Explosive (12 page)

“He’s seeing that redhead. The interior designer.”

“Not according to the redhead,” Garnier said flatly. “He hasn’t called her in weeks. But like I said, we’re watching her place, just in case.”

He inhaled slowly, tamping down his temper with effort.

“We need that tape. Are you sure you’ve checked everywhere that you can?”

Garnier grunted. “He’s got it with him. He has to. Try not to worry too much. All it takes is one phone call from his cell phone and our contact at the phone company will be able to give us his location within fifty yards.”

“All it will
take
is one phone call from him, you asshole!”

A silence ensued following his outburst. He clutched at his chest, knowing his employee had been caught off guard by his uncustomary show of fury.

“If he uses his cell phone to contact one person—
just one
—we’ll have him. How much damage could he actually do in a few hours?” asked Garnier.

“Think
apocalyptic
, you stupid son of a bitch. You’d better rattle around those rocks in your head, Garnier, and figure out exactly where he is. If you think I’m going to wait around for him to make the phone call that’ll ruin me in order to find him, you’re even more of an idiot that I thought you were.”

When Garnier was chastised into silence, he cursed under his breath and sagged into his leather desk chair.

“He’s just like his father,” he mumbled after a pause.

“Leave it to me, and he’ll end up
exactly
like his father,” Garnier promised.

He hung up the phone a few seconds later, willing the stabbing pain in his chest to ease. After a moment, he stood and shuffled down the hallway toward his sleeping wife, weariness weighting every muscle in his body.

A lifetime of effort, and for what?
he thought bitterly.

He could withstand many things, and fate had forced him to do so. But if there was one thing he couldn’t tolerate, it was disloyalty.

Disloyalty had to be stamped out at all costs.

Thomas listened to the shower running in Sophie’s private bathroom. She’d insisted upon showering after they’d made love, and he’d been too tired to protest her absence in his arms.

The thought of her warm and naked in the shower made his cock stir. Again. He told himself to get up and join her in the shower. He even prepared to do so by fully removing all his clothes. Once he’d stripped, however, a wave of exhaustion struck him.

He hadn’t been sleeping well since Rick’s death.

No, that wasn’t right. His sleep had been fractured and irregular for a week before Rick died. Ever since his brother had come to him, distraught and agitated about what he’d discovered in his investigative report about the Chicago mob.

He shut his eyelids and pressed his chest into the mattress, as though he were applying pressure to a gaping wound. He turned his face into the pillow and inhaled Sophie’s scent—floral, female . . . clean.

She’d implied he was ill . . . sick at heart, that a few days of relaxing at Haven Lake would serve him well. Thomas didn’t know if he believed her or not, but the thought of staying in the peaceful house . . . the prospect of spending time with Sophie appealed to him, feeling like a balm on the bloodied edges of his ragged spirit. He’d call his parents tomorrow; tell them he’d decided to get away for the weekend.

A pang of guilt and unease went through him when he thought of how his father would react to the Mannero warehouse explosion. He’d call Joseph Carlisle first thing in the morning, he promised himself. Thomas should be the one to tell his father instead of having him hear it from Fisk and Larue, who would be eager to somehow implicate his father in the arson.

For the destruction of those records Thomas had gone to examine.

He clamped his eyelids shut, willing his mind to clear. While he’d been making love to Sophie, he hadn’t even noticed his pervasive headache, but it throbbed to life now, the pain dull and muted, but still clouding his thoughts.

He knew the real world would interfere at some point with his avoidance of it. Chances were Fisk hadn’t identified them at Mannero’s warehouse. Even so, the FBI would want to question Thomas in regard to the explosion. They’d be asking for him. It was only a matter of time before he’d have to return to Chicago to be with his parents during this trying time.

But didn’t he deserve a temporary escape?

He buried his nose farther in the pillowcase and breathed Sophie’s scent, letting it soothe his agitation. The clean, white cotton reminded him of her underwear. It’d been incredibly exciting watching her undress, seeing her reveal all her firm curves and skin that reminded him of apricots and cream. He would never have guessed he’d find a modest, low-heeled pair of pumps, an old-fashioned padded brassiere, and white cotton panties sexy, but on Sophie, it was an image that defined erotic.

