She's Gotta Be Mine (32 page)

“It’ll be okay. Just go a little slower.”

“You know slow is
gonna
kill me.” But he braced himself on his elbows and eased in, bare centimeters at a time. “Is that better?”

She did relax, tilting her hips to his. He began to slide, her body accepting, slowly expanding around him.

“Christ, you are so tight. Almost like a virgin.”

Yes, well, she wasn’t actually far from that after fifteen years of marriage to Warren and only one lover before that.

Nick closed his eyes, arched his neck, and thrust deeper. “God, you don’t know how good this feels.”

Actually, she did. She felt it in him and was beginning to feel it in herself. She’d come so many times, her juices eased the passage.

“God, baby, I want you.” He buried his face in her neck. “Are you okay now?”

She was. Better than okay. He was all the way in. And she wanted him to move. “Please.”

“Yeah, you please me all right.” Instead of pulling out, though, he gathered her hips in his hands, lifted her, and plunged another inch. “Like that?”

“More,” she begged. And more.

He drew out, keeping her hips angled, sliding sharply against a delicious spot inside. Oh my God, he’d found something new.

The pillow fell off the other side of the bed, and somehow, the lack of it gave him better access to that very special spot.

He plunged back in, finding it again. She arched her back to keep the contact. Ooh, she’d never felt anything quite this nice. Not even his tongue. What
was
that spot?

He picked up speed, a quick rhythm. She panted, straining to keep up. She pulled her knees higher, gripping his waist.

She was going to come again. She couldn’t believe it. Sensation crashed over her as she dug her nails into his shoulders. She screamed again, this time, his name.

“That’s it, baby, again, do it again. I can feel it.”

Then he was taking her hand, forcing it between their pumping hips. “Here, touch yourself here.”

He put her fingers to her clitoris, and she was too far gone to stop him. Building, crashing, rising, screaming. He came at her like a battering ram, her head hanging off the side of the bed. She jerked in a breath, and with each thrust, his body forced her finger against herself, feeling bursting within and without.

He threw himself into her again, then she felt him seize, tossing his head back. Orgasm rolled her over like a wave, tumbling her about, stealing her breath. Then he spurted deep inside, pulsing, pumping, beating against her.

How long it had been since a man had come inside her? Longer even than the five years. Maybe never. She couldn’t even remember how it felt to have a man lay on her. He shifted, pulling up and away from her.

“Don’t move.”

“But I’m crushing you,” he whispered in her hair.

“I like it.” She tugged on his shoulders until he sagged against her once more. His delicious weight squeezed the air from her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. She didn’t care.

Nick might not realize it, but she’d just died and gone to heaven. And he’d been the only one, ever, to send her there.

* * * * *

“So, how are we going to save Warren?”

He woke from a blissful sleep to find her sitting on the end of the bed, dressed and in the final process of buttoning her wrinkled uniform. He glanced at the clock. Quarter after five in the morning. “What the hell are you doing up already?”

“Places to go, people to question,” she quipped.

He didn’t laugh, not even a smile. He wanted to make love again. For the fourth time. She’d only had nine orgasms, he wanted to make it ten before the sun came up.

“Get back in bed.”

She bounced to her feet. “I need a mocha before I go to work.”

“You don’t have to be at work until seven-thirty. How long does it take to make a mocha?”

“Seven minutes if you want it really frothy, and that’s including letting the machine work up a steam.”

He looked at her tight butt and thought of how tightly her body had gripped him. How tight
she
was. “I’ve worked up a head of steam. I think you need to bleed it off.”

She tipped her head to one side. “Somehow that seems like a sort of disgusting metaphor for what you really mean.”

She was right, it was. But she’d scrambled his brains last night, and his powers of intellect might never be the same. “I want you.”

She came to sit down on the bed beside him, stroked a hand through his hair, her fingers tangling. “Thank you.”

“It was my pleasure.” He smiled, tried to tug her closer

She resisted. “I know. That’s why I’m saying thank you.”

“You drive me crazy, you know.” It was true. He didn’t have to fake a damn thing for her. When he came inside her last night for the third time, the feeling had been so intense he’d almost lost consciousness. Swear to God. He wanted to lose his wits all over again. He was past caring if he lost himself as well. “Come back to bed.”

She rose, stepped back out of his reach. “I can’t. I have to ask around about Warren and stuff before work.”

“What stuff?”

“Cookie and
Jimbo
stuff. Stuff that’ll show she did it.”

He reached for her once more, missed again. “Let
Brax
prove it. That’s his job.”

“I can’t sit idly by.”

Well,
he
could. She might think she’d done nothing to help Warren solve his own problems all these years, but her perception and reality were two different things. He didn’t believe Bobbie Jones would ever sit idly by.

She leaned in to kiss his forehead, then jumped back before he could haul her into his arms where she belonged. At least for now.

“Someone’s trying to frame you, Nick. If I leave it to
Brax
to solve, he’s going to come looking for you. I told you last night, I wouldn’t let that happen.”

He hadn’t believed her. Actually he hadn’t given it a thought. All he’d wanted to do was show her how beautiful, how desirable she was. But she was also like a Mama Bear looking out for her cub. If it were in her power, she wouldn’t let anything happen to him.

