Читать книгу Never Say Never Again - Tori Carrington - Страница 9

THERE WERE BLASTED story-twisting, scandal-hungry reporters hiding out everywhere. When Connor went home to his D.C. apartment, they sprung from behind the bushes, camera lights blinding him, microphones hitting him in the chin. When he checked in at work, they were in the hall outside his office; he’d even found one hiding in one of the men’s room stalls. He grimaced. Not that there was much reason for him to go to work nowadays. He’d been suspended with pay the instant Melissa Robbins’s body had been found…and he’d been named as suspect number one.

Two days and it hadn’t sunk in yet. He was good at his job. Damn good. He’d never done one single thing in his entire career to cast him in a suspicious light. He prided himself on being the one they called in for special ops, and carefully cultivated his reputation for getting the job done. He’d never lost a witness. It was only natural then that he’d fully expected his boss to stand behind him.

Not exactly the way things had gone down. Before he could get two words in, old Newton had asked for his badge and his firearm and told him he was on indefinite suspension until the outcome of the case was decided.

Politics. He knew the drill. The higher-ups in the department had to distance themselves, or at least appear like they were distancing themselves, from him in order to cover their asses. Not merely because of potential lawsuits from the victim’s family. But because Washington bigwigs loved to throw their weight around when it came to high-profile cases like this one. The perfect PR opportunity to make it look like they were doing something for the constituents back home. Unfortunately, their power plays ultimately hurt the ones least responsible for the trouble. Men like his boss, Newton.

Men like him.

He hadn’t been able to get a full accounting of exactly what implausible evidence linked him to Robbins’s murder. But sources did tell him that an arrest was probably imminent. It was his job to make sure that arrest never took place.

Tightening his hands on the steering wheel of his silver SUV, Connor pulled up into the gravel drive of the McCoy place in Manchester, Virginia. Pops’s car wasn’t there. Good. And at this time of the morning, Liz and Mitch would be busy in the ranch office. Even better. His mind had been so busy whizzing through all the details of his predicament in the past two days, he hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. It wasn’t until he’d accidentally poured salt into his coffee instead of sugar at a D.C. diner that morning that he realized he needed a few hours to himself to get some major shut-eye. And the old McCoy house was just the place to do that.

He distractedly eyed the pen that paralleled the parking area. Kelli’s mutt, Kojak, was sitting inside with Mitch’s behemoth Goliath.

Clutching the keys to the McCoy place, and to his car, he climbed out then crossed over to the pen and crouched down. Kojak ignored him, but Goliath ambled over and stuck his wet nose through the fence. He absently stroked him. “What is it, boy? Feeling a little put out?”

Could he ever relate to that feeling. For the past thirty-six hours, he’d launched an all out attack to find out why he was under suspicion for Melissa Robbins’s murder. He’d come up with little more than nothing. He’d finally had to admit he needed access to inside info. Needed to find out exactly what the U.S. attorney’s office had on him before he could go any further.

Goliath nudged his other hand, causing him to lose his grip on his keys. Grimacing, he bent down to pick them up, then stood up slowly as Goliath sprinted away from the fence.

Giving the quiet grounds a once-over, Connor turned from the dog, then he walked toward the house and let himself in. The door was open, which wasn’t surprising. The crime rate in Manchester was basically nil. And what criminals might be lurking about certainly wouldn’t think of coming all the way out here.

He stepped into the kitchen. The telltale acrid smell of something having been burned permeated the room. He was growing used to that. It was the utter silence of the place he found unsettling. In his overtired state, he found it all too easy to imagine Jake sitting in his room studying the latest in international law; Marc camped out in front of the television, soaking in whatever happened to be playing that time of the day; Mitch repairing something or other upstairs; David tossing a baseball against the side of the house, the clunk, clunk each time the ball made contact irritating yet reassuring.

David….

It was impossible to believe the kid was married. Married, for cripe’s sake.

What was he talking about? He couldn’t believe he was the only one of the five of them unmarried.

