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“You can have the friend,” he said, straightening his shoulders.
“Gee thanks, but no thanks.”
“We’re done, here, right? All we’re doing is talking in circles anyway. Come on. Let’s see if we can go get in on some of this action.”
Connor hiked a skeptical brow.
“I’m talking about pool, doofus. What did you think I meant?”
“I don’t play pool.”
David barely heard him, his gaze fastened on the woman even now bending over to set up her next shot. Her toffee-colored hair swept down over her face and, with cleanly manicured nails, she pushed it so the strands mingled with the hair on the other side of her perfect head. Her gaze shifting back to him, she pulled the pool stick back then scratched, completely missing the ball. She might not know much about the game of pool, but she’d look damn hot stretched across the green felt…naked as the day she was born.
“Look out, here he goes again,” he overheard a fellow officer say to another as he walked by them, the comment punctuated by laughter.
David’s grin merely widened.
“IF THE DEVIL wore jeans, this is what he’d look like.”
Kelli Hatfield laughed at her friend’s whispered comment, then self-consciously tugged the snug, unfamiliar pink material of her new top away from her skin. She didn’t have to ask who Bronte was talking about. The blond guy from the end of the bar, who could easily have posed for Michelangelo’s David, was sauntering their way. And saunter was about the word for it. With his sexy gaze openly fastened on her, he gave the impression that she might be his destination. She swallowed hard, straightened, then resisted the urge to pluck at her top again. She caught her friend’s cautionary gaze but purposefully ignored it. The same way she had ignored Bronte’s groan earlier when she saw what she was wearing. And her arguments when Kelli had suggested they go to the renowned D.C. cop bar for “just one drink and a game of pool.” And her warnings that she was just looking for trouble by shimmying like that when she bent over to take a shot. Until that moment, Kelli hadn’t known she could shimmy.
A delicious, reckless shiver glided down her spine.
Bronte leaned closer. “Don’t even think about it, Kell. The guy’s Grade-A trouble. In capital letters. Bolded. Underlined. A lady-killer and a half.”
Kelli’s smile widened as she brushed off her friend’s warning. When was the last time she had felt this way? Keyed up? Sexy? Ready to take on the world? Well, okay, maybe not the world, but certainly the prime male specimen heading her way. She frowned slightly, not knowing what was worse—the fact that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this way, or the suspicion that she never had. The unclear answer made her all the more determined to pay attention to the fiery emotions.
Sure, she admitted it probably wasn’t very wise to openly encourage a guy in a cop bar, considering her circumstances. But it was her first night living in D.C. after three long years. And, by God, it felt good to be home, in the city where she’d been raised and where she planned to live out the rest of her life. It felt good thinking about her new job and knowing she had a choice apartment in Columbia Heights, the equivalent of which she would never have been able to afford in New York City. Overall, she felt good. And the instant she’d exchanged glances with the man now close enough for her to see the color of his eyes—a warm, vivid blue that sent another shiver sliding behind the other—she’d felt the overwhelming need to cut loose in a way she never had.
“Tonight, maybe Grade-A trouble is what I’m in the market for,” Kelli said, enjoying her friend’s shocked expression.
There wasn’t much capable of shocking Bronte O’Brien. If she were to be honest, Bronte had always been the shocker out of the two of them. Ever since forming an odd union of sorts while taking pre-law at George Washington University, Bronte had been the racy one, reckless, the girl on scholarship who hid her brains behind her good looks. Kelli had lived vicariously through her best friend for years, though she had to admit Bronte’s life had become boring as of late. Still, it was long past time Kelli started doing her own living.
Bronte rubbed the smooth skin between her brows and sighed. “You know, Kelli, I take back everything I’ve ever encouraged you to do. For years, I’ve been telling you that you need to loosen up. Get out and experience life. Get a life.” She slowly shook her head, the dim light burnishing her short red hair. “But this is definitely not what I had in mind. If you won’t take the advice from me, personally, take it from your trusted attorney—you don’t want to do this. I know the guy he’s with—I’ve run across him on the job. He’s a marshal. Anyway, a guy like this one making a beeline for you…well, he has catastrophe written all over him. He should come with a warning label—Commitment Phobic—Use For One-Night Stand Only.”
