Black Widow (13 page)

“That’s Wilford Austin, sir. He wants to know when we’ll be done tramplin’ his corn all to hell.”

“Did you get a statement from him?”

Bucky grinned. “I do believe that’s what Earl is attempting, even as we speak.”

“What about the kids?”

“This just might turn out to be their last coon huntin’ experience, Chief. Looks like they might’ve lost their taste for it.”

“Where’s the photog?”

“Drew Logan usually does it, but he’s gone to Talladega, to a family reunion, so Eddie Sheldon from the
Gazette’s
comin’ over, soon’s he can get his film loaded.”

Nick ran both hands over his face. “Christ,” he said, “is there anybody around here who doesn’t do two or three different jobs?”

“Small town, Chief. A man’s gotta eat. You might want to talk to the kids, sir. They’re lookin’ like they’d rather be somewhere else.”

He spent fifteen minutes with Freddie Floyd and Billy Jo Wright, asking them to repeat again the stories they’d already told four or five times. “This is the last time,” he promised. “Then you can go home.”

So they ran through their disjointed story again, both of them obviously repelled by the details but nevertheless excited by their status. Finding a dead body, especially one that had been recently murdered, was a rare event indeed in a town the size of Elba. People would be tossing their names about for the next twenty years, remembering them as
those two boys that stumbled over Wanita Crumley’s body
.

“I lost my supper,” Freddie Floyd admitted. “I ain’t never seen no dead person before.”

Nick patted the boy’s slender shoulders. “It’s normal. Nothing to be ashamed of. My first time, I tossed my cookies all over the sidewalk.”

“Chief,” Bucky said, as the boys and their dogs headed for home, “we found this in her pocket. Looks like she was supposed to meet somebody. There’s a phone number. Think it might mean something?”

Sixteen years as a cop had perfected his poker face. On the slip of paper Bucky held between gloved hands, next to Kathryn’s phone number, somebody had scribbled,
Lake Alberta, 8:00 Friday
.

For the long moment in which he studied it, his entire past as a good cop passed in front of his eyes. One tiny slip of paper. One very tiny slip of paper that could easily disappear. And who would know the difference?

Nick closed his eyes. Took a deep breath. “Bag it,” he said.

Chapter Eight

She was napping, but she awakened instantly when Nick pulled into the driveway with just his parking lights on. She glanced at her bedside clock and saw that it was nearly 2:30 in the morning. He shut off the Blazer and squawked open his door, and she hastily pulled on her robe and went downstairs to let him in.

Even in the darkness, she could see the exhaustion on his face. He locked the door behind him and without speaking, she stepped into his arms.

Warm. He felt so warm. They stood intertwined, heat melding with heat, bodies swaying gently in rhythm with their breathing. Nick buried his face in her hair and murmured, “You smell good.”

He skimmed his mouth down her cheek, her jaw, the length of her neck, his hot breath raising goosebumps on sensitive flesh. She knotted her fists in his hair and let her head fall back in limp acquiescence as he loosened the belt to her robe and peeled it back. He sank gentle teeth into her shoulder, and white-hot desire shot through her. “Nick,” she said hoarsely. “Oh, Christ, Nick.”

And the robe dropped to the floor.

Tomorrow, she might regret this, but tonight there was no regret, no coherent thought at all, only sensation, only the touch, the taste, the scent of this man she’d been waiting to touch since the day she first walked into his office. There was a wildness in him that called to a corresponding wildness in her, a wildness she’d never known existed before today. As his mouth worried the soft flesh of her shoulder, she unbuttoned his shirt and tugged it free of his belt. He shrugged out of it, and it fell to the floor. Beneath it he was sleek and hard and muscled, exquisitely male. She inhaled his scent, tasted the tang of salt on his skin, knowing she’d never wanted anything in her life as much as she wanted Nick DiSalvo.

“I didn’t intend to do this,” he said harshly. “I kept telling myself I had to stay away from you. But I couldn’t.” He ran his tongue down the swell of her breast, took the hard little peak into his mouth, and exquisite pleasure tore through her as his tongue circled and teased. Just when she was certain she would implode, he changed tactics, working his way back upward, toward her mouth. Hoarsely, he said, “I’m not an easy man, Kathryn.”

Her heart thundered in her chest. Trembling violently, she said, “And I’m a hard woman.”

“You can say that again.” He ran a hand down her back, slipped a single finger between her buttocks, advanced it until he reached the hot, wet center of her. When he slipped it inside her, she nearly detonated. Near her ear, he rasped, “I’ve wanted you naked like this, McAllister, since the first day you walked into my office.”

Her body no longer belonged to her. He had total control as she moved involuntarily against his hand. “DiSalvo,” she whispered. “Oh, God, Nick, don’t make me wait.”

