Eye of the Storm (9 page)

“Yeah. Real exciting. If you’re not busy, go tell him to come on back.” Setting the file back on her desk, Marcy ran a brush through her hair and checked her lipstick. Habit, because she might as well have been invisible for all the attention Gray had ever paid her as a woman. Must be nice for
Andi
to have a guy who had eyes just for her.

An eye, that is. Far from being off-putting, the guy’s scars and the black patch that covered his ruined eye socket gave him a rugged look as well as reminding everybody he’d gone through hell and survived to tell the tale.

Marcy smiled and rose when Gray came through the door. “Sit down. I have the copy you asked for of the Katz file.”

“Thanks.” Propping his crutches against the side of her desk, Gray sat and set out some papers. “Here’s some information our investigators have found. You might want to take a look.”

“I’m not dropping the charges. We may as well get that straight up front.”

Gray nudged the stack of papers her way. “I’ve got witnesses to Soto pulling a knife and demanding Stephen’s money before Stephen ever laid a hand on him. Two of them. One’s a hooker, but the other is a seventy-year-old lady who’s been staying at that fleabag motel because it’s the only place she can afford.”

“Motel?” Marcy hadn’t seen anything in the police report about a motel.

“The one next door to the club, the kind of joint where they rent by the hour or the week, customer’s choice. Most apparently choose the hourly plan. There’s a clear view out the old lady’s window to the parking lot where the action went down. The hooker was in the parking lot, apparently trying to drum up more business.”

“What was your client doing, hanging out in the parking lot of the Club Tetras? It seems hardly the spot for a clean-cut college boy to go.” Drugs? A possibility, although if he’d been buying them, it apparently wasn’t for himself. Stephen had tested squeaky-clean following his arrest.

“Trying to score with a lady of the evening.” Gray shook his head. “Yeah, it was stupid, but you don’t want to let it ruin the kid’s life forever. Come on, cut him some slack. Forget filing charges. File ‘
em
against Soto instead. Get a real criminal off the streets for a few years.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be filing charges against Mr. Soto too. May I assume Winston Roe won’t be representing
him
?”

“You can. Come on, Marcy, Tony picks and chooses the firm’s criminal clients. Our scumbags have to have some redeeming qualities, or at least a defensible case. Soto doesn’t have either.”

Marcy sighed. “Okay. I sympathize with young Mr. Katz. Really I do. There aren’t many of us who’ve never done something abysmally stupid.”
Including me
. “Let me think this over. I’ll get back to you by next Monday.”

“Fair enough.” Gray grabbed his crutches and heaved himself off the chair. “
Andi
said to tell you, we’re having some friends over on Saturday. We’d love for you to join us. Mexican food, margaritas and so on.”

“I’ll be there.” Sex with anybody but Sam held no appeal, and Marcy figured by the weekend she’d need diversion or she’d be likely to chase him down and jump him. “Want me to bring something?”

“Just yourself and a big appetite. Cocktails at seven, dinner at eight. Casual. If the weather’s good, we’ll do it outside by the pool.”

“Okay. I’ll try to come to a decision before then on your case. Give
Andi
and the kids my best.”

For a long time after he’d left, Marcy sat at her desk, going over the file and the additional information Winston Roe’s crack investigators had dug up. When she called chief of detectives Rocky Delgado, he verified that what Gray’s investigator had turned up rang true. Stephen Katz no more belonged in prison than she did. Now she had her job cut out persuading Harper that they should decline to prosecute.

Damn it. She had no trouble rationalizing dropping charges against a young stranger who’d foolishly gotten caught in the wrong place, the wrong time.

Why the hell can’t I understand and accept that the man I love lashed out at me because of his own pain?

That night Marcy lay in bed, still pondering whether she could let go of her hurt, her defensiveness. If Sam hurt her again, she doubted she could survive…but she wasn’t sure she could survive without him.

Chapter Six

Damp, muggy air bathed her skin. The sheets clung to her body. The fragrance of crushed rose petals and the musk of sex surrounded her. Marcy woke up slowly, drenched with sweat. His body heat scorched her back, and his hot breath tickled her neck.