“You’re not my attorney, Bronte. You’re a U.S. attorney. And I’m not interested in his friend. I’m interested in him.” Kelli looked her full in the face. “Besides, maybe a one-night stand is all I’m looking for.”
“That’s what you say now. Let’s see how fast that story changes afterward.”
Kelli leaned against her stick. “Come on, Bron, lighten up. You’re acting like my sleeping with this guy is a forgone conclusion.” She held up a rigid finger. “One. That’s the whole of my experience with the opposite sex.” An experience she didn’t want to repeat much less remember. “Only then I was so green you could have planted me.”
“So you say. Mark my words, Jed was an amateur. This one’s a pro.” Bronte hooked a thumb to where the guy in question stopped to talk to a couple of men at the bar, though his gaze never strayed from their direction. “A regular heartache waiting to happen.”
Kelli rolled her eyes to stare at the ceiling, then laughed. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” She drew her thumb along the smooth wood of the pool stick then bit softly on her bottom lip. “Come on, Bronte, I’m tired of being a good girl. Fed up with always doing the right thing, both in my job and my personal life. The perfect worker who passes up a vacation day because a coworker needs to go to his kid’s school play. The friend who’s always home because she never goes anywhere, never does anything. The boring neighbor who doesn’t mind feeding your pets while you’re away sipping Bahama Mamas on some tropical island. I want to step outside my safe little box, live a little, even if just for this one night.”
Kelli swallowed, not understanding the scope of her restlessness until that very moment. There had been hints over the past few months. The Egyptian silk sheets she’d dropped a fortune on because she thought they were sexy. Her new interest in cooking exotic foods; she’d even bought a wok, for God’s sake. Her sudden, insatiable hunger for romance novels, addictive books she had only picked up on occasion before, but now her collection had grown so large it had taken five huge boxes to cart it from New York. The simple truth was that she no longer wanted to rub her legs against the sheets…alone. She didn’t want to spend hours concocting the perfect meal only to be disappointed when she discovered she and her dog Kojak were the only ones around to eat it. She wanted to live the lives of those romance heroines rather than just read about them.
“And as for your worrying about me getting my heart broken,” she continued, “give me a little credit, will you? I think I deserve at least that after all the heartaches I watched you experience. I never said word one to you all those times you got yourself in trouble over some walking stud muffin.”
“What, are you actually inventorying each of my doomed romances so you can be sure to get in all your I told you so’s?” Bronte grimaced and held up her hand. “And don’t try to give me that innocent look either.” Her blue eyes twinkled as she sipped her purple drink. “Just how do you think I learned how to give you a hard time now?”
Kelli squinted at her.
“Every little jab I’ve just hit you with, you’ve poked at me over the years.”
Touché. She leaned over the table and lined up her next shot. Right before she would take it, she glanced past the cue ball and directly into the suggestive eyes of the man in question. She scratched so badly she nearly tore a hole in the green felt.
The guy grinned and began swaggering their way again.
Bronte dropped her voice. “Just don’t say I didn’t tell you so, you hear?”
Kelli didn’t absorb her friend’s words, concentrating instead on the heat spilling through her bloodstream, the tingly tightening of her breasts. Tonight she wanted to be the ravisher and the ravishee. She wanted to throw her hands up in the air and say “I am woman, hear me roar.” And she wanted to swallow the gorgeous guy moving toward them whole.
Shamelessly she openly eyed the man’s physique. Oh, he was a cop all right. There was no denying that. Everything about him spoke of cockiness and authority, a rough-around-the-edges attitude that stemmed as much from knowing himself capable of saving someone’s life as from the certainty that he could take a suspect’s. And he was still young enough to think himself immortal.
She briefly caught her bottom lip between her teeth again. Maybe he was just the thing this good girl needed to turn very, very bad.
He reached the pool table just as someone finished feeding the jukebox a slew of coins. Bronte rolled her eyes as Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” attempted to drown out the hum of conversation and clink of glasses from behind the bar.
