Hush: A Thriller Part 15

Short answers: FBI agent; information she couldn't, wouldn't, give.

She lifted her chin at him. "Anybody ever tell you you have a great imagination?" To her dismay, instead of being light as she'd intended, her voice came out sounding throaty, thick.

This time his mouth got so close to her ear that she could actually feel his lips moving. "Are you denying it?"

She shivered, and not from guilt or fear. It was from the b.u.t.terfly touch of his mouth on her skin. As he straightened, her arms stayed wrapped around his neck. Her head tilted farther back as if to offer up her lips for his kiss.

"Yes."

He looked like he was barely managing to swallow some choice curse words. His arms hardened around her, shifted. One hand slid down to rest in the small of her back. She could feel the size and shape of it through her dress. Another inch or so, and he'd have his hand on her b.u.t.t. Difficult as it might be to face the truth, she wanted his hand on her b.u.t.t. She found herself pressed even more firmly against the hardness that told her that, despite his terse questions, he was at least as aroused as she was, and she wasn't sure if it was his doing or hers.

He bent his head again, only this time he didn't say anything. Instead his lips brushed her ear, and then they settled against the tender skin just below it.

They were warm and firm and totally mind-blowing. She could feel the rasp of his stubble against her skin.

He kissed her there, lingered, kissed some more. She sucked in air.

His mouth was hot, and damp, and a revelation in the way it made her feel as it crawled tenderly, searchingly, thrillingly, along the underside of her jaw before returning to nuzzle her beneath her ear again.

Her heart thumped. Her loins tightened. Her bones turned to water. The world spun away. If she hadn't managed to clamp her lips together just in time, she would have moaned out loud. She was on fire, burning up, hungry for more. There it was again, the same blazing chemistry that had sprung up between them when he had kissed her before, and if there'd been a bed handy she would have been falling into it with him just as fast as she could. Her arms tightened around his neck and her body arched up against his and she told him in every way but words how much she wanted him. But even as she was melting inside from the heat the two of them were generating, the thinking part of her, the logical, reasonable, rational part of her, whispered a killjoy warning: You need to put a stop to this.

The thing was, she didn't want to.

His lips were at her ear again. "Think I can't tell you're lying? All I have to do is feel how fast your pulse is pounding."

Not what she had been expecting.

Her eyes popped open. Her fingers, which had been threading through the thick hair on the back of his head, stilled. The heat, the urgency, the sheer reckless desire that had brought her to the brink of possibly doing something really stupid, was blasted by a wave of cold reality.

He'd been kissing her neck as a kind of lie detector test.

Outrage didn't begin to cover it.

Two could play at this game. His ear was within easy reach of her mouth. Sensuously she ran her tongue along the st.u.r.dy outer curve of it, nibbled his soft earlobe, enjoying the harsh intake of his breath, the way he stiffened.

Then, in the spirit of sweet revenge, she whispered throatily into it, "You ever think that maybe you just really turn me on?"

She felt the impact of the words. .h.i.tting him. For a moment he went still as stone in her arms. His every muscle tensed. He seemed to stop breathing. His reaction was everything she had hoped for, and more.

He lifted his head just enough so that he could look down at her.

A dark flush rode high on his cheekbones. His eyes were narrow and glittering, their blue-gray no longer calm. The look in them told her everything she needed to know: he might have been trying to seduce her secrets out of her, to gauge her truthfulness with kisses, but he was even hungrier for her than she was for him.

A second later, it became obvious from the hardening of his expression that he'd figured out that she'd just slapped some payback on him.

His brows twitched together.

"Enough of this. You need to start telling me the truth." His voice was harsh, with a rough edge to it that, despite everything, still managed to do funny things to her insides.

"You need to start trying to find out who killed my ex-husband instead of constantly hara.s.sing me," she snapped, and pushed free of his arms. Standing in front of him on the dance floor with couples crowding around them on all sides, she folded her arms over her chest and glared at him. "I have to go back to work. I can't make you, obviously, but I wish you'd leave."

Then she turned on her heel and walked off the dance floor.

