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NASH FROZE. DANIKA seemed to know what she was doing, and had avoided contact with any of his injuries. Did he want this to continue?
Stupid question. Of course he wanted it. Craved it. But was it the smart thing to do?
Danika had lowered his zipper. He’d made no move to stop her. He tilted his head against the back of the couch and gave in to the sensation of her fondling him.
Could they take this further? He couldn’t be on top—his leg would never support him. Lying beneath her, as wonderful as it would be, would put pressure on both his injuries. Nothing like pain to result in instant deflation.
She was stroking him now, balls to tip. Damn.
With every available scrap of control, he removed her hands.
Her eyes rounded with surprise. “You don’t—?”
“I do. Later.” He gestured for her to move away while he shifted so he was sitting lengthwise on the couch. He patted the cushions on either side of him.
Danika straddled him again, keeping her weight on her knees, and he reached under her sweatshirt for her small, firm breasts. She wore a tee under the sweatshirt, and he restrained himself from delving under that layer. It was thin enough to feel her nipples standing at attention through the fabric and the bra beneath. Her moans of pleasure sent what was left of his blood supply straight to his dick.
She leaned forward, one hand on either side of his head, and pressed her lips to his.
She tasted sweet. Hot. Tongues dueled. Without breaking the kiss or releasing her breast, he reached for the button on her jeans and popped it loose, fumbling to open her zipper.
“Let me,” she whispered. She wriggled her jeans down over her hips, revealing light-blue nylon panties. She leaned away and tugged her sweatshirt and tee over her head and tossed them onto the floor. Her bra was a no-frills affair, thin white nylon displaying shadows of her peaked nipples. He urged her low enough to get his lips on one, nipping at it through the fabric.
“Feels so good.” She squirmed. “You have your shirt on.”
He couldn’t stand the idea of stopping long enough to unbutton his shirt. Still scraping her nipple with his teeth, he massaged her other breast, working his fingers beneath the silky fabric. Her skin was smooth. Warm. “Later,” he muttered into her chest.
“I need more hands,” she said. “I want to touch you.”
Dammit, he wanted to be touched, but not yet. “Later,” he said again.
He walked his fingers down her torso, her belly, caressed the skin around her navel. Went lower to her panties. Cupped the fabric between her thighs. She rocked against his hand, not making contact with his legs.
He worked his finger inside her panties. She was wet. For him. He parted her folds, found her nub swollen. For him.
His fingers stroked her core. His teeth and tongue worked her nipple. Her ragged breathing, her rocking hips threatened to undo him.
Later.
She groaned, squirmed, and bucked against his hand. With a cry of pleasure, she collapsed against his chest, one leg on the floor—considerate of his injuries—panting.
He caressed her back in long, easy strokes.
“You okay?” he whispered.
She lay still a while longer, then eased herself off him, kneeling on the floor beside the couch. “Not quite,” she said.
She worked on the buttons of his shirt, lay it open, and used her teeth on his chest, replicating what he’d done to her with mouth and hands.
Her fingers returned to where they’d been before, stroking his dick, spreading the inevitable moisture her touch created. She stroked, teased, then leaned over him, her lips and tongue torturing him. Pleasure mixed with pain, pressure built until he could stand no more.
“Dan ... i ... ka.”
*****
NASH SNAPPED AWAKE, taking in his surroundings. Couch. Living room. House. Blackthorne house. He flung the blanket covering him aside—where had it come from? His jeans were open, lowered past his hips.
The memories flooded over him. Danika. Where was she?
Pulling up his jeans, he swung his legs to the floor and stood. The aroma of coffee wafted from the kitchen. He stumbled in that direction, his injured leg barely protesting. Danika sat at the kitchen table, her laptop in front of her, the printouts from Grinch’s beside it, a steaming mug of coffee cupped in her hands.
She smelled like soap and shampoo, not the musky, sexy scent he remembered. Or had he been dreaming? He scraped his fingers over his jaw. Rough. He’d shaved this morning. He glanced at the bright green numerals glowing from the microwave. After three?
