Obsession (41 page)

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you. You have nothing to worry about.”

They were sitting so close that their arms brushed. Jenna turned a little sideways so that she faced him. Except for the flickering light from the TV, the small living room was dark.

“I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about my father. ” She picked up Nick’s hand and held it in both of hers, her slim, cool fingers sliding with wordless entreaty against his big, warm ones. Her heart stuttered a little as their eyes met. Despite the circumstances, despite what she now knew about him, despite the threat that he posed to her father, she could still feel the heat sparking between them. “What’s going to happen to him?”

“He’s going to prison.” His voice was flat. “I’ll tell the court how much his cooperation meant to the investigation, and he’ll probably get just a few years.”

Jenna felt faint. “A few years.” She lifted his hand to her face, pressing the palm against her soft cheek. His eyes narrowed. His mouth tightened. He didn’t pull his hand away, though, and she took this as a good sign. “He’s an old man. Prison could kill him.”

“Prison won’t kill him. Manucci will.”

She took a deep breath. “There has to be some way, something you can do. . . .”

“There isn’t.”

“Nick, please . . .” She turned her head so that her lips grazed his palm. Deliberately, she parted her lips against his skin so that he could feel the moist heat of her mouth. She pressed a soft kiss to his palm and touched it with her tongue. His hand stiffened, he sucked in air through his teeth, and his eyes went dark and hot. Electricity arced through the air between them, and she could feel her body quickening with anticipation. Holding his gaze, she whispered, “I’ll do anything,
anything,
if you’ll keep my father from going to prison.”

He moved then, leaning toward her, his hand tightening on her face as he tilted it up to him. For an instant his eyes slid over her face, seeming to linger on each feature. Then his mouth was on hers, hard and hot and fierce and absolutely mind-blowing. Her eyes closed, her lips parted, and her bones melted, all in a single sizzling instant.

Then he pulled his mouth from hers and stood up.

“Forget it, angel eyes” was what he said, in a low, rough tone, as she sat there gazing blankly up at him, her eyes dazed, her head spinning, her body aflame. “Even if I wanted to, there’s nothing I can do. This thing’s too big, and I’m not the only one involved here.”

Then he scooped up his jacket and tie from the nearby armchair and walked out the front door.

Two days after that, late on a Saturday night when the rest of the building was deserted, she and her father were huddled in front of the computer in the basement offices where their back files were stored, at Jenna’s insistence secretly going through every business dealing Mike had ever had with Manucci. If there was any way to make any of them look legit in the eyes of the law, that was what Jenna was determined to do, and to hell with whether she got in trouble for it or not.

Then two of Manucci’s goons had appeared out of nowhere, shoving guns in their faces, pulling Jenna away from her father and tying her to a chair. It was, she realized immediately, the real-life basis for the dream she’d had in Nick’s cabin. Manucci had gotten wind of a possible FBI investigation and meant to find out what, if anything, Mike Hill had told them. Once that was accomplished, he’d given orders for the pair of them to be killed.

At practically the last second, Nick and his team had shown up and blown the goons away.

Nick had untied her as Mike, who had collapsed and was lying in a pool of what turned out not to be his own blood, was surrounded by frantic agents. By the time Nick got her free and she was able to run to her father’s side, it had been determined that Mike hadn’t been hit: He had simply fainted. Then a medical team showed up and whisked him away, and she went with him. Mike was formally arrested later that night.

The last time she saw Nick prior to his showing up in her kitchen with his “deal” was at her father’s sentencing. It was the previous June, and he’d sat in the witness chair, unemotionally telling the judge that Mike Hill had been instrumental in bringing down Manucci and his crime family. She had been seated in the courtroom listening, and their eyes had met precisely once. By then she almost hated Nick—but still she felt the electric jolt of that contact clear down to her toes. And that made her hate him even more.

At the end of the day, the judge had sentenced Mike Hill to ten years, and she had collapsed in floods of tears. Not that it had done the least bit of good.

With her father in prison and the firm gone, its associates and clients dispersed, its assets confiscated, she had taken a job with a landscaping firm. The hours were flexible, there was no pressure or stress, and she had always loved working with plants. She hoped that tending living things would help her heal.

