Under the Surface (28 page)

“Wow,” she managed, and cleared her throat. “Congratulations to him. What does he plan to do with it?”

Lyle smiled. “He's going to open a welding business. Or a strip club. He's not sure which.” A laugh, then, “Jesus, Evie. If you could have seen your face. I'm kidding. You bid for it, didn't you?”

She nodded. “Oh well. I couldn't really afford it.” She couldn't afford not to have it either.

“Should have let me help you,” he chastised. “I could see if he'd cut you a deal. He'd make a little money fast and you'd get the lot.”

“Brokering,” she said. “There's usually a fee involved.”

“Just doing a friend a favor.”

And there it was, the truth Matt had seen before she did. Lyle wanted to own her in every possible way. She let her eyes widen, like he'd just offered her the secret recipe for the hottest drink on the market, and tried not to gabble in fear. “That'd be … that would be great. I'll pay you back. I can't now, but I will.”

He gave her a courteous, old-fashioned nod, and stood up. This time he let himself out, back into the bar. Eve paused at the bottom of the stairs and watched him walk through her building, her crowd, her business, like he owned it.

Matt materialized out of the crowd, gripped her upper arm, and all but yanked her into the phone alcove. He was white to his lips, his eyes hard. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“He's not going to shoot me upstairs in my office with three hundred people in the building,” she pointed out rationally, and jerked her arm loose.

A hand landed on either side of her head as he got right in her face. “There are a dozen other things he could do to you, Eve, starting with taking you out through your apartment door without anyone knowing,” he said.

Her eyes widened. It was the most vivid display of emotion she'd ever seen from him. “I didn't think of that,” she said.

Matt visibly got himself back under control. “What happened?”

“We can talk about it later,” she said. “Two more parties are coming in.”

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

After Eye Candy closed, Eve powered down the lights, and found a small task force assembled in her office: Matt, Sorenson, Carlucci, and Hawthorn.

“Murphy approached you?” Hawthorn said without preamble.

“In the middle of the rush,” she said, rubbing her eyes without a care for her mascara. She was so tired. So wired, and she'd gotten them nothing they could use.

Sorenson got her notebook. “What exactly did he say?”

In response, Eve set her iPhone on her desk and opened the voice recorder. She pressed play, and the conversation broadcast into the office.

Matt stood beside her, arms folded, back to brick wall.

“I
was
listening when we talked at your house,” she said in a low voice.

“I lost ten years off my life when you walked up those stairs alone,” he said. His voice was equally low, his eyes focused on the iPhone as Sorenson replayed the conversation. “Do that again and I'll make ‘forceful' look like riding the carousel at the zoo.”

Certain he was joking, she stared at his unyielding profile, waiting for the tight line of his jaw to relax. Then he turned to look at her. For a moment of time measurable only by the atomic clock the real Matt Dorchester, the man locked away behind duty and honor and service, inhabited his hazel eyes, and she stopped breathing. He blinked, then disappeared.

Oxygen returned to the room, so she could speak. “I'm sorry,” she said defensively. “It was the best option.”

“The fuck it was. The best fucking option was to tell him that after some lowlife motherfucker nearly fucking killed you your domineering boyfriend won't let you do anything alone.”

Lyle got stupid when he was angry. Eve got impulsive. Anger brought out Matt Dorchester's Army vocabulary and a glare that somehow managed to be both ice-cold and white-hot.

She opened her mouth.

“Later.”

Her teeth clicked shut. “Yes,” she said. “Later.” She folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the wall. In the mirror on the back of the door, her jaw and Matt's looked identical, mulishly set.

Sorenson looked between the two of them as she took the phone from Eve and connected the phone to her computer, then transferred the recording to the laptop. “How did you get away with starting the recorder?” she asked, rummaging through a variety of cables in her bag.

“I said I was posting bachelorette party pictures online. Which I was. Then I started the app.”

“That's a really tempting offer,” Hawthorn said mildly.

