hit her. Darkness ... her room was dark. She wasn't dreaming, and her room was dark. The apartment was dark, too, and quiet. Too quiet. The TV ... it was off, dark, soundless.

Her ears picked up a sound, a movement. Her breathing stopped as her eyes swung blindly in the direction from which it came.

This time it was for real.

FIFTEEN

Maddie.” It was McCabe's voice, the merest thread of sound.

Maddie drew in a shuddering breath and sat up. Her thundering heart slowed, and the knot in her stomach seemed to loosen.

“McCabe?”

“Shh.”
He was beside her, beside the bed. She could see him now, indistinctly, as a denser shadow in the darkness. It wasn't absolute, she saw. Not the pitch-blackness of her dream ...

She shuddered at the memory.

“Get up.” His tone was urgent. His hand touched her arm, slid around her back. Before she responded, he was all but lifting her off the bed.

“What?” Whispering, too, trying to get her still-foggy mind around what was happening, she slid to her feet, then stumbled against him. His chest was a solid wall that kept her from falling. His arm tightened around her, hard and supportive—and insistent.

“Someone's coming up the fire escape. I want you to get in the bathroom, lock the door.”

He was already hustling her out of the bedroom. Still slightly dazed, not one hundred percent sure she wasn't dreaming this, too, she went with him, shivering slightly despite the warmth of his arm around her, weak and drained as she always was in the aftermath of the dream. As they moved into the living room, the darkness lightened a degree, and Maddie saw that the long curtains covering the windows did not quite meet in the middle. A sliver of moonlight slid between them to paint a pale gray line across the floor. There was just enough light to permit her to see that in his other hand, the hand that was not clamped around her waist, McCabe held a gun.

Her heart lurched. What was happening became suddenly, sharply real.

They reached the bathroom and he thrust her inside.

“Lock it,” he said, voice low, and pulled the door closed behind him. “And stay put. I'll be back.”

Maddie locked the door. Then she leaned against the thin panel, fingers wrapped around the knob, bare toes curling against the cold tile. The bathroom had no window, and she dared not turn on a light. The darkness was absolute, rendering her effectively blind. The faint scent of soap reached her nostrils. Shivering, pressing her cheek against the smooth painted wood, she listened with every fiber of her being. The toilet ran slightly; the air-conditioning hummed. Above those homely sounds, she could hear nothing—no footsteps, no rush of movement, nothing.

Except the drumming of her own heart in her ears.

Cold panic curled deep inside her stomach at the thought. Her knees went weak.

Where was McCabe?

There was no way to tell. He might be right outside the door. He might be in the kitchen. He might have rushed down the fire escape to confront the intruder. He might be silently, horribly dead....

All she knew for sure was that she was alone in the dark, the terrifying dark, waiting for something to happen, for someone to come....

Swaying, she clutched the doorknob for support. She was shivering, breathing fast. Her heart knocked against her ribs.

The dream still had her in its thrall. Maddie recognized that she was reacting to the situation she saw over and over again in her nightmares rather than to what was happening right at that moment, in what was now her real life. It was an effort to remember that the girl who had shivered so helplessly on that bed was long gone. She had grown up, grown resourceful, grown strong.

Get a grip,
Maddie said it to herself savagely. Taking a deep breath, straightening her spine, willing her rubbery knees to hold up, she turned away from the door. Feeling her way along the tile wall, she found the sink, then the cabinet above it. Opening it, flinching slightly at the tiny creak, she touched the shelves, reaching for the can of hair spray she knew was there.

As a weapon, it didn't even make the charts, she realized as she lifted the smooth metal cylinder from its accustomed spot. Mace or pepper spray it wasn't. But in a pinch, if aimed at an intruder's face, it might buy her time—maybe even enough time to get away. In any case, it was the closest thing to a weapon she could get her hands on.

