Make Me Melt

7


JASON NEEDED A stiff drink.

Badly.

He’d waited until Caroline had fallen asleep; then, unable to close his own eyes, he’d finally gone downstairs. Barefoot and shirtless, he strode to the wet bar and poured himself a shot of Judge Banks’s best bourbon, then quaffed it in a single gulp. He gasped as the liquor burned its way down his throat and set the empty glass down on the counter.

Sex with Caroline had exceeded anything Jason could have imagined, and he’d imagined a lot. He just hadn’t been prepared for how completely she’d made love with him. She hadn’t held anything back, and she hadn’t let him hold back, either. As much as he’d like to tell himself this was only about sex, he knew differently. Despite what she’d told him all those years ago, Caroline wasn’t the kind of woman to sleep with a guy unless it meant something to her, and that was causing him all kinds of guilt.

With a groan, he scrubbed his hands over his face and sat down at the table where he had spread out the case files. After several moments, he gave up any pretense of looking at the documents. He couldn’t concentrate. All he could think about was Caroline. Upstairs, in his bed.

Naked.

He could still taste her, still feel the satiny texture of her skin beneath his fingertips. Still hear the feminine sounds of pleasure she’d made as he’d brought her to orgasm. He didn’t think he’d ever experienced anything as sexy and beautiful as Caroline Banks in the throes of ecstasy.

No question about it—he was in serious trouble. If she had even an inkling of where he’d come from or what he’d done in the past, she’d never have considered inviting him into her bed. He tried not to think about what would happen if she were to see through his carefully constructed veneer, to what he really was inside.

In the next instant, he realized it didn’t even matter. She wasn’t staying in California, and he wasn’t about to let himself get serious about her, even if she was. He thought he’d put his past behind him, but it was times like this when he realized he was still very much that angry boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Despite his personal successes, he couldn’t quite convince himself that he was good enough for Caroline Banks. He had no doubt that eventually she’d come to the same realization.

With a deep sigh, he laced his fingers together behind his head and stared at the ceiling, envisioning Caroline curled up in bed. Before he could change his mind, he pushed his chair back and took the stairs two at a time. He still believed that she deserved better than him, but he silently acknowledged that he wasn’t above taking whatever she offered. He was a selfish bastard and not afraid to admit it.

Outside his bedroom, he paused, and then he carefully opened the door. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but he could just make out her form under the blanket. Quietly, he shucked his jeans and slid in behind her. She gave a sleepy murmur of surprise and then shifted so her back was pressed against his chest. Groping with one hand, she found his arm and dragged it over her body so that he was wrapped around her. She was warm, and she smelled like the fragrant soap she’d used in the shower. It took all his restraint not to let his hands roam everywhere. Instead, he forced himself to remain still, but there was nothing he could do about his growing arousal.

“Where’d you go?” she whispered.

Jason leaned over and kissed her. “Just downstairs for a minute. You okay?”

She squeezed his hand and brought it up to cover one bare breast. “Better than okay. That was perfect. You were perfect. Even better than my fantasies.”

Jason groaned, knowing he was a goner. Her breast was heavy and soft in his hand, and he cupped it gently, stroking his thumb over her nipple until it tightened beneath his touch. While there was a part of him that was scared shitless about what had happened between them, another part of him was filled with masculine satisfaction. For tonight, it was enough. He wouldn’t let himself think about tomorrow.

* * *

JASON LEFT THE bed as the first fingers of light were touching the ocean beyond the dunes. He crept silently down the stairs, unwilling to wake her. After last night, she needed her sleep more than she needed to rush to her father’s bedside. As he entered the kitchen, he stopped short.

Colton leaned against the counter with a cup of coffee in one hand and a disapproving expression on his face. Silently, he poured a second cup of coffee from the fresh pot he had brewed and handed it to Jason.

“Don’t say it,” Jason warned, accepting the mug.

“What were you doing upstairs?” Colton asked. “Please tell me you weren’t with her.”

Jason took a gulp of the hot liquid, ignoring the other man’s question. “Have you been in touch with the hospital?”

Colton nodded. “Yeah. There’s been no change to the judge’s condition.” He glanced at his watch. “What time do you want to leave?”

Jason walked over to the table and pretended to consider the files that were strewn across the surface. “I thought I’d let Caroline catch up on her sleep. She had a pretty rough day yesterday.”

Colton was too well trained to comment, but Jason knew the other man wasn’t fooled. The truth was, he and Caroline hadn’t gotten very much sleep after he’d returned to bed. Jason was still riding an adrenaline high, but he knew he’d be feeling the effects of the strenuous night before the day was through. He was trained to go for extended periods without sleep, but Caroline wasn’t. The emotional stress she was under, combined with the physical demands he’d made of her, meant she would be exhausted unless she got some rest.

