“It’s not just physical,” he admitted, not sounding exactly happy about it. “I want you, but I also like you, Sam. I think I could like you a lot. I don’t want anything to happen to you, especially not on my watch.”
She understood. He wasn’t stopping her, wasn’t pushing her away. With a few more whispers, the soft press of her mouth on his throat, perhaps, she could probably have what she wanted. What they both wanted.
Tempting. Oh, God, so tempting.
“So would you do me a favor?” he asked, even as he leaned down, his face so close to hers they exchanged breaths that further dispersed the chill. “Would you walk back over there and sit down?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. Instead, he leaned even closer, until that last sliver of space between them disappeared and their lips touched.
No frenzied, frantic kiss like last night, this was a soft caress, a gentle plea. Even a promise that there would be more to come, later. When the time was right.
He lifted his mouth from hers far enough to whisper, “Please?”
Breathless and every bit as aroused by his tenderness as she’d been by his hunger the night before, she still somehow managed to nod. “Okay.”
“Thank you.”
On shaky legs, she retreated. Part of her should have resented that he’d done the unimaginable and kissed her before shooing her away. Another recognized that he’d been unable to stop himself, any more than she’d been able to refuse.
Resuming their previous positions, they descended into silence for a few minutes. She could think only how lucky it was that they were in a two-room suite. If there had been a big, king-size bed between them, she didn’t know that she could have come down off of red alert back to just orange.
Finally, when she felt like she could speak without sounding as though she hadn’t drawn breath in twenty minutes, she said, “I could probably use something to eat now, if that’s okay.”
He nodded, glad for the distraction. “Yeah, sure. Check out the room service menu.” Glancing at his watch, he added, “Maybe we should order something for Lily, too.”
“Do you think she’ll be back so soon? What if this creep shows up and wants to talk?”
Alec, who had walked to the desk to retrieve a leather-encased room service menu, tilted his head in confusion. “What creep?”
“This pedophile she’s after.”
He still appeared puzzled.
“I guess it’s another case you guys are working on? She said she was going into a chat room posing as a little girl to try to lure a pedophile.”
With a frown, he admitted, “Doesn’t sound like something Blackstone’s team is supposed to be dealing with.”
“Don’t you mean your team?”
Sheepish, he nodded. “Right. I guess I’m just not used to that yet.”
Again, she wondered about the reason for his transfer. He had never come out and said exactly why he had taken it, but from the few things he had let drop, and Lily’s brief comments earlier tonight, she sensed the topic was a sticky one.
Things had been sticky enough tonight. So she avoided even going there.
“Why wouldn’t your group work on a pedophile case? Isn’t that exactly what the Cyber Action Teams do?”
“Not this one. Their-our focus is a little narrower. We look at murders with an Internet connection.”
“Oh.” She blew out a soft breath. “Then this pedophile, he must be someone who…”
“Yeah, he must.”
Though the idea that a sick degenerate was out there trying to find a child to molest and kill filled her with revulsion, Sam didn’t ask any more questions. She was in an odd position: a civilian, yet so wrapped up in an investigation she’d started feeling right at home with the investigators. She wasn’t one of them, however, and had no business being inquisitive.
Nor was she sure she really wanted to know any additional details. The one ugly corner of the world she had been sucked into was enough. She didn’t want to visit any more of them if she could help it.
Taking the menu, she glanced over it, told Alec what she wanted, and watched him call in an order. The tension eased, the simple act of deciding on dinner cutting through some of the physical awareness. It wasn’t gone, merely banked for now, set aside to deal with at a more appropriate time.
And that turned out to be a good thing. Because their evening together stretched out a lot longer than either of them had anticipated. A whole lot longer.
“It’s eleven o’clock; where the hell is she?” Alec asked later that night. They had expected to see Agent Fletcher back by nine and had easily filled the first couple of hours with dinner and some casual conversation, back-and-forth chitchat more appropriate to a first date than a night at a safe house.
Of course, given the tension simmering between them, they had moved far beyond first-date territory. At least, her first-date territory, though it had been so long since she’d had any kind of date, she couldn’t be sure.
“Isn’t this good news? I mean, doesn’t it mean she was successful in trying to get the guy she’s after to talk to her?”
“I suppose,” he said, not sounding convinced. The tension that had slipped away over the last couple of hours had eased back, evidenced by the tense set of his jaw and the stiffness of his shoulders.
“Still no answer on her cell phone?” she asked as she watched him try to call again, then slam the phone shut.
“No.” He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “I don’t like this.”
“I’m okay staying by myself, really.”
He looked at her as if she’d said something utterly ridiculous. “I mean, I’m worried about Fletcher.”
“Oh.” Noting the lines on his brow as his frown deepened, she knew he meant it. He wasn’t frustrated about having to sit here with her and pretend they hadn’t kissed a couple of hours ago. He was genuinely concerned about his colleague. Which increased her concern about the other woman, too.
“This pedophile investigation, what else did she say about it?”
“Nothing more than I already told you.” She racked her brain, trying to recall every word. “She got a call, said she couldn’t help out with it because she had to babysit me; then you showed up and she realized she could go after all.”
“Who called?”
Sam closed her eyes to concentrate.
“Taggert and Mulrooney were with me all day; Jackie went home to her kids. Was it Brandon? Wyatt?”
She shook her head. “No. I would have remembered if she had said one of their names. It was something else-Anderson? Wait, I think she said Anspaugh.”
“There’s nobody named Anspaugh on our team.”
“Well, she certainly didn’t sound like she was making it up,” Sam said, truly confused.
About to go on asking why another agent would conceal her investigation from her own coworkers, she was interrupted by a brief knock on the door. As Lily had before him, Alec approached it carefully, flinging it open only after he peered out and obviously recognized whoever was on the other side of it.
“I’m so sorry,” Lily Fletcher said as she pushed past him into the room.
“Where the hell have you been?”
The blonde’s eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t mean to inconvenience you…”
“It’s not the inconvenience. It’s you dropping off the face of the earth, not answering your phone. And a pedophile investigation? Why haven’t I heard about it? What is going on?”
Lily looked back and forth between Sam and Alec. The other woman certainly hadn’t asked Sam not to say anything about the mysterious errand she had to run, yet Sam still felt a little embarrassed, as if she’d betrayed a trust.
“I’m helping another CAT, trying to track a pedophile who operated at Satan’s Playground. He slipped through the cracks then; we think we have a line on him now.”