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  “I know,” he said softly against her hair. “I know. And I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

  It was the worst thing in the world he could have done or said. The show of sympathy made the dam inside of her break apart into a million pieces.

  Chapter 12

  He made her feel safe. As if having his arms around her created some sort of a haven, was some kind of a barrier against all the hurt that the world had to offer. Knowing she shouldn’t, Julianne clung to that. Clung to him.

  Later, looking back, she wasn’t really sure how it all happened.

  One minute, she was holding on to Frank, on to the tiny fragment of peace he magically created for her. And then the next, she’d raised her mouth, salty with her fallen tears, to his.

  In less than a heartbeat, the kiss sealed her to him, evolving from a quest for comfort to sheer exploding passion. Her arms went around his neck as she poured her entire soul into the kiss. Her fragile world was rocked because Frank McIntyre kissed her back the way she had never been kissed before—except, perhaps, that one time. By him.

  Damn it, Frank silently cursed. Instead of easier, Julianne White Bear was getting harder and harder to resist.

  This absolutely had to go under the heading of being close to superhuman, he thought, as he struggled to put distance between himself and her. Struggled to just separate himself from her.

  It wasn’t easy.

  But he had to. For her sake if not for his. She wasn’t thinking clearly and he couldn’t allow himself to get carried away when she was like that.

  Drawing his head back, he attempted to remove her arms from around his neck. “Julianne, you’re upset—”

  “Don’t say no to me, Frank,” she pleaded quietly. “Don’t say no.”

  He had expected her to take offense and pull away. She didn’t.

  Frank bit back a frustrated groan, convinced he was going to hate himself in the morning for what he was valiantly trying to do tonight.

  He had to keep talking until she came to her senses. “I didn’t bring you here for this, Julianne.”

  She believed him. God help her, she believed him. With eyes and a mouth like sin, the man still had his own honorable code of ethics.

  But she didn’t want honorable, not tonight. If she couldn’t lose herself in a bottle, then she was going to lose herself in him. She needed to.

  “New plan, then,” Julianne told him less than a half a beat before she sealed her mouth to his again.

  He felt intoxicated. His head was swimming. And when he tried to draw her away a second time, the look in her eyes stopped him cold. It was a mixture of pleading and sadness. Sadness of a kind that he’d never seen before. Sadness that went clear down to the bone. Clear into the bone.

  All he could think of was wiping that sadness away. He brought his mouth down to hers.

  The next moment, he found himself engulfed in sensations running rampant through him. He felt as if he was about to burst into flame. A completely new experience for him. Considering the fact he was far from a novice with women, that was saying a great deal. He’d honestly thought there were no new experiences left for him.

  To find out he was wrong was both humbling and earthshaking at the same time. The revelation didn’t even involve any sort of new, exotic technique on her part. She wasn’t doing anything different, anything extraordinary. She was just kissing him.

  There was no “just” about it.

  The mere sensation of her velvet lips against his awoke something inside of him, something that made him want to comfort her at the same time that it urged him to take solace within her.

  In the eye of the storm, there was peace.

  Rather than lyrical, the lovemaking that erupted between them sizzled and was close to frantic. Clothes went flying in all directions. Mouths, teeth, tongues went exploring, tasting, sampling. Glorying. And with each pass bringing a giant wave of extreme pleasure, the magnitude of which, heretofore, had not been felt or even suspected.

  Frank came to realize it was his soul quaking, as close to an out-of-body experience as he would ever hope to have.

  The more he kissed Julianne, the more he wanted to kiss her. Every single tempting inch of her.

  His hands skimmed over her body, caressing, touching, possessing and questing until he was fairly certain he could re create her shape blindfolded. And all the while, as he was trying to deal with an expanding host of emotions, something inside of him was building up a huge head of steam, threatening an even greater eruption than he’d already experienced.

  He’d never felt out of control before, not even marginally. Here he was barely holding on with his fingertips.

  The very scent of her was driving him wild.

  More than anything else, Julianne wanted to get lost in him, to literally disintegrate and maybe, just maybe, reinvent herself and come back as something new. Someone else. Someone who had no bad memories coloring each and every fiber of her life, casting shadows so engulfing that there was no space for happiness.

  She needed happiness.

  That’s what this emotion was, Julianne suddenly realized with a start. Happiness. Frank had the ability to make things glow inside of her. The ability to bring happiness into her life, however briefly.

  Close to breathless, Julianne felt herself scrambling to embrace the warmth, to embrace the completely foreign sensation of well-being radiating all through her.

  And then, out of nowhere, she felt herself in the midst of fireworks exploding throughout her body, beginning with her very core.

  Startled, Julianne’s deep blue eyes widened as she struggled to both absorb the experience and, at the same time, prolong it.

  Was this what she thought it was?

  Arching against him, pressing her lips together to keep a sob from escaping, she felt the heat of Frank’s breath on her belly.

  The explosion left her wanting more.

