“You shot my car?”
John watched, dumbfounded, as antifreeze-tinged water glugged out of a bullet-sized hole in his radiator.
“You shot my car?”
Renee stared down at the gun in her hand. “Uh…yeah. I guess I did.”
In a fit of angry frustration, John did what he should have done the moment she got her hands on his weapon: he strode over and yanked it right out of her hand.
“What have you got against cars?” he shouted, stuffing the gun into the waistband of his jeans. “You torch one, you shoot another. What’s next? A hangman’s noose? The guillotine?”
Renee took a tentative step forward, peering at the bullet hole. “I got the radiator, right? Can a car run without one of those?”
“Sure it can! As long as you don’t mind overheating the engine and cracking the block!”
“Cracking the block. That’s bad?”
“About two thousand dollars’ worth of bad!”
“So it wouldn’t be a good thing to drive the car when the radiator is, well…shot?”
All at once he understood. So that was why she’d done it. Instead of disabling the cop, she’d disabled his car.
John didn’t know how much more of this he could take. He had five shots left, but it would take only one to solve all his problems. After dumping her body into the lake, he could get a good night’s sleep, wake to a bright, sunshiny morning, call the auto club, get his radiator fixed, then proceed with his life as if he’d never set eyes on Renee Esterhaus. And she’d spend the rest of eternity making Satan sorry he’d ever bargained for her soul.
Okay. So it was just a fantasy. But at least he could do the auto club part. He took the keys from Renee, then grabbed his phone from the car. He flipped it on.
Nothing.
He stared at it dumbly for a moment, then looked back at Renee with an accusing stare.
“Okay, so I made a call.”
“I don’t give a damn about the call! You ran down the battery!”
A look of sudden understanding came over her face, and her gaze turned speculative. “You can charge it again, can’t you? You have your charger, right?”
No. He’d forgotten the damned thing. But he’d figured that out in the middle of nowhere like this, getting a cell signal was a crap shoot anyway. So what did it matter?
John couldn’t believe this. He was a cop, for God’s sake. He’d arrested some of the vilest, most evil people who’d ever drawn breath, yet he couldn’t manage to outwit a woman half his size who clearly had a screw loose.
“You think you’re real smart, don’t you?” he told her. “Well, you’re not. You’ve only delayed the inevitable. If we can’t drive out of here, we’ll walk. First thing in the morning.” He took a few threatening steps toward her, backing her against his car. “And you’ll behave yourself every step of the way, or I’ll make you wish to God you had.”
She gave him a stony stare that would have put Medusa to shame. “Well. We’ll just see about that, won’t we?”
Her go-to-hell attitude astonished him. “Don’t mess with me, Renee.”
She stood up straight and pushed herself away from his car, bumping him off-balance and forcing him to take a step backward.
“I am not an armed robber. I am not a car thief. And I don’t care what I have to do—I am not going to jail!”
Her gaze bored into him, those blue eyes hot with anger. Strangely enough, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he felt that familiar little heart skip that had become his body’s way of telling him he’d better watch his back.
That’s crap, he told himself in the next instant, furious that he’d let her rattle him, even for a moment. “Oh, no. You are going to jail, even if I have to use my last breath to drag you there!”
“Then get your last breath ready, buster. You’re going to need it!”
She elbowed past him and started down the path, and John had to fight his gut reaction to reach out and yank her right back around again. What good would it do? Did he really think the bone-rattling shake he wanted to give her would dislodge that smart-ass attitude?
She reached the cabin, fumbled the door open with her bound hands, then went inside and slammed the door behind her. The noise rocketed through the silence of the forest, tripping his anger one more time, and he spewed a string of curse words so virulent the pine trees wilted. What in the hell had he done to deserve all this?
He looked at his wounded radiator. It was going to cost him hundreds of dollars to get it fixed, and it would take him hundreds of years to get reimbursement for the damages. He looked at the dark clouds that obscured the moon and threatened rain, thinking about the miles of dirt road they had to navigate tomorrow on foot. Then he looked back at the cabin. What other tricks did Renee have up her sleeve that would make him wish he’d never been born?
