The Risqué Target (16 page)

He softly kissed her pursed lips and moved back to see if the passion was still there or if she had blinked it away. It was there, now blazing. Her arms came around him, and it was she who pulled him closer.

“You want me to kiss you again?” he asked cautiously, unable to believe it himself.

“Yes,” she said in a low, sultry voice, and he almost came undone.

He palmed her face, searching for a spark of reluctance, a trickle of doubt, but there was none. His heart quickened. He wanted her so bad, had longed for her bittersweet surrender. The shaking started again, from his feet to his palms, but he couldn’t give into it. He couldn’t give into her. Leaning in, too close for his own comfort, he said, “I want the words. Tell me what I want to hear, Nala.”

The light crystallized in her blue, passion-filled eyes. Her lids fell, hiding her fervor for a split second before she reopened them and whispered the long-awaited surrender. “I-I want… I want you.”

With everything in him, he sought to take her and all that hot fucking sex lingering in her eyes, but he couldn’t. Not like that. He released her face, and put some much-needed distance between them by taking a step back.

Her brows were scrunched, perplexed, but she held her tongue and waited.

“See?” He sighed with relief for maintaining his control. “We've just established a bit of trust, because I believe you. You've convinced me that you want my body. But the next time you pull a stunt like that, running off the way you did and damn near killing me in the process, I can promise you it won't be my finger doing the punishment. Do you understand me, Nala?”

She nodded.

He had to get away from her. He turned to leave the room, but when he reached the door, he heard her whisper behind him.

“The file?” Her voice quivered, and he wasn’t sure if she sounded tentative or ashamed.

He slowed his step. “I'll give it to you after breakfast.”

So, it was about the file after all. Splat!
His heart fell to the floor.

Nala caught his hestation at the door. She secretly wished he'd turn around, take her in his arms, and finish her well-deserved “consequence” She had, after all, almost killed him. But no. He’d heard what he wanted, and left.

What did that matter? It was all about the file. That was why she caved, why she confessed.
Wasn’t it? I did it for the file, didn’t I?

It couldn’t be because his touch burned her, leaving her flesh still sizzling. She’d gone weak in the knees just from his nearness—that sexy drawl, the low, husky voice, full of such promising appeal, those eyes, apatite gemstones daring and baiting her to get lost in their hypnotizing gleam.

She’d fallen for his well-played-out, well-rehearsed seductive act. Fallen like the rain. The wetness still lingered between her legs, berating her. He hadn’t forced her. She’d admitted her defeat, capitulated to his kisses all on her own. She hadn’t lied. With every ounce of her being, she wanted him, longed for him to throw her on the bed and give to her the heat that flickered beneath his hooded eyes… and he’d walked away!

Have you gone crazy, Nala?
She shouldn’t care what he thought, even if she did, for a split second, get caught up in the moment.
Sex
. She hadn’t had it in a while, and she hadn’t gotten it good in… well, never, as he already guessed. But that still wasn’t an excuse for her knees losing their strength, definitely not a reason for her mouth to open up and blurt out that she wanted him.

Damn it!
She needed to wash the freaking wetlands from between her legs. He'd been right. Her best orgasms came from her own hand, but she sensed he'd outdo her perfected technique if given the chance.

She'd only given up her control to one person, and that was herself. It had been a problem for years. Her father had called her a control freak since she was eight, when she stood outside in the rain until she finally made the shot in the basketball net. When she turned sixteen, she wouldn’t allow anyone else to drive while they were in the car with her. She had to be behind the wheel, in constant control of where they were going and how fast they would get there. At seventeen, her father took her to the shooting range, and she refused to leave until she hit the bull's-eye. It had been an ongoing joke in her familyNala—the control freak.

When
he
said it, though, like he knew her so intimately, she felt exposed, vulnerable.

But the real question was
who
brought her to the brink of almost breaking.
Who
made her hot and ready to give up her esteemed control? There was only one answer to that. Marcus Richards, Tantum Maddox, The Dark Angel himself.

****

A plate full of eggs, toast, and a few pieces of bacon were placed out for her on the table. She ate hungrily, but it did not feed the hunger he’d left behind when he walked out on her. When he entered the dining room in a fitted t-shirt and worn denim jeans, need whispered in the back of her head, “
Simply delicious.
”
 
She was still hungry, all right, and with Tantum Maddox around, she was never going to feel freaking full again.

He flipped the dark wet strands from his forehead and flashed those bright aqua eyes. “Here,” he grunted and tossed the file he'd promised before he picked up her plate.

She snatched it, fearful it was another tease, but he only turned away, taking her plate with him. As she pulled the paper from the manila envelope, anticipation shook through her fingertips. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves. Her gaze drifted from the file to his back. He’d held up his end of the bargain, his promise, and given her the file—in its entirety, the best she could tell. “Tantum…’” It rolled off her tongue, and that frightened her.

He stopped, plate in his hand, and turned his head, his eyes cautious. He was like a panther stalking its prey, always patiently waiting.

“I want you to know I'm sorry.” The paper in her fingers lightened, and his impassive watch became heavier. “I wouldn’t have given you the valium if I'd known….”

As she trailed off, his gaze roamed her face for excruciating seconds. She wondered if he was trying to read her, to see if she was telling him the truth. Unlike him, with his little right-eye twitch, she knew she didn’t have a dead giveaway to her truthfulness.

