Jenna Ryan - Raven's Hollow

“No idea, but please tell me there isn’t a legend in the Cove about this kind of thing.”

“Not that I know of, and it’s the card part that’s ringing a really distant bell.”

“That bell could be your head still ringing from the whack it took when you almost wound up in the bog.”

“There is that,” he agreed.

When thunder caused the ground to tremble, she stared straight into his eyes. “You know where we are, don’t you.”

It wasn’t a question, Eli reflected. “Yeah, I know. This is where you and I met the night we discovered Laura’s body.”

“Met, argued, walked and found.”

“It’s been two decades, Sadie.”

“I have a long, and vivid, memory.”

“Ditto, but right now I have a more immediate problem.”

The breath she released ended on a laugh. “You really don’t, you know. You’ve got a flat and no spare, which means your vehicle’s stranded. Mine, on the other hand, has all four tires intact. Seeing as it’s on the other side of the pine, the Hollow as a destination wins by default.” A light danced up into her eyes. “Looks like you get to check out that bulldog after all, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah, well.” He moved too quickly for her to react. One moment, his gaze was sliding across her mouth. The next, his own was covering it.

The last thought Eli had before his brain shut down was that kissing Sadie Bellam would be either the best thing he’d ever do or the worst mistake he’d ever make.

Chapter Five

For a suspended moment, Sadie’s mind and senses blanked. Then everything inside began to sizzle and snap.

She hadn’t kissed him in Boston. Oh, she’d wanted to, too many times to count, but whenever she’d thought about it, the ring on her finger had become a lead weight reminding her that she was engaged to another man.

There was no ring on her finger now, Sadie’s overheated senses pointed out. But that still didn’t make kissing him a good idea.

Unfortunately, the sound that emerged from her throat more closely resembled a purr than a protest. She also suspected the fingers she’d curled into his hair were holding his mouth on hers rather than trying to push him away.

Fascination wove a greedy path through the sparks. Eli was seducing her with his lips and tongue, with his whole mouth, in fact. Although it was difficult to form a thought, Sadie wondered if she’d ever been kissed quite this thoroughly before. If she had—and she doubted it—the memory eluded her.

A crackle of lightning preceded another ground-shaking peal of thunder. The storm sounds matched the heat currently shooting through her veins. With her fisted hands, she tugged him closer. She wanted to climb over the console and onto his lap, to let herself slide from fantasy into reality. She wanted to return the demands of his mouth, then simply sink in and not think at all.

The fingers on her neck slid up into her damp hair, and his thumb grazed the side of her jaw. Her skin tingled everywhere, and her breathing—well, maybe she’d stopped breathing, because her head was alive with sensations she couldn’t hope to untangle.

The next thunderbolt vibrated the body of Eli’s truck and shot straight up into her bones. Prying her mouth free, Sadie raised uncertain eyes. “Why do I feel like someone just reached down and gave us a really hard shake?”

“I thought it was my brain trying to shake some time-and-place sense into us.”

Or sense in general, Sadie reflected. A sigh escaped as she forced her spinning emotions to disengage.

Did it surprise her that his kiss would be off the scale? Hardly. After one dance in Boston, she’d expected that scale to blow eventually.

It was an effort to separate herself from him and keep her voice steady. “This shouldn’t have happened, Eli. We shouldn’t have let it happen.”

Skimming his knuckles over her cheekbone, he held her gaze. “I won’t argue with you, but only because I know what I can and can’t give a woman. More than sex is more than I’ve got inside me right now.”

She laughed out a breath. “When I unscramble that remark, I’ll probably agree. In the meantime...” She leaned forward just far enough to whisper a teasing “Your kisses rock, Lieutenant, with or without the drama of a full-blown storm beneath them.”

Sadie knew he was considering tossing caution aside and diving in again, but he went with the wiser, if somewhat disappointing, alternative and reached behind them for his backpack. “It’s time we put some distance between us and these trees. Where’s your—” he raised a humorous brow “—car?”

“Cars are neither bad words nor bad vehicles. I spent half my teenage life wanting to own a Maserati.”

“You own a Maserati?”

“No, I own a Land Rover, because I’m not in my teens, and I knew when I came back to the Hollow that the roads, in a pothole-to-pavement ratio, strongly favor the potholes. My mother had a man friend once who leased a Maserati, but I was thirteen when she left him, so I waved goodbye to that wish and switched to boys instead.”

“I didn’t know your parents had broken up, Sadie. I’m sorry.”

She twitched away any residual sadness. “They were barely together when we lived in the Hollow. Molly says it’s the Bellam curse.”

“What is?”

“The inability of Nola Bellam’s female descendants—my mother in this case—to commit to people, places and/or things. An inability she believes is supplemented by the fact that those female descendants insist on passing the Bellam surname on to their own female children.”

“Would this be your cousin Molly who only left Raven’s Hollow long enough to go to college?”

“That’s the one.”

“Making her the notable exception commitment-wise.”

“So it would seem.”

With a smile grazing his lips, Eli indicated the outside storm. “You ready?”

“Would saying no change the situation?”

His smile deepened. “Between lightning bolts, then.”

He would be gorgeous, Sadie thought with a sigh. A hot, gorgeous cop. A loner, with a reputation for getting the job done—however distasteful that job might be.

As homicides went, Eli did it all. He’d go undercover for weeks, often months at a time, if going under meant bringing down a New York crime lord. During his tenure on the force, he’d worked countless night shifts while investigating gang-related murders. He’d hunted down serial killers, sunk his teeth into a dozen or more cold cases and, in at least one instance that she knew of, apprehended a man who made Hannibal Lecter appear well adjusted.

Of course, it also didn’t hurt that he wore his dark hair long, always looked a little dangerous and somehow kept his truly superior six-foot-two-inch body totally cut.

“There’s less than five seconds between thunderbolts,” he said now. “We’ll need to move fast and stay low.”

“My way’s better.” Dragging her eyes from his profile, she regarded the storm-tossed trees. “Don’t count, don’t think, just do.”

“Which is why, as a kid, you stepped in groundhog holes and sprained your ankles on a monthly basis.”

“Two groundhog holes, two twisted ankles.” And one dead hand, she recalled with a chill that she couldn’t quite battle back. “On three?”

“Your count.”

They exited the truck simultaneously. With her skirt tied into a thigh-baring knot, Sadie led the way to the narrowest part of the fallen tree’s trunk. Before she could boost herself up and over, Eli scooped her off the ground.

“Wait, don’t! Are you...” He deposited her without ceremony in a puddle on the far side. “...crazy?” she finished through her teeth.

Joining her, he shouldered his pack and grabbed her hand. “Come on.”