Pressing the small of her back up against the unyielding contours of the sink so that she faced the door, her every sense trained on the deathly silence beyond the bathroom, Maddie clutched the can and waited.

Time spun out interminably.

A quick footstep just outside the door.

She caught her breath.

A brisk tap. “Maddie?”

Exhaling, Maddie rushed to the door and opened it. The apartment was still lit only by that sliver of moon. She could see no more of him than a powerful, dark shape. But even if the voice hadn't identified him, she would have known it was McCabe.

It was clear from his tone, his knock: The danger was past.

Her knees gave out, and she practically fell forward against him.

“Hey,” he said on a surprised note, catching her by her elbows. “It's over. It's okay.”

“Did you get him?” She was cold, so cold that she was shivering in her thin little ivory slip of a nightgown, and weak with reaction to the dream and the scare combined.

“No.” McCabe must have felt the tremors that racked her, because he wrapped hard arms around her, pulling her comfortingly close even as he answered her question. He felt strong and solid, and he smelled of the outdoors and the faint but intoxicating
eau de man
that she had noticed before, and, best of all, he radiated heat like a stove. She absorbed the warmth greedily, snuggling closer yet, unable to resist the temptation to let her head droop forward like a too-heavy flower to rest against the firm, broad expanse of his chest.

Encouraging him to hold her like this was probably a mistake, she knew. But she couldn't seem to summon the willpower to push herself out of his arms. Always, she'd had to stand on her own two feet. Always, she'd had to take care of herself, to be strong. Where was the harm, for once in her life, in surrendering for just a few moments to the pure luxury of having somebody to lean on?

“Was it—him?” she asked in a faint voice.

“I don't know. He was about a third of the way up your back stairs when something apparently spooked him. He took off like a bat out of hell.”

Maddie closed her eyes. What were the chances that this was a totally random thing? In the four years she had lived in her apartment, no one had ever been caught climbing her fire escape in the middle of the night—until now.

“I'm glad you were here.” It was quite an admission, and she recognized its enormity even as the words came out of her mouth. Her eyes popped open in alarm and she glanced up at him. Of course, it was impossible to see anything more than shadows upon shadows in the gloom.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

His tone told her that he had no clue just how huge her admission had been. She took a deep breath, knowing that she had to make a move and yet not able, just at that moment, to do so, and his arms tightened fractionally around her. His body was tense, and Maddie guessed that he was still wired, on edge, from the intruder. He exuded controlled power, and without any real surprise at all, she discovered that she had absolute faith in his ability to keep her safe.

From night-crawling hit men, at least.

The problem was, who was going to keep her safe from him?

With that thought, Maddie started to regain her sense of self-preservation.

What are you doing?
she scolded herself.
He's an FBI agent, you numbskull.

Willing herself to get back with the program while she still could, she lifted her head from his chest. At the same moment, he moved. Maddie only realized that he was reaching behind her for the switch when the bathroom light clicked on.

She blinked with surprise, glanced up to discover just how close his face was, and found herself a little unnerved. He was looking down at her, frowning slightly. Her eyes were on a level with the top of his shoulder, and in the space of a heartbeat she took in the wide expanse of those shoulders in the dark green T-shirt she had only felt until now, absorbed the sturdy bronze column of his neck and the flexing muscles of his arm that was in the process of dropping away from the light switch. She saw that his chin was once again dark with stubble, and his hair was mussed like he'd been running his hands through it, and his brows had twitched together so that there were faint lines corrugating the space between them. His mouth was only inches from hers. She fixated on that hard, masculine mouth and felt her own lips part. He seemed to be breathing harder now than his strictly stationary posture called for, she realized. She could feel his chest rising and falling against her breasts, and the warmth of his breath brushed her face where she hadn't been aware of it before. Their eyes met, and in the coffee-brown depths of his, she saw something—a hot little flicker. An awareness ...

The air between them was suddenly charged. Maddie felt the electricity, and heat curled somewhere deep inside her. Her breathing quickened. Her body began to tighten, to throb.

