Maddie and Wyn (25 page)

Hackles rising, Wyn glared. “What?”

“I just learned something new about you,” she shared, shrugging, her long bare legs swinging against the side of the desk. “You’re not good with awkward silences. You said you didn’t want to speak first, but you spoke first anyway to tell me you don’t want to talk first.”

Icy prickles dotted Wyn’s skin, and he felt his face turn to stone. Just as he was figuring out how the hell to chisel some new lips into his face so he could apologize yet again, Maddie reached out and grazed her fingertips against his stomach and kicked him back into life, allowing him to make eye contact again. Her sweet smile, the one that had dragged him just as powerfully into her world as her biting tongue and sexy nature did, remained, and he started to breathe once more.

“I didn’t say you upset me,” Maddie told him. “In fact, it’s kind of nice that at unexpected moments I can still learn new things about you.”

Easiness spread through Wyn again, and he flashed a fast grin. “I’m not good with silences with you right now, that’s true, but it’s not a flaw I have with anyone else. I’m pretty damned good with outlasting a perp,” he boasted. “I can wait out a zipped-lip suspect better than most, and I’m pretty respected for it in my job.”

As soon as those words passed his lips, Maddie’s eyes widened and her smile slipped away. It only took Wyn one second longer to process what he’d said.
Shit.
He swore while metaphorically kicking himself in his bare ass. “And I just ruined the moment again.” With jerky movements, he righted his underwear and pants and pulled both back up to his waist. “I brought up suspects and reminded you why I was here at your garage in the first place and killed the peace between us.”

Wyn took a step back and started to excuse himself, but Maddie reached out fast and grabbed his arm. “No.” Familiar silver sparks lit her eyes. “This time I’m not going to yell at you, and we’re not going to walk away mad with each other.”

“How do you figure?” Wyn crossed his arms against his chest and cursed as he realized his clothes were still half off. Taking a moment to swipe her panties off the floor and hand them to her, he yanked his tie around to the front and straightened his shirt so he could button it back up. He faced her head on as he dressed, unable to bend in this situation. “We each have a path we feel in our guts we need to take with this case, and they don’t seem to align.”

In a quick series of moves, Maddie hopped off the desk and put her sundress and panties back in order. “How about this,” she proposed as she pushed her feet back into her ballet flats, all the while her focus on him. “How about you stop going behind my back in your efforts to solve this mystery, and I will stop fighting every single suspect you bring to the table?” She swallowed hard then, and her jaw ticked just a bit, and Wyn instantly knew how difficult it had been for her to concede that point to him. “How about we work together on this case because we have a common goal, and we respect that each of us has knowledge the other doesn’t. We accept that we’ll each be more productive if we’re working together, sharing whatever we find, rather than trying to prove the other one wrong.”

Taking a step closer, Wyn, still so unsure of his position with her, clasped his hands behind his back. “I can do that.” She gave him something hard to concede, and he would do the same. “And what about…this that just happened?” His gaze briefly slid behind her to the desk. “Another one-time blip?”

In kind, Maddie took a step and put them less than a foot apart. She held her hands behind her back in a mirror of his and looked up at him with a new luminosity in her eyes. “How about for as long as we’re living together and solving this case, we stop fighting the attraction we have between us and just do what we want, no judgment, expectations or consequences, until it’s time to go our separate ways again. Can we do that, without drama, like adults?”

Wyn gave Maddie an easy smile, even as every invisible hackle on his body rose straight on end. “I’m not gonna say no.” He took what he could get and stole a fast kiss from her still way-too-red lips. “I have to go back to the house and change,” he looked down at his rumpled and torn beyond repair clothes and made a funny face, “and then I have to get to the station.”

“Sounds good. We have a deal.” Maddie walked him to her office door and waved. “Bye.”

“I’ll see you tonight.” With one last visual drink of Maddie’s sweet yet alluring-as-hell beauty, Wyn waved, unlocked the front entry, and strode out of the garage as if he didn’t have a care in the world. But in truth, like hell he was walking away from Maddie when this was over. He growled and snarled a bit at the world in general, but outside there was nobody to see or hear him so he didn’t try to hide it.

