Wilde Nights in Paradise (A Wilde Security Novel) (Entangled Brazen) (16 page)

“Jude, no—”

“I envy you,” he said, cutting off her protest. He motioned to the cell phone. “What you have with your parents. Hell, even the fact that you still have your parents. I envy you. I always have.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Libby opened her mouth, but after that whopper of a confession, one he hadn’t meant to make, he couldn’t stay to hear whatever pity she was about to lay on him. He strode into the bedroom, needing space from her, but finding the room resonated with her essence. The faint hint of vanilla in the air from her perfume, her nightshirt folded so neatly on the end of the made bed. Even as miserable as he felt, he had to smile. Meticulous even when she’d been feeling blue—she was his opposite in almost every way. In the rare occasions when he got mopey, his apartment usually suffered for it.

Jude sat on the edge of the bed and cradled his head in his hands. Part of him wanted to hate Libby for dragging him through the muck of the past. He never let himself think about that night but, he supposed, he’d never managed to leave it behind him, either. It colored everything he’d ever done in his life. And, hell, to this day he couldn’t watch
Jurassic Park
without bawling like a baby.

Maybe it was time to face it.

The door opened a crack, and Libby peeked into the dim room, the light from the hallway creating a halo effect around her golden hair. After a moment of indecision, she came inside, shut the door, and moved to stand in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Fuck. Who knew two little words could pack such a punch? Appalled that his vision had gone blurry, he snaked a hand around her waist and pulled her toward him, burying his face in the soft fabric of her T-shirt over her belly.

“I shouldn’t have asked.” Her fingers sifted through his hair, trailed down the back of his neck and spine. Pleasurable goose bumps swept over his skin.

Her name left his lips on a groan, and as he tilted his face up, her lips descended on his. He parted his knees, inviting her to step into him, wanting her closer, needing her closer. Funny how just a moment ago, he’d thought he needed some time alone, but he’d been so ridiculously wrong about that. He didn’t need space. All he needed was her. He had a sinking feeling that she was all he’d ever need. She was definitely all he’d ever wanted, but he’d learned long ago that yearning for something he would never be able to have was pointless. All they had was this fling. This night. Possibly tomorrow night, but that was no guarantee. His brothers could capture K-Bar at any moment, and then this would all be over. He had to take what he could get now.

No emotions.

He could do that. He’d done it most of his life.

As their mouths fused together in a slow burn of passion, his hands dipped under her shirt and caressed the skin of her back. She sighed into his mouth, then pulled away long enough to whisk her shirt over her head. Standing, he unbuttoned his jeans, but couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Undressing her held a lot more appeal anyway, and he skimmed her shorts down her legs, trailing his lips along all the golden skin he found on the way. Her fingers dug into his scalp, and he felt the tug on his hair all the way to the tip of his cock. Man, he loved it when she did that.

No emotions.

In a burst of movement, he cupped her lovely, lace-covered ass, scooped her up until her legs wound around his waist, and switched their positions, laying her gently on the bed. He lowered himself on top of her, loving the way everything soft on her body yielded to everything hard on his. And the way she smiled up at him like she had a secret she was about to divulge. And the way her glasses sat slightly crooked on her nose, knocked askew by him, and how she didn’t give a shit.

Jude lifted her glasses off and folded them carefully on the nightstand. Turning her head on the pillow, she reached out to help, but he caught her hand and nuzzled the exposed column of her neck.

No emotions.

A hum of pleasure vibrated her throat under his lips, and his body reacted as if she had zapped him, every nerve ending firing at the same moment. He reclaimed her mouth, and his senses filled to capacity with her taste, her vanilla scent, her soft skin, the sound of her breathing, the beat of her heart…

No emotions?

Yeah, right.

…

Something was different about Jude tonight. He took his time, drawing every kiss, every caress out until every inch of her skin flushed hot and every breath came out as a sigh or a moan. This wasn’t the fast, hard, bed-rocking sex she’d had with him in the past, but something else entirely. Something gentle and pure and genuine.

If she didn’t know any better, she’d think he was making love to her.

With a sigh, she opened herself to him, taking him deep into her body—and, she feared, her heart. But she wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t let herself feel anything but the pleasure of this moment. She shut her eyes, focused only on the sensations of their joining, but he stopped moving, and his fingers trailed along her cheek. He cupped a hand around the back of her neck and lifted her toward him, his lips sealing over hers with such possessiveness that her eyes popped open in surprise. He stared right back at her, every wild, passionate, insane emotion she was trying so hard not to feel reflected in his gaze.

