slid his mouth across her cheek and down her neck to her shoulder. She shivered in reaction and moaned his name. “Your skin is so warm,” he murmured. “So silky.”
He skimmed his palms down her back, along the curve of her spine to the rounded swells of her butt. She’d been sexy before, but thin with sharp curves. Now she was more rounded. Soft and so damn sexy that just touching her tried his control.
He had to taste her, too. He gently pushed her down onto the bed. He kissed his way down her body, from her shoulder, over the curve of her breasts. He sucked a taut nipple between his lips and teased it with the tip of his tongue.
She squirmed beneath him, touching him everywhere she could reach. His back. His butt...
He swallowed a groan as the tension built inside him. Another part of him other than his head throbbed and ached, rubbing against her and begging for release.
But he denied his own pleasure to prolong hers. He moved from her breasts, over the soft curve of her stomach to that apex of curls. He teased with his tongue, sliding it in and out of her.
She clutched at his back and then his hair. She arched and wriggled and moaned. And then she came—shattering with ecstasy.
While she was still wet and pulsing, he thrust inside her. And her inner muscles clutched at him, pulling him deeper. She wrapped her legs and arms around him and met each of his thrusts.
Their mouths mated, their kisses frantic, lips clinging, tongue sliding over tongue. He didn’t even need to touch her before she shattered again. He thrust once more and joined her in madness—unable to breathe, unable to think...
He could only feel. Pleasure. And love.
He loved her. That was why he had to make certain she would never be in danger again because of him. If he had to give up his life for hers and their son’s, he would do it willingly.
Chapter Fourteen
Her body ached. Not from the explosion or even from running from gunmen. Her body ached from making love. Josie smiled and rolled over, reaching across the bed. The sheets were still warm, tangled and scented with their lovemaking. He’d made love to her again and again until she’d fallen into an exhausted slumber.
And she realized why when she jerked awake to an empty bed. An empty room. He’d left her. She didn’t need to search her house to confirm that he was gone. But she pulled on a robe and checked CJ’s room before she looked through the rest of the house.
Her son slept peacefully, the streetlamp casting light through his bedroom window. It made his red curls glow like fire, reminding her of the explosion.
And she hurried up her search, running through the house before reaching out over the basement stairwell to jerk down the pull chain on the dangling bulb. It swung out over the steps, the light dancing around her as she hurried down to her den. He wasn’t there and neither were her folders.
He had found something in them. What?
What had she had?
Notes she’d taken from the conversations she’d overheard in the bar and from informal interviews she’d done with other members of the O’Hannigan family. News clippings from other reporters who’d covered the story. Sloppily. They hadn’t dug nearly as deep as she had. A copy of the case file from his father’s murder, which she’d bought off a cop on the force. Brendan wasn’t wrong that many people had a price. They could be bought.
But not Charlotte.
Too bad the former U.S. marshal wasn’t close enough to help her now. Maybe Josie wasn’t close enough, either—to stop Brendan from doing what she was afraid he was about to do: either confront or kill his father’s murderer.
“But who? Who is it?” she murmured to herself.
She’d gone through the folders so many times that she pretty much had the contents memorized. Brendan had figured it out; so could she. But she couldn’t let him keep his head start on her. She had to catch up with him.
No doubt he had taken her SUV. But she had another car parked in the garage off the alley, a rattletrap Volkswagen convertible. It wasn’t pretty, but mechanically it should be sound enough to get her back to Chicago. She had bought the car from a student desperate to sell it for money to buy textbooks.
She had never had to struggle for cash as her community college students