For him, anyway.

He’d insisted upon inhaling the scent from her panties while she’d watched. The memory of how wet the panel had been; the image of her wide eyes when he’d inhaled her delicate, delicious fragrance made his cock stiffen next to the cool sheets.

He’d wanted to shock her a little. He hated himself for always wanting to dirty her, but that didn’t stop the beast in him from craving to do just that: to desecrate the shrine of sex and innocence that was Sophie. When he thought about how he’d fucked her so savagely in her office . . . how he’d ridden her so hard just minutes ago, he twisted in discomfort on the bed.

But his damn cock swelled to full readiness yet again.

He knew it wasn’t right for him to take out all his unrest, his grief, his fury on her . . . but his regret wasn’t sufficient to make him walk away from her potent allure.

And it wasn’t as if she didn’t seem interested. Her large, dark eyes may hold a hint of trepidation at times, but she couldn’t hide her arousal. He’d never known a woman to get so wet.
All that warm, sweet cream
, Thomas thought as he wrapped his hand around his erection and stroked himself. Eating her had been like drowning in sex-honey. And when he’d spanked her, the flush of liquid heat around his cock had sent her right over the edge.

Sophie may look like the image of wholesome beauty, but she’d been turned on by being spanked.

He groaned when he realized he was pumping his cock . . . recognized he was conjuring all sorts of fantasies about Sophie in his mind.
Stupid
fantasies. Like he was a horny seventeen-year-old all over again.

He pictured himself getting up and entering the humid bathroom, joining Sophie in the shower . . . bending her over and driving his cock into her tight, warm heat. The fantasy was so realistic that his hand moved desperately.

Why didn’t he get up? Why didn’t he walk into that bathroom and just
do
it?

But he knew why he didn’t, Thomas realized as he graphically imagined his cock hammering into her soft, giving body while he gently smacked her firm, damp ass. He’d already fucked her like a maniac twice tonight. Held her down on her desk and slaked his monumental thirst; spread her wide here in bed and drilled her until she’d screamed in release.

Sophie’d had enough. Even if he hadn’t.

He winced as he came, careful to keep the erupting semen from soiling her sheets. When he heard the shower shut off, he reached for some tissues from the bedside table and cleaned himself off. He’d thrown away the tissues and gotten back in bed by the time she came out of the bathroom.

She believed he was sleeping, he realized, as he watched her pad quietly toward the bureau. She carefully opened the top drawer. He said nothing, enjoying the chance to observe her while she was unaware. She dropped the towel that she’d wrapped around her. His eyebrows went up in interest when she bent to lace her feet through some clean panties. She silently opened another drawer and started to withdraw a T-shirt.

“Uh-uh. Come to bed, Sophie.”

She started and looked over her shoulder. She set the shirt on the dresser and walked toward him. He watched, appreciating the erotic contrast between her round hips and narrow waist . . . the slight sway of her breasts as she moved.

It was a good thing he
had
masturbated, he thought wryly as she slid beneath the sheet. She switched off the lamp and he pulled her into his arms, appreciating the shower-warmed softness of her skin in the air-conditioned room. The odor of some kind of fruity soap or lotion and Sophie just beneath it filled his nose. He settled her back against his chest and kissed the top of her head. Her soft sigh brushed across his forearm, making his skin prickle.

It didn’t matter that he’d just come. He wanted her again. Some powerful combination of grief, anxiety, and Sophie Gable had transformed him into something insatiable.

He determinedly closed his eyes and let the exhaustion that was never too far from the periphery of his consciousness claim him.

He dreamt of the summer following his parents’ murders—the summer he’d gone to live with the Carlisle family. In his dream, Rick and he were kids again in the outfield at Briar Park on a muggy summer day. Joseph—their Little League coach—was in the dugout, a powerful presence always at the periphery of Thomas’s awareness.

Thomas’s depression and grief over the sudden, inexplicable loss of his entire world had taken the form of surliness and anger. At ten years old, Thomas more resembled a teenage rebel than the vulnerable child that he was. Joseph had recruited him onto Rick’s baseball team in order to give him something to focus on other than the empty hole that had opened up in the center of his chest.

