Las Vegas: Seduction: The Heiress's 2-Week Affair

It was time to tell her. He didn’t want her imagination conjuring up false, negative theories, didn’t want her believing something that wasn’t true. Believing that he didn’t love her. Natalie deserved to know the truth.

“You want to know why I left that morning?”

She stopped struggling. “Considering that I’ve asked you several times since yesterday, I’d say you just made a very clever leap to a conclusion.”

Her sarcasm didn’t affect him. He knew it was her shield, her way of keeping the pain at bay. Hopefully what he had to tell her would minimize the pain. “I left for you.”

So he kept trying to tell her. “Oh, please.” She rolled her eyes. He was more clever than that. “You’re going to have to do better than that. That’s right up there with that old saw, ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’”

“It was me,” he insisted, then amended. “Or more accurately, it was my family. And it still is my family. The morning I left, I’d gotten a call from Scott. He was in some kind of trouble—”

“What kind?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter. What mattered was I realized that he and the rest of them would always keep pulling me back in. I’ve tried to separate myself from my family, to go my own way and just pretend they didn’t exist, but—”

“They’re still your family,” Natalie supplied with a sigh. How well she knew that feeling. There’d been a time when she’d considered changing her last name. But that still wouldn’t change who she was, or that they were her family. “Welcome to my world.” She propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him. Was it as simple as that? He’d pulled away from her because of his family? “Look, if you can put up with mine, I can put up with yours.”

There was one basic flaw with that philosophy. “Yours doesn’t kill people. Doesn’t have people after them because they want to ‘even’ some score. I left you because I couldn’t put you in that kind of danger just because I couldn’t live without you.”

“Too late,” she declared. “Candace’s murder just changed the rules of the game. There might be a very good chance that my sister was killed because someone was looking to get even—” Natalie abruptly stopped, her eyes widening as she just now recalled the end of his statement. “Did you just say you couldn’t live without me?”

Maybe he shouldn’t have told her. But now that he had, he wasn’t about to say that he hadn’t meant what he’d said.

“Yes.”

Feeling her heart beginning to accelerate, Natalie struggled to sound calm. “And how long has this been going on?”

He told her the simple truth. “Since the first moment I laid eyes on you.”

If she was smart, she wouldn’t believe him. But she’d already proven she wasn’t smart. Because she was lying on her kitchen floor, naked—and wanting more.

Natalie laughed softly and shook her head as she moved closer to him. “You know, for a monk—” which was what he’d alluded his life was like “—you have a very smooth tongue.” Each word was separated by a small, flittering kiss as her lips lightly grazed different parts of his anatomy. She felt him stiffening against her and smiled. “Encore?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” he told her just before he brought her up to his level and sealed his mouth to hers.

Chapter 11

She was getting nowhere.

And the worst part about it, she was getting there in slow motion.

Natalie could feel her frustration mounting, governing her every waking moment—and keeping her from finding sleep for more than a few fitful minutes at a time.

Thanks to Matt’s connections, over the last week she had been able to question anyone at the party who might have seen her twin interact with people at the gala. The upshot of that had been that, other than posing for the cameras and exchanging a few words with reporters, Candace hadn’t really talked to anyone besides Luke Montgomery and Matt himself.

Matt, at least, didn’t seem to have anything to hide. She wasn’t all that sure about Luke yet.

Not only had Matt covertly gotten her a copy of the tapes that her own department had commandeered but he had also given her Montgomery’s guest list under the guise that it was public knowledge who had attended. For her part over this last week, Natalie had judiciously gone down that list, calling or going to see as many people on it as she physically could.

All she had managed to garner over and over again was not information but condolences. For the most part, once she identified herself as Candace’s twin, the people she spoke with focused on the words “so sorry for your loss.” When it came to saying something kind or flattering about Candace, there was far less enthusiasm. The kindest thing that anyone could offer was that her sister was “a woman who knew how to have a good time.”

