On Thin Ice (28 page)

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Authors: Susan Andersen

BOOK: On Thin Ice
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“Oh, my God,” she said in a faint voice and had to quell a sudden, adolescent urge to giggle. “It's true then what the guys have been saying about Karen? That she . . . that she, uh...”
“Likes the horizontal boogie?”
“Karen
Corselli
? ”Sasha demanded incredulously and shook her head. “I've heard rumors to that effect of course, but I gotta tell ya, Lonnie, I'm still having a hard time believing it.” She eyed him speculatively. “And
you
and Karen? Boy, there's a combination I never in a million years would have figured.” She was silent then as the elevator descended, gazing at him as if answers to all the questions percolating in her mind would emblazon themselves across his forehead if she only looked hard enough.
They didn't. “So,” she finally inquired as the doors slid open at the lobby level. “What's she like then?”
Lonnie looked a little beleaguered. He rubbed at the side of his neck and looked around. Then, taking her by the elbow, he escorted her off the elevator and across the lobby to the lounge. “Come on. If you really think it's necessary to hash this all out, the least you can do is buy me a drink.”
“As long as you hold up your end of the bargain and spill your guts,” she agreed, surreptitiously checking the denomination of the one bill left stuffed into the front pocket of her jeans and then following along amiably in his wake. It was a ten; that ought to buy a couple of drinks.
“A coke for the lady, and I'll have a Heineken,” Lon told the cocktail waitress moments later, and she nodded and started to turn away.
“Miss?” Sasha stopped her. “Make that a Smith and Kerns instead of a coke will you?” She'd already had several drinks this evening and probably shouldn't have another. But really . . . Turning to him when the waitress had departed, she said dryly, “I'm not twenty years old any longer, Lon. You seem to have a difficult time remembering that.”
And that, she thought, was probably their basic problem in a nutshell. From the moment they'd reunited he'd acted as if she'd been wrapped in cotton batting and left on a shelf somewhere for the past five and a half years. He seemed to think she was exactly the same as the last time he'd seen her, regardless of the years that had passed or the experiences she'd gained in that time. Sasha looked at him across the table and said evenly, “While you were in stir, I was busy growing up.”
“Yeah, okay. Sorry.” He rolled his shoulders uneasily. If Vinicor was an example of one of the ways she'd grown up, then frankly, he didn't much care for it.
On the other hand there wasn't anything he could do about it, so he supposed he might as well learn to live with it.
“So, tell me about Karen,” she invited. “How long have you two been”—she twirled her hand—“you know.”
“You know?” The smile he gave her was slanted by irony. “I'd say the growin' up process has a ways to go if you're still calling sex ‘you know.' ”
“Nice dodge, Morrison. But I'm not budging until I get some answers. How long have you been sleeping together?”
“A while,” he said gruffly. “And Karen's okay. She can be bossy, which you probably already know, but she's also sexy and sometimes there's a real vulnerability about her.”
“Really? Give me a for instance.” Vulnerable would have been the last characteristic Sasha attributed to her.
“Well, she's deathly afraid of—” He broke off suddenly and drilled Sasha with an intent stare. “This is just between you and me now, Sasha, y'hear me? All of it—my relationship with her, what I'm about to tell you. It's not to go any further than the two of us. And that includes Lover Boy.”
As if she said one word more than necessary to Special Agent Vinicor these days. But she couldn't tell Lon that without a lot of dreary explanations she had no intention of getting into, so she merely nodded. “Gotcha.”
“Gotcha don't cut it, Sweet Thing. I want your word.”
“You have my word,” she assured him impatiently. “Now spill!”
“She's afraid of the dark. No, more than afraid.
Terrified.”
“You're kidding.” Sasha blinked. “Do you know why?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, babe. She has this little night-light she is never without. I was with her once when the thing burned out and, Saush, the woman went ape shit. I'm not talking a little bit upset, here, I'm talking totally, one hundred percent freaked out.”
“Poor Karen,” Sasha commiserated with ready sympathy. “She must have had a horrible experience with a dark place at some point in her life. Maybe she got lost as a kid in the Carlsbad Caverns or something.”
“I really couldn't say.” Lon shrugged. “But Saush? The point I'm trying to make here is that Karen is more than just the one aspect of her personality that you've seen.” Man, was
that
the black belt of understatement. “And I don't want to see her embarrassed by the knowledge that you know I'm sleeping with her.”
Not to mention that if Karen possessed even darker aspects than he'd previously suspected, he didn't want Sasha put at risk.
“My God, just what is it you think I'm planning to do, Lon?” Sasha inquired indignantly, “go up to her and start singing, ‘Lon and Karen sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G'?” She glared at him across the table. “You might find my tendency to say ‘you know' instead of ‘sex' a little on the juvenile side, but I assure you I do comprehend the basics on how to conduct myself like an adult.” She dug the ten out of her pocket and threw it on the table, then started to slide out of the booth, but she was hemmed in by the sudden arrival of the waitress with their drinks. By the time the woman had counted out her change and left, Lon had reached a hand over to stay her.
“Calm down, calm down now; that's not what I meant at all,” he said, stroking her fingers soothingly. She was taking a deep breath to do exactly that, feeling ridiculous for overreacting, when he opened his mouth again and ruined the bit of progress he'd made by adding with a trace of male condescension, “You've really been tense lately, Sasha. Maybe you oughtta take a little time out to get a firmer grip on your emotions.”
Leaving a dollar bill on the table, Sasha pocketed the rest of her change, picked up her drink, and slid out of the booth. “Thanks for the advice, chief,” she said levelly, looking down at him. “I'll be sure to keep it in mind.”
She strode from the lounge, thinking unkind thoughts about mankind in general and two men in particular. Too angry to pay attention to the woman crossing the lobby toward the doorway she had just exited, she marched straight past Karen Corselli without ever seeing her.
 
