At Close Range (10 page)

The conversation had gone downhill from there, Cassie remembered, and was surprised to find herself a little wistful for that first moment of meeting him, before things had gotten complicated by attraction and history and work. For an instant as he’d stood framed in the airport doorway, she’d seen him as a man rather than an obstacle. And in that moment, she’d like what she was seeing. Then she’d gotten to know him a little, and that liking had been quickly lost to irritation.

Aggravation. Dislike.

You like him just fine, that little voice said, aggravation and all.

“Oh, shut up,” she said aloud, and forced herself to snap out of it and get on with the work.

She keyed in her final few notes, and then lifted the class ring in the rubberized tweezers before she pushed away from the stereoscope and scooted her rolling chair back to the main table. Once there, she reached down beneath the table to grab a plastic evidence baggie, thinking to reseal the evidence before she turned to a computer check of class ring distributors and designs.

As she straightened, she caught a swing of motion in her peripheral vision and her heart jolted. She wasn’t alone anymore!

She didn’t waste time wondering who was there or how they’d gotten past the motion detectors in the outer room. She lunged out of the chair and grabbed for the SIG-Sauer she’d tucked into her waistband at the small of her back.

“Oh, no you don’t,” a deep voice growled. Strong hands grabbed her wrists and powerful arms pinned her body. She screamed as she was spun around and pressed against the basement wall, right beside the security system hub, which glowed green across the board, indicating that it had been disarmed.

The breath hissed from her lungs as the weight of her attacker’s body pressed her into the wall. Her heart hammered against her chest when she looked up into familiar light green eyes that told her two things.

One, her attacker was Varitek.

And two, he was furious.

The feel of Cassie’s lithe body against his did nothing to calm the rage that thundered through Seth. He grabbed the front of her wrinkled shirt and twined his fingers into the material, holding her in place so there could be no avoiding it when he growled, “What part of stay in your room don’t you get?”

He didn’t bother to ask if she was okay. She seemed fine, save for a few bruises from earlier in the day—yesterday now, he supposed, since it was nearing dawn.

Her eyes narrowed and she hissed, “You’re not my keeper. You might outrank me, but we’re in different agencies so I’m not even sure it counts. And you sure as hell don’t get to order me off my own case. The chief told me to work the skeleton.”

She struggled against him for a moment, then stopped when he didn’t budge. She bared her teeth. “I was following orders, Special Agent Varitek. Just not yours.

Which is the problem, isn’t it?”

“I’ll tell you what my problem is, you—” Seth bit off the words.

His problem was the images that had slammed into his brain the moment he’d realized she was gone. His problem was hearing an “officer down” call on the radio as he’d driven like fury to get back to the P.D. He should have been relieved when the call had turned out to be two uniforms dealing with a convenience store holdup, but the images hadn’t stopped. They caromed through his mind in a twisted blend of memory and prescience, vivid pictures of Robyn’s blood-smeared face and Cassie’s limp form sprawled behind her living room couch.

The farther he’d driven, the less he’d seen of Robyn and the more he’d thought of Cassie in trouble. Cassie being chased, grabbed, beaten, tied up, blown up, a hundred deaths that he’d seen on the job, echoes of a thousand crime scenes, a thousand victims’ families crying over their losses.

He twisted his fist in her shirt. “It’s not about giving orders, it’s about being stupid, Cassie. What if he’d seen you leave the hotel?” He jerked his chin at the green-lit security board. “That’s a bad joke. I had it disarmed in under a minute.”

He didn’t bother to mention that the unit’s designer was a former Bureau man who’d shown him the trick. He wanted her good and scared.

But instead she came right back at him, hissing, “And I would’ve had you flat on your back thirty seconds after you touched me if I hadn’t recognized you.”

He snorted. “Baloney. I’ve got weight, height and reach on you. You couldn’t take me if your life depended on it. In fact, I bet you—”

She snaked a foot behind his ankle, planted her opposite knee in his solar plexus and knocked him to the floor. His breath whooshed out of his lungs more from surprise than impact, and he lay there for a moment, sprawled half-beneath the wide lab table.

