The Heat Is On (6 page)

Every single erogenous zone in her body quivered. “And what is it?”

He flashed her a wicked, naughty grin, and opened the door. “Lock the door,” he said, and then he was gone.

 

J
ACOB DROVE HOME TO
his ranch-style house in the sprawling, rolling hills that backdropped Santa Rey. He'd bought the house back when it was a piece of shit and no one had wanted to live all the way out here, and as a result, he'd gotten it and the land damn cheap. Good thing, as he could never afford it now that the area was in fashion.

He'd slowly fixed the place up one room at a time, using his own hands and cheap labor—his brothers. He'd found that for the price of beer and pizza, he could coax them out on the weekends, and as a result, his place had become Madden central.

So he wasn't all that surprised when he pulled up and found Cord and Austin in his backyard, drinking
his beer and idly watching his two horses roam the pen they'd all worked on putting up.

Austin handed him a beer.

Cord offered an opened tin of cookies, half-empty.

No one spoke until Jacob had taken a long pull from the beer and put away two chocolate-chip cookies, obviously homemade. Since Cord could burn water, he said, “Tell Lexi these were amazing.”

Cord grinned stupidly. He'd finally gotten smart and for the last month had been dating his sweet, sexy next-door neighbor, a woman who would most definitely give Cord a run for his money.

“Long day, I hear,” Austin said. He was a private investigator working insurance fraud, but his office monitored the police scanners. “You caught a murder.”

“And lost it.” Jacob took another pull of his beer and told them the story, making sure to face Cord as he spoke, since his brother still suffered fifty percent hearing loss from the explosion he'd lived through overseas.

“So you boinked the prime suspect.” Cord shook his head and grinned. “And I thought I was the screwup.”

“Bella didn't commit murder,” Jacob said.

“So I guess that means you've taken interrogation to a whole new level,” Austin said, cracking Cord up. Jacob sent him a don't-make-me-kick-your-ass look, which only made Cord laugh harder.

Whatever. Jacob took the last cookie and Cord stopped laughing.

“That was mine.”

Jacob shrugged. “Two types of people in this house. The fast and the hungry.”

Cord watched the cookie vanish into Jacob's mouth. “I can go home and talk her into making me more.” He added a love-struck little smile, and both Austin and Jacob stared at him. Each of them had had women in their lives before, plenty of them.

None had stuck.

But there was a different element to his brother's expression lately, an inexplicable light in his eyes that signalled something that they hadn't seen in a long time. Happiness.

After the hell Cord had been through with his long, painful recovery, he deserved that. So very much, he deserved it, and Jacob was happy for him.

And also just a little envious.

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, J
ACOB
found Ethan waiting for him in his office. He'd made himself at home, sitting back in the guest chair, feet up on Jacob's desk, legs crossed as he sipped coffee and thumbed through his iPhone.

“Something new on the case?” Jacob asked him.

“Crime lab lifted a tread print from the top step to Edible Bliss's back door,” Ethan said. “They're
working on tracing it.” He looked up from his phone. “And I thought you were staying out of this one.”

“I am.”

“Yeah?” Ethan cocked his head. “Is that why you saw Bella last night?”

“We went out for a bite. I walked her home to make sure she got there safely.”

“Dude, I came back to ask her a question and heard someone pressing someone up against her front door.”

When Jacob narrowed his eyes, Ethan smiled. “I was going to ask her if Seth Owen had brought her flowers on their first date. But I heard that rustling up against the door and figured you two…had your hands full.”

Jacob had no response to make because it was true. He'd had his hands full.

“Maybe you were frisking her,” Ethan suggested with a smile.

In return, Jacob suggested something with his middle finger.

“Huh. Again with the no comment,” Ethan noted. “Maybe she wore out your tongue?”

Jesus. Jacob drew in a breath, and purposely let it out, refusing to let Ethan push his buttons.

“So. You get laid again?”

Jacob shoved Ethan's feet off his desk and sat behind it. “None of the above.”

“No frisking, no tongue exhaustion, no getting laid. Got it.” Ethan looked at him for a long moment.
“Makes sense since you're so grumpy.” He paused. “You're into her.”

Jacob booted up his laptop.

Getting no response from Jacob, Ethan pressed, “So into her.”

“Not that it's any of your business, but we're just—” He broke off, because he had no idea what they were just.

Seeing right through him, Ethan laughed softly. “Look, I get it. You wanted it to be casual because women end up dumping us for the job. It's a damn fact, man. But if it's more, it's more.”

Again, Jacob didn't answer. Didn't know how to answer.

“Fine. Be the big, strong, silent type.” Ethan rose lithely to his feet. “But if she's nothing to you, maybe when this is all over, she'll go out with me.”