Oh God,
she thought, panicking.
I want him.

His eyes slid to her mouth. Which promptly went dry.

Then his gaze dropped lower still and his frown deepened.

“What the hell?”

Confused, Maddie followed his gaze and discovered, to her own surprise, that she was still clutching the can of hair spray. It was sandwiched between them, its little black spray nozzle pointed directly at his chest.

“Oh,” she said, feeling foolish. Apparently, while she'd been busy getting all hot and bothered, he'd been passing the time wondering about the hard, round thing that was poking him in the chest. Struggling to think of this amorous lapse on his part as a positive development, she looked up at him. “
Uh—
it's hair spray.”

“I can see that.” His lips twitched, and then he grinned, a lopsided, charming grin that warmed his eyes and brought those to-die-for dimples into roguish life. “Planning to style somebody's hair?”

“I was in the bathroom. It was the only thing I could think of to use as a weapon,” she said with dignity.

He laughed out loud. “Pencils. Hair spray. Darlin', God help the bad guys if you ever get your hands on a gun.”

Outraged, she pushed against his chest, aerosol can and all.

“Let go.”

“You don't want me to,” he said.

Then he kissed her.

Maddie was so surprised that, for the space of maybe a heartbeat, she didn't even move. She just stood there with her eyes wide open, clutching the aerosol can while he pulled her so close that the can's metal edge dug into the side of her breast, and slanted his lips across hers and licked into her mouth with a hungry urgency that sent fire shooting clear down to her toes.

The question, complete with its telling answer, ricocheted through her stunned brain even as her body reacted quite independently. Her eyes closed, her lips parted all on their own, and her free hand slid around his nape, her fingers curling into the short, crisp hair at the back of his head. He deepened the kiss, and the heat of it melted away the last rational thought left to her name. Head reeling, she kissed him back, feeling the hot, slick glide of his tongue against hers, tasting the faint tang of Diet Coke in his mouth. His hands splayed over her back, big and strong and hot through the thin nylon of her gown. Pulse racing, she surged against him, loving the silky slide of her gown against his clothes. Hot little ripples of pleasure slid down her thighs as she discovered the hard bulge beneath his jeans and moved sensuously against it.

He broke off the kiss, lifted his head, sucked in air.

“McCabe,” she whispered, rocking against him then going up on tiptoe to seek his mouth again.

“Christ,”
he said and bent his head, kissing her harder, exploring her mouth with an expertise that made her dizzy. The hot, sweet throbbing in her loins that he'd awakened earlier was back, times ten. Her breasts swelled, and her nipples contracted until they were needy little nubs pressing urgently against his chest.

His lips left hers, found the soft, sensitive spot beneath her ear, then slid down her neck. His mouth was hot and wet and firm, and the feel of it crawling over her skin made her dizzy. Her heart lurched, her bones liquified, and if he hadn't been holding her so tightly, she thought she would have melted into a sizzling little puddle at his feet.

She made a small, hungry sound deep in her throat and pressed as close to him as she could get. His head lifted, and then his mouth was on hers again. He was unmistakably turned-on, hard and hot with wanting her, holding her close and kissing her silly and making her feel things she had almost forgotten she could feel. She was on fire for him, burning deep inside, wanting to get naked and horizontal with him so badly that if he hadn't been bigger than she was, and stronger than she was, and such a really impressive kisser besides, she would have thrown him down on the floor and stripped off her nightgown and had her way with him there and then. But then his hands flattened on her back, slid lower, and she shivered, glad she had waited. They were big and long-fingered and strong, the kind of hands she loved, and she tracked their sensuous glide over the silky nylon with quivering anticipation. They slid over her butt, cupping her cheeks, and she moaned her pleasure into his mouth. She could feel the heat and strength and size of those hands with every nerve ending she possessed, even as he pulled her tight against him and rocked into her.