Goes down easy: Roped into romance (7 page)

He’d come out of nowhere, bulldozed into her life with a hailstorm of demands, then turned around and in the next breath was so much a part of her existence she didn’t remember what the day before had been like without him around. And it was that realization as much as exhaustion that had finally sent her to her room.

In much the same way it had her jolting awake now.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and eased to her feet. She’d slept deeply, though not long. The bedside clock read 1:00 a.m., and she’d climbed between the sheets at ten.

After a bathroom stop—one that included brushing her teeth and a quick fluff of her bed-head hair—she made her way down the hall, pausing at the living room door.

The main room was dark, but the light was still on in the dining nook. And Jack still sat at the table, jotting notes, glasses perched on the end of his nose.

“Hi,” she said, as she walked up behind him and circled the table, sitting in the same chair as before. “Any progress?”

For several seconds, he stared at her over the rims of his glasses, his eyes red, his exhaustion evident. Then he took them off and tossed them onto the table. “What time is it?”

He had a clock on his computer, so surely he knew. “A little after one,” she answered, watching as he scrubbed both hands down his face. “Why are you still up?”

He laughed, the sound more snort than chuckle, and seemingly directed at himself. “You stay up long enough, you forget you’re supposed to sleep.”

She remembered finding him awake in the kitchen almost twenty-four hours earlier. “You didn’t sleep at all last night, did you?”

Leaning back in his chair, his hands covering his face, he shook his head. “Maybe thirty minutes. And I drove in from Austin that morning.”

“So you’ve been without sleep for—” she glanced up at the wall clock, too tired to calculate the time “—how long now?”

“God, I have no idea.” He sat forward then, forearms on the table’s edge, taking her in with a gaze that was too sharply wired for a man as exhausted as he was. “I have a bad habit of not sleeping when I need to.”

She laced her hands together on the table. “I think you need to very soon.”

“I know.” He picked up his pencil, bounced the eraser end on the corner of his laptop. “I’ve been thinking for a while about hitting the couch.”

“But you haven’t, because…?”

He shrugged, ran his fingers up and down the pencil’s length. “I kept thinking I’d find a connection between Dawn Taylor and Dayton Eckhardt.”

Nerves fluttered in Perry’s stomach. “So you did find something.”

This time when Jack looked up, his excitement snagged her gaze and held. “Her husband used to work for Eckton Computing.”

“And?”

“When he couldn’t find work after Eckton left New Orleans, he took a short walk off the Causeway Bridge and killed himself.”

“D
O YOU THINK
Dawn’s involved in the kidnapping?” Perry asked as Jack returned to the table.

His announcement of Taylor’s suicide had left Perry momentarily lost in thought. He’d used the time to carry his cup and the empty coffee carafe back to the kitchen.

After Perry had cleared their dinner dishes and gone to bed, he’d started nodding off. A combination of exhaustion and pasta. Without a mega dose of caffeine, he’d known there was no way he’d make it through even an hour of his online fact-finding mission.

And as much as he was enjoying Perry’s company, as much as he’d like to enjoy even more, she wasn’t the reason he was here. He couldn’t let go of his focus, couldn’t let himself lose sight of his priorities or his purpose.

The Eckhardt family had placed their trust in him, their faith. Their hope that he’d be able to succeed where law enforcement had failed.

They knew his reputation for finding the people he was hired to find. What they didn’t know was the road he’d traveled from special ops to private investigation.

“That I’m not sure about,” he said, answering Perry’s question as he settled back into his seat. “But I am certain that she’s not the least bit unhappy that he’s missing.”

“Wonder what she’d think about him being dead,” Perry said, reminding him of Della’s last vision of Dayton Eckhardt.

Jack wasn’t ready to go there. Not now. Not yet. “I have to operate on the assumption that he’s alive and at least marginally well.”

“I didn’t think you’d do anything else.”

He looked up in time to catch her hiding a smile behind her fingertips. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“The obvious.” She fluttered the hand she’d had at her mouth, wrapped her other arm around her middle. “You’re a ‘just-the-facts’ kind of guy. You have to see for yourself before you’ll believe. And even then I’m guessing you need to get your hands on whatever it is before you’re one-hundred percent convinced.”

She’d pegged him pretty damn well. “Some people talk with their hands. I think with mine.”

“Then it shouldn’t be too hard for you to understand that there are times Della can see things with hers.”

Yeah, right. He wasn’t going there, either.

“If you’d rather not talk about it, I’ll understand. But I am curious.” She returned her laced hands to the tabletop. “And eventually, I’ll get Della to tell me.”

“Tell you what?” Jack asked, fighting the fist that had slammed into his stomach.

“What she saw when she touched you,” Perry said,
meeting his gaze, refusing to look away when he glared.

He did not want Perry knowing about his failures, or about the mess he’d made of his life. “Don’t psychics have a code of ethics? A doctor-patient confidentiality thing?”