He climbed the steps two at a time, then crossed the second-floor hall to the room that had always been his, even after moving out and getting his own apartment in D.C. over a decade earlier. He started pulling off his shirt even as he opened the door. At least the reporters hadn’t found out about this place yet. He could use it as home base until he figured out just how, exactly, he’d ended up in the mess he was in. And who had set him up to take a fall he hadn’t earned.

He drew to an abrupt stop in the middle of his room. Only a quick, startled glance told him it was no longer his room. He backed up into the hall, looked around, then stared at the door that still held the words he’d carved when he was ten. “Private. Keep Out.” He peered back inside.

It was his room, all right. Only it wasn’t. A wood, spindle cradle sat in the middle, stuffed full of tiny, brightly colored toy animals. A rocking chair was angled where his twin bed used to be. And someone had painted the walls white and decorated them with…was that Winnie the Pooh?

He grimaced. Where were all his sports posters? The collection of football cards he’d kept piled up in the corner? The photograph of his mother he kept on a nightstand that was no longer there?

“Aw, hell.” He realized that while he’d visited in the past three months, he’d never actually gone up to his old room. His new sisters-in-law must have turned it into a nursery for his nephew while he wasn’t looking, to use whenever Marc and Mel came for visits. Which was too often for his liking.

Connor scratched his head. Shouldn’t someone have asked him before doing something so drastic? And what about the other rooms? Why hadn’t they chosen one of those?

He strode down the hall, throwing open doors as he went. Pops’s room looked the same. So did Marc’s. Jake had added a double bed to his, and his old twin now sported a pink, frilly spread, more likely than not compliments of Lili, but it was still the same. Mitch’s was hardly recognizable now that his wife, Liz, had moved in, but there was no mistaking that it was still his room.

His was the only one they had screwed with.

He rubbed his hand over his numb face, feeling ridiculously like he’d woken up that morning to find he’d been evicted from his life.

He backtracked to Marc’s room, stalked to the bed, then sank down on the new mattress, curious as to why Marc and Mel hadn’t traded the twin for a double, or why they hadn’t put the damn crib in here—but he wasn’t up to dealing with the answer right now. He tossed his shirt to the corner, kicked his boots off, then stretched out, staring at the ceiling without seeing it, his feet dangling from the end of the too-short bed.

Almost immediately an image of Bronte O’Brien filled his mind.

Figured. The first free moment he had to himself and a woman intruded.

He supposed he should be used to it by now, given all the females that had taken over the McCoy place, but this was different, somehow. Bronte was different.

He closed his eyes and crossed his arms over them. Oh, he’d had his share of women in his lifetime. Mostly short-lived relationships that ended almost as quickly as they began. He’d meet someone somewhere, take her out a couple times, go to bed with her, then walk out when she started talking about something more serious.

He found it a little strange that he had never asked Bronte out. Not only now, but back in college. It wasn’t as if she had a sign around her neck that read, “Interested in marriage, only.” On the contrary, if she wore a sign it would probably say, “Mention of the word marriage is punishable by death.”

Normally his kind of girl.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been attracted to her. She’d always commanded his attention the moment she walked into the room. And that certainly hadn’t changed.

There. That was it. His epiphany of the day. He was attracted to Bronte. If kissing her the other night hadn’t proven that, then certainly his inability to stop thinking about her now did.

He jerkily rolled over, compensating when the move nearly threw him over the side of the narrow bed. Her wanton reaction to him hinted that she was as drawn to him as he was to her. By all rights, he ought to just sleep with her and get it over with.

He remembered the way she’d pressed her breast into his touch. How she’d boldly reached down to cup his erection in her hand. Recalled her surprised gasp when she ran her fingers down and around the length and breadth of him.

Connor’s stomach tightened and he turned his head the other way on the pillow. He’d never…wanted a woman the way he wanted Bronte O’Brien. He wanted to kiss her senseless. Watch her lick that full upper lip of hers right before she fastened her mouth around his erection. Grind into her like nobody’s business. Tug her hair until her head fell back, giving him free access to her long neck and breasts. He wanted to possess her inside and out.

The mere thought of being between her thighs made him hard. And the feel of the mattress beneath him wasn’t helping matters much.

