Scarlett shook her head. Her mother would never ask her brothers to do the same. ‘Tell her I’m not dead,’ she said, trying to keep the attitude from her tone. ‘I’ll drop by when I can, but it won’t be today.’
‘I should make you tell her yourself,’ he grumbled. ‘But I know you’re busy with this case.’ He exhaled heavily. ‘Stay safe, okay, baby?’
She forced her lips to curve. ‘Okay,’ she said with a pleasantness that was equally forced.
A slight hesitation. ‘Listen, about this publisher . . . Your lieutenant seems to think he’s more than a witness to you.’
Scarlett’s teeth clenched. Yet another question her parents wouldn’t dream of asking her brothers. ‘Is this an official question? Sir?’
A pause, longer than the hesitation. ‘And if it is?’ her father asked crisply.
‘Then I’ll tell you the same thing I just told Isenberg. No conflict of interest. Sir. I have things to do. I’ll call when I can.’ She hung up and drew a deep breath.
Her father always did this to her. Always treated her like she was five years old. She’d thought when she earned her badge that he’d change, but he hadn’t. She’d thought when she earned her detective shield that he’d change, but he hadn’t then either. He might never change. She’d learn to be okay with that. Someday. At least she knew it was because he cared, but that didn’t make it any easier to tolerate.
‘I’ve made things difficult for you, haven’t I?’ Marcus asked quietly from the sofa.
Yes, you have, but I’m okay with that too. ‘No, not really.’
‘You lied to your boss. And to your father. Who is also a cop, I take it?’
She frowned at him. ‘Yes, he is a cop. I come from a long line of cops. And no, I didn’t lie to either of them.’
‘You told both of them that you didn’t have a conflict.’
‘And I don’t. You’d be a conflict if you were a suspect.’ Or if I were to fall in love with you. ‘You are not a suspect.’
‘And if I were?’
‘If I had even an inkling that you were, your ass would be in lockup so fast your head would spin. But you’re not a suspect.’ She shrugged. ‘And sticking with me is the best way to keep it that way. If you’re with me, nobody can accuse you of anything.’
His lips curved, making her heart stutter in her chest. ‘Protecting me, Scarlett?’
‘Maybe. Maybe you need it.’ She went back to the table that held her first aid supplies. ‘Mr I’ve-got-concrete-in-my-head.’
‘Touché,’ he said, sounding pleased. ‘You’re going to fix me up after all. I thought you’d be racing out of here to interview Annabelle Church.’
‘It’ll take Lynda a little while to coordinate a pickup with Children’s Services, and I’m only fifteen minutes from the precinct, so we’ve got a little time.’ She pulled a headlamp from the box, slipped it over her head and turned it on, then went back to the bathroom to wash her hands again. A minute later she was back, snapping on a new set of gloves. ‘Hold still,’ she said, sitting on the arm of the sofa again so that she could get close to the cut on his head. Holding a pair of tweezers in one hand, she pushed his hair from the wound with the other and wiped away the dried blood with some soft, dry gauze.
‘You look like a coalminer,’ he said gruffly.
She frowned again. ‘You do realize I’m holding a pair of very pointy tweezers mere millimeters from your head?’
‘You do realize you’ve got your breasts in my face? I have to distract myself somehow, and commenting on your coalminer-ness was the first thing that came to mind.’
She looked down and her cheeks instantly heated, because he was right. She had pressed her breasts almost in his face. She leaned back and dropped her hands, trying to figure out how she could accomplish her task without getting so close to him.
He scowled up at her. ‘I’ll be quiet. Just get the cut cleaned. I can control my baser instincts that long.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m used to patching up little people. The angle is different.’ She scooted closer on the arm of the chair so she didn’t have to lean over so far. ‘I would have had you sit on one of my bar stools,’ she said as she finished wiping the dried blood from his head, ‘but they’re all wobbly. I’ll fix one of them so you’ll have a stable place to sit while I do this the next time you almost get yourself killed.’
‘God, you’re snotty when you’re being Nurse Nancy.’