He sighed. Tomorrow was going to be one hell of a day.
Renee never imagined that merely walking along a calm, wooded road could be such an excruciating experience.
The forest was nice enough. In fact, in the daylight it was downright picturesque. Streaks of bright morning sun shot through the canopy of pine trees, casting cool shadows on the forest floor. Birds were chirping tentatively, as if they weren’t quite sure it was safe to venture out again after last night’s rain. It was a fairy-tale forest. A weekend-in-the-country forest. A forest this quaint and charming should have a yellow-brick road winding through it, with Dorothy and company skipping along, full of optimistic good cheer as they headed for the Emerald City.
Instead, rain had turned the road into a potholed mud bath, Renee wasn’t the least bit optimistic, and she was headed for jail. And Dorothy had a whole lot more congenial company than the man who was slogging through the mud beside her. John wore a scowl that had become a permanent part of his face, and he threw off so much negative energy that he practically blew her off the road.
He’d fallen asleep last night before she had, leaving her to shiver in the dark with her bound hands tied to the frame of the sofa bed with a length of twine he’d found in a kitchen cabinet. She’d stared at him in the light of the dying fire, mad as hell at him at the same time she couldn’t take her eyes off him.
Yeah, he’d looked pretty good lying there in bed last night, only to wake this morning and turn into Nasty Cop all over again. He hadn’t even taken the tape off her wrists to let her go to the bathroom. She’d had to twist herself into a pretzel to accomplish what should have been a relatively simple task, which had forced her to reconsider her natural assumption that all people, even pissed-off cops, were in possession of a heart.
Then he’d gotten all bent out of shape just because she’d used his toothbrush. Please. He could kiss her last night, but she couldn’t use his toothbrush this morning? If she’d known how much her invasion into his personal space irritated him, she’d have swished his manly extra-strength deodorant stick around in the toilet bowl.
As they walked along the muddy road, she turned to him for yet another plea. “John, will you please take this tape off my wrists?”
“I told you three times already to shut up.”
She glared at him. “What’s the matter? Did we get up on the wrong side of the lumpy sofa bed this morning?”
“You’ve already proven you’ll do anything to stay out of jail, so why should I take a chance?”
“Because it would be a nice thing to do, maybe?”
“It’s not my job to be nice.”
“As a taxpaying citizen, I beg to differ.”
“Major advantage of prison life, Renee. You won’t be paying taxes for long.”
She huffed with disgust. “Would it kill you to let me be just a little bit comfortable?”
“The last time you were comfortable, you stole my car.”
“I told you I had every intention of giving it back to you!”
“Did you also have every intention of giving back the money you stole from that convenience store? And pulling the bullet back out of that clerk you shot? Did you have every intention of doing that, too?”
“I didn’t shoot anybody! And I didn’t rob anybody! How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass how many times you tell me. You’re going to jail.”
What had made her think she could talk him into anything? She might not have a prayer of escaping jail. Not on John’s shift, anyway. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to pour her heart and soul into the fight right up to the moment they tossed her into the cell and clanged the door shut.
“John? How many people do you suppose you’ve taken to jail?”
“I don’t keep track.”
“Just an estimate. A hundred? Two hundred?”
“Probably. And before the day’s out, I’ll be able to add one more to the list.”
“Gee, that’s a lot of guilty people. Or maybe,” she ventured, “some of them were innocent.”
“All of them were innocent.”
“What?”
“Just ask them. They’ll tell you.”
A hundred nasty responses swelled through her mind, but she stopped herself before they came rushing out of her mouth. Cops didn’t like insults. She’d learned that the hard way once during a Metallica concert when she was sixteen. Full of her usual nasty belligerence, she’d told a rent-a-cop to get his fat ass out of the way because he was blocking the stage, and she’d ended up with an even worse view—from the parking lot.
