Adam was torn. On one level, he liked—more than liked—the feeling it gave him to be here with her, alone except for Cutter. Cutter who, if Quinn was to be believed, and there was certainly no reason not to, had planned, plotted and pushed this. He and Mandy. Together.
But the reason they were both here hovered inexorably, and cast a shadow over the pleasant idea. Trying to ignore it, at least for the short time of peace Quinn thought they would have, he watched as Mandy began to ponder something to fix for dinner later. She said she wanted to, which surprised him. Although the feeling he got at the casual way she’d tossed out “I like the idea of cooking for us,” with the emphasis on that “us,” made his throat tighten.
After she tossed out a couple of ideas that earned her merely a “fine” and a shrug, she closed a cupboard door and turned to look at him.
“You don’t need to cook,” he said.
“But I need to eat,” she pointed out. “And so do you.”
“I’d say let’s order in pizza, except I’d be afraid we’d be setting up some poor delivery person to be hurt so they could replace him,” Adam muttered.
Her eyes widened, and he instantly regretted having spoken the crazy thought aloud.
“I’m sorry,” she said before he could voice the same words.
He blinked. “What are you sorry about?”
“Foolishly thinking we could pretend things were normal. Just grab some time out of this nightmare to just…be. Together.”
Did that mean it was over? The together part? “Amanda—”
“Mandy.” She visibly took in a breath. “For you, it’s Mandy. Don’t go backward.”
For a long, silent moment he could only stare at her. He hadn’t even realized that at her words his mind had already put such distance between them that he’d gone back without thinking to the more formal name.
When she spoke again her voice was a gentle, quiet thing. “I was so wrong, and—” He started shaking his head but she stopped him with a sharp, “No. Stop it, Adam. You have to stop blaming yourself.”
“But—”
“No buts. Was it my fault I couldn’t dodge that car that hit me?”
“Of course not, but—”
“Do you blame me for not coming to help you after that wild shot caught me?”
“That’s…different.”
“Why? And if you dare say because I’m female I can’t guarantee I won’t hurt you.”
He smiled, ruefully. And gave her some truth. “You,” he said quietly, “have more power to hurt me than anybody right now.”
“Why? Because you won’t fight back?”
“No.” Although he wouldn’t. “Because of…this last weekend. I never thought…imagined…” He stopped, afraid he’d make things worse, stumbling around what he really wanted to say, which he was afraid she didn’t want to hear. Even after this weekend together.
“I did,” she said rather bluntly. “I imagined a lot. And you…are everything I hoped you were the first time I saw you and spent a long time wondering how I was going to get past my father’s objections to me dating his new partner.”
He blinked. “You…what?”
“Do you really think this would have happened so fast if the core of it hadn’t already been there?” She lowered her gaze and her voice, and added in a thicker, more aching voice, “Do you think I would have been so blindly angry with you if I hadn’t cared about you? If there weren’t already strong emotions in place?”
“You had every right—”
Her head came up sharply. “I mean it, Adam. Stop it. You’ve got to stop it. Not only is it not true, it’s…damaging.”
“Damaging?”
“Us.”
That word again. That beautiful, wonderful, unattainable word. But was it unattainable? He swallowed, hard, and said, “That first day, when I first saw you and forgot to breathe, and then realized who you were… I don’t think I’ve ever silently sworn so much in my life. Because I knew your father wouldn’t want you with a cop. He’d said so.”
“And now you’re not one, so no problem.”
He drew back slightly. She’d said it so lightly, like someone who’d had a major impediment removed. It had never once occurred to him that losing the career he’d worked for could have a bright side. He added that to the list of things he needed to think about, when he had time.
He belatedly became aware of something that had been going on for a while now, as they’d been talking; Cutter, making his guard duty rounds, circling the living room, pausing near the windows, then walking to the back door and pausing again, then going down the hallway to the bedrooms and office, but then coming back to watch them for a few minutes before starting again. This time Cutter just looked at them both, head tilted in a funny, quizzical way, looking decidedly self-satisfied.
“He really does look smug,” Mandy said.
“Yes.”
“Think it’s that matchmaker thing Quinn talked about?”
“Yes.”
She glanced at him then. He couldn’t get another word out. She looked back at Cutter.
“A matchmaking guard dog.” The dog sat and grinned at her. There was no other word for it. She turned back to look at him. And something in her gaze made him reach for her. She moved in the same moment he did, sliding her arms around him in a fierce hug. “Did he succeed?”
