Finger Prints (35 page)

“You know?”

He pressed her hand to his bearded jaw. “I spent the weekend in Chicago.”

“Ch-Chicago?”

Shifting her onto his lap, he settled back into her corner. Holding her tightly but gently, he told her everything. “I’m sorry to have left you that way Friday night. I was hurt and confused. I didn’t know what to do. Sam met me at the airport today. He half thought I’d made contact with Culbert in Chicago.”

“With Culbert? How could he think
that
?”

“It’s his job. He’s protecting you. I must have looked pretty strange when I disappeared, to go to Chicago, no less. But we got everything straightened out. He said Tom and Sheila were with you.”

“I sent them home.”

Thoughts of her safety were foremost in his mind. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed to be alone.”

Ryan frowned, as though just then realizing where she was. “How did you get in?”

The night couldn’t hide her sheepish expression. “Sam picked the lock when we first went looking for you.” Her voice dropped. “I stole the key from your key board. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. I should have given you one sooner.” He glanced off into the darkness. “Your Sam. He’s not such a bad guy after all.”

For the first time since he’d returned, Carly felt the horror of the past begin to recede. Tension very slowly seeped from her limbs. The ice that had encased her senses grew moist. “I missed you so, Ryan. I can imagine what you must have felt when I raced off to Chicago with Sam.”

“Thank God I didn’t know then that you were with him. I didn’t figure that out till a little while ago. I think I would have gone mad if I’d known.”

“I half wish you had. Maybe this would have all come out sooner.”

He held her back and gazed into her eyes. “But you were going to tell me? Before I left?”

Reaching up, she kissed him softly. “Friday night. I waited and waited, but you didn’t come.”

“Will you ever forgive me?”

“Will
you
ever forgive
me
?”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” he whispered. “You were frightened. I can now understand why. I only wish I’d been able to share some of that fear with you.”

“But I didn’t want that. Don’t you see? It’s bad enough that I have to live with it, but to impose it on someone else makes it even worse.”

“I love you, Carly. That gives me the right to know, the right to share
everything
with you.”

She wasn’t sure she totally agreed, but couldn’t think about it with his lips suddenly sipping hers. The knowledge that he was here with her, safe and loving, made her mind whirl. A soft moan slid from far back in her throat and she opened her mouth, craving more than his gentleness offered.

He needed little encouragement. Her invitation touched off a spark, igniting his passion like a match to dried leaves. With a shudder, he kissed her more deeply. Their lips meshed, their tongues dueled. He sought from her every bit of her sweetness, and, brimming with it, she gave eagerly.

He groaned, shifting her to face him, easing her legs around his hips. “Do you know how much I need you? Do you know how much I love you?” Pressing his hands against her buttocks, he showed her how his body ached, and she thrilled to the fact even as her own body matched his yearning.

Sliding his hands beneath the band of her sweat shirt, he touched the slender span of her back and, finding no barrier, sought her breasts. He held their fullness and kneaded them, aware of their swelling at his touch. Deftly whipping the sweat shirt over her head, he feasted his eyes on what he’d felt.

“Your breasts are beautiful,” he said thickly. “See how the moon catches them?”

Carly looked down. Her breasts were high and full, gleaming softly in the silver light, their tips waiting for his touch. She would never have believed she could be further aroused by the sight of her own body, but at that moment her body gloried in Ryan’s searing gaze. Dear God, how she’d missed him. Even aside from his passion, she had missed their conversations, his quiet companionship, his caring. Two days—and she’d had a glimpse of what life would be like without him. She prayed it would never come to be.

Excitement shot through her when he lifted his hands. With thumbs and forefingers alone he touched her nipples, rolling them slowly, tugging them taut. Closing her eyes against the sweet torment, she cried his name and arched closer.

“You’re mine,” he whispered. “These are mine. When I touch them they respond as though they were made for me.”

“I think they were,” she managed in a strangled gasp. “No one’s ever made me feel the way you do.” Needing to touch him, she ran her hands over the fabric of his shirt, lauding the swell of his chest, its firm muscle, the symmetrically ridged contour of his rib cage. They fell past his belt to graze the hardness beneath his zipper. There she caressed him, spreading her palm over his strength, closing her fingers around his tumescence as much as the straining fabric would allow.