The devil in blue jeans slapped a fiver on the edge of the pool table near the coin slot. “I play the loser.” His grin made her heart race. “David McCoy.”
Kelli repositioned her pool stick and slowly shook his hand, the heat the simple touch generated exhilaratingly cathartic. “Kelli Hatfield.” She released his hand then tapped the stick lightly against her side. This was one game she was going to enjoy losing. “You’re on.”
TWO HOURS LATER, David launched a renewed assault on Kelli Hatfield’s luscious mouth and backed her toward her stripped bed in the corner. Her hungry but obviously inexperienced response made him harder than steel. As drop-dead sexy as the woman was, an innocence clung to her silky skin like an irresistible perfume, making him want to breathe her in, eat her alive, thrust into her like nobody’s business.
And that’s exactly what he intended to do. That is, if he could pull his thoughts together long enough to take things further than kissing.
The strength of his reaction was like a sucker punch to the gut. Even he had to admit surprise at how quickly they’d ended up back at her place, clawing at each other’s clothes, devouring each other’s mouths. He’d lay ten-to-one odds that the woman even now clumsily unzipping his fly had never uttered the words “one-night stand” before, much less indulged in one. Still, he hadn’t had to resort to any of his old come-on lines at the bar. It had always been a bit tricky trying to get a woman between the sheets while keeping her well away from serious commitment territory. After their sexually charged game of pool, he’d simply suggested they get out of there, and she’d agreed. Even Connor and her friend, Bronte, had held up their hands as if their leaving were inevitable and said little more than “Bye” when they grabbed their coats and practically ran from the bar.
Just thinking about the remarkable, lightning-fast string of events sent David’s pulse rate skyrocketing off the charts. Hell, he felt he might lose it if he couldn’t bury himself in her hot flesh right then and there.
He supposed she might be drunk, but he knew what signs to look for and she displayed none of them. In fact, he didn’t detect a hint of liquor. Rather, he tasted something hot and undeniably sweet on her tongue. Then there was her skin….
Peaches. She tasted like peaches, for crying out loud.
Off went that stretchy pink top and her lacy bra. He palmed her breasts and groaned at their nicely rounded weight. Not too big. Not too small. Pure heaven.
“Wait…I…” she whispered huskily.
He pulled an engorged, pale nipple into the depths of his mouth. She gasped and ceased trying to speak.
With more strength than he would have thought possible, she reversed their positions then pushed him toward the mattress. Off went her slacks, his jeans. Before he knew it, his fingers were entangled in her hair, his mouth greedily pulling at hers, and she was poised, ready, above him.
He tugged his mouth from hers and met her eyes. In the fleeting beams of passing headlights, he saw on her face a gravity, a need, a beauty that made him groan. He’d experienced one or two one-night stands in the past, but this was different somehow. Rather, Kelli Hatfield was different. He’d never felt so in tune with a woman, so completely wrapped up in her. And though they didn’t know each other well, he felt that he knew her on a level that transcended the trivial details normally exchanged during the traditional first few dates. He didn’t know what college she had attended in New York, where she’d said she just moved from, but he knew that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. And that was saying a whole lot.
Her gaze remaining locked with his, Kelli lowered herself. His hips bucked and suddenly her tight, slick flesh surrounded him.
He recaptured her mouth and closed his eyes, feeling an odd sensation of inner calm even as their movements grew restless, their breathing ragged. When they climaxed together minutes later, he felt an odd sense of completion that stemmed from more than just the physical. The sensation was foreign, frightening, electrifying, and completely blew his mind.
“Wow,” Kelli whispered, her damp flesh resting against his.
“Yeah…wow,” he repeated.
Slowly, his breathing evened, his heartbeat went back to normal, and the world came back into focus. He glanced around the room. Boxes everywhere. There weren’t even sheets on the bed, though the old radiator in the corner emanated so much heat, it didn’t matter. He vaguely wondered if she’d just moved in, but didn’t have the energy to ask. For the first time since he could remember, David McCoy was completely devoid of words.