Heart in her throat, she tightened her legs around his hips and pushed herself up with her arms. He relented easily, laying back and letting her take control. His hands slid upward from her waist, released the clasp of her bra, and skimmed the straps off her shoulders. He traced the fullness of each breast as the bra fell away, then smoothed his fingers down her arms until they found her hands. He pressed their palms together, his fingers twice as big and deeply tanned, hers smaller and only a few sun-kissed shades lighter. Smiling slightly, he twined their fingers together. Somehow, that tender joining was even more intimate than the one at their hips, and emotion thickened in her throat.

Did she dare take the risk of loving him again?

Really, did she even have a choice?

She wouldn’t think about it. Not tonight. She’d just feel. Enjoy. And pretend he didn’t already hold her still-fragile heart in his hands.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Jude half woke to the sound of his phone
bzz-bzz-bzz
ing on the nightstand and slapped at it to shut it up. It stopped. Satisfied, he rolled toward Libby and nuzzled the back of her neck. She gave a contented sigh, but otherwise didn’t stir.

They’d wiped each other out last night, making love until he barely had enough energy left to drag the blankets off the floor and cover them before sleep overtook him. He, for one, was one hundred thousand percent okay with that. He wasn’t hearing any complaints from her, either, and he thought he might even be ready to do it all over again.

Make love.

That was exactly what they had done last night. It transcended sex and had proved more satisfying—and more exhausting—than anything else he’d ever experienced in a bed. His cock couldn’t wait for more and stood at rigid attention, prodding at the cleft of Libby’s lovely ass, ready for action as a good soldier should be. But the rest of his body was so not on board, still too physically exhausted to act on the urge. Another hour of zzzs, he told his lower half, and then all bets were off because he definitely needed to be making love to Libby again soon.

He nuzzled his face in the long silk of her unbound hair, inhaled her scent, and drifted toward sleep with a smile—until the phone started ringing again.

“Goddammit.” He reached for it and rubbed his eyes before checking the screen. Camden. Grumbling, he answered. “Someone had better be dead.”

“Someone is,” Camden said, and he sounded exhausted. “K-Bar.”

Jude blinked, his mind running sluggishly, still fuzzy with sleep, and he wasn’t sure he’d heard that right. “Wait, what?”

“He’s dead. As in he’s no longer living. Decapitated and hacked into pieces dead.”

“Okay, okay, I got it.” Wide awake now, Jude glanced over at Libby and told himself to man up as a heaviness centered in his chest. It was over. All of it, including their affair. Goddammit. “Hey, that’s great news.”

“Not even close,” Cam said. “He’s been dead a while. At least a week, probably ever since he went missing. There’s no way he could have flown to Key West and followed you two.”

Slowly, so as not to wake Libby, Jude slid his arm out from underneath her and sat up on the edge of the bed. He kept his voice low. “What happened?”

“Kenneth Burke killed him.”

“GQ? Pruitt’s lawyer? What makes you think that?”

“The blue car that almost ran you and Libby over? The pregnant woman it was stolen from lives in the apartment complex behind Burke’s condo.”

“So he could have known the woman was on bed rest and wouldn’t report it missing,” Jude said and glanced over at Libby’s sleeping form. “That’s definitely suspicious, but Libby would ream you a new one for calling that proof of his involvement.”

“You haven’t heard the worst of it yet,” his brother continued. “We wouldn’t have realized he was practically the woman’s neighbor if he hadn’t had the sheer ego to use the car
again
for K-Bar’s murder. The woman wised up and had her husband move her bed closer to the window so she could keep an eye on the car, and she saw him take it. Called the cops and described him, but by the time they tracked down the vehicle, K-Bar was dead in the backseat.”

“Damn.” Squeezing his eyes shut, Jude pinched the bridge of his nose as a tension headache started to throb in the center of his forehead. “Burke’s called me nonstop every day. I just thought he was doing it on the colonel’s behalf.”

“No, Pruitt’s been dealing directly with us,” Camden said. “The lawyer shouldn’t even be involved at this point, but his credit card shows a recent one-day trip to Key West. Best guess is he saw your iguana video online and flew down there to find Libby.”

“Does he know our cover identities?”

“He must, otherwise he wouldn’t have found you at the boat charter place on Big Pine Key.”

“Shit. Where is he now?”

“We don’t know.”

Jude groaned. “Cam, that’s not what I want to hear. Did you search his place?”

“Eva did.”

