Her limbs seemed to grow cold again. She should take whatever she could get. She needed the help, and there was no reason to refuse it. Except…except for the way she felt about him.
“You—you don’t have to do that, you know,” she heard herself say stiffly. “You don’t have to take on work that isn’t yours for my benefit. Looking into Stuart’s case just because he’s my friend,” she added. She could have kicked herself. She needed and wanted all the help she could get. “I won’t let it go,” she told him. “I’ll never let it go, because I know Stuart. But you’re not…required to feel the same way.”
“Don’t you go doing anything,” he told her flatly.
She felt her temper bristle. “I’m obviously not an idiot. I was one of the top trainees in my class.”
“Ashley, no one is doubting your intelligence. But diving into things without knowing what you’re doing is dangerous.”
“Because I’m a woman.”
“For anyone. Anyone without experience and training.”
“Right. ’Cuz you started out with experience, of course.”
“Ashley, do me a favor. Sit back and give me a lousy few days. I don’t want you diving in headfirst because you really don’t know what you’re doing. And, yes, I do know. And as to Stuart’s case, taking it on won’t just be a favor to you. I’ll look into it because it might have been an attempted homicide. And I’m hoping that by tomorrow I’ll have some answers regarding the Bordon murders. And Cassie Sewell.”
“And your partner?” she asked quietly.
He nodded. “And Nancy.”
They were both still standing there, dripping. Almost touching. Seconds ticked by, and they remained, staring at one another.
“You really need those answers, don’t you?” she asked.
“I really want those answers,” he replied.
She was quiet for a moment, watching him.
He still wasn’t touching her, but he was so close she could feel his warmth; the dampness of his flesh seemed to brush her own. He leaned forward, pressing her against the wall behind her, bracing them both, where they stood, and when he spoke, there was emotion in his voice, as if the moments of banter had been cast aside. “I want the answers, yes, because if anyone ever deserved for the truth to be known, it was Nancy.”
She lowered her head suddenly afraid. She had rushed into this, thinking she could indulge in reckless desire and come out unscathed. She wasn’t even hearing what he was saying to her; she was far too hypnotized by the aura of this man she had known for so brief a time. But that time had been intense. She knew she had been attracted to him from more than a physical standpoint, though that particular appeal was in the ascendant at this particular moment. But there was so much else about him to admire. She knew he took work seriously, that he wouldn’t take the time to humor a whim of hers no matter what he felt for her sexually.
She also knew that there had been something lacking in him. An ability to give himself completely, maybe, because the past had been shadowing him no matter how he had tried to shake it. She wondered if his words were a strange form of commitment to her, but she didn’t want to try to test them. She was shaken, frightened of the passion, of her own desire to be with him. Not just to sleep with him, but to be with him.
“Ashley?”
He lifted her chin, then slid a hand around her nape, bent and kissed her lips. Against the chill of the air-conditioned cabin, the warmth of his lips was electric. The ills of the world seemed to slip from her shoulders. The hair-roughened texture of his chest rubbed against her naked breasts, and that light contact seemed to arouse a roiling lava bed in the pit of her stomach.
When he moved away from her, his lips remained close as he whispered, “You know, you looked good in those trainee blues of yours, you look darn good in jeans, and you even look fantastic in seaweed. But I’m willing to bet you look even better all lathered in soap.”
A smile crept into her lips. “I’m assuming this boat has a small shower.”
“Small can be good.”
“And too tight to move.”
“Tight can be good, too.”
“And awkward.”
“You never know until you investigate the situation.”
“True. And, of course, you’re known for your investigative technique.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“My pleasure.” She slipped from beneath his arm, shed the jeans that had given him so much trouble, took a step and eased out of her thong panties. She cast a glance over her shoulder. “Head…master cabin…shower. I’m on my way.”
It wasn’t that small a shower. The Gwendolyn was a houseboat, after all, not a pleasure craft. Tight, yes, but the shower did offer room for two. Two who stood very close. Almost touching, skin to skin. Yet when she took hold of the bar of soap, she didn’t have the room to slide it freely down the length of her form. Apparently he’d been anticipating such a dilemma. His darkly bronzed fingers slid over her own and took the bar of soap from her grip. He started with her throat. “We investigators don’t like to miss a thing.”
“Your entire case could fall apart if you did.”
“I like to be thorough.”
The bar of soap, wielded so deftly in his hands, moved over her breasts, the hardness of the bar excruciating against the sensitivity of her nipples. She felt them quickening, shaking with little spasms centered deeper in her body. The water in the tiny stall sluiced continually against the foam he created. Steam misted and rose quickly. His hands, slick and sure, moved slowly down the length of her, caressing her ribs and midriff, the plane of her abdomen, over her hips, then erotically flat and low, sliding between the length of her legs. Her breath caught. She felt she would have fallen had there been room to do so. The slide and swiftness of his fingers seared and teased with each seductive touch and stroke. The soap fell between them. They both went to retrieve it, crashed, laughed, left it…locked into an embrace instead, mouths glued and hungry, tongues sweeping, soap still sluicing over them both as the water rained down and the steam rose, enveloping them both.
