Inked Magic (26 page)

His phone rang, the tone indicating it was his uncle. He pulled his hand from her panties, sliding arousal-wet fingers over her belly and growing harder as a result of it.

“I’ve got to get this,” he said, breaking the physical contact and taking a few steps away from Etaín.

“You with your new lady friend?”

Cathal tensed, knowing his uncle hadn’t called to check up on his progress. That’d be his father’s responsibility. “I’m with her.”

“Brianna nearly died today.”

The heat of seconds ago disappeared in a cold rush of fear. “How?”

“The pool.” A long silence followed, as if his uncle was trying to get himself under control. “I almost didn’t get to her in time.”

“I’ll come by the house and visit her.”

“Make it by tonight, Cathal. Those names you mentioned at breakfast aren’t going to change how I feel now. The time for words is over. Niall will understand that after I tell him what happened.”

The call dropped, the message as clear as if his uncle had spoken it directly, leaving Cathal’s heart pounding as if he’d run a mile. He was caught in the middle with no way out.

Pocketing the phone, he turned around and saw Etaín standing in her doorway. His body responded, the heat returning in a rush so all he wanted to do was get naked and lose himself in her for a little while.

“You need to head out?” she asked.

“No.” Just the opposite, he needed to stay with her and use the time he had to convince her to help his family.

Etaín didn’t know whether to be glad or not. It unnerved her to think about how far they might have taken things if the call hadn’t interrupted them. She was comfortable with her sexuality, but making a public show of getting fucked wasn’t something she ever intended to do.

He closed the distance between them, bringing the hum of desire with him. His hands settled on her hips as he nuzzled her cheek, her ear, sending a shiver of need through her.

“Where were we?” he asked, touching his mouth to hers.

“Probably on the verge of getting arrested,” she said, covering her uneasiness with humor.

He smiled against her lips and she felt it all the way to her toes. “Maybe we should go to bed instead of jail.”

“Good idea.”

She entered the apartment first, setting the tattoo kit just inside the door. She didn’t bring many people home. Jamaal and Derrick and Bryce came by sometimes if they were on this side of the bay, but mostly she went to their places because they lived in San Francisco and that’s where she spent most of her time.

For the first time in memory, she saw her apartment through the lens of someone else’s eyes. It was comfortable, lived in, the same way Cathal’s was, and yet it didn’t have the same sense of permanence. It shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did when she realized that nothing was irreplaceable. If she had to, she could leave everything behind and disappear, like her mother had always been able to do.

He didn’t say anything and she welcomed the silence as they moved in unspoken accord to where the mattress lay on the floor. His hands went to the front of her shirt, slow seduction replacing rough urgency as first one button and then another gave way.

His mouth claimed hers, his tongue sliding between parted lips to
rub against hers. She wrapped her arms around his neck, her breasts swelling, anxious for the feel of his hands on them.

A moan came when he rubbed his palms over taut nipples. She pressed her lower body to his, grinding against him until his hands moved to her shoulders, forcing her away long enough to rid her of shirt and bra.

“You’re beautiful,” he said in between kisses, his fingers tight on her nipples, squeezing, tugging, twisting. Sending pleasure straight to her cunt. “Have you ever posed?”

Her hands dropped to his waistband, undoing his buckle and then the front of his pants. “For a skin mag? So some guy can jerk off looking at me? Or for a lover?”

Cathal bit her bottom lip. A sharp rebuke, maybe, for reminding him there had been other men before him, and would be after, though the thought of not having whatever it was she’d found with him sent an unfamiliar ache through her.

“For other artists,” he said. “Or ads.”

“No.”

She freed his cock, absorbing the smooth heat of him through her palm as she pressed her lips to his, drawing his tongue into her mouth and sucking, ending the conversation for long moments.

“You’re a major distraction,” he said.

“And you’re not?”

“We’ll see.”

He kissed downward. Pausing to take each nipple into his mouth, every pull of his lips and press of his teeth intensifying the desire and making her grow more wet and swollen.

She tangled her fingers in his hair, unsure whether to hold him to her breasts or push him lower, to her cunt.

