The Last Victim (28 page)

Just like being next to naked with him and having his hands up under her nightgown holding her by her hips didn’t embarrass her at all.

Truth was, she liked it.

“I got to tell you, you keep surprising me.” Garland’s voice was slightly thick. When she looked up to meet his eyes, she saw that they were hot. Her heart revved until it was beating a mile a minute. Her blood heated to boiling as it rushed through her veins. “Back there on the Ridge, I sure didn’t have you pegged as the type to go for sexy nighties.”

“I like pretty things.” She sounded maybe a tad defensive, because lingerie was the one area in which she could indulge her feminine side and she did. Her delicates were an antidote to the nearly androgynous professional look her work life demanded.

His eyes slid over her a second time, and by the time they met hers again there was a carnal gleam in them that made her want to start pulling her nightgown over her head and shimmying out of her panties. His lids had a sudden heaviness to them. A smile curved his mouth slightly.

“Yeah, me too.”

By the way he said it she knew he meant pretty things like her, and her bones turned to water and her blood to steam.

Swaying close, she smiled into his eyes.

It was the smell penetrating the dreamy haze that had prompted her smile, and had her hands sliding sensuously over his chest, that did it. The smell was what stopped her cold. The air that wafted around them was fresher and cooler than it should be, Charlie realized at last. Instead of popcorn and beer, it smelled briny and fishy, like the sea. The surface beneath her feet was firm but gritty. Sand. A
beach. Deserted, as far as she could tell. A sharp glance to her right found the ocean. Black waves tipped with silver rolled toward shore, surging to within inches of her toes. Overhead, the moon was as big as a saucer and silver, too, surrounded by giant tinsel stars that seemed close enough to touch.

Her mouth dropped open at the impossibility of it. She cast Garland a startled look. “Where are we?”

Then she remembered: this was a dream.

The negative shake of his head indicated that he had no clue.

“Romantic, though.” The smallest touch of humor was in his voice, but there was an underlying rasp to it that told her all she needed to know. Looking up into his hard, handsome face, she saw the hot flare of passion in his eyes. And she saw he was teasing her a little, too.

“Why do you say it like that?” Her breathing was uneven. Her body pulsed with sexual need. It was ridiculous to feel shy of him suddenly, but she did. To cover up, she went with her suspicious side.

“It’s
your
dream, Doc,” he drawled, and pulled her close. “I figure that means it works out however you want it to.”

Then he bent his head and kissed her mouth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It was the kind of kiss that Charlie never in a million years would have expected from him: gentle and tender, a tasting. A testing.

Her heart lurched. Her pulse drummed in her ears. Fireworks went off somewhere deep inside. For a moment she simply stood there, not breathing, letting him kiss her, letting him learn the shape of her mouth and sample, just sample, the warm wetness between her lips. Her hands closed on the front of his T-shirt and her wide-open eyes searched his face.

The kiss should have been a nothing, should have been a throwaway on the keeper scale of kisses, and yet it set her body ablaze.

When he stopped kissing her and drew back and opened his eyes to look into her face, Charlie finally remembered to breathe. She was melting inside, liquefying, and it was the most unsettling thing she had ever felt. No way should she be reacting like this to a barely-there kiss. She had kissed her fair share of men—really kissed some of them, too—and not one of them had made her feel like this.

Not one of them had made her feel as hungry for sex as an animal in heat.

“Doc,” Garland said. He looked down at her with what she recognized
as a predator’s unblinking gaze. His jaw was tense, his mouth unsmiling. Tall, hot, and dangerous as hell: Charlie knew it.
Knew
it.

In an instant, a thousand reasons why she didn’t want to do this chased one another through her mind. And vanished, blown away by a blast of desire stronger than reason could ever be. Want didn’t enter into it anymore. What she felt was pure need.

“Garland.” Hands still fisted in his T-shirt, Charlie went up on tiptoes and kissed him back, a hot, tantalizing sampling of her own that made her dizzy.

“Michael,” he corrected against her lips as she drew a little away.