He roughly turned back over, determined to ignore his physical reaction, though his mind kept rushing down the same path, a steam locomotive that wouldn’t stop until it reached an unknown destination.

He supposed part of the reason for his different attraction to Bronte was that she’d been a secret fantasy of his for so long. For whatever reason, from the start, he’d put her aside, above other women he dated. Purposely made her unobtainable, out of bounds. He’d immediately sensed in her a…sameness. Glimpsed in her eyes a shared understanding that had nearly knocked him straight out of his shoes the instant he saw it.

Outside he heard distant sounds. Probably Mitch in the later stages of breaking one of his new fillies. He fought to concentrate on the normal sound, to stop thinking about the woman he shouldn’t be thinking of, get some sleep, then get up to figure out exactly who was trying to set him up for Robbins’s murder and why. His sandpapery eyelids blessedly began drifting closed.

Still, the nameless something that existed between him and Bronte tempted his attention. He’d never experienced the same thing with another woman before or since.

And that’s exactly the reason he’d kept his distance—and should continue to keep his distance.

But when he finally fell into a deep, exhausted slumber, there existed absolutely no distance whatsoever between him and Bronte O’Brien.

BRONTE FIGURED SHE REALLY needed to find something more interesting to do with her down time—like defrosting the freezer.

After ten grueling hours of chaos spent juggling ongoing cases while trying to get a handle on the Pryka/Robbins development, she needed something that would take her mind off the office, allow her to take an all-important step back and look at the details with a fresh perspective.

Sitting alone at her kitchen table, Bronte finished pushing the remains of her gourmet microwave dinner around in its plastic container, then leaned back in her chair. Gourmet. Right. More like airplane food for the patently time-impaired single person. She looked around the too-quiet kitchen. The television was turned low in the corner of the counter behind her, but talking heads didn’t quite do it for her tonight.

Neither did the array of interior design magazines and fabric swatches lying on the corner of the table. She reached out and leafed through the top magazine, stopping when she came to a photo of a high-tech nursery, complete with a three-camera-angle monitoring system and automatic diaper dispenser. Absently, she bent the corner of the page back and forth. There was a point when she’d believed motherhood wasn’t a part of her future. A time when she’d seen herself as a lifelong career woman, being completely content, deliriously happy even, building a name for herself in the U.S. attorney’s office. Then came Thomas. She not only began hearing wedding bells, she found herself slowing her step near the children’s section of Saks. Began reading articles on the future cost of higher education in magazines that she usually skipped. Had idly debated cloth versus disposable and began wondering if day care was tax deductible.

Of course all those thoughts went right out the door along with Thomas.

Then why was she wondering what the nursery in the magazine would look like with a different color scheme?

She sighed and pushed the periodical aside. Maybe she should get an animal that wasn’t of the human male variety. Now that would be a switch. Kelli’s criminally ugly dog Kojak seemed to supply her with constant companionship. She twisted her lips. Then again, she’d balked so badly—obsessed with all the possible stains that could show up on her Persian rug—when Kelli had asked her to watch her prized pet, her best friend had finally taken the pooch out to the McCoy ranch in Virginia while she was on her honeymoon.

No, a dog was definitely out. And the thought of being single with a cat…well, she wasn’t even going to go there.

She heard herself sigh again, then pushed her tray aside and pulled the first of the evening edition newspapers in front of her.

Today, especially, had been grueling. The buzz around the U.S. attorney’s office was that there was little question as to Connor McCoy’s guilt in the Melissa Robbins case. A case that rightly should have been hers as head of the Pryka case, but notably wasn’t. Word even had it that Bernie Leighton himself, the senior attorney, her superior, was working up a case against him. While running back and forth to district court juggling two other cases, one an appearance for an evidentiary hearing, the other to sit co-counsel for a rotating attorney during his first preliminary hearing, Bronte had left at least five messages for Bernie. On last check, he’d returned none of them.

Bronte fingered the grainy black-and-white photo of Connor on the front page of the Washington Times-Herald. He was wearing a dark bulletproof vest with U.S. Marshal printed across the chest, holding a sniper’s rifle at attention. Given the handcuffed and shackled men in institution dress behind him, the picture had likely been shot while transporting federal prisoners. The expression on his face… She caught herself almost caressing that inanimate face and snatched her hand back. The expression on his face was nothing if not arrogant.