His kiss was savage, his tongue sleek against hers, sending shudders to the very pit of her stomach. With his free hand, he fumbled with his belt buckle. Still riding the glorious pleasure of that finger sliding in and out of her, she helped him, loosening his belt and shoving his clothing aside. Then he was free and she took him, thick and heavy and pendulous, in her hands.

“Kat,” he said raggedly. “Jesus, Kat, it seems like I’ve been waiting forever for you to touch me like this.”

This time, the kiss they shared was gentle, delicate. A surge of tenderness swelled inside her, frightening in its intensity, confusing in its significance. After four years in prison, tenderness wasn’t something she’d thought herself capable of. She could accept herself as a sexual creature, wanting, desiring, even needing. But caring for Nick DiSalvo was something else entirely.

He knelt on the floor and hastily arranged her robe beneath him. Rocking back on his heels, he held out his hand. “Come here, Kat,” he said. “Come to me, baby.”

Kathryn looked into those melted-chocolate eyes and forgot all uncertainty. Hooking both arms around his neck, she wrapped her legs around him, and his fingertips dug into her buttocks as he lowered her to his lap and drove that hot hardness up inside her.

She cried out, locked her thighs around his waist, and rode him. He whispered hoarse and muffled words into her ear, but she couldn’t answer him, couldn’t draw in enough oxygen to speak. She clung to him, her face buried in his shoulder, lost in the white-hot heat that fused them together, gasping with each thrust of that rock-hard body. “Hang on,” he rasped, and took her to the floor beneath him.

He was heavy on top of her, heavy and wet and shuddering and thoroughly, unequivocally male. She twined her fists in his hair and kissed him as they rocked together, both of them shuddering, both uttering harsh, breathy sounds of pleasure. Gasping to fill her overheated lungs with oxygen, she rolled and tumbled with him across the floor, slamming into an end table and sending it skidding across polished hardwood.

“Kathryn,” he said hoarsely. “Tell me when, baby. Tell me when.”

“Now. Oh, Nick. Now!”

He drove into her, hot and hard and slick, and together they tumbled over the edge into paradise.

When it was over, they lay dazed and gasping, glued together by their own dampness. The clock on the fireplace mantel ticked in the silence. In the kitchen, Elvis yawned long and loud, then thunked his head back down onto his paws. “I think I’m dead,” Nick said hoarsely. “I think you killed me.”

“You started it, DiSalvo.”

“You don’t hear me complaining, do you, McAllister?”

She stroked the smooth slope of his shoulder. “Do you have to go home?”

“Caroline said she’d stay all night.”

“Then come to bed. You need some sleep.”

He was asleep the instant his head hit the pillow. She nestled close against his warmth and lay there watching the rise and fall of his chest. Since the day she’d come home and found Michael dead on the floor, she’d never felt safe. Not anywhere, not until she met Nick DiSalvo. He was inordinately bossy, and frequently infuriating. But he made her feel safe, and she trusted him in a way she trusted no other living soul.

She hadn’t counted on this. Hell, after four years in prison, she’d stopped hoping for anything more satisfying than a hot meal and a hard bed. And as long as Michael’s killer was still running around loose, she couldn’t indulge herself in the luxury of any romantic entanglements. She couldn’t afford to be distracted. There was too much at stake.

Yet there was a part of her, some soft woman-place hidden beneath the hard-edged veneer she showed the world, that still dared to hope prison hadn’t succeeded in stamping out her ability to love. In four years, she’d never let anybody through that veneer to touch the woman beneath. Until Nick DiSalvo.

As he slept peacefully beside her, moonlight spilling through the window and turning his dark hair to silver, Kathryn realized she wanted to run. But did she want to run toward Nick, or away from him?

She honestly didn’t know.

It was the pager that woke him, insistent and annoying, and he rolled over in bed and reached out to shut it off before he realized he wasn’t in his own bed. Beside him, Kathryn lay sleeping, and on the bedside table, the clock read 7:02. He sat up on the side of the bed and rubbed his eyes, and then he went naked to the living room to find the pager in the heap of clothing they’d left in a haphazard tangle on the floor.

He shut it off and went back upstairs. Kathryn sat up in bed with the sheet tucked demurely around her breasts, her blue eyes still soft with sleep. “Morning,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “It is, isn’t it?”

There was a phone next to the bed. He sat down beside her and dialed the station. “Hear you had quite a night,” Rowena said cheerfully, and it took him a minute to realize she meant the murder and not his heated entanglement with Kathryn.

“What’s up?” he said.

“There’s some fella from the SBI waitin’ in your office. Seems extremely anxious to see you.”

