Obsession (27 page)

There was no doubt that he wanted her. His body was aroused. She could feel the physical evidence of it against her with absolutely no possibility of mistake. In fact, every muscle in his body felt rigid. But all of a sudden he wasn’t doing anything about it. Instead, he was holding himself perfectly still, apparently engaged in some kind of inner battle that she could only guess at.

“Let me go then,” she said, the words a challenge.

His eyes slid over her face, stopped at her lips, lingered. Her mouth went dry. Her heart raced like she had been running for miles. Of its own accord, her chin tilted up just the smallest fraction. Her lips parted in silent invitation.

His eyes gleamed hotly down at her.

“You make it sound easy.” The wryness in his voice was matched by the slight curve of his mouth.

Before she could even start to puzzle out the whys and wherefores of that, his head dipped and his mouth was on hers again.

The carnality of the kiss made her dizzy. His mouth moved on hers with a fierce, hot urgency that made her go all soft and shivery inside. She forgot everything but him as passion exploded between them like an incendiary device. He slanted his mouth over hers and slid his tongue between her lips and pushed a thigh between hers and in general pretty much succeeded in rocking her world. He knew what he was doing, knew how to tantalize, how to thrill, and he had her near mindless and panting and moving urgently against him in response. Her body quaked and her breasts swelled and her back arched as she kissed him back with escalating desire.

“I want you,” he whispered as he let go of her hands at last to wrap his arms around her. They were strong and hard as they pulled her closer yet. His hands felt big and warm through her wet T-shirt as they splayed across her back. Heart pounding, pulse racing, still kissing him for all she was worth, she slid her hands with sensuous pleasure over the smooth, satiny skin of his shoulders and back. His skin was warm and faintly damp with rain and, she thought, perspiration. The underlying muscles were toned and strong and so unmistakably, blatantly alpha male that her insides turned to jelly even as the few tiny, remaining functional synapses in her brain fired feebly.

All this mind-blowing sizzle was coming from somewhere, and never mind that he knew how to kiss and knew his way around a woman’s body. That wasn’t it—or, at least, that wasn’t all. There was a pent-up quality to it, an aching, abiding need that made her think what was happening had been a long time coming.

The question flared in her brain again, but then his hand found her breast and every last vestige of rational thought she possessed vanished in an avalanche of fiery longing. Her breath caught. Her throat went dry. Her heart threatened to slam its way out of her chest.

Murmuring her pleasure into his mouth, she wrapped her arms around his neck and threaded her fingers through the silky curls at his nape and clung for all she was worth.

The only thing she knew for sure about him, she thought hazily, was this: She wanted to get naked with him in the worst possible way. And right now that was all that really mattered.

His hand burned through her wet T-shirt, causing her nipple to tighten and butt up into his palm while heat rocketed through her body. Arching up into that caressing hand, kissing him as if she’d die if she didn’t, she barely noticed when his caressing hand froze and he suddenly stiffened.

Then he pulled his mouth from hers and lifted his head.

“
Shit,”
he said, even as, with deliberate sensuousness, she ran her lips along the bristly, faintly salty line of his jaw.

This was sufficiently surprising that her eyes blinked open and she quit kissing him. The moon had clearly retreated behind the curtain of clouds again, because their surroundings were dark with shadow. As far as she could tell, the rain had stopped completely. The wind was blowing harder than before. Although they could barely feel it, deep in the sheltering woods as they were, she could hear the rush of it through the leaves high overhead. The woodland chorus trilled insistently on.

He was breathing hard. His body, hot and hard with desire for her, covered hers almost completely. His hand rested heavily on her breast, cupping it possessively.

But suddenly his attention was elsewhere.

“What?” she asked. He was, she saw, staring back the way they had come. Lying on her back as she was, she couldn’t see what he was looking at without doing some serious damage to her neck, but from the hardening of his jaw and the grim set of his mouth, something was up. Her heart still pounded. Her body still quaked. Physically, she was definitely still with the program. But all of a sudden she remembered that the world—at least,
her
world—was fraught with uncertainty and danger.