“Oh, yes? Then why did you piss off Dennis Burns today by defending McCoy? Why don’t you just hand dimwit Dennis your job and be done with it?” she asked herself aloud.

She opened the paper to page four, where the meat of the story lay, and folded it back to the piece. Okay, so maybe she took a little too much pleasure in honking off a certain rotating junior attorney, aka pissant Dennis Burns, whenever the opportunity arose—which was often, given his interest in her permanent position in the Transnational/Major Crimes Section. It was an interest he’d made no secret of when he requested to assist her on the Pryka case—a request Bernie had immediately granted, putting her in nearly daily contact with the guy. Dennis had been with the section for four months and she’d caught him practically salivating outside her office no fewer than five times. And that wasn’t saying anything about his overt attempts to win the senior U.S. attorney’s affection by eavesdropping on her conversations and—she suspected but had yet to prove—going through her mail and beating her to the punch at status meetings whenever she got a snippet of interesting information.

If she were a man, she probably would have taken him out back and settled things with him months ago.

But she wasn’t a man, and her only effective means of ammo was working her butt off to prove herself the better person for her job. The key word being “her.”

She skimmed the news story. These guys really should get themselves some new sources. Most of the time they were so far off the mark—

Her eye caught on something and she traced her finger back up to the top of the section.

“This afternoon Senior U.S. Attorney Bernard Leighton has named junior attorney D.C. Dennis Burns to head up the investigation…”

Bronte leapt up so quickly, she nearly knocked over her chair.

No…it couldn’t be. Pryka was her case. She’d been the one Robbins had come to wanting to testify against her Serbian-by-birth ex-boyfriend for myriad criminal activities, not limited to but including the smuggling of illegal explosives into the country, purportedly for a third-party terrorist organization. She’d been the one who had nervously made her case before the attorney general to get Robbins accepted into the witness protection program. She had even begun doing some fancy footwork on how best to shore up the hole left by Melissa Robbins’s death—first and foremost, by putting a call into the FBI agents who had been working the case much longer than she had, trying to finger Pryka as being behind the murder of his ex-girlfriend, if not directly, then indirectly.

Of course, she’d have never guessed in a million years that Connor McCoy would be the one ultimately under suspicion.

Still wearing her gray skirt suit and hose, she padded to the front of the town house and yanked open the door. On the step lay the last of the day’s print news offerings. She snatched the paper up and quickly turned to the section on the case. There, in black and white, the information from the other piece was confirmed. According to two sources, Burns had succeeded in taking the case from her.

“Why that no good, scheming, conniving little son-of-a-bitch,” she murmured under her breath.

The sound of a passing car caught her attention. She looked up and distantly followed its passage. For a moment, she forgot that it was after eight o’clock. The deep shadows confirmed that it, indeed, was. Policewoman-to-the-core Kelli had once warned her that she should be a little more careful when opening her front door. That her daily routines were anal and predictable and, thus, made her more of a target for crime. Bronte told her friend that the only concession she would make was she’d vary the times she picked up her much-loved newspapers by five minutes.

She shook her head then turned to go back inside.

“Wait.”

Bronte nearly jumped clear out of her hose. She swiveled at the sound of the masculine voice coming from over the stoop, then continued toward her now more urgent goal to go back inside the house.

“For God’s sake, Bronte, it’s me.”

Her heart hammering against her rib cage, she stopped herself from closing the door all the way. She craned her head through the opening. “Connor?”

The instant she said the name, she wanted to kick herself. Admitting that she recognized his voice from the darkness and with very little to go on was far too telling in her book—both to him and to herself.

“Are you alone?”

She considered telling him no, then thought better of it. He probably already knew if she was alone or not and lying would only make her look sorrier than she already was. “Yes.”

All too quickly, he stood just on the other side of the door. She had to look up to see into his face. An involuntary shiver skittered down her spine—a shiver that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the man eyeing her in much the same way she was him.

