Private Investigations Page 13

  JOE WALKED BESIDE RIPLEY, trying not to notice how well the red dress she’d changed into fit her, or how her breasts threatened to spill out of the top of it, making his mouth water for just a taste of the smooth, warm flesh. He swallowed hard, nodding at some lame comment she made on the history of Sun Studio and Elvis Presley.

  Since she was obviously not going to wear the shoes he’d given her, he’d driven them to Beale Street, and instead of the walk he’d planned, they were walking the length of it. The sound of various blues bands filtered onto the street from the doorways they passed, the music sometimes slow and seductive, other times fast and lush. Even though the sun was sliding over the horizon, it was hotter than it had been at any other time of the day, a result of the asphalt beneath their feet having absorbed much of the sun’s heat. Of course, Ripley’s sexy attire wasn’t helping in the heat area much, either, but Joe was trying not to notice that.

  He sighed and wished he had changed into something more comfortable, cooler. He’d rolled his shirt sleeves to his elbows, loosened his tie and undid the first few buttons of his shirt, but he was sure he was sweating through the back of the crisp cotton.

  A kid ran past them then launched into a series of flips the length of the sidewalk, then back again. Joe reached into his pocket, but Ripley caught his arm. “Let me.”

  She gave the preteen a couple of bills then tucked her hand easily into the crook of Joe’s arm where he had stuffed his hands into his pockets. He felt his spine immediately snap straight and something akin to pride puff out his chest. She angled a smile at him, and he was sure she knew what had just happened. But rather than worry about her powers of observation, he merely smiled at her.

  She lay her head briefly against his shoulder then lifted it. “So, tell me,” she said quietly, “what’s life like being Joe Pruitt?”

  Pretty damn dull, he thought. At least until recently. He shrugged. “I don’t know. The usual, I guess.”

  “Define the usual.”

  He squinted at her. “Are you hungry?”

  “Not yet.” She squeezed his arm through his shirt. “Since this was your idea, then you’re going to have to start answering some of my questions.”

  “Define the usual,” he repeated, slowing to allow another couple to pass in front of them. “I get up at six in the morning, go for a five-mile run if weather permits. In the office by eight. Out at five.” He shrugged again. “The usual.”

  She hummed. “Except when you’re traveling.”

  “Except when I’m traveling,” he agreed.

  “And how often do you do that?”

  He made the necessary calculations. “Last year, I was on the road nearly thirty-two weeks.”

  “That much? That makes two-thirds of the time.”

  He nodded.

  “So you travel as much as a rock star.”

  He chuckled. “Yes, as much as rock star. Just with different hours.” And no groupies.

  Trust Ripley to make his job sound more interesting than it was.

  He caught himself. He’d never really thought of running his company as a job before. It was his career. His way of life. Never merely a job that he had to do to pay the bills.

  “And you used to be a secretary,” he said, unable to bring himself to compare her to Gloria. He couldn’t imagine Ripley sitting still for more than five minutes at a time. Aside from the fact that she’d be damn distracting taking dictation.

  Then again, if he had a secretary like Ripley, he probably wouldn’t go out on the road as much as he did. He had four other low-level salesmen on the payroll who could take up much of the slack. But even when he’d hired them, he hadn’t considered cutting back his travel hours.

  “I was a secretary for six years,” Ripley said quietly, as if the reality surprised her as much as him.

  They walked in silence for another block, Ripley lingering in front of the glass fronts of nightclubs, watching the bands inside. Joe stared at his feet and felt pretty miserable, although he couldn’t understand why.

  When he’d left her alone at the hotel earlier, he’d decided to try to regain a hold on his life. He’d contacted Gloria and retrieved his messages and told her how he could be contacted. Then he put a call in to the company reps he had been wooing to set things in motion, only he didn’t know how successful he’d been after an afternoon full of meetings he hadn’t wanted to be in, his mind steadfastly on what kind of trouble Ripley was or wasn’t getting herself into while he was away.

