Sandra Brown - Ricochet

“It certainly didn’t seem you wanted to help when I came to your house that morning.”

“I was scared.”

“Of me?”

“Big-time scared. Because for all my honorable posturing, I also wanted you naked, like this. Don’t smile. That’s quite a conflict for a cop.”

“I’m only smiling because I’m glad you have me naked, like this. But I don’t make light of the conflict. That conflict is a measure of the man you are. If you hadn’t been conflicted about me, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with you.”

His head went back several inches. He looked at her with an unspoken question. She nodded. “I said as much that night in the old house. Weren’t you listening?”

“I was listening. I thought you were speaking generally.”

“No,” she said. “You were as much a surprise to me as I was to you, Duncan. I thought the years with Cato had destroyed that part of me. I thought I would never feel attraction for another man. Then you spoke to me at the awards dinner, and you took my breath.”

“I took your breath? Really?”

“Hmm. And you have every time I’ve seen you since. I was desperate for your help, Duncan. But I was equally desperate to be with you.” She leaned forward and kissed his chest, took a love bite out of his pectoral, then did something incredible to his nipple with her tongue.

He grew hard in her hand, but he angled away from her. “We can’t,” he said unevenly. “We’re oh for two on safe sex, and I don’t have anything to use.”

Like a cloud moving across the sun, sadness dimmed the lambency in her eyes. “It doesn’t matter.” She paused, drew a deep breath. “Cato made clear that he didn’t want a child. He insisted I have a tubal ligation before we were married.”

Duncan lay perfectly still, assimilating that.

“I agreed to it because I certainly didn’t want his child. I didn’t think beyond getting vengeance for Chet. I thought being childless was a small price to pay.” A tear slid from the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek. She touched his lips. “I may have been wrong.”

He pulled her tight against him. As he cradled her close and pressed her face into his neck, he thought he might yet have to kill Cato Laird.

Recognizing the complicated classical piece he was playing on the piano, Elise smiled even before she opened her eyes. He didn’t play “sometimes,” as he had told her. If he played Mozart that expertly, he played often. What else about Duncan Hatcher didn’t she know?

She knew he was an excellent lover. Her body ached, but deliciously so. They’d made love for hours, leaving each other only for calls of nature, and once for glasses of iced water, which they’d drunk only to revive themselves before indulging in more.

There were also long interludes of conversation, some of it the lighthearted banter of lovers. They exchanged information, the getting-acquainted kind of facts that new lovers find fascinating about each other.

However, a lot of their discussion was much more serious. She resented each time Cato’s name was spoken, but she sensed Duncan’s urgency to strike hard and soon. He laid plans. She listened, argued, wished aloud that they could simply go away together, leave Cato and Savich to the devil.

But he couldn’t walk away from his responsibilities.

She couldn’t abandon her vow to avenge Chet’s death.

They knew this. They also knew they might not survive the inevitable showdown. This fear went unspoken, but it was there, as real and powerful as their desire. The uncertainty of their future increased the fervency of their lovemaking. They engaged hungrily, their passion tinged with desperation.

And there was something else. As serious to her as the fear of losing him was the fear that he still harbored doubts about her character. Once when she’d pulled back, he blinked her into focus, gasping, “Why’d you stop? I mean, if you want to stop, that’s fine. But why did you start if you didn’t-”

“I did.”

“Okay.” His question stood. She wouldn’t meet his eyes until he laid his hand against her cheek and forced her to look at him.

“Because of what you said last night, Duncan. I don’t want you to think that I was like this with him. It wasn’t the same.”

“Elise,” he said on a soft groan. “You are here. With me. Now. That’s what matters to me.”

Freed to love him as she wished, she had. She turned warm now at the memory of how sensually she had prolonged his pleasure, how he’d moaned her name as his hands bracketed her head, how full and rigid he’d become before her tongue nudged him over the brink and he came.

Then he had gathered her against him, her back to his front. He kissed the nape of her neck. “Rest,” he suggested in a drowsy voice. Reaching around her, he covered her breast. They lay quietly for a time, then he idly brushed her nipple with his fingertips.

“How am I supposed to rest with you doing that?”

“Sorry.” But his hand wandered down over her hip, along her thighs, between them.

When he pushed his fingers into her, she sighed his name.

“Shh,” he said. “You can sleep if you try.”

She tried. For about sixty seconds. Then she murmured, “Keep your thumb still.”

“Okay.”

But of course he didn’t and soon she was clamping down on his hand in the throes of a dreamlike but all-consuming orgasm. It subsided and she relaxed against him, whispering, “Cheater.”

His chuckle was the last thing she remembered before drifting off to sleep.

She wondered now how long she’d slept. Looking toward the window, she guessed by the position of the sun that it was midafternoon. As she got out of bed, he ended Mozart’s Sonata in C Major and began playing another classical piece.

After the first few bars, she identified the tune and her heart constricted. Quickly, she pulled on her pajamas and went to the door. There she paused to watch him as his hands moved fluidly over the keys, never missing a note, playing with the same level of intensity with which he made love.

She went to him and combed her fingers through his hair. He turned his head and smiled up at her, but continued to play.

“Für Elise,” she said.

“Für Elise.” He built to the crescendo, his arms and shoulders as involved as his hands, then let the tempo and volume gently coast back down to the final poignant notes. He removed his hands from the keys and took his foot off the pedal. When the last reverberation died, he swung his right leg around to straddle the short bench and placed his hands on her hips, pulling her toward him.

“Beautiful, Duncan.”

“No,” he said, nuzzling the cleft between her breasts. “Beautiful Elise.”

“You lying son of a bitch!”

They both started at the sudden and unexpected voice.

DeeDee Bowen was standing in the open front door, glaring at them. Furiously, she kicked the door closed; it slammed shut behind her. “You do play the piano.”

“APPARENTLY YOUR TALENT EXTENDS TO RESURRECTING THE dead.”

The piano had kept them from hearing the approaching car and DeeDee coming up the steps. Not that it mattered. This would have been an ugly scene in any case, but at least if Duncan had been alerted to her arrival, he would have had a few seconds to brace himself for the inevitable storm. He would have had time to put on his pants. As it was, he’d been caught in nothing but his drawers, and was damned lucky at that.

Elise slipped into the bedroom and closed the door. DeeDee stared after her, then her irate gaze swung back to him. “How long have you known she was alive? From the night she disappeared?”

“Night before last.” Trying to defuse her, he calmly explained finding Elise in his bedroom after DeeDee had driven him home from Smitty’s. “I was holding her at gunpoint, DeeDee, thinking everything you’re thinking right now. Then Gerard called and told me that Judge Laird had positively identified her body at the morgue.”