He took the decision away from her after tugging her jeans and panties to her ankles, then stripping them off her along with her shoes.

“Get on the bed and spread your legs,” he said in the same threat-rough tone he’d used at the front door.

She reacted to it, turned on in the same way she was to the inherent danger Eamon represented. She obeyed, heat rushing to her breasts and swollen folds as she watched Cathal shed his clothing, his eyes riveted to her cunt as he did it.

She lifted her hips when he knelt between her thighs, silently ordering him to deliver on the promise his gaze and parted lips had made.

This time he was the one who did as commanded, putting his mouth on her, pleasuring her with the thrust and swirl of his tongue, with sucks that became a carnal demand she willingly surrendered to.

She came.

Then came again when he used his upper body strength to hold her buttocks and lower back off the sheets while he remained on his knees, the angle allowing him to drive his cock in deep and hard, as if he meant to reach her very core. She tightened on him in climax and was rewarded by the flush of pleasure on his face and the liquid hot release of it in her channel.

He covered her with his body when the last of his semen had jetted through his cock, then rolled so she sprawled across him. She closed her eyes, savoring the lazy caress of his hands on her back and the feel of his fingers combing through her hair.

This is dangerous
, she thought, admitting to herself how much she liked their continued physical contact after sex. Worried that even knowing she should roll off and away, putting distance between them, she didn’t move.

It’s the novelty of it
, she rationalized, placing her palm against his side, where smooth, tanned skin was a sensual contrast to the thick mat of hair on his chest. Any other lover—except Eamon possibly—and she’d have to be very, very careful not to allow the tattooed eyes to touch him after this much contact.

Cathal’s voice was a rumble in her ear. “Why the shelter? Why are you involved with it?”

“Justine.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“She did teen outreach for a while. Still does, though it’s unofficial, and she doesn’t have much time to dedicate to it.”

“You were in trouble? Living on the streets?”

She took refuge in asking a question of her own, her usual dodge. “What makes you think that?”

“You live in a studio apartment and unless you’ve got pictures in the bathroom or in your closet, I don’t see a single one. Not you alone. Not you with friends. And, most importantly, not you with your family though you take your brother’s calls and stay out late when he needs your help.”

She had a deep-seated aversion to having her image captured. Another of her mother’s legacies, and something more, a survival instinct so thoroughly engrained that even as child wanting to please the only father she’d known, she’d battled furiously against being photographed.

“You’re very observant,” she said, deflecting, turning the conversation. “Maybe you should be cop instead of a club owner.”

His chest rose and fell with a laugh that wasn’t all mirth, making her wonder if he’d had run-ins with the law at some point in his life. His hands stopped their stroking and his arms went around her, holding her tight. “How come no photographs?”

“Everyone I hang out with draws.”

His arms tightened further, his frustration leaching into her as if forced through the electric-hum barrier that still seemed to be protecting him from her gift. “You’re a hard woman to get to know.”

Her reactive response was
I don’t want to be known
. But that wasn’t the truth. If it had been, then she wouldn’t have ignored the refrain drilled into her by her mother at every opportunity.

Keep moving. Stay uninvolved in the lives of others. See but don’t be seen.

He was a complication in her life. A change. A lover who unnerved her and thrilled her and was rapidly becoming an addiction.

If she continued to evade would it drive him away?

Or draw him closer?

Which of them did she really want?

She didn’t know and didn’t want to think about it, making answering the easiest course of action. “I went a little wild in my teens. Drugs. Sex. Violating curfews and rules until it just got easier to stay out than go back. That’s how I met Justine.”

“You were living on the streets?”

“For a little while, until the captain had me scooped up and put in a cell overnight.”

She couldn’t keep the remembered terror from sliding out of the mental box she tried to keep it in. It traveled through her in a soul-deep shudder.

Beneath her Cathal tensed, probably sorry he’d hit a nerve. She wrestled the fear back inside its cage.

“The captain?”

She sighed. “Chevenier.” And because it was easier, a truth still present in her heart, she added, “My father. You might remember the scandal my coming to live with him caused.”