She started to laugh, but held it back to keep her hands steady. ‘Nurse Nancy?’
‘It’s a guy thing. Naughty nurse fantasy.’
A single glance at his lap told her he wasn’t bluffing. ‘Well thank you very much,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Now I’ve got that picture in my mind.’
‘Are you wearing the naughty nurse uniform in that mental picture?’ he asked slyly.
She huffed. ‘I am now. I thought you were going to be quiet. I have to make sure you don’t have any debris in here before I clean it.’ She stole another glance at the very impressive bulge in his lap and had to draw a steadying breath before leaning a little closer to examine the wound. ‘I don’t see any splinters of wood or shards of concrete.’ She reached for a bottle of wound cleaner. ‘This should help numb it while I’m cleaning it. Again, no allergies, right?’
‘None,’ he said, much quieter than he had been before.
She’d leaned in and was squirting cleaner into the wound when he spoke again, his tone very serious. ‘What did your neighbor mean about “that other one”? The one you gave walking papers to?’
Damn you, Mrs Pepper. The old woman had said that on purpose. ‘Bryan is an ex. Kind of, sort of.’
‘Kind of, sort of?’ he asked sharply. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Well, first, I did give him his walking papers, so he is no longer anything other than an old friend. We’ve been friends since college. Kind of, sort of means that he was off and on. Never anyone steady. We both knew that. He didn’t want to take the walking papers at first and kept ignoring them. So I put my foot down and Mrs Pepper heard us.’
His eyebrows shot up. ‘She heard you? Was he fighting with you?’
‘No, not that time. We were standing in the driveway. I didn’t want to let him in the house.’
‘Not that time?’
‘Like I said, he didn’t want to take his walking papers the first several times I handed them to him.’
‘When was the first time?’
‘Eight months ago.’
His brows shot up. ‘Eight?’
She knew what he was asking. ‘Like I said, we were off and on, mostly off. “On” was usually at his instigation. He was in a relationship until eight months ago, so that was the first time it came up.’
‘And if he’d instigated something nine and a half months ago?’
Right before she’d first met Marcus. She focused on swabbing the cut on his head to keep her hands steady. ‘We’d have probably been on. Bryan has always been a friend, Marcus. We always knew that one of us would end this off-and-on thing eventually.’
‘Will he remain your friend?’
She hesitated, then nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, packing the cut with treated gauze. ‘This stuff has antiseptic in it, so you don’t need to add anything else. You should probably have a doctor look at the cut. I didn’t see any splinters, but sometimes they hide.’ She turned back to her kit to trade the wound cleaner for a roll of tape. ‘I’m not sure this will keep the gauze in the wound with your hair in the way.’
‘Then shave it,’ he said curtly. ‘I don’t want to go to the hospital or see a doctor.’
Scarlett winced, both at the hurt in his tone and at the thought of shaving off any of his beautiful dark hair. She changed the blade on her razor and cleared away just enough hair so that the tape would stick. ‘Bryan and I go back a long way, Marcus.’
‘Back to your college days. I heard you.’
And it had hurt him. That much was clear. ‘He’s more like a .
. . war buddy than anything else. We went through a rough time together and for a long time only had each other.’ She hesitated again, then sighed. ‘I don’t love him, okay? I never did. Not like that, anyway.’
A moment of silence. ‘What did you go through?’ he asked carefully.
Her hands stilled as she pressed the tape to his scalp. ‘You remember me saying that I’d lost a friend back in college?’
‘Of course. Michelle.’
He’d remembered Michelle’s name. Scarlett braced herself, willing the words to come. ‘I found her body. Thrown behind a dumpster, like she was trash. And there was so much blood.’ She gritted her teeth, forcing the images to the side of her mind. ‘Bryan was with me. We found her together. It’s not something either of us has managed to completely leave behind.’
His sigh was heavy. ‘I’m so sorry, Scarlett.’
‘It’s all right. But there will always be that link between us. I can’t make it go away. Trust me, I’ve tried. I’m sorry.’ She’d finished her task, but didn’t move away from him. And then a second later she didn’t want to move anywhere. He’d leaned into her, closing the distance between them, resting his head against her.
