Beachcomber (39 page)

“Just for the record, I did not romance you and kiss
you and screw you to get information.” His hand tightened on her hipbone. He leaned over her, his mouth grave, his eyes warm and apologetic and, yes, sensuous. “I did it because I wanted to. Because I couldn’t help myself. Because you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Because every time I’m anywhere near you I get hot.”

For a moment, as she met his gaze, her breathing suspended. For a moment, as she met his gaze, her bones seemed to melt and her heart did a funny little tap dance in her chest. For a moment, as she met his gaze, she believed.

But only for a moment. Unfortunately for him, she’d been down this route before.

“Don’t you dare try to sweet-talk me anymore!” Outraged, she sat up and shoved the lying weasel hard with both hands when he grabbed at her. Caught off guard, he toppled onto his back, then with a yelp slid off the side of the bed. He hit the floor with a thud, and for the space of a heartbeat Christy blinked in surprise at the place where he had been.

Then she shot off the bed like a rock out of a slingshot and bolted for the door.

“Goddamn it, Christy, come back here!” he roared, already scrambling up.

“In your dreams, asshole.”

Yanking open the door, she pelted for the great outdoors. At the precise same moment, Gary leaped out of the third bedroom yelling, “Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!”

28

“H
ELP!”
C
HRISTY SHRIEKED
at the top of her lungs as Luke grabbed her. Finding Gary square in her path had delayed her just enough to allow Luke to catch up. With a hand over her mouth and an arm clamped around her chest that, not coincidentally, also served to pinion her arms, he dragged her back toward his bedroom. Christy squirmed like a worm on a hook, but she couldn’t break free.

“Her sister’s coming,” Gary said urgently to Luke over Christy’s muffled cries. “What are we going to do?”

“Stall her. Talk about the weather. Exchange recipes. Hell, I don’t know. Improvise.”

“What do I tell her if she wants to see Christy?”

“Tell her we can’t be disturbed. Tell her we’re having a nooner.”

With that Luke heaved her kicking and squirming back over the threshold, shouldered the door shut, then dragged her on past the bed into the bathroom and shut that door, too. It was dark as pitch in the small space until he managed to turn the light on with his elbow. Blinking, Christy saw that the bathroom was the
twin of her own, right down to the fifties’ tile and pedestal sink. Hauling her a little farther in, he managed to turn the water on in the sink, presumably to drown out any sounds she might make.

Like the muffled threats that were being garbled by his hand.

It was abundantly clear that she wasn’t going anywhere. Christy quit struggling as she acknowledged that, giving the threats a rest, going still in his arms, hoping to lull him into a false sense of complacency. She was going to give Angie a few minutes, enough time to where she judged Gary might be talking to her, maybe even, if she was really lucky, with the patio door open, and then she was going to bite Luke’s muffling hand like a rabid dog.

And scream for all she was worth.

He was watching her in the mirror above the sink, she discovered as she glimpsed their reflections. His broad shoulders dwarfed her own slender ones, and his hair gleamed with the dull gold of an old coin under the overhead light. With his hand over her mouth and his tall body curved around hers, he looked like a particularly sexy mugger caught in the act of overpowering his victim. The only problem with that scenario was that she, the muggee, did not look properly frightened. Instead, she looked furious.

Which was exactly what she was.

And that was a good thing, because it kept the hurt that lurked beneath the anger at bay. Everything had been a
lie… .

Their gazes met in the mirror. Christy narrowed her eyes at him.

He sighed.

“Look, I’m going to take my hand off your mouth. If you scream, if your sister hears you, I’m going to have to tell her who I am and then she’s going to be involved in this whether you like it or not. Is that what you want?”

Christy stared at him through the mirror as his words took form and substance in her mind.
My God.
She hadn’t thought that far ahead, and if she’d carried out her plan the outcome would have been disastrous. If she screamed and Angie heard, Angie would come running. Getting Angie involved in this was the very last thing she wanted to do.

He must have read her reaction in her eyes.

“She’s your sister. Whether you scream or not is up to you.”

Watching her through the mirror, Luke slowly lifted his hand away from her mouth. It was clear that he wasn’t quite sure what she would do. She could feel his tension, feel the heat of him, feel the accelerated rise and fall of his chest, feel the way his weight was balanced on the balls of his feet in case he should have to take action. His body was muscled and strong against her back and his arms were hard around her. He wasn’t holding her tightly enough to hurt her, not at all, but she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon and she was left in no doubt about just how very strong he was. As she had thought before, those sissy curls and celestial eyes were downright misleading.

Just like the rest of him. She would never, in her wildest dreams, have guessed her laid-back surfer dude was a Fed.

More fool she.

“Go to hell,” she said very pleasantly to his reflection.

His mouth went wry. “Jesus, Christy, give me a break here. I’m sorry, okay?”

“Not okay. And get your hands off me.”

“Fine. Be as bitchy as you want.” He let her go and stepped back, though, Christy noticed as she turned to face him, he was careful to stay between her and the door. Sliding his hands into the front pockets of his jeans, he rocked back on his heels. “For the record, though, this thing that’s happening between us—it doesn’t have anything to do with me trying to get information out of you.”

Christy’s brows twitched together ominously. “There is no ‘thing’ happening between us. Not now, not ever.”

His eyes flicked over her face, and he sighed. “Do you think you could just listen to me for a minute?”

“Oh, absolutely.” Christy folded her arms over her chest and glared at him. “Go ahead. Tell me a few more lies.”

His lips tightened impatiently. “Okay, yes, I lied. I admit it. You tell me what else I was supposed to do. Walk right up and introduce myself? Not gonna happen. I’m an FBI agent, for God’s sake, and I had you under surveillance. And let’s not forget why: because you were down here acting as a bagman for the mob.”