She’d almost forgotten about that night, but now the feeling was razor-sharp again, just as she’d felt it back then. Cops are the enemy. Intellectually she knew that wasn’t right. Stay within the law, and you had nothing to fear. That was what she’d told herself all the years since then. You can change. Make a new life for yourself. A life you can be proud of. But that wasn’t right, either, was it? She’d stayed within the boundaries of the law, and look where she’d ended up anyway.
Unfortunately it appeared that John was just like every cop she’d ever encountered. Hard, jaded, don’t-give-a-damn kind of guys. Did jerks get into law enforcement, or did law enforcement turn them into jerks?
“How many times do you think somebody’s looked guilty,” she said, “but they really weren’t?”
“Give it a rest, will you, Renee?”
“But it’s only logical that—”
He came to a quick halt and faced her. “If you don’t shut up—”
“What?” she said. “What are you going to do if I don’t shut up?”
He took a few threatening steps toward her. A lock of hair fell over his forehead, bordering his angry eyes and making him look dark and dangerous. She knew that baiting this man was like dangling fresh fish over a shark tank. But instead of maiming her, as his expression said he was considering doing, he merely shook his head with disgust, wheeled around, and stalked up the road.
Renee felt a flush of exhilaration at winning round one. Could it be that the big, bad cop wasn’t so big and bad after all?
She trotted to catch up. “John. Slow down.”
He sped up again, his long strides taking him several paces ahead of her. She caught up again and strode alongside him.
“Will you slow down a minute and listen to me?”
“Not necessary, Renee. I already get the picture. This is unjust. You didn’t do it. And I’m a real asshole for doing my job and taking you in. Does that about sum it up?”
No, it didn’t. She wanted to take him by the shirt collar, yank him to a halt, and tell him to listen to the whole story or else. Unfortunately, she didn’t have an “else” to fall back on. If he kept up this pace, though, she’d be dead by the time they emerged from the forest.
Oh. Wait a minute.
She stopped and stood in the middle of the road. She couldn’t believe she was being such a fool. Why in the world was she hurrying to keep up? She strolled over to a grassy spot by the side of the road.
And sat down.
John stopped and turned back. “What are you doing?”
She pretended to ignore him. Passive resistance. It had worked for Gandhi, hadn’t it?
“Get up,” he said. “Now!”
When she still ignored him, John stomped over to her. He skewered her with a concentrated gaze of restrained fury—one of those heavy-duty cop looks he’d probably spent hours perfecting in his bathroom mirror.
“Get up,” he repeated, his voice frigid.
“Maybe you should sit down with me instead. We could have a nice…chat.”
“Chat, my ass.”
Before she knew what was happening, he’d grabbed her arm and hauled her to her feet. Birds squawked and scattered, their wings making a whop, whop, whop noise that echoed through the piney woods. He gripped her by her arms, determination oozing off him like a red-hot aura. “I swear to God, if you don’t turn around and walk down this road right now, I’ll—”
“You’ll what? Throw me over your shoulder and carry me out of here? It’s only another eight or ten miles, right?”
“You’re resisting arrest!”
Renee shrugged indifferently. “Compared to the other charges against me, I’d say that’s a drop in the bucket.”
Anger flooded his face, but she was on a roll and she couldn’t stop now.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she went on. “Not until you listen to me.”
“Fine,” he said, releasing her. “Talk all you want to. While you’re walking.”
The last thing Renee wanted was to move one step closer to incarceration. But at least he’d be listening to her instead of walking ten paces ahead of her. And he didn’t say how fast she had to walk, did he?
“Agreed. But only if you take this tape off my wrists.”
“No way.”
“John…” Her voice slid up the scale a few notes, warning him against disagreeing with her.
“No,” he repeated. “I am not going to—”
She plunked herself down in the middle of the road.
“Damn it, Renee! You are really starting to piss me off!” The last thing John had intended to do was lose his temper, but then again, he hadn’t counted on dealing with such an outrageously obstinate woman. How had things gotten twisted around until she thought she was the one calling the shots?
