And something niggled at her about the shrink, too. He put on a nice-guy veneer, the complete opposite of Roman Numeral, as she’d dubbed Winchester. Still Reicht was a cipher. Of course, he was a psychiatrist and that might explain the creepy feeling he gave her. Some of them were as loosely packed as their patients. She made a mental note to have Matt check out Homeside while she was searching for Farley.
The last thing Sam Ballanger ever intended to do was to deliver a client into a worse situation than the one she snatched him from.
“Yeah, that’s right, a 1980 Jaguar XJ6.” Sam ticked off the license plate number to an old friend at Metro-Dade Police Headquarters. “Bright maroon. Oughta stand out like a black tux in a room full of brown shoes.”
As she tapped a pencil against the edge of a front tooth, waiting impatiently for the cop to check the computer records, Matt watched his wife. Sam arched her back against the wreck of a swivel chair she insisted on keeping when she moved in. In spite of her small one-hundred-ten-pound body, the springs creaked precariously when she tipped it sharply backward. Her bare feet were propped up on the cluttered desk in her office and she was wearing a ratty old pink chenille bathrobe that he teasingly called her “Linus blanket.”
He eyed the ugly bruise on her shin and the scrapes on her cheekbone, worried but knowing there was no way short of putting her in one of those custom straitjackets she used on retrievals that he could keep her safe. They argued about her dangerous job almost as much as they did about his aunt’s money. Correction. She argued about the money. He argued about her safety.
Matt glided into the room and began massaging her shoulders while she leaned forward and jotted down information. What was a guy supposed to do with a bullheaded female like Sam? She wouldn’t even take his name—unless he agreed to “really let me in the family by accepting Aunt Claudia’s offer.” She’d signed Sam Ballanger on their marriage certificate. The woman had the instincts of a first-rate blackmailer—or a criminal defense attorney.
Sam hung up the phone and laid her head against his flat abdomen. The man even had a sexy navel. “Mmm, that feels good,” she murmured as he bent over her for an upside-down kiss. “Even better.” She held his head in her hands and returned the kiss for a moment before spinning her chair around and considering the notes she’d scribbled on the page.
“Any leads on your lost boy?” he asked, then couldn’t resist adding, “Or on those two goons who tried to play crash-test dummy with you?”
“Strike out on the Olds, but I figured it would be. Bogus plates. I asked Pat to keep checking. Doubt he’ll turn up much on them, but he just might on Elvis Scruggs. I did come up with where Farley and Elvis are heading. A vintage Jag stands out almost as much as a flying saucer.”
“And a guy named Elvis doesn’t?”
“Depends on what part of the country you’re in. Nobody remembers him but thanks to my hacker pal, Ethan Frobisher, we have a trace on cash flow to back up the runaways’ destination. Seems Farley’s been using several of Daddy’s credit cards. Hotels, meals, ATM withdrawals in Tallahassee, Nashville and Louisville. The last was in some hick burg in southern Illinois. Then I used that info you so kindly dug up for me on the Net.”
She tossed him the printout of Space Quest conventions he’d pulled off the Internet for her. One was circled. “Big one in St. Louis. Starts tomorrow.”
He shrugged. “Your crazy job’s going to get you killed. I don’t know why I aid and abet you.”
“’Cause you can’t get enough of my bod,” she said, grinning as she stood up and wrapped her arms around his waist.
“You’re the trained health professional, Ms. Paramedic. What do you think?” he asked, prodding her with an erection that always grew like Pinocchio’s nose when she got within a dozen yards of him.
Sam rotated her pelvis against him and chuckled. “I think if I don’t take care of this immediately, you could suffer a serious…backup.”
“Speaking of backing up…” he said, turning her around while nibbling small kisses across her eyelids and down her nose to her throat. He backed her through the door and down the hall to their bedroom.
They were so engaged in the hot exchange neither saw the obstacle until their feet were tangled in it. They went tumbling across the threshold and landed on the carpet. Somehow Sam managed to come out on top. She always did. Matt looked down at what they’d tripped over—the ruins of her good black suit.
“As long as we’re down here, might as well make the ride worthwhile,” he said, rolling her onto her back.
Chapter 4
Sam let him pull off her old chenille bathrobe while she worked the snap on his jeans and carefully lowered the distressed zipper. By the time his tongue danced from one bared nipple to the other and back, she had worked the denim over his buns and he kicked the pants away. She arched into his delicate caresses as she buried her hands in his thick black hair, urging him on.
“Talk about steam-cleaning the carpet,” she murmured. “I’m gonna have rug burns…again.” She didn’t sound particularly concerned.
“It serves you right,” he growled as he felt her hands play along his back, down to curve around his butt. “Hussy.”
“Hunk.”
“Sammie, oh, Sammie,” he murmured, gliding inside the sleek wetness of her body.
Was it always this good? Only with Matt. Always with Matt. Sam wrapped her legs around him as he moved in her, slowly, gently. She could feel the springy hair on his chest abrade her sensitized breasts, making her nipples tingle and draw into even harder little points. “I’ll…give you…exactly one hour…to cut this out,” she whispered breathlessly.
But when he started moving faster, she bit his ear and said, “An hour, remember? I can’t last…if you don’t…ahhh.”
“Who says you have to last?” he asked with a wicked chuckle, feeling her body spasm around his. Matt concentrated on control. Dames did have the advantage when it came to coming. And his little Sammie had to be the world’s champ.
When he renewed his sensual assault with slow precision, Sam took a moment for the world to stop spinning. Then she took control. She was little but she hadn’t earned a black belt in judo without developing some serious moves of her own. With one heel and a lift of her hip, she rolled them over until she was on top, breathless, grinning triumphantly down at him.
“How…the hell…do you…do that?”
“In judo, it’s called mat work.” She chuckled, running her hands proprietarily across his hard pectoral muscles and tracing the narrowing pattern of black hair in its downward descent.
“We gotta…work out…more often.” Now it was Matt’s turn to be breathless. The view inspired it. He looked up at the most sensational pair of knockers he’d ever seen, standing high and firm above a slim waist and flared hips that perched neatly over him. Oh, my, yes…yes! Her sensational body, especially the breasts, had been the first thing he’d noticed about Sam Ballanger the day they met.
The day she kidnapped him at gunpoint.
But as she worked her magic on him, kissing and caressing, moving only the way she could move, memories of that incident faded. He felt the wild exhilaration building. When she tossed her head back and cried out his name, he let go with everything in him.
Sam lay prostrate over his much larger frame. When her heart returned to some semblance of a normal beat, she raised her head and looked over at the clock. “You’re off, Granger. Only