“Whatever goes on between Della and her clients during a reading remains private, yes.”

“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas?” he mused, not liking the bit of smugness in her smile.

“That’s a workable analogy.” She lifted a brow. “Except it only applies when it comes to closed sessions.”

“Making the rest of us open books, whether we like it or not.” He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.

“Well…” she said, then let the thought trail.

“Go ahead. Enjoy a big fat laugh at my expense.” He flicked his pencil across the table. “I’ll be gone soon, anyway.”

At that, she looked away, picking at a mark on the wooden surface of the table with her thumbnail. “When do you think you’ll be leaving?”

“I don’t know. Look, I’m sorry. I’m beat, and if this lead with Taylor doesn’t pan out I’m stuck with nothing else tangible to go on.”

Not to mention that his wanting to get to know her wasn’t going so well. Wrong time, wrong place, and all that. Though right now, he wouldn’t say no if she offered.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked. “Anything I can look up or print out, or local numbers you need?”

Actually, he had an idea—one that went against his
grain. But with the chips down and the weirdness of the last two days starting to make a twisted sort of sense, he wasn’t above looking like a fool if doing so resulted in answers.

So he started to tell Perry everything. But when he focused again on her face, her expression had him forgetting what he was going to say.

Her dark eyes were wide, the brows above raised while she waited for him to answer. She’d washed away what little makeup she’d been wearing before. And as much as he liked the natural look, what he really liked was that she let him see her face.

The beaded earrings that seemed her trademark no longer dangled the length of her neck. She’d pushed her froth of curls behind her ears, and for the first time he noticed the jewels piercing the upper shell. Garnets, he thought, not really up on his semiprecious stones.

She was wearing a tank top that matched her pajama bottoms, so he figured it was a set. A soft looking purple fabric, like that of a well-worn T-shirt. He wished she’d tug it over her head and off.

“Jack?” she prodded, reaching over and touching his wrist.

He looked down to where their skin made contact, hers cool against his, which he couldn’t imagine felt anything but hot. And then he lifted his gaze, curious, willing to take a long walk on a short plank if it would get him the truth.

“What do you see?”

She frowned. “Besides the whites of your eyes, which look like road maps?”

“Yeah. How much of your aunt’s gift did you inherit?” he asked, not certain he wanted to know if she could see the same things.

She shook her head. “None. I don’t know what she saw. All I can see is you.”

He wanted to believe her. He couldn’t think of what she’d have to gain by lying. Even her efforts to convince him that the trick of the light he’d seen in the stairwell was some sort of spectral energy didn’t seem particularly self-serving.

He took a deep breath, and an even deeper leap of faith. “Good. I don’t like everyone and his brother knowing where I’ve been.”

She pressed her lips together in that prissy way she had. “So, you think of me as everyone’s brother?”

He waited a moment, letting the seconds tick by as the skin in the hollow of her throat grew damp. “No. I don’t.”

“But you still don’t want me to know.”

He shook his head.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you to turn me down when I ask you to come over here and sit on my lap.”

P
ERRY DIDN’T THINK
any man had ever said anything to her that made her knees so unbelievably weak, or her heart rush like the wind.

She knew without thinking that things between them would never be the same after this. There was something about Jack she couldn’t resist, and she was so very glad to have met him.

It was forever before she remembered to breathe.
Even longer before she managed a response. First, she had to swallow the tight ball of butterflies that had risen on a whoosh of air from her belly up her throat.

And then, what she said was probably not at all what Jack expected to hear. She wasn’t even certain if she was ready for what her words implied. All she knew was that trusting her instincts had always been the right choice. She did that very thing now.

“I can’t turn you down if you don’t ask,” she said, blowing out the breath she’d been keeping inside and squeezing his wrist where her fingers still rested. She watched his eyes then, waiting for him to react.

When he did, it was to turn his hand over and force her to make the next move. Oh, but he was sneaky, this one, asking her without speaking, putting the decision into her hands by putting hers into his.

She didn’t do it right away. She waited; she made him wait, keeping her fingers on his wrist where she could feel his pulse racing.

“What happens next?” she finally asked, fighting a smile when his mouth twitched.

“Well, if you wait too long, I imagine I’ll topple over and spend the night sleeping on the floor.”

She rolled her eyes, started to pull her hand away, but then let the tips of her fingers walk over the heel of his palm. “If you’re that tired—”

“I’m never that tired,” he cut her off to insist, closing her fingers in his fist. “In fact, I’m feeling powerfully wide awake.”

“Hmm.” She tugged, but he held her tight. “Must be all that coffee.”

“It’s a second wind.”

“Considering how little sleep you’ve had, it’s more likely your third or fourth.”

“Then you’d better take advantage of my offer before I expire,” he said, appearing on the verge of passing out as he did.