  She grabbed his shoulders, barely getting her fingers around them as she urgently tried to pull Frank up toward her, desperately wanting to seal her mouth to his. To give back a little of what she’d received. It was only fair.

  As Frank slowly snaked his body over hers, rising to her level, she saw his smile through the haze swirling around her brain. It wasn’t a superior smirk, which would have all but killed her, but a smile, as if he could read her thoughts. As if he was enjoying her enjoying what he was doing to her.

  Her heart slammed against her rib cage, tired of its prison.

  Her breath all but gone, coming in ragged snatches, Julianne spread her legs for him, silently inviting Frank to become one with her.

  Not to have sex with her, she suddenly realized, but to become one with her.

  What had he done to her?

  And then, there was no time for silent questions, no time to think, only to react. Frank was driving himself into her. The rhythm of life took hold as he infused her with the same melody that he was moving with. The same melody that he heard in his head.

  Their rhythm of life.

  The tempo increased, going faster and faster. Together, they raced toward the promise of stardust and dreams, however fleeting it might be. And then, just as the singular golden moment arrived, Frank, his hands joined with hers, kissed her.

  Hard.

  As if they belonged together forever.

  The glow began to recede seconds after it had arrived and she struggled to hang on to it for just a little longer. If she could have, she would have pressed the feeling between the pages of a book.

  A sense of sorrow moved to take its place. Sorrow because she’d never experienced anything even close to this level of excitement and passion before and was more than convinced she never would again.

  When Frank shifted his weight off her, she expected him to get up and hurry into his clothes. Expected him to say something not too subtle about the fact that she should be leaving soon.

  The one thing she didn’t expect was for Frank to thread his arm around her and draw
her closer to him. And she certainly didn’t expect him just to hold her.

  Moreover, she didn’t expect to have the feel of his heart beating hard against hers generate such a sensation of comfort within her.

  What was going on here? She had no answer.

  The sound of their combined breathing was the only sound that drifted through the apartment. Confused by her feelings, by his actions, by everything that had transpired this last hour, Julianne turned toward the man who’d set her world on fire and demanded, “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  Smiling, Frank brushed his lips over the top of her head and murmured, “How about those Dodgers?” The next moment he was laughing because she’d hit his shoulder with the heel of her hand. Hard. She packed quite a wallop, in more ways than one.

  “Wrong thing to say?” he guessed.

  She sat up then, pulling her knees up to her chest and huddling her body into almost a tight ball. She said nothing, her midnight-black hair raining down along her arm.

  His amusement faded to concern. Frank sat up beside her. But when he tried to put his arm around her, she shrugged it off, making an unintelligible sound.

  “Julianne, are you all right?”

  No, I’m not all right. I’m confused. Up is down, down is up and all I want to do is make love with you again. And again.

  “What did you just do?” she demanded hotly. The question sounded as if it was a trick one, meant to trip him up. Frank didn’t answer her immediately. “What did you just do?” she demanded again, more angrily this time, turning her face toward him.

  Like a man trying to survive his way crossing a minefield, Frank picked his path slowly. “If you have to ask, I guess I must have done it wrong.”

  “Yes, you did it wrong,” she accused. She felt like crying and laughing at the same time. Was she going crazy? “I felt something,” she fairly shouted the words at him. “I’m not supposed to feel anything.”

  He stared at her. She couldn’t be serious—could she? “Who told you that?”

  “Me, I told me that,” she snapped. “If you don’t feel, then you’re safe.”

  He had his answer. It was starting to make sense now. Julianne was angry at him because she’d just lost her defense mechanism.

  “No,” he corrected her quietly, skimming his fingertips along her face ever so lightly. “Then you’re isolated—and you might as well be dead. Life is about reaching out, Julianne. About feeling. And you, lady, whether you like it or not, made the earth move for me.”

  She wished she could believe him. But she knew better. “Is that your usual speech?” she asked, trying her best to sound haughty and disdainful. Anything but naively trusting.

  “No,” he told her honestly. And then he smiled at her. It was a small, intimate smile and, like a rose-tipped arrow, it went straight to her heart. “It’s okay to be afraid, Julianne.”

  He was reading her mind and that scared the hell out of her. Her chin shot up. “I’m not afraid,” she retorted.

  He saw right through her. Right through the lie, but he allowed her to have it. “Good,” he answered, “because I am.”

  What kind of a game was this? Men like Frank didn’t admit to fear. They didn’t have fear, not when it came to women. “You?”

  In his own way, he’d played it safe all his life when it came to the fairer sex. It was time to risk something in order to win something.

  Still, it took him a moment before he could. “Something just happened here that never happened before—and you scared the hell out of me.”

  She made no effort to bank down the smirk. “You’re not going to tell me that you’ve never made love before, are you?”

  “Oh, I’ve made love before,” he assured her. “But I’ve never felt as if I wasn’t in control of the situation before.” His eyes skimmed over her, creating swirls of warmth throughout her body. And then he grinned. “Must have been a fluke.”

  If that was the way he wanted to play it, fine. “Must have.”

