Into Her Fire (Fantasy Heights) (9 page)

Neither did Earl. His hands and mouth were happily occupied with her breasts, and she could feel him pushing back against Thomas. The nature of the noises he made grew in urgency. He probably never noticed Thomas reaching over to smear his hand through a puddle of oil on the massage table. He did certainly notice when Thomas straightened and forced him to back away from the table.

Amanda felt abandoned but didn’t mind as she watched Thomas bend his knees. He maintained deep penetration while reaching around to take hold of Earl’s cock. How Thomas managed to keep his balance doing that, she could never figure out, but he never let up, stroking and thrusting. Earl rested his hands on the table for balance and leverage. His stomach muscles contracted, curling him forward in an involuntary reaction to Thomas’s determination to reach the final act.

She caught herself panting in time with Earl. Wanting. Caught Thomas watching her. If her hands hadn’t been tied, he might have seen her do something much more explicit than rub her knees together in desperate, relentless need.

They broke eye contact when Earl tensed up, body clenching, tightening toward orgasm. Thomas closed his hand over the tip of Earl’s cock and eased forward, pressing himself deeper. Now that his client was right on the verge, his tightly focused control returned. Amanda watched his hand squeeze that tip in a rounded, rough motion. He achieved his goal in spectacular fashion. Earl shot semen half the distance to the massage table.

Thomas knew just how to handle a polite but rapid departure, too. He’d pulled out before Earl had much, if any, time to recover. Their client’s breathless, “Thank you,” was answered with a light, quick kiss.

Max approached to help with her wrist restraints, while Thomas plucked costumes from the floor. He caught her hand and hurried her out, leaving Max to help Earl gather his wits and his clothing.

In the hallway, Thomas handed over her things. Their swing through the greenroom to throw on robes was silent. Charged.

She couldn’t let this go on. She absolutely needed to talk to him today, but if she said anything, the words would crack and chip, shatter against the steely tension between them.

A text alert went off. She couldn’t tell whose phone.

“It’s not me,” Thomas said. “It’s yours.”

Fumbling a bit with her costume, she managed to extract her phone from a pocket and thumb up her message.

When she saw the sender’s name, her step faltered.

No. No, no, no. This had to be a butt-dial. Please, please let it be an accidental butt-dial.

She flicked the
Read
button with her thumb and much to her dismay, discovered it was no garbled, unintentional text. Her newlywed stepsister had texted three very precise words:
Where is he?

She texted back:
Where is who?

By then, she’d stopped walking. Thomas stopped alongside her and set a hand on her shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

She shrugged his hand off. “Nothing. None of your business.”

He made a haughty snorting sound while she shifted her costume around, trying to get it draped better over one arm. She started to walk again but didn’t make it more than four steps before her phone began to ring. She tilted the phone to look at the screen. Shelley. Calling this time, instead of texting.

Amanda stopped walking again. Should she answer? Nothing good could come of it. She knew that, but what if it was important? What if something had happened to Dad?

She wadded all the clothes under her arm and was forced to endure Thomas’s dry, disapproving raised eyebrow until he snatched the bundle away.

The fake scar was starting to come loose. One end of the adhesive latex patch had lifted.

She reached up, grabbed on, and tore it off.

“Ow! Fuck! What was that for?”

She turned her back on him and answered the call. “Hey. What’s going on?”

“Like you don’t know,” her stepsister snapped. The connection was bad, but Amanda could still hear the shrill, blade-sharp tinge in Shelley’s voice. “I know Darren’s with you. This is revenge, right? Your version of karma?”

“Shelley, what the heck is going on? I haven’t seen Darren since the wedding.”

Amanda flinched away from the phone when Shelley let out an enraged roar, then hung up.

For a moment, Amanda stared at her phone. That did not just happen. No way did that just happen.

“What’s the matter?” Thomas asked.

Stunned speechless by that roar and what it implied, Amanda looked up at Thomas. Her mouth was probably hanging open. What was she supposed to do? And why was everyone always accusing her of things she hadn’t done?

Their costumes and street clothes now stuffed under one arm, Thomas braced the other across the small of her back and swept her into motion. “Shower,” he ordered.