She held up her wrists with a look that said it was her way or no way. He didn’t trust her for a minute, but what choice did he have? He could carry her out of this forest and probably die of exhaustion in the effort. He could threaten her again, with absolutely no way to back it up. If he was going to get out of this crappy place and this crappy situation sometime before Christmas, his only choice was to compromise.
He let out a hiss of disgust, then pulled out his pocketknife and sliced through the tape, feeling as if he were turning Godzilla loose to ravage Tokyo. The second she peeled the tape off, he grabbed her by the arm again and hauled her to her feet.
“Get moving,” he said, clicking the knife shut and jamming it back into his pocket. “And no stopping until we’re out of here.”
She turned and started down the road, moving with the speed of a geriatric turtle.
“Get with it,” he said, stepping along beside her. “This isn’t a walk in the park.”
She sped up a little, but at this pace it would be the next millennium before they got back to the main highway.
“You know,” Renee said after a moment, “if I’d been that officer, I’d have arrested me, too, with the gun and the money being in my car and all.”
Her sudden acquiescence put him on red alert. “Oh, yeah. He deserves a medal for all the intuitive thinking he used to make that arrest.”
“And apparently it was a blonde woman who committed the robbery.”
“So I hear.”
“And I don’t have an alibi.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I guess I look like a pretty good suspect, huh?”
“Damned good.”
“But what about motive?”
“What about it?”
“It was the one thing nobody had an answer for. I mean, why in the world would someone like me knock over a convenience store?”
Drugs. Running with a bad crowd. Coercive boyfriend. Being desperate for money. Just plain old lack of conscience. Hell, he had a hundred answers for that one. And not one of them mattered in the least.
“I’ve got news for you, Renee. If you’re standing over a dead body holding a smoking gun, proving motive really isn’t necessary.”
“I know it looks bad. But I had no reason to do it. None. I’ve got a good job. Why would I rob a convenience store?”
“Do you owe money?”
“Of course. Who doesn’t?”
“A lot of it?”
“More than I wish I did, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”
“Do you have a record?”
She paused. “Of course not.”
“You had to think about it?”
“I’m just not used to getting interrogated, that’s all.”
“Do you do drugs?”
“No! Never! Not even when—” She stopped short, then continued. “I’ve never done drugs. Period.”
“Then I guess you wouldn’t mind pulling up the sleeves of your sweatshirt.”
She came to a halt and spun around to face him. She narrowed her eyes angrily, then shoved the sleeves of her sweatshirt to her elbows and thrust her arms forward. “Needle tracks? Is that what you’re looking for?”
He inspected her forearms. Her smooth ivory skin was as fresh and pretty as the rest of her. Most of the law-breaking women he encountered were foulmouthed hookers, female con artists, and just plain lowlifes—drugged-up, used-up women who looked forty-five when they were twenty-five. Not this one.
His gaze inched down her forearms to her wrists, where the tape had left pale red welts on her skin. He felt a twinge of guilt, then immediately shoved it aside. The last thing he needed was to feel sorry for her. Any pain she’d suffered she’d brought on herself because of the bad habits she’d recently developed, such as jumping bail, setting fires, and stealing cars. Still, for some reason Leandro’s words lingered in his mind. That’s one hot little body she’s got. It was probably the only thing on earth he and Leandro would ever agree about.
“So you don’t shoot up,” John said. “There are plenty of other bad habits that require a load of cash to support.”
She yanked her sleeves back down. “I don’t put anything in my lungs or up my nose, either. I even quit smoking. If you’re looking for a drug habit as motive, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“So you’re a model citizen.”
“No, I’m not. I’ve got just as many vices as the rest of the world. But that doesn’t mean I committed a crime.”
“I assume your fingerprints weren’t on the weapon.”
“Of course not.”
“Did they test for gunpowder residue?”
“Yes. My hands were clean.”
“What did the victim say? Was the robber wearing gloves?”
Renee paused. “Yes.”
“There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence in your favor, does there, Renee?”