Another thousand reasons why she needed to turn back now assaulted her brain. Calling him by his first name made it personal, signified a connection that she’d have to be crazy to form. This was the last guy on earth, or in heaven, or hell, with whom she needed to forge any kind of emotional bond. Any kind of physical bond. She knew that if she didn’t call a halt now, right now, she was stepping into a quagmire from which she might never be able to extricate herself. But if the heart wants what it wants, the body equally needs what it needs. What was happening between them was pure chemistry, pure animal attraction, and it was as impossible to resist as a magnet’s pull to the north. Their lips were millimeters apart now, but still she shivered, even as, deep inside, her body burned.

Maybe she still would have summoned the fortitude to turn away while she had the chance if she’d thought that what was happening between them was anything other than a dream.

His eyes held hers, waiting. The price for what she wanted was his name.

“Michael,” she said obediently, in a throaty voice that she scarcely recognized as her own. His lips curved into the slightest of smiles. His eyes blazed down into hers.

“Charlie.” He drew her name out like he was savoring the feel of it on his tongue. Other than that, his only response was to tighten his grip on her hips. His hold was almost hard enough to hurt, his strong fingers digging into her flesh, but she barely noticed and didn’t care. Her heart hammered. Her body was on fire. He might be able to take his time, but she couldn’t wait. Impatient, she let go of his shirt, slid
her arms up around his neck, fitted her lips to his, and slipped her tongue inside his mouth. Molding herself to the whole long length of him, she kissed him with an urgency that was a silent testimony to the conflagration he’d lit inside her. He stayed still as stone against her, letting her coax him, letting her tantalize him into coming out to play.

Until he did.

One minute she was touching her tongue to his, and plying his lips with hers, and pressing herself ardently against him, and for all the response she got she might as well have been trying to seduce an especially hunky statue. Then he let go of her hips to slide his arms around her. They stayed underneath her nightgown, encircling her waist and back, hard as iron and warm as a furnace against her bare skin as he pulled her even more tightly against him. He seemed to pause for a second. She got the impression that he was making sure he had himself under rigid control.

“You’re going to hate me for this in the morning, you know,” he murmured in a rough-edged voice that made it as much a turn-on as a warning. She shook her head.

“No, I won’t. Why would I?”

“I guess we’ll just have to see.” His eyes moved over her face, fastened on her mouth. Then his lips slanted across hers and he tipped her head back against his shoulder and took her mouth, and she was lost to everything except him, and the way he made her feel.

He kissed her with a fierce passion that made her blood sizzle and her bare toes curl into the sand. His mouth was hard and hot and demanding, taking possession, taking control.

Fire shot through her body as he explored her mouth with a voracious hunger that was greedy and domineering and completely enthralling all at the same time.

He knows his way around women
, she thought,
and it shows
.

She kissed him back as if she would die if she didn’t. Her senses went into instant meltdown. The hot spiral of arousal that had been building inside her for what seemed like days spun into a blazing whirlwind that threatened to consume her in the flames. As they kissed, lightning struck and thunder rolled, and Charlie felt herself being swept away by a blistering storm of passion that was like nothing she had ever experienced.

Those experts in sexual attraction, the French, have an expression:
coup de foudre
. Thunderbolt. That’s what she felt. He was kissing her like he could never get enough of her mouth, and for her the heavens split and the earth shuddered, and everything she had ever thought she knew about the depth and breadth and height of her own capacity for sexual desire flew out the window.

She saw now that as far as her own sexuality was concerned, she had never had a clue. Something about
him
—his kiss, his touch, the feel of his body against hers, she didn’t know—roused her to a fever pitch of excitement. He kissed her, and she burned for him. She lusted for him. She craved him.

His mouth was fierce on hers. His tongue staked bold possession. She kissed him back with abandon. She loved the taste of him, the heat of his mouth, the feel of his body against hers.

By the time she pulled her mouth from his, she was shaking. Her knees had gone weak and the hot rhythmic throbbing deep inside her body was too urgent to ignore.

“Michael. Let me go.”

His eyes opened, narrowed, and he looked down at her with a frown that couldn’t quite mask the hungry glint in his eyes.

