Wild Hawk (31 page)

“We could,” he said dryly, “but it would land us in a mental hospital somewhere.”

She sighed. “Probably. But we may wind up in that jail cell anyway.”

“You think she’ll go through with it?”

“Do you think she’d have the slightest qualm, after what she’s already done?”

“No. I just wasn’t sure you knew that.”

“I don’t have many illusions left about how ruthless Alice can be, just as I didn’t have many about Aaron. Hawks are a ferocious bunch.”

He went very still. “Yes. They are. You should remember that.”

She raised herself up on one elbow to look at him. She clearly hadn’t mistaken his meaning, but he hadn’t expected her to.

“Was that a warning? Are you thinking of yourself as one now?”

“Maybe,” he said, not really clarifying which question he was answering.

Instead of looking wary—as she should have if she had any sense at all, Jason thought—she looked very satisfied.

“Good,” she said, taking it as an answer to her second question. “A Hawk just might be able to take Alice on.”

“Oh, I’ll take her on,” he promised softly. “And I’ll bring her down.”

He turned to her then, before she could ask him anything he didn’t want to answer. He kissed her, gently at first, then with more heat as she sighed and threaded her fingers through his hair. He trailed kisses over her jaw, then down the side of her throat, lingered in the hollow at the base to taste her skin with his tongue. Then he lowered his head farther, tracing the full, soft swell of her breasts, drawing each nipple in turn to rigid attention, with the careful rake of his teeth and teasing flicks of his tongue. She responded, moaning softly, with the swiftness that stoked an answering blaze in him, and he was achingly hard again so fast it almost scared him.

“Damn,” he muttered, “how do you do this to me?”

“I think that’s my question,” Kendall whispered. “I’ve never felt the way you make me feel. I think I understand what Aaron meant, now. How he felt about . . .”

Jason froze as her words trailed away. He didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want to hear her say what he thought was coming. He’d had women tell him they loved him before, and he’d turned it aside with a laugh and a joke about not being fool enough to fall in love, or sometimes a callous reminder of the purely physical basis of the relationship. But he couldn’t bring himself to be quite so cold with her. And that worried him as much as anything else. Still, he warned her.

“You’re heading for thin ice, Kendall.”

She sighed, as if she’d expected it. Then her hand slid down his back past his waist, lingered for a brief, squeezing caress of his buttock, then around his hip. He moved without thinking, automatically, giving her the access she had silently asked for. Her fingers stroked through the thicket of hair at his groin, then curled around his erection in a caress that made him suck in his breath as his stomach muscles rippled.

“Actually,” she said, her light tone putting things back on the level he wanted them, “I was heading for this. And there’s nothing thin or icy about it.”

“And you,” he said through clenched teeth as she began to stroke him, applying exactly the right amount of pressure to drive him mad, “learn awfully damned fast.”

“Sometimes,” she said, rather wistfully.

But then she leaned forward to place a kiss in the center of his chest, moved to circle his nipples with her tongue, all the while stroking and squeezing him, and he forgot everything except how incredibly, unbelievably good it was going to feel to be inside her again, and how much he wanted to be there when she hit the peak, wanted to feel the exquisite gripping embrace of her body, telling him undeniably that she was with him.

Before, it had been simply a matter of male pride, the need to know he’d pleased his partner. But with Kendall it was, as were so many things, different. It wasn’t just pride; it was necessity. He had to know he wasn’t alone in this craziness, wasn’t alone in being swept up into this inferno they’d turned loose. And if that only added to his uneasiness, he couldn’t think about it now. He couldn’t think of anything now, except that she was touching him, caressing him, as if she found every part of him wondrous.

And he was far too close to the edge. He seized her busy hand and gently but firmly drew it up to the relative safety of his waist.

“Slow,” he said, not caring anymore that his voice betrayed his need by coming out as nearly a growl. “We’re going to go very, very slow this time.”

“We . . . are?”

