Heat Of Passion Read online

  “You needed ice,” he said.

  “What?” His answer was so unexpected that she blurted her response.

  “You were all out of ice in your room, and you figured I might just have some, so here you are. You were right about that, too. I do have ice.” He lifted the top off the ice bucket on the tray behind the bottles. “I have exactly what you need.”

  His voice dropped even lower on those final words and thrilled through her like the thrum of a very deep and vibrant guitar chord. She shuddered, and she could feel her breath go shallower still. This man, the sultry night, the scent of flowers on a soft breeze through the open doors onto his terrace. The spell of all that was more than she could stand. She could feel herself about to be swept up on that breeze and carried out beyond the terrace rail over the expanse of the perilous, bottomless sea. This is what she’d come here for, of course, to be precisely that carried away. Now, the prospect terrified her. She swallowed to cover her fear and to urge her breath toward a more normal rhythm if that were any longer possible.

  “Water or whiskey or both?” he asked with the ice bucket top still in his hand and his dark eyes drawing her in just as they’d drawn in the night a few moments ago.

  “Water,” she managed to reply.

  “And ice,” he stated, as if to confirm his explanation of why she’d shown up at a strange man’s door late at night.

  “Yes, ice.”

  She’d wanted only to nod, but speaking the words made her feel more in control no matter how far that might be from the reality of her current state of being. He took a pair of tongs from the bucket and picked up a cube of ice. The cube dropped into the glass, then was followed by another. The clink of one cube hitting the next resounded in her soul like the sealing of her fate, but she made no move to escape. Instead, she longed to snatch the ice-filled glass from his hand and press it to her flaming cheek. She wondered if her skin might sizzle audibly when she did that. She noted how this idle wondering drifted across her mind like vapor. Her thoughts were turning as languid as the night. Her limbs felt limpid and drifting, too. She might have blamed the tequila, except that she’d left her margarita hardly tasted on the bar before leaving there.

  “Let’s sit outside,” he said.

  He had a glass in each hand, one filled with clear liquid, the other with brown. He motioned toward the open doors. Phoenix stared up at him for a moment. She hadn’t expected him to take his time this way, make them drinks, sit on the terrace, chat for a while. She’d thought he would grab her as soon as she walked in the door. She’d been a little afraid of that happening. Maybe she’d hoped for it, too, for everything to happen so unstoppably fast that she wouldn’t have to hold herself responsible for it later. This gradual approach of his was giving her too much time to think. She didn’t want that

  Still, the slowness was also like the place and the night, seductive and luring her in. She walked ahead of him out onto the terrace and sat down on the wicker divan which was identical to her own, back on her own terrace to her own room. Everything sensible about her said that back there was where she ought to be right now as he sat down next to her. His size took up so much of the width of the divan that his thigh touched hers. She could feel the heat of him through her cotton skirt. She edged slightly away.

  “This isn’t your cup of tea, is it?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Her tormented emotions had her so confused she thought for a moment he might be referring to the drinks he still held in his hands.

  “Coming to a man’s room like this,” he said. “I get the feeling it’s not the usual thing you do.”

  Phoenix took a deep breath then plunged. “Maybe I want it to be,” she said. “At least, for tonight.”

  He looked at her and kept very still for a long moment. The moon shone low over the bay in place of the sun which had set so beautifully earlier. The moonlight was brilliant against the black, star-pricked heavens. A path of silver-white shimmered across the dark water toward the terrace where Phoenix and Slater sat. They were up so high on the edge of the cliff that no land was visible below them, only sea and sky. They might have stepped over the balcony onto that moonpath and walked the water like a god and goddess. She could feel that kind of power crackling in the scented air around them.

  Slater turned away from her to put the glasses down on the wicker table next to the divan. In that instant, she felt the absense of his gaze like a chill across her face from the cold center of the moon. Phoenix shivered, but when he turned back toward her she was instantly warm all over again. She couldn’t help smiling at the strangeness of those two sensations coming so close together, one upon the other. She was still smiling when his lips touched hers.

  The magnetic force of his dark emerald eyes had been powerful, but that was nothing compared to the compulsion with which the breath of his kiss drank her in. She couldn’t have moved her mouth away from his if she wanted to, and she didn’t want to. She smiled more widely at the sheer, pulsing joy he was pulling her into. Her eyes were still slightly opened, but the moonlight had disappeared. The breadth of Slater’s shoulders blocked out the moon, the ocean, everything, and she didn’t care. She would have liked him to blot out all of life for her, if only for tonight.

  His tongue had found the place where her smile parted her lips and pressed between them into her mouth. She felt the intimacy of that invasion in a thrust of sensation that sought its mark between her thighs and spread there with a sudden, undeniable warmth. She could all but scent her own desire mingling with the aroma of blossoms on the tropical air. With all that was womanly in her, she wanted more than anything in that moment for him to catch that essence of her, too, and breathe it in. She pressed her mouth even more inseparably to his and met his tongue with her own.