Then, on a wintry January day a little more than six months later, Nick had come knocking at her kitchen door.

Nick, whose lap she was presently curled up in, whose arms were warm and strong around her, who was right at that moment whispering soft words of reassurance in her ears. To be in his arms felt so good, so right, that once she would have wanted to stay right where she was forever. But now that she remembered exactly who he was and what he had done, she stiffened like somebody had goosed her. Her fists clenched. Her head lifted from his shoulder. Her spine straightened and she pushed herself upright in his lap. As he looked at her in surprise, pure fire shot at him from her eyes.

“You no-good, dirty, rotten son of a bitch,” she said. “Get your hands off me.”

25

Nick was still regarding her with transparent surprise as she whisked herself off his lap. Of course, as soon as she stood up her towel slipped—she’d forgotten that all she was wearing was a giant orange towel—and she had to grab at it to keep it from dropping like a stone to her feet. But she saved the towel, tucking the ends securely between her breasts and glaring at him at the same time, and never mind that her head was hurting and her legs were rubbery and she had just remembered the experience from hell. Actually, that was a plus, because it had provided her with a much-needed adrenaline boost. She felt totally herself for the first time in ages, and as a result she was so mad at him she could spit.

“For your information, I just remembered everything, ” she said through her teeth.

His expression turned cautious. He leaned back in the chair, his posture maddeningly relaxed as he looked up at her. “Did you now?”

“You said I’d be perfectly safe. You said you’d make sure of it. You said I would never even set eyes on Ed.” She would have stomped her foot if she hadn’t been afraid of dislodging the towel. Instead, she gripped it tighter and glared at him. “What you didn’t say was that people were going to be messing with my mind. You lying
jackass
.”

Infuriatingly, he smiled.

“Welcome back, angel eyes,” he said softly.

As the endearment registered, Jenna felt as though steam should be pouring out of her ears.

“Angel eyes? Don’t you dare call me that. Besides being brainwashed, I’ve been beaten and tortured and scared to death and almost killed about half a dozen times now, thanks to you. That’s enough. I quit, do you hear? I
quit
.” She was quivering with outrage. “I’ve kept my end of the deal. Now it’s time for you to keep yours and get my father out of prison.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “And you better not have been lying to me about that, too, because if you don’t do what you promised, I’m going to run straight to a reporter I know at
The Washington Post
and tell him every tiny little thing I know about this top-secret investigation of yours.”

“Are you threatening me?” He not only looked amused, he sounded amused. She felt her temper shoot through the roof.

“You’re damned right I’m threatening you.”

Without warning, he stood up, his height and broad shoulders making him loom suddenly very large in the uncertain light.
Intimidating? Oh, yeah—
or at least, he would have been if she’d been even the tiniest little bit afraid of him. The thing was, she wasn’t. She now knew Nick Houston far too well for that. Glaring at him, gripping the towel just in case it should choose that inopportune moment to go south, she stepped back a pace. But only because he was crowding her and she refused to be that close to him voluntarily ever again. So what if her heart was beating faster now simply because, despite everything, she was discovering to her fury that she still wasn’t quite over that thing she had for Nick.

“I don’t blame you,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously, but he sounded sincere. The light spilling through the open bathroom door touched his golden hair; his blue eyes (and was their mildness deceptive, or what?); his long, mobile mouth; the strong, angular lines of his cheekbones and chin. The top of her head just about reached his chin, and the breadth of his shoulders was easily double that of hers. Scowling up at him, she had this thought: How unfair was it that her nemesis should be sexy enough to make her toes curl?

“You don’t?”

“Nope. But you don’t have to worry. It’s over for you now, and the deal stands: Your father’s early release is already in the works.” He reached out and trailed his knuckles along her cheekbone. Ignoring the way the warmth of his fingers made her stomach contract, she frowned direly and jerked her face away and took another step back. But that still didn’t put her very far away. She was not ready, she discovered, much to her own chagrin, to turn her back on him completely quite yet.

Some part of her—the stupid part—still wanted Nick.