  But he couldn’t place the blame on her for his distracted state. Not completely, anyway. He was coming to realize that beyond his incurable lust for Ripley, and the bizarre, dreamlike quality of the past couple of days, what he was feeling for his job—it certainly wasn’t an adventure—had been slowly lifting to the surface for the past few months. Landing distribution contracts, launching promotional campaigns and signing sports heroes to wear his products just weren’t doing it for him anymore.

  The problem was that beyond Ripley, he didn’t know what would do it for him.

  Then there was the little detail that soon not even Ripley would be in his life to distract him.

  There was a tug on his arm. He looked to find her watching him curiously. “You know, I’m starting to worry about you,” she said. “You haven’t looked at my breasts once.”

  His gaze automatically drifted to the top of her dress and the soft, smooth skin there. “Yes, I have. You just haven’t seen me do it.”

  Her smile was one hundred percent pure Ripley.

  “Besides,” he said. “I thought you hated that I had a one-track mind.”

  She seemed to consider his words. “One track is better than no track. Ever since this afternoon I feel like I’ve lost you.”

  That makes two of us, Joe thought.

  Her hand slowly dropped to his, then she crossed in front of him, pulling him forward. “Tell me, what do you want to do? Name it. Anything, and we’ll do it.”

  He wanted the world to start making sense again. But he didn’t think that was going to happen anytime soon.

  “Joe?”

  “Hmm?” He blinked to stare into her face.

  She stopped next to a lamppost, a decidedly suggestive smile curving her mouth. “Kiss me.”

  A groan started somewhere in the vicinity of his groin and twisted its way into his throat. Right that second, taking in her big brown eyes, pouty lips and suggestive expression, he couldn’t name anything he’d rather do more.

  Curving his fingers around her neck, feeling the throb of her pulse at the base, he slowly backed her against the lamppost, taking first one step, then another. Her eyes darkened as her gaze slid from his mouth to meet his gaze. Her tongue made a command performance, dragging across her full bottom lip, then dipping inside the slick depths of her mouth. Her back met with the post, and she reached to steady herself. Only Joe had no intention of allowing her to regain her equilibrium. He put his other hand on the pole above her head then bent and brushed his lips against hers.

  Soft and sweet and heady. Joe closed his eyes and rested his forehead against hers, pulling his mouth mere millimeters away, their breath mingling between them. For an incredible moment, he wondered if he was going to survive her. And the question had nothing to do with the FBI, runaway clients or gun-pointing missing persons. Or even Ripley’s penchant for finding trouble where none previously existed. No, his fear grew from knowing the woman herself. Watching her eyes brighten as she thought about her new career, the wrinkle between her eyebrows as she tried to figure out her case, her enthusiasm when she attacked a plate of ribs. He stroked his finger along her cheek and delicate jaw. There was also a lot to be said about the curve of her back as she strained against him during climax. The soft sounds she made when he thrust madly into her. The feel of her soft mouth covering his erection, giving him the complete attention she gave to everything else in her life.

  Ripley stood staring at him, her whiskey-brown eyes full of questions. Then she ti
lted her mouth and pressed her lips more urgently against his.

  Joe couldn’t help but respond in kind.

  The bustling street around them vanished, the world shrinking to include only Ripley where she stood in the pool of lamplight. As she dipped her tongue into his mouth, he couldn’t help thinking she had crawled completely inside him over the past few days. He moved. He felt her right there under his skin even when they weren’t together. His first waking thought was of her and where she was and how quickly he could sink into her silken, hot flesh. His last thought was to hold her to him as closely as possible to keep her from vanishing in the same mist that had brought her into his life.

  The damnable part about the whole thing was that he didn’t have a clue how she felt about him.

  Ripley pulled away from the kiss, her soft, sexy laugh doing things to him that hands could never do. “Well, that was, um, nice.”

