Desire & Ice: A MacKenzie Family Novella (The MacKenzie Family) Read online

  They were still trapped. They should be watching the door, the window. They should be doing anything other than discovering they kissed like they were born to kiss each other. He broke suddenly, gazing into her eyes, shaking his head slowly as if he were as dazed by this sudden burst of passion as she was.

  “I think…” he tried, but lost his words.

  “What do you think, Danny?”

  “I think if we just keep our eyes on the door, we’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.”

  Was he putting the brakes on? She wasn’t sure. It was the most sensible thing to do, that was for sure. He slid off her and sat up, back against the wall, eyes on the door. She did the same. But he curved an arm around her back and brought her body sideways against his. It was awkward at first, but then he positioned her so that she was lying halfway across his lap.

  “Now that I’m watching the door,” he said, unbuttoning the top few buttons of her blouse, “I think we’ll be fine.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  He brought his fingers to his mouth, moistened them with his tongue, then dipped them between the folds of her shirt. Slowly, he wedged them under the cup of her bra. When he found her nipple underneath, he said, “Yeah. Just fine.”

  In an instant, her body was flush with goose bumps.

  Eyes on the door, his gun within easy reach, he circled her nipple with his moistened fingers. His precision and restraint combined to make her wet in other places as well. She’d seen the passion in his eyes, a youthful crush that had matured into a man’s desire. But now, he was willing to delay his own gratification so that he could protect her and pleasure her at the same time.

  “Let me give you a little help there,” she whispered.

  Without getting up, she reached back and unfastened her bra.

  It fell away from her breasts slightly, still trapped within the confines of her blouse, which she wasn’t about to remove.

  She was facing the door too. It only seemed fair.

  And she didn’t want to distract Danny again by rolling over onto her back and offering herself up to him. Then he might lose all control. As much as she wanted him to, now wasn’t the time. Now was the time for this sweet, prolonged torture, for the slow and leisurely way he was testing her nipples with his fingertips. Searching for just the perfect spot. The perfect amount of pressure that would make her muscles tense and her breaths sharpen into gasps. For some reason, dividing his focus between the door and her body seemed to make him highly responsive to each sound of pleasure coming from her.

  “See, we’ll be fine as long as I keep my eyes on the door,” he said.

  “More than fine,” she whispered.

  The wind howled. His fingers traced her breasts. Her folds moistened.

  “So that thing you said.” He unbuttoned her jeans. “About concrete examples.”

  “Yes,” she said between gasps.

  He parted the flaps of her jeans enough so he could slide three fingers under the waistband of her panties.

  “When the moment’s right, when I’ve got you all to myself, safe and warm and home, what I’m doing with my fingers right now…” He traced her folds with two fingers, dragging them gently toward her aching bud. “I’m going to do this with my tongue. After I kiss every inch of you, of course. After I use my mouth to show you what a man I’ve grown up to be.”

  “Danny…”

  “Yes, Eliza.”

  Not Miss Brightwell. Not anymore. She was Eliza and he was Danny, both adults now, brought together by circumstances beyond their control. Now his heat and desire sustained her, wrapped her in comfort and pleasure on one of the darkest, most terrifying nights she’d ever known. And that was part of the pleasure, she had to admit. The defiance of it. The refusal to be terrified into submission by anonymous gunmen in the icy dark. As if Danny was thumbing his nose at their pursuers by leisurely, attentively fingering her clit. Worshiping it gently and easily and without