Shiver of Fear (21 page)

Because hers was gone. Above her, he intensified everything. The pressure, the kisses, the touching.

Each breath was more shallow, more impossible as he cupped her breast, then caressed, slow and sure, her nipple instantly
hardening to the insane pleasure of his touch.

She had to end this. And she would… as soon as she took one more kiss, let one more wave of sheer dizziness roll over her
as their tongues played and his fingers traveled and their bodies moved with an ancient rhythm.

He slipped his hand under her sweater to get closer to flesh. Her stomach muscles tensed as he seared her skin with his palm,
breaking the kiss long enough to absolutely slay her with a look of hunger and longing.

“Devyn,” he whispered. “I’m not going to stop until you tell me to.”

She tried to breathe, but it came out as a ragged sigh. “I want you…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

What did she want? Sex. Him. Comfort. Closeness.
Sex
.

She just moaned, and he took it exactly how she meant it, a plea for more. His hand delved under her bra as he kissed her
again, keeping his eyes open, adding pressure between her legs.

Sweet, sweet pressure that made her wet with need and physically incapable of not moving to meet every roll of his hips.

“Your hands are so warm,” she whispered.

“It’s your body.” He pushed her top up, out of the way, unsnapping her bra in front and admiring her as he did.

“I’m never warm.”

“This is way past warm, honey.” He thumbed her nipple, teasing, torturing, taking his time to make her crazy.

Possessed, she pressed just enough on his shoulder to tell him what she wanted.

He closed his mouth over her breast, sending sparks over her skin, squeezing between her legs, bringing her to the shocking
edge of an orgasm.

It controlled her. He controlled her, his hands everywhere, on her stomach, on her jeans, on her zipper. With one more kiss,
slow and sexy, rich with meaning and intent, he pushed her jeans over her hips and dipped down to trail kisses on her exposed
body.

He kissed over the silk of her panties, slipping his tongue along the lace, sliding his fingers into the tiny strips of satin
that held them on her hips.

“Oh my God.” Her voice quivered with the feeling, the raw pleasure when his finger touched her.

She threaded her fingers through his hair, added some pressure on his head, and spread her legs enough to draw him closer.
With one finger, he pushed the silk aside and drew his tongue along the exposed center, like a hot, wet stroke of fire that
made her want to scream.

Blood pulsed and throbbed everywhere. Under his tongue, through every vein, in her head like a drumbeat, keeping the rhythm
of his licks. Harder, faster, deeper as he curled inside her and—

Froze, lifting his head.

“What?”

“That’s your phone.” He gave her a questioning look, ready to ignore the text, but then she remembered Padraig.

“It could be her,” she said, easing him off her.

He assisted by reaching over and grabbing her bag and
her phone. Hope surged when the screen said
Unknown Caller.

Please, please be Sharon.

She sat up, her nakedness forgotten as she pressed the button and read.

Rose, please go. I need you

“It’s from Sharon.” The words whooshed out in one breath.

Over her shoulder, he read the screen. “How do you know?”

“No one else would call me Rose. That was the name on my birth papers, and no one knows it but her.” She started to get off
the bed, but he grabbed her arm.

“How would she know you would know it?”

She considered that for a moment, shaking her head. “Marc, I don’t know, but I do know what I’m doing next and you cannot
stop me. I’m going to Enniskillen.”

He blinked as if his head were exploding in frustration. “It could be a trap, Devyn. You don’t know what it means by ‘go.’
Go anywhere. It doesn’t say go to Enniskillen. There are a lot of ways to interpret that.”

“Well, this is how I’m interpreting it. She sent me a private message and she says she needs me. Add to that the fact that
a man who knows a lot more about me than anyone else took great pains to find me today and tell me to go to Enniskillen. If
I go there and she’s not there, I haven’t lost anything.”

“If you go there and get killed, you’ve lost
everything
.”

She met his gaze in a long, silent, visual showdown that she would not lose.

“How do you propose to get out of this hotel without being shot at or followed?” he demanded.