Although Cam’s former partner with the Metropolitan PD homicide division was thorough, Jude wished his brothers had conducted the search instead. “What did she find?”

Cam exhaled slowly. “Hundreds of paper dolls and a few pairs of what Eva assumes are Libby’s underwear.”

A chill scraped across the back of Jude’s neck. “Jesus Christ.”

“He has notebooks filled with letters to her and hundreds of pictures of her that date back to her law school years. Some she clearly posed for, but she didn’t realize she was being photographed in most of them.”

Jude reached over and shook Libby awake. She blinked up at him and started to smile, but the look on his face must have been grim because she bolted upright. “What’s wrong?”

“Did you know Kenneth Burke in law school?” he asked.

Her forehead wrinkled in confusion, and she fumbled for her glasses. “Yes. We hung out with the same people. Why?”

“Is he the guy you slept with?”

She wrapped her arms around herself as color filled her cheeks. “No, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to anything.”

“Did he ever show any sexual interest in you?”

She squirmed, obviously uneasy, but he couldn’t mince words to make his questions more comfortable. Not when he felt this niggling sensation of urgency.

“We went on one date my first semester of law school,” she answered at last. “I thought it was time to move on, and I chose him because he’s your opposite in almost every way. During dinner, we both realized there wasn’t anything romantic between us, and that was the end of it. We’ve been friends since.”

Uh-huh
, Jude thought. More like she placed Burke in the friend category and he’d gone along with it to stay close to her. But somewhere along the way, his interest had become a very dangerous obsession.

The front gate buzzer sounded. Once. Twice. Three times. Four, five, six…nine times in total.

Libby started at the sound. “What’s that?”

“Shit,” Jude said into the phone and shot off the bed, grabbing his weapon from the bedside table. “Cam, someone’s at the gate.”

His brother echoed his curse. “Don’t answer it. Get Libby somewhere safe.”

“Call me some fucking backup.” He hung up and yanked on his basketball shorts, and then he scooped Libby into his arms, bedsheet and all, and carried her into the closet. She didn’t protest like he thought she would. She merely wrapped her arms around his neck and held on as he punched a code on a panel in the back wall.

A hidden door swooshed open with a slight breeze due to the pressure-lock, and he stepped into the twelve-by-twelve room that used to be a second bedroom. Now it rivaled any doomsday prepper’s bunker, which was one of the reasons he’d been so determined to keep Libby in this house. He had no doubt this room would survive a nuclear blast, and Seth kept it stocked with several years’ worth of supplies, including all kinds of weapons, some of which he probably shouldn’t legally own.

Jude set Libby down and studied the wall of monitors that covered every inch of the house and property. Kenneth Burke stood at the gate with Colonel Pruitt directly in front of him, both of them soaked by the drizzle of rain. Pruitt looked up and down the street, then reached out and leaned on the buzzer again. Nine times.

Short, short, short. Long, long, long. Short, short, short.

S.O.S. in Morse code.

Jude hit the switch for the intercom. “I’m not opening the gate, Pruitt.”

“Good. Don’t. Burke is the stalker. He tricked me into bringing him here, told me she was in danger,” Pruitt said as if giving a sitrep, and the lawyer’s eyes rounded in surprise.

And there it was—the gun. Burke raised it to Pruitt’s temple, pressed it so hard into his flesh that the colonel couldn’t hide his wince.

“Then you’ll kill him,” Burke said. “Are you ready to watch him die?”

“You won’t,” Jude said, even though he didn’t believe his own words. If Burke was demented enough to decapitate K-Bar, the man would have no problem killing Pruitt. But he had to keep Burke talking just long enough for the cavalry to arrive. “Run a man over with a car? Sure, I can see that, but—”

“That was a warning,” Burke said. “I tried telling Libby to watch out for you.”

Watch out.
The message on the windshield of her car. Jude cursed at himself. He’d been so focused on it as a threat, it never occurred to him that it might be a warning instead.

“But then she kissed you,” Burke continued. “I have been waiting
years
for her to realize how right we are together, giving her little gifts, little nudges. Then you come along out of the blue, and it was like our relationship meant nothing to her. Nothing. Understandably, I lost my mind for a moment, thought maybe I could scare you away from her so she’d come to her senses.”

“It takes more than Ford Taurus to scare me, asshole.”

Libby came up to stand beside him and touched his arm with trembling fingers, her complexion as white as the sheet he’d wrapped her in. “W-what’s going on?”

He tried to block the monitors. “It’s all under control—”

“Is that my dad?” Her hand covered a gasp. “And Kenneth?”