He knew what she meant. Knew what he had to, if not forget, at least let go of for this to work. But it would be like excising the last five years out of his life, and he wasn’t sure he could do it. Wasn’t sure he could overcome that swamping sense of guilt that buried him every time he thought of her father. He would have thought knowing she no longer blamed him would have done it, but he was beginning to realize that the real barrier was him blaming himself.
Cutter got to his feet again and began the same circuit. And that brought Adam back to the immediate reality, which had to take precedence over a potential future. A future he was afraid to even hope for.
“Let’s get through this first,” he said, watching the dog listening at the back door.
“All right.” His brow furrowed as she agreed easily. Too easily. And the moment she spoke again he knew he’d been right. “As long as we take advantage of this bit of peace we should have until tonight.”
That quickly his breath slammed out of him. It took all of his nerve to turn and look at her. When he did, the way she was looking at him made him wonder if he would ever breathe normally again. Because there was such heat in her gaze, such softness in her mouth as she looked back at him, lips parted, that he couldn’t seem to remember how.
And then she bit her lower lip, in the exact spot where he had lightly nipped her during that first sweet night. As if she was remembering. As if she was wanting it again. Fire rocketed through him, and his body responded so swiftly and fiercely it nearly put him on his knees.
“Can we forget about it, just for a few minutes?” she asked in a whisper that was so husky, so wanting that it blasted all his hesitation to bits.
“A few minutes,” he said, his own voice nearly hoarse, “isn’t going to be nearly enough.”
* * *
Mandy was fairly certain she had screamed this time. She was certain she’d clawed at him as her body had clenched so fiercely she simply had to pull him as close as she could get him. She knew, somewhere down deep, that she would never, ever get enough of the feel of him, driving into her, stroking her to that incredible explosion unlike anything she’d ever felt. Only with him had she become fully aware of the glory of this, and it made her shiver inside to think of how close she’d come to never knowing.
She drew in a deep breath before saying, slowly, “Sometimes I wonder if I might have…let go of my anger sooner if I hadn’t chosen to do what I do.”
Adam propped himself up on one elbow to look at her. He had slid to her right side after collapsing atop her—with a shout of her name that seemed ripped from deep within him and made her own pleasure peak again—so it was his left elbow. The one that worked properly. She didn’t look at the other, now resting against his rib cage. She didn’t need to. That road map of scars, many of them the straighter lines of surgery amid the twisting ones of the original injury, was all too emblazoned in her memory.
“I thought…you liked your work.”
“I do,” she said. “And it’s…necessary, sadly. It’s hard enough to wend your way through the system without trying to do it when your world has been shattered. People need somebody who knows the way it works.”
“Obviously, Foxworth agrees.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to do this without their help and funding,” she said. “But still, it’s hard to be in the middle of it all the time, and remembering why…” She let out a long sigh. “Maybe I should have taken that job Ms. Harris offered me.”
Adam’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“She offered me a job on her staff, after it happened.”
“Katrina Harris?” he asked. “On the city council?”
“Is there another one by that name?” she said teasingly.
“But…why?” She raised an eyebrow at him. He shook his head. “I mean I know how smart you are, and that you’d be a great addition anywhere, you’re so good with people, but—”
She cut him off with a laugh. “You don’t need to flatter me.”
“I wasn’t.”
She leaned over and kissed him for that. And that led to a need she didn’t even try to deny, to run her hands over him, feeling the taut muscle, the lean lines of him. She was suddenly swamped with the need to give him a kind of pleasure she thought he’d probably had little of in his life lately, a pleasure where he was the focus and the reason. And so she followed the paths she’d traced with her hands with her lips, her mouth, kissing, licking, tasting. And when she paused near that part of him that had responded most visibly, she felt him go very still. He would never push her, probably never even ask her, so she knew it was up to her. She delayed just a bit longer, so that when she finally moved to take him in her mouth a harsh groan of her name ripped out of his throat.
And she knew how deeply she’d come to feel about him when giving him pleasure gave her a joy that went down to the bone.
When this was over, they would… She wasn’t sure what they would do, only that she didn’t want to be without him. She’d wasted enough time already in her blindness. And who knew better than she that tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed? And she wanted tomorrow. She wanted a whole string of tomorrows.
With Adam.