Fool's Gold (A sexy funny mystery/romance, Cottonmouth Book 2) (35 page)

You never wanted to find that the smile and
good humor of someone you knew could harbor the soul of a killer.
You’d bait a trap, thinking you had total control over the outcome.
You’d avoid facing it until suddenly other lives hung in the
balance.

Even then, a man didn’t always learn his
lesson. His lesson had started with murder in Cottonmouth. He was
learning it all over again in Goldstone. Anyone was capable of
anything if the circumstances were right and the anger burned hot
enough.

Anger such as Maggie’s.

“Don’t.” Simone stared at him with wide,
frightened eyes.

His mouth dried up. “What?”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

She couldn’t know the depths to which his
mind could sink. Especially the depraved notions he had about his
own sister.

“Maggie didn’t do this,” she said.
Emphatically. With a hint of terror.

He struggled to breathe. How could she read
his mind so easily? He took her shoulders in his hands, holding her
still. “I don’t blame her if she did. Bad things were going on in
her marriage. I ignored them.”

“You can’t blame yourself for Carl’s
death.”

He turned the statement around on her.
“Didn’t you blame yourself because of a fantasy and an email?”

“You showed me I was wrong. I still feel bad,
but then I think of what you told me.”

Christ. There was such an overwhelming wealth
of trust in her statement. Trust he wasn’t worthy of. “It’s not the
first time I’ve minimized a situation.”

“Hindsight’s twenty-twenty. It only works in
hindsight.”

Another time, he might have laughed. How
could he explain that a cop couldn’t afford hindsight? “I didn’t
come to Goldstone for a vacation.” One could actually say he’d been
running away. Like Simone. Like everyone else in Goldstone.

“Why are you here then?”

He steeled himself, then gave her a
confession he’d given to no one else. “I let a friend get
murdered.”

“Did you kill him?”

He rubbed her arms almost absently. “You know
that’s not what I meant. He was killed. It was preventable if I’d
been paying attention the way a cop is supposed to.”

She put a hand to his cheek. “I think you did
everything in your power. I
know
you did.”

If only things were that simple. In Simone’s
world, maybe they were. “The truth is that I didn’t.”

“If you didn’t kill him, and you didn’t know
he was going to be killed, then it isn’t your fault.”

“Simone—”

She stopped him with a soft kiss. “You can’t
save everyone from the bad things that will happen to them, Brax. I
wish I hadn’t written that fantasy. But I’m not sure Carl would be
alive even if I hadn’t. And I’m not sure your friend would be alive
if you’d done anything different. You can’t be sure either.”

Just as Teesdale couldn’t save an
eight-year-old girl. But he could save his own child. And he’d done
it by coming to Goldstone and giving her a safer life.

“You can only do your best, and I know
without a doubt that’s exactly what you did. But you can’t do your
job if you blame yourself for things you can’t control.”

He knew that. It was damn near the same thing
he’d been telling himself.

“I know you
know
that,” she said,
though he hadn’t said anything. “But you don’t believe it.”

“Are you some sort of mind reader?”

She put her face to his chest and shook her
head. “No. But you tend to think like me. So I’m telling you the
same stuff I always tell myself.”

They were alike? Sweet, innocent Simone? And
him? “It was my job, Simone, and I failed.” Christ, how did she get
him to admit these things aloud? “Your guilt over that fantasy and
what I did are two completely different things.”

She looked at him, then whispered, “Are
they?”

He opened his mouth to shoot off a quick
retort. She gently covered his lips with her palm. “Think before
you say it. Is the guilt, not the circumstance, really that
different?”

Asked that way, he suddenly wasn’t so
sure.

She must have seen that uncertainty in his
eyes. Or read his mind again. “Don’t answer now,” she said. “Just
think. Very carefully.”

He tipped her chin up and lightly kissed her
nose. “I’ll think.” He would. Later. When he knew what had happened
to Carl. For now, the revelation eased something deep inside him.
Her simple acceptance of his biggest mistake was more than he’d
believed possible.

Simone smiled, flipping his heart with her
dazzle. “Let’s talk about Maggie and the ridiculous notion that she
pushed Carl.”

