Chapter 4
What the hell was he doing? What the hell was she doing? Shana scrambled to her feet and stepped back from the edge of the dock as if the water might suck her in after him. Was it her fault he jumped into the harbor? More likely it was the heat.
She needed to make a decision about Dane—before her mother and brothers came for their visit.
Before she was lost forever to a self-destructive commitment.
She needed to move out into a real place of her own and get some distance from him.
She couldn’t make a decision about him when she was with him all the time, enticing her with his scent and his power and his charm and his boldness.
He belonged with someone like Angelique Dubois. Someone who enjoyed taunting and playing games with people. Shana didn’t like that.
Or did she? What was it that kept her there?
She watched the water. He’d been under for almost five minutes already.
She heard him splash to the surface and turned.
He was to the left and walking toward the stone wall at the shoreline along his property.
She walked off the pier to join him as he stepped over the short wall and onto the grass.
Night was falling fast now. Her heartbeat picked up as if the darkness signified danger.
But it was her approach to Dane that signified danger.
She reached him where he lay in the grass.
He glistened, dripping wet under the twinkling stars and harbor lights.
She stopped and he grabbed onto her ankle.
She knew what he would do next and she let him.
She went down gracefully, considering, and ended up half lying across his chest, propped on her elbows.
“What do you want, Shana? What if you could have anything in the world? What would your life be?”
Her face was a breath away from his. She tried to laugh his question off, tried to think of it as silly, but her heart beat faster against her ribs and against his. There was no way to hide her agitation from him.
“I never pegged you for the fanciful type.”
“Answer me.”
“There is no answer. Why don’t you answer it—what would your perfect life be?”
He stared at her. His eyelashes glistened with water, his face intense and bare.
She had a heartbreaking glimpse inside his battered soul.
She closed her eyes. She didn’t expect him to answer—that was her point.
That was the message in his eyes. There was no answer to such a question.
But he spoke and caused a stutter to her heart and she opened her eyes again as if he had commanded her.
“I don’t know what my perfect life would be, but I do know one thing.
” She waited. His eyes had lost their vulnerable look.
Her heart thudded again, pounding in her ears and against his chest. She strained to feel his heartbeat, needed to know if his beat as wildly as hers.
He seemed implacable. And silent. She wanted to prompt him but didn’t. He finally spoke again.
“It would include you.” He rasped the words.
She grasped at them and wanted to hear them again, wanted to capture them and hold them and to hold him.
She moved more fully on top of him now and held his face in her hands as he moved his hands to hold her waist. She felt a tremor but it might have been her own.
“Why are you telling me this? What does it mean?”
He shook his head. Then he raked his hands up her back and through her hair and pushed her face toward his until he caught her lips with his mouth and latched on, nibbling and kissing and pulling her tightly to him.
She wanted to be devoured by him, wanted to devour him, to revel in the taste of him, the salty harbor water mixed with sweat and that special flavor of Dane, strong and bitter and bold.
His strong deft hands slipped inside her shorts and pressed into the flesh of her buttocks, cool and wet and maddeningly sensual. She moaned as her hips ground into his and the aching press of his cock found that sweet center between her thighs, spiraling her need and driving everything.
When he pushed her shorts and panties from her hips, a surge of panic combined with the heart-pounding thrill. Her chest bubbled with excitement and she moved her hands over him, pulling at his clothes, reaching between them to find his zipper in the crush between their bodies.
All the while, he never let go of her mouth, nipping and catching her bottom lip with his teeth and plunging his tongue to claim every corner in possessive strokes.
When she freed his cock from his pants, he lifted her hips to fit himself between her legs.
The shock of his bold move and the sudden quick separation followed by the intimate joining of his pulsing cock sliding deep and alive and penetrating shocked her senses so that she called out his name.
He dragged her face back down to his and nuzzled her neck and whispered in her ear like a caress, endearments of every kind, words of love and promise and forever and never.
His hard breathing and soft words and thundering heart and pulsing cock inside her filled her mind and became the whole world.
The vibrating of her entire being surged until she could stand it no more and he pulled her hips close and moved in that way he had that made her scream at the agonizing jolt of pleasure and release in wave after wave of seemingly endless searing mind-melting ecstasy.