Ryan’s hands fell to the delta of her womanhood. Slowly, devastatingly, he massaged her there. “So warm,” he murmured against her lips moments before his tongue plunged into her mouth. One kiss followed another, and the intimate petting went on. Releasing him only long enough to unfasten his belt and lower his zipper, she slid her hands under his shorts to his hot flesh. He convulsed helplessly, urging her into a tighter, more erotic grasp, his breath coming in tortured gasps as, increasingly, was hers. When he could bear no more, he made a low sound.

Slipping his arms under her to hold her to him as he stood, he carried her from the dark of the bedroom into the brighter living room. She eyed him warily.

“But the bed….”

“This room’s too empty,” he explained. “I want to fill it with you.”

His words thrilled her, his very presence still new and imbuing her with untold relief. That he was safe seemed a dear gift; that he was back loving her was incredible.

Her feet slid to the floor when he stopped in the middle of the room, and she saw the same hunger in his eyes that she felt in his body. Only then letting him go, and never once taking her eyes from his, she stripped off her jeans and panties in one quick move, then finished the work she’d begun on his pants.

Fumbling in his haste, he had his shirt barely unbuttoned when she finished. Swallowing hard, he watched her slip to her knees and press her head to his stomach. She turned her face from side to side, driven wild by his scent and the firmness of his skin. Her lips traced a fiery path over his hard muscles, her tongue a tool of rampant heat. When her mouth ventured lower, he felt his knees tremble. Ripping the shirt open, he thrust it aside, then collapsed onto his knees and took her to the rug with him.

But Carly had begun something she couldn’t stop. Never in her life had she felt as uninhibited. She’d been blessed with Ryan’s return; her gratitude knew no bounds. Every inch of his body was precious and desirable; she showed him this in no uncertain terms. The past days’ agony had left her starving for him, and now her soul was bared and she was proclaiming it his.

Her lips sampled the haired plane of his thighs, moving from one to the other and ever upward. The swath of skin at his groin was smooth at the side. She nibbled her way in until once more her lips approached the core of his maleness. Hands never idle, she explored and fondled, cupping, gently squeezing, only realizing that he’d shifted her when she felt his breath between her thighs.

Arousal and excitement and passion took new meaning then. Holding him still with one hand while the other caressed him lower, she used her tongue in an exploration of silk. Intoxicated by the eroticism of the act, she instinctively sought more.

She barely felt the hands that bent her knee up. Somewhere in the background of her own heady daze, she was aware of encroaching kisses at the top of her thigh. She moaned her delight when his fingers slid against the source of her heat, forging deeper with each glide, slowly, tenderly opening her wide. Then, as his lips found her moistness and sucked gently, his hands shifted to cup the curve of her buttocks, caressing her intimately closer. She had to struggle to maintain her own gentle touch against the urgency that was building, filling her with nearly unbearable need.

She stroked him as he stroked her, matching the deep plunge of his tongue with searing swirls of her own. She attempted to devour him as she was being devoured, and rather than becoming less for losing part of herself in him, she was more.

Every muscle straining against the limits of the flesh, Ryan suddenly twisted, rising over her, coming down to take her lips in the kiss of a heavenly soulmate. At that moment he entered her. His hips surged forward, grinding her against the rug, his hardness a fiery prod electrifying the pathway to her womb.

Then, feeling the quick gathering in both their bodies, he held himself above her. “Look at me,” he gasped in a hoarse whisper. She opened her eyes to the wealth of love he offered. “I love you,” he mouthed, withdrawing nearly completely, then slowly, ever so slowly filling her again.

She caught in a breath, her eyes wide at the exquisitely gentle motion, but she knew that the excitement she felt went far beyond the simple mating of flesh. Her heart was Ryan’s, her soul was Ryan’s. She was naked before him, exposed and adored. As she mouthed his words in return, she felt a graceful crescendo begin in her body, rise higher, flame hotter, gain a force that finally exploded with a cry from her lips.