She didn’t argue, not even when they ended up side by side in the beige-tiled shower room, too shell-shocked by that phone call to give Thomas much thought. Was it possible? Had Darren already left Shelley? What went wrong? And why would Shelley assume Darren would come here? When he’d ended their engagement, he’d made it abundantly clear that he felt nothing for her anymore beyond mild disbelief that he’d ever asked her to marry him in the first place.

The betrayal returned at full strength, taking a fresh handful of her insides and giving them a sharp crank. She ducked her head under the shower spray to hide the hurt. The quick swallow. The wrenching nausea and crushing humiliation to know she’d been dumped in favor of a girl who’d once asked how many zeroes there were in two hundred.

She squeezed her eyes shut tight. What was the matter with her? She didn’t even give a damn about Darren anymore but the rejection could still grind her down to nothing.

Something interrupted the water stream.

Thomas.

Water pouring down the sides of his neck, he cupped her face with his hands. “What happened? Did he leave her already?”

“Please leave me alone. I just want to be left alone.”

“No. I’m not leaving until you swear to me that you won’t take him back.”

She grabbed at his hands, trying to pry them off. “What’s the matter with you? You can’t accuse me of something crazy one minute, then pretend to give a crap about me the next.”

Thomas hauled her away from the spray, eyes narrowed, voice gruff. “Pretend? You think I’m pretending? I don’t want to give a crap, Amanda. My life would be a hell of a lot simpler if I didn’t.”

“Then stop. Transfer me to another trainer or something. I hate that you don’t trust me. I don’t understand it.”

“You?” he challenged. And then he snapped. Some sort of dam broke open and an entire universe of confusion and frustration came flying out. “How do you think I feel? Steph decides she wants to throw the rulebook out the window and give you a try. Josh can’t stop her and God forbid she listen to me, and then there you are, and I’m supposed to train you? Right. I felt like I was dressing up a child in street-colored clothes and dropping you in the middle of a freeway. I’m covering my eyes, waiting for you to get mowed down, and yet somehow, you manage never to get hit.”

“And that’s why you’re suspicious of me? Because I haven’t been a disaster?”

“Yes. No. Jesus, I don’t know what to think anymore.” He let go of her to grind the heels of his hands into his eyes for a minute before speaking again, looking years older, the way he had that night in Steph’s office. “All I know is, you don’t belong here. Josh knows it, too, except he keeps telling me to give you the benefit of the doubt. I can’t tell if he sees something I don’t, or if he’s just thinking with his dick, which is what landed us all in this mess in the first place.”

She didn’t know whether to be offended or fascinated to see the real Thomas emerge once more. And he did not shy away from speaking the truth.

“If I want to get rid of you, all I have to do is close my eyes and wait for you to get hit. It will happen. You need to understand that if you stay here, it will happen, and sometimes it feels like I’m already mourning you while you’re standing right in front of me.”

She had no idea what to say to that. What could she say? She stood there, getting colder and colder, trying to think up a way to make things better, but feared nothing ever could. The things he was saying and the loss behind them had little to do with her. Compared to pain and dread of that magnitude, she must barely even register.

“I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

“No.” He took hold of her again, and drew her back to him, and even though she didn’t want to be there, to have her body reignited courtesy of proximity to his, she needed the warmth. Shivering, she pressed herself closer still, forced to own a guilt-ridden surge of conquering arousal at the weakness he showed as her belly rested against his erection.

She watched him grind his back teeth together, and counted the jerky, erratic breaths he took while trying to tame his body’s response.

Eight breaths before he gave up and kissed her. Long, searching, scalding tastes fit to liquefy every bone in her body.

And then he took his mouth away. “You gotta stop this. You’ve got me so fucked up I can’t think straight. Those things I said to you, the things I suspected… I’m not proud of it, but it only proves I can’t do this. I can’t get involved with you.”

“Have I ever asked you to—”

“Don’t. Just let me finish. I’m not good at this, Amanda. I’m not good at being anyone other than Special Agent Thomas Bishop. It’s not who you want me to be, but it’s who I am. I’m a guy who takes orders, and I rule by fear. Those are the only things I understand anymore.”