The kiss they’d shared earlier had been intimate. This was much more so.
She peeled off the gloves so that she could stroke his hair. ‘I told him that it was over. Today, in fact. When I came home from the alley, he was waiting for me. I’d been avoiding him for the last few weeks because he wouldn’t take no for an answer.’
He shuddered in pleasure when she raked her fingers through the hair at the back of his head, so she did it again. ‘Do I need to go beat him up for you?’ he asked lazily.
Her lips curved. ‘Thank you, but no. I can do that on my own, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I . . . told him that there was someone else. He finally got it.’
Marcus pulled back to meet her eyes. ‘That someone is me, right?’ he asked lightly.
Scarlett chuckled. ‘Yes, Marcus.’
He rested his head against her again, his shoulders relaxing. ‘Just checking.’
That he could make her smile even as the images of Michelle’s broken body continued to flash through her mind was nothing short of a miracle. A gift she didn’t intend to squander. She pulled him a little closer, her eyes sliding shut when he wrapped an arm around her waist and simply held her. She felt . . . cocooned. Safe. Wanted.
His arm remained curved around her waist, his hand lightly gripping her hip. He touched her nowhere else, but God, she wanted him to. Her breasts grew heavy, her nipples tight and sensitive, her panties moist. She could smell her own arousal. From the deep breaths he drew, she could tell he could too.
She was going to have to change her clothes before heading back to work. She couldn’t go question a woman named Church while smelling like sex.
‘I have a confession to make,’ he murmured, his breath warm against her breast.
She swallowed hard, her mind no longer on the job. ‘More stalking?’ she asked, the words coming out husky and thick.
He turned his head so that his lips brushed against her nipple, sending a stream of current straight between her thighs, making her suck in a startled breath. ‘No, Detective Smartass,’ he muttered. ‘Just for that I won’t.’
She stroked his hair some more, wondering if he meant that he wouldn’t tell her or that he wouldn’t touch her. Both were unacceptable. ‘Tell me. Please.’
He was quiet for so long that she thought he’d been serious about not confessing, but then he whispered, ‘You think I don’t like hospitals because of what happened last year.’
One of her hands dropped to his chest, her fingers seeking the place where the bullet had ripped his skin, piercing one of his lungs, but all she felt was his Kevlar vest and she was thankful for it. ‘But that’s not the reason?’
‘No. The real reason is that when I was young, my mother spent a lot of time in a hospital. I visited her there and it was not pleasant. The smell of antiseptic makes me . . . Well, it makes me go back to a place I never want to see again.’
There was something here, she thought. Something much deeper. ‘Why was your mom in the hospital, Marcus?’
Another, longer, silence. ‘She took a lot of pills. I couldn’t wake her up, so I called 911. She was almost gone when they got her to the ER.’
‘Oh no,’ she whispered. ‘How old were you?’
‘Eight.’
The same age that he’d moved in with his grandfather. ‘Why did she take the pills?’
His throat convulsed against her as he fought to swallow. ‘It was right around the time my father died. So, uh, no hospitals, okay?’
‘Okay.’ She kissed the top of his head, wishing she could take the hurt away, but understanding the tentacles those old memories wound into one’s brain. And understanding that he’d offered her one of his secrets because she’d given him one of hers. ‘If it starts to get infected, I’ll call Dani, Deacon’s sister. She can check you out here or down at her shelter.’
‘All right.’ He drew another breath. ‘You smell so damn good. I remember that from when you came to see me. When things got too intense, when the smell of antiseptic started to choke me, I’d think about how good you smelled. Like wildflowers.’
‘Honeysuckle,’ she whispered. ‘It’s my shampoo. And body wash.’
This time she felt his cheeks crease in a smile. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘For what?’
‘For replacing the memory of my mom in the hospital with one of you naked and sudsy in the shower. With my hands all over you, getting you very, very clean.’
Everything deep inside her clenched, desperately wanting. ‘Oh,’ she breathed quietly. ‘Unfair, O’Bannion. Really unfair.’