“So are you going to invite me in or what?”

Bronte tightened her fingers on the door. “After the scare you just gave me, I’m more in the ‘or what’ frame of mind.”

She made out his frown in the porch light from a neighboring town house.

“Oh, all right,” she said and swung the door inward.

As soon as he was inside, she peeked back out, making sure no one had seen him come in. Though why she was so concerned, she couldn’t say. Maybe because this was Georgetown. And for some reason it mattered to her that her neighbors not think she was in cahoots with the person whose face was splattered all over the front page of the very newspaper she still clutched to her chest.

She closed the door and turned to face him. “An apology for scaring me out of my wits would be nice.”

“Sorry.”

“Gee, Connor, somehow that one just didn’t hit the mark.” Despite, or perhaps because of, the shiver that continued to skitter across her skin, she branded her wise-cracking for exactly what it was: her need to cover her thrill at seeing him again.

But that didn’t change that she was minus one lead witness, or that the man in front of her was accused of subtracting her.

She eyed him closely. “What are you doing here, Connor?”

He stood still as stone for several heartbeats. When he finally did shrug, he looked anything but casual. “Would you believe me if I said I was in the neighborhood and decided to drop in for a visit?”

She found herself smiling at him. “Not a chance.”

“Okay, then. How about I say I wanted to talk to you.”

She worried her bottom lip between her teeth, trying not to notice the fresh, crisp smell of his leather jacket, or the way the snug black T-shirt she could see between the flaps hugged his abdomen to perfection. “I’d buy that.”

“Good,” he said, grinning. “Then I want to talk to you.”

Bronte nearly took a step back. Boy, when he grinned, he was devastating. She’d have to remember not to make him grin.

“So…let’s talk.”

She led the way back into the kitchen, the only room downstairs that still showed significant signs that someone lived there. She plopped the paper down on top of the others, then moved to close the curtains on the back door and the window. For good measure, she switched off the television as well.

When she faced Connor once again, she found his leather jacket hanging on the back of a chair, and him standing with his arms crossed over his cotton-clad chest, his expression as dark as the one she’d seen in the picture. Only now the smart-ass description refused to spring forth. Rather words like competent, sharp and irresistibly sexy came to mind.

“What’s with the clandestine stuff?” he asked, cocking a brow.

She made a face at him. “You tell me. You’re the one hiding out in my bushes and scaring the bejesus out of me.” You’re the one suspected of murder.

He openly eyed the small stack of papers on her table. Right next to her half-eaten sorry excuse for dinner and the designing schemes she’d been considering. His expression darkened. She looked to find him staring at the picture of the nursery.

She rushed to clean up the place. “A little late for a casual drop-in visit, wouldn’t you say?”

He didn’t say.

“You could have called first. You know, given me fair warning so I could tidy up.”

“I didn’t have your number.”

No, he wouldn’t have. With Kelli away, there was no other way he could get it. Given her high-profile career, it wasn’t wise for her to list her number in the book. And any unofficial channels he might have employed were no longer accessible to him. It was normal operating procedure that a government employee be indefinitely suspended when suspected of a serious crime, especially when said crime didn’t reflect well on same government.

She slowly wiped her hands on a tea towel, thinking Connor had to possess a good memory to have remembered her address. It must have been at least two months ago when Kelli and David dropped her off at home after a quick dinner, Connor a silent presence in the back of the car as they did so. “I’m sorry to hear about your suspension.”

Oh, but that was obtuse. Why not just come out and ask if he did the evil deed, Bronte?

“You got some coffee?”

She stared at him, surprised. “Um…as a matter of fact, no. I don’t drink coffee. I have tea.”

His grimace served as his answer.

She tossed the towel to the counter then opened the refrigerator. “Sorry, I drank the last beer last night. I have some vodka in the freezer.”

“Do you have orange juice?”

She tossed another surprised glance over her shoulder. “Sure. With or without the vodka?”

“Without.”

She grabbed the juice container, then retrieved a glass from one of the cupboards. She noticed the slight trembling of her hands as she poured the liquid and wondered just what he was doing there. And what, exactly, his overtly sexual presence in her last sanctuary would mean to her vow to stay away from him.