  She’d never kissed a man so hungrily before. She circled his tongue with the tip of hers, voraciously, as if from an appetite that must be fulfilled or she might die from longing for it. She sucked at him and moaned deep in her throat as she did. She wanted to bring him inside of her, now his tongue, later the rest of him. She reached her hands up into the darkness of his hair and the surprising coolness of the waves of it around her fingers. That was the only coolness she felt from either of them as his moan answered hers and he dragged her to him, close and hard. She wasn’t startled by that sudden roughness. It was what she wanted, at least she thought she did, inasmuch as she could manage to think at the moment.

  She wrenched aside any shred of doubt that might still be plaguing her and breathed one word against his lips. “Yes,” she said on a moan that he must feel as much as hear. “Yes.”

  He groaned and lifted her to pull her over on top of him. She gasped. She could feel the hardness of him against her as she was certain he meant her to do. Her first instinct was to grind herself against him, to pound her body into his, like the waves pounding the rocks at the bottom of the cliff below them. She doubted she had the willpower to hold herself back from doing that, but somehow she did.

  Phoenix felt the pulses of the breeze in her blood. Her hips longed to move in an undulating dance against the hardness between his thighs. He groaned again, and she could hear longing identical to her own in the sound. She was torturing him with her closeness, the same way he was torturing her. Just by moving her hips in a sinuous flow and rubbing her breasts against his chest, she would be able to make this mountain of a man do anything she wanted him to do. That was a power she had never before realized she possessed. She moved and he moaned yet again, more agonizingly than ever.

  He clamped her more tightly to him so suddenly she had no time to prepare for the thrust of desire that rocketed through her. She’d been a fool. He was the one in power here. She knew that to be undeniably true at the same instant he reached down and began to pull up her skirt. The implication of that movement and what it must inevitably lead to startled Phoenix into stillness for the moment. The long folds of her skirt whispered against her skin as he dragged them
upward. She wished for one last tantalizing instant that she was the kind of woman she had come here to be. Only disappointment accompanied her recognition that she was not. Her hand shot out and covered his before it could move an inch farther.

  “Stop,” she said, shocked by the sound of her voice nearly strangling with what felt like tears. “I can’t.”

  Before he could respond, Phoenix had torn herself from his arms and was running as fast as she could through his terrace door, out of his room, away from temptation stronger than any she had ever known.

  Chapter Four

  Slater woke up hot and disgruntled. He was on top of the wrinkled bedspread with a pillow stuffed under his head, and he was alone. He’d been alone when he threw himself down here last night after pacing savagely back and forth across his floor and terrace for so long that he was surprised not to find a path worn in the tiles by the time he was done. He’d tossed restlessly through the night, shaking himself awake over and over again until the dawn began to pale the darkness. He’d slept a while then, a shallow slumber through which he reached for her repeatedly and she just as repeatedly melted away before he could so much as touch her soft, fragrant skin. That fragrance from twilight sleep mingled with the breeze from his terrace as Slater came finally fully awake with the sun sparkling brightly through his terrace doors and the gulls shrieking what sounded to him like, “Fool, fool, fool,” as they swooped through the air beyond the terrace railing.

  He was a fool all right, a bigger one than he’d ever allowed himself to be in his life. Slater grabbed the pillow from beneath his head and threw it between the open doors so hard it hit the bougainvillea hanging over his balcony and sent dislodged blossoms tumbling to the terrace floor. He swore under his breath and ran his fingers through his hair. He felt like bashing his head against the stucco wall. Maybe he could knock some sense into himself that way. Last night, he’d made one of the stupidest moves of his career. He’d let an assignment get out of control because he got out of control.

  According to Slater’s personal code, control was one thing he must absolutely never lose. He had learned the hard way what could happen when he didn’t follow that rule. He’d almost washed himself out of the police work he loved. His temper did that to him. Now he was discovering other parts of himself that could be just as dangerous, and this was a new experience for him. He’d never had a woman get to him the way this one did last night. Fortunately, what happened between them hadn’t gone completely over the top, but he could take no credit for that.

  The danger wasn’t just about sex, either. Sex could work in a cop’s favor sometimes. In fact, he knew about lots of cases where the bed had been a principal weapon in getting the job done. Slater, on the other hand, didn’t do that, at least he never had before. Using sex to collar a perp was one of the things he’d told himself he would never do. Too sleazy for me, he’d always said. There were names for somebody who did that kind of thing. As he saw it, those names applied whether you were a man or a woman, but last night had been different. What happened between Phoenix and him had nothing to do with why he was in Mexico.

  He could hardly believe the way he’d behaved. She’d come close to him, and he was lost. He couldn’t be certain exactly when it happened, maybe the first minute he opened the door and saw her standing there looking scared to death. From then on, he was a goner. If she hadn’t called a halt when she did, he’d have been guilty of more than just misjudgment. He’d have been the perpetrator of a professional disaster.