During the silence of her inability to respond, the strains of the wedding music played outside the window. And gave her the
answer.

“Did you bring any nice clothes?”

He just frowned, then his expression changed from confusion to a mix of admiration and resignation. “Yeah.”

N
othing about Oak Ridge Drive was remarkable. Middle America tucked into the hills and woods. A touch of Southern comfort here
and there in the form of red brick and white columns. Expansive manicured lawns, cookie-cutter houses, a bicycle in one driveway,
a gardener finishing up a day’s work at another.

So, was some lug nut waiting around the corner to attack?

It sure seemed unlikely to Vivi.

This place was Raleigh’s version of the Boston suburbs, where she’d landed at the age of ten, after the dark days of being
orphaned in Italy. Sudbury had seemed a little like a fairy tale at the time, not as wrenchingly beautiful as her homeland,
but it was… home.

Still, the suburbs had their dark side, and that’s what had made Vivi itch to run like a city rat. She’d never live in a place
like Oak Ridge Drive in Raleigh, North Carolina.

She drove the rental to the end of the cul-de-sac, following
the detailed directions Marc had e-mailed her. They included everything, except how to get in, and a warning that the last
time Devyn Sterling had visited, the house hadn’t been empty.

But the brick ranch house looked deserted today. According to the one person she could find at the university, Dr. Greenberg
was on an extended sabbatical, traveling through Europe on a speaking circuit. She had no classes this semester, and her lab
was closed.

Vivi parked on the street and headed straight to the front door, not at all sure what she was looking for—just the
unusual
. After her years as a reporter, she had a pretty good nose for finding unusual when it didn’t want to be found.

Around the yard, dead autumn leaves formed a brown blanket under the ubiquitous oak trees that gave the street its name. There
was no sign of any life at all. No mail, no papers, all the windows closed, blinds drawn in the front, no sign of life.

She rang the doorbell, waited, and after a few minutes and another ring, she rounded the house to the back, inspecting what
she could on the way. The last time she broke into an empty house, she nearly ended up dead.

But this time she’d been warned and was armed, so she powered on. The back door was locked, but not dead bolted. It didn’t
take five minutes to pick the simple latch, making as little noise as possible. Before she went inside, she took out her Glock,
racked the slide, then stepped into the kitchen.

After standing perfectly still for five minutes, she felt relatively sure she was alone and dead bolted the door to make sure
no one followed her in, then she waited again for any response to the echo of the latch. Nothing.

Setting her tote bag on the floor, she started a slow and quiet search. With each room, she grew more confident she was alone.
As she combed every inch of Sharon Greenberg’s life, she found nothing too extraordinary. The woman might have had a green
thumb, but all the plants were now dead, and she had no obvious family ties, since there wasn’t a personal photo in the whole
house. A workaholic, Vivi surmised, as most of the household activity seemed to take place in her office.

The room looked the way Marc told her it had when Devyn was last there: laden with files, magazines, and paperwork.

She finished in a spacious master bedroom, clearly added on after the house was built, with a more modern, crisp feel, an
oversized fireplace, a luxurious bathroom. And a jewelry safe hidden behind an innocuous door in that luxurious bathroom.

She touched the knob and the safe popped right open. So it was probably a freebie from the builder, or someone had beaten
Vivi to the punch, because the velvet posts and hooks for jewelry were all empty.

Maybe Devyn was wrong and the intruder had been a garden-variety thief who’d taken what jewelry he could find and left everything
else.

She slid her hands down the sides of the unit, poking into the velvet for a false opening that she knew these things sometimes
had. And found one.

With a little “Oh!” of delight at the discovery, she pushed the ledge that ran across the bottom, and it flipped up on an
invisible hinge, revealing another compartment.

And, holy shit, there was stuff in there.

Not jewelry, but tiny scraps of paper, handwritten notes
or a letter that had been torn to teensy bits and stored there. A fine chill fluttered down her spine as she touched a few
pieces of paper, reading random words like
decision
and
promise
and
never
and
please
….