Had he dreamt the whole thing? His open jeans had hinted otherwise. Good grief. Had he taken his desire for Danika into his own hands? Quick checks said no. Too vivid for a dream. Or was it?
After buttoning his shirt, he strode to the coffeemaker and filled a mug with the fresh brew. Maybe that would clear his head, realign his thoughts. It wasn’t like he could say, “Hey, Danika. Did we do anything of a sexual nature when we got home from the Sheriff’s Department?”
Sheriff’s Department. He remembered that clearly enough. Deputy Cochran saying he’d follow up on the vandalism to Danika’s car.
He sat across from Danika and worked on his coffee.
She smiled at him. “Have a nice nap? I’ll bet you’re hungry. We can have an early dinner. You slept through lunchtime, but I didn’t have the heart to wake you. Your body knows what it needs, even if you refuse to listen sometimes.”
His body had known what it needed. The question still was, how had he gotten it?
“Guess so. What have you been doing?” He gestured toward her laptop and the paperwork.
“I confess I took a short nap myself. Cloudy days seem to demand them. And a shower. I put the clothes we rescued from the washer at the cabin into the machine here. I haven’t been up long, maybe an hour. My body needed rest, too.”
She was staring at him, as if she expected him to respond. Like about what they may or may not have done.
Nash hadn’t felt this confused since he’d been in the hospital, and that was when he’d been drugged big time. He moseyed to the fridge and hid behind eating an apple while hoping his brain would straighten out the real versus imagined scenario.
“Sounds like you’ve been productive. Any progress on the searches?”
Her frown said that wasn’t the right thing to say. He tried to come up with a variation on Was it good for you, too? that would work if it had only been good for him.
What the hell. He set the apple down, crossed to the other side of the table, and tilted Danika’s face to his. Heat filled her eyes. He kissed her. With tongue.
*****
DANIKA ENJOYED THE apple-flavored kiss until she couldn’t breathe. She broke away, scraping her nails along the stubble on Nash’s jaw. She wondered how long it would be before he could have sex in a more traditional fashion—and if she’d even be around to enjoy it. They were far from any commitment stages.
His limp hadn’t been as pronounced when he’d come into the kitchen, so her decision to let him sleep had been a good one, although the confusion in his expression had puzzled her.
Whatever the cause, the kiss seemed to have erased it, as his eyes held warmth, and there was a trace of a smile dancing at his lips.
“Nice,” he said.
“Agreed. But we have work to do.” She pointed to her printouts, where she’d added handwritten notes as ideas occurred to her. “I’ve been looking at the kids in Jorge’s program,” she said, explaining her reasoning.
Nash picked up the sheet of paper where she’d written the kids’ names. “How did you find these?”
“I went to the program’s website and found some there. A few names I remembered from an award of Jorge’s, where the kids had signed a card.”
His brows winged upward. “You have quite a memory.”
Danika waved off his remark. “It’s okay. He had the card framed along with the award and kept it in his office. I had plenty of chances to see it.”
He seemed satisfied.
“What?” she said. “You thought I asked Jorge, didn’t you?”
“It occurred to me.”
She huffed. “I haven’t been in touch with Jorge, or anyone else at the paper since I was fired. My Gazette credentials have been revoked, meaning I can’t access the inner workings of the paper. The only thing I did after I was fired was set up a new online subscription using a free Hotmail email address and a fake name.”
“You paid for the subscription using your credit card, though, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but I thought you said those things weren’t tracked without permission from the credit card company.”
“True. If you haven’t used your card since you left, there’s no trail to follow, even if someone did find a reason to subpoena your bank or phone records. I’m being overly cautious.”
“So I’m okay?” she asked.
He grinned. “I’d say you’re more than okay.”
Delighted with his grin, she gave a quick jab to his biceps. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“You’re okay on taking security measures, too.” Nash sat beside her. “How old are these kids? Would they have a reason to harm you?”
“Middle school through high school,” Danika said. “My thoughts were running more along the working for someone else line.”
“Makes sense, but that doesn’t help us find whoever’s calling the shots.”