“It’s more difficult to be objective when you’re emotionally involved with your detail,” Colton commented. “Not to mention that it’s not very professional. I know you and Caroline go way back, but I’m not sure this is the time or place to rediscover whatever it is you had together.”

Jason shot him a baleful look. “Let it go, Black.”

Colton made a sound of disgust as he pushed away from the counter and headed for the door, coffee mug in hand. “I hope you know what you’re doing. I’ll be outside if you need me.”

Jason didn’t take offense at the other man’s words. The two of them had worked together for over five years, and Colton was the closest thing he had to a friend. If their positions were reversed, he’d have expressed the same concerns. He didn’t regret last night, but he acknowledged that sleeping with Caroline might not have been the smartest idea. But now that he had, everything had changed.

She was his, in the most elemental way there was. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her. In order to protect her, he needed to find out who had shot her father. Whoever was responsible was still out there. And while the FBI had formal jurisdiction over the case and was performing its own investigation, Jason knew it couldn’t hurt for him to review the files. He had an immediate familiarity with most of the cases and a good instinct for what might have motivated such a vicious attack.

Pulling up a chair, he set his mug down and began methodically going through the files. Steve Anderson had done him a favor by segregating the worst offenders out of the pile of possible suspects. Flipping through the documents, Jason discarded one and then another file. He set two of the files to one side, believing they warranted a closer look.


The first was the Sanchez case, and while Jason knew the leader of the drug-smuggling gang was more than capable of putting a hit out on the judge, he wasn’t sure that would be his style. Sanchez would lose any hope of serving out the remainder of his prison term in Mexico if the authorities even suspected he was behind the shooting. But it was possible that one of his henchmen had acted in retaliation. He set the file aside for further investigation.

He reached for the next file, and then hesitated when he saw the name that was written across the top. He told himself that Edward Green was a common enough name, but when he opened the file, he recognized the man in the police photo. Eddie Green was one of the most notorious gang leaders in the Hunters Point region of San Francisco. He’d been charged with numerous offenses, including drug distribution, operating a prostitution ring, weapons possession and murder. Jason recognized him from his own childhood. They had grown up together in the projects, and Jason had been one of Eddie’s earliest recruits into his violent Hunters Point gang.

He closed his eyes briefly against the unwelcome memories. He’d been twelve years old to Eddie’s sixteen, and he had worshipped the older boy, for both his cunning and his reckless attitude. Eddie Green didn’t take crap from anyone, and if someone did him wrong, he meted out his own form of brutal punishment. When he was seventeen, he’d been suspected of beating his mother’s boyfriend to death, but no charges had ever been pressed.

Jason couldn’t think about those days without a degree of self-loathing. He’d had a crummy homelife, with a grandmother who worked too much to really be an influence in his life and a father who was a drug addict. His grandmother had died when he was fifteen, and after that, Daryl Cooper had been too concerned about where his next fix was coming from to worry about what illegal activities his kid might be involved in. Jason had never known his mother. She’d been gone long before he was old enough to remember her. Eddie Green and his budding gang had seemed like family to Jason, and he’d looked up to Eddie as he would have an older brother.

Even when Eddie had demanded he commit petty crimes in order to prove his loyalty and commitment to the gang, Jason hadn’t stopped hanging out with the group. He’d deluded himself into thinking that it was okay to rob a convenience store or break into someone’s home when they weren’t there and steal their jewelry and electronics. He’d told himself that society owed him something for dealing him such a lousy hand. Still, on some level, he knew it was only a matter of time before he’d be told to kill someone. But by then he was too deeply entrenched to get out. Then his grandmother had died, and Jason had realized that if he didn’t extricate himself, he was going to end up dead or a junkie like his father. He’d been arrested three days later for jacking a car and had ended up in Judge Banks’s courtroom. Looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened to him.

He flipped through Eddie’s file, noting that his former friend had been released from prison about fourteen months earlier, having served six years on a murder conviction. But Eddie’s younger brother, Mikey, along with another key gang member, were on death row, charged in the murder of two police officers. Eddie’s gang had threatened to take down everyone involved in the sentencing if Mikey’s conviction wasn’t overturned. Judge Banks had been the one who had sentenced the two men.

Closing the file, Jason sat back in his chair, feeling as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. He knew what Eddie and his men were capable of. They were ruthless criminals without consciences, and they would absolutely destroy anyone who got in their way. But would they go so far as to shoot a superior court judge in his own home? Jason didn’t know. He thought again of what Steven Anderson had said about seeing an old car parked in the Sea Cliff neighborhood, conspicuous because of its age and condition. Could it have been Eddie, or one of his gang members, in that car? Just thinking about that scumbag coming anywhere near Caroline made his blood run cold.