Shreds of something far more personal and valuable than hidden jewelry. This pile of paper bore the fingerprints of emotion.
Someone had torn it in anger, then saved it in remorse. No single piece of paper contained more than two words. Was this
one
ripped document, or many?

She picked up one more piece, blank on one side, and turned it. Her heart stopped and her eyes widened. She’d found the signature
of the person who had sent this letter, and everything changed.

Best, Finn
.

The paper almost burned her hands. Finn MacCauley had written this diatribe. How old was this? Could this be criminal evidence
that could be key to finding a most-wanted fugitive, or was it just a lover’s torn missive?

That wasn’t her question to answer. This should be turned over to the FBI, stat.

Her hands trembled a little as she carefully fingered the shreds, rationalizations screaming in her head.

She had a possible key to finding Finn MacCauley, right in her hot little hands. These shreds were more valuable than the
freaking Constitution to her. To her
business
, which could explode if they brought in a high-profile fugitive.

“I have to keep this,” she said, silencing any internal argument. “I can’t give this to Lang. Not yet anyway.”

Decision made, she turned, looking around for something that could hold the torn treasure. Still holding the find, she headed
back into the office and returned to the
shelves where she’d seen half a box of standard business envelopes. She pulled one out and tapped the bits of paper into it,
her gaze moving around the office, stopping on a wall calendar.

The quintessential image of emerald Irish hills rolling down into a vast spread of bizarre rectangular stones, the words in
a Gaelic font:
The Giant’s Causeway.

Wasn’t Marc just there yesterday? Sealing the envelope, she walked to the calendar and lifted the page, sucking in a little
surprised breath at how familiar it was.

“Too freaky,” she whispered, staring at the image of the seaside resort of Bangor, exactly where Chessie had just sent Marc.
The month, September, was empty of any notes, except for one date, circled in red. The 17th. Three letters written: PUG.

Something clicked in place.
Puggaree17
. The e-mail Marc had them checking.

She looked to the next page. This one had a church spire over a sweet little village called Enniskillen. She had to squint
to read the tiny notations on most of the days in October. Single letters—A, B, B, D, F, G. And every so often, a number sign.

This definitely qualified as
unusual
, so she took the calendar and the precious envelope and headed back out the way she came in, trying to figure out who to
share this with.

She knew who
not
to share it with—Colton Lang.

Buttoning his shirt in the pitch-black room, listening to the sounds of Devyn dressing in the bathroom, Marc tried telling
himself that getting dressed up and sneaking out of the hotel by blending into a crowded wedding was
a smart way to achieve what still was his original goal—to get Devyn out of Belfast.

So of course he hadn’t put up a fight, and it wasn’t just because he was temporarily blinded by lust.

Although he was that, too.

He was going along with her escape plan because of another male weakness he harbored—the need to help women with a cause.
And not just any kind of woman, oh, no. That would be too easy.

The worst kind of woman—flawless and perfect on the outside and scarred and wrecked and ruined on the inside. Marc Rossi to
the rescue.

Except hadn’t he learned from Laura that he couldn’t fix those internal scars? Women like that despised themselves and were
incapable of love. He couldn’t make Laura love herself after her mess of a childhood, but he didn’t accept that fact until
the day she stuck her sweet little Beretta 92—the one he’d given her for her birthday—in his face and damn near killed him.

Because no matter how he’d tried to show Laura he loved her, she refused to believe that deep inside she was worthy of that
love. So all that effort was wasted.

And she was an embezzler. He couldn’t forget that.

Devyn was no criminal, like his ex-wife. But she was lost, alone, and longing for something he didn’t think her birth mother
was going to give her. He could help her find that out, but he couldn’t, absolutely could
not
, let himself get involved with her.

Rescuing her was not his job. Getting her out of Belfast was.

“Hey, I’d dance with you.”

He looked up from the cuff he was tugging through a
sports coat sleeve, his night vision easily strong enough to see the
vision
in front of him.