“I don’t—”

She ignored him. “You know, if Maggie was
angry, she’d have shot Carl right then and there, not followed him
up a mountain trail looking for a perfect place to push him
off.”

Jesus, the way her mind worked. Icy logic
confirming exactly what he wanted to hear.

“And she wouldn’t have risked that Carl might
not be dead when he hit the bottom.”

Brax stared at her.

“If you’re really, really angry, you just
want them dead and you don’t care about making it look like it was
an accident.”

He blinked.

“That’s why the death penalty doesn’t work.
Because people don’t think first, they just act. At least most of
the time.”

“You scare me, Miss Chandler.” She made him
hot, actually, the way she smelled, the way her mind worked. Her
defense of Maggie. Her belief in him. She could turn any man’s
thinking around, and so help him God, he needed that. Now.

“Someday, I’ll write a murder mystery,” she
told him.

Putting a hand to her face, he smoothed his
thumb across her cheek. “I think you write a mean fantasy. I
wouldn’t give up your strong suit.”

“There can be sex in mysteries.”

“Hot sex?”

“Oh yeah. All that threat of danger and lives
at risk. Very fast, very hot, and very sexy. Against-the-wall kind
of sex where they don’t even have time to get their clothes
off.”

He put a finger to her lips to shush her.
“You better stop right there or we’ll never finish this
mission.”

She pulled his finger away. “You wouldn’t
dare. My mother’s out there.”

“I don’t care.” He waited, his gaze roaming
her face.

“But you’d be embarrassed when we walked out
afterward. Humiliated even. She’d look at you like you were—” She
stopped, her eyes wide and bright with glimmering emotion.

“Look at you like you were what?”

She didn’t even seem to notice that he’d used
the same pronoun, turning the statement back on her.

“Like you were life’s greatest
disappointment,” she whispered.

Her scent screwed with his common sense. He
let it. He pulled her hand down to the hard bulge in his jeans.
“Does this feel like I’m looking at life’s biggest
disappointment?”

She stared at him through wide, disbelieving
eyes. More than anything, he needed her to believe. In herself. In
her power over him. Last night, her skin had glowed with
mortification after she’d lost herself in his touch, in his arms.
This morning he wanted to reward her with that same loss of
control, but this time he’d teach her its glory, see her revel in
it. At this moment, bad as the timing was, it was a gift he had to
give her. She’d given him something equally precious, her
acceptance and her trust. He wanted to drown out the sound of her
mother’s disapproving voice. She needed him. He needed her.

He pressed her hand, rubbed himself with her
palm. “This feels like anticipation, like I don’t give a flying
rat’s ass who’s out there or who hears or how they look at us
afterward. This feels like I’ll go crazy if you don’t do exactly
what that story says.”

She worried the inside of her cheek.

“Please. Put me out of my misery,” he
murmured, a hairsbreadth away from taking her lips with his. “I’m
begging you.”

She looked at him as if no man in her life
had ever begged for her touch. “Stand up.”

He did as she commanded, rising, giving her,
on her knees, all the power over him.

She undid his belt, slowly pulling the
leather free of the buckle, her palms resting on him as she gazed
up. Taking even longer to unzip him, she stretched out the thin
wire of his tension.

She tugged at his waistband. He helped her
push the jeans over his hips until she’d exposed him completely. A
groan escaped him as she closed her fingers around him, a long
heartfelt sound of desire and need. He gave up the last of his
control to her ministrations as she put her mouth on him.

Her cherry-red lips caressed his length until
they met her fingers fisted at his base. Then she looked at him
with a gaze drunk on her own power over him. He almost came,
hanging on only with the knowledge that it was too fast, that he’d
rob her of something she badly needed. Her tongue swirling back up,
she sucked the tip.

He pushed his fingers through her silky hair,
begging her without words. This time she moaned and clutched his
hips, taking him deeper, holding nothing back. The soft delicious
sounds in her throat vibrated against his nerve endings.