Natalie sincerely doubted that. What Candace had actually done was try desperately to numb herself, to party to the point of exhaustion. She’d gone at an almost frenzied pace from man to man in hopes of finding the man, never realizing that relationships did not spring out of the ground fully formed but actually took work. Constant work. With luck, that work made the relationship better. Made it golden.

Candace wasn’t the only one to be disappointed, she thought now, sitting at her desk in the semidarkness in the room she used as her office.

That was the kind of relationship, eight years ago, she would have sworn she had with Matt. And yet, look how wrong she’d been about that. The first perceived bump in the road and he had vanished without a trace. Never mind that the bump originated with him and not her…and that he’d done it supposedly for selfless reasons. What it came down to in her mind was that he hadn’t thought enough of her to ask how she felt about this sacrifice he was making. He hadn’t even bothered to ask if she agreed with his reasoning.

If he had, she would have talked him out of it. Then. But now, there was no point in going over old ground. Too much time had passed, too many years of hurt that hadn’t been remedied. Despite the lovemaking that first night—and the second and the third and all the rest that followed—the path they were on had been set. Try as she might, she didn’t see them going off into the sunset together.

Besides, he hadn’t said anything about getting together, not in any sort of permanent way. For the last week they had gotten together every evening to discuss their combined lack of headway in this investigation. Somehow these discussions always culminated with them going to bed together. Natalie mused that their insatiable desire for one another was most likely the result of an attraction that should have come with its own asbestos container because, left out in the open, it was as combustible as nitroglycerin.

So here she was, slipping out of her bed, padding in bare feet into the next room, dressed in a longer-than-usual-peasant blouse she’d pulled on and nothing more. Restless, her mind going in three different directions at once, Natalie wanted to look over her notes in order to see if there was something she’d somehow missed. Anything, no matter how tiny, that might finally send her off in the right direction.

She’d been at it less than twenty minutes when she became aware that she was no longer alone in the room. Matt had come up behind her.

The next moment, he lifted her hair away and pressed a kiss to the back of her neck. “Bed’s cold without you,” he murmured.

His breath was warm on her skin, sending shivers down her spine.

“This is April in Vegas. Nothing is cold in Vegas in April.” She struggled to sound coherent. She would’ve thought that after the torrid session they’d had together, she couldn’t be aroused again so soon.

But she could and she was.

“Relatively cold compared to before,” Matt amended. As he spoke, he placed his hands on her bare shoulders.

It was a possessive gesture she found oddly comforting. She never did think clearly around him, Natalie mused.

“Have a sudden inspiration?” he asked, looking over her shoulder at her notes.

With effort, she focused on what had drawn her out of bed.

“I wish.” Natalie sighed. “I don’t even know if Candace was killed and the ring was stolen to make it look like a robbery, or the ring was the object of the crime and she was killed when she wouldn’t give it up.”

“Does it matter?” There was an ironic tone to his voice and she knew what he meant. That either way, the outcome was that Candace was dead.

“It might help me figure out who did it,” she explained. “If Candace picked up someone and brought them home, then that explains why the door wasn’t jimmied and points to the killer being a stranger. If it was someone she knew, she opened the door because of that—and whoever killed her did it for personal reasons.”

Matt took her argument a step further. “Maybe the ‘personal’ reasons was that he—or she,” he inserted although it was obvious to Natalie that he really didn’t think that a woman was responsible for Candace’s death, “felt the ring actually should belong to them and not Candace.”

That was an odd thing to say. “I thought the ring was always in our family.”

“I heard a rumor to the contrary the other day.”

Natalie was immediately intrigued. Swinging around to look up at him, her mouth dropped open. She hadn’t realized that Matt hadn’t put anything on when he’d come looking for her. Her present position put her at a definite disadvantage as far as clear thinking went. Clearing her throat, she rose from the chair, doing her best to keep her eyes on his.

“Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” she wanted to know, her voice quavering just a little.

They’d gotten into it pretty hot and heavy almost from the moment he’d walked in the door. She’d been on his mind the entire day. By the time he’d come over, all he’d wanted to do was make love with her until he dropped from exhaustion.