Strong, Sleek and Sinful - By Lorie O'Clare Page 0,89
keep him out of a place if he wanted to enter. It was obvious he didn’t like being monitored, which fit with his nature. Perry didn’t want anyone having the upper hand. By breaking into her home successfully, he proved to her that she could monitor anyone, but not him. Kylie could show him, instead of tell him, a few things of her own. She didn’t need to rely on that equipment as her only means of protection. She was perfectly capable of protecting herself.
There was a moment’s satisfaction when her elbow made contact. Although she wasn’t sure she hurt him as much as the impact of her bone against rock-hard muscle jarred her. It was her only window, though, and she couldn’t dwell on which case might be the truth. Instead, she twisted her body, reaching with her one free hand, and did her best to jump away from him.
“If you break into my house,” she snarled, “don’t think you can then hold me in your arms.”
“Is that so?” He let go of her but grabbed her wrist.
No way he’d have the thrill of watching her surrender. Relaxing for just a moment, she allowed him to pull her toward him. Again, her moment of opportunity was minuscule, but then it had been even shorter when she’d worked in Washington taking down a sexual predator who weighed a good hundred pounds more than Perry.
When she was sure he thought she’d tumble into him, she yanked back, using enough force that she almost dislocated her shoulder. The move was effective, though, and pulled Perry off guard.
“That’s what you get for thinking,” she snapped, pulling him toward her and then using his grip on her as a brace when she jumped into the air and kicked him hard in the gut.
Perry stumbled backward, howling from the impact. Where her perp on her previous assignment had let her go, hugging himself against the broken rib she’d given him, Perry’s grip grew tighter and he pulled her down with him. The two of them went stumbling to the side, hitting the side of the couch and causing it to make a terrible shrieking sound when it scraped across the floor.
“You’d be surprised what I think about,” he said, sounding, surprisingly, not hurt at all as his arms wrapped around her.
He pulled her over him so she was draped over all of that steel muscle. It felt a little bit too hard, even for Perry. Relaxing her body and pushing herself off him so she could rest on her elbow against his chest, Kylie ran her hand over the width of his chest.
“What the hell are you wearing?” she asked, and then yanked on his shirt to see for herself. “Body armor,” she growled. “You aren’t playing fair.”
“Want to try it on?” he said, sounding amused. His dark eyes flashed with emotions she wasn’t sure she wanted to decipher at the moment.
She hated body armor. It weighed half a ton and itched. “No thanks,” she said dryly.
Kylie wasn’t paying attention to the drama show on TV, but when it cut to commercial and a news brief started playing she froze, her attention snapping to the screen.
“Earlier tonight, Rita Simoli, a seventeen-year-old junior at Mission High, disappeared from this parking lot,” a pretty young woman began, holding a microphone to her mouth as she stared seriously at the camera. “Investigators have confirmed she was chatting with a boy on the Internet that she didn’t know, whose name is currently not being released, and agreed to meet here after the grocery store closed.”
Perry lifted her, and himself, and resituated them on the couch, pulling Kylie onto his lap. She was so wrapped up in the reporter’s story she didn’t realize her arm rested on Perry’s shoulder, or his hand on her upper thigh, until he had them comfortable. His expression was blank and almost cruel looking as he focused on the set.
“The Simolis, owners of a restaurant here in town, are offering a large reward for the return of their daughter, alive and well. But beyond that, they’ve arranged to have meetings at their restaurant for parents of other girls who’ve disappeared in the Kansas City area over the past year. Apparently the number is quite high, and shocking to this reporter that the local law enforcement have kept this so quiet when we obviously have a serial rapist and murderer on our hands. Last October, Maura Reynolds, a sixteen-year-old who lived right here in Mission Hills,