Ashley clung to him for a moment, needing more, ran her fingers down his back, following the muscled curve of his buttocks, gripping the length of his erection. Sound growled from the depths of his throat, and he kicked open the door. Soaked and slick, she was somehow wrested into his arms and they were both laughing. A moment later they were falling on the expanse of the bed. As he rose over her then, the laughter they had shared faded. His eyes sought hers; his body pressed against hers. His hand slid down the length of her, again, and he thrust inside her with a movement that itself nearly sent her over the edge. She clung to him and felt for a moment the dampness of her skin, the coolness of the covers, the slight rocking of the boat in its slip. She closed her eyes and felt the hot vital structure of the man, the strength of his arms, the power of his hips and thighs locked around her, and then nothing but the fever inside her, the rise of honeyed fire, the yearning, reaching, stretching, desperate wanting….
Explosions seemed to rocket through her body with the force of her climax, followed by delicious little electric shocks, sweeping through her time and time again. She felt the force of his urgency, as well, each movement winding her tighter, taking her higher, a burst of heat like lava warming the insides of her, filling something deeper than a sexual need. He held her, locked in his warm embrace, and she clung to him as if her limbs had frozen around him. There was something so fierce in being with him that it was frightening, something beyond thought and logic and reality. She was terrified to realize that she felt far too deeply as if she belonged here, as if she had known him forever and was meant to be nowhere but with him for eternity.
She was startled when he spoke, though he still didn’t pull away from her. “Ashley, stay out of things until I get back. I mean it.”
She caught her breath, wincing. A moment later, he rolled to his side, coming up on an elbow.
She stroked his cheek. “I don?
??t care what you say. You are a chauvinist. You’re afraid for me because Nancy’s dead.”
“It has nothing to do with Nancy,” he said impatiently.
“Jake, I didn’t go into the academy because I didn’t have the money for a ritzy art school, but because I really wanted to be a cop.”
“Like your father.”
“Not just because of my father. I believe in law and order, and in the protecting and serving part of it, too. Okay, the way that things worked out, I’m not a cop. But I do work for the police force. And I’m going to face really bad things, we both know that. Jake, I have the stomach and the nerve for it.”
“But do you have the common sense for it?” he asked irritably.
“I resent that,” she told him.
“Resent away, but what I’m asking you is important. You get the bit between your teeth and you’re determined to run with it, the hell with the consequences.”
“I’m not like that at all! And what makes you think I am?”
“You’re making judgments based on what you feel in your heart, not what you can see, feel and touch, as hard evidence.”
“You do that all the time. It’s supposedly what makes you good at your work.”
“What I do is different.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Because I started with one of the best beat cops in history. Because I took all the steps to get me where I am today. You draw pictures, Ashley. You’ve got a real talent, so stick with that. If you go on a wild-goose chase of some kind, all you’ll do is get yourself killed.”
“Jake, stop it! What is your problem with me?”
“You’re a kid, a kid with an incredible talent, who is still soaking wet behind the ears. And my problem is that—” He broke off abruptly, shaking his head in anger. “You’re too frigging naive to even understand what I’m saying to you.”
She started to roll away, ready to rise, torn between her realization of how deeply she had let her emotions tumble and her need to be her own person.
He caught her hand.
“There you go, flying off the handle.”
“You’re the one who’s yelling.”
His eyes narrowed. “I’m not yelling. I just want to talk to you. And I’m not letting go until you listen.”
She felt the tension in her rise. “At this precise second, I could probably kick you in the balls hard enough to leave you screaming for the next thousand years.”
The threat didn’t work. In an instant he was on top of her; she couldn’t have moved a knee if her life depended on it. His point, she knew.
“Well?” he said softly.
“Get the hell off me, Dilessio. I’m leaving. I’ve got things to do, too.”
“You had no intention of leaving now.”
“Maybe I didn’t before, but I do now. Jake, I can’t stay here if you think you can humor me, manipulate me…make me promise to stay in a little glass case because you fell in love with a policewoman once before.” She held up a hand to stop him when he would have spoken. “Whether you slept with her or not, you were in love with her. You might have spent the last five years forcing her case into the background while you went ahead and worked hard on what was happening each day, but you’ve never really stepped back. That’s understandable. But you can’t envision the future based on what happened in the past.”
He rose, leaving her on the bed. “I’ll toss your stuff in the dryer. You can stay, shower and leave at your leisure—go do whatever things you need to do in the middle of the night. I’ve got to get out of here.”
He didn’t have to leave that quickly, she knew. He had told her that he didn’t need to be on the road until four. She was restless and angry. She wanted to argue, remind him that she could be out of his hair in a matter of minutes, but he was already up and headed back for the tiny shower stall—alone.
The door closed. She wasn’t going to stand outside and argue with him over the roar of the water.
