“Touch me,” he said against her lips.
At last she removed the staid blue cotton and ran her fingers, then her mouth, all over him. Time lost meaning and, needing more room to explore each other, somehow along the way they left the couch and tumbled across the carpet. They each came nearly to the peak, and then came down, only to come nearer and nearer each time as they touched and kissed, murmured and gasped, tasted and suckled.
For a moment he left her, searching for his trousers, fumbling around a bit with an urgency that endeared him, even though the clinical rasp of the foil packet made her wince. But when he returned, slipping inside her, making her feel and not think, she only wanted to complete what they had begun in the way they had begun it—fast, hard, now.
Heat and lust and incomprehensible need overtook her and she convulsed with a suddenness that shocked her. Feeling him pulse deep inside made her own release lengthen and when the storm was over, a strange tenderness overtook her that she did not understand. The hand she smoothed over the nape of his neck shook, and she bit her lip, hoping he would not notice.
She tensed when he stirred, half-afraid he would make some sarcastic comment and ruin what for her had been a wonderful, terrifying experience.
He raised his head and stared at her for a long moment. The candles flickered in his eyes, making her wonder if she saw confusion there, too, or nothing but the dancing flames. Then he bent foreward and kissed her temple in a tender gesture that did not seem like McGuire at all.
“Hi,” he said. She smiled. “You want to adjourn to the bedroom?”
Silly and schoolgirlish as it was, she blushed. She was lying naked on the floor of her apartment, having just had mad passionate sex all over the room with the man who she could still feel against her; yet she blushed when he asked if she’d like to go another round on the bed.
“Uh…sure,” she said, then gritted her teeth at her lack of social grace. Was there an etiquette to this? She hadn’t a clue. Her experiences in the land of slap and tickle did not include how to get from the floor to the bed with grace and class. Probably because once you’d done it on the floor you’d pretty much killed any hope of being classy again.
McGuire didn’t seem embarrassed though. He probably did this all the time. That thought made Jessica narrow her eyes at his back as he stood. Then he turned and reached for her, lifting her to her feet with ease, and pulling her against him for a long, mind-numbing kiss. After that, when he led her down the hall, she went, and she didn’t think anymore.
At least not until she drifted toward sleep in his arms, the scent of him—of them—all around her and wondered just what in the name of common sense she had done.
The sound of a cell phone going off in the distance dragged her from a deep and satisfying sleep. Blinking she looked around the bedroom. The grayish cast revealed they’d slept the rest of the night, which hadn’t been much after they’d played a repeat performance—make that a double feature—on Jessica’s bed.
Doug got up cursing and walked down the hall toward the living room. She heard him thrashing around, bumping into furniture and continuing to curse, presumably trying to find his pants—and his phone. Then the ringing stopped and a few seconds later she heard the low, somehow comforting murmur of him talking on the phone.
She drifted in a pleasant half awake, half asleep state until he touched her shoulder. Jessica opened her eyes to find him fully dressed, gun and all, staring down at her with a bemused smile as the light of the rising sun tinted the window behind him an orange, yellow and pink.
“Hi.” Jessica shoved her hair out of her face, grimacing as she felt the tangles a night rolling around had caused.
Doug sat down on the bed and she rolled against him, the bump of their hips making her body kick into lust overdrive. She put her hand on his thigh to steady herself, and his leg clenched.
“I have to go.”
She frowned at the distance in his voice and his eyes. “I understand.”
“Call you later?”
Jessica nodded. Every woman’s nightmare—I’ll call. Yeah right!
“Sure,” she answered and took her hand from his leg. He kissed her, but she could tell his mind was already somewhere else. The next time she saw Doug McGuire, it would be in a courtroom.
A night spent on the couch, and the floor, and the bed—and hadn’t there been a wall in there somewhere—made Jessica fall back asleep, even when she should have gotten up as soon as the door closed behind Doug McGuire.
Instead, the phone shrilling in her ear brought her awake with a gasp to bright sunlight across the bed. Her pounding heart leaped at the sight of her clock reading 8:15 a.m.
Using some of the colorful curses she’d heard McGuire use that morning, she found the phone amidst a tower of law books on her nightstand.
“So how was your night with the real man?” Her father’s voice boomed in her ear.
“What?”
For a moment she thought her father knew everything, and even though he was her best friend, and she was an adult, well, everything that had happened here last night was for no one’s ears but her own. Not even Liz’s this time.
“What happened with that cop who dragged you away the other night?”
“Nothing, Dad,” she lied as her gaze took in the state of her room. She was certain her living room looked even worse than her bedroom. Thank God her father hadn’t come over, as she had wished last night.
“Nothing! I’m disappointed. A man like that…a woman like you? In my day—”
“Dad! I’m sorry but I’m late. Where have you been anyway? All I get is your machine these days.”
“Just busy, sweet cheeks. You know how it is.”
The teasing lilt to his voice disappeared, and Jessica frowned. Was he working too hard? Should she push him about selling Water Street Bistro and moving on to something new? It wasn’t like him to keep a place so long, to be late for dinner, or to—
“That’s why I called this morning. I can’t go with you to the Bar Association Ball.”
—not take your loving daughter to important dates like the Bar Association Ball, Jessica thought, but said, instead, “What? Dad, you can’t back out on me now. The blasted thing is tonight.”
“I know. And I’m really, really sorry, honey, but this is unavoidable.”
“What is?”
Jessica frowned when her question was followed by a long silence. Finally, she asked, “Dad?”
“Why don’t you ask Detective McGuire?”
“To the ball? Oh, that would really work. I can see McGuire at a formal event for lawyers. He hates lawyers.”
“I don’t think so. I read a lot into his body language the other night.”
“I think you need glasses.”
“What’s the harm in asking him? It would be worth it just to see Wolcott’s face when you show up with a real man.”
“Dad!”
Her father started laughing, sounding more like himself at least, and Jessica smiled. “See you Thursday,” he said and hung up.
As she lowered the phone to her lap, she realized he had never explained what was so unavoidable.
Doug hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair. Another dead end. Ninety percent of murder investigations were spent on the telephone following up worthless leads.
Earlier