  He rolled an auburn curl between his fingers. “Nice?” he asked with a cocked brow.

  “Very.” She smiled then curled her hands into the open edges of his shirt. “Come on. I think we’d better go get something to eat before we get arrested for indecent exposure.”

  “We still have our clothes on.”

  “Exactly.”

  RIPLEY UNLOCKED the door to her room while still kissing Joe. In all honesty, she was afraid to stop kissing him for fear that he would get that serious expression on his face again and find an excuse to go to his own room. She pushed the door open with her hip, loving the taste of beer on his tongue, the feel of heat in his hands as he captured one of her breasts, pinching her tight nipple through the fabric of her dress. She let the strap of her purse slide off her shoulder, and the bag dropped to the floor with the weight of all it held.

  Somehow she’d made it through dinner without diving straight into his lap and kissing that adorable but alarming expression from his face. She wished she knew what he was thinking, but she’d asked once, and he hadn’t answered. She’d silently vowed not to hound him about it, too afraid she’d sound like her mother, who had a tendency to sound like a broken record when you weren’t in a talking mood. Either that, or what you were thinking wasn’t suitable to share with your mother.

  She closed the door and pushed Joe against it, tugging his shirt from the waist of his slacks, then digging her fingers into the smooth, rippled flesh of his stomach. Maybe what Joe was thinking he couldn’t share. While she didn’t think he would lie to her about being married, it wasn’t beyond the realm that he had a woman somewhere, a girlfriend maybe.

  She didn’t like the direction of her thoughts, so she stopped thinking altogether and concentrated on feeling.

  And oh, boy, were there lots of feelings to be felt.

  The instant they were in the privacy of her room, Joe thrust his hands up the short skirt of her dress, palming her bottom in that way that made her shiver with anticipation. Before she could get his shirt halfway unbuttoned, he’d stripped her of her panties. She gave up on the buttons and yanked the shirt off over his head, pressing her breasts against the solid wall of his chest. She sighed, loving the way he felt against her—her breasts smashed against his chest—his arousal hot and hard against her stomach.

  He backed her toward the bed as he worked the zipper of her dress down. She tripped over something on the floor and he caught her, the incident affecting their mood not at all. They continued their blind search for the bed, and Ripley tripped over something else, this time something that sounded breakable. Her eyes flew open, and her mouth froze against Joe’s.

  “I hate to say it, but that doesn’t sound good.” He ground out the words between ragged gasps.

  She agreed.

  He kissed her hard again then reached to switch on the lamp. Only there was no lamp to be turned on.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  Ripley groaned, reluctantly letting go of him so he could backtrack to the foyer and the switch there. Instantly, the room was awash in light. And Ripley didn’t much like what she was seeing.

  Joe let rip a string of ripe curses that Ripley wished she could have mouthed, if she were capable of speech at all.

  The place was a mess. The lamp Joe had tried to turn on was the source of the glass sound. It lay on the floor, the bulb shattered, the bottom pulled off as if the something that someone had been looking for was inside the body of it. The mattress was slashed to shreds, pieces of stuffing and springs popping out at odd angles, and the pillows had been completely defeathered. Ripley hugged her arms around herself, noticing that not even her clothes had survived the search. Articles were strewn around the room. She picked up a T-shirt, eyeing the rip down the middle. She shivered, but this time it had nothing to do with Joe’s hands on her bottom.

  “I knew we should have gone to my room,” he said under his breath.

  AN HOUR LATER Ripley sat on the destroyed bed holding the card Agent Miller had given to Joe. There was nothing but a simple number printed in the middle. No name. Nothing to indicate if he or the other two men were, indeed, FBI.

  After Joe had verified that his room had been left untouched, they’d called the hotel manager, who had called the police. They’d told the officials as much as they had to, considering that they didn’t know much themselves. Joe was seeing the hotel manager out, assuring him that Ripley didn’t need another room, that she would be staying with him but that that information wasn’t for public knowledge. Should anyone call, hotel personnel were to say she had checked out.

