When I'm With You: The Complete Novel (52 page)

“I don’t deserve you, Clarissa,” Shane muttered, wishing for the thousandth time that he could rid himself of these uncertainties. Surely it was just the longtime bachelor in him getting the jitters?

But at the same time he couldn’t help but think that if Clarissa was truly the woman for him, there wasn’t a chance in hell thoughts of her would so rarely cross his mind for ten days in a row, no matter
how
compelling his work was.

The sultry expression she wore as she looked up at him went a long way toward erasing his doubts for the time being. His eyelids narrowed as he watched her lean forward and plant a kiss on the root of his cock. Despite his fatigue he felt himself stir with arousal.

“You’re right. You don’t deserve me. I have to admit one thing though.
Chicago
magazine was dead-on. You’re downright edible in this tux, Dom.”

“Is that a promise?”

She arched her golden eyebrows. “Why don’t you go and get comfortable and pour us a drink. Then we’ll decide if you’re in the mood to sleep or fuck.”

“I know what I’m in the mood for and it’s not sleeping. I owe you after this week, Clarissa,” he murmured as he pressed his thumb to her lower lip.

“We’ll see if you’re up for it.”

“Oh, I’m
up
for it all right,” he assured her.

The sound of Clarissa’s appreciative laughter followed him out of the den. He grinned. She really was an amazing woman. She’d just thrown down the gauntlet, knowing full well that he never walked away from a challenge. He may be tired as hell but it was the exhaustion that came after a bloody battle. Some lusty sex would be the perfect way to celebrate his triumph.

Not to mention make him forget his doubts in regard to marriage.

He wasn’t a young man anymore. He needed to settle down. So what if he wasn’t necessarily eager to rush home to see Clarissa at the end of a workday? He’d just have to try harder to be considerate, that’s all. She was a fine woman. He enjoyed her company. There weren’t a lot of smart, independent women out there who could meet his needs sexually, but once they were behind bedroom doors, Clarissa submitted very sweetly to him.

Still . . . those doubts lingered.

Thirteen and a half years
, for Christ’s sake. How lame could he be to carry a torch for a woman for so long? Not just any woman, either. A woman who clearly didn’t want him.

A woman he obviously shouldn’t want.

Clarissa was standing directly in front of the television set when he returned a few minutes later wearing pajama bottoms and carrying two brandy snifters. He was used to her occasionally switching on CNN business news for any recent headlines, but he was a little surprised that her attention remained fixed on the screen when he came up beside her.

“Oh no, Dom,” she whispered.

“What?” he asked

“Look . . .”

His gaze shot to the television screen. It showed a handsome man with dark hair graying at the temples dressed in an expensive, immaculately tailored gray suit exiting the doors of the Dirksen Federal Building. Shane knew the footage had been taken two days ago, just after Huey Mays had been released after posting bail.

A feeling of profound hatred swelled in Shane’s chest, the magnitude of it shocking him a little. It must have been the unexpectedness of the image that had taken him off guard.

“Yeah, that’s Huey Mays. They’ll be running the story about the arrest of a captain of the Organized Crime Division running the most extensive jewel, fur, and rare coin theft ring in history from the offices of the Chicago Police Department for quite a while,” he muttered with grim satisfaction.

“That’s not the story they’re running,” Clarissa said as she looked up at him anxiously. She took the drink that he offered her without seeming to be aware of what she was doing. “Or at least that’s only part of it. The story is that Huey Mays shot himself earlier this evening. He was just pronounced dead at Northwestern Memorial a half hour ago, Dom.”

***

Shane slowed his car on Erie Street next to the entrance of Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He spotted one of his nemeses, Blaine Howard, a reporter for Channel Eight News, dashing toward the doors leading to the east side of the massive building, his cameraman huffing and puffing to keep up with his long-legged sprint.

In Shane’s experience the only characteristic that exceeded Howard’s ignorance was his arrogance. It wasn’t a pretty combination. But if there was one thing Blaine could do it was smell blood.