“I didn’t do it!”
“Then what were the loot and the weapon doing in the back seat of your car?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “I honestly don’t.”
She stared down at her feet, her shoulders drooping. The shadows under her eyes said she hadn’t slept much last night, and for a second he wondered if maybe he’d tied her so tightly that she couldn’t get comfortable.
Damn. He had to stop this. Why did he care one way or the other? As long as she had enough energy left to walk out of this forest, that was all that mattered.
“That kind of ignorance will buy you a prison sentence in a hurry,” he told her.
“But it’s the truth! I don’t know how that stuff got in the back seat of my car. My car’s old, and the door locks don’t work. Anybody could have thrown something in there!”
“Yeah. Any blonde woman who’d robbed a convenience store and just happened by.”
“I know it looks bad, but—”
“The clerk picked you out of a lineup.”
“I know! But I have no idea how—”
“Why did you run?”
“Because I didn’t do it!”
“Then you should have stayed around to prove it.”
“Even my attorney thought I was guilty. How was I supposed to fight that?”
He shrugged indifferently.
Renee tightened her hands into fists. “It’s so easy for you to shrug it off, isn’t it? You’re a cop. The guy on the other side. The one who throws people in jail. You’ve never had to face the prospect of looking at those bars from the inside out!”
“That’s right. Law-abiding citizens don’t have to worry about that.”
“I am a law-abiding citizen!”
John snorted with disgust. “I think that’s up to the jury to decide.”
Renee swept a strand of blonde hair away from her eyes and glared at him. “You’re a real jerk, you know that?”
“And you’re a real pain in the ass. Do you know that?”
To his utter surprise, Renee wheeled around and smacked him on the upper arm with her doubled-up fist. He recoiled involuntarily, but when her fist came flying at him again, he lunged at her, caught her by the wrists, and backed her against a tree trunk.
“You just assaulted a police officer,” he said. “Add that to the charges you’ve already racked up, and you’re never going to see the light of day again!”
“Tell me, John. Have you ever stopped to wonder if any of those people you lock up are innocent? Or do you just go for the first suspect you see who maybe fits the description, toss him in jail, and think you’ve done a good day’s work? Is that how it is?”
“I’ll tell you how it is, sweetheart. I spend my life rounding up the scum of the earth, people who’d shoot their own mother for a fix, people who’d plant a knife in someone’s back if it got them what they wanted. That’s what I deal with every day!”
“So is that what you figure I am?” she said, her whole body trembling with anger. “One of those people? Bad to the bone?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think. If I’ve got probable cause, I pull the scum off the streets. It’s somebody else’s job to dispose of it.”
“So that’s how you deal with it? You figure it’s not your job, so you don’t have to worry about all those poor people serving jail sentences because you got it wrong? How do you live with that?”
“Because more of them are guilty than not, and if they walk, that’s not justice!”
“Oh, yeah. But it’s justice to lock up the innocent ones, just in case?”
John wanted to shake that mocking condescension right out of her. It took a lot of nerve for her to pass judgment on him, as if she had any idea what it was like to do his job. As if she thought he wanted innocent people to go to jail. As if he knew who was going to serve time when they were innocent and walk when they were guilty. Judges and juries were insane about half the time and made decisions he wouldn’t understand if he lived to be a hundred.
“How can you do it, John?” she repeated. “How can you look people in the eye and—”
“I don’t look! I’ve got a job to do, and I don’t need that kind of complication!”
“Complication? Complication? Looking someone you arrest in the eye makes things complicated? You mean, like, you might actually see that you’re making a mistake once in a while?”
John blinked with astonishment at the words that had tumbled out of her mouth—and his. It wasn’t until this moment that he realized the truth—it was the eyes that did him in. That little scumbag who’d gotten off scot-free had those guilty, mocking little eyes that had set John off like a firecracker on the Fourth of July, making him destroy that damned paper towel dispenser because he hadn’t been able to destroy the little scumbag.