“Libby,” Burke called, his voice going all sickly sweet. On screen, his features softened. “I know you can hear me. Let me in, sweetheart.”

“Kenneth?” she repeated faintly. She closed her eyes, and her skin took on a sickly green cast. “Oh God.”

“Libby, open the gate, or I’ll kill him.”

Jude wrapped his arms around her shivering frame and pressed his lips to her temple. “Don’t listen to him. Cam’s sending help. We just have to hold him off until the police get here.”

“Oh, yes, I’ll kill your father,” Burke said matter-of-factly. “I won’t like it, but I’ll do it, and then his blood will be on your hands, sweetheart. Can you live with that? I don’t think so.”

Libby lunged for the intercom. “Kenneth, please, don’t hurt him. We’re opening the gate now. Please, don’t hurt my dad.”

Jude caught her hand before she found the button for the gate’s lock. She stared up at him, her eyes huge and shining with terror behind her glasses, a plea in her gaze.

“Jude,” she said around a sob. “He’s my father.”

“It’s my job to keep you safe.”

“Wouldn’t you have done anything to keep your father alive? Even if it meant risking your own life?”

“Yes,” he said without flinching. “But I can’t let you. I—”
Love you.
The words caught. He’d never said those words to her or anyone else. Since his parents died, they were just too damn hard to articulate. “I can’t put you in danger.”

She cupped his cheek in her palm, and he leaned into it, pressing his hand over hers.

“You’re not putting me in danger,” she said softly. “I am.” Before he could stop her, she slammed her free hand down on the gate release.

Swearing, Jude spun toward the monitors. On screen, Burke nudged Pruitt through the gate with the gun’s muzzle. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He grasped Libby by the shoulders. “You need to stay here in this room no matter what, you understand? You get my cell phone out of the bedroom, then stay in here and call the police. I’ll stall him as long as I can.”

“My dad—”

“Is well trained. He can handle himself.” He kissed her hard. “If you leave this room, you’ll just give Burke what he wants—an extra target.”

She nodded and swallowed hard. “I’ll stay. I promise.”

Somehow, he doubted that. He pulled her in for another quick kiss, silently pleading with her to keep that promise and wishing like hell Seth was here. That bastard Burke would already be dead with a capital D, and Libby would be safe. When Seth got behind the scope of a sniper rifle, he didn’t miss. One shot, one kill—a skill Jude didn’t have that would definitely come in handy right about now.

Libby caught his hand before he turned away and motioned to the glass-fronted gunroom that, he remembered, used to be a walk-in closet. “You should take a gun.”

He shook his head, offered a reassuring smile. Without Seth’s sharpshooter skills, a weapon would only exacerbate the problem, and he knew other ways to kill besides with a gun. “I’ll be fine.” He winked. “Trust me, I’ve done this before.”

She laughed, but it came out more like a sob. “If you get killed, I’m going to be very pissed off.”

“Babe, c’mon, give me some credit here. I wouldn’t dare deny you the pleasure of killing me yourself.”

This time, when she laughed, it sounded more authentic. “It’s amazing you’ve lived this long.”

“So Camden always tells me.” He paused in the doorway, glanced back. There she stood wrapped in a sheet, her hair falling a tangled mess around her shoulders, her glasses slightly askew. His heart squeezed so hard it hurt. “Now go get my phone and some clothes and lock yourself in this room. Tell the cops what’s happening and open the gate when they get here. This will all be over soon.”

He didn’t wait for a reply but hurried out through the bedroom, careful to shut the door behind him. He emerged into the living room as the front door opened, and Pruitt stepped in, followed closely by Burke with the gun still pressed against the colonel’s back.

Kenneth fucking Burke.

Shit, he really hadn’t seen this coming. He’d pegged the guy as a pretentious yuppie but hadn’t thought him capable of stalking and murder.

At least the colonel appeared calm, despite the handcuffs now circling his wrists, a nasty black eye, split lip, and a cut on his forehead.

“Where is she?” Burke demanded. His gaze darted from one corner of the room to the other. “Where is Libby?”

“She’s safe. Tucked away in a place you’ll never find her.” Hands raised in front of him, Jude eased forward.

“Stop!” Burke swung the gun toward him, toward Pruitt, then back to him again. Unsure of who was the bigger threat. Good.

Jude slid another step closer. “You might as well put the gun down. I called the cops. They’ll be here any minute.”

“Then I have to make this fast.” He pressed the gun to Pruitt’s head again. “Take me to Libby.”