Just One Look

If she wasn’t careful, she’d be coming undone next.

“What do you want?” he prompted, steering her gently back to the conversation they’d been having, the one in which she’d almost admitted to dark desires for a downtown detective.

Her heart pounded so loudly she couldn’t hear herself think through the noise. No. Admit it, Tabitha. She just wasn’t thinking at all.

“I don’t know about you. But I really only want dessert.” The sordid truth of the matter sat between them for only a moment before her confession ignited something explosive.

She arched up to him, drawn to him and unwilling to pretend she wasn’t. She wanted this man. Badly.

Lips parting, she kissed him. Sensation rippled through her chest, fluttering down to her belly and tingling outward.

For long moments, she simply breathed his air, her mouth hovering lightly against his. He didn’t press her, didn’t touch her anywhere except that feather-light caress of his hand on her shoulder.

He tasted like peppermint. The scent mixed with the vanilla lip gloss she’d put on at some point that day. Courage growing along with the liquid warmth threatening to swallow her, Tabitha couldn’t wait any longer to test the texture of the rest of his mouth. Her tongue came in brief, hot contact with his lips, darting along the fullness of the middle before she wound her arms around his neck and pressed her whole body against him.

He surprised her by breaking the contact, pulling back when she’d been debating another move forward. Had he realized she’d been about to tackle him? The twinge of disappointment startled her as much as the way her heart jumped in nervous rhythm.

“You’re agreeing to dessert then, right?” He relinquished her shoulder to smooth his way up her neck and cup her chin. “I want to make sure we understand each other before we go any further.”

“You want clarification?” Her fingers reached up to touch the open collar of his shirt and she remembered how he mentioned not liking people with false facades. Lucky for him, she was all too glad to be honest about this. “I’m interested in exploring this attraction wherever it leads, but I’m not going down the path of dinner or drinks or a standing Friday-night commitment for all the orgasms in the world.”

“I’ll make sure not to bother you on Fridays.” A hint of a smile twitched his lips before he ventured near again, but now that Tabitha had found her voice, she couldn’t seem to silence it. She had to share one more, very important thing.

“But if we’re going to follow this where it leads, could you do me one small favor?” She pressed her hand to his chest at the last minute and got to experience the solid warmth of him.

Her hand splayed against his heart.

“Name it.” His heart hammered quickly beneath her hand in a way that fascinated her. Flattered her even more.

“Just be careful you don’t touch any more than my lips until we’re ready to take this to its natural conclusion.” She’d always had intimacy problems. Bad timing with her…er, climaxes. “I’m sort of a sexual powder keg after too many nights alone and—” deep, steadying breath “—I think I have a pretty sensitive trigger by now.”

4

A STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN who was a self-proclaimed sexual powder keg wanted a no-strings relationship with him?

Warren had to check his horoscope to see if all kinds of planets were aligned because this kind of thing did not happen to him. His world was a brutal place, not some red-hot fairy tale with a curvy siren in a starring role.

He studied Tabitha in the crimson glow of the lamp. Was it just the light that suffused her cheeks with color as he leaned closer to align their bodies without touching?

Her eyelids fluttered once, twice, then closed as she tilted her chin to meet his mouth. The need to feel her skin, to hold her steady while he kissed her, rode him hard. He remembered the silky warmth of her when he’d stroked up her neck earlier, and he wanted to indulge the feel of her again. But a good man follows a woman’s rules, right? Even while he did his damnedest to ensure she wouldn’t want to follow them for long.

He just needed to make her touch him, and then all bets were off for the kind of restraint he needed to show today. Lips grazing hers, he sampled the vanilla-tinged flavor of her mouth more deeply, lingering in the places that made her squirm in her seat.

A blessedly easy task.

She sighed in the back of her throat, her hips tilting ever so slightly closer. He could tell because her body radiated heat as surely as she radiated sex appeal and every millimeter closer she got spiked the temperature in the room.

He really shouldn’t take this too far tonight since their conversation had been tinged with the attraction they’d both been feeling. Didn’t he owe her a sort of cooling-off period to make sure this was what she wanted? Not that he could necessarily walk away from her anyhow, but his sense of fair play suggested he should. But next time…he’d take her up on that dessert offer, by God. His blood was slamming through his arteries with excessive force. He couldn’t tell if he was burning from the inside out or the outside in anymore. His swim training didn’t do half the number on him that her kisses could.

Just when he figured he’d have to call uncle and admit defeat, Tabitha busted the “no touch” rule in spectacular fashion by wrapping her arms around him and drawing him down on top of her. Her breasts were suddenly pressed against his chest, the soft swells straining the buttons on her sweater as much as they strained his crumbling reserve. They’d been sitting on the couch, but now they listed to one side in an effort to connect as many square inches of their bodies as possible.