Shane recognized her immediately when she exited the glass doors and jogged down the sidewalk. A bevy of reporters and cameramen followed several feet behind her, shouting questions and clicking off photo after photo. Shane saw the trace of panic in her rigid features as they closed in on her.

He knew how much she hated crowds. When they were teenagers her brother Joey had slacked off on studying for his entrance exams to Whitney Young Magnet High School and had had to attend St. Ignatius instead. So when Laura had started at Whitney as a freshman and Shane had been a senior, he’d taken Joey’s kid sister under his wing. He’d coached her in order to get her through a required public-speaking class. She was a bright student and a brilliant artist, but she was reserved. Not shy necessarily.

The public arena just wasn’t Laura’s domain.

Or at least it hadn’t been when he’d known her, when innocence still clung to her like morning dew to an exquisite, unopened rose. Things were different now, of course. Huey Mays had seen to that. Huey and whoever else he’d granted rights to the use of his stunning wife’s body.

To his stunning slave’s body.

There were a lot of things an officer of the law learned from electronic surveillance that he’d rather not hear. In Laura’s case they’d been things Shane would have paid any price to permanently erase from his memory banks.

She abruptly broke free and sprinted ahead of the pursuing reporters and photographers. He pulled up a few feet in front of her as she ran down Erie Street and slammed on the brakes.

“Get in,” he barked through the lowered window.

She pulled up short, her eyes widening when she saw him. She hesitated.

“Get in the damn car, Laura. They’ll be all over you in a second.”

Once she’d made her decision she moved fleetly. He stomped on the accelerator the second she’d slammed the door. One of the members of the rushing media slapped the back of his car in frustration as it took off down the street.

For almost a minute neither of them spoke as he merged onto Lake Shore Drive south. It struck him as surreal to be driving a car with Laura Vasquez in the passenger seat. This morning he’d never have guessed in a million years that this was how his day would end.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Shane. One of them might have seen your license plate and figured out that I was just picked up by the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago offices—the same man who was responsible for Huey’s arrest.”

“
Huey
was responsible for his arrest, Laura.”

His stern tone might have been an attempt to neutralize the effect her low, husky voice had on his body. She was one of three people on the face of the earth who actually called him by his given name—his mother and father being the other two. He hadn’t heard it coming off her tongue for more than a dozen years now.

He glanced over at her, taking in the clean, harmonious curves and angles of her profile against the lights of the city, a flawless diamond set among glittering rhinestones. She appeared calm and untouched by his provocative statement.

How did she really feel about her husband’s death? He forced his stare back to the road.

As usual it was impossible to plumb her depths. She was the one person he’d ever encountered who represented incontrovertible truth that his ability to judge another human being’s character was grievously flawed. His peers would say that was Shane’s expertise—the ability to comprehend people’s motivations, to predict how they’d act given a certain set of circumstances.

The fact that his feelings toward Laura were such a stark discrepancy of what they
should
be given reality bugged the shit out of him. It’d been like a burr under his skin for thirteen and a half years, a wound that just wouldn’t heal no matter how he tried to forget her and move on with his life.

“So what if they do realize it was me?” he muttered. “I’ll say that I picked you up for questioning.”

“Is that really what you’re doing?”

For a brief second their eyes met in the shadows. “Questioning you has never gotten me anywhere in the past, has it, Laura?”

She looked like she was about to say something but then she stopped herself. Her face looked set and pale—the most beautiful mask he’d ever seen in his life. He resisted an urge to pull the car over and shake her until she showed him something. Her rage. Her sadness. Her passion.

Anything
but this cold indifference.

“Where are you taking me?”

He blinked at the mundane question in the midst of such a charged moment. Charged for
him
, anyway.

“I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”

“So you’re really not taking me in for questioning?”

He cast a hard look in her direction. “Didn’t the police question you?”

“Yes. At the hospital. They said they’d be contacting me in the morning to clarify a few other things. I received the news that Huey had passed away as they were questioning me . . .”