“Are you trying to say that it’s all
my
fault that you lied to me?” She was outraged all over again.

“Damn it, Christy, what I’m saying is that I was just doing my job.”

“Oh, that’s original! Did you think that up all by yourself? That excuse is so old and so lame that we don’t even try to use it in court anymore. ‘I was just doing my job’ doesn’t cut it, not with me or anybody else.”

He sighed again. “Look, it’s not like I set out to lie to you. You were never even supposed to see me. If you hadn’t caught me on your patio, you never would have known you were under surveillance. The only way you were supposed to know I was here is if I arrested you.”

Christy felt her heart skip a beat. This was a possibility that she’d never considered. “Arrested me?”

“Yeah, arrested you. If we didn’t find DePalma by watching you, the next step would have been to arrest you and charge you with a crime. That works real well as leverage. To avoid going to jail, people will generally make a deal to tell everything they know.”

As she thought that one over, Christy started to fume.

“So,
are
you going to arrest me? Oh, wait, you don’t need to, do you? You already found out everything you wanted to know by sleeping with me.”

“Damn it, Christy—” He reached for her, but she took a quick step backward, dodging his hands. Anger was morphing into rage inside her, and this, she realized, was a good thing: she was now so mad that it
completely blocked the pain of finding out he’d been using her all along.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t you ever touch me again.”

Luke’s expression turned suddenly grim. “You’re determined to make me the bad guy here, aren’t you? Okay, fine. I’m the bad guy. But just for the record, I made it with you because I wanted to and because you wanted to and for no other reason. And just for the record again, this surveillance thing has worked out as much to your advantage as mine: I may have gotten a little information out of it, but basically I’ve spent most of my time saving your ass.”

“Oh, really?” Christy narrowed her eyes at him. “Did I forget to say thanks? Well, pardon me. My manners must be slipping.” She took a deep breath. She was mad as hell, but she was working to get it under control. She had to summon up enough calm from somewhere to face Angie and the others in a few minutes without giving anything away. Which would take some acting: Angie knew her pretty darn well. “While we’re putting things on the record here, let me just say that I think you’re a lying jackass, and if you ever come near me again I’ll cut off your dick and stuff it down your throat.” She smiled at him, a quick, angry faux smile that was really more a baring of her teeth.

“Now you’ve gone and done it: my knees are shaking.” Luke was smiling a little, and Christy realized, to her absolute fury, that he found her amusing.

“Are you
laughing?”
she asked.

“No. Absolutely not. Perish the thought.” The smile vanished from his lips, but not from his eyes. He came
toward her, caught her elbows, and pulled her into his arms.

“You’re beautiful, you know that? I’m crazy about you. Lying was a mistake, I should never have done it, and I’ll never do it again. Forgive me. Please.”

Holding her gaze, he bent his head, clearly meaning to kiss her. Unwillingly fascinated, she watched his eyes as his head descended toward her. His lids drooped and the bright blue depths darkened until they were mere rings around his pupils. Beneath the lurking smile, his eyes went almost tender… .

The tenderness she thought she saw—to say nothing of the
I’m crazy about you
part of what he’d said—almost softened her up. Until she remembered that the dirty dog lied as easily as he breathed.

“When hell freezes over.”

Infuriated all over again by her near-weakening, she punched him in the gut and, while he was still bending over sucking air, whisked herself around him and out the bathroom door.

“Wait. Stop. Hold it right there.”

Okay, so she hadn’t punched him hard, and he had a gut like iron. Next time he tried to kiss her, she would put some real muscle behind it.

“Get away from me, creep,” she said, running for the bedroom door.

He caught her around the waist and spun her away from the door. She ended up with her back against the bedroom wall, her hands pinned beside her head, and all two hundred solid pounds of him pressing into her, holding her in place. The muscled resilience of his
chest flattened her breasts, the hardness of his pelvis pinned her nether regions, and the solid strength of his legs lodged on either side of hers, rendering her all but immobile. To her annoyance, she discovered that the front of her was suddenly so hot that she positively welcomed the cool plaster at her back.

“Did I mention that you turn me on?” he said, looking down at her, still with that faint smile.

She gave him an evil look. Under the circumstances, the fact that the feeling was mutual in no way endeared him to her.

“Did I mention that I think you’re better in bed than Michael?” Her tone was sugar sweet.

His eyes flickered, and his lids drooped a little, giving him a sexy, slumbrous look that made her want to do him and kill him at one and the same time.

“Yeah, I seem to recall something about that.”

Kill him won in a landslide. “I lied.”

“You did not.”

The complacence in his voice made her grit her teeth. Only the thought of Angie possibly being within earshot kept her from ratcheting the encounter up a couple of hundred notches—like, with a quick upward jerk of her knee. Under the circumstances, though, she knew she needed to do her best to keep things low-key. Angie was the one who would suffer most if she lost it. She could not let Angie get involved in this.

Luke was watching her. She glared at him.

“You’re not ready to forgive me yet, are you?” he asked with a sigh.

“Believe me, there’s no ‘yet’ in this.”

“Fine. Be mad. I’ll still be crazy about you when you’re over it.”

“You can give the bullshit a rest. It’s not working anymore.”

“I mean it.”

“Uh-huh. You want to let me go now?”

“You gonna go for my privates with a knife?” An infuriating half-smile still lurked around his mouth. Sexy little crinkles surrounded his eyes.

“I don’t have one.” Unfortunately.

“Then I guess I’m safe enough for now.”

He eased himself off her, and positioned himself between her and the bedroom door. As she watched, he crossed his arms over his chest and negligently leaned one broad shoulder against the painted wooden panel.