That wasn’t actually the temptation that gnawed at her, of course. She longed to slip back in and laugh again as the soap slid against her skin, as…
Something seized at her heart. It was wrong, all wrong. She couldn’t be what he wanted or needed, couldn’t say the words now that would be lies in the future.
She struggled into her wet clothing, then hesitated. She could still hear the water running. If she wrote him a note, it would be a cop-out. If she waited and spoke to him…
She hurried to the notepad by the phone and flipped past the pages that held her drawings. She started writing.
Dear Jake…
Nothing came to mind. The water wouldn’t run forever.
This won’t work.
Again the words she needed eluded her. There was so much she could say. I can’t keep my nose out of things that involve me? No.
I understand how you feel. Perhaps not completely, but I know enough about the past. I’m so sorry for what happened to Nancy, but I’m sure that whatever she was doing, she felt it was important and something she had to do. But I can’t be a hothouse flower. You can’t spend your life trying to protect me because you care about me.
Was that too presumptuous?
Maybe she was attributing way too much meaning to what was just a hot and heavy sexual relationship to him. No. He cared about her. She knew that. And she cared too much. Dare she write the truth? I’m falling in love with you, enough to sell my soul, my future, my belief in myself….
No. She wasn’t about to write that. She settled for I can’t see you anymore.
There was more. So much more she could put down on paper. Too much. But right now she had even greater concerns. Karen. She had to find out what was happening with her friend. She was afraid, but she had to do things herself, make the right moves.
She had said what needed to be said to Jake.
The water stopped running. Ashley didn’t sign the page; she simply dropped it and ran, fleeing the houseboat before he could stop her.
CHAPTER 20
It all started with a food fight, something that didn’t even draw Peter Bordon’s attention immediately, since it started far down at the end of the breakfast table.
Violence seldom occurred in the area of the prison where he was incarcerated. The men here were mostly white-collar criminals. They wanted to get out. They had families. Some dreamed of going straight.
They were rarely unruly, much less violent.
It started with flying eggs, but in seconds, there was a melee going. He had no intention of getting involved. He didn’t care if he wore egg or not.
Then someone had him by the shirt collar and he was being dragged across the table. The next thing he knew, he was on the floor, and there were a dozen men on top of him. He could hear whistles and shouts as the guards came rushing in to break it up, but he was more concerned with the elbow slammed into his face, thudding his head against the floor. Punches were raining down all over his body. He was smothering. He yelled, furious, trying to get the men off him. He returned their punches as best he could with the weight on him.
At first he wasn’t even aware of the blade sliding into him….
Then, beneath the pile-up, he knew.
The food fight was a performance, acted out for his benefit alone. Someone knew about the phone call. Any of them might have betrayed him. There was big money involved. Hell, it didn’t even matter who had turned on him. There was always someone who could be bought, no questions asked.
The blade inside him twisted. He screamed, but his voice and his lungs were failing. He had blacked out by the time the guards at last pulled the other prisoners from him.
It had all taken just a few moments of time.
“The coffee is made—and aren’t you running late?” Nick asked as Ashley made her way through the main house.
“I don’t have to report in until eight now,” she told him.
“Ah, well, that’s good. You look like hell—well, for be
ing young and beautiful, you look like hell, anyway.”
“Thanks—kind of.”
“Look, Ashley, I’m not going to presume to tell you what to do, but you might want to take things a little slower with Dilessio.”
“Um, I might.” Was a dead standstill going to be slow enough? She already regretted her note. For some reason, she had thought he might pound on her door and say something. Hardly likely, and it hadn’t happened. He was on his way up to the center of the state, maybe finally solving the mystery that had plagued him for so long. For his sake, she hoped he found the answers. But she didn’t think that was going to change him.
His concern for the woman he’d loved in the past was greater than any feelings he had for her.
“How was your night out?” she asked her uncle.
“Great. Sharon’s appointment got cancelled, so we went to South Beach for stone crabs, took in a movie on Lincoln Road and walked on the beach.”
“Very romantic.”
“Yeah, it was,” Nick admitted, shrugging like a jock caught sending a frilly Valentine. “Sharon is…beyond great. Hey, did you get your laundry?”
“My laundry?”
“Sharon said she put some of your things in your room for you.”
“She did?” Ashley murmured. “Is she awake yet?”
“She doesn’t have anything today until a closing at noon. She was going back to sleep when I left her.”
Ashley smiled at her uncle. “I think I’ll just give a knock and see if she’s still awake.”
She hurried away before he could stop her. He’d left his door ajar, and Sharon hadn’t risen to close it. Ashley knocked.
“Nick?” Sharon’s sleepy voice had a note of curiosity in it. Of course, why would Nick be knocking?
“Sharon, it’s me. Ashley. May I speak with you?”
“One sec.”
Sharon pulled the door fully open a moment later, tying a bathrobe around her waist as she did so. She was a beautiful woman. First thing in the morning, hair tousled, no makeup—she was still stunning with her soft tresses, petite size and classic features. No wonder Nick thought he was a lucky man.