And he was looking through the woods like some of it had just landed on their doorstep.

He flicked a glance down at her just as her arms unwound themselves from around his neck.

“We’ve got company.” His tone was abrupt. His hand left her breast and he eased himself off her.

“Who?” Her voice was sharp with fear. Looking around, she saw nothing but darkness and trees.

“Come on.”

He was on his feet now, reaching a hand down to help her up. She took it, scrambling up beside him, suddenly cold to the bone as she followed his gaze to find herself looking at—two round, bobbing lights, each about the size of a baby aspirin. Flashlights. On this side of the road, coming at them through the trees. The pale beams cut through the night-dark forest in slow, sweeping strokes, illuminating trees and foliage and the shiny, wet leaves that seemed to cover every inch of ground.

Watching them come, she started to shiver. Her instincts screamed
run,
but Dan wasn’t moving. Her hold on his hand tightened, and in response his fingers curled tightly around hers, and he pulled her protectively close to his side. Breathing hard, heart racing, she leaned against his muscular warmth, clutching his hand as if it were a lifeline. Her eyes were all on the oncoming flashlights—until it occurred to her that Dan wasn’t moving or making any kind of potentially defensive preparations. Motionless as the thick tree trunks around them, he was just standing there watching the flashlights—and whoever was holding them—approach. His face could have been carved from stone.

“You know, don’t you? You know who they are.” Her eyes were wide as they met his. Her voice was shrill with the beginning of panic. She sucked in air, grabbed his arm, shook it.
“Tell me the truth.”

“You don’t need to be afraid.” His voice was low and soothing. His arm encircled her waist, pulling her up against his chest. His hand came up to slide along her cheek. As she stared up at him, aghast, he dropped a quick, hard kiss on her mouth. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Trust me.”

“No,” she said, almost frantic now as she realized that the flashlights were only yards away. Her pulse pounded. Her stomach clenched. The taste of fear—sour as vinegar, as she had recently learned—was in her mouth. “I don’t.”

A single wild look around told her that she was almost out of time. She could see the tall, dark silhouettes of the men holding the flashlights now. Clearly, this was her last chance to run. She pushed at his chest in a desperate attempt to free herself, only to realize that he had her fast.

“What are you doing?” she cried even as she struggled to free herself. Terror dried her throat, set her heart to pumping wildly. “Dan—”

“It’s going to be okay,” he said.

And then the men reached them, and it was too late.

When Katharine awoke the next morning, it was almost ten. She was feeling much better. Stronger, calmer, more at ease with herself and the world. Examining her reflection in the bathroom mirror of her room in the Embassy Suites Hotel, where Dan had driven her last night by mutual agreement after explaining to the two men from the sheriff’s department who’d been behind the flashlights in the woods that the burglar alarm had gone off by accident, she was even able to reassure herself that the reflection looking back at her was indeed her. Now she remembered the drastic diet that had whittled away her curves, remembered getting her teeth fixed and her hair colored and cut. She even remembered making weekly visits to Mystic Tan to keep herself from looking so unfashionably pale. If yesterday’s lapse had been some kind of weird amnesia, well, at least it had been temporary and easily cured.

A good night’s sleep had worked wonders. It had allowed her to see that her fears had been nothing more than the product of a blow to the head coupled with the terrible trauma she had suffered. Having a dear friend murdered in front of her in combination with being attacked and terrorized (twice) in her own home would be enough to send most anybody off the rails.

But now she was back, restored, whole. She could even breathe better through her nose, although she meant to keep the bandage across the bridge in place until it was thoroughly healed.

She showered, blew her hair dry, put on her usual makeup, got dressed in a turquoise tank and a pretty summer skirt that she retrieved from the duffel bag, and slid her feet into her elegant sandals. Straightening her ring, which was too loose because of her weight loss, she touched her ears to make sure the diamond studs were still in place. Then she fished her phone out of her purse and made a quick phone call. She got voicemail and left a message, then disconnected. The room came equipped with a tiny kitchenette, which included a coffeepot and packets of coffee. She made herself some.