He had to make sure that, by the end of his time in her house, she didn’t want him to leave. Wyn had less than two weeks to catch a thief so that Maddie would be safe again. In between, he had to win over one very wary, still-wounded heart.

“Oh God, Wyn, please…” Unleashed pleasure coursing through her body from top to bottom, Maddie braced herself against the back porch stairs as Wyn drove his cock deep into her pussy from behind. Already a slave to the needs he brought out of her so easily, Maddie begged, “Fuck me,” and rocked back on his thick, hot shaft, moaning low as he split her folds and filled her to the root once more.

Wyn growled in response and covered her completely like an animal in heat. His hard, scorching chest and belly seared themselves to her back, branding her flesh in yet another way. He pressed his face in her hair and pumped his length in and out of her cunt over and over again, whispering at her ear, “Jesus, Maddie. I can never get enough of you.”

On all fours, her knees on a lower step than her hands, Maddie curled her fingers into the painted wood and planted the side of her face against the porch landing. She nodded against the wood, responded, “Me too,” and lost herself to the steady, deep thrusts of Wyn’s claiming while the last rays of the evening sun broke through the trees and painted an ever-changing sun-dappled mosaic across their naked bodies.

So quickly, only a day and a half into their truce, and already Maddie could not keep her hands off Wyn. Her only saving grace was that he seemed to possess the same weakness.

She’d walked across the field from the garage just moments ago, wondering if Wyn had made them dinner, as he’d done last night, or if manners and protocol dictated that she should make something for him tonight. Instead she’d spotted him coming out of the back gate of the garden, his shirt off, arms full of debris, sweat slicking his short hair and covering his upper body. The ruggedly masculine sight stopped her in her tracks. Wyn, almost as if he’d caught her scent, had glanced in her direction, and without pause had thrown the refuse in a pile and began striding emphatically in her direction.

As if he were a magnet pulling her to him, she’d started running, drawn in a way she could not deny. They’d met at the foot of the porch, where he dragged her to him and she’d equally aggressively wrapped her arms around him. He’d swooped down and crushed his lips to hers, and she’d kissed him back just as hard, all enthusiasm and no technique. He hadn’t seemed to care. He’d torn at her clothes and she’d ripped at his jeans, and within moments they were both naked and wet and hard and on the stairs. She hadn’t been able to make it more than three steps before she’d folded to her knees and told him she couldn’t wait a second longer. He’d pushed into her quivering channel and she’d groaned her acceptance of his invasion, needing this melding of their bodies more than she’d needed the comfort of a bed or even a roof over her head.

Right then Wyn ran his hands down her arms, buried his nose in the crook of her neck, and brought Maddie back into the present. He inhaled and hummed against her skin. “Damn it, you smell good.”

Laughter bubbled up through her middle unexpectedly, and she grinned against the wood. “I smell like motor oil and sweat.”

“No, it’s you.” He licked her neck and trembled against her, and his voice went husky. “You smell like heaven to me.”

A trill of panic rushed through Maddie’s system, all the way to her core. She reared up to her knees, dragged Wyn’s hands to her chest and forced him to squeeze her breasts. She needed them both to be lost in purely sexual heat. “Touch me.” Bucking back against him, she pleaded, “Touch me everywhere. I need to feel you all over me.”

Uttering an epithet to a higher power, he scraped his teeth across her shoulder and rolled her breasts under his hands, awakening her nipples and skin with the calluses on his palms. Maddie shuddered and slammed back against him, filling herself with him to the root. Wyn groaned and teased her nipples harder, plying the berry-red discs and tugging on the tips until they were tight points of screaming sensitivity.

Out of control, Maddie pumped herself back against Wyn over and over again, loving the way his thick length filled her past capacity and sent her aching for a release that would spin her out into the emerging stars.

Against her nape, Wyn spoke her name in a broken crack, and at the same time shoved his hand between her thighs and found her clit. With first contact, Maddie cried out and covered his hand with hers. She held him in place, but she needn’t have bothered; he flicked and feathered the tiny ball of sensitivity with his rough fingers, touching her so perfectly she’d swear he had silk covering his digits. Maddie keened and creamed for him more, slickening his cock and fingers with her excitement.