He just wished he didn’t resent it so damn much that she had to do the same thing for her
fricking
husband.

* * * * *

Sheriff Braxton didn’t believe him. That much was certain.

In the early morning darkness, Warren lay on his two-foot-wide bed, hands stacked beneath his head, mattress thin enough to let the springs gouge. At least it was clean. So was the cell. Six by twelve, there was enough room for bed, toilet, and sink. Concrete walls made sure he didn’t mingle with the rest of the jail’s occupants. If there were any. Cottonmouth didn’t sport too many criminal types. Just Beau Beaumont, the town drunk, and eighty-three-year-old Bertha
Swurtz
, whom Braxton pulled in regularly for driving without a license.

The clock tower in the square struck the five-o’clock hour. Warren had slept, off and on. But he’d been awake since the last strike a half hour before. Cookie had begged him to help her on Sunday night. He’d flatly refused. He hadn’t suspected she’d take matters into her own hands.

Pretty stupid assumption on his part. He’d left her no choice. What he’d done was to leave her totally defenseless.

She’d called him early that morning, sobbing so hard, it had taken long minutes just to get the story out of her. With some crazy notion that
Jimbo
was out there hiring a hit man to kill her, she’d followed him down to the lake. But
Jimbo
was already dead. She’d picked up the shovel because she was afraid the murderer still lurked in the vicinity. Of course, the killer hadn’t been, as it turned out, but her fingerprints were all over the shovel. She’d panicked, buried it, driven home, and called Warren.

The only person with more holes in her story than he had was Cookie.

He’d known she’d done it herself. Probably after another fight. Hell, maybe
Jimbo
had even followed them out there on Sunday. He’d thought he’d heard something out in the woods. Maybe he’d been angry, dragged Cookie back to the scene of her sins, maybe he’d even planned to bash
her
head in with the shovel.

It didn’t matter how or why she’d done it, Warren was honor bound to save her. She’d warned him, he hadn’t heeded the call, hence it was his duty to protect her.

Telling her to report
Jimbo
missing, he’d driven down to the lake. James Beaumont had lain half in, half out of the water, five feet from the bumper of his silver Cadillac. Unmoving, his head in the lake, he’d definitely been dead.

An owl hooted. A full moon lit the sky, creating a shimmering path across the water that led straight to the spot where
Jimbo
lay. Like a beacon.

Later that morning, showered and shaved, Warren had confessed to the sheriff. But he’d had to confess to
himself
that saving the damsel in distress had been one massive power rush. He’d lived off it even through Roberta’s interrogation, managed to hold his own with the sheriff only because of it.

That was before he knew about the shoe print. The shoe print of a big man. Obviously not Cookie’s foot. Obviously not
Jimbo’s
or the sheriff would never have mentioned it.

Those thoughts had woken Warren every hour, sometimes more.

Had Cookie been telling him the truth about a shadowy killer?

Or had an accomplice helped her murder
Jimbo
?

Warren had wanted her to accept him back into her life so badly, he hadn’t even questioned the miracle when she did. But, as Roberta accused, had Cookie pumped him full of sex and lies, looking all along for a stooge to take the rap for her husband’s murder?

No, that couldn’t be. He wouldn’t let it be. He’d rather face the death penalty.

Chapter Fourteen

She was a new woman. Totally. She could save Warren. She could save Nick. She could save the world.

And all because of an orgasm. Nine of them. Or was that ten? Who needed to count anyway? Maybe she should have made Nick a mocha for all his hard work on her behalf.

That sounded a little glib for something so momentous. Bobbie secured the last three buttons on her uniform, then assessed herself in the mirror. Glib was easy, the truth harder. For the first time, in God knew how long, she felt like a woman. Warren never understood how sex made a woman feel...feminine. It was integral to the gender. Oh, she could hear all the naysayers, the feminists, the careerists. Bottom line was, sex with Nick had made her feel special again. Finally. After years of drought. Today, she had a new and powerful attitude. She’d use it to get Warren out of jail, and to keep Nick safe, once she’d accomplished step one.

The nice thing about feeling different on the inside was that people saw it on the outside; they just couldn’t figure out what it was. That made it easier to slip a few things by them.

Before work, she had a few things to slip by Beau. First of all,
Brax
had been down there. She wanted to know what
Brax
wanted. Second, Beau was
Jimbo’s
brother.

She tugged on a white cardigan, then marched resolutely to the corner of Pine and Main. Cars passed, starting early for the trek into Red Cliff to the north or Chico to the south, mostly men on their way to work, ties knotted, suit jackets on a hook in the back. Or trucks filled with gadgets and utensils, blue collar workers getting a jump on the heat of the day. Nick was somewhere in between blue and white collar, a category all his own.

When would he show her his paintings? She felt a bit of a cheat for looking at the calendar in Mavis’s office, especially after last night. She wanted the real thing—Nick’s trust.

Mavis had told her Beau lived at the garage. She banged on the door. And waited. The glare of the morning sun off the corrugated metal made her squint and produced a sheen of perspiration on her upper lip. She banged again.