The only person in the Carlisle household he didn’t cop an attitude toward was Joseph. In the beginning, Iris Carlisle, Joseph’s wife, seemed at a loss for how to reach him. He’d wanted nothing to do with her maternal warmth and kindness. She wasn’t
his
mother, and Thomas resented her for reminding him of his mom with her concerned eyes and soft touches.

Joseph, on the other hand, had been a good decade and a half older than both Iris and his own parents. His thick mane of iron-gray hair, broad grin, and sparkling blue eyes made Thomas associate him more with a grandfather or uncle than the father figure he would have likely rejected out of grief from missing his own dad.

His adoptive father took pride in his working-class roots despite having risen through the ranks of the business world to be the owner of a large, prosperous trucking company. Joseph Carlisle was a man’s man, and it didn’t take a young Thomas long to discover that Joseph was impatient at Ricky’s lack of interest in sports and other stereotypical boyish activities. Ricky had no talent for sports, and that simple fact acted like a splinter under Joseph Carlisle’s skin.

Rick had been a year older than his adoptive brother, but Thomas was bigger, even when they first met. Not in weight—Rick actually still carried his baby fat, which he never lost until adolescence—but Thomas was the taller of the two. Thomas possessed a whole different set of genes than Ricky, genes that had made him enjoy and excel at the things Joseph Carlisle found worthwhile like sports. Ricky, on the other hand, would have been happy to be left alone, reading his novels of high adventure or dreaming up his own stories, which he recorded in a black notebook he kept carefully hidden beneath his bed.

Joseph Carlisle’s square jaw would have clamped tight and his eyes blazed with anger if he’d ever discovered that notebook full of his son’s dreams.

You need to get out of the house, get some fresh air . . . run around like a
normal
boy,
Joseph used to growl in frustration
.
In his first few months at the Carlisle house, Thomas had smirked every time he’d heard Joseph admonish Ricky. He’d been so confused and bitter by the abrupt absence of the two pillars that had previously held up his entire world that he’d taken a kind of sick satisfaction from seeing the pinched, pained expression on Ricky’s face when he heard his father’s familiar litany.

In Thomas’s dream, he stood on the pitcher’s mound and followed a fly ball headed toward right field. Ricky staggered around on his chubby legs, trying to follow the ball as he squinted into the bright sunlight. Thomas’d once heard Joseph tell one of the assistant coaches that since Ricky was their weak spot, they’d put him in right field to diminish their losses.

Ricky looked sweaty and slightly panicked as the ball arced downward out of the sky. The back of Thomas’s neck prickled with the awareness of Joseph Carlisle’s observance from the dugout.

In the dream, he was able to sense his adopted father’s thoughts. Joseph knew his son was going to drop the ball. Thomas knew it, too.

A deep, nameless dread filled him.

“You can do it, Ricky! Concentrate,” he shouted at the dark-haired boy. In the dream, time stretched. Ricky glanced over at him. He seemed to gain confidence at something he saw. A smile tilted his lips.

He looked up and caught the dropping ball. Thomas whooped loudly.

“I’ll practice hitting with you later on,” he shouted when Ricky joined him at a jog, still clutching the ball victoriously. Love for his brother felt like it’d burst from his chest.

“You will?
Really,
Tom?” Ricky asked, surprised by his unexpected generosity. A flash of guilt stabbed through him. He’d been so rude and sarcastic to Ricky since he’d arrived at the Carlisle house, feeling like an unwelcome guest, an ugly, pulsating blemish on the smooth, lovely façade of the Carlisle family.

“Sure,” he assured Ricky as they ran toward the dugout and a watchful Joseph Carlisle. Thinking about Joseph’s reaction to Ricky catching the fly ball made him beam with happiness. “We’ll practice out back after dinner. I don’t care how many nights it takes. You’re gonna hit the ball wherever you want.”

Thomas started into wakefulness, the image of Ricky’s dawning smile fresh in his mind and spirit. He stared blankly out the curtained window, seeing the gray light of dawn. It took him a moment to recall where he was, but then he inhaled Sophie’s scent combined with that of the clean cotton sheets.