Red-Hot & Reckless Page 7

  Her areola covered nearly the entire circumference of her breast, large and a deep burgundy color. His mouth watered with the craving to feel her skin against his tongue again. She shifted, forcing the material down even farther, her breathing shallow, her tongue dipping out to moisten her full, provocative lips.

  “So are you going to kiss me or what?”

  Alex blinked until he was looking into the intoxicating depths of her eyes.

  Good God, but he was afraid that if anyone could tempt him to cross the line of the law, it would be this dark temptress.

  NICOLE’S HEART beat a slow, uneven rhythm beneath her breastbone, making it impossible to draw in the air that she needed. The cool air from an overhead vent spilled over her bare skin, further puckering her nipple and making her shiver even as pure, scorching heat rushed to her lower abdomen.

  She wanted this man between her legs. Now. She didn’t care that at any moment his secretary would be coming through that door. That on the other side of that board were pictures of her that she hadn’t known had been taken. That she was pretty sure the occupants in the building across the street could see what they were doing through the windows.

  “Or what,” Alex rasped, finally answering her question then leaning over to run his tongue along her swollen nipple.

  Nicole gasped, the blatant show of desire the last thing she expected from him. Her back automatically arched and she grasped the edge of the desk to keep from toppling off the side. Ripples of sheer pleasure rushed over her skin, leaving her breathless and hot, so very hot.

  Alex’s actions ceased and Nicole blinked open her eyelids to find him looking at her. She hadn’t realized she’d closed her eyes until then. He groaned then tugged on her knees, pulling her until her legs dangled over his side of the desk, mindless of the files that plunged to the floor as he edged his way between her thighs and pressed himself against the crotch of her panties.

  Nicole grasped his shoulders to catch her balance, then scooted until her bottom was at the very edge of the desk making for a fuller meeting between his body and hers.

  Then he finally kissed her.

  For a blissful instant Nicole forgot entirely where she was. Red-hot sensation poured over her, through her, as his tongue tangled with hers, claiming her mouth in a way that was ravenous yet gentle, demanding yet pleading, so unlike the awkward kiss from the night before. This was a man who was sure of what he wanted, was even surer that he shouldn’t want it, and was going ahead and taking it anyway.

  Nicole lifted her hands to his face and pulled him closer yet, her palms rasping over the slight stubble on his jaw. She moved her head right to left then back again, wanting to swallow him whole.

  She felt Alex’s hands on her knees, lingering at the top of her boots, then seeking out the flesh just above them.

  Slow, too slow, Nicole thought for the second time in as many days. She reached down and hiked up the cotton of her skirt then placed his hand directly between her legs.

  A shudder so profound she was afraid she might climax wracked her body. She caught herself with her hands on the desk behind her, then jerked her hips upward, sliding her swollen womanhood against the thick ridge bulging beneath his jeans.

  Nice. Very nice, indeed.

  He bent to lick her exposed breast and she watched him, captivated by the darkening of his green eyes, the pained pleasure on his face. He pressed his palm against her chest, slowly forcing her to lie flat against the desk. Nicole’s breath caught in her throat as she watched him slide that same hand down the middle of her abdomen, lower and lower until the heel of his palm ground against the pulse point between her legs. She gasped. But when she thought the sensation couldn’t be any stronger without penetration, he worked his index finger under the elastic of her panties and drew his knuckle over the engorged flesh then down through her narrow, wet channel.

  There was a knock at the door. Nicole heard another gasp, and realized it hadn’t come from either her or Alex.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll, um, come back later.”

  The closing of the door.

  Nicole would have laughed at the secretary’s reaction, if she hadn’t been so damn hot she thought she might spontaneously combust.

  She reached to keep Alex centered, but he was already gone, having removed his hand and stepped away, staring at her as if just realizing she was in the room.

  She pushed up onto her elbows. “Don’t tell me that’s the first time you’ve done something like this in here.”

  His voice sounded grave. “Okay, I won’t.”

  Reluctantly she raised to a sitting position and swung her legs back and forth in an effort to burn up unused energy that, unfortunately, she didn’t think was going to be used anytime soon. Not with Alex looking like he was considering jumping out the window.

  She pushed from the desk and repositioned certain areas of her dress.

  Alex’s gaze followed her movements. “I’ll just go get those files.”

  WHAT WAS HE THINKING?

  Or, more accurately, what part of his body had he been thinking with?

  He’d left his office to collect the files from the shell-shocked secretary he shared with four other investigators, but ended up passing her desk in favor of the men’s room and lots of cold running water. He scooped it up and over his face again and again until his skin was numb.

  He stared at his dripping face in the mirror and reached for a wad of paper towels. Had he really been about to have sex with Nicole right there on his desk?

  He grew rock-hard just thinking about it, answering his own questions.

  Oh, yes, he wanted her. But on his terms. And what had happened in the other room had been on her terms. Nicole appeared to be into sexual power games. She was a woman who could never be happy with just plain sex in a bed with sheets and an alarm clock on the bedside table. She craved excitement, spontaneity and out-of-your-mind passion.