“Getting cold feet, Doc?” His face was hard and tight with passion, and a faint flush rode his cheekbones as she unlocked her hands from around his neck and set her hands against his chest and pushed a little away from him. Calling her “Doc” was, she felt, an effort to distance himself from the attraction blazing between them now that he thought she was calling a halt. He didn’t quite let her go—she remembered his concern about that—but he did loosen his grip enough that she could put a few inches between them. His next question was a growling taunt: “Ready to turn tail and run already?”

She shook her head. Not in a million years. “No.”

Then she did what she had been meaning to do all along: grasped the hem of her nightgown and pulled it up over her head. When it was off, when she was naked except for her panties, she dropped the gossamer flutter of blue to the sand. The sea breeze caressed her skin. Glancing down, she saw that, bathed in silvery moonlight, she looked slender and pale. Her breasts stood up full and firm, with her nipples proudly erect. His hands were big and dark against the suppleness of
her waist. The delicate triangle of blue clinging to her hips was the only interruption to the long slim line of her hips and legs.

If this was her dream, her sexual fantasy, she wasn’t going to be half-assed about it. She would have what she wanted, and she would have it all.

His eyes were riveted on her. They were hot and dark as they roamed her body. That perfect masculine mouth of his firmed into a hard, sensuous line.

“You’re beautiful.” She could feel his tension in his hands gripping her waist, and see it in the bunched muscles of his powerful arms, and hear it in the guttural undertone to his voice. “I’ve been imagining you like this since the moment I first laid eyes on you.”

Remembering the steely-eyed, honey-voiced convict chained across the table from her, she shivered, then put up her chin. “You think I didn’t know?”

His mouth quirked. His eyes met hers with tender mockery. “You were a real ball-buster. Sexy as hell, though. If you knew, why didn’t you run away screaming?”

Charlie gave a delicate shrug. “I wanted to psychoanalyze the heck out of you. Plus, I had a lot of faith in those shackles.”

He laughed, looking like the sound was surprised out of him. Then he pulled her toward him. Charlie’s heart hammered and her breath caught and her body went up in flames.

She caught just a glimpse of his eyes, glittering with the thrilling promise of what was to come, before his arms closed around her. Then the two of them were kissing and her hands were moving up under his T-shirt to slide over the taut muscles and warm, sleek skin of his back and he was scooping her up and then sinking down with her onto the sand. It was soft and warm and faintly damp, the perfect mattress. She felt it give beneath her even as she surged against him. He rolled onto his back and pulled her on top of him, to protect her from the ground, she thought, until his mouth on hers stopped her from thinking at all. He kissed her like he was never going to get enough of her mouth. The feel of his hot, strong body beneath hers drove her wild. Then his hands closed on her rib cage and he lifted her a few inches higher. His mouth, scalding hot and hungry, slid down
her throat and over the upper slopes of her breast in search of her nipple.

She waited with breathless anticipation. His lips were crawling over her skin. He was taking his time, taking it slow. Closing her lips on a groan, she buried her hands in the tawny thickness of his hair.

“I want you,” he said in a voice that was like nothing she had ever heard from him before.

She wanted him, too. So much that she could no longer form words, or get them out. So much that she felt everything in the world that wasn’t connected to sex and him start to spin away.

“Michael,” she breathed, writhing against him shamelessly as every single inhibition she had ever possessed fell away. She needed him to hurry, needed him to …

A sound jolted her. It was loud. Shrill. Intrusive. Charlie’s eyes snapped open as abruptly as if someone had slapped her in the face. For a moment she simply lay there, blinking dazedly into the dark, not knowing quite where she was or what was happening. She was breathing in ragged little gasps. Her legs moved restlessly, and her body burned. She felt hot all over, like she had a fever. Her lips felt swollen and tingly. So did her breasts. Deep inside, she felt a desperate wanting. She throbbed. She quaked.

Oh, God, Michael’s—no,
Garland’s
—mouth had been just about to close over her nipple. Even now, awake, she wanted it there so badly that her back was arching up as if to offer it to him.