He caressed the line of her jaw with his thumb. And something fierce and angry erupted inside her—a desperation to burn down her own insecurities, to kill the pain, to blind herself to the fear of what her own memories might reveal, the realities that she might have to face about what had happened to her in childhood. She grabbed his tie and yanked him closer. Drawing his head down, she reached herself up and pressed her mouth hungrily to his. His lips were cold from outside. He hesitated a nanosecond before suddenly cupping her buttocks and jerking her hips tightly up against his pelvis. His mouth bore down on hers, forcing her lips open. He slid his tongue inside, met hers. Lust blinded Angie as she felt his erection stiffening against her belly.
Desperately, furiously, she shoved him back against the wall near the door, oblivious to the pain in her arm. A picture crashed to the floor. Kissing him hard, their tongues slipping, tangling, mating, she hurriedly undid his fly and slid her hand into his pants. He was hot and hard against her palm. The big-shot homicide cop, the ex-Mountie who’d saved her ass by not reporting her mental collapse. The lover who’d broken her down and built her back up. The man who’d shown her how to submit, how to trust during sex. The man who lived on an old yacht he’d been trying to salvage like his sinking marriage and family dreams. The father whose life she’d saved along with the life of his daughter. A man she believed she could come to love—if only she’d let herself.
He moaned deep in his throat as she took his penis in her hand, working him. He attempted to move away from the wall, to back her toward her bedroom, but she resisted, instead pressing him harder up against the wall, pulling his pants down around his hips. “Now. Here,” she growled against his mouth as she wiggled her own pants down over her hips, tangling them in her Ugg boots. She kicked off one boot and freed herself of one pant leg before lowering him fully to the floor.
His eyes, intense, held hers as he allowed her to pin his wrists above his head against the floor. Angie straddled his hips and slid the crotch of her skimpy panties aside. Widening her knees, parting her thighs, she sank down onto the hot, hard length of him. With a bliss-filled sigh she spread her thighs farther, making him go deep, deeper. And she began to rock her hips, creating friction deep inside the core of her body. Her breaths came fast, faster. She rocked harder. She became slick around his erection. Her body began to tingle. A hot, raw anger exploded, ripping through her gut, driving her wilder. She closed her eyes, put her head back, mouth open wide, panting, her skin going damp. And she rode him hard and fast and half-clothed, forcing her mind back, mentally reliving that very first night she’d spent with him at the Foxy Motel. She gasped suddenly, froze, then cried out as muscle contractions slammed through her in rolling waves, taking control of her body.
CHAPTER 13
Maddocks sat beside Angie on the sofa in front of her gas fire. Sipping wine, he listened as she told him first about her meeting with Vedder and Flint, her discipline, then about her trip to Vancouver and her discovery of the case files. She smelled good, fresh from their shower, and she was bundled in a soft white robe, hair damp. Rain ticked against the windows as the clock edged toward midnight. Foghorns sounded balefully out over the water.
She spoke with a toneless voice, and her complexion was wan, her eyes circled with the darkness of fatigue. She was corralling her emotion again. Only letting it escape through fierce, angry, controlling sex.
While their coupling had been exhilarating and his orgasm mind-blowing, a disquieting sensation lingered in Maddocks. It reminded him of their first sex together at the Foxy Motel when she’d cuffed him to the bed, straddled him, and ridden him to her heart’s content and then gotten off him before he could come. He’d thought she was going to leave him there, naked and bound to the bed with an aching hard-on. It had made him ravenous for more. He’d wanted to get to know this woman named Angie who’d picked him up in the club expressly to screw him and leave him.
But he now knew that dominant sex was Angie’s coping mechanism, her addiction. They’d gone beyond that first night. Well beyond. They’d found something tender and vulnerable based on trust. But this . . . given what she was going through right now, it was a sign of regression. He worried what it might mean for their fledgling and as yet fragile relationship.
“I can’t do it, Maddocks,” she said, setting her wine glass firmly down on the coffee table next to the envelope she had not yet opened. “Putting on a uniform every day, driving a desk nine to five for an entire year? Preaching to schoolkids? Social media—me?” She cursed softly and stared into the flames. “It’s humiliating,” she said quietly.
He leaned forward. “If you don’t suck it up, if you quit now, there’s no way you’ll ever get a letter of reference. You’ll never work as a cop again, Angie.”
Her jaw tightened. She refused to look at him.
“Hey.” He touched her hand. She tensed and pulled away, reaching instead for her glass. He inhaled deeply. “Listen,” he said softly, “twelve months will go faster than you think. It’ll be over before you know it. And—”
She swung round to face him. “Don’t. Do not patronize me, Maddocks. Ever.”
He held her gaze. “It’s still policing work of value—building bonds with kids, creating awareness in young women. It’s an opportunity to get in touch with our constituents, our community. You could teach self-defense. You can make it work, Angie, I know you can. You’re just fighting it on principle right now.”
“That’s all very well for you to say, Mr. Hot-Shot Homicide Cop who’s leading the task force—an investigation I should be working. Have they offered you Buziak’s job full-time yet? You going to be the big overall MVPD homicide boss now?”
His gaze pinned hers. The undercurrents of her words swirled dark and potent between them like a lethal undertow. With it surged his own feelings of guilt. She’d done it for him—disobeyed direct orders. Still, there’d been no need to overkill Addams like that. Emptying her clip into Addams’s face, her use of excessive force, was wrong. And the evidence of rage and a blackout—those were worrisome issues. As a boss he could not justifiably overlook the fact that this woman could put other officers in jeopardy in a crisis situation. She’d gotten off lightly. And she needed to visit that police shrink in order to get to the bottom of her hair-trigger rage. Her issues probably stemmed from buried childhood trauma and the more recent tragedy of losing her previous partner on a call, but that didn’t make her safe. It didn’t make the way she’d shot Spencer Addams okay.
“Let me help you, Angie,” he said, voice low, firm. “We can work through this together. And if you do the probation, it will give you evenings and weekends to work through Voight’s case files. If you stay on the job, you’ll have access to law enforcement databases. By next Christmas this will be over. Four seasons. That’s all.”
She swallowed. Emotion glittered in her eyes, hard like diamonds. “You can’t help me,” she said softly, coolly. “You’re too busy. What happened today, anyway? Why were you at the correctional center? What kept you from our date?”
“Between you and me—”