FINN CURSED himself all the way back to his hotel room. From the moment he'd seen Cowboy Bob's hand sliding up and down Riley's bare arm, his plan had gone to h.e.l.l right along with his temper. Instead of calmly confronting her with what he knew and demanding that she tell him the truth under threat of arrest, which was the gist of what he'd intended to do when he'd left the hotel to pay her a visit, he'd gotten hung up on his dislike of the old guy touching her and the way she didn't seem to have a problem with it. He'd lost his cool, and then, when he'd been stupid enough to let her pull him out onto the dance floor, lost his head entirely.

Difficult to interrogate a suspect when all you wanted to do was f.u.c.k her senseless.

Difficult to rationally evaluate anything she'd said when all you still wanted to do was f.u.c.k her senseless.

Every time he remembered the warm glide of her tongue along the outside of his ear, he got hard as a rock.

The easy solution-stop remembering-wasn't as easy as it sounded.

He couldn't seem to get it out of his head.

Any of it.

Her.

So much for saying good-bye. She was officially top of his. .h.i.t parade again.

She knew something. Something big. No longer any doubt about it in his mind.

He'd been doing this too long not to have developed a nose for guilt.

And tonight she'd been throwing off guilt like skunk scent.

Even while she smelled of roses.

This time he'd recognized the scent. Same one she'd smelled of before, which he'd finally identified, although it had taken him a while to figure out exactly why some kind of flower seemed to be perfuming the air everywhere he went. Finally a lightbulb had gone off: it was his d.a.m.ned jacket, which had smelled like her all last night. This morning he'd dropped that particular suit off at the cleaners. He needed it to be minus any trace of Riley Cowan before he wore it again.

The better to put you out of my mind, my dear.

Thing was, it wasn't looking like he was going to be able to do that anytime soon.

Other thing was, he wasn't the only player in the game.

At least he wasn't going to do her any physical harm.

She'd made a nice move by announcing on worldwide TV that she'd given Jeffy-boy's phone to the FBI.

Smart girl.

He wasn't sure it was enough.

His driving fear was that somebody else might start to wonder about what secrets she was keeping.

To that end, he'd made arrangements for a pair of undercover cops to be in the parking lot when she got off work at 2 a.m. Keeping discreetly out of sight, they would watch her walk from the door of the Palm Room to her car, then follow her home where the squad car was already in her driveway keeping tabs on everything that was happening in Margaret's house.

The good news was, somebody placing a bomb in Riley's car probably wasn't going to happen. No point in killing the secret keeper until you knew the secret.

Letting himself into his hotel room-quietly so as not to disturb Bax next door-Finn headed straight for the bathroom, stripping his clothes off as he went.

What he needed was a long cold shower, followed by a few hours' sleep.

AFTER SNAPPING at a customer who'd come up to her to complain that his drinks were watered (they weren't), and being terse with a limo driver who tried to insist on parking right outside the front door as he waited for his VIP client, and threatening to call the police on a table of big drinkers who tried to sneak out without paying their tab, Riley was forced to face it: she was something less than her usual even-tempered self. And that would be because she was both worried sick and mad as h.e.l.l at Finn. Ordinarily she would have fixed all those typical Friday night problems with her typical poise and finesse, but since she'd walked away from him on the dance floor and he'd subsequently (color her surprised) left the club, she'd been edgy and irritable and a whole lot quicker to jump than she normally would have been.

Fortunately, Don had left the club. Also fortunately, it was getting on toward one thirty. The club shut down at two. Closing up would keep her another half an hour after that, and then she would be free to go home.

Until ten o'clock Sat.u.r.day morning, when she was due at her first job again.

At the thought, she barely swallowed a groan.

She hadn't slept much last night, and she'd put in a full day's work at the car dealership before coming in to the club tonight. She was bruised, thoroughly traumatized, and a little sore. The thought of calling in sick to both jobs had been tempting, but with the economy like it was, jobs were hard to come by. For her, with her baggage and especially with the fact that she'd been all over last night's 11 p.m. news and, for all she knew, the news today, jobs were especially hard to come by. She hadn't wanted to push it with either employer.