Then, cup in hand, she sat down to wait.

It didn’t take long.

The knock on her door was sharp and imperative. Calmly she rose from the chair by the window, picked up her purse and the duffel bag, and crossed the small suite to the door. After a quick, careful look through the peephole, she opened the door and smiled at the two men waiting for her in the green-carpeted hallway. It was a good feeling to realize that she remembered them now. They were CIA case officers who, unlike most of those in the bloated Agency hierarchy, reported directly to Ed and acted, basically, as his errand boys. Her relationship with them was professional rather than friendly—she thought they might disapprove of the fact that she was sleeping with the boss—but she’d seen them on the average of several times a week for the past two years. Tom Starkey was closest to the door and, apparently, was the one who had done the knocking. In his early thirties, he was about six feet tall, broad-shouldered and fit in a navy blue suit, white shirt, and red tie, with a square-jawed, handsome face, a buzz cut that looked like it would be medium brown if it ever grew long enough to actually have a color, and a faint bulge beneath his jacket that, Katharine knew, was the shoulder-holstered pistol that he was never without. A couple of steps behind him stood George Bennett, maybe five years older and half an inch taller, with darker brown hair and a paler complexion but otherwise looking enough like Starkey to be his brother. It was the suits, Katharine thought, that made them look so much alike. Bennett was wearing a navy blue one, too, and a white shirt, although his tie had subtle stripes. Short-haired, well-built men in suits tended to lose their individuality if you saw enough of them.

Clearly, since that was the case with her, she’d been a resident of Alphabet Soup World for too long.

“Morning, Ms. Lawrence,” Starkey said, as politely as if he had not spent the past twenty-four hours searching frantically for her, which she knew, without anyone having to tell her, he had done. Ed would have been upset at her disappearance. When Ed got upset, Starkey and Bennett got busy. They had undoubtedly borne the brunt of his displeasure as well.

“Good morning,” she answered. Neither of them had so far cracked a smile, and she understood from that that she was far from being their favorite person at the moment. Well, so be it. She had done what, at the time, she’d felt she had to do.

Even though now she knew how unnecessary all that panic had been.

Starkey took the duffel bag from her and closed the door.

“This way,” Bennett said, and she followed him without even asking where they were going while Starkey brought up the rear. Because, the thing was, where they were going didn’t really matter. By coming back, by making that phone call, she had placed herself in Ed’s hands, and Starkey and Bennett were there as extensions of Ed. They were taking her where Ed had told them to take her, and she found she really didn’t need to know more than that.

Ed was her boyfriend. She could trust Ed.

Her room was on the third floor. They rode the elevator down, and then the pair of them waited like watchful nannies while she checked out.

“Mr. Barnes is in a meeting,” Starkey informed her as he settled her into the backseat of the big black Mercedes waiting beside one of the hotel’s side entrances. “He said to tell you he’ll be with you this evening.”

Katharine nodded, and he closed the door on her. He and Bennett got into the front seat. Starkey drove. The tires swished and the air-conditioning hummed, but besides that there was no other sound. None of them spoke as they pulled away from the hotel, which was an older specimen of the chain located in Garfield Heights, in the seedy section of Southeast Washington. The hotel was near the Navy Museum, which was a major tourist attraction, but it was surrounded by run-down apartment buildings, cheap ethnic restaurants, and discount stores, with a few pockets of restored older homes providing glimpses of the block-by-block revitalization that was under way.

She had chosen the hotel, she remembered, because it had allowed her to pay cash. Using her credit cards would have, she feared, brought Ed down on her within the hour. And she had needed the time to be alone, to think, to sleep.

The sleep had, of course, done her a world of good. Her disordered thinking had completely gone away. She was herself again.