A frown flitted between her brows. “And what do you get out of it, Jethro?”
What did he get out of it? A chance to feel loved, at least the periphery of it. A chance to feel alive as he never had until he saw her.
“More pleasure than you can imagine, Keiley,” he assured he softly.
More pleasure than he had ever believed possible. The darkness of his past and a lifetime of loneliness receded when she was near.
“Enough pleasure to stick around a while?” Mac’s question had him jerking around, almost guiltily.
“You never know.” Jethro grinned, injecting a humor he didn’t feel. “Director’s in no hurry to have me fill my desk right now.”
“Jethro likes to pound on the criminals.” Mac glanced at his wife, his gaze assured, confident of his place in her soul. “I’m trying to convince him to take a vacation when his suspension is up at the end of the week.”
Jethro watched the silent communication between husband and wife. That bond that allowed them to read each other. To see each other without words.
“You should,” Keiley agreed softly, turning her head slowly to meet Jethro’s gaze.
She didn’t say anything more. Instead she took his wrist, the sponge still held loosely in his hand, and pulled it to her shoulder.
Jethro couldn’t speak. There was no need to speak. Aware of Mac behind him, he did what he had done many times in the past: he bathed the woman they had shared. Unlike those other times, he didn’t tease or joke. There was no teasing in him tonight. Nothing to joke about. This was more serious than he had ever imagined it could be.
She had given him a gift that shook him to his soul, and he couldn’t even explain exactly what it was.
He washed her thoroughly, even going so far as to ignore the blush that seemed to blaze across her enter body when he nudged the sponge between her thighs.
As he cleaned her, Jethro watched the languorous pleasure that suffused her, the drowsy sensuality that began to bloom on her cheeks once again.
After rinsing her, he stepped back, glancing at Mac as he leaned against the doorframe, staring at her with a gentle quirk of a smile and an expression that Jethro had never seen him use with anyone but Keiley.
“Come on, princess.” Mac grabbed the towel before Jethro could reach it and moved for the tub. “Let’s get you dressed before that pizza arrives.”
Jethro moved back, watching as Mac drew his wife from the tub and wrapped the towel around her body. He dried her slowly, peppering kisses over her shoulders as she leaned into him, clearly luxuriating in her husband’s touch.
Her husband. She belonged to another man, and he couldn’t forget that. He didn’t want to change that, but he had to consciously force himself to remember it.
Her soft laughter as Mac lifted her into his arms and carried her out of the bathroom stroked over his senses. It melted something hard and tight inside his heart and chipped away at the shield that guarded his soul.
“Come on, Jethro, pizza will be here soon,” Mac called out. “I’d prefer we be dressed and at least pretending to be decent when they arrive.”
Hell. Small-town life. Mac should have kept his ass in Virginia. Now Jethro was going to have to get up close and personal with the demented and country-loving inhabitants of this small town to find out where the rumors against Keiley were originating. And he would find out.
Something dark and vengeful flared within him then. He’d be damned if he would let some petty, jealous witch strike out at her in this way. Delia Staten wanted Mac; he had learned that much earlier in the day. Even now, fifteen years later, lust and hatred drove her.
Mac had told him about her and various other members of this fine community. How they had stood aside and kept silent whenever old man McCoy had beat the shit out of his son and publicly humiliated his wife. How they had gossiped and made Mac’s mother’s life more of a hell than it already was.
How Mac had found it within him to return here, to be sociable and polite to these damned people, amazed him.
Shaking his head, he moved from the bathroom and through the bedroom. From the corner of his eye he could see Mac dressing Keiley. Drawing another pair of those loose pants over her legs, kissing her stomach as he pulled the elastic band just over her hip bones.
The intimacy that connected the two had his teeth gritting in a hunger that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with a threat to his soul.
Naked, aroused, he moved through the hallway to his own room, coming to a hard, abrupt stop at a whisper of sound from below.
Jethro eased back into the shadows of the hall, staring down the stairs with narrowed eyes. There it was again, almost not there, like the slide of displaced air over a sinister whisper.
He eased back the way he had come, moving quickly back to the bedroom and giving Mac a hard, warning glance as his friend’s gaze jerked suddenly to him.
Mac clamped his hand over Keiley’s lips as she began to utter a surprised question. Jethro was jerking a pair of pants from Mac’s closet, dragging them over his legs even as he gave Mac a quick hand motion for a weapon.