Cathal rubbed his cheek against her hair, stroking a hand down her spine in a caress she felt deep inside her. “What I remember is that a woman showed up and presented your father with a daughter he accepted right away as his. Speculation followed, about just when the girl was conceived, before or during the very brief time he was separated from his old-money wife. It wasn’t titillating to me as a kid and I don’t give a shit about it as an adult. Your brother’s FBI, right?”

“Yes.”

“The other day you said you didn’t see them often, but you took your brother’s call then rushed off to help him.”

“That’s true. We’re not completely estranged.”

“Do they drop by your apartment to check up on you?”

“Parker has been here a couple of times.”
To pick up drawings. Not to visit.

She changed the topic by asking, “Was that your father who called?”

Father or uncle. By Cathal’s answer of
I’m with her
it had to be one of them.

He didn’t answer for a long time, as if he wrestled with becoming known, too. And she vacillated between pushing closer or backing away until the choice was taken from her.

“It was Denis. He called to tell me my cousin Brianna nearly drowned herself in the pool.”

Don’t involve yourself
.

Etaín ignored the words whispering in her mother’s voice. She didn’t pretend to misunderstand the way Cathal phrased his answer. “She’s tried before?”

“Not the pool, but other ways.” His arms tightened, delivering a hint of physical pain along with an emotional one breaching the barrier between them. “She’s so heavily sedated, I don’t know how she managed to get outside and into the water. She’s had a private nurse since coming home from the hospital. She’s watched twenty-four, seven.”

Like a fogged window clearing to reveal the scene behind it, Etaín saw Cathal in a hospital room with a teenage girl, then that same girl lying glassy-eyed in a bedroom with posters on the wall, movie and rock stars. She remembered seeing it before, along with another one, of Cathal standing near a casket, in the dreams that were a precursor to Tyra’s memories.

Don’t involve yourself
.

Once again she ignored her mother’s refrain.

“Someone Brianna was close to died?”

Cathal tensed beneath her. “How do you know that?”

She scrambled for an answer since she couldn’t tell him the full truth. “A guess. She wants to die. So either something terrible happened to her, or someone she loved died and she wants to be with them.”

Some of the rigidness left Cathal’s body. “Both. In the last year her mother died of cancer and her brother Brian in a car accident. A few weeks ago she spent the night with her friend Caitlyn. They went somewhere. We don’t know any of the details. Only that they ended up drugged, gang raped, and left to die at Lake Merced. A jogger found them in time for Brianna, but not for Caitlyn.”

He didn’t hide his pain, his anguish over what had happened to his cousin. “Sixteen. That’s how old they are. Were. Until this happened Brianna was coping okay. Denis was there for her. She’s also a gifted musician, so it gave her a place to go to deal with losing her mother and Brian.”

Etaín remembered the fleeting impression she’d had when she shook hands with Cathal’s uncle. Seething emotion barely contained. A boiling cauldron with the lid clamped down hard and tight.

He had good reason for it.

Don’t involve yourself
.

For a third time she ignored her mother’s voice and her mother’s lessons. She slid off Cathal to sit next to him, her arms around her legs, her chin resting on her knees. She took her time, finding just the right way to explain without revealing too much.

“Parker needed my help with a rape victim. That’s why he called me. It’s a gift I have, being able to draw out information from people. If you’d like me try with Brianna . . .”

Cathal’s heart became an erratic drumbeat pushing a myriad of different emotions through him. Relief. Fear. Worry. Guilt.

Along with renewed desire.

Naked and in that pose she looked so beautiful, so vulnerable, like some ethereal woodland nymph needing protection. Yet when he met
her gaze, he saw a wild spirit in her dark, dark eyes, a sexual fantasy capable of making him hard over and over again.

He sat, drawing his leg up as well, not to hide her effect on him, but to keep himself from tumbling her back to the mattress so neither of them had to cross the line he knew existed for both of them. He’d wanted her to do this willingly,
intended
to ensure she would when he agreed to handle this at his father’s request. But now he found he didn’t want her made an accessory to murder, even an unwitting one.