She never minded the heat, so long as they were generating it together. “Sam?”

“Huh?” His sleepy rumble reminded her he’d been out late, delivering somebody’s baby.

He was home now. Home and hard, she realized, her pussy twitching in time with the insistent prodding of his big cock between her legs. God, how she loved him! “Boy or girl?”

“Girl. Shall we make one for ourselves?” He slid his hand along her damp skin, each long finger branding the pathway over her breasts, splaying possessively over her belly before he moved lower and cupped her mound.

“Let’s.” She wanted his baby, had wanted it ever since they were hardly more than kids themselves. Now that they’d finally settled down in their jobs and bought a home, it was time. “I’ll toss out my pills first thing in the morning.”

“Good.” He rolled her onto her belly. Flexing his hips, he entered her from behind and began to move. The tension built up with every slow plunge, each tantalizing retreat. “Baby, I love how you’re always wet for me. Come on, tell me how you want me.”

“Harder. Faster. Oh God, Sam, give me a baby now.”

“First you’ve
gotta
come for me. Oh yeah. Squeeze me. Harder. You’re so hot, so tight. So mine.”

What she’d always wanted to be. His. Unequivocally, totally his. Her pussy clutched him tighter, harder, as if it never wanted to let him go. She had to hold on to all the sensations that had every nerve in her body on edge, wanting release. The delicious feeling of fullness had her on the brink of coming. Slapping sounds of his hard, demanding cock invading her softer, swollen tissue…the pervasive musk of sex mingled with the clean, crisp smell of freshly changed bed linens…

Every time they made love he put her on sensual overload. She loved it. Loved him. Oh God, she couldn’t hold back any longer when he changed the angle of penetration and slammed into her G-spot. “
Yesss
. Give me your come. Damn it, I want to feel you spurting hot and fast. Sam, I want your baby.”

Marcy woke to sensations of spurting semen in her cunt and hard breathing against her neck. She reached out for Sam, but he wasn’t there.

She’d had the dream before and fled into the arms of other lovers. Tonight she wanted only Sam. As though in a trance, she got up and went where she hadn’t been for five long years.

Afraid of what she’d see and feel, she trembled when she cracked open the door of the bedroom they’d shared. The room so full of memories she hadn’t been able to face it until now. Thanks to her housekeeper’s conscientious cleaning, it looked the same. Same king-size canopy bed draped in sheer midnight blue, tied at each of the four posts with matching bows. Same armoire and chest and vanity table they’d picked out together on a trip to Amish country. Marcy remembered the toys in the drawers of the matching nightstands, smiled at the knowledge they still were there, as if waiting for their owners to return and play.

The last one Sam had brought home had been a set of pink gel anal stimulators in graduated sizes. A preliminary, he’d said, to introduce her to the joys of anal penetration—something they’d never tried since she’d discovered the next day that she was pregnant—and he’d withdrawn emotionally. Physically too. Strange. She’d never had anal sex with anyone else, either. Never wanted to. The act seemed too personal, even more intimate than welcoming a lover’s cock into her pussy. Something that needed doing with love, not just to satisfy curiosity or scratch a sexual itch.

Memories flooded her mind, the way she’d known they would the minute she opened that long-sealed door. They’d made so many here, in the thirteen months after buying the house and before splitting up.

The early morning sun still cast its shadow across the room, distorting the watered-silk pattern of cream-colored wallpaper they’d argued about buying. An argument she’d finally won, only to lose him. Nothing but an empty walk-in closet and a bathroom missing the
accouterments
of occupancy bore testimony to the beautiful room’s disuse.

She ought to get rid of it all. Toss it away and consign Sam firmly to the past. Get on with her life. Damn it, she should redecorate and move back in here from the guest room.

Or she could risk it all and welcome him back into her life. Forgive him, hope he’d understand and excuse her for the frantic sexual explorations she’d been making since their divorce. Bank on him trusting her more now than he had back then. Marcy stepped further inside the room, sat on the edge of the bed she hadn’t slept in for five long years, and debated opposing arguments in her head and heart.