“You came back, Nala,” he finally said, flat and unemotional, and went into the kitchen to dispose of the plate.

“Yes, but….”

He came back into the room, smiling that little, teasing smile. “I applaud you,” he said, cutting her off. “You won that round. You could have gotten away.”

He’d shut her out again. She shrugged. “For future reference, do you have any other allergies?”

He smiled, a warm, attractive gesture, practiced and polished. “No. In fact, I didn’t know I had any until recently. Luckily, I was in the hospital at the time. They tried to sedate me after an injury.”

“What injury?”

Giving his flat stomach a pat, he answered, “This one.”

He didn’t mention the other wounds, the ones she'd seen on his ankles and feet. “That scar doesn’t look like it's from too long ago.”

“No,” he responded, short and quick. Seemingly, he wasn’t going to offer anything further.

That wouldn’t stop her from inquiring, though. “I hear you've got quite a few people after you. I'm not the only one.”

“Bucky should keep his mouth shut.”

“Bucky?” She smiled at the name. “I think he worries about you.”

“He shouldn’t. No one should.” He turned away. “Read the file, Nala. You might feel differently, and you may have second thoughts about the decision you made to come back and save me.” With that, he departed the room, leaving her alone with the file.

****

Nala sifted through the documents. According to NESA's information, Tantum had requested floor plans to each location where the bombs were discovered. He'd rented a vehicle, the GPS dates and coordinates coinciding with the bomb locations.

The first one was found in Baltimore, Maryland at the Hotel Monaco on May 11, 2009. She could still remember Gabe calling her about the case. She had felt such an adrenaline rush, for it was her first real case. Baltimore was only an hour from their regional office in Washington, D.C., so she jumped in her car and met him there.

The local police had already taped off and gone through the scene. There were no leads, nothing to tip them off about who had built or placed the bomb in the conference room at the hotel. The local authorities allowed her and Gabe to take their own pictures, scope out the surrounding area, question people, and log the bomb components.

Gabe had to leave to prepare for an upcoming court case. Nala stayed up all night, searching the NESA database and some other databases she shouldn't have had access to, but she came up with nothing. Whoever created the bomb didn’t have a signature yet, at least not anywhere in government or NESA records.

She went home the next morning exhausted and disappointed. After a hot shower and a few hours of sleep, she woke up around six or so, dinnertime. Gabe called her to tell her another bomb had been found, this one in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a little over three hours away, at a NESA-owned safe house. The local police department was kept out of the discovery.

She met him at the site in nice, little, quiet Scranton. The investigation revealed that the bomb components matched the one discovered in Baltimore the day before, but other than that, there were still no leads. Gabe needed to get back to Washington. He was scheduled to appear in court the next morning for a previous case he'd worked on. Nala headed to their regional office in Rochester, New York to report in. They assumed their bomber was moving north, and they wanted to be close.

A few hours later, Gabe showed up at the hotel, and the partners ordered Chinese. Nala began to feel nauseated, she assumed from the undercooked fish. It had smelled a tad too fishy. She was hit hard by food poisoning. Gabe stayed by her side. He rubbed her back and pulled the hair from her face while she bent over the porcelain bowl in the hotel room. One of the reasons she cared for him was that he was always a true gentleman, even when she was at her worst.

Once the poison exited her worn-out digestive system, she slept hard for many hours, up until their phones rang late the next morning. There was another bomb, but this one had detonated, killing five people in a motel at Niagara Falls, New York. She and Gabe were only an hour away. In the end, six people died that day, and Gabe was in the death toll.

Not wanting to go down that dreadful road again, she continued riffling through the  folder.

Tantum had requested floor plans from the first location, Hotel Monaco, just three hours and twelve minutes before the bomb was discovered and reported to local law enforcement. The logs showed he requested the safe house floor plans two hours prior to that bomb’s discovery, as well as for the last, the one that went off and killed half a dozen people. He’d put in his request for that location one hour and six minutes prior to the fatal detonation.

The GPS route placed Tantum at every location around the time the bombs would've been positioned and set up. The evidence was certainly incriminating. For a convicted murderer standing at hell's door, he looked pretty damn good for the crime.

“I'm not going down for this,”
she recalled him saying back at her apartment when he had perused the file, overt anger in his eyes. What else did he say?
“Do you even know who the intended Target was?”
What was he talking about? Or, more importantly, who?

All the time she'd spent with him clogged her head and made a mess of her judgment. She'd started to think, or at least wanted to believe, that he might be innocent. He'd protected her at the motel when they were kidnapped, even when he didn’t know her. She was a stranger to him, yet he'd been ready to sacrifice himself to keep her safe. He'd cared for her shoulder and held her in his arms, hushing the pain away. When he touched her… well, she couldn’t afford to think about that.

And then she saw it.

Her heart quickened, but her body turned to stone.

There was a photo of Tantum, holding the bomb at the Monaco Hotel. The timestamp on the picture was twenty minutes before the bomb’s discovery. The second photo was one of him concealing it, and another as he walked away.

Her heart fluttered like a playing card in the wheel of a bike, a kid racing frantically to get home on time. The clicking, the vibration shook her, rattling her cold bones. The painstaking truth hurt like a swift, hard kick to the gut.