It had been too long for him. He’d hardly dated since a divorce that was a hell of a lot older than hers. Three years. A few women. None of them like Tabitha.

She guided his hand to her cashmere-covered breast and that cooling-off period started to sound like a load of crap. She wanted him as badly as he wanted her, and that blew his mind. Her full breasts pressed against her clothes and toward his touch. Everything about her was soft and warm and he needed to lose himself inside her, surround himself with that kind of warmth. He popped two buttons free on her sweater before diving beneath the fabric for a handful of fragrant feminine flesh.

And she was fragrant. He’d been curious about the scent of her since he’d caught the hint of clean soapiness about her skin on the set. But the hollow between her breasts held another kind of perfume, sweetly exotic and all the more intoxicating because the knowledge seemed secret somehow. He breathed deep, losing his mind to anything but sexual thoughts.

Sprawling on top of her on the couch, he left one leg dragging on the floor, his hips in tight proximity to hers as his hands molded to the shape of her breasts through the feather-thin fabric of her bra. Her fingers raked through his hair and trailed down his back, scoring his shoulders right through the fabric of his shirt. He used his knee to find leverage between her legs, spreading her open to the touches he’d been holding back.

He abandoned her breast to reach under her skirt, stroking up one silken leg. If she had a sensitive trigger, how fair was it to make her wait? The justification made perfect sense and gave him permission to do everything he wanted to do with this woman.

Her taut calf gave way to her knee and the delicate place behind it that made her convulse just a little when he circled the soft skin. Leaving that tender spot for her thigh, he spread his hand wide to cover as much of her skin as possible, savoring the way her flesh felt hotter the nearer he came to the juncture of her legs.

His cell phone blared into his consciousness, shattering the hottest foreplay of his life with some obnoxious mechanical-sounding ring tone one of the guys at the precinct must have programmed for him.

“Damn it.” He said worse things in his mind, but he didn’t want to scare off Tabitha, who looked fairly dazed.

If he could dispatch this call in thirty seconds or less, maybe they could pick right up where they left off.

He reached into his jacket pocket on the second ring and hit the button to answer the call that he could see emanated from the precinct.

Not a good sign for handling this in a hurry.

“Vitalis here.”

He tried to blink through the raw lust for Tabitha enough to concentrate on the phone call from another detective—a woman new to the detective squad who’d made her first big arrest last month. Donata Casale had raised a lot of eyebrows in the department when she came on board since she’d been a gangster’s girlfriend at one time, but she’d clawed her way through police ranks with hardcore determination to change her life.

Warren respected the hell out of her, even if he didn’t appreciate this particular interruption.

“Got a bullet embedded in brick. The guys say they can take it out with little peripheral damage, but I wanted to check with you first to see what you thought. I’ve got a homicide in the VIP room of a club downtown and the embedded bullet is at an odd angle. The victim is apparently a well-known porn star, John de Milo.”

Warren knew Donata’s partner—a seasoned vet—was out of town this week. Detectives with more experience might be apt to just remove the bullet and let Warren work through the ballistics issues in the office, but he could see the benefit to observing the bullet in play if the angle was a concern. A good extraction could be key in a case that had a lot riding on identifying a weapon. Any schmo could figure out what caliber a bullet was, but Warren’s specialty was for matching particular bullets or shell casings with those at other scenes, or even tying them to evidence in cold cases. Knowing that the same firearm had discharged bullets in separate incidents had been critical evidence in plenty of investigations during his tenure with the NYPD.

Besides, Warren had personal reasons for making ballistics his life and they applied whether or not he was on the verge of the best sex of his life.

Not that he didn’t regret it.

“Would you rather I just have the guys remove the bullet?” Donata asked, tipping him off that he’d been thinking too long.

And wishing he didn’t have to walk out of Tabitha’s apartment tonight.

“No. I can be downtown in fifteen minutes. What’s the address?” He wrote the street number on a corner of newspaper on the coffee table and disconnected the call, only to realize Tabitha was already inching her way out from underneath him.

He regretted the need to leave her when she looked so deliciously disheveled with her bra strap falling off one shoulder and her sweater half undone. His heart still slammed hard, his body not quite getting the message that he wouldn’t be able to have dessert tonight.

“Sorry.” He straightened, pulling her up to a sitting position on the couch beside him. “I wouldn’t leave if it wasn’t urgent. There’s a homicide scene I need to check out. I don’t know if I told you before, but I spend most of my time at the precinct as a ballistics analyst.”

Her fingers moved over the buttons on her sweater, closing the gaping fabric. She nodded quickly and he half wondered if she was more relieved than disappointed since things had escalated fast tonight.