He moved her hips with his strong hands in unrelenting rhythm against his, hard and fast until her world exploded again.
Then he exploded inside her and she felt more searing heat and the swelling of pleasure went through her entire body, filling her chest and her mind like a white light, suspending her in time for a moment like a stop-motion picture.
After what seemed like forever and as though she were returning from a different world from far away, from an imaginary universe without dimension, she came back.
She felt the hard surface of his chest beneath hers as the heaving breaths slowed.
She felt the tight hold of his arms around her relax.
She became aware of the heat and sweat and the earthy scent of their lovemaking mingling with the heavy summer night air surrounding them.
And then he whispered in her ear as he brought a hand up to touch and caress her hair as he always did.
“You know I adore you.”
The words sent a surge of warmth and a spasm of pleasure around his cock still inside her. He chuckled softly into her hair and nibbled her earlobe. She wanted the moment to last, but she already felt it slipping away.
As happened on these rare occasions where they stole some intimacy, pretending they were a real couple, the lovemaking glow didn’t last and left them more distant.
It was as if the lovemaking exposed the gap, making it seem wider when it was over.
But Shana knew that wasn’t true. It was the fear filling the gap—the fear of exposure of what was there in their hearts and souls, the longing.
They both needed to hide that from each other and from themselves too.
So each time they made love, threatening to reveal their deep down hearts’ desires, they doubled down on closing up, hiding and armoring themselves against the exposure.
Dane rolled to his side so that she lay next to him, separate, and he zipped his pants. He looked over at her saying nothing, expressionless. He’d already shut down the tenderness, removed any trace of intimacy or vulnerability from his face.
Shana rose from the grass to a stand and left him. She shuddered from the chill of losing his warmth, of losing the tender moment. It terrified her. If he adored her then how did she feel? More than that? Was she already lost?
She pushed it all aside and ignored the scared pounding of her heart as she went inside the back door to the stifling heat of the beach shack. She walked straight to the shower, turned on the cold water full blast and stepped under the bracing chill of the spray.
*****
Shana avoided him the next day. He let her.
He rose early, abandoning her warmth, but leaving a pot of coffee and a note.
When he got to the end of the note, the compulsion to sign it struck him and he struck back.
He dropped the pen without writing his name—or any closing—like “affectionately” or “yours truly.” Or “love.”
It wasn’t that he was a coward. It was that he didn’t have it in him. He’d been there once—maybe twice. He’d lost whatever ability he had to trust that kind of bond. He knew it was poison. He knew his limits. He’d been a fool to tell her he adored her.
He’d rather face down an ambush in a remote mountain village—again—than head into another romantic commitment. He told himself he was no fool.
Somehow, he didn’t believe himself.
That was the mood he’d left the house in and drove around town in, ran the beach in, headed to the scenes of the damn crimes in.
He’d half hoped he might run into the French pretender in town so he could drag her sweet ass into Cap’s police station and wring a confession from her, then call it a day. How hard would it be?
At lunchtime, instead of heading to the Lucky Parrot like he would have on another day, he drove to the Gables’ house.
In his note he’d instructed Shana to meet him there.
With Cap. After checking the crime scenes of the three thefts to date, he’d noticed a common denominator.
All the thefts were second-story jobs. Not much to go on, but he’d called Acer to run a check on international thieves known for second-story jobs combined with the description of Angelique Dubois.
Dane leaned against his Jag parked in the circular drive out front of the Gables’ mansion. It couldn’t be called a house. At ten past noon Cap pulled in the drive and parked behind him. Dane’s heart thudded like a foreboding gavel. Shana was not with him.
Cap swung out of his unmarked car and said, “Don’t shoot the messenger.
” He pushed his door closed and stood where he was a good distance away.
Dane’s heart continued to hammer at his chest wall until he thought he wouldn’t be able to hear what message Cap had for him.
He needed to hear it. He did not want to hear it.
He swiped the sweat from his upper lip and steeled himself.
“Shana said she couldn’t make it—she has an appointment to look at an apartment.”