“Maybe nothing. But I need to be—”
“Yeah, yeah,” she cut in. “I get it.”
A moment passed as she appeared to collect her thoughts. She stared at some point be yond him. The drapes on the windows were closed, so certainly not at any enticing view.
“Baby,” she said abruptly as her eyes met his once more. “He called me baby when ever we…” She cleared her throat. “When ever we were intimate.”
“Baby,” he murmured, committing the term to memory.
“No.” She shook her head. “Not like that. Baaaby. With the emphasis on the first syllable.”
“Baaaby,” he echoed, drawing out the first syllable as if it were two.
She nodded once. “Yes. Like that.”
He propped against the dresser and let her talk. She seemed to know what he needed to ask and he appreciated that more than she could possibly comprehend. She shared the sexual vocabulary Maddox used. His euphemisms for body parts and the words that he whispered in her ear as they made love. With every word, every nuance of her voice he felt closer to her…felt the need to touch her. Tension vibrated through him to the point that every nerve ending felt taut with anticipation of what she would say next.
“He liked for me to be on top,” she said, careful to avert her eyes. “When I wasn’t on top he was usually…” She cleared her throat. “He liked to get behind me.” She fisted her fingers and hugged her arms around her middle. “He was very aggressive. Preferred to be in control other than the being on top thing.”
Joe wanted to make her stop, but he couldn’t. And yet with each new detail she revealed, his body grew harder, he wanted her more.
“Was there a certain…way he touched you?” he ventured, his throat so tight he barely managed to speak.
She blinked, looked away again. “My…ah…breasts. He always touched me that way a lot. Even when we were just kissing.” She rubbed at her fore head, then quickly clasped her arm back around her.
He couldn’t take any more of this. He’d hurt her and tortured him self physically. No more.
“Thank you for sharing such intimate—”
“Don’t you want to know how he kissed me?” She glared up at him then, the breath rushing in and out of her lungs. All semblance of calm or submissiveness was gone.
Joe straightened away from the dresser. “We can talk about this some more later. There’s—”
She rocketed to her feet. “He wasn’t that great when it came to kissing.”
Her eyes looked huge in her pale face. He couldn’t tell if what he saw there was fear or humiliation. Maybe both, and it tore at his guts.
“He used his tongue too much.” She paced the length of the room, then turned and moved back in his direction. “But I got used to it eventually.” She shrugged her shoulders, the movement stilted. “I was so busy with my work I didn’t have time to be too picky about my sex life. Really, what’s a busy woman like me supposed to do?”
Her lips trembled with the last and he had to touch her. She was close enough.
“Elizabeth, I’m sorry. I—”
She drew her shoulder away from his seeking hand but didn’t back off. “Are you really?” The accusation in her eyes dealt him another gut-wrenching blow. She took a step closer. “If you’re so sorry then what prompted your considerable erection, Agent Hennessey?” She reached out and smoothed a hand over the front of his jeans, molded her palm to his aching hard-on.
He moved her hand away but didn’t let go of her arm. “Don’t do this to your self, Elizabeth. I explained to you that the female contact was someone he knew before you came into his life.”
“And I know a lie when I hear one, Joe.”
He closed his eyes and ex haled a weary breath. Maybe he should have been up-front with her sooner. He should never have listened to Director Allen. Elizabeth Cameron was far too smart for these kinds of tactics.
“I had known something was wrong for a while,” she said, her voice soft, the fierce attitude having surrendered to the hurt. “We hadn’t made love in two months when he died. I’d only seen him two or three times. He called, but never talked for long. I guess I knew it was over. I just didn’t know why.”
It took every ounce of strength Joe possessed not to tell her the truth about David Maddox. He’d used her. He’d cheated on her all along. The latter came with the territory. No man who hoped to keep a clean relationship with a woman stayed in field operations. It simply wasn’t feasible.
“You don’t know that,” he argued, hoping to salvage her feelings to what ever extent possible. “There could have been a lot of things going on that prevented him from coming to you. Your safety for one thing,” he offered, grasping at straws. “Remember he sent me in to rescue you that one night when he was too far away to do it him self.”