“What the hell is he doing here? Wanita’s been dead less than twelve hours, and already the State’s sticking their nose in?”

“I made him a cup of our finest coffee and told him you’d be along in a bit.”

“It won’t hurt him to cool his heels for a while. Use some of your innate charm to keep him occupied. I’m running on three hours of sleep and I haven’t had my morning caffeine yet. Or a shower. I’ll be there when I get there.”

He hung up the phone and turned to Kathryn. She was still sitting there holding the covers to her bosom like a fifteen-year-old virgin. He caught the bedding in his hand and tugged, peeling it down and tossing it over the foot of the bed. “That’s more like it,” he said.

Her body was just as he’d imagined it a thousand times, lean and willowy, her belly flat, her waist tiny, her breasts ample and firm. He ran an exploratory hand down that smooth, flat belly and cupped the soft mound between her legs. “Pheromones,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve finally figured it out. That’s what keeps me coming around here, again and again. Pheromones.”

“That’s certainly flattering, DiSalvo.”

“I’m desperate for a shower,” he said. “You game?”

They made hot, wet, soapy love in the shower while Elvis whined and scratched at the closed door. Afterward, while he dressed and combed his hair, she brewed coffee. He followed his nose to the kitchen and found her bustling around, pulling things from the refrigerator. Eggs, milk, butter. “I don’t have time for breakfast,” he said as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

She wasn’t quite quick enough to hide the disappointment in her eyes. “Oh,” she said.

“I have to go home and change. And check on Janine.” Christ, he’d forgotten all about Janine. “And this State guy’s waiting in my office.” Why did he feel as though he owed her an explanation? He’d only slept with her, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t as though he’d offered her a goddamn engagement ring. “Look,” he said, “there’s something I want you to do for me.”

She leaned against the counter, spatula in hand, and tossed those blonde curls back from her face. “What?” she said.

“I want you to get dressed and pack a suitcase,” he said, pouring milk into his coffee. He capped the milk and returned it to the refrigerator. Took a sip. Her coffee was weak and insubstantial. He was going to have to teach her how to make it right. “I’m sending Bucky over, and he’s driving you someplace where you’ll be safe until this is all over.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I don’t care where you go
_—
Fayetteville, Raleigh, Charlotte
_—
I just want you out of Elba.”

He’d seen that stubborn look before, and it didn’t bode well for him. “I see,” she said. “Is that a direct order, Chief DiSalvo, to get out of your picturesque little town before sundown?”

He slammed down the cup of coffee, and hot liquid sloshed over the side. “Goddamn it, Kat,” he said, “I’m not talking to you as a cop, I’m talking to you as a man.” He crossed the room, removed the spatula from her hand, and took her in his arms. “The man,” he said pointedly, “who just spent the night in your bed.”

She studied his face, and for a moment he thought she was going to give in. “There’s just one problem with that, Nick,” she said. “You can’t separate the cop from the man. They’re one and the same.”

He brushed the back of his knuckles across her cheek. “Why do you have to fight me at every turn?”

“I told you already. I’m not letting them scare me off.”

“You’re a goddamn stubborn woman, Kathryn. And I can’t watch over you every single hour of every single day.”

She reached up and straightened his collar, and that simple gesture turned him inside out. “Kiss me, DiSalvo,” she said, “and then go to work. They need you more than I do right now.”

He buried his face in her hair and lost himself. She smelled so damn good. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to come back,” he said, running the pad of his thumb along the line of her jaw. “With Janine, and now this homicide investigation
_—
”

“It’s all right. I understand.”

He turned her face up to his and studied those clear blue eyes. “I
will
be back,” he said.

She tightened her fingers on the fabric of his shirt. “I know,” she said.

He kissed her gently, sweetly. “I have to go now,” he said, “but
_—
”

“I know,” she said with resignation. “Keep the doors locked.”

It was a fine Carolina morning, and he drove with his window down, surprised at how good a man could feel with three hours of sleep, a lousy cup of coffee, and an unsolved homicide hanging over him. He wheeled into his driveway and sprang up the steps to the apartment. Janine and Caroline Belmont were having breakfast together at his kitchen table. “Morning,” he said, and Janine shot up from her chair.

“Daddy!” she said. “You’re home!”

He returned her hug. “Just for a few minutes, squirt. I have somebody waiting for me in my office.”

“That’s not fair, for them to make you work so hard.” She looked wildly indignant. “When are you supposed to sleep?”

“I, uh, caught a couple hours of sleep,” he said, and Caroline raised a single, elegant eyebrow.

“Where?” Janine demanded.

“At the station. Look, sweetheart, I have to change and get back. Maybe tonight I can take you out for pizza. Would you like that?”