She rolled off of him and reached for a robe pooled on the bare wood floor. He fought the urge to pull her back.
“I could do with a glass of something cold. How about you?” she asked, tucking her tousled hair behind her ear.
David noticed the way she didn’t look directly at him, rather concentrated on a spot just over his right shoulder. His brows shot up. He recognized her actions all too well, because, simply, he was usually the one who made them after sex. He pushed himself up onto his elbows. God, this was a first. “I…yeah, sure. I could go for some water or something.”
A whole holding tank full of ice-cold water, he thought.
Tying the robe around her trim waist, she scooped up the empty condom packet from the nightstand, then padded barefoot from the room.
David lay still for a long moment staring after her. So that was it, huh? The most explosive sex he’d had…well, that he’d ever had, and it was over. It was time for him to leave.
He closed his eyes and groaned. Mitch had always warned him that one day he’d pay for his errant ways. He absently scratched his head, the thought of one brother leading to thoughts of another. Was Connor somewhere getting better acquainted with Kelli’s friend, Bronte, right now? Or had he taken off right after he and Kelli had?
For the life of him, he didn’t want to move. He wasn’t sure what exactly had happened just now. The sex between him and Kelli was…well, whatever it was, he had to get himself some more of that.
Something cold and wet nudged against his foot. David went from complete relaxation to nearly catapulting from the bed at Olympic record-setting speed. He thoroughly searched the area but found nothing on the quilted blue-flowered mattress. If that was a bug, it had to be one of the slimiest…
There was a click-click against the wood floor. David looked anxiously around the room for something to defend himself with. He settled on one of his hiking boots. He slowly moved toward the end of the bed aided only by the boot and the dim light filtering in through the window. Not only did it have to be the slimiest, it must be the biggest damn bug—
A hulking, jowl-drooping blond boxer stuck his head out from around the corner of the bed and eyed him, his tongue seeming to curve upward toward his nose. David sagged with relief. A dog. It was a dog. Sensing that the crisis had passed, the ugly pooch came loping around the corner, his wagging short tail making his entire overly plump body shimmy.
David reached down to let the canine sniff the back of his free hand. “Hey…” he craned to see, “boy. How are you doing, huh?” He heartily rubbed him behind the ears.
A switch clicked, then an overhead light filled the room with its harsh glare. David blinked rapidly to adjust his eyesight, then looked at where Kelli stood in the doorway, a brow raised in question. David grimaced at his undressed state and the hiking boot he still held. Way to go, McCoy. It began to sink in that he wasn’t going to be getting anymore of anything anytime soon.
WOW.
The word ran through Kelli’s mind like a hit compact disc on permanent replay, despite the strange scene she encountered when she returned to her bedroom.
Her brain had effectively stopped working, oh, about an hour and a half ago at the bar, when she’d basically decided she was going to take one delectable David McCoy home with her. And it hadn’t switched on again until she found herself lying on top of David, gloriously sweaty, wondering what in the world had just happened.
Despite her arguments to Bronte to the contrary, the limited scope of her experience had left her criminally unprepared for this man and her phenomenal reaction to him. She pulled her white, threadbare robe more tightly around herself with one hand. If this was what made Bronte jump into every bed she came across, then she herself had definitely been missing out on a whole lot of something for much too long.
The only problem was that remembering how very bad she’d just been made the good girl come out to do some mental finger-shaking.
The boot David held clunked to the floor and he grinned boyishly. “Uh…your dog and I were just getting acquainted.”
Dog… Oh, God, her dog! “Kojak! Come here, boy.” She’d purposely closed the bedroom door when they’d come in, but the pooch must have snuck in while she was in the other room. “There you are.”
“I thought he was a bug.”
“What?”
David was tugging up his jeans, his back to her, his firm, rounded behind tempting her touch. She averted her gaze and felt her cheeks color—which was ridiculous, because mere moments before she’d shamelessly run her fingers all over the flesh in question. “Never mind.”
“I have your water,” she blurted needlessly, the plastic glass in her hand.
