Baby, Don't Go Read online

  He bent his head and whispered a suggestion in her ear that caused her to clench tightly around him. He hissed air in through his teeth.

  “I’ve never, um, performed that particular act,” Daisy admitted. Moving restively, seeking the pinnacle that was just out of her reach, she looked up into his face. He looked like a fallen angel, one who held the key to whether or not she achieved satisfaction anytime in this millennium. “I could probably do it, though. Can’t promise I’d do it well, but I bet I wouldn’t be too terrible at it.”

  “Ah, Jesus.” He hooked the inside bend of his elbows behind her knees and planted his hands flat on the bed on either side of her shoulders, lifting her hips off the mattress and canting her knees back toward her armpits. “You are something else, Daisy Parker. You are something so freakin’ special I don’t even have the words.” He began to move his hips like a pile driver, and the new position drove him deep.

  “Nick?” She locked her hands behind his neck and wrapped her legs around his back. The head of his penis hit the mark with every inward thrust, nudging that spot high inside her, and she strained against him. “Oh, please, oh, please, Nick? Uhh! I’m so—it’s so—oh…my…gawwwwwd!” The relentless friction suddenly ignited, raced up a short fuse, then exploded like Hollywood special effects. Her interior muscles went berserk, grabbing and milking the source of all that pleasure as shock waves of pure, unadulterated ecstasy rocked her body. She was vaguely aware of Nick slamming deep into her one last time, and of his deep, attenuated groan in counterpart to her own breathy oh-oh-ohs. Mostly, though, she was fiercely focused on her own orgasm as it went on.

  And on.

  And on.

  Nick suddenly collapsed on her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and welcomed his heat and weight as she fought to catch her breath. She felt limp and languid, as if she were a helium balloon that might float into the stratosphere. She had never felt so relaxed in her life.

  Until her brain started to function again. Then unease began to creep in. God, what was she, a glutton for punishment? She felt his breath on her neck, the brush of his hair beneath her chin, and just went mushy all over. She wanted to hold him this way in her arms forever.

  Yet she’d been in this exact same position before. And experience told her not to plan for tomorrow, let alone start picking out china patterns. The harder you tried to hang on to men, the quicker they were to hit the road. And Nick was probably the most commitment-shy of them all.

  Lord, what had she done? She’d known darn well when she’d signed on for this gig that the chances were great he’d break her heart in two. Damn, damn, dammit. What on earth had she gotten herself into this time?

  12

  NICK lay sprawled on top of Daisy, telling himself he really ought to be a little more concerned about what he’d just gotten himself into.

  Then he grinned against her neck. He knew exactly what he’d gotten himself into—Daisy. He was deep inside her, right where he wanted to be, and he liked it. A snicker escaped him at his juvenile enjoyment of the play on words, but he quickly muffled it against her throat.

  “What?” she murmured.

  “Nothing. I just feel good.” Now, there was an understatement. He felt stupendous. His entire body hummed from the most satisfying sex he’d ever had.

  He knew damn well that attractions came and went, and that great sex was nothing to base a relationship on. Chemistry, no matter how red-hot it started out to be, burned itself out in the end. It was the gospel according to Coltrane.

  And yet…

  That was what he’d told himself nine years ago, when he’d climbed out of Daisy’s arms and left her in that room at the Mark Hopkins. He’d assured himself that it wasn’t really pain he felt as he forced himself to walk away; had told himself that he’d forget her in no time at all. It was merely that the sex had been so exceptional for a virgin’s first time.

  And no two ways about it, the sex had been good. But he hadn’t let it sucker him into doing something foolish, and God knew, temptation had been thick on the ground that night. He’d been overwhelmed by a barrage of cravings, any of which would have spelled disaster had he allowed himself to be enticed by them. Instead, he’d done the smart thing and gotten the hell out of Dodge before he could give in to the urge to follow in the old man’s footsteps.

  But he hadn’t forgotten that night. Nor had walking away stopped the ache. That had lasted for a long, long time.