Much like the hung jury that had capped off her last court battle against Tony Landry, the arguments she posed with herself ended in a stalemate.

Should she reach out, take a chance on suffering devastating pain? Or play it safe and satisfy herself with less than the kind of breathtaking joy she knew could happen when the chemistry was just right? Marcy still didn’t know when she left that room full of memories and closed the door firmly behind her.

With any kind of luck,
Andi
and Gray’s party would be lively enough to distract her from the blue funk she was in.

* * * * *

If she showed up with another guy, he’d feel like a fish out of water for sure, one lonesome, tongue-tied doc trying to keep his head above water in a pool full of silver-tongued legal sharks. Never mind that he numbered some of them among his closest friends. Sam stared at the clothes in his closet. What the fuck had he been thinking a couple of days ago when he’d heard Marcy would be at Gray’s party and wangled himself an invitation?

As he drove down
Bayshore
Boulevard, Sam watched waves slap against the shore. Joggers and inline skaters zipped along the sidewalk, the bay corralling them on one side while fast-moving traffic passed by on the other. Just part of living in old Hyde Park, Marcy used to tell him when he’d mentioned how unhealthy it was to exercise while inhaling gas fumes from the constant stream of cars.

Although he’d visited Gray at home several times and despite his own six-figure income, the stately mansion overlooking Old Tampa Bay still awed Sam. Built in the early nineteen hundreds by one of Gray’s ancestors, it smacked of status and old money. He pulled onto a narrow side street lined with venerable oak trees, then made a sharp turn onto the driveway that circled in front of the house. A huge swing set on one side of the place reminded him this might be a historic landmark, but it was home to Gray and
Andi
and their two kids.

Kids. Suddenly it struck Sam that it wasn’t the house that intimidated him, but the children who’d be running around in it, constantly reminding him of his own shortcomings. With any kind of luck, this would be an adult party, not a family affair. That had been the impression Gray had conveyed by mentioning margaritas by the pitcher and an assortment of blow-your-head-off spicy Tex-Mex food.

Okay. Tony Landry was here minus his eighteen-month-old son, if the presence of his sleek black Ferrari was an accurate indicator. Not long before the baby’s arrival, Kristine had mentioned to Sam how carefully Tony had researched cars before bringing home a Volvo wagon for them to haul little Anthony around, quoting reports that said it was the safest vehicle around. Sam pulled up behind the costly sports car and made his way toward the front door.

When he spotted Marcy’s little silver Honda they’d bought for her when she’d passed the bar eight years ago, his gut clenched. Damn it, she had to listen. Had to give him another chance. His normally steady hand shook when he rang the doorbell. Hell, he hadn’t been so scared and ill at ease for more than twenty years—since that day in second-year French class when he’d finally summoned the courage to ask her for a date.

Andi
swung open the heavy door, a big smile on her face. “Hey, Sam. Come on in. Gray said you’d be joining us. Party’s just warming up out on the patio.”

“Where are the kids?” he asked as they moved through the house. “Don’t think I’ve ever been here before when Brett didn’t answer the door.”

“Ours are with my brother for the weekend. Sandra and Rocky took theirs to his mom. Kristine and Tony left Anthony home with his nanny.” She went up on tiptoe and whispered in Sam’s ear. “Tonight’s party time for us big kids. Marcy came alone, in case you wanted to know.”

“Thanks.” Pumpkins and Indian corn decorated each of the glass-topped wrought-iron tables, and amazingly lifelike looking blow-up Pilgrim and Indian figures sat under a palm tree next to the free-form pool. “Pretty impressive decorations.”

“They’re leftovers from the birthday party we had for Brett the other day.”
Andi
stepped behind the bar and grabbed a salt-rimmed stem glass. “Here. Have a margarita. Your choice. The virgin ones are in the white pitchers, the high-octane stuff in the neon green ones.”