“Not directly, but if it’s one of these kids, I’ll bet they could be convinced to give up whoever hired them.”
Nash paused. “Or was blackmailing them. Or threatening their families.”
She drummed her fingers on her chin. “You sound like you’re familiar with these possibilities. Is that part of what you do for Blackthorne?”
Another pause. The man was the king of pauses.
“Do? No. See them happen? Yes.”
Danika decided she wasn’t going to get much more about what jobs Nash had done for Blackthorne, so she dropped that line of questioning and went back to Jorge’s kids.
“Which do you think is most likely?” she asked. “Hiring, blackmailing, or threatening?”
Nash finished his apple and took the core to the trash. “Can’t generalize. It’s going to depend on the individual, and I’m not sure you’ll be able to pull that information out of a public search engine.”
“Do you think a private one would give better results?”
Nash rinsed his hands and dried them on the kitchen towel, folding it neatly and draping it over the oven handle. Another way to pause and think rather than compulsive neatness, she decided.
“Unless these kids are in the system, not likely,” he said. “It’s my guess you’d have to know who else to look for. The person doing the coercion, not the kid.”
Disappointed at the speed with which Nash had effectively quashed her hopes she’d find whoever was after her, she set aside her notes. “You’re saying to drop this angle?”
“I’m saying it’s beyond the scope of our investigative abilities at the moment. Save the names and let’s move on. There’s your ethnicity story and your scams.”
On the job, Danika had always felt she was on her own. Sure, Jorge was there to offer guidance and serve as a sounding board, but her stories were her stories, and most of the time, she had to push for them. Now, between Nash, Grinch, and the people at Blackthorne Nash had said were working on her behalf, she felt like she was part of a team.
Dare she think Blackthorne would investigate in that much detail for a non-client? How far did the related to an employee’s cabin being torched stretch?
Back to business. “I’d looked up three scams for my proposal,” she said. “I talked to several victims, but since the story was shot down, I didn’t go further. I can’t imagine a victim of fraud coming after me for wanting to expose the scammer. I say we can eliminate that one.”
“For now,” Nash said. “You never know what kind of hidden connections are buried somewhere.”
“Then it’s the story about ethnic groups. I’ll look there next.” Danika leafed through her printouts in search of the notes for that proposal.
Nash stood. “If you don’t need me, I should take some treadmill time. I’ve been neglecting my workouts.”
Good. He was finally taking care of himself. “Go for it.”
Danika booted her laptop. If she was under Nash’s protection because she was a target, the least she could do was keep looking for whoever was behind it. He hadn’t asked for this assignment. Neither had she. She wondered if he was being paid. Although they’d had a nice diversion earlier, she couldn’t continue to impose. He had his life, and she needed to figure out what she wanted to do with hers. Playing house with a good-looking bodyguard wasn’t exactly a commendable life goal. Looking at her laptop’s wallpaper reminded her that she was a reporter. She had other goals.
If their theory was right, her trouble was related to one of her nipped-in-the-bud stories, and she didn’t have the resources to run background checks on all the kids in Jorge’s program. Which left her ethnicity story.
She’d found a number of ethnic social groups when she’d begun gathering information for her proposal, so she’d focus on the three she’d zeroed in on. Germans, Russians, and Scandinavians. She’d gone to a pot luck social with a German group, which was a starting place.
She clicked open Facebook and went to the group’s page, the way she’d found them to begin with. There were sixty-seven members. Danika clicked on the first name, Elsa Greenwald, and found her profile.
As if she’d advertise she’d sent threatening letters, slashed tires, or had a bomb delivered. Then again, people posted stupid things on social media, down to photographing themselves breaking the law.
Nope. Elsa’s profile showed pictures of her cats and food. Danika recognized one of the dishes from the pot luck and wondered if Elsa would share the recipe, and if it would fit Nash’s diet.
Fifteen minutes later, Danika stifled a yawn. Looking up members of a social club wasn’t much different from trying to do background checks on Jorge’s basketball team, even though these adults yielded more hits in search engines.
So, you’re giving up because it’s hard? Some investigative reporter you’d make.