“What exactly were the terms?” she asked, fighting a yawn herself. “I don’t remember.”

He let her go then, and sat back. “Damn, but you make it hard on a man.”

He seemed so miserable, fighting both exhaustion and the losing battle of wits and wills. “How would you feel about a compromise?” she asked.

“What are
your
terms?”

She closed her eyes, found her strength, opened them. “If you come to bed with me now to sleep, I’ll sit on your lap in the morning.”

“Come to bed with you,” he repeated, adding, “to sleep,” as if he wasn’t quite sure.

Nodding, she got to her feet. “Exactly. And my offer expires with the first step I take away from the table.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Ms. Brazille,” he said, his voice one notch above a slur. “But I’ll take you up on it. Because having you on my lap is something I’d like to be awake for.”

He left his glasses and pencil and laptop where they were, and held her hand while he followed her down the hall. Her bedroom was dark. She’d used the bathroom light earlier to guide her way.

It served the same purpose now, allowing them to avoid running into her dresser or her armoire or the
spindles at the foot of her four poster bed. She took one side. Jack took the other.

Since she was already in her pajamas, all there was for her to do was crawl between the sheets. But she waited, because she didn’t want to miss a second of watching him take off his clothes.

He held on to the footboard for balance as he toed off his shoes, reached down to tug off his socks. His T-shirt was next. He whipped it over his head and off, and she was left standing there, looking at black denim and bare skin.

She wanted to flip on the light because really, how fair was it that she could see so little of him after being tempted for two days by his T-shirts?

When his hands went to the fly of his jeans, her breath caught, and she forced herself to climb onto the mattress. Sitting with her legs tucked beneath her, she pulled the blankets to her chin and listened to the flip of the brass buttons through the holes of his fly.

And then his jeans came down in a scratch of denim over skin, and she saw the dark fabric of boxers before she felt the dip of the mattress beneath his weight.

He was warm beside her, and his heat was as comforting as his smell. He reminded her of the big outdoors, the freshness of rain, the snap of the cold that had hit them in January after December’s unusual dog days.

He dropped to his back, tugged the blankets to his chest, rested an arm over his eyes. He didn’t say a word, and it wasn’t three minutes before his breathing was deep and even.

She sighed, scooted down and rolled to her side, her back to him as she faced the wall. She fought a twinge of disappointment that sharing a bed with her wasn’t enough to keep him awake.

But then logic took over. The man hadn’t slept in days. She doubted he could stay awake for any woman at this point. Well, maybe Carmen Electra. Or Angelina Jolie.

In the next moment, before she could come up with another well-endowed name, he rolled toward her. Draping an arm over her waist, he cuddled up against her, pressing the spoon of his body to hers.

When he began snoring lightly in her ear, she realized how deeply asleep he’d fallen. He was so wonderfully close, so soothingly warm, so large and so comfortably…there, just there, that she found herself drifting off, content and relaxed beneath the weight of his arm.

It was the movement of that arm that roused her. Her lashes fluttered. She blinked, glanced over her shoulder at the red dotted numbers on the face of her clock. They’d been asleep for less than thirty minutes. And it was obvious that Jack wasn’t sleeping now.

He was breathing in her ear, shallow breaths, choppy breaths, all the while quietly working his hand beneath her top to her skin. Once he got past the fabric, once his palm lay flat on her belly, once his fingertips grazed the lower swells of her breasts, he grew still.

And for several long seconds, he stayed that way.

She, on the other hand, grew itchy and tight. Her nipples hardened. Her skin flushed. She contracted the
muscles deep inside her sex, and slipped a hand between her legs to ease the tension.

He chuckled. “Wasn’t sure you were ever going to wake up.”

Humph. “If you’ve been trying for a while, then you haven’t been trying very hard.”

“I’m not in any hurry. Besides, you were enjoying your beauty sleep.”

Beauty sleep? “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You purr like a kitten when you snore.”

She supposed that wasn’t a bad thing. If she snored. Which she didn’t.

“Kinda makes me wonder what other animal noises you make,” he said.

“Well, let’s see,” she said, rolling slowly onto her back and taking care not to dislodge his hand. She liked the weight of it, the calluses, the warmth, as much as she liked his need to touch. “I can snap like a turtle.”

He laughed. “That one doesn’t surprise me.”

His noticing that aspect of her personality didn’t come as a surprise to her, either. “I can growl like a mama lion, or coo like a dove.”

“Those work,” he said, cuddling closer, weighting her down with a knee on her thigh. “If you want to demonstrate, I’m all ears.”

No, what he was was all hard body. His arm, his chest, his leg. And then there was the other hardness pressing into her hip. The one reminding her she hadn’t done this in a very long time. The one she couldn’t ignore.

“I don’t perform on command.” She drew up her knees, knocking his leg back to the bed. “I need…inspiration. Or the promise of a reward.”