Jacob slid him a long look.

“You know, since you're not into her or anything.”

And though Ethan was an ass, he wasn't stupid. He was quickly out the door, a wide, obnoxious grin in place.

Probably if Jacob had consumed any caffeine yet, he'd have caught up with him and pounded him into dust. Probably he could have done it even without the caffeine, except for one thing.

Ethan was right.

Jacob was into Bella.

Luckily, his workload was off the charts, and he
managed to keep busy the entire day. First he was called out as backup on a domestic violence case. They had to pull the wife off her husband, and were listening to the man's side of the story when the wife hit the guy over the head with a flowerpot, right in front of Jacob and his partner. A few minutes later, Jacob was reading the woman her rights, the husband standing there dripping blood, potting soil and daisies.

Boggled the mind.

In the afternoon, he sat in a hot car for two hours staking out a corner near Fourth Street with binoculars, hoping to catch sight of a known identity thief he'd been trying to pull in. By six o'clock, he'd seen a handful of public sex acts, one or two of which had surprised even him, but not a single sign of his man. By the time he got back to his desk, it was far past dinnertime.

But his paperwork had piled up, threatening to topple over. It took him two more hours to make even a dent, and by then, he was starving. He shut down his computer and was nearly to his motorcycle, when a call came in. Another shooting.

Instead of going home, he met Ethan on scene. “Male, shot once with a through-and-through hit to the thigh,” Ethan told him.

“Connected to the first shooting at Bella's place?”

“Don't know. Going to guess yes, since bullet type
matches. The guy was just coming home from being out all day. He had ducked to tie his shoe or he'd have taken the hit to the torso and we'd be calling the coroner about now.”

“His lucky day,” Jacob said. “ID?”

“Banning Jefferson. Ring a bell?”

“No.”

“He lives in the building. His neighbor reported seeing an unidentified male running from the scene.”

“Anything else?”

“Perp's around six feet and Caucasian.”

Much preferable to five foot seven and female.

“Now, get out of here,” Ethan said. “I'm going to nail his ass and I don't want any technicalities holding me up.”

“And I'm a technicality?”

“If these shootings are connected, you could be.”

Jacob got back on his bike. He needed to go home, eat and sleep.

But first he wanted to make sure Bella was okay. He'd just follow up, he assured himself, and it had nothing to do with their obvious sexual chemistry.

Nothing at all…

Ten minutes later, he was in front of her building. There were no parking spots. With no qualms whatsoever, he parked illegally, telling himself that the salary raise the city hadn't been able to afford to
give him for three years running could be paid back in special parking privileges.

He got off his bike, removed his helmet and was at the bottom of her steps, just outside the pastry shop's back door when he heard a scream.

The man standing in front of her was faceless. He had a huge bullet hole where his forehead should have been, and he was reaching for her with a hand that held a bouquet of wildflowers. “Bella,” he said in a zombie voice. “Bella!”

She screamed and took a step backward, stumbling in shock when she realized that she held a smoking gun.

She'd shot him.

She'd shot his face off.

“Bella!”

She jerked away and fell out of bed.
“Ow.”

Two big, warm hands scooped her up and pulled her into what felt like a wall of muscle.

Even with her eyes closed, she recognized Jacob by his scent and the feel of his arms, and she melted into him, pressing her face to his throat. He brushed
the hair away from her damp face, his warm lips settling against her temple. “Bad dream?”

“Zombies.” She stayed there in his arms, the sound of her accelerated, panicked breathing and heart pounding in her ears all she could hear as the rest of the world stopped existing.

Moonlight came in through her shutters, slanting the room in glowing stripes. Jacob was on the floor with her, holding her, and there was nowhere else she wanted to be.

He pulled back enough to see into her eyes. “Better?”

Was she? She tried to figure that out. She was damp with terror sweat, wearing only a tiny tank and boy-cut panties. But there was no dead guy without a face, and she wasn't holding a smoking gun.
And
she was in Jacob's lap. “Really bad dream.”

“Zombies?”

She let out a shaky breath. “A dead guy. With no face and a hole in his forehead, carrying wildflowers. Chasing me.” She shuddered. “And I had the gun.”

With a low, wordless murmur, he hugged her closer. Chilled to the bone, she burrowed in. His hands grazed her arms, her back, her bare thighs—

He froze for a single beat as if just realizing only now how undressed she was. Then she shivered again, and a big hand cupped the nape of her neck. “When I heard you scream, I lost about two years of my life during the time it took me to get in here to you.”

She tightened her grip. “I didn't put the key under the mat.”

“I know. You had it under the flowerpot. We'll talk about
that
later.”

She pressed her face into his shoulder. “You smell good.”