Cassie flowed to her feet with more skill than he’d expected from an evidence tech, and pressed the sole of her canvas sneaker across his throat. “You don’t grow up with four brothers without learning that quicker beats bigger every time.”

Before Seth’s rational side could protest, he grabbed her foot and twisted sharply to bring her down. He threw out an arm and caught her waist to break her fall, then when she grabbed his arm and parried with an elbow jab to his throat, he decided enough was enough. He pinned her squirming body to the floor with his full weight.

Aware that he was likely crushing her, he scowled down. “Quicker’s better than bigger, eh? Now what are you going to do?”

Her face was flushed and she breathed heavily beneath him, but she didn’t look the slightest bit cowed. “I’m going to fight dirty. Just remember, you asked for it.”

He expected a knee to the crotch, and tangled his legs around hers to guard against the move. But he was unprepared for her to reach a hand between them and grab his tender flesh as though she were going to squeeze and twist.

Shock and a roar of heat paralyzed him for the half second she needed, and she neatly reversed their positions so she straddled him, literally holding him at her mercy. But instead of flashing with triumph, her eyes darkened. Instead of crowing with victory, she hitched in a breath and a dark flush washed up her neck, visible in the bright fluorescent lights.

Seth knew damn well what she was feeling. He might try to tell himself that this was about the job, the case, her protection, but it was really about the two of them, about the fact that he couldn’t be in a room with her and not feel the heat of attraction that had bound them together since the first moment they’d met, when he’d been polite and she’d bitten his head off.

It wasn’t love at first sight. There would be no second chance at love for him. But it had been want at first sight. Lust at first sight.

At least on his part.

And looking up at her, at the way the pulse pounded at her throat and her tongue moistened her lips as he watched, he had a pretty good idea the feeling was mutual.

“Ah, hell,” he said, and reached up for her the moment she leaned down for him.

Their lips met halfway as though that had been the plan all along.

ONE MOMENT she was kicking his ass and the next they were lip-locked. Cassie wasn’t quite sure how it had happened, but in the first moment of contact, when she tasted his breath and felt the faint rasp of unshaven stubble, she knew it was the only way this could have ended.

During their wrestling match, she’d flashed back on an early lesson from her middle brother, Rick—the one entitled “What to do if your date doesn’t get the word no.”

She’d grabbed Varitek, not thinking of the consequences.

But in that first moment, when she’d become profoundly, intimately aware of his excitement, part of her admitted that she’d known precisely what she was doing.

Precisely what she wanted to have happen.

This, she thought as she opened her mouth to him. She invited his tongue, demanded it and twined the fingers of her free hand into his shirt to keep herself from taking the kiss further, taking it all the way as her body demanded.

This was what she’d wanted, what she needed. This was the flash and the flame she’d been missing with the men she’d dated since Lee. This was the power and the demand.

And, she realized as he rolled them so they were on their sides, hip to hip, meeting as equals, this was what she’d feared, because how could she not give up control to a feeling as big as this one?

The heat roared through her alongside need, alongside the desire to chuck rationality, to chuck her carefully constructed defenses and give in to the pleasure of flesh against flesh, strength against strength. Almost without her permission, the fingers of her free hand strayed from his shirt to his close-cropped hair and the heavy muscles of his upper arms. It wasn’t until he groaned and swept a hand down her back to her hip and urged her closer that she realized her other hand still cupped him intimately.

He reached down and urged her hand boldly up another inch, until she was touching the heavy, hard length of him though his jeans, which were soft with wear and time.

He groaned and pressed himself into her hand as though he was helpless to do otherwise. He loosened her shirt from the waistband of her pants and touched the skin of her belly, her ribs, reminding her that her spare set of clothes hadn’t included a bra.

Or underwear.