“You better be telling the truth.”

His smile was brief and wry. “You really don’t trust me, do you?”

“No.”

“Okay, I guess I can’t blame you for that, either. Look, a lot of the stuff that’s happened I didn’t foresee. We were going to pull Katharine out while Barnes was out of town, and if things had gone down like they were supposed to, you wouldn’t have had any contact with him at all. You were just supposed to kind of hold her place for a week or so while she testified before the secret grand jury that’s been convened so we could get an indictment against Barnes to wrap this thing up. With an investigation of this magnitude, as high-level as Barnes is and as much dirt as he has on everybody in town, we had to make sure that he didn’t get the slightest hint that we were working to bring him down. Obviously, something went wrong and he did get wind of it. But believe me, I never thought, when I brought you into this, that you would get hurt. It kills me that you got hurt.” He took her hand, and she didn’t resist, although part of her wanted to. His jaw tightened as he looked down at the small, round burns on her arm. When he met her gaze again, his expression was stark. “When I heard you scream tonight down in that damned bunker and I couldn’t get to you, I almost lost my mind.”

Lifting her hand, he placed it against his cheek. Her heart picked up the pace a little more and her breathing quickened as she felt the warm prickliness of his skin with its hint of stubble beneath her palm. Taking a deep breath, fighting to keep at the forefront of her mind the anger and hurt and sense of betrayal that were what she knew she should be feeling, she still didn’t pull her hand away. She realized that she wanted—no, needed—to hear the rest of what he had to say first.

“I was ready to take the place apart with my bare hands. If they hadn’t brought you out when they did, I would have done whatever it took to get to you.” He turned his mouth into her palm, pressing his lips to the sensitive skin. Her breath caught. Her heart pounded. Her mouth went dry. It was a deliberate repeat of the way she had kissed his hand on the couch in her father’s house on that never-to-be-forgotten night when she had begged Nick to save her father from prison.

Which he hadn’t done. He had, in fact, kissed her and turned her down flat, leaving her both heartbroken and humiliated.

The memory broke the shimmering aura of heat and electricity that was building between them like a bucket of water to the face.

She snatched her hand back, folded her arms over her chest, and glared at him.

“Is there a point to this? Because it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere I care to go.”

“There’s a point.” He gave her a small, rueful grimace. “And you’re going to make me spell it out, aren’t you? Fair enough. Here goes.” He hesitated, and for a moment she thought he was going to reach for her again and tensed in automatic rejection. But he didn’t, instead thrusting his hands into the front pockets of his pants and regarding her steadily. “From the first moment I saw you when you came walking barefoot into Mike’s office, I was attracted to you. The more I was around you, the more I got to know the person you were inside the beautiful, sexy package”—here she narrowed her eyes at him warningly just to let him know that she was immune to his flattery—“the more I was attracted. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it, because I was working a case that involved your father, and anything personal between you and me would be a huge conflict of interest. That night on Mike’s couch when you begged me to fix things so he wouldn’t have to go to prison, I almost lost it. You were tearing my heart out, and at the same time I wanted you so bad I—well, let’s just say I wanted you bad. But I walked away because I had a job to do. And I stayed away, for the same reason, even though through all those months I couldn’t get you out of my mind.”

Her eyes were now clinging to his, no longer narrowed with suspicion but rounded with hope and vulnerability, and as soon as she realized it she immediately scowled in reaction. His mouth twisted in wry acknowledgment of her change of expression as he continued: “I knew Mike wasn’t a bad guy, and I knew how close the two of you were. I kept looking for an angle to help you both, and when I came across Katharine Lawrence and saw how much she looked like you, I found it. She’d been acting as an informant for us for months, and we only needed about a week of testimony from her without Barnes suspecting anything was up to wrap things up, but that was a very dangerous week for our investigation. I thought the best thing to do was put somebody in her place while she testified, so that Barnes wouldn’t even begin to suspect what was up. That somebody was you. I used your physical resemblance to her to give you what you wanted, which was your father out of prison, and I used it to get back in with you. And the reason why I did it is because I’m crazy about you.”