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds when she trailed off. Huey Mays’s unexpected death by suicide pissed him off so much that he’d practically been blind with rage for a few seconds as he stood there in front of his television set forty-five minutes ago.

Oily little weasel to the finish, wriggling free of the snare he’d caught himself in like the coward that he was. Shane seethed.

Mays had been the linchpin to the FBI’s continued investigations into corruption at the CPD. The man was slimier than the stuff that got stuck to the bottom of your shoe in a sleazy dive’s john. Except Mays was worse because he was handsome enough to appear on the front of a men’s magazine and just as slick as the glossy cover.

Shane suspected that Mays would have spilled names to save his own neck, and his instinct was rarely wrong in such matters. He had hoped that he’d sing one name loud and clear—that of the current chief of the Organized Crime Division of the CPD, Randall Moody.

“Did they tell you that Huey left a note?” he asked Laura. He’d spoken to the commander in charge of the precinct where Huey’s body had been found and knew the basic details of the case.

“Yes,” she replied.

He took in her unruffled composure. Shane sighed, ineffectively venting an almost fourteen-year-long frustration at the sight.

“His body will still be examined by one of the Bureau’s agents at the crime lab, but as long as everything checks out with their report and the note is genuine, there won’t be a formal investigation. It’ll be ruled a clear-cut case of suicide. Picking you up on the street just now wasn’t official business. It was a spur of the moment thing,” he mumbled after a few seconds when he saw her smooth brow wrinkle in puzzlement. “I saw the media charging you. I spend half my life escaping from those jackals.”

A small smile tilted her full lips. “Still saving me from the bad guys, Shane?”

“That would require you
allowing
me to save you, wouldn’t it? You’ve swum way too deep now, sweetheart,” he snarled.

He paused when he noticed the glaze of shock in her wide eyes. He inhaled slowly and fixed his stare on the road. Jesus, what the hell was wrong with him?

“I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that. Not tonight.” He felt her gaze on him, making his skin prickle, but she didn’t speak for several moments. Finally she cleared her throat.

“I suppose they would have told you that he . . . he did it in his car?” she asked. “Another police officer found him. Huey had parked in a deserted area near the Cal-Sag Channel. The police officer thought the car had been abandoned and went to investigate. Huey was still alive but unconscious. He never woke up.”

“Who was the officer?”

“Josh Hannigan, from the Sixth Precinct.”

“Do you know him?”

Laura shook her head.

He peered at her suspiciously through the darkness. Laura came from a family of cops. Her uncle Derrick—her guardian—had been a twice-decorated sergeant. Her older brother, Joey, was a vice detective.

And, of course, her husband had been a cop—though Huey’d made a mockery of the title. Now it looked as if Joey might be entangled in the whole affair as well.

And Laura sat in the midst of it all, silent and inexplicable. Who was she protecting with her aloofness? Her husband? Joey?

Herself?

He blinked to clear the blurriness from his sleep-deprived eyes and took stock of his surroundings. He realized he’d been driving south on Lake Shore Drive without a clue as to where he was going. He got over into the right lane and narrowly made the closest exit.

Joey Vasquez might be a person of interest in the CPD theft ring case, but he also was an important part of Shane’s history and Laura’s only living immediate family. Joey and he hadn’t seen much of each other since Shane had returned to his hometown, this time to head up the Chicago offices of the FBI. Still, he knew that Joey lived in Hyde Park. He ducked his head and tried to make out the street sign as he passed to get his bearings.

“You shouldn’t be alone right now. I’ll take you over to Joey’s,” he muttered.

“No, not to Joey’s. Take me to my house, please.”

“
Laura
, you just—”

“Joey is out of town,” she interrupted calmly. She noticed his skeptical glance. “I’m telling the truth, Shane. He and Shelly took a van-load of kids to Springfield for the high school girls state volleyball championship. Carlotta is playing in the finals.”

“Carlotta can
not
be in high school,” Shane proclaimed flatly, referring to Joey’s daughter.

His gaze caught and stuck on the tantalizing image of Laura’s small, wistful smile. “She’s a junior at Marie Curie High School.”