  And he’d been just a hairbreadth away from giving it to her.

  He mopped the water from his face, thrust his fingers through his tousled hair, then stalked back toward his office.

  “Do you have the files, Dorothy?”

  The secretary blinked at him. “Your…she…the woman you were, um, meeting with took them.”

  Alex pushed open his office door to find Nicole sitting in his desk chair going through the files in question. He crossed the room and took them out of her hands. “That’s classified information.”

  “Not anymore.”

  He glanced at her over the top of the first file. “How did you get them from Dorothy, anyway?”

  “Isn’t it funny how some women react to seeing another woman’s bare breasts?” She shook her head. “I could have asked her for the key to the company safe and she probably would have given it to me.”

  Alex grimaced as he walked across the room.

  “He’ll target the client in the file I put on top,” Nicole said, getting up from his desk.

  He scanned the term policy taken out by a high-end auction house set to sell off an impressive estate art collection next Tuesday. Interesting, but…

  “Actually something just occurred to me.” He squinted at her. “What if we were to fabricate a policy? I have a wealthy client who’s in Europe for the next few weeks so I know his house is empty. We could make up a story saying he bought, I don’t know, say, some of those Double Eagle coins that are making the news lately and is taking out a policy to cover them.”

  “What are Double Eagles?”

  “They’re uncirculated 1933 twenty-dollar gold pieces. There are only a few known to be in existence and they’re nabbing a king’s ransom at last check.” He tapped a pen against the folder she’d pointed out. “We could issue this fake policy then make sure it was leaked. Then all we would have to do is case the empty house and wait for D.M. to go after the literal loot.”

  “He’s too thorough for that. He’d smell a setup a mile away.”

  He watched her pick up her backpa
ck and walk past him toward the door. “Where are you going?”

  She stopped just inside and leaned against the wooden barrier. “You always ask this many questions?”

  He did when so much of his life and career hung in the balance.

  “I’ll see you later.”

  Alex stared at the empty air she’d left in her wake and frowned.

  See him later, when? At his apartment? Here?

  He rounded his desk and sank into his chair. The woman was trouble with a capital T. He opened his desk drawer to take out the D.M. file. Only when he reached in, his hand closed around something else instead. More specifically, a square clear plastic packet through the side of which he could see a bright purple condom.

  He opened the other four drawers finding different colored prophylactics in all of them.

  Holy Mother of God.

  He gathered them up and slid them into his pocket, only to find another one in there.

  He grinned. He had to admit, she had style.

  6

  THE OLD WINDUP CLOCK ticked the seconds away on the bedside table. Alex picked it up and stared at the face in the dim light from the quarter moon hanging outside his multipaned windows. After 2:00 a.m. and he hadn’t been able to close his eyes yet. After 2:00 a.m. and even Manhattan was quiet, the occasional police siren and odd car going by on the streets outside. After 2:00 a.m. and he hadn’t heard from Nicole since 2:00 p.m., when she’d walked out of his office with the promise that she’d see him later.

  The old bedsprings squeaked as he put the clock back down, then shifted into a more comfortable position on his back. The problem was that in two minutes he’d have to shift again because no position was comfortable for long. Not because he wasn’t physically tired. Rather his mind roared ahead at sixty miles per hour, going over the things he had said and done with Nicole. And driving him insane with the possibilities of what she might be doing at that exact moment.

  He glanced toward the window to the far left. The one that Nicole had opened just enough to let her damn cat out. He hadn’t spotted the furball so he assumed he was outside somewhere terrorizing the neighborhood, even though the food bowl she’d put out in the kitchen proved he’d been in to eat. Which was just fine with him. Nicole was enough to contend with. He didn’t have it in him to contend with her cat, too.

  Over his past four-month investigation of her, she’d had no fewer than three boyfriends. If the term “boyfriend” could even apply to a man Nicole went out with. Lover seemed closer, but even that implied a longtime commitment. From what he could tell, she didn’t know the definition of the word commitment. She met a guy—the first at a dance club, the second at a coffee shop, the third at an after-show party of an off-off-Broadway play—she dated him briefly, then she moved on like a restless raven looking for a better view on another tree.

  He rubbed his face with his hands then stretched his arms up over his head, closing his eyes. The thing was, while he knew a lot of superficial information, he knew absolutely zip when it came to the emotional foundation of the very sexy, very cunning Nicole Bennett. She’d mentioned a father. Was there a mother in the picture? What about siblings? How did she feel about the world at large, and family life in particular? Did a house in the suburbs appeal to her, or would she rather live in perpetual motion in the city, moving from man to man, flophouse to flophouse?

  Simply, she was the wildest, most eccentric person he’d ever met. Not above sharing a couple of her trade secrets with him by way of demonstration rather than telling. And not hesitant about telling him how she felt about him. Which was pretty much how he felt about her. Namely, he wanted to have sex with her so bad the mere thought of the possibility gave him a rock-hard erection.

