Matt. And yet, look how wrong she’d been about that. The first perceived bump in the road and he had vanished without a trace. Never mind that the bump originated with him and not her…and that he’d done it supposedly for selfless reasons. What it came down to in her mind was that he hadn’t thought enough of her to ask how she felt about this sacrifice he was making. He hadn’t even bothered to ask if she agreed with his reasoning.
If he had, she would have talked him out of it. Then. But now, there was no point in going over old ground. Too much time had passed, too many years of hurt that hadn’t been remedied. Despite the lovemaking that first night—and the second and the third and all the rest that followed—the path they were on had been set. Try as she might, she didn’t see them going off into the sunset together.
Besides, he hadn’t said anything about getting together, not in any sort of permanent way. For the last week they had gotten together every evening to discuss their combined lack of headway in this investigation. Somehow these discussions always culminated with them going to bed together. Natalie mused that their insatiable desire for one another was most likely the result of an attraction that should have come with its own asbestos container because, left out in the open, it was as combustible as nitroglycerin.
So here she was, slipping out of her bed, padding in bare feet into the next room, dressed in a longer-than-usual-peasant blouse she’d pulled on and nothing more. Restless, her mind going in three different directions at once, Natalie wanted to look over her notes in order to see if there was something she’d somehow missed. Anything, no matter how tiny, that might finally send her off in the right direction.
She’d been at it less than twenty minutes when she became aware that she was no longer alone in the room. Matt had come up behind her.
The next moment, he lifted her hair away and pressed a kiss to the back of her neck. “Bed’s cold without you,” he murmured.
His breath was warm on her skin, sending shivers down her spine.
“This is April in Vegas. Nothing is cold in Vegas in April.” She struggled to sound coherent. She would’ve thought that after the torrid session they’d had together, she couldn’t be aroused again so soon.
But she could and she was.
“Relatively cold compared to before,” Matt amended. As he spoke, he placed his hands on her bare shoulders.
It was a possessive gesture she found oddly comforting. She never did think clearly around him, Natalie mused.
“Have a sudden inspiration?” he asked, looking over her shoulder at her notes.
With effort, she focused on what had drawn her out of bed.
“I wish.” Natalie sighed. “I don’t even know if Candace was killed and the ring was stolen to make it look like a robbery, or the ring was the object of the crime and she was killed when she wouldn’t give it up.”
“Does it matter?” There was an ironic tone to his voice and she knew what he meant. That either way, the outcome was that Candace was dead.
“It might help me figure out who did it,” she explained. “If Candace picked up someone and brought them home, then that explains why the door wasn’t jimmied and points to the killer being a stranger. If it was someone she knew, she opened the door because of that—and whoever killed her did it for personal reasons.”
Matt took her argument a step further. “Maybe the ‘personal’ reasons was that he—or she,” he inserted although it was obvious to Natalie that he really didn’t think that a woman was responsible for Candace’s death, “felt the ring actually should belong to them and not Candace.”
That was an odd thing to say. “I thought the ring was always in our family.”
“I heard a rumor to the contrary the other day.”
Natalie was immediately intrigued. Swinging around to look up at him, her mouth dropped open. She hadn’t realized that Matt hadn’t put anything on when he’d come looking for her. Her present position put her at a definite disadvantage as far as clear thinking went. Clearing her throat, she rose from the chair, doing her best to keep her eyes on his.
“Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” she wanted to know, her voice quavering just a little.
They’d gotten into it pretty hot and heavy almost from the moment he’d walked in the door. She’d been on his mind the entire day. By the time he’d come over, all he’d wanted to do was make love with her until he dropped from exhaustion.
“Earlier I was occupied,” he told her.
No, she wasn’t going to allow herself to get sidetracked. Not this time.
“This is important,” she insisted, hitting his shoulder with the flat of her hand.
He merely grinned. “So was what I was doing earlier,” he answered, before returning to the subject at hand. “Besides, it was only a rumor, and I hadn’t heard anything to back it up.”
Still, it was a new idea, a possible new direction to go in. “We need to follow that up.”
She remembered the note her father had told her he’d gotten. A note that seemed to threaten all of them. She’d kept that little tidbit from Matt on the pretext that she didn’t want him to worry. Now her father’s fear had gotten legs.
“If someone thought the ring belonged to him, or was stolen from his family, well, that could be motive enough to kill Candace when she wouldn’t surrender the ring—” She caught her breath as she felt Matt slip his hand up along her thigh. “What are you doing?”
“Sliding my fingers along the softest, most tempting piece of flesh I’ve ever had the good fortune to touch,” he told her seductively.
Her pulse began to scramble. “I can’t think when you do that.”
“That’s the whole idea,” he admitted. Taking her hand, he began to draw her from the room. “Come back to bed, Natalie. It’s three in the morning. The only people who are up at this hour are the gambling addicts and the pit crews who make their living off the addicts. We’ll pursue this angle in the morning,” he promised her. He pressed another kiss to her temple. “Right now, all I want to pursue is you.”
Damn but he could reduce her to a quivering mound of jelly in an instant. “That would be assuming that I was on the run.”
The grin on his lips grew wider—and all the sexier for it. He was already making love to her with his eyes. “Yeah.”
She could feel the heat radiating from his body. Encompassing her. Making her yearn for contact. “I’m not running.”
“Even better,” he murmured, closing his arms around her and pulling her to him.
Damn it, she was supposed to be concentrating on finding Candace’s killer, not surrendering to a man with whom she had one hell of a past and no obvious future.
What was she thinking?
That was just it, she wasn’t thinking. She was feeling. Feeling an entire cauldron of emotions that were swirling madly through her.
And then, while her mouth was still sealed to his, she felt herself being lifted up in the air. Lifted and carried back to her bed.
The journey, punctuated with a myriad of hot, passionate, open-mouth kisses, was slow going. But half the fun, she knew, was in getting there.
By the time they did, he had her so worked up that she was all but ready to attack him.
The passion escalated to heights she didn’t think could be achieved, especially with someone who knew her the way Matt did.
She knew that in the not-too-far distance, the inevitable waited. Matt would leave again, and she would let him go. Because he felt that ultimately they didn’t belong together, and she had too much pride to beg him to reconsider.
But for