Ashley clung to him for a moment, needing more, ran her fingers down his back, following the muscled curve of his buttocks, gripping the length of his erection. Sound growled from the depths of his throat, and he kicked open the door. Soaked and slick, she was somehow wrested into his arms and they were both laughing. A moment later they were falling on the expanse of the bed. As he rose over her then, the laughter they had shared faded. His eyes sought hers; his body pressed against hers. His hand slid down the length of her, again, and he thrust inside her with a movement that itself nearly sent her over the edge. She clung to him and felt for a moment the dampness of her skin, the coolness of the covers, the slight rocking of the boat in its slip. She closed her eyes and felt the hot vital structure of the man, the strength of his arms, the power of his hips and thighs locked around her, and then nothing but the fever inside her, the rise of honeyed fire, the yearning, reaching, stretching, desperate wanting….
Explosions seemed to rocket through her body with the force of her climax, followed by delicious little electric shocks, sweeping through her time and time again. She felt the force of his urgency, as well, each movement winding her tighter, taking her higher, a burst of heat like lava warming the insides of her, filling something deeper than a sexual need. He held her, locked in his warm embrace, and she clung to him as if her limbs had frozen around him. There was something so fierce in being with him that it was frightening, something beyond thought and logic and reality. She was terrified to realize that she felt far too deeply as if she belonged here, as if she had known him forever and was meant to be nowhere but with him for eternity.
She was startled when he spoke, though he still didn’t pull away from her. “Ashley, stay out of things until I get back. I mean it.”
She caught her breath, wincing. A moment later, he rolled to his side, coming up on an elbow.
She stroked his cheek. “I don’t care what you say. You are a chauvinist. You’re afraid for me because Nancy’s dead.”
“It has nothing to do with Nancy,” he said impatiently.
“Jake, I didn’t go into the academy because I didn’t have the money for a ritzy art school, but because I really wanted to be a cop.”
“Like your father.”
“Not just because of my father. I believe in law and order, and in the protecting and serving part of it, too. Okay, the way that things worked out, I’m not a cop. But I do work for the police force. And I’m going to face really bad things, we both know that. Jake, I have the stomach and the nerve for it.”
“But do you have the common sense for it?” he asked irritably.
“I resent that,” she told him.
“Resent away, but what I’m asking you is important. You get the bit between your teeth and you’re determined to run with it, the hell with the consequences.”
“I’m not like that at all! And what makes you think I am?”
“You’re making judgments based on what you feel in your heart, not what you can see, feel and touch, as hard evidence.”
“You do that all the time. It’s supposedly what makes you good at your work.”
“What I do is different.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Because I started with one of the best beat cops in history. Because I took all the steps to get me where I am today. You draw pictures, Ashley. You’ve got a real talent, so stick with that. If you go on a wild-goose chase of some kind, all you’ll do is get yourself killed.”
“Jake, stop it! What is your problem with me?”
“You’re a kid, a kid with an incredible talent, who is still soaking wet behind the ears. And my problem is that—” He broke off abruptly, shaking his head in anger. “You’re too frigging naive to even understand what I’m saying to you.”
She started to roll away, ready to rise, torn between her realization of how deeply she had let her emotions tumble and her need to be her own person.
He caught her hand.
“There you go, flying off the handle.”
“You’re the one who’s yelling.”
His eyes narrowed. “I’m not yelling. I just want to talk to you. And I’m not letting go until you listen.”
She felt the tension in her rise. “At this precise second, I could probably kick you in the balls hard enough to leave you screaming for the next thousand years.”
The threat didn’t work. In an instant he was on top of her; she couldn’t have moved a knee if her life depended on it. His point, she knew.
“Well?” he said softly.
“Get the hell off me, Dilessio. I’m leaving. I’ve got things to do, too.”
“You had no intention of leaving now.”
“Maybe I didn’t before, but I do now. Jake, I can’t stay here if you think you can humor me, manipulate me…make me promise to stay in a little glass case because you fell in love with a policewoman once before.” She held up a hand to stop him when he would have spoken. “Whether you slept with her or not, you were in love with her. You might have spent the last five years forcing her case into the background while you went ahead and worked hard on what was happening each day, but you’ve never really stepped back. That’s understandable. But you can’t envision the future based on what happened in the past.”
He rose, leaving her on the bed. “I’ll toss your stuff in the dryer. You can stay, shower and leave at your leisure—go do whatever things you need to do in the middle of the night. I’ve got to get out of here.”
He didn’t have to leave that quickly, she knew. He had told her that he didn’t need to be on the road until four. She was restless and angry. She wanted to argue, remind him that she could be out of his hair in a matter of minutes, but he was already up and headed back for the tiny shower stall—alone.