Jason no longer identified with the troubled youth he’d once been, and he’d done his best to put his past behind him. But there were times, like now, when the memories of his upbringing clung to him like a dirty second skin that no amount of washing could remove. As much as the idea repulsed him, he knew he’d have to return to Hunters Point and get whatever information he could about Eddie Green and Judge Banks.

He looked up when he heard footsteps on the stairs and saw Caroline slowly making her way toward him. She wore his discarded T-shirt and a pair of shorts, and she hadn’t bothered brushing her hair. She looked so sexy that Jason felt his heart thud in his chest.

“Good morning,” he murmured, rising to his feet. “Did you sleep okay?”

She nodded and moved into his arms as naturally as if they’d been lovers for years. She was warm and supple and she smelled good enough to eat. Jason closed his eyes and hugged her tightly, unable to believe that this woman wanted to be with him.

“I missed you when I woke up,” she said and pressed a kiss against his jaw.

“I wanted to let you sleep, and it gave me time to start going through these case files.”

Caroline inspected the open file on the table. Jason wanted to slap it shut and prevent her from reading about the sordid details of Eddie Green’s history.

“I remember overhearing my father talking about this guy when I was a kid,” she said, picking up the photo of Eddie and inspecting it. “He sure is a scary-looking guy.”

Standing behind her, Jason studied the photo she held in her hand. Eddie had changed in the years since Jason had known him. He’d shaved his head, and the exposed skin was covered with intricate tattoos that extended down his neck and over his shoulders and chest. He had gauges in both ears and a piercing in one eyebrow, but it was none of these things that made him look frightening. It was the utter deadness of his eyes.

“He lost his way a long time ago,” Jason said.

Caroline replaced the photo in the file and picked up the written report, scanning quickly through Eddie’s rap sheet.

“He’s one nasty character.” She turned and looked at him. “He’s from Hunters Point, too. Did you know this guy?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.” He didn’t want to share his troubled youth with Caroline. He’d worked hard to put it behind him. He’d dedicated his life to putting creeps like Eddie Green behind bars. He didn’t want her to even think of him and Eddie in the same thought. “Like you said, he’s a bad character.”

She reached up and gently traced one of the scars on his face with her fingertip. “I remember when this was brand-new,” she said. “You had so many scars back then. I asked my father about them once, but he wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“Because he wanted to keep that ugliness out of your life,” he said, brushing a strand of hair back from her face. “You were so young and so damned sweet. I’m still surprised that he even let me into his house, considering what he knew of me.”

“Because he has a unique ability to see the true character of people,” she said, rubbing her finger over his lower lip. “He knew that you were a good person. Just like I knew.”


Her words grabbed hold of something in his chest and squeezed hard, making it difficult for him to breathe.

She’s not yours to keep. He told himself again that this was only temporary, and he’d do better if he remembered that. Caroline Banks would never commit herself to a guy like him, at least not permanently. But it was difficult to think straight when she pressed her mouth against his and kissed him slowly and languorously. Her lips were soft, and she tasted faintly of toothpaste. For just a moment, Jason resisted. But his body had other ideas, and before he could prevent himself, he slid his hands into her hair and tilted her face, fitting his mouth over hers. He pushed her back against the table before cupping her rear in his hands and lifting her onto the surface, heedless of the papers that went scattering.

He swallowed Caroline’s surprised gurgle of laughter and situated himself between her thighs, pressing forward until she couldn’t help but feel his growing arousal. Her laughter died, and she deepened the kiss, clutching him with a new intensity. Jason knew they couldn’t do this now.

Reluctantly, he broke the kiss, smoothing his thumb along the clean line of her jaw. “We should probably head back to San Francisco.”

Caroline nodded and rolled her lips inward, as if she could still taste him. “Okay. Give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll be ready to go.”

“I’ll make us something to eat while you shower,” he offered and lifted her from the table.

“Someday,” Caroline stated, glancing at Eddie’s file, “you’ll tell me about your past and how you got those scars.”

Jason tried to keep his tone light. “Don’t count on it.”

Leaning up, she kissed him briefly. “Oh, but I will. You won’t stand a chance.”

After she left, Jason sighed, knowing she was right. He didn’t stand a chance. While he might want two uninterrupted weeks with her in the bedroom upstairs, now wasn’t the time. But he promised himself that when this was all over, and if Caroline was still interested in him, they’d find a quiet place to hole up and get to know each other better. He just hoped when they did, she wouldn’t be disappointed with what she discovered.