If Hawthorn was right, if Lyle was dead set on killing her, she had no option but to continue to cooperate with the LPD. “I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
“People tell us to fuck off all the time, Eve. More often than not, they get scared, walk away. Your family has history with Murphy. If you want to make amends there and walk away, you probably could.”
She could. She never, ever would. Death threat or no death threat, Lyle had to be stopped, and she was in the best place to do just that. But trusting Matt was a completely different story. “Did you sleep with me to keep me close? To make sure I’d take your protection?”
He smiled, but there was no real humor in the twist of his mouth. “Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is a limit to what I’ll do for the LPD.”
A hint of a smile curved her lips at the self-mocking words but she really didn’t feel like liking him right now. “So why? Why give in to the impulse now, after weeks of no?”
“I wanted to,” he said.
Oh.
His expression didn’t change. She rested her head on her folded arms and closed her eyes. The vent emitted tepid air from the softly rattling air conditioner. She lay beside him and wondered how to handle a Matt Dorchester who was actually doing what he wanted to do.
CHAPTER TEN
He’d just made mistake number four. No, mistake number four was going upstairs with her, what was it, less than twenty-four hours ago? This was mistake number five. Making mistakes was becoming a habit, the kind of habit his father loathed, preached against, habits of weakness and emotion. Except this time his emotions weren’t the only ones in the game, and it sure as hell didn’t feel like a mistake.
He lay on his back beside Eve, one arm tucked under his head. She wasn’t asleep, just stretched out on her belly, her ankle resting in the bend of her knee, arms folded under her head, her eyes closed. The pale skin of her back gleamed with sweat and her black hair tumbled around her shoulder and over the pillow.
For a moment he tried for the usual blankness when he could be nothing, no needs, no demands, no pressures, but there was no ignoring Eve in his bed. God knew she had every right to tell him to deliver meals to Luke’s room for the next forty-eight hours, then go fuck himself, but he’d underestimated the unpredictable life force Eve channeled. He’d tried to do this the right way, offering up the option that, until recently, had worked for him. It didn’t work for her. Eve wasn’t the kind of person to stuff everything down, or substitute exercise for emotion, or settle for anything less than what she wanted.
People did atypical things when they were angry. Physical things. They hit things, or each other. Ran. Stormed around, screamed obscenities, made accusations, went cold and hard and silent.
Sometimes, for all the wrong reasons, they had sex.
If he’d been able to pick the circumstances for his first time with Eve, anger-driven sex wouldn’t have been on the list. Except she’d sat in his kitchen, looking like she was going to flare into flames from the inside out. Her tight, clipped sentences told the story as much as the edgy nerves she didn’t even bother to hide. Then she said she still wanted him, despite the anger, or maybe because of it, throwing the words at him like a challenge. Just like every encounter with Eve for the last two weeks, he simply couldn’t resist reaching out to touch that live wire.
It chapped his ass to hear her list any number of motives for sex, and burned like salt rubbed in the raw spots when she checked the condom wrapper for herself, but he’d earned that. There was more to come. But for now she was relaxed, breathing easily, soft and warm in his bed. It should have been purely physical, a way to ease her stress, scratch the itch and see if it went away. It hadn’t. Instead, he felt sore inside, something similar to the ache left after he took a good pounding to his ribs. He couldn’t name it, so he noted the feeling and set it aside.
He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Less than an hour until Hawthorn and Sorenson arrived. “You want to shower again?”
“Yes,” she said. “You go first. I’ll take longer.”
He eased himself away from her warm body, stood under a lukewarm shower, and repeated his new mantra: no more mistakes. He’d fucked up, but he could rescue this from the death spiral. All he had to do was keep it together, until they got Murphy.
He got out, toweled off, then went back into the bedroom to get dressed. As soon as he reappeared, Eve slid out of bed, gathered her clothes from the floor, and ducked into the bathroom.
She joined him in the kitchen ten minutes later, her combed hair lying wet against her neck. “Do you have any elastic bands?”