Wyn grunted and buried himself deep in her pussy. Next to her ear, he said, “I only have another second, baby.” He cursed and she felt his cock impossibly thicken in her body. “You’re killing me so good. Come for me, baby.”

As soon as he spoke, he ran his fingers down her slick folds, running them with shiver-worthy precision around his deeply embedded length, playing just inside her cunt, filling her with him even more. Her channel went into spasms, and she shouted and started to shake. Not giving her an inch, Wyn pushed his other hand down the front of her body and plied her nerve-rich clit like a string master playing a high-end Stradivarius and catapulted her straight into the sky.

Screaming his name, Maddie bowed back against him, threw her head on his shoulder, and exploded into a thousand pieces of perfect pleasure. Behind her, Wyn shouted something animalistic, shoved them both forward onto the stairs, and plunged into her hard. Just as her pussy clenched in a series of spasms all around his cock, he shot his load into her channel. For long moments suspended in time, out of her control, Maddie squeezed inside, as if pulling his essence from his very being, and with each clutch her pussy put around his prick, Wyn dumped more semen into the recesses of her body, soaking her inside with his seed.

Once they were both fully spent, under him, pressed uncomfortably into the stairs, Maddie exhaled and bumped him up off her. She created enough space to roll over under him, but remained trapped in his arms.
Oh my goodness yes.

Twinkles brought out the lighter shades of brown in his eyes, and Maddie couldn’t stop the tug in her heart or hold back from reaching up to cup his cheek. “Good heavens.” Looking at him, she blew upward, trying to get a flyaway hair off her cheek. “That was a fine ‘how do you do’.”

Wyn turned his head sideways and pressed a kiss to the inside of her hand. “Best I’ve ever had.” Brushing the hairs off her face for her, he grinned big and added, “And here I thought last night’s Olympic-grade session on the hallway floor was a thank you for making dinner. If I’d known it was just my stunning good looks that did it, I might have passed on the barbecue I already prepped for a meal tonight.”

Smiling back, Maddie lifted up, pressed a soft kiss to his lips, and grazed her tongue across his cheek to his ear. “There’s no reason we can’t have a hello out here and then a thank you inside later.” She tried to put a purr in her voice, and told him softly, “I always reward people who do a job well.”

His voice husky at her ear, he said back, “You’ll find I’m capable of all kinds of household tasks if this is how you’ll praise my work.”

Maddie pulled back and gave him her most serious face while looking him right in the eyes. “If you’re serious I have some wicked gnarly knick-knack dusting you could do.”

Wyn’s eyes widened for a heartbeat, as if stunned by this turn of events, and then he finally reared up to his knees and roared with laughter. Maddie fell into peals of laughter too, as much for how silly he looked kneeling naked on her back steps while laughing as for how her heart lifted over having a fun, giddy moment with him again. She’d missed this. She’d missed him.

As soon as that thought went through her mind, and a hint of pining hit her in the chest, a frisson of cold slid down her spine too.

Before a fear of being hurt again could take root in her, Wyn muttered, “Who the hell is that?” and shot to his feet. In two quick moves he tossed Maddie her clothes and jerked his head toward the garage while grabbing his jeans. “Get dressed. We’ll have company in a minute.”

Crap
. Her heart leaping into her throat for a whole new reason, Maddie scrambled upright and wiggled into her shorts and tank top, all while squinting toward the garage, focusing on a male starting to cross the field to her house. “Aidan or Dev would assume I’d be home by now and come straight here.” Maddie strained to see, but too many shadows from the early night sky shaded the man’s face from view. “And my customers know what time I close up shop.”

His lips twisting, Wyn raised a brow in her direction. “Maybe it’s someone new.” His frown turned fierce and a rough noise rumbled through him. “Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t respect your hours of business.”

On their timer, right on schedule, her porch lights flickered on and the floodlight on the side of the house lit the field. Yellow tinted light bathed a swath of grass more than a dozen feet away, illuminating a dark-haired, olive-skinned man in a gray suit.
Oh my goodness
. Unwittingly, the sight of the familiar figure raised the hairs on Maddie’s neck.
Wyn’s going to growl even more in a minute.