  He’d had two relationships in his life. Serious ones. Then again, those were the only ones he’d had. While he’d sowed his oats a bit at NYU by sleeping with a couple of fellow students, casual sex had never been his thing. No. There was all that postcoital awkwardness. Rather, Jenny Callas had been his first girlfriend, from age seventeen until well into his sophomore year in college. Why had that ended? He rubbed the line of his brow with his thumb. Oh, that’s right. Jenny had broken it off when he hadn’t shown an interest in getting married and starting a family while he was still at university.

  A year or two after that he’d entered into a semi-arranged relationship with Natassa Hurley, whose Greek mother had met his mother through the church. Natassa worked at her mother’s bakery, was pretty and turned out to be pretty good company. But eventually she, too, had started talking marriage, about his coming into the bakery with her, and he refused to participate in the conversation. Now, a year later, she was married to a Polish guy and had a baby and as far as he could tell, she led a happy life living in the apartment above the bakery.

  Marriage. His mother sometimes asked if he had something against it, if there was something he’d seen in his parents’ marriage to scare him away from it. He’d answered her honestly. That no, he had nothing against it. But it hadn’t felt right with Jenny or Natassa. While he’d cared for both women, when he’d looked into their eyes he hadn’t seen beyond that moment. No tomorrow. No children lurking in there begging to be let out. Nothing solid or concrete on which to build a relationship that was intended to last for life.

  He sighed.

  And Nicole?

  Hell, if there was a model to be used for what not to look for in a wife, it was her.

  He grimaced, imagining how his parents would react to her.

  But his parents’ approval wasn’t all that made her bad marriage material. There was the little detail that she lived on the wrong side of the law. Darted in and out of the shadows that inevitably would one day not hide her well enough and she would be left facing serious punishment for her crimes. Her father was in prison, for Christ’s sake. How did you explain that one to your children? “Of course you have a grandpa, son, but he’s indisposed at the moment because he did something very bad.”

  What was he thinking? Nicole scrambled his gray matter in a way that didn’t allow him to think, period. For that reason alone he could never imagine more than a hot tryst with her. He couldn’t see them twenty years down the road, him wondering where she was, whose jewelry she was pilfering and wanting her so much that he didn’t care about either.

  But he did want her. So badly it hurt.

  The sound of metal teeth ratcheting then the feel of cold metal encircling his wrist where he had his arm stretched above his head let him know he was no longer alone.

  “Mmm. Penny for your thoughts,” Nicole whispered against his ear. Her hair teased the skin on his shoulder as she tested the soundness of the handcuffs she’d just fastened around his wrist.

  Alex didn’t open his eyes immediately. Instead he breathed in the spicy scent of her.

  She’d come back.

  In that one moment, it didn’t matter where she had been, or what kind of trouble she might have gotten into, or even whether or not she had broken the law. What emerged as important to him just then was that they use every last one of the condoms she’d left behind in his office.

  He felt fingertips walk over his erection through his snug cotton boxers and groaned.

  “Did you miss me?” she whispered, gripping him in her hand. “I think you did.”

  How could he miss what he hadn’t had yet? Instead, he was driving himself crazy thinking about getting it.

  Alex heard the sound of material rasping against skin and cracked his eyelids open to find her stripping from the boots, blouse and dress she’d had on earlier. The moonlight kissed her pale skin and turned her dark hair into a black cloud, making her look almost ethereal. Which was definitely not a word he’d generally use to describe Nicole Bennett. Sinfully sexy, unabashedly bold, uninhibitedly decadent, but never ethereal.

  He swallowed as he realized he’d been right about her not wearing a bra earlier. Her breasts were well shaped, not too large, not too small, and were pert and full, in per
fect proportion to the rest of her body.

  Then there was that underwear…

  Alex tried to reach for her, only to find that she’d handcuffed his right hand to the headboard. Using his left would be awkward at best, and make him look desperate at worst.

  She flashed him a knowing smile as she drew a finger around and around his right nipple, then tweaked the bit of flesh. “I figure after last night, turnabout is fair play.”

  Alex wanted to open his mouth to object, to remind her that he hadn’t abused the opportunity provided by her being handcuffed to his bed. But the truth was there was something dangerously exciting about being shackled to his own bed, unable to move. He’d been a cop for eight years and had heard his co-workers talk about the ways they’d used cuffs that you wouldn’t find in any procedural manual, but it had never occurred to him to use them himself outside of what was dictated by his job.

  He watched as Nicole climbed on top of the bed then straddled him, her hot bottom resting against the tops of his legs. Good God, she was going to end him right there and then. She gathered her hair over on one side of her head then leaned forward to tantalizingly brush her lips against his.

  “Mmm…I’ve been thinking about this all day,” she murmured, dipping her tongue between his lips and taking inventory before darting back out again.

  He cleared his throat, thinking he should say something that didn’t make him sound like a lustful moron. “And what did that day entail, exactly?”

  She pulled back a bit and smiled down at him. “There was this really hot, really uptight guy that I spent a good part of the time with.”

  He didn’t have to ask if she was talking about him. Uptight was his middle name.

  “And I’ve come to a conclusion about him.”

  Alex swallowed the saliva collecting at the back of his mouth. “Oh?”