  Ripley cleared her throat. “Wait a minute.”

  Joe turned to face her from the door along with the manager.

  “If anyone calls, I want them put straight through to Mr. Pruitt’s room,” she said.

  Joe frowned at her.

  She couldn’t argue with him about staying in his room. The truth was, she didn’t even want to contemplate sleeping alone tonight. Not when the person who had ripped her room apart had done such a thorough job of it. The police officers hadn’t found the item used to rip apart the mattress, but they were fairly certain it had been a razor. Probably a straight edge, and a long one, at that.

  Joe closed the door after the manager then came to sit on the destroyed bed next to her. She was grateful for the feel of his heat, although for an entirely different reason than before.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  She glanced at him. “I don’t know.” She rolled everything around in her mind. Clarise Bennett, aka Christine Bowman. Nicole Bennett, whose name may or may not be Bennett at all. The FBI. The pawnshop….

  Her heart did the equivalent of a tire skid across her chest.

  “What is it?” Joe asked, watching as she got up and scrambled toward the door. She plucked up her purse then made her way to the bed. But rather than sitting again, she emptied the contents of her bag on the spread. She pushed aside her gun, her makeup bag, a pamphlet from the hotel, then found the item she wanted hiding under a wad of tissues.

  The jewelry box.

  “You had it with you?” Joe asked.

  She nodded. “I stuck it into my bag right before we left, you know, thinking that if something occurred to me, I wanted to have it with me so I could go through it again.”

  She flipped the lid open and stared at the fake jewels inside.

  Was it possible that they weren’t fake? How much did the pawnshop owner really know about jewels? Could Nicole have told him they were fake, thinking they were, too, and he hadn’t questioned it?

  “So you know anything about jewelry?” she asked Joe.

  He shook his head. “Not a thing.”

  “Me, either.”

  “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”

  “What, that they’re real?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, yes, I am.”

  She crossed the room and picked up the phone, staring at the card still in her hand, then dialing the number there. “Only one surefire way to find out.”

  JOE
STEPPED OUT of the shower, having finished in record time. “Ripley?” he called.

  “What?” Her head popped into the doorway.

  He grinned at her. “Nothing.”

  She rolled her eyes then walked into the other room.

  Shortly after the phone call Ripley placed to Agent Miller to arrange for a meeting first thing in the morning, they’d gone to Joe’s room. Not only was the security latch in place, he had moved a low bureau in front of the door, and he hoped like hell that Ripley would remain the only person ever to sneak into his bedroom via the balcony doors.

  He hadn’t wanted to leave her alone long enough to take a shower, but he’d been in dire need of one after their walk down Beale Street. He felt better now, not only because he’d had one, but because he was out again.

  He draped a thick white towel around his hips and stepped into the other room where Ripley sat on the floor cross-legged, the box and its contents spread out, the television turned on low in front of her. ESPN? A girl after his own heart.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “They still look fake to me.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, drying his hair with another towel. “Maybe it’s not the jewelry they were after.”

  She twisted her lips and looked at him. “What else could there be?”

  He picked up the box. “The box itself, perhaps?”

  He turned it around and around in his hands, looking inside, then out, then turning it upright. It didn’t look like anything special to him. But what did he know?

  “Wait,” Ripley said softly, reaching to still his hands.

  She positioned her head so she was staring under the box. Either that, or she was trying to sneak a peak under his towel. He was hoping it might be the latter. Unfortunately, it proved to be the former.

  She steadied the box with one hand, then tugged on something with another. He watched an orange-tabbed key drop to the floor.

  “Oh, boy,” Ripley whispered, plucking the key and holding it for him to see.

  He turned the box over and stared at the fake bottom. Actually, it was more like a small compartment in the corner. Very easily missed, as both of them could attest to.