Clad only in jeans, he sauntered over to her and accepted the cold drink. While he drank, Kelli covertly skimmed the well-toned body she had hungrily molested in the dark and was shocked by the rush of desire to consume him all over again. She mimicked his movements by swallowing hard. The guy was perfect in every sense of the word. His abs stood out in wondrous relief, making her itch to run her fingers over the sculpted muscles, down to where a thin line of blond hair disappeared into the waistband of his jeans.
“So that’s it then, huh?” he asked, holding out the glass to her.
Kelli took it. “Did you want more?”
The odd way he looked at her made her rethink her question. “Depends on what you’re referring to.”
Kelli’s cheeks burned hotly all over again. He wasn’t talking about water. He was likely referring to the fact that she hadn’t given them the chance for more. After they’d…had sex, she couldn’t have run from the room quicker had it been on fire.
The dog butted his head against her shin, then ran around her legs in an attempt to gain her attention. “Not now…Jack.”
David’s grin nearly knocked her over. “Good thing you clarified who you were talking to, ’cause I was just about to grab my shirt.”
Bronte would be happy to know that every last thing she’d uttered about David McCoy was absolutely, positively, one hundred percent true. He was a pro. And now that Kelli’s head was working again, she was beginning to fear she was greener now than she’d ever been. Beginning to fear that it was impossible for her to have casual sex, because tomorrow kept intruding, making her wonder about stupid things like whether or not he would call her, or if he liked Chinese food.
Her gaze drifted down the sculpted planes of his chest and her own breathing grew curiously ragged. Green or not, she still wanted this man with every fiber of her being. She looked at his flat, beaded nipples and her own tightened and ached to be touched. She saw the thick ridge pressing against the zipper of his jeans, and felt a rush of hot desire between her bare legs.
She flicked her eyes up to stare into his, recognizing and instantly responding to the need reflected in the midnight blue depths. The hungry, sex-deprived wanton may have abandoned her, but she was finding that the good girl wanted everything she had…and more.
A tiny whimper gathered in her throat. Oh, to hell with tomorrow and consequences and hearing Bronte say “I told you so.” The simple truth was that it was still night, and she wanted to spend every single last moment of it with David McCoy cradled between her thighs.
Forgetting the dog, she practically leapt on David, circling her arms around his neck, pasting her mouth against his and hungrily letting him know exactly what she was feeling. He slid his hands inside her robe and the ineffective belt slid to the floor…right along with the empty plastic glass. David grinned then scooped her up and practically tossed her back on top of the bed.
2
“YOU’RE LATE, Officer McCoy. Again.”
David waved away O’Leary, the desk sergeant, and his penchant for protocol as he rushed by on his way to the briefing room. He’d run into bumper-to-bumper traffic near Dupont Circle, so had parked his car in the station commander’s spot in front of the street level building to save time. His uniform shirt was wrinkled because when he’d looked for it on the passenger’s seat—where he thought he’d put it when he leapt into the car half-dressed—he found instead that he’d been sitting on it. And he hadn’t had a chance to clean and check his firearm, as he did every morning.
Despite all that, he caught himself whistling.
Okay, so it was tuneless, and he was also pretty sure he looked like Gomer Pyle on drugs, but he couldn’t help himself.
Slowing his step, he made sure the back of his shirt was tucked in, folded his police issue winter jacket over his arm, and started to turn the corner. Lieutenant Kowalsky would have his ass for being late again. Still, suffering through old Kow’s impending wrath didn’t bother him half as much as it normally would. His good humor might have something to do with last night, and the incredible mind-blowing sex he’d had with Kelli Hatfield.
Kelli Hatfield.
If it was true what they said about the whole Hatfield and McCoy feud…well, then, he and Kelli had made it their duty to put a huge dent into righting old wrongs.
“Nobody’s in there.”
O’Leary’s words reached him the instant David opened the door to find the briefing room empty. He relaxed his shoulders from their stiff at-attention angle then glanced at his watch. Certainly, he hadn’t missed roll call.
“Okay, O’L, what gives?” David stalked back to the front desk.