 
Mick looked up when the door slammed closed. His shoulders lost the rigidity they'd been plagued with for the past hour and a half, and his stomach finally stopped pumping out a steady stream of acid. He hadn't known what the hell he was going to do if Sasha decided to park her pretty little butt in her friend's room for the night.
Connie had already called his bluff on the protective custody scam. His take on her attitude had been that even armed with the knowledge that it was nothing more than smoke and mirrors on his part, she was tacitly agreeing to let him get away with it for the time being. He sure as hell couldn't count on her remaining so forbearing, however, if he attempted to pack Sasha off. Not, at any rate, if Sasha expressed an adamant wish not to be packed . . . and he certainly had no reasonable expectation she'd do otherwise.
Legs stretched out in front of him, Mick lounged indolently on an overstuffed chair and watched her storm into the room. Given the way she'd been pretending he was invisible ever since she'd discovered the truth of his employment, he fully expected to be ignored. That was how it usually went down these days, and after cursing at her earlier he naturally assumed he was in for more of the same. He was therefore caught unprepared when she marched straight up to him, slammed her half empty drink down on the table, planted her hands militantly on the arms of the chair he sat in, and leaned forward, getting right in his face. The scent of liquor wafted on her breath as she declared furiously, “Men are . . .
pond scum
.” Her chest heaved once, twice, her eyes burned with rage. “And I detest every last one of you.”
It was the wrong time to attack him. “Well, stop the presses,” he snarled right back. “What a news flash.” Snapping erect, he thrust his face aggressively forward to swallow up the fraction of an inch of space she'd left between them, lip curling nastily when she jerked back in reaction. If she wanted a fight, he was more than ready to accommodate her. He'd tried being a New Age sensitive guy and look where that horseshit had gotten him—the proud possessor of way too much frustration. “This might come as a big shock to you, sister, but women aren't all they're cracked up to be either.”
“Oh yeah? Do they lie and spy and act like condescending jerks?”
“Hell no, that'd be too mature. They sulk and pout and expend so much energy feeling sorry for themselves that they don't have anything left over to occasionally look at things from someone
else's
point of view.”
“Feel sorry for themselves?”
Sasha's voice rose several octaves and she lost all control, those words reverberating in her skull like the high-pitched scream of a table saw. He thought she was feeling
sorry
for herself? How dare he reduce her feelings to some petty little pity feast, as if he'd merely spilled a drink on her blouse and she was childishly refusing to get over it.
She came up swinging.
Mick was caught patently flat-footed and she got in two solid punches before he grabbed hold of her forearms and wrestled her arms down to her sides. He jerked her forward to knock her off balance.
She landed partly on his chest, one knee planted in the chair cushion between his legs, her other leg out from under her as her thighs sloppily straddled one of his. She was in no position to fight but she nevertheless bucked and pitched with such fierce determination he half expected at any moment to feel the sick sensation of her kneecap slamming his scrotum up to meet his backbone. He slid out of the chair onto his knees, which effectively put her knees out of commission as well by the simple expedient of dragging her down right along with him.
Sasha's breath whistled in her throat and escaped in sobs as she attempted to fight free, twisting and jerking and calling him words he would have sworn she didn't even know, or at least never in a million years would have said out loud. Mick was astounded that such a little body, even if it did belong to an athlete in her prime, could put up so much resistance against his own overwhelmingly greater strength.
He'd grown accustomed to butting his head up against the solid wall of her cool dignity—it was that very imperturbability that had made him feel about two inches tall all week long. This total loss of a discipline he'd believed to be impenetrable shook him up and drained him of his anger. He wrestled her down onto her back on the floor and lay on top of her, his hands stapling her wrists to the carpet, his heavy thighs pinning hers into immobility beneath him. Still she struggled in a blind rage, trying futilely to throw him off.
“Shhh, shh, shh, shh,” he soothed. Using his chin to push her hair out of his way, he pressed his open mouth against her ear, breathing into it a medley of nonsensical sounds whose sole purpose was designed to calm her, to neutralize her rage. “Hush now, darlin', shhhhh.” He buried his nose in the fragrant hair behind her ear and planted kisses on the skin just in front of her hairline, then shifted over her, stringing a line of kisses down the side of her neck. And all the while he crooned soothing words. “I'm sorry. Ah, shh, baby, shh. I'm sorry.”
Little by little her struggles ceased. Where restraint alone had failed to subdue her, the combination of his soothing voice, his soft kisses, and the heat and weight of his body surrounding hers slowly penetrated the red mist of rage that fogged her alcohol-impaired control. Except for intermittent shuddery little exhalations, she was soon lying quietly beneath him.
Sasha was aware he was aroused; that rigid length lying against her inner thigh was unmistakable. But he made no overt movement to force awareness of his stimulated state on her—he didn't move his hips, he didn't even press it against her, and his lips moving up and down her throat traveled with a gentle lack of threat against her skin. It was in any case her own body's response to the knowledge of his arousal that unnerved her. “Let me up,” she said in a thick voice. Clearing her throat she added, “Please.”
Mick stilled; then he slowly lifted his lips away from her throat, released her wrists, and pushed up off the carpet with his hands and feet, shifting his weight to the side. Sasha slid out from under and he lowered himself again, lying on his stomach with his pelvis thrust forward, pressing his erection against the floor to afford himself the modicum of relief he hadn't dared risk taking from her. He turned his head to look at her, drawing in deep breaths through his nostrils and exhaling them silently through his teeth.

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