Of course, if she'd known Finn was going to stop by the club, she would have called in sick in a heartbeat.

I was glad to see him. That was the really galling part.

I must be insane.

He was an FBI agent, an investigator. He wasn't hanging around her because he was smitten with her big green-hazel eyes.

He was doing his fricking job.

He probably thought of making out with her as a nice perk, like dental insurance.

That thought made her mad all over again.

So get over him already.

He knew way too much about what she'd been doing. He was suspicious of her, nosing around, and she was as sure as it was possible to be of anything that he wasn't going to just go away.

Unless he was psychic, though, she didn't see any way he could find out about George's notebook, or discover what she and Margaret had done.

Didn't keep her from being scared to death anyway. Not of Finn, but of being found out.

To say nothing of whatever murderous characters might be lurking around as they hunted the money.

The knot her stomach had wrapped itself into after last night's conversation with Margaret kept twisting tighter.

Cissy Barry, the head waitress from the Star Lounge, came hurrying up to Riley. Maybe thirty-five, with short blond hair, she was still able to rock the club's body-baring uniform, which only the two female a.s.sistant managers and the hostesses were exempted from wearing. "The ice machine in the Star Lounge is on the fritz. I've scooped all the ice out, but it's going to need to be fixed before tomorrow night."

Riley nodded. "I'll leave a note for Stephan"-the handyman who worked days to keep the club functional at night-"to check it out." Maude Clemons, one of the hostesses, was beckoning to her as she finished speaking. With a quick smile for Cissy, Riley headed toward the hostess' station, threading her way among a crowd of rowdy Astros fans (she could tell by their T-shirts) heading for the dance floor.

The hostess station was twenty feet back from the second set of doors that const.i.tuted the entry. Paneled in bronzed mirrors, with a carefully tended live palm tree in one corner and a black leather hostess stand as the central feature, it was where the club's four hostesses took turns greeting guests and showing them to tables, among other duties.

Maude, a beautiful twenty-something brunette who worked days as a model, said, "Phone for you," and nodded toward the landline on the credenza behind the podium. Riley waved her thanks as Maude stepped away to greet a pair of just-arriving businessmen.

Walking over to the credenza, she saw the flashing light that indicated a call on line one, picked up the receiver, and pushed the b.u.t.ton.

"Riley Cowan," she said into the phone.

"Can you come and get me?" It was Emma. Her voice sounded small and thin and shaky.

- CHAPTER -

SIXTEEN.

Less than twenty minutes later, Riley drove through the dozen or so four-story brick buildings that made up the Heywood Plaza apartment complex, jittery with nerves, taking in the relatively late-model cars all lined up in the parking areas, the green s.p.a.ce complete with playground and swimming pool between the buildings, the dim and yellowish, but present, security lighting that kept these wee hours of the morning from being overwhelmingly dark. The complex was not particularly upscale, but it didn't scream danger, either. The area of town was decent, not too far from River Oaks.

The surroundings weren't the reason she was feeling so anxious.

It was the fact that Emma might be out here alone at this time of night that was giving her a spasm. Coupled with the fact that she definitely was out here alone. After last night, to borrow a phrase from Disney's The Little Mermaid, which Emma had watched so often years ago that the songs were permanently implanted in the family consciousness, Riley wanted to be where the people are. Although she thought (hoped) she'd headed off any more attacks on her by telling the world that she no longer had Jeff's phone, she couldn't be sure that she wouldn't be attacked for some other reason. Or that Emma wouldn't be attacked.

Simply speculating about the possibilities was enough to make her blood run cold.

That old adage about there being safety in numbers had never been more true.

Em, what were you thinking?

The complex was laid out in a square with a single entrance off Willowick Road. Despite the lateness of the hour, a few people were outside-heading to or from their cars, walking leashed dogs, carrying out trash-but there was no sign of Emma. As Riley scanned the shadowy sidewalks and parking lots and front-yard s.p.a.ce and vestibules, the ever-present knot in her stomach was joined by a tightness in her chest.