Eve rubbed her forehead. “He's definitely got the upper hand. It's bad enough if that building doesn't come down, but if someone puts up a welding shop or a strip club, it sabotages the whole redevelopment effort.”

“You're doing great, Eve,” Hawthorn said. “We've got accounts, numbers, a history of transactions. We can track the outflows back into the Strykers. Just a little bit longer.”

“I'm fine,” Eve said. “I can do this. I can.”

“And nice job with the voice recording,” Sorenson said. “You were thinking on your feet.”

“It was Matt's idea,” Eve said without looking at him. “We talked about a variety of scenarios over the weekend.”

Sorenson gestured for Eve to meet her by the door. “How are you holding up?” she asked quietly, her gaze holding Eve's.

Her voice was too low for either Hawthorn or Matt to hear her words, but she could tell Matt got the gist of the question by the way his jaw tightened.

“Fine,” Eve lied.

“He's just doing his job,” Sorenson said.

“I know.”

The space between her and Matt seemed as wide as the ocean after Sorenson, Carlucci, and Hawthorn left. She closed her apartment door and turned to find him leaning against the door to her office. There couldn't have been more than ten feet between them, but the gulf seemed impossible to cross, and in that moment, Eve knew her whole life was crashing down around her ears. Lyle would win. She'd lose Eye Candy, and the East Side would lose support for the redevelopment bid. Worst of all, people were dying, and she …

She was if-you-don't-say-the-word-love-then-it's-not-real falling for a man so afraid of emotion he locked away everything he felt, everything he was, behind
layers
of fictional identity. Ten minutes earlier, for a split second, she'd seen the real Matt, the man suppressed under the bartender, the cop, the brother. The lover.

Now she knew. The sex, the laughter, the teasing banter, none of it was really him.

He leaned against the door, his fists jammed tight in his pockets, probably to keep from shaking her until her teeth rattled in her head, but she would have welcomed that, because it would have been real. Not this artificial, thrumming silence.

“I had to do it. He never would have given away so much if you were in the room. If we're going to end this anytime soon, we need that evidence.”

“Fuck the evidence. You don't ever go anywhere alone with him again. Understand?”

She saw red. For the first time in a volatile, impulse-filled life, she actually saw red with anger. “I'm not your partner,” she flung at him. “Or your girlfriend. You don't have any right to talk to me like that.”

She'd just swung at a hot button with a sledgehammer, but for once it wasn't an impulse. Her reward was a second glimpse of the searing, wild emotion lighting up his eyes. The long muscles in his forearms, exposed by the short-sleeved Eye Candy T-shirt, tightened, standing out in stark relief under his skin. In the still darkness of her apartment emotion poured from him in waves. It was like standing in a lashing, pelting thunderstorm, the air crackling with electricity, sheer human feeling buffeting her like slaps of wind and rain.

The white-hot threat didn't disappear from his eyes this time. She lifted her chin defiantly and waited.
Bring it on.
For once, for just once in their ill-timed relationship riddled with lies and fictional identities, she wanted the man locked away in Matt Dorchester's soul.

She wanted the truth of him.

In the next instant, he was against her. He trapped her body between his and the door and kissed her. The pressure of his mouth on hers, demanding she open to him, was near enough to brutal to make her gasp in fierce delight. She kissed him back, hard enough to draw blood from her inner lip. He gripped her wrists in one hand and with the other held her jaw and throat for his demanding kiss.

His arm slid down around her waist, lifting her against his hard torso to walk into the bedroom and fall onto her bed with her underneath him. Air rushed out of her at the sudden impact. The old metal frame squawked in protest but held. Again he trapped her wrists over her head and with his free hand he yanked at the tie of her wrap dress and spread it open so she lay in a pool of red silk. His eyes were fierce and desolate as he straddled her, opened his jeans, rolled down a condom, and dealt with her panties with a swift yank of his fist.