“You’re so beautiful.” The sight of him
sliding inside her warmth, then his flesh reappearing, wet with
her, the tip of her tongue as she drank from him. He lost himself
in sight, sound, and sensation, gave voice to it low in his throat.
“Take me to heaven, Simone. Please.” She’d cried out her joy for
him last night. He would do no less for her now.

His muscles bunched beneath her touch, a fire
built in his belly, then shot low and wide. His hips thrust,
filling her. He closed his eyes, grit his teeth until he exploded
in light and sound.

He called out her name, cried out to God, and
gave her his essence. She took everything he had, everything he
was, keeping him inside until his spirit floated back and reentered
his body.

He’d wrapped her hair around his hands. She’d
left marks on his body where she’d clutched him. He cupped her
face, and she nuzzled into his palm.

Pulling her up, he pressed her against him,
whispering in her hair. “Thank you.”

“You shouted.” She burrowed into his
chest.

“Hell, yes.” He’d do it again, shout out in
pleasure and exultation. “Nothing you could ever do to me, and
nothing I could ever do to you is shameful or embarrassing.
Nothing.”

She burrowed deeper and shuddered. Pushing
her back a fraction, he tilted her face until she was forced to
look at him. “Don’t take that away from yourself. Or from me.”

He was ready to battle the red stain on her
cheeks. Instead, she glowed, her eyes, her moist lips still with
lipstick amazingly intact. “That was the most incredible thing a
man ever let me do.”

“Let you?” He smoothed back the hair he’d
disheveled. ”I begged you.”

She rose on tiptoe to throw her arms around
his neck. “I’m special.”

He squeezed her tight. “You don’t even know
the half of it.”

* * * * *

I’m special
.

Simone looked down at Brax’s head as he
gathered the scrolls of her story, tossing the ribbons aside,
ordering them, then rolling them all backwards to force them
flat.

What they had just done was much more than
sex, more than taking him in her mouth. Brax wanted them all to
hear. Not some triumphant thing, as if he’d laid the homecoming
queen in his backseat. He’d wanted
her
. He’d needed
her
. He’d come for
her
.

“It’s all about me,” she whispered to
herself.

He turned, flopped on the bed, his belt
buckle flapping, then gave her a shit-eating grin. “Yeah. It’s all
about you.”

She had the feeling there wasn’t an
exhibitionist bone in his body. Yet he’d cried out for her. He
didn’t care that anyone heard.

He fluttered the pages at her. “I’ll take
these with me to go over them more fully. You gonna be all right
with Mommie—your mother?”

She snorted. In spite of Ariana. Maybe
because
of Ariana. “I’m going with you.”

“Not.”

She braced her hands on his shoulders and
climbed onto his lap. “For sure.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“You think Carl’s killer is skulking around
the scene of the crime?”

“They always come back.”

She rubbed noses with him. “You’re afraid my
fantasy will be your undoing, and you’ll have to have me six times
on the way up there.”

“You’re already my undoing. I let you blow me
while your mother was sitting out in the living room. And I’ve got
a feeling trailer doors are very thin.”

They were. Little better than wallpaper. She
nibbled his lip. “Yeah. You
begged
me to blow you.”

It was crass. It was crude. It was
exhilarating. What she’d done. Sex play. Love talk. She’d never
been comfortable with any of it. Except on paper. Always
inadequate. Always wondering about the performance. But not with
Brax.

“And you were so easy,” she added.

“You were too damn good. I couldn’t help
myself. Think your mother will understand?”

She should have been horrified at what they’d
done. At least a little embarrassed.

Instead, she still tasted him, still felt the
throb of him in her mouth, the bite of his fingers against her
scalp at the moment he filled her, his wholly animal cry that
lifted her above herself.

Her mother would understand all right. Brax
had staked a claim. He’d drawn a line in the sand, shouted his
emotions to the world with an “Ah, God” and an “Oh Jesus” as if he
were really saying,
Your daughter is the most beautiful perfect
creature I’ve ever touched or wanted and I’m damn well going to let
you know. Take that, Ariana Chandler
.

“Let me go with you, Brax.” She wasn’t silly
enough to think that what he’d done for her was love. But it was
equally as important, and she wouldn’t willingly let Brax leave her
side until the day his vacation ended.