Knowing this was foolish, stupid, all the things she’d told herself before but that didn’t seem so important now, she murmured and kissed him, letting her tongue and touch encourage him, incite him.

Needing no more urging, he cupped one of her breasts in his palm and dragged his thumb across her aching nipple, setting free a shower of sparks within her system.

She bowed back on a wash of pleasure, and when he shifted to rise above her, she freed both hands to pop the snap of his jeans. The top of his member rose free from his briefs, and she teased her thumb across it, collecting a single drop of fluid, a pearl of want that spread across his skin, loosing the smell of sex. Of desire.

Too fast, a voice chanted in the back of her head. Too fast, bad idea! But she ignored it because it had been too long since she’d felt this way—hell, had she ever felt this way? She didn’t think so, knew only that her body was crying for release, for completion.

For Varitek.

Hell, for Seth. She should probably practice using his first name at this point.

Refusing to let reality intrude, she kissed him again, and gloried in his skilled touch at her breasts her belly, her sides, the pulse at her throat. It seemed his hands were everywhere, inciting, inflaming.

Need pulsed within her alongside the knowledge that they were separated by only a few layers of clothing, that it would only take—

Footsteps sounded on the basement steps.

Fear sluiced through Cassie, a cold dose of the reality she’d been trying to avoid.

She froze.

Holy hell. She was making out with a coworker on the floor of the crime lab.

The footsteps drew closer—several sets of them—and a man’s voice said, “The desk officer said she was down here. The security system’s off, but I don’t see anyone.”

The sounds passed into the outer office area as Cassie and Varitek jerked away from each other.

Caught, Cassie thought. They were so caught.

And then they were caught. Tucker stepped into the doorway with Alissa flanking him on one side and Maya on the other. Alissa’s honey-colored hair was pulled back in a workable ponytail and threaded through a BCCPD ball cap, and her pale eyes were wide with shock. Maya was darker and more formally dressed, and hid her surprise beneath her counselor’s veneer, while Tucker’s habitual untamed air was lost to amusement.

Cassie yanked her hand out of Varitek’s jeans and hoped to hell the others couldn’t see that his arm disappeared at the elbow beneath her shirt. “Hey, guys. I was…we were…”

She faltered, too aware of her friends’ shock and the fact that Varitek had barely reacted at all. He stared fixedly over her shoulder, jaw clenched as though he was furious. At her. At himself. She wasn’t sure, but his response tightened something sick and unsettled in her gut.

“I can see you were,” Alissa said, voice strangled. “And here I was thinking you were in trouble after you phoned. I called Maya and we decided to come home. You sounded so strange, like there was something going on.” Her eyebrow rose. “I can see there is. When did Special Agent Varitek get into town? That is Varitek, right?”

That brought him off the ground with something between a curse and a roar. He reached down and hauled Cassie up as though it was no effort whatsoever—leading her to wonder whether she’d won their wrestling match after all, or whether he’d let her win. She glanced down and was grateful to realize that her shirt was more or less retucked and his fly was fastened, though she wasn’t sure when he’d managed either.

Varitek shoved his hands in his pockets as though that would camouflage his physical state. “Yeah, it’s me. And regardless of what you just saw, we’ve got a serious problem. The Canyon kidnapper’s partner has surfaced. He’s graduated to murder, and he’s targeted Cassie.”

“Cass?” Alissa took a step forward as Tucker moved to guard her back. “Are you okay?”

“I’m—” fine she started to say, but Varitek interrupted.

“Her brakes were tampered with and her house was nearly flattened last night with her in it. She won’t be fine again until we find this guy. Hell, nobody in Bear Claw will be safe until we do.” He pushed away from her and stalked past the others. Once he was through the door, he turned back and glowered at her. “Stay here with your friends. Tucker, you’re with me.”

Then he was gone, his retreat marked only by angry bootfalls on the stairway.

Tucker glanced at Alissa. “I’ll deal with him and see what the chief has to say. You three watch each other’s backs, okay?” And then he was gone.