  But his eyes wouldn’t release hers. And she could feel her heart accelerating again, just as it had the last time.

  “Only one way to find out if it was or not,” he told her.

  It took her a second to realize that her breath was just sitting in her throat, stuck. She could barely squeeze the words out.

  “And that is?”

  Frank kissed her shoulder, sending all sorts of delicious sensations scrambling through her—again. And they all felt stronger than they had the first time. “Guess.”

  Julianne turned her face toward his and within a moment, there was no need to guess. Because he was showing her.

  Exhausted, spent, Julianne fell back, snuggling against the space that Frank had created for her with the crook of his arm.

  Incredibly, it had happened again. He’d had her climaxing, one overwhelming, breath-stealing sensation flowering into another until she thought she was going to die from the myriad sensations assaulting her body. Die willingly and happily.

  Granted, she was as confused as she’d been the first time around, but this time she caught herself smiling more. Willing to accept the pleasure at its face value. The proof was that she found herself curling into him rather than into herself.

  She knew it was all just temporary, all just an illusion. But for now, she wanted nothing more than to hang on to it for however short a time period she had left to her.

  Was this what it was like, she wondered. To be normal? Not to be the prisoner of dark memories and a childhood that had had the blush of innocence stolen away all too soon?

  If she could just pretend….

  And then, the ribbon of a melody sliced through the sound of their joint, uneven breathing. The song was vaguely familiar to her, although she couldn’t place it immediately.

  The next moment, she heard Frank groaning. With a resigned sigh, he sat up. “That’s my phone,” he told her, looking around.

  It was evident that he hadn’t the slightest idea where his cell phone was. Frank began sorting through their clothes, trying to locate the evil instrument that had called a halt to their euphoric state.

  Just as he found his pants, and, by association, his cell phone, a high-pitched ringing noise chimed in.

  That was her phone.

  They exchanged looks, both knowing what that meant. Neither one wanted to say it out loud, hoping that they were wrong, that their night of lovemaking wasn’t being capped off by the discovery of yet another body cast off into a Dumpster.

  “McIntyre,” Frank announced crisply as he snapped open his phone.

  “White Bear,” Julianne said, following suit with her own silver phone. She fell silent, listening to the voice on the other end.

  The world had found her again, she thought, pulling her out of paradise and back down to earth. She’d expected nothing less, but she’d hoped for just a little more time.

  The man on the other end, Sanchez, stopped talking. He and Hill had been the first called on the scene and now they were calling in the rest of the team.

  “Right,” Julianne said, apropos to nothing in particular. “I’ll be right there.”

  Frank had already ended his call. Putting the cell phone down, he started getting dressed. When he spoke, his voice was vibrating from suppressed emotion.

  “This guy isn’t going to give it a rest until we get him,” he speculated grimly.

  Julianne merely nodded, hurrying into her clothes. She tried to assess what had just happened, but her efforts were futile. Finally, dressed, she looked at Frank.

  “What do we tell people?” she asked.

  He slipped his phone into his pocket, his mind charging in a dozen different directions at once. “About?”

  She slanted a look at him, but he wasn’t playing games, he was actually asking her. “About why we’re driving in together.”

  That was when he looked at her. She couldn’t read his expression. “The truth.”

  He had to be kidding. But just to be safe, she
put the question to him. “That we were going at it like rabbits when they called?”

  “That we went to investigate where one of the serial killer’s victims lived and then stopped to get some coffee. We don’t have to tell them where we stopped,” he added, seeing the reluctance in her eyes. “Or what happened after we did.”

  She felt relieved and yet, at the same time, oddly put off. “Embarrassed?” she finally asked.

  “Just trying to protect your privacy,” Frank countered. He strapped his gun on, then checked to see if it was secure. “And to answer your question, no, I’m not. Why should I be?”

  Julianne shrugged, trying her best to seem careless. She was about to stride past him to the door when he caught her by the shoulders and spun her around to face him. The look in her eyes was both defiant and confused.

  “This isn’t over, Julianne,” he told her. “Not by a long shot.”

  “We’ve got a crime scene waiting for us,” she countered, deliberately ignoring what he was saying.

  She didn’t know if what he said made her uncomfortable—or the exact opposite. All she knew was that she’d never been as confused, as conflicted as she was at this very moment. Making love with him had undone everything that she had believed to be true up to this evening. Not the least of which was the fact that she could take or leave sex—and it certainly never made her take leave of her senses before.

  She couldn’t claim that anymore. At least, not truthfully.

  Once they were outside, he dug into his pocket. “Here—” he handed her the keys to her vehicle. “You drive.”

  She took the keys gladly. At least this was one thing she could be in control of. Her car.

  As if that made a difference, something inside of her scoffed. Her world was jumbled up. And, she slanted a grudging look in Frank’s direction, it was all his fault.

  Chapter 13

  According to the information found in her purse, victim number ten was Anastasia Aliprantis. She was a pharmaceutical representative for Geneva Labs who’d been with her company more than five years and had done very well for herself. Up until now.