THE JUICE WAS ALMOST GONE

Connor’s fingers tensed against the cool glass. He slid a glance toward where Bronte sat at the table across from him, her gaze probing, her stance curiously standoffish.

He didn’t quite know what he’d expected when he decided to show up on her doorstep to ask for help, but it certainly wasn’t the blouse-buttoned-up-to-her-chin, suit-clad, tight-lipped woman across from him.

She got up for the third time in as many minutes. He watched her move to get something out from under the counter, the gray material of her skirt pulling nicely across her rounded bottom. He swallowed hard and purposely forced himself to look around the kitchen. He hadn’t seen much of the rest of the shadowy town house, but this room was nice. Airy. The rough-hewn pine table was obviously the centerpiece. It was easy to picture ten people seated around it, chatting after a large meal.

“I was just about to fix myself some dinner. Have you eaten?”

Connor’s gaze snapped to where she was angling a huge pot out, then putting it on the stove. He could have sworn he spotted one of those TV type dinners on the table when he came in. He knew them all too well. “No. But I’m not hungry.”

She turned and leaned against the stove, jumping when a burner switch must have goosed her. She moved over to lean against the counter instead. She crossed her arms under her breasts, bringing them into prominent relief despite the severe cut of her jacket. “Look, Connor, I don’t know what you had in mind, but you’d better be out with it pretty quick. You say you came here to talk, but you’re not talking. And I know you’re not here for orange juice. And since you’re not hungry, you didn’t come all this way hoping to mooch a meal.”

“I only live a few blocks away.”

“Oh.” She uncrossed her arms, then toyed with the spiky red bangs brushing her brows. “Then tell me, what are you doing here?”

Connor stared at the little that remained in his glass, then slowly drank it. Coming here was one of the most difficult things he’d ever had to do in his life. And now that he was here, he couldn’t seem to bring himself to take the next step. He had to know what the U.S. attorney’s office had on him, or else he wouldn’t be going anywhere, period.

Every muscle in his body grew taut, his reaction having just as much to do with the physical tension that infused the room than his reason for being there. But he hadn’t come for the physical part, no matter how enticing she looked and how much he’d like to sample that tart mouth of hers, to see if it tasted as good as he remembered.

Hell, he was the one who was supposed to help people. It was a role he had played well almost his entire life. First, when his mother died and Pops had disappeared into a whiskey bottle. Then, as a U.S. marshall in WitSec, where witnesses depended on him to see them to safety and make sure they stayed safe.

It was so foreign to now be in a position of asking for help, especially from Bronte O’Brien.

“I…um…”

“Wait a minute here.” She held up her hands to halt him. He stared at her unblinkingly. “If you’re here for the reason I think you are, you can just forget it, Connor. I mean, I enjoyed the other night as much as you did. But the other night was the other night. And today is today. You get my drift?”

He squinted at her. “What are you talking about?”

She gestured with her hands. “I’m talking about my just coming off a really bad relationship and not needing to get involved in another.”

He got quickly to his feet. “Relationship?”

Her frown would have been amusing had the situation not been so serious. “Oh, wait. I get it. You’re not interested in a relationship, are you?” She slapped her forehead then stared at the ceiling. “No. Of course, you’re not. You were alone. I was alone. And you thought that maybe we could be alone together.”

He widened his stance and planted his hands on his hips. “Are you done yet?”

She looked at him. “Yes. I think I pretty much got my point across.”

“Good.” He began to shake his head, then dragged his hand over his face instead. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re an attractive woman. Any man in his right mind would want to do…well, what you’re implying I came here for.”

Her eyes narrowed and she chewed on her bottom lip, making her upper lip look all the more plump…and kissable.

“I’m not here to sleep with you, Bronte.”

Her eyes narrowed even further. “Oh.” Suddenly they opened wide. “Oh!” She turned, fussed with the pot some more, then quickly faced him again. “Then why are you here?”

Say it, McCoy. Just open your damn mouth and ask her. “Because I need your help, Bronte. I need you to help me figure out how to get out of the mess I’m in.”