And now he was looking at the flip side. At Renee, whose big blue eyes were screaming her innocence. An image slammed into him of her in prison, falsely accused, a nameless, faceless entity shuttled through the system, emerging ten years later a hard, bitter woman, nothing but a shadow of who she was now, a woman whose life had been stolen from her…
He looked away. She grabbed his arm and yanked him back. “Don’t you dare look away!”
He whipped back around, his jaw so tight it trembled. “Okay, Renee. I’m looking. And do you know what I see? I see a criminal who’s lying to save her skin. That’s what I see!”
“Do you know what I see? I see a man who’s so jaded he couldn’t recognize the truth if it slapped him in the face!”
His anger surged, pounding inside his head with a primitive rhythm. “You don’t know shit about me.”
“Oh, but I do. You’re a man who’d like to think the best of people, but you can’t do that because you’ve seen too much of the rotten side of humanity to believe in much of anything anymore. So that means you’ve lost it, John. You’ve lost any hope you ever had of spending the rest of your life as an actual human being. Now, I don’t know if your life is crappy in general, or if it’s just your job that’s got you all screwed up, but—”
“Shut up, Renee.”
“—you’ve got a hell of a rotten attitude. And instead of backing off right now and thinking about what you’re doing, you’re just playing by the numbers no matter what they add up to. And you’re too damned afraid to look at me, because you just might see how wrong—”
“I said shut up!”
She stopped short and stared up at him, breathing hard, her cheeks flushed red with anger. He needed to back off, yank her away from that tree, and get on down the road again. But the nerve she’d struck was a live one, and all he could do was stare at her, wondering how she’d gotten under his skin. Wondering why he was standing so close to her that a tissue couldn’t have separated them. Wondering why, when he needed desperately not to look at her, he couldn’t tear his gaze away.
Something John hated to face had welled up inside him—a feeling of uncertainty that rattled him all the way to his bones. He relaxed his grip on her wrists until it became almost a caress. Time seemed to move like molasses as he hovered next to her, and slowly, slowly, her furious expression melted into a plaintive one.
“Look at me, John. Am I guilty?”
Her voice was barely audible now, her words passing her lips on a whispered breath. In that moment he felt all the anger and skepticism drain right out of his body—those critical emotions that were built into cops so they didn’t do stupid, reckless things like listen to beautiful blonde fugitives professing their innocence.
“The evidence says you are.”
“The evidence is wrong.”
He stared at her a long time, the cool breeze of the piney woods swirling around them. “Maybe.”
Maybe.
The moment he uttered that word, he knew he’d crossed a line he never should have gotten within a hundred miles of. There was no “maybe” about this, so how in the hell had he let that word come out of his mouth? It was time to become a cop again, to back away, to clear his head of all this uncertainty. But still he stood so close to her he could sense the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. This was either one of the biggest injustices he’d ever encountered, or Renee Esterhaus was one of the biggest con artists he’d ever encountered. And the fact that he couldn’t tell the difference was eating him alive.
His gaze dropped to her lips, lips that could be telling the truth, or lying to save her skin. The heated anger between them only a few moments ago had faded, and now every second that passed felt blurry around the edges, as if he were walking through a dream.
“I’ve got no choice,” he said. “I’m going to take you in.”
“I know,” she whispered. She gently pulled her hands from his grip, then flattened both of her palms against his chest. “But just for a minute…would you pretend you’re not?”
Holy shit.
She leaned in to him, inching her hands upward until they reached his shirt collar, then moving them across that boundary to ease around his neck. He blinked with surprise, but some force he couldn’t fathom kept him from pulling away. For a long, breathless moment he stared at her, knowing exactly what she wanted, and the knowing almost did him in. She moved closer by small degrees until her breasts grazed his chest. Then she touched the tip of her tongue to her lips, leaving them moist and glistening.
One minute he was supercop, taking no crap, and the next minute he was staring at her lips as if he were dying in the desert and they were a cup of crisp, cool water. If she were to fall backward onto a bed of pine leaves and drag him right down on top of her, God help him, he knew he wouldn’t put up one moment of protest.