  Slater cursed under his breath some more as he stood and stretched as best he could without scraping his knuckles on the rough plaster of the ceiling. He was stiff from sleeping so fitfully with his long legs at odd angles across the bed. He would have liked to go for a run. He’d take off down the winding road that led from the hotel to the town. He’d find the steepest way back up the hillside and push himself to keep running all the way until his lungs felt as if they were about to explode. Maybe he could blast her out of his system that way, but he didn’t have time for a run right now.

  Slater had to concentrate on damage control. Unfortunately, all he could think about was Phoenix Farraday. His original plan was to establish a rapport with the subject. He shook his head and sighed as he stretched again and cranked his neck to loosen the tight muscle he could feel there. He’d established rapport all right, but not the kind that got the job done. What he’d allowed to happen last night was the kind of situation that could screw a job up so bad there’d be no chance of unscrewing it again. What happened last night was that he’d allowed himself to care, and this was the biggest no-no of all.

  When Slater was on a case, he made certain to have himself ready for whatever might arise. Otherwise, he could get himself killed. He hadn’t been ready for last night because nothing like that had ever crossed his path before, nothing like Phoenix, either. She’d blindsided him in a way he wouldn’t have thought possible before it happened. She’d made him forget who he was, and who she was, too. Ever since New York, he’d been wondering how he’d get around telling Laurent he’d found her once he did. Slater wasn’t about to be the cause of getting a woman killed, whether she was a thief or not He’d always known there was no chance he’d turn her over to a creep like Laurent and, of course, no chance Slater would harm her himself. In fact, after last night, all he could think about was how he could protect her. That’s the power of the effect she had on him, a power that was not to be denied.

  Slater unbuttoned his shirt and was pulling it off when he stopped to wonder if she could have known what she was doing all along. She could have come here to his room deliberately to draw him under her spell. She wouldn’t be the first woman to pull that on a guy. She was a thief, after all. Maybe she was some other things, too. He remembered her face, as if he could ever forget it, the liquid of her eyes shining in the moonlight almost as if they were filled with tears. Every cop instinct he possessed told him she hadn’t been faking that any more than he could have faked what he felt when he looked into those eyes.

  Or maybe he just wanted to believe that What guy wanted to think a woman was gazing up at him and moaning in his arms because she was trying to get something out of him? The memory of Phoenix’s shining eyes and the sweet sounds she’d made last night brought other memories, and sensations, too. He thought he caught the smell of her hair on the breeze that blew through the open doors onto the terrace. Slater shoved those doors shut with a bang as if to shut the thought of her outside, but it didn’t work. He’d just met her, and she was under his skin already. He had to get her out before she worked herself deeper still into his system.

  “I don’t need this,” he muttered.

  Slater threw off the rest of his clothes and headed for the bathroom. This was one morning he wouldn’t complain about how long it took the water to turn from cold to hot in his shower.

  SLATER WAS KNOCKING on her door this time and telling himself to stay cool. He was after rapport and nothing more. Rapport and nothing more. He repeated the little rhyme in his head, making it his mantra.

  “Who is it?”

  Her voice sounded small, even weak on the other side of the door. Had being with him brought her down that much? He could already guess what she’d say. She’d talk about how she’d come to his room, let him get next to her, then regretted it. He’d heard that tune before. He’d been singing it to himself ever since he woke up.

  “It’s Slater.”

  He figured she’d be more likely to bar the door than let him in. He was surprised to hear the lock click and see the door fling open.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Phoenix grabbed his arm and pulled him through the doorway. He hardly had time to think what was going on. He did have time to notice how lovely she looked in the morning. Last night’s moonbeams had been flattering, but he could tell now that she didn’t need them to make his breath move deeper in his throat and his muscles tighten below his belt. Rapport, nothing more, he had to remind himself yet
again. All the same, he was ready to wrap his arms around her the minute she gave the slightest sign of wanting them there.

  “Somebody’s been in here,” she said.

  She shut the door as fast as she’d opened it After turning the lock and flipping the night latch into place she stood against the door with her back pressed to the dark red-painted finish as if she might be holding the fort against an expected assault. Slater didn’t have to look very deep into her eyes to recognize the fear there. He’d seen those eyes frightened before, last night first in the restaurant then again outside his door. This was a different kind of fear. He recognized the edge of panic in it.

  “What makes you think that?” he asked.

  “I can tell.”

  Slater looked around. Everything appeared in order, a lot more so than his room would ever be.

  “Is this the way you found the place?” he asked.

  “Just like this.”

  “When you got back here last night you decided someone had been in here while you were gone?”

  “Not then.” She turned away but not before he saw her cheeks redden beneath the pale gold of her beginning tan. He guessed she might be thinking about where she’d been before returning to her room. “Everything was in place last night. I had a hard time sleeping and went for a walk just after dawn. Whoever it was must have come in here then.”

  Slater nodded. He tried not to think about the thrill it made him feel to hear that she’d had as much trouble sleeping as he did.

  “You should be careful about walking around here by yourself when the streets are deserted,” he said.

  “I thought I’d be safe. Now I’m not so sure.”