Again, she had no idea what to say. She understood what he was trying to tell her, and though she found the bleak picture he painted terrifying, after what she’d seen and heard yesterday from Derek, she had begun to realize Thomas’s sharp edges were necessary. What had once been a vague, distant hint of intrigue had a name: DriveRate. Josh freaked out at the mere mention, and Thomas would have to do something about it. She was only now starting to catch up, and wasn’t sure she would be any less rigid, put in Thomas’s shoes.

He continued, and she watched the Special Agent reclaim himself, inch by inch. “You’re a distraction. I’m supposed to be looking for Nicole, doing my time on set, and getting straight back to why I’m really here, but you know what I’m thinking about? I’m thinking about Haynes House, wishing you were still tied to that table. I can’t operate that way. I can’t always do what I want. I have to follow orders.”

Chilled now, she tucked her arms between them, palms flat against his chest, fingertips resting gingerly on his collarbones. “It’s okay. There’s no argument, here. You have a job to do, and I understand you can’t shrug it off every time our hormones boil over. You do what you have to do. If and when you ever need an escape from it, I will tie myself to the table of your choosing.”

He stared down at her for a very long time before speaking again. “What are you doing in this place? You don’t belong here. You never will.”

“I’m beginning to believe you might be right. But I’m here. And I’m not Steph. I would never do anything to jeopardize your position. I might even help protect it if I knew what you needed.”

He raised his hands to her face and lowered his head, and contrary to instinct, Amanda did not submit to his probing, domineering kiss. She nipped at his mouth, answering hunger with restraint.

When he lifted his head once more, he stared down at her for a long time, as if struggling to interpret an unexpected lack of submission from her.

It should not be unexpected. Hadn’t he called her the worst submissive of all time not so long ago?

“All right,” he said at last. “You want to help me? We’ll start small. If anyone asks about your mystery client, tell them it was me. It was always me, not just the last time at Haynes House. No matter what, no matter who asks, it was always me.”

“Okay, but why?”

He turned to look toward the hallway running between the showers and dressing rooms.

His hearing must have been much more acute than hers. She hadn’t heard anyone approaching, but a moment later Max appeared in the entryway to give his watch a meaningful tap.

Thomas nodded, and then gestured for him to leave.

Once Max was gone, he summarized the answers to questions she never even managed to ask. “All the brass is here now, and they’ll start meeting soon. Keep your head down. Stick close to Eric, and don’t get any ideas. Stuff’s gonna happen this week, good and bad. Don’t try to help, don’t try to interfere, just do the job.”

It was the calmest he’d looked and sounded since they’d left the set, and it did wonders for her nerves. She believed that between him and Josh, they had things well in hand.

* * * * *

Thomas left the resort and drove straight to the antique store, pulling around back and feeling his temper restart itself.

Three cars. They weren’t conspicuous or anything, with a crowd gathered behind an antique store at nine PM.

It couldn’t be helped. This meeting would determine how, and in which direction, he would funnel information this week. Unless he wanted to fuck things up, he had better drag his head out of that shower room.

God, that woman. He could still feel her, still see those enormous brown eyes staring up at him, demanding he be a better man. And he’d do it, too, if he knew how.

Forcing Amanda to the sidelines once more, he went through the antique store’s back entryway. Helen Reyes, the shop’s owner and also his predecessor as Fantasy Height’s FBI agent, awaited him. She stood beside her closed break-room door. Her grave, schoolmarm expression told him everything he needed to know. Things were just as bad as he’d feared.

Maybe even worse. “Go easy,” she said quietly, then opened the door for him.

Inside waited Jerod Hughes. He was alone. Before him on the table were several small stacks of paper, everything he’d managed to preserve from Steph’s secret and disastrous plan to get rid of Andrew West.

The kid looked sick to his stomach.

Good, Thomas thought. If it weren’t for loyalty to Jerod’s old man, the kid would already be out on his ass. His father, Gregory Hughes, was the local DA. He had assisted with the investigation of Kay Prescott-Taylor’s murder. Gregory and Jerod had their differences, but at the end of the day, Gregory was a solid ally.