Ryan held himself on a wire-taut thread of control in a bid to savor the glorious sensation of her contracting around him. Eyes bright and passion fired, he marveled at her beauty as she arched in the throes of her climax. Head thrown back, her neck glistened. Her pulse throbbed. Her breasts shimmered. She gave him everything she possessed, making his life in that instant as rich and full as anything he’d ever known.

Then, slowly, she opened her eyes and smiled. It was his undoing. The very innocence she exuded stimulated him as much as her womanly intricacies. On trembling arms he bowed his back, withdrew one last time, then drove forward into a climax that stole every thought from mind but one, and that one was on his tongue at the supreme moment. “Carly!”

His body pulsed wildly, blindly, for what seemed an eternity of indescribable pleasure. Finally collapsing, he gasped for breath. “Ahh, Carly….” It was a hoarse moan muffled against her hair. “You can’t believe what that…was…”

Her smile grew less innocent and more smug. She had a head start on him for composure. “I think I can.”

Very slowly, his limbs heavy and languorous, he slid to the side, drawing Carly with him. Nose to nose they lay in quiet enjoyment of the sounds and feel of each other’s life’s breath.

“You’re wonderful,” he murmured at last.

“So are you,” she whispered. “I do love you.”

There was a slight tremor in the hand he raised to brush loose wisps of hair from her face. His fingers returned to trace her features, which relaxed and glowed with happiness. “When I first saw you that night in the courtyard, you looked so frightened. I wanted to protect you then. I wanted to see you smile the way you did just now.” He sucked in a breath of remembrance. “That really turned me on.”

She halted his hand in its wanderings and pressed it to her lips. “You mean that all I have to do is smile and…wham?”

“Well,” he drawled, “I’m not saying that the rest of you didn’t help. You’re quite a lover.”

“When one is stimulated by another who is just a little better, one always rises to the occasion.”

“Tell me you teach that to your students.”

She grinned. “Not in the same context, that’s for sure. But I do believe it. Playing tennis, skiing, bicycling, writing, it’s the challenge that works.”

“Tell me about your writing, Carly. I read as many of your articles as I could find while I was in the library in Chicago. You were good. Do you miss it?”

Taking a deep breath, she rested her head back on his outstretched arm. “I haven’t had a chance to miss it. When I was in protective custody all those months, I was too nervous and upset to think about anything much. Then, after the trial, when I moved here, I was too busy trying to get ready for school. When I wasn’t working, I was preoccupied with sheer survival.”

“I wish I could have spared you some of that.”

“It wasn’t your job to. I had to learn to live with Carly Quinn myself. A crutch would have done as much harm as good.”

“But still, I hurt when I think of what you went through.”

“I was the lucky one,” she said quietly. “I lived.”

“You’re thinking of Peter.”

“He was a wonderful person—talented and dedicated. We were just about ready to wrap up our story. We had gotten this last tip and felt that if we could
be
there, if we could get pictures, we would have irrefutable proof.”

“Of Culbert’s involvement?”

“More of Barber’s. We’d already tied the two of them together pretty conclusively. We never expected Culbert to be there at the scene of the crime.”

“You testified that he was.”

“And he was. Peter had pictures. It was a deserted old apartment building that would have cost untold millions to renovate without the insurance money Culbert was counting on. Barber set up the fire the way he always did—using a cigarette attached to a match-book, which was in turn attached to a fuse and then something highly flammable like a plastic bag filled with cleaning solvent. It was perfect. The evidence self-destructed during the fire. There was never anything left afterward. Which was why Peter wanted to get pictures inside before we called the police.

“Culbert and Barber were outside in a dark corner talking. We thought we had time. We knew that between Barber’s technique and Culbert’s connections neither the police nor the fire department would find evidence of arson. So we wanted proof.” She frowned, still disbelieving. “We were sure we had time. What we hadn’t counted on was Barber lighting the cigarette when he did—or the entire building seeming to explode. By the time I could get to an alarm, Peter was trapped.” She shivered and whispered, “It was awful. There wasn’t anything I could do. By the time the firemen pulled him out, he had third-degree burns over ninety percent of his body. He lay in critical condition for a week before he died.”