The throaty sound of her voice made him both more determined to do exactly what he’d said, and more doubtful that he could. He reined himself in, setting his jaw as he fought down the conflagration her touch engendered in him.

“Yes,” he said, lowering his head once more to her breasts as he slid a hand down her body to probe the delta of dark curls. He punctuated each phrase with a flick of his tongue over her nipple, or a circling of that tiny knot of aroused nerves his questing finger had found. “We’re going . . . to go . . . slow. Very . . . very . . . slow. Then we’ll stop . . . and start again . . . and stop . . . and start. Until you’re so damn close . . . you come the instant . . . I slide into you.”

She moaned, low and husky. “Oh, God, Jason.”

He caught a nipple once more, this time sucking hard and deep at the same moment he stroked her wet, slick flesh hard and deep. She cried out, and her body arched against him. He held her tightly, never letting up in his caresses, and proceeded to keep every promise he’d just made to her.

“I’LL LET YOU KNOW if you need to come bail me out,” Jason was saying jokingly into the phone when Kendall stepped out of the bathroom, toweling her hair, lifting the wet strands so they didn’t soak her shirt. She wondered who he was talking to. Someone he knew well enough to kid about winding up in jail, obviously. She wished she felt as lighthearted about it as he apparently did.

She had to get some fresh clothes, she thought. Buy some, if Jason still didn’t want to go back to the motel. But George had said it was probably safe enough now that they’d filed the challenge; he’d met them yesterday at the courthouse, to pick up copies of the codicil and the statements she and Jason had written out. It had been almost funny, seeing the two men eye each other so warily, but Jason had never spoken, never said he knew who George was, had merely nodded in answer to Alton’s watchful greeting and stood silently as Kendall handed over the papers.

When he sensed her presence in the room Jason turned his head to look at her, rather intently, as if he was trying to judge how much she might have heard. Then whoever was on the phone said something that drew his attention. After a moment he laughed.

“Yeah, I know. But they don’t. I’ll play it along for a while longer. Until everything’s in place.”

Kendall watched as he hung up. “Problem?”

He got up and started toward her. He’d already been up and taken a shower before she’d even awakened this morning; his hair was still wet and slicked back.

“No. Just thought I’d get my one phone call in ahead of time, before Alice sics the cops on us,” he said, grinning as if there wasn’t every likelihood that exactly that could happen.

He’d reached her then, settled his hands lightly on her shoulders, and bent to kiss her thoroughly. Instinctively her hands came up to rest on his chest. He hadn’t put on a shirt yet, and the feel of his skin, satin smooth over hard, fit muscle, distracted her nearly as much as the feel of his lips on hers again did.

It shouldn’t have this effect, she thought dazedly when at last he broke away from the kiss. Not after last night, not after the hours they’d spent proving that it wasn’t a fluke, this lightning that flashed between them. Not after they’d been so wild her body still ached from the unfamiliar use, and his bore the marks of her fervent response in more than one reddened line left by her nails. And they both had a few other marks to show for the night’s work as well. And in some very interesting places.

No, it shouldn’t have this effect on her, just a simple good morning kiss and the fact that he had no shirt on. Not when he’d kissed every inch of her, and she’d explored every inch of him, repeatedly. Yet it did. And when he at last released her, she wondered vaguely if he knew that. If perhaps that was why he’d done it, so that she would be distracted from what he’d been saying on the phone. Not that there had been anything curious about it, except for that remark about playing it along for a while longer. But at the moment, even if he had done it to distract her, she couldn’t manage to care.

She set down the towel she’d been using on her hair and picked up the big, blunt-toothed comb she had bought at a drugstore they’d stopped at after their trip to court yesterday. Jason hadn’t wanted to go back to the motel for their things yet, although he’d admitted that by now Alice probably knew where they were; he’d only expected his ruse with the airline tickets to give them a day. But it had been the day they’d needed, Kendall thought, to begin to stop Alice.

“So,” Jason said, to Kendall’s disappointment, pulling on his shirt, and then leaning a hip against the sink counter as she began the somewhat laborious task of untangling her hair, “how long do you think it will take the old bat to rally the troops?”