“Yeah? So do you.” He buried his nose in her hair. “Like vanilla and sugar. Good enough to eat.”

She squirmed at that image. “I made cookies.”

“For the shop?”

“For me.” She sighed. “It's a destress thing.” She knew she was wrapped around him like Saran Wrap but couldn't make herself let go. He was strong and solid, and she could feel the even, steady beat of his heart. Hers was still racing. “I'm not dressed.”

“I noticed that.” If her voice was shaking from adrenaline, his was low and husky. His
aroused
voice, which added an entirely new element to her adrenaline rush.

“Not that I'm complaining,” she said. “But what brought you here?”

He didn't answer, and it was her turn to pull back a little bit and look into his face. “Uh-oh.” She couldn't see him clearly, but she could certainly feel the tension in him, tension she'd missed before because she'd been too busy recouping from the nightmare. “Jacob?”

“I was just leaving work.”

“This late?” It was ten-thirty. A long day by any standards, and she was quite certain his hadn't been
spent hanging out baking in a kitchen, or sitting and staring at the waves. He'd been out there, catching bad guys, and probably risking life and limb while he was at it.

“It was one of those days,” he allowed, in what was undoubtedly an understatement.

“Lots of bad guys?”

“Always.” He paused. “And a late call came in.”

More tension, she felt it in his thighs beneath her, in the chest she'd set her head on and in the arms he'd banded around her. She climbed out of his lap, stood and flipped on the light by her bed, because she had a feeling she needed to see his face.

From the floor, he blinked, adjusting to the light as his gaze ran over her from head to toe, slowing at all the places in between. “God, Bella.”

“I was hot.”

His eyes flared, letting her know exactly how hot he thought she was.

“I have to go downstairs in a few minutes and beat up some dough for the morning.” The fib popped out of her mouth automatically. But that's how she operated, always giving herself a way out with a man. She called it her safety net.

Except at the moment, for the first time in memory, she didn't want a safety net, and regretted the lie the minute it left her lips.

Jacob remained on the floor. He leaned against her bed, dropping his head back on the mattress and closing his eyes as if afraid to look at her too long.
His dark silky hair was tousled, as if he'd shoved his fingers through it repeatedly. There was a grim set to his mouth, and fine lines of tension fanning out from his eyes.

“You look exhausted,” she said softly, and came back to him, curling up at his side, mirroring his pose but setting her head on his chest instead of against the bed.

He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her in. “There was another shooting, Bella. The guy took a hit to the thigh, and should live.”

She looked at him, but his head was still back, eyes closed. “Who?”

“Banning Jefferson. You know him?”

She let out a breath. She didn't, not that it made it any less horrifying. “No. The name doesn't ring a bell.” She relaxed slightly, grateful this one at least didn't involve her.

His fingers brushed low on her spine, against the bare skin between the hem of her tank and her low-cut panties. “Bullet type matches.” Lifting his head, he met her gaze. “In a big city, this wouldn't be enough to connect the shootings, but here in Santa Rey, we don't get shootings every day. Not even every month. So just having two in a matter of days is enough to possibly connect them.”

They were close enough to share air, and one thing she already knew about Jacob, he was good up close. Very good. He had a way of looking at her, of touch
ing her, like now, that made her feel both safe and sexy, and that was a lethal combination.

Suddenly she wanted him to use those traits to help her escape, to forget the horror of finding Seth's body even for a few minutes, and it was all she could do to resist setting her hands on his flat stomach, sliding her fingers over those hard muscles as she leaned in and took a bite of him—

“Look at me, Bella.”

She was. She was looking at his chest and wondering how long it would take to get him out of that shirt…

“At my face,” he said with what might have been amusement.

As if his face was any less dangerous….

Adding an assist, he cupped her jaw and tilted it up to his, looking her over carefully with that intense, all-seeing gaze that made her want to confess to state secrets, and also take off what little clothing she still wore. She squirmed a little, working her way even closer to him.

“Are you okay?” he asked quietly.

“Working on it. Jacob?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm glad I didn't move to Siberia,” she whispered. “And I'm glad
you
didn't move to Siberia.” She brushed her lips lightly over his. “I was really scared tonight. I'm glad you're here.”

He almost smiled. “You just want me to check for the boogeyman again.”

She dipped her head and brushed another kiss on him, this time on his chest. “That would be great.”

“Christ, Bella.” He ran a hand up her back, wrapped his fingers around her loose, unruly pony tail and gently tugged until she was looking up at him again. “What am I going to do with you?”

Do me
was the first thought that came to mind, but he rose and did his cop thing, thoroughly checking out the small apartment, even looking beneath her bed and in her bathtub.

“There's no one here but us,” she said when he came back.

“I know.”

“Then why did you search the place?”

“So you could go back to sleep.”

Which meant he was leaving. Disappointment settled in her belly, which was ridiculous. She'd been the one to formulate the escape plan. “Jacob?”

He lowered himself to a crouch in front of her, running a finger over her temple, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Yeah?”

Reaching up, she cupped her hand around his wrist. “What are we doing?”

“Other than checking for the boogeyman?”

“Yeah. Other than that.”

He looked into her eyes. “No idea.”

“Casually seeing each other?”

He thought about that a moment, then nodded.

“How casually?”

“Asks the woman with one foot already out of Santa Rey.”

Fair enough, she supposed. She'd made a big deal out of leaving, and he knew it.

“And I've done the long-term thing,” he said. “It doesn't mix well with being a cop.”

Right. She knew this, knew all of it, which in no way explained the ball of discontent deep in her belly. She managed a smile. “I know who you are, Jacob. Being a cop is part of you. No woman should ask you to change that.”

“Yeah.” He grimaced. “It might be more than the cop thing.”

“Such as…?”

“I've been told I can be obstinate, single-minded and doggedly aggressive.” He said this with a tone of slight admission that it might all be true, and she laughed.

“Well, hell, if you're all that, forget about it,” she teased.

“Bella—”

“No, listen to me.” She grabbed his arms when he would have straightened. “Those are the very things that make you such a great cop.” And, she thought, a great lover. “You're okay, Jacob, just the way you are.”

He let out a slow, appreciative breath, then took her hand in his as he rose and walked to the front door. There he stopped and looked down at her, not
smiling, but his eyes were warm as he leaned down to kiss her.

“Bye,” she whispered.

“Bye,” he said against her lips, but instead of opening the door, he threaded his hands into her hair and kissed her again, leisurely this time, allowing his tongue a very thorough farewell.

Her nipples had been hard since he'd first appeared in her bedroom, but the rest of her body joined the fray now, and she rubbed up against him. She'd have crawled into him if she could. “Keep that up,” she managed to say, breathless as hell. “And I'm going to fake another nightmare to keep you here.”

He stared at her from heavy-lidded eyes, then backed her to the door and kissed her again, kissed her until she was gripping his shirt in two tight fists. His erection pressed into her, nestling against the crux of her sex, and he made a guttural sound deep in his throat. “No faking anything,” he said against her mouth.

“Ah, but how would you know?”

“I'd know,” he said firmly, and when she let out a low laugh, he paused meaningfully. “I'm sensing a challenge.”

“I'm just saying.”

“Saying what exactly?” he wanted to know, all male pride and ego, his expression suggesting she'd somehow questioned his manhood or testosterone level.

She tried not to laugh and failed. “Look, faking
is nothing but a polite lie designed to avoid hurting anyone's feelings.”

He blinked, looking genuinely confused. “But why lie at all? I mean, if you're going to fake, then why not fake
not
having an orgasm, so that the guy keeps at it?”

“Huh.” She laughed again. “Never thought of it that way.”

He shook his head, his eyes still heated, his body still taut and tense…everywhere.

Hers tightened in response. She was going to have to accept that whenever she saw him, this crazy heat would be there. But also there was more. What exactly that more was, she couldn't say, but it was a little disturbing given that she'd known him all of a few days.

And even more disturbing, he made her laugh.

God, she was a sucker for that.

She realized he made her both laugh and want, a double whammy, one she wasn't sure she could resist, or why she even wanted to try.

He was just watching her watch him, another thing she liked about him. He was tough and edgy, a cop through and through, and yet he had seemingly endless patience.

But just behind that patience was hot, simmering passion that took her breath away.

He said her name once, softly, then let go of her hair to slide his hands up her back, and down, cupping her bottom, a cheek in each of his big palms,
cheeks that were more than half bared by her scrap of panties. A sound of distinct male satisfaction rumbled from his chest, and he squeezed before lifting her to nestle her best part against his best part.

A movement that had them both stopping to gasp in pleasure.

She didn't know about him, but she was instantly back to quivering with need, burning up with it. Her breathing was unsteady, ragged, making her breasts brush his chest with every breath of air she gulped.

He ran his mouth over her jaw to her ear while his fingers explored her body. “If I stand here any longer, Bella, you are not going to make it downstairs to deal with your dough.”

“Yeah.” She winced. “Remember when you said I always need an escape route? Well, I usually do, when it pertains to men.”

“And what, the dough thing was it?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

His eyes were two dark pools. “Tell me to go, Bella.”

She opened her mouth to do just that and said “stay” instead.

He groaned and once again pressed her into the door, lifting one of her legs to wrap around his hip, opening her up so that when he rocked again, he slid his erection directly against the core of her. The only thing that separated them were his jeans and her very thin, very wet panties.