  His fascination with Daisy clearly hadn’t burned itself out. Maybe he’d been a little too quick to nip it in the bud. Or maybe what he felt for her was different than, stronger than, he’d thought.

  Maybe he ought to take a chance and see where it took him.

  It would be a giant leap of faith on his part, but a relationship between them might actually have a slim chance of working—odder things had happened. And, hell, it wasn’t as if he were talking marriage or anything. Just a monogamous arrangement that they could take one day at a time. Sort of a twelve-step romance.

  He inhaled the scent of her and felt good. He’d have to be careful how he presented it to her, of course. He didn’t want her attaching too much importance to it, but he did want her to know that she mattered to him.

  It would be a first for him. He wasn’t accustomed to going out on the relationship limb to expose his feelings for a woman’s exploration. But while he planned to take matters cautiously, he also thought that he and Blondie had an actual shot of seeing this thing progress.

  Someday.

  As long as she didn’t expect too much too soon.

  He’d hurt her once, and he planned to do everything in his power to avoid hurting her again. But he also planned to take this at his own pace.

  Daisy stretched beneath him and murmured, “I’m glad you feel so good. Does this mean you want me to stay on the job after all?”

  “Hell, yeah. It wasn’t my idea for you to leave in the first place.” He pushed up on his elbows and looked down at her. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and her lips looked full and well kissed, and he couldn’t think of a single reason for them to get out of bed for the next several hours. “What about you; how do you feel?”

  She stretched again. “Oh, I feel very, very good, too.”

  “Yeah?” Well, never let it be said that Nicholas Coltrane wasn’t willing to help a partner recapture that “very, very good” feeling. Before he could lower his head to kiss her, however, Daisy gently pushed him back. He pulled out of her and rolled onto his side, propping his head in his hand as he watched her climb to her feet. He loved looking at her. She was lithe and fit, and just contemplating some of the possibilities for putting all that fitness to work made his heart beat faster.

  “We should have done this much sooner,” Daisy said casually as she located her panties and stepped into them. “It would have saved us both a ton of tension…not to mention all that tap-dancing we’ve been doing around each other.” She found her bra and hooked it, looking over at him as she shimmied into the cups. “Now that we’ve finally gotten it out of the way, maybe we can settle down to the business at hand.” She straightened the straps on her shoulders.

  “What?” Unable to believe she could possibly mean what it sounded as if she meant, Nick sat up.

  “We finally scratched the itch. Now we can move on.”

  His gut started to knot up. “And you don’t expect to get the itch again?”

  “I don’t know—I’m not the most sexual person in the world.”

  “Oh, yeah, I could tell that by the quiet way you just laid there waiting for me to finish having my wicked way with you.”

  Her cheeks turned pink. “Okay, so this was different—you made me feel much more sexual than I usually do.”

  His gut seized up at her confession, but before he could pursue it, could find out how many men she’d been with and why they’d left her thinking of herself as an asexual being when any idiot could see she was about as sexual as it got, she rushed on. “What I’m tryi
ng to say is, if I do get the itch again, I imagine we could scratch that, too.” She quit dressing for a moment to give him her full attention. “You don’t have to worry, though, Nick. I’m not going to go all needy on you; I know the rules this time. No strings.”

  He thought he saw something in her eyes that belied her breezy tone, but she bent over to pull on her socks before he could be sure. Carefully, he said, “What if I want strings?”

  She laughed. “Yeah, right. I’m gonna hold my breath waiting for that to happen.”

  For some odd reason, that pissed him off. He caught himself before he could lash out, though, surprised at the need to do so. He was generally much more contained than this. “Stranger things have happened, cupcake. What if I’m the one to get the itch?”

  She paused in the midst of lacing her shoe to look up at him. “Then I guess you’ll just have to persuade me to help you scratch it, won’t you?” She finished with her shoe and stood up. “Look, we’re both adults. If we want to conduct a purely sexual relationship, then that’s what we’ll do, right?”