But as he was pondering the logistics of that, a truth he’d chosen to ignore crept into his mind again, pounding away at him like a native drumbeat spelling out an urgent message.
He’d been here before.
The diner. Last night.
Slowly the memory went from hazy to sharp focus. In that diner last night, her eyes had been full of lust, her lips full of hunger, her touch full of promise, and her brain full of ulterior motive. He’d been thinking hot sex and she’d been thinking escape.
In a thunderclap of sudden reason, John froze, allowing his brain time to crawl out of his pants and make its way back up to his head. He couldn’t believe what a fool he’d almost been.
It was time to stop her from messing with his mind. To let her know that under no circumstances was he interested in a repeat performance of the kiss she’d given him in that diner, no matter how heart stopping it had been. To let her know who was the boss here, and it wasn’t a pretty blonde fugitive with a body that could make a priest toss down his collar and never look back. Coming on to him all of a sudden was nothing more than a ploy to entice him to let her go, and she wasn’t going to get away with it.
It was time to fight fire with fire.
In one smooth, quick move, he took hold of her wrists again and pushed her back against the tree. He held her arms firmly at her sides, then inched closer, insinuating his body next to hers, meeting her eyes in a long, languorous stare.
“Now, if I didn’t know better, sweetheart, I’d think you wanted me to kiss you.”
She stared up at him, her eyes wide with surprise. He moved his lips to within inches of hers. “And I’m thinking that sounds pretty good.”
Renee twisted in his grip, but he held her tightly.
“But there are a lot of things besides kissing that sound pretty good, too. How about if I cash in on that promise you made me last night that you never followed through on?”
Her accelerated breathing and widened eyes told him she hadn’t counted on this turn of events. John smiled to himself. She’d run scared last night at the mere suggestion that they have sex. The more he poured on the intimidation now, the less likely she was to pull this crap on him again.
“I want what you promised me,” he whispered. “And this time I’m not stopping until I get it.”
He dragged the words out in a seductive drawl, waiting for her to tell him loud and clear to get the hell away from her so he could claim victory. But all she did was squirm a little in his grip. He tightened his hand on her wrists, then inched closer and placed a feathery kiss on the angle of her jaw. She sucked in a sharp breath at the touch of his lips, as if he’d struck a live nerve, so he followed that kiss with several more, placing them wherever they seemed to generate the most reaction.
“John…please…”
Ah. Now he was getting to her. She shimmied against him, her breath coming faster, but with his hold on her wrists and the tree at her back, there was absolutely nowhere for her to go. He continued his featherlight kisses, letting his hot breath spill over her skin.
Unfortunately, this was getting to him, too.
Every time he touched his lips to her cheek, her neck, her throat, images flashed through his mind of what it would be like to go through with his threat, and it wasn’t long before the close proximity he’d created was making him half-crazy with lust. Just because his brain had no intention of following through didn’t mean his body had gotten that message, and if he didn’t end this pretty soon, he wasn’t going to be in complete control of the situation.
He dragged his lips along the curve of her ear. She shimmied against him but he held on tightly, whispering in the most blatantly carnal tone he could muster, “You’re not going anywhere, Renee. You started this, and I’m going to finish it. We’re going to have sex right here and right now. We’re getting down in the dirt, getting naked, and not even coming up for air. And if you think you’re getting out of it this time, you’ve got another thing—”
“Okay,” she whispered.
John pulled back and stared at her. “What?”
She lunged forward and pressed her lips against his in a fiery, demanding kiss that shocked the holy hell out of him. He let go of her wrists and pulled away, only to have her take advantage of her freedom by winding her arms around his neck and pulling him back again, devouring his mouth with hers.
Somewhere in John’s mind, the word stop was blinking at him in red neon letters, but those talented lips of Renee’s had caused his brain waves to flatline. Stop. He knew that word had to be telling him something, but damned if he could figure out what.
And before he knew it, he was kissing her back.