Maggie Price - Dangerous Liaisons

Squaring her shoulders, Nicole turned to face him, offered her hand. “It was nice to meet you, Jake. Give me a call if you decide you want to try out my services.”

He hesitated for a brief instant, then cupped her hand in his while he flashed a careless grin. “Your services?”

Her throat tightened. Even as her brain told her that retreat would be wise, she allowed her hand to remain in his. Only one other time in her life had a man had such an immediate, stunning effect on her. Then, she’d gone with emotion, listened to her heart instead of her head, and she’d wound up betrayed and hurt. Desperately hurt.

Now all of her senses screamed at her to do an about-face and run for the hills. For some incomprehensible reason, she stayed put.

“My company’s services, of course,” she amended, keeping her voice light. “You might wake up some morning and decide you want to meet the doctor after all.”

He kept his eyes locked with hers while his thumb stroked the inside of her wrist. Her pulse stuttered, then her stomach dropped to her toes.

“I won’t.”

Even as he turned and walked away she took a step backward. Then another.

Feeling the aftershock of his touch in every pore, she curled her fingers over her palms. She remained unmoving, her gaze tracking his progress toward the door while she waited for her pulse to settle. It didn’t.

Hours later, her nerves still thrumming, Nicole lay in her bed, thinking about Jake Ford. About his dark eyes and ruthless good looks. About the way the attraction she’d felt for him had hit her like a freight train and hadn’t abated.

Even for a woman who knew he wasn’t the type of man she wanted, those thoughts made him dangerous.

Too dangerous.

Stifling a groan, she dragged a pillow over her head and breathed deeply of the soft scent of vanilla that drifted from the linen pillowcase. At least Jake wasn’t part of her brother’s new family, she reasoned. He was Whitney’s partner; there was no reason she and the cop with the whiskey-colored eyes would ever cross paths again.

And that, all of her instincts told her, was a very good thing.

He shouldn’t have danced with her. Shouldn’t have touched her, shouldn’t have stroked his thumb across her wrist.

Jake scrubbed a hand across his face. Over a week had dragged by since Bill and Whitney’s wedding. Over a week. He had lost track of how many times he’d berated himself on the subject of Nicole Taylor. Even now, his mind kept wandering out of the parked detective cruiser in which he sat and back to the hotel’s glittering ballroom. To the heady feel of her in his arms. To her tempting scent.

To her.

“Dammit!” Setting his jaw, he pushed away the maddening thoughts and focused his mind. He stared out the windshield at the decrepit brick apartment building that looked like a hulking mammoth on the dark, weed-infested lawn. A bare bulb glowed above the building’s crumbling cement porch, sending weak rays into the moonless night. His most reliable snitch had sworn that the girlfriend of Ramon Cárdenas, primary suspect in the drive-by homicide of seven-year-old Enrique Quintero, planned to show up at the apartment building sometime tonight.

Jake had been on the stakeout since sundown. So far, no girlfriend.

He had the cruiser’s windows open; the heat of late September hung heavy in the still night air. In the distance, traffic rumbled along the interstate that cut a swath through downtown. Several houses away, a dog broke into a flurry of barks, ending when a gruff male shout splintered the air. The police radio in the cruiser’s dash crackled softly, the dispatcher sounding as if he were speaking a foreign language.

As if on automatic pilot, Jake’s brain processed the garbled information, which included a female patrol officer notifying dispatch of a Signal 7 at Stonebridge, a swanky gated housing community in the far northwest part of the city. A Signal 7 meant a dead body. One of the Holy Grails of police work was that an unexplained death got treated as a murder right from the start. If his name had headed Homicide’s list to take the next call, Jake would have responded. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch, knowing that the team of detectives pulling night shift this month would head to the scene in a matter of minutes.

Settling down in his seat, he swallowed the last dregs of his convenience-store coffee, then tossed the foam cup over his shoulder. He gave an unconcerned glance at the back seat, littered with the wadded sacks and empty cups from that week’s take-out meals. He had a few days before Whitney got back from her honeymoon—he would shovel out the cruiser before then.

With the bitter taste of coffee still on his tongue, his hand automatically went to the pocket of his chambray shirt, found it empty. He scowled. Dammit, he hadn’t smoked in two months, five days and seven hours. When the hell was he going to stop reaching for the pack of cigarettes that wasn’t there?

Smoking was the least of the things he missed, Jake reminded himself, his mood turning as dark as the night around him. He couldn’t quite forget the bite of aged Scotch. Or the heady feel of a woman. A soft woman with stunning blue eyes. A woman who smelled good enough to make a man wonder how it would feel to have her move beneath him in the dark.

A woman like Nicole Taylor.

He exhaled a slow breath. He could still feel the way her pulse had spiked beneath his thumb. After that, it had taken all of his control not to press his mouth to that soft place on her wrist and find out if she tasted as good as she looked.

Doing that would have only compounded the already idiotic move he’d made when he’d slicked his thumb across her flesh. He didn’t want to start something he knew didn’t have a chance in hell of going anywhere. Didn’t want to sample what he couldn’t allow himself to have.

Yet, because he’d given in to the impulse to hold on to her longer than he should have, he couldn’t forget the gratifying stutter his touch had put in her pulse.

That memory wasn’t the only thing giving him trouble.

Until that night, all he’d wanted was to rid himself of the clawing dream that dragged him to that second in time when a bomb ignited and ripped apart his world. The dream had faded the past several nights, just as the police psychologist had assured him it would. Problem was, his subconscious had replaced that dream with one of Nicole. A dream that, in one way, was far more disconcerting because there was no therapy for it. No way to talk the woman out of his head, no logical way of ridding his system of her.

She was there. Inside him. All of his instincts told him he was going to have one hell of a time shaking her presence. But shake her, he would.

He had learned the hard way that what fate tossed out was not always kind. Learned in the most horrific way how fast a person’s life could change. How, in a slash of time, happiness could transform into grief. Numbing, ceaseless grief.

Before he could switch off his thoughts, he saw again the memorial service crowded with relatives, friends and cops, where music drifted and the cloying scent of roses hung in the air. There had been no caskets—there couldn’t be, not when jagged shards of the plane’s fuselage were all that had been left floating in the Gulf of Mexico. He’d bought one cemetery plot, stood alone in grim silence while a granite headstone with the names of his wife and twin daughters was positioned at the head of the empty grave. He hadn’t gone back to the cemetery since that day.

With the memories closing in on him, Jake rubbed the heel of his hand over his heart. Never again. Never again would he leave himself wide open for fate to deliver another staggering blow. For that reason, there was no room in his life for Nicole Taylor, or any other woman.