Part 15 (1/2)

Short answers: FBI agent; information she couldn't, wouldn't, give.

She lifted her chin at him. ”Anybody ever tell you you have a great imagination?” To her dismay, instead of being light as she'd intended, her voice came out sounding throaty, thick.

This time his mouth got so close to her ear that she could actually feel his lips moving. ”Are you denying it?”

She s.h.i.+vered, and not from guilt or fear. It was from the b.u.t.terfly touch of his mouth on her skin. As he straightened, her arms stayed wrapped around his neck. Her head tilted farther back as if to offer up her lips for his kiss.

”Yes.”

He looked like he was barely managing to swallow some choice curse words. His arms hardened around her, s.h.i.+fted. One hand slid down to rest in the small of her back. She could feel the size and shape of it through her dress. Another inch or so, and he'd have his hand on her b.u.t.t. Difficult as it might be to face the truth, she wanted his hand on her b.u.t.t. She found herself pressed even more firmly against the hardness that told her that, despite his terse questions, he was at least as aroused as she was, and she wasn't sure if it was his doing or hers.

He bent his head again, only this time he didn't say anything. Instead his lips brushed her ear, and then they settled against the tender skin just below it.

They were warm and firm and totally mind-blowing. She could feel the rasp of his stubble against her skin.

He kissed her there, lingered, kissed some more. She sucked in air.

His mouth was hot, and damp, and a revelation in the way it made her feel as it crawled tenderly, searchingly, thrillingly, along the underside of her jaw before returning to nuzzle her beneath her ear again.

Her heart thumped. Her loins tightened. Her bones turned to water. The world spun away. If she hadn't managed to clamp her lips together just in time, she would have moaned out loud. She was on fire, burning up, hungry for more. There it was again, the same blazing chemistry that had sprung up between them when he had kissed her before, and if there'd been a bed handy she would have been falling into it with him just as fast as she could. Her arms tightened around his neck and her body arched up against his and she told him in every way but words how much she wanted him. But even as she was melting inside from the heat the two of them were generating, the thinking part of her, the logical, reasonable, rational part of her, whispered a killjoy warning: You need to put a stop to this.

The thing was, she didn't want to.

His lips were at her ear again. ”Think I can't tell you're lying? All I have to do is feel how fast your pulse is pounding.”

Not what she had been expecting.

Her eyes popped open. Her fingers, which had been threading through the thick hair on the back of his head, stilled. The heat, the urgency, the sheer reckless desire that had brought her to the brink of possibly doing something really stupid, was blasted by a wave of cold reality.

He'd been kissing her neck as a kind of lie detector test.

Outrage didn't begin to cover it.

Two could play at this game. His ear was within easy reach of her mouth. Sensuously she ran her tongue along the st.u.r.dy outer curve of it, nibbled his soft earlobe, enjoying the harsh intake of his breath, the way he stiffened.

Then, in the spirit of sweet revenge, she whispered throatily into it, ”You ever think that maybe you just really turn me on?”

She felt the impact of the words. .h.i.tting him. For a moment he went still as stone in her arms. His every muscle tensed. He seemed to stop breathing. His reaction was everything she had hoped for, and more.

He lifted his head just enough so that he could look down at her.

A dark flush rode high on his cheekbones. His eyes were narrow and glittering, their blue-gray no longer calm. The look in them told her everything she needed to know: he might have been trying to seduce her secrets out of her, to gauge her truthfulness with kisses, but he was even hungrier for her than she was for him.

A second later, it became obvious from the hardening of his expression that he'd figured out that she'd just slapped some payback on him.

His brows twitched together.

”Enough of this. You need to start telling me the truth.” His voice was harsh, with a rough edge to it that, despite everything, still managed to do funny things to her insides.

”You need to start trying to find out who killed my ex-husband instead of constantly hara.s.sing me,” she snapped, and pushed free of his arms. Standing in front of him on the dance floor with couples crowding around them on all sides, she folded her arms over her chest and glared at him. ”I have to go back to work. I can't make you, obviously, but I wish you'd leave.”

Then she turned on her heel and walked off the dance floor.

FINN CURSED himself all the way back to his hotel room. From the moment he'd seen Cowboy Bob's hand sliding up and down Riley's bare arm, his plan had gone to h.e.l.l right along with his temper. Instead of calmly confronting her with what he knew and demanding that she tell him the truth under threat of arrest, which was the gist of what he'd intended to do when he'd left the hotel to pay her a visit, he'd gotten hung up on his dislike of the old guy touching her and the way she didn't seem to have a problem with it. He'd lost his cool, and then, when he'd been stupid enough to let her pull him out onto the dance floor, lost his head entirely.

Difficult to interrogate a suspect when all you wanted to do was f.u.c.k her senseless.

Difficult to rationally evaluate anything she'd said when all you still wanted to do was f.u.c.k her senseless.

Every time he remembered the warm glide of her tongue along the outside of his ear, he got hard as a rock.

The easy solution-stop remembering-wasn't as easy as it sounded.

He couldn't seem to get it out of his head.

Any of it.

Her.

So much for saying good-bye. She was officially top of his. .h.i.t parade again.

She knew something. Something big. No longer any doubt about it in his mind.

He'd been doing this too long not to have developed a nose for guilt.

And tonight she'd been throwing off guilt like skunk scent.

Even while she smelled of roses.

This time he'd recognized the scent. Same one she'd smelled of before, which he'd finally identified, although it had taken him a while to figure out exactly why some kind of flower seemed to be perfuming the air everywhere he went. Finally a lightbulb had gone off: it was his d.a.m.ned jacket, which had smelled like her all last night. This morning he'd dropped that particular suit off at the cleaners. He needed it to be minus any trace of Riley Cowan before he wore it again.

The better to put you out of my mind, my dear.

Thing was, it wasn't looking like he was going to be able to do that anytime soon.

Other thing was, he wasn't the only player in the game.