  Damn. Nick didn’t know what to think. He should be ecstatic; she offered the perfect solution. Usually women got all huffy when he made it clear he wasn’t interested in a long term-relationship.

  But he’d been willing to offer Daisy more than his usual thank-you-I’m-outta-here lovemaking. He’d had it all figured out, but her total lack of interest sure hadn’t been part of the equation.

  Shrugging, he reached for his boxers. This was what happened when you stepped out of your comfort zone to do something nice for someone. He’d been willing to crawl out on a limb for her, only to have her reach for the saw to hack the branch off beneath his feet.

  Well, the hell with it; there was no sense in getting his nose out of joint. And no point in bringing up his thoughts on the twelve-step relationship thing, either. She’d made her position clear.

  Which was…fine. Great, in fact. Hell, now that he’d had a moment to think about it, it was actually the best of both worlds. He got to have sex with Daisy, without all the clinging and the talk of the future. Really, it was perfect.

  So he wondered why it felt as if all the blood in his veins had suddenly been replaced by ice water.

  “When’s that damn cop going to get here?” Nick stopped pacing to look out the mullioned windows for the fourth time in twenty minutes.

  Daisy, who had been watching him stalk from window, to kitchenette, to fireplace, to hall, and back to the windows, summoned the patience to reply—again—that she really couldn’t say. “We’re in no imminent danger, so we’re not likely to be a high priority.” He started prowling again, and her patience slipped its leash. “For heaven’s sake, will you sit down? You’re going to wear a path in the floor.”

  He plunked himself down on the edge of the black tapestry chair facing her. He drummed his fingers on his knees; he tapped his foot. Finally, meeting her gaze, he stilled. “Listen, when the cops get here, I’d like to talk to them by myself.”

  “What?” She snapped upright. “Oh, that’s perfect, Coltrane—just shove an ice pick through my heart, why don’t you? Or is this your unsubtle way of telling me you’d like a new security specialist after all?”

  “For chrissake, Daisy, will you get your needle out of that groove? You’re the one who was gonna quit in a huff.”

  “It was not a huff! It was a reasonable option, given your refusal to take professional advice.”

  “Whatever. It’s still not what I’m saying here.”

  “Well, you might as well be, since you obviously don’t trust me worth a damn.” Thank God she’d put an arm’s length between them after they’d made love. He’d stomp her feelings right into the ground if she ever went all soft on him.

  Nick raked his hair back. “Dammit, this has nothing to do with trust or the lack of it! I’m just not comfortable talking about a former lover in front of you, all right?”

  She made a rude noise, and he scowled at her.

  “Listen, Blondie, you’ve made your feelings about this painfully clear on more than one occasion. So if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon make my statement about the goons’ motive without you breathing down my neck.”

  She crossed her arms over her breasts and glared at him. “Fine.”

  A growl of exasperation escaped him. “Dammit, don’t do that. Don’t treat me like I’m intelligence-impaired. You don’t mean ‘fine’ at all. You mean screw you, jerk-off, only you’re not honest enough to just come out and say it.”

  “Screw you, jerk-off.”

  Nick hunched his shoulders, shoved his hands in his pocket, and flopped back in the chair. He looked her in the eye. “Fine.”

  The atmosphere was thicker than summer fog by the time the patrolman finally arrived. Daisy answered the door and, wondering when the academy had started graduating fourteen-year-olds, ushered the young man into the living room. Nick offered him a seat.

  They took turns explaining the attack and Daisy’s role as Nick’s security specialist. The cop looked at Nick. “Why do you need a bodyguard?”

  “I’d like to go over that with you in private when we’re through here, if you don’t mind.”

  “All right.” The patrolman shrugged. “You said the attack occurred at approximately eleven a.m.?”

  “Around then, yes.”

  “Yet it says in my report that you didn’t call in the incident until eleven fifty-five.”

  Daisy’s mind abruptly went blank of everything except what they’d been doing during those missing fifty-five minutes, and she looked at Nick.

  He said coolly, “Ms. Parker sustained an injury when the first thug knocked her into the wall. She was bleeding, and we had to patch her up.”

