Page 40 of Burning Justice

She sifted her fingers through his hair, sending sparks across every inch of his scalp. “Mmm.”

Yeah. Mmm. Right there with you, baby.

He trailed the palm of his hand down the side of her ribcage to her bare upper thigh, just below the hem of her shorts. In slow, teasing movements, he swirled his fingers across her smooth skin, then beneath the hem of her shorts to cup the perfect globe of her ass and pull her against his now fully stiff erection. When she pushed her hips against him, it was his turn to groan.

Her body felt amazing against his and would feel even better when his body was inside hers.

Gemma turned her head away, ending the kiss. “I, um. I don’t think this is a good idea.”

Maybe not. “Probably not,” Brett gritted out. Definitely not. He sat up and dragged a hand down his face, trying not to let the groanus interruptus escape from his throat.

“I should probably get to work on those money stats you asked for.” She practically jumped off the bed, then tugged her shorts down and began smoothing her hair. A moment later, she was back at the table, searching through the stack of files.

He should probably thank her for stopping him before they both did something stupid.

“Blaze.” Blaze ignored him, his eyes still glued to the TV. “Blaze!” Blaze shot to his feet, panting and snorting. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Brett snapped on the leash and led his dog outside. Mercifully, the sun had dipped below the horizon. With Leadville’s elevation and virtually no humidity, the temperature had to be around fifty. Good thing, because he was burning up.

He could still taste Gemma on his lips and tongue. It was a taste he needed to forget. Kissing her in the first place had been a tactical error, but her sweetness and beauty had overridden his common sense. His priority should be to keep a clear head and keep his brains focused on the arsonist they were chasing. Not to dive into something that was doomed before it had even begun.

Blaze led him through the parking lot, heading for a hedgerow by the hotel office. The white SUV the family of four had gotten out of was still parked in the same space as before. As Blaze lifted his leg on the bushes, another white Yukon approached on the main road in front of the hotel but didn’t turn in. Just before rolling past, the driver turned his head.

Dark ball cap. Light colored T-shirt. The vehicle moved on, then changed lanes as it picked up speed.

There had to be hundreds of white SUVs, including Yukons, on the road in Colorado at any given moment. Johnny Nash didn’t own a white SUV or any vehicle at the moment. That didn’t mean he hadn’t procured one.

A vague detail dinged in the back of his head.

Stavros Medukin, one of the three employees Frodo Building Supply had fired, owned a white Yukon. Even if Medukin was out of the hospital, would he really be in any condition to drive?

Someone else could have been driving Medukin’s vehicle. Nash? Could they be working together?

Brett tugged on the leash, then headed back to Gemma’s room. Not wanting to overfeed his paranoia, he had to consider other, non-nefarious possibilities.

The driver of the vehicle they’d chased after could merely have been using the driveway as a turnaround. But his gut still said otherwise, and right now, it was screaming that they hadn’t seen the last of that driver.

Chapter Eleven

While they descended from the twisting mountain portion of I-70 and finally hit the flat section of highway heading east, Gemma crunched profit-and-loss numbers for the twenty-one houses. By the time they were three hours into the four-hour drive to Burlington, she’d managed to dig up sales numbers on eight of the burned houses and plug them into the new spreadsheet she’d created on her laptop.

She pulled up data for the next house on the list, but her concentration was shot. The fact was she’d spent the last twenty minutes reliving that kiss. Much as she tried otherwise, it was impossible not to. Good old-fashioned chemistry. That’s what it had to be.

Because that kiss was… Off. The. Charts.

Sensing Brett’s hesitation, she’d met him halfway. Brief though it had been, her body shivered involuntarily as she thought back to his warm lips. Gentle yet demanding. Soft and hard at the same time. How skillfully his tongue had tangled with hers. Not that she had a whole lot of kissing in her personal repertoire to compare it to.

Brett’s kisses were exactly how she imagined an awesome, off-the-charts kiss would be.

When he’d pressed her into the mattress and covered her with his big body, it was all she could do not to strip off his shirt and shorts and run her hands over all those powerful muscles. Everywhere she was soft, he was hard, and he had been hard. There’d been no disguising how much he’d wanted her. She’d felt how much, right up against the soft cleft between her thighs.

Had she been a fool to stop him? Or, perhaps, an even bigger fool to let them even get to that point. Mostly, it was fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the known.

In high school, she’d never really had much of a boyfriend. Her college dates had been few and far between. Rather than kissing, those guys had focused more on getting her into bed. Since then, her dating life had been sporadic, at best, and she was okay with that. It was easier working alone and just…being alone, rather than wasting her personal and emotional energy on guys who wouldn’t stick around after a few weeks.

And then there was her colleague at the NICB. In hindsight, she’d realized the only reason he’d flirted with her and offered his help was so he could learn all about her case, then steal it. Letting him get close to her had been her downfall.

Her mistake and one she wouldn’t make again.