She explained the story. Italy. Her dad’s sabbatical. “But looking at the photos, something about the timing seems off.” She described to him about the dates inscribed on the backs of the Italy photos, the discrepancies she’d discovered. Then she mentioned her mother’s strange comments about angels, and how “Angie” was returned on a Christmas Eve when it was snowing, and how badly she’d been shaken when her mother had started to sing “Ave Maria” in a soft mezzo-soprano.
His eyes narrowed. “So all these triggers came together in a convergence tonight? Is that what happened? The cathedral, the bells, the season being Christmas, the fact it had started snowing, the boy singing the same hymn as your mom?”
She heaved out a chestful of air and rubbed her face. “I guess. I ... I felt panic. Terror, even, when I ... we came out. I saw the red emergency entrance sign, and then I don’t recall what happened next.”
He snorted. “You tried to kill me, that’s what.”
“I’m sorry. I’m a fuckup.” She reached for her glass and swigged back a gulp of scotch.
“You do need to talk to someone, Angie, a professional—”
“And lose my job when Metro PD discovers I’m some crackpot?”
He held her gaze, and she read the unspoken words in his eyes:You’re not safe to do the job while youaresome crackpot.
“You owe it to yourself,” he said quietly. “And to everyone who might work with you in a high-risk situation.”
Hearing him voice it again made her feel sick to her stomach. She was a liability. To herself. To others. She could have killed him.
He cupped her face. Gently, he thumbed her lip, her scar. “It might be quite simple, Angie,” he said. “Memories—that’s all it might be. Things you might have repressed as a kid. Something around the accident coming out now because of a convergence of circumstances that are stressful. Like your mother being admitted. Hash and the toddler dying on your watch. This Baptist case. They’re triggers.”
“And the girl in pink?”
“You said she has long red hair. Maybe she’s some externalized version of yourself at an age where you experienced the violent accident. Maybe extrapolated with Tiffany.”
“And the Polish language?” she said again.
“Again, maybe something locked in your memory. You yelled at me in what sounded like a foreign language outside the hospital. It could have been Polish.”
She closed her eyes and yielded to the sensation of his caress on her face, the feel of his solidity beside her. The sense of cocooned comfort inside his boat. Even his gnarly little rescue dog had decided to nudge his nose up against her socked foot now, and it was snoring in an ugly little fashion that somehow relaxed her.
“What if I learn that I’ve inherited my mother’s illness?”
“Then you need to know. Either way. Because as you mentioned, your mother apparently managed it for years, and you can get treatment, manage it, too.”
“I’d have to quit being a cop.”
“Being a cop is not what it’s cracked up to be. Look at what it did to my life.”
She glanced around the interior of his yacht, this testimony to his solo existence. She thought of him trying to repair this old boat, to somehow mend his old dreams of family, retirement. Her gaze went to the pics of him and Ginny stuck to his little fridge, and her heart opened big and sudden to this man. She fingered his ring. He looked down and watched her doing it. In silence, he withdrew his hand and removed the gold band. He set it on the table next to his glass, and his gaze met hers. She swallowed.
He leaned in and kissed her.
The touch of his lips against hers was soft, seductive, the stubble on his jaw rough against her skin as his mouth opened hers, and the tip of his tongue explored her scar, caressing it. She placed her hand against the side of his face, careful not to hurt his injuries, and she leaned back, angling for a deeper kiss. He began to undo the buttons of her shirt as his mouth moved over hers. He slid the fabric off her shoulders. She reached behind her back to unclasp her bra. Her breasts swelled free, and his breath caught in his throat.
“Come,” he murmured against her mouth as he cupped her breast with his rough hand. “Come to my bed.”
CHAPTER 47
Naked, Angie sat on the edge of the bed, Maddocks standing between her legs while she undid his pants, a lust building, boiling, deep inside her. She slid his pants down his hips and that gorgeous dick swelled free. She caressed him, taking him into her mouth, holding his hips as she worked him with her lips, her tongue. His hands clamped down hard on her shoulders, his fingers digging deeper and deeper into her skin as she stimulated him to the point that he groaned, fisting her hair. He stopped her suddenly, pulling her off his wet erection by moving her head back. His gaze, dark, dangerous, locked with hers, and he shoved her backward and hard onto the covers.
She fell back with a bounce against the mattress, hair spreading in a wild tangle around her head, thighs open. She ached for him. Was so ready for him. She raised her hips to him. Slowly—painfully slowly—he raked his gaze down the length of her body. He swallowed, his indigo eyes turning black with lust above his bandage, his carotid fluttering fast at his neck. She rotated her hips slightly in a come-hither-I-want-you gesture, burning for his penetration, to feel his length plunging deep inside her, his width stretching her. A slight smile of appreciation played over his lips. But he took his sweet time, reaching for his pants on the floor and taking a condom from a pocket.
Angie watched him sheath himself, and a slight unease began to whisper along the distant fringes of her consciousness. It was always she who brought a condom, rolled it on. But he had his own, in his pocket, and while that shouldn’t really mean anything to her, it robbed her sense of being absolutely in control. He knelt over her, hands on either side of her head, and with his knees he widened her thighs as he lowered his mouth to her throat, licking, teasing, working his way down toward her left nipple. It tightened with exquisite sensitivity as he took the tip between his teeth. Heat snaked through her. Blood pulsed like molten fire into her groin, swelling her labia, making her clit hard and erect, tingling for his touch. He moved his mouth lower, down her belly, flicking his tongue into her navel, lower, down between her legs. His tongue, warm, wet, slicked in between her folds and encircled her clit. He nipped lightly with his teeth, pulling on the nub. A silent scream, a pressure, built inside her chest, inside her head, inside her vagina, and she felt as though she would explode as her vision, her entire world narrowed to just this moment, to him, on this boat, this bed. She opened her legs as wide as she could, arching her spine, lifting herself to him as his tongue sought deeper entry to her vagina, slipping in and out. She closed her eyes, rolling her head from side to side, moaning until she couldn’t take it any longer. She needed the hardness of him, deep. She needed to fuck him, hard. In rising desperation, her body going slick with sweat, her muscles starting to shake, she moved her arms under his armpits, drawing his head out from between her thighs, and she raised her right knee, bringing her inner thigh up his hip as she twisted her body at the waist, struggling to flip him over onto his back so that she could straddle him and sink herself down onto the hot length of him, rock and rub her clit against the coarse hair of his groin, feel the delicious friction that she recalled from the night in the club. But he resisted her.
Instead, he grabbed her wrists and pinned her hands high above her head as he kneed her open even wider and put just the tip of his erection inside her. Angie stilled. Her heart jackhammered. Her breaths came light and fast and dizzying. He had her totally exposed. She wriggled, trying to free her hands, but he was strong. Far stronger than she was, than she could ever be. Angie closed her eyes, the sound of her blood booming against her eardrums, a cocktail of conflicted emotions suddenly raging like a cracking wildfire through her—submit, she told herself. It felt good. She wanted this.
He moved slowly at first, achingly slowly, and a tension of another kind built inside her as she wiggled to free her hands again but couldn’t. And her eyes flared wide. She was struggling to breathe.