  Daisy felt the officer’s eyes on her and knew what he saw, because it was the same thing she’d seen in the mirror a while ago. Her lips were swollen from Nick’s kisses, there was beard burn around it, and his mouth had left a faint mark just beneath her jaw.

  A knowing smile tugged up the cop’s mouth. “Emergency patch job,” he murmured and caught Daisy’s eye. “Gotcha.”

  She silently cursed the blush that rose up her throat.

  Nick had been ticked at Daisy ever since she’d blown off their time in bed together, but that didn’t mean he liked seeing her embarrassed. If there was any embarrassing to be done around here, it would be done by him, not some kiddie cop having too much fun letting Daisy know that he knew what they’d been doing. “Look,” he said, pulling the patrolman’s attention away from her. “Have you got any questions that are actually pertinent to the attack itself? If not, perhaps Ms. Parker can excuse us for a few moments while we go over what I consider to be the motive for the goon patrol descending on us.”

  Clearly not pleased with Nick’s attitude, the cop asked them to clear up a few inconsequential details, then let Daisy go. He turned to Nick as soon as the bedroom door closed behind her. “Okay, let’s have it.”

  “Last Saturday I inadvertently took two photographs of J. Fitzgerald Douglass having sex with a young woman who is not his wife. Since that time, I’ve had my darkroom broken into, my property destroyed, and my shoulder dislocated. I was nearly run down by a car, and as you already know, Daisy and I were attacked in the—”

  “Hold it, hold it, hold it.” The patrolman held up a hand. “You’re trying to tell me that Douglass is responsible for all this? The J. Fitzgerald Douglass, the guy who’s up for an ambassadorship?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Get outta here. He’s Mr. San Francisco himself. He spoke at my church—hell, he gave my church money. The man’s a saint.”

  Great. “If you’d care to wait here a moment, I’ll be happy to go fetch the photographs Douglass is so hot to suppress. I think you’ll see he is far from being a saint.”

  “Keep your photos.” Snapping his notebook shut, the patrolman rose to his feet. “Photos can be doctored. Anybody who’s ever seen some of the
stuff in the sleezoid press knows that.” The look he gave Nick firmly established him within those ranks.

  Nick stood also. “I’m sure that’s true, but I don’t work for the tabloids. I’m a portrait photographer, and frankly, kid, I’m every bit as reputable in my own right as Douglass. Check it out—I was the photographer at Bitsy Pembroke’s wedding the afternoon I memorialized Douglass and his little kewpie doll on film.”

  The officer just gave him a flat-eyed stare and Nick’s temper slipped. “This is serve and protect?” he demanded. “You’ve made up your mind that a man you admire couldn’t possibly be responsible, so you just disregard everything that’s happened to me since? That’s professional.”

  The young man flushed. “Give me the dates and places of those other attacks.” Nick did so, and the officer wrote them down. “I’ll take Ms. Pembroke’s number, too.” He gave Nick a hard look. “I will be checking you out.”

  “Do that.” Nick got up. “Since she’s on her honeymoon this week, I’ll give you her mother’s number—you can talk to her. While you’re at it, here’s Senator Slater’s number, too. He’ll vouch for me.” He slapped the piece of paper he’d listed them on in the cop’s hand. Anger had him breathing fast, and he took a deep breath, making a conscious effort to get himself under control.

  Slipping the paper into his notebook and putting it away, the patrolman looked at Nick and said, “I’ll pay Mr. Douglass a visit and ask him about his employees.”

  As if the goon patrol was likely to be on Douglass’ regular payroll.

  Still, recognizing it for the concession it was intended to be, Nick thanked the cop for his time and ushered him out.

  He badly wanted to hit something, but failing to hang on to his cool was probably what had gotten him off track with the rookie cop in the first place. He relieved his ire by slapping his palm against the closed bedroom door with enough force to rattle it. “You can come out now, Daise.”

  She opened the door so fast she must have been standing behind it. “Well?” she demanded. “You boys have a nice bonding moment?”