Kendall considered that for a moment. “Aaron was once able to hold an emergency board meeting within twelve hours. But that was before things were quite so scattered. There are a couple of people on the board who are some distance away, now. It will take time for them to get here.”

“And they may not be willing to jump quite so fast for Alice?”

She hadn’t come out and said it, but he didn’t miss a thing, Kendall thought. He rarely did. “Not right away. But she won’t waste any time making sure they see things her way when they get here.”

“From where?”

She paused in her combing. She wasn’t sure why it mattered to him, but she answered anyway. “John Corelli’s in St. Louis, he’s the farthest. The rest are fairly close.”

“But not all in California?”

“No.”

She glanced at him in the mirror, wondering why he wanted to know, since it had no bearing on their problem. She tugged at a stubborn knot at the back of her head, then moved the comb to work at the tangle from beneath.

“Here,” he said, moving to stand behind her, “let me do that.”

Before she could protest he’d taken the comb and was working with a surprising gentleness at the tangle, barely causing a tug at her sensitive scalp.

“So the BOD is scattered all over? Even those here on the coast?”

BOD? Odd that he would use the abbreviation for board of directors, Kendall thought. She looked at him in the mirror again, but he appeared to be concentrating solely on her hair.

“Besides Corelli, Paul Barker is in Seattle,” she said after a moment. “Martin Burr is in Phoenix. Two are original investors, still in California. The sixth seat has never been taken, Aaron always voted a proxy.”

“Hmm.”

It was a sound of neutral acknowledgment, as if he hadn’t really cared about the answer, but had just been making conversation. And there really was no reason for him to care where the board members were. Perhaps, she thought wryly, he was just making sure the conversation didn’t drift to something he didn’t want to talk about. Like them.

He’d sorted out the tangle now, but rather than turning the comb back to her, he began on another section of her hair. She could feel his heat, knew if she leaned back it would sear her. And they would most likely wind up back in bed. She resisted the urge.

He moved unhurriedly, as if he had nothing better to do than deal with the mass of her hair. He never pulled too hard, just worked through the strands until he was able to comb through them in one long, smooth motion. Slowly. As if he was enjoying it. As she certainly was; she was a little surprised at how good it felt to have him lavish so much care on such a mundane task for her. He kept on long after the tangles were gone.

“So that’s it,” she said teasingly when at last he stopped, “you’re a hairdresser.”

She heard him chuckle. “Hardly.”

She turned and took the comb from him, and walked across the room to where her purse sat on the small desk, to pull out the scarf she planned to use to control her wet locks.

“No? What, then?”

She looked back at him in time to glimpse a look of caution on his face before he said, “I . . . still work with marine diesels, sometimes, but I work with boats, mostly.”

She began to pull her hair back and tie the scarf around it. It would dry into a flyaway mass, but she didn’t want to take the time right now to use the hair dryer on it.

“Like the fishing boat you worked on as a kid?” she asked as she looped the scarf into a small bow.

“Sometimes. Sometimes bigger ones, sometimes smaller ones.” He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “Half the population in Seattle is connected with boats somehow, I think.”

“Makes for job security, I imagine,” she said.

He smiled at her, and she decided to take advantage of the fact that he had at least answered her this time. Besides, she wanted to know what he did with boats that had netted him a platinum credit card. A corporate one. Perhaps he had an exceptionally generous boss, who’d loaned it to him to come to his father’s funeral.

“So what do you do with these boats? Work on—”

The ringing of the phone right beside her made her jump, startled. George, she thought. He was the only one she’d given the number here to.

Jason took a step toward her as she reached for the receiver, then stopped as she picked it up and said hello. He didn’t look very happy, and she wondered if perhaps he’d given the number to someone and had been expecting a call back.

“Kendall?”

Alton’s voice told her she’d been right in her guess, but he sounded tentative, cautious.

“I thought it must be you. What—”

“Is West there with you?”

“Yes, right—”