She threw back her head in adulation. Then she couldn't talk because he'd shoved himself inside her, the impact of his thick shaft inside her and the pressure of his chest against her breasts forcing the air from her lungs. Her vocal cords turned the gasp into a whimper as the pressure sharpened to pain. She willed herself to stay open to him, and the edge softened into a swell of pleasure that rolled from her center into the pitch-blackness, where it melded with the tempestuous emotion emanating from Matt.

Every time they'd had sex, all she'd sensed from him was a firm grip on his control. Even in the most intense, heated, erotic moments when sheer masculine need seethed under his skin, he'd never let himself go. But now he was actually feeling—anger, fear, desire, a soul-deep longing she didn't dare put into words.

It was wildly, compellingly real.

She stripped his shirt over his head, leaving his carved torso bare to her hands. In response he shoved her bra to her collarbone and braced his elbows just above her shoulders to hold her in place. The searing touch of skin against skin brought a rough groan from his throat as he began to move.

There was no clawing at his back, no pitching and heaving under him, no sexy pleading. She gripped his biceps and lifted her hips to meet each thrust, every nerve ending in her soft channel screaming with heightened awareness. He pounded into her, a soft grunt huffing from his throat with each impact. It was raw, it was purely male dominance in search of release, and she loved every moment of it.

Emotion and sexual heat twined together and spiraled through her body, until, without warning, the tight fist at her core flew open and flung her into a star-spattered blackness. As if from a distance she heard her stuttering gasps of release. He buried himself deep inside her and shuddered, jaw clenched, to his own orgasm.

Long moments passed as he lay on top of her, sweat trickling from his ribs to hers, his breath gusting in her ear. Then he pulled away and went into the bathroom. She slipped her arms from the sleeves of her dress and curled up naked on her side, ribbons of pleasure fluttering against her nerves as she waited for him to return.

He didn't. Her stomach seized when she heard him pull on his Army running shorts, then lace up his shoes. “I'll be downstairs,” he said abruptly from the doorway.

She pushed herself up on one elbow. “Matt, what's—”

“Not now,” he said. Then he turned and left.

When the door closed with the faintest of clicks she understood. He might not be able to resist her, but giving in to her didn't feel like a respite from the staggering burdens he shouldered. Giving in to an impulse, giving in to
her
felt like a failure of character, a weakness. She might be his drug, but he hated the addiction as much as he craved the rush.

She loved him.

Being with her was tearing him apart.

*   *   *

He got as far as the top of the spiral staircase before his knees gave way. His palm slipped on the wrought iron banister, nearly pitching him down the stairs before he caught himself and sank down on the landing. The edges of the posts dug into his spine, and he latched onto the pain, welcomed it, braced his foot against the opposite railing and shoved. Hard.

What had he done?
What had he just done?

You just made the worst mistake a man can make.

Cool air drifted over damp skin, triggering tiny flashpoints of memory—her soft mouth under his; the sharp, exhilarating tang of blood; the visceral, terrifying rush when he embedded himself deep inside her and everything disappeared, he disappeared, in an obliterating wave of infinite black energy. Into Eve.

So that's what it was like to feel.

He must have hurt her. No way he hadn't hurt her. He should go back and apologize. Except his mouth wasn't shaped around “I'm sorry” but rather words he could never speak, never take back.

The air conditioner thunked off, leaving only a ringing silence. No sound from the apartment. No sound from the bar below. Only the rush of breath and blood in his ears and that strange heaving in his chest, like a wild, caged thing gripped his ribs and rammed shoulder to breastbone like the bars of a prison, testing for weaknesses, seeking a way out.

He took a deep breath. Unfisted his hands. Consciously relaxed the muscles in his thigh until the pain grinding into his back eased. Control surfaced, familiar and comforting. He shaped his mind around it, felt the struggling thing inside him recede as iron gray steel reasserted itself under his skin, encasing his muscles and bones. His pulse slowed, and he got to his feet, found his shoulders squaring, his body once again under his command.

He took the first step, then the next. All systems go. She'd be asleep by now. They were both exhausted. Under duress. She needed sleep more than she needed to debrief what just happened. What he'd just done. In the morning he'd apologize for losing control and essentially brutalizing her.