Lisa Gardner - Gone

Mac had left messages with the local recruiting offices in Portland. Chances were, however, he wouldn’t hear back until morning.

And that was it for the family meeting. The hour was late, sleep as good an idea as any. They’d all be up with the crack of dawn, and tomorrow would be a big day.

Kimberly tried one more time to get her father to come with them. And one more time, he declined.

He was exhausted, Quincy said, just needed some time alone. He was going back to the house and going straight to bed.

Kimberly didn’t believe him for a moment. Sleep? Her father? Even now, he was probably roaming from room to room, torturing himself with might-have-beens.

Similar to what she might do, she supposed, if she didn’t have Mac beside her, his hand folded around her own as they drove to the B amp;B in companionable silence.

Once inside the room-beautiful cherry furniture, hideous floral wallpaper-Kimberly went to work draping her wet clothes over the towel racks. Mac produced an old T-shirt out of his bag, and she gratefully slipped into the oversized jersey while taking a hair dryer to her dry-clean-only wardrobe. She put the blower on high, closed the bathroom door, and heated the tiny space to approximately five hundred degrees. It felt marvelous. Sweat dotting her upper lip, arms loosening into rhythmic cadence.

She walked out of the bathroom to discover Mac sprawled on top of the queen-size bed, wearing nothing but a pair of plaid boxers and a heavy-lidded look she knew too well. In spite of the late hour and the day’s events, she felt the familiar answering tingle low in her belly. Here was the upside of a relationship where they never saw each other nearly enough; Mac merely had to walk into a room, and she was ready to take him then and there. He had yet to complain.

Now, she crossed to the bed, aware of how his eyes were following her, lingering on her pale neck, her broad shoulders, her small rounded breasts. “Nice room,” she said.

“If you like chintz.”

“If memory serves, chintz has been very good to us.”

“True.”

She crawled on the bed, the top of the oversized T-shirt gaping low enough to reveal that she wore nothing underneath.

“It’s been a long day,” Mac murmured.

“It has.”

“Upsetting.”

“Yep.”

“I would understand if you needed to talk.”

“Talk? Don’t you remember? I’m my father’s daughter.” And then Kimberly was climbing on top of him.

His chest was warm and broad. She liked the way his skin felt against the palm of her hand, the brush of her cheek. She nuzzled his neck, reveling in the scent of him. Soap, aftershave, sweat. She should shower; he should shower. They had always taken such considerations for each other; again, weekend lovers who could afford to be on their best behavior. Now, however, she didn’t want to let him go. She needed the hard planes of his body pressed against her own. She wanted to hear his heartbeat thundering against her ear. She wanted to taste the salt of his skin and feel the sharp intake of his quickly drawn breath.

She was tired. She was sad in a place way down deep, difficult to decipher, hard to touch. So much of her life had been spent in the company of death. First sharing her father with a caseload that seemed to need him more than his own children could. Then her first forays into his office, sneaking down his homicide textbooks, looking at all the pictures. Realizing at the age of thirteen, when her own body was starting to bud and ripen, what a pair of pliers could do to the human breast. Reading at fifteen all the ways deviant sexual behavior could turn violent, sadistic, cruel.

She inundated herself with case studies, stories of depravity, summaries of the worst horrors committed against women and children. She did not know how to bring her father into her world, so she threw herself into his. If these victims were her father’s taskmasters, then she would learn to fight for them, too.

In time for her sister to die, for her mother to be murdered, for herself to stand in a hotel room with a madman’s gun stroking her temple. As a child, violence had taken her father from her. As an adult, that same violence gave him back.

Now she followed in his footsteps, a fellow FBI agent, counting the days until she was qualified to do profiling, so that what? She could squander her marriage, abandon her children, become an island lost inside herself?

She kissed Mac harder. His hands were tangled in her hair, his erection hot against her thighs. She ground herself against him. He caught her hips with his hands.

“Shhh,” he whispered against her lips. “Shhh.”

It took her that long to realize she was crying, that the hot warmth she felt was her own tears sliding down her cheeks, splashing across his chest. She kissed them, too, following the rain across his collarbone, catching the salt upon her tongue.

Then she was on her back and he was leaning over her, his weight upon his knees, his large hands impossibly gentle as they gathered up the T-shirt, slid it over her head.

“Now,” she commanded urgently. “Now!”

But he wouldn’t do it. No matter how hard she tried to grab his shoulders, to twine her legs around his waist. He was the model of control, nuzzling her earlobe, whispering across her neck until her entire body bloomed with the most delicious goose bumps and she was so acutely aware of her own skin she would scream if he didn’t touch her again.

His head was at her breast, his whiskered cheeks rasping lightly across her nipple to be followed by the soothing pressure of his lips. She had an athlete’s body, slim, narrow-hipped, flat-chested. But he made her feel voluptuous, his broad, dark hands splayed across her pale white breast, the silk of his hair tickling her belly.

Finally he took pity on her, his hips settling between her legs, his large body rocking against her own.

She opened her eyes at the last minute. She watched her lover, head thrown back, teeth gritted as he lost himself in the pleasure of her body. And she felt, through her ecstasy, through her sadness, a moment of unbearable tenderness. She splayed her hands across his face. She willed him to come, wanted to see the moment crashing across his features. She needed him to find release. She needed to know that she made this one person happy.

The dam broke. The unbearable pressure building inside her spiked and shattered. She was falling down, down, down, her arms and legs still wrapped around Mac and, for a moment at least, it was enough.

Tuesday, 11:28 p.m. PST

“YOU KNOW, I’D TIE YOU UP if I thought it would work,” Mac said sometime later. “I’d beat my chest, engage in some quality male posturing, and count on you, as the weaker, subservient female, to do as you were told.”

She slugged him in the shoulder.

“Ow.”

“That was for saying ‘weaker.’ I’m still thinking of the punishment for ‘subservient.’”

He rolled on top of her, pinning her against the mattress, and surprising her with the sudden moves. “I am bigger,” he said quietly. “I am stronger. But I know when I’ve met my match, Kimberly. And I respect your need to help your father. I understand that you need to do what you need to do, even if it puts you in harm’s way.”

She didn’t know how to respond. The room was dark, shuttered. It saved her from being too exposed, but offered him the same protection. She could see just the glitter of his eyes in the dark. Mostly, she felt the weight of the words he didn’t say, of all the fears neither one of them would ever discuss. Like all the things that could go wrong tomorrow, or maybe the next day, or the day after that.

Neither one of them feared for themselves, but they did not know how not to fear for the other.