His chuckle was wicked. ‘I have another confession,’ he said.
She thought she just might like this one better. ‘Tell me.’
Abruptly he moved, grabbing her around the waist and yanking her down to the sofa. A second later she was on her back, staring up into his dark eyes. His body was a welcome weight, the bulge in his pants now hard and thick, positioned exactly where it felt the best.
Well, not exactly where it felt the best. There wasn’t enough time for that.
But she wished there was, especially when he began slowly thrusting against her. Her eyes slid closed on a low moan. She really wished there was. ‘What is your confession?’ she managed, gasping when his thrusts became harder, faster.
His head dipped low, his lips kissing a line of fire up her throat, along her jaw, up to her ear. ‘I dream.’
A shudder racked her body. ‘So do I. I have for months and months. Since the first day I saw you. Heard you.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ he demanded hoarsely.
She opened her eyes, snaring his gaze. ‘Why didn’t you?’
His hands kneaded her shoulders fitfully. ‘If I did have a reason, for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. In my dreams, you’re always looking up at me just like this.’
She brushed her fingers against his cheek, already dark with stubble even though he’d shaved only a few hours before. ‘In my dreams, it’s always your voice.’
‘Good to know,’ he murmured. His dark eyes flared hot and needy as they slowly traveled from her face to her breasts, lingering there for a heartbeat or two or ten before returning to her face, staring down at her like she was a treat he wanted to devour.
The tight rein she’d kept on her response simply snapped. She slid her hands into his hair, pulling his head down as she lifted hers up, meeting him halfway, kissing him the way she’d done earlier in that parking lot. And in all of her dreams. Their dreams.
He’d been dreaming of her too. All this time, she thought. All this time wasted.
And then she stopped thinking when he gripped her hips and hauled her into him, his groan vibrating against her lips, her breasts, everywhere he touched her. He took over the kiss, slanting his mouth,
teasing her lips with little licks of his tongue, urging her to open for him, then groaning into her mouth when she did.
His hands squeezed her hips, then slid beneath her to flatten at the small of her back, clenching in the fabric of her shirt as he kissed her mindless. He broke away to let them breathe, kissing his way down her throat, then running his tongue back up, and then he was kissing her again like a man starved. She dug her fingers into his muscled shoulders, struggling to get closer to that hard ridge in his jeans.
She heard a low growl of frustration, then realized it had come from her throat. The growl became a moan, his greedy mouth muffling her cry of satisfaction as she thrust back, her release coiling tighter and tighter.
She couldn’t remember ever feeling this good while still wearing her clothes. Once again he pulled back to let her breathe, and her head fell against the sofa cushion. She was panting, for God’s sake. She could run a seven-minute mile, but he had her so wound up that her lungs felt like they were about to burst. He was panting too, but he didn’t seem the least bit deterred, pressing hot, wet kisses down her throat and along the edge of the scoop-neck T-shirt she wore. All while he continued the hard, steady thrusting between her legs.
‘Feels so damn good,’ she whispered, and he pulled back to meet her eyes, his hunger laid bare.
‘I want you,’ he said quietly. ‘I have dreamed of having you every way imaginable. Woken up so damn hard it hurt. I want to taste you and touch you and stroke you and watch you come for me. Over and over and over. And then I want to come inside you and start all over again until you scream my name.’
Scarlett opened her mouth, but not a single word came out, the images his words evoked winding her even tighter. But her expression must have been sufficient, because his mouth curved with satisfaction.
‘Is that a yes?’ he asked, dropping his voice a few notes lower.
She swallowed audibly. Nodded. Forced real words out of her mouth. ‘That’s a yes.’
His eyes closed, his erection becoming even harder when she hadn’t thought it possible. Without warning, he palmed her breast and she cried out in stunned pleasure, hardly even aware that he was pushing up her shirt and her bra along with it until she felt his hot, moist mouth close over her bare nipple. A low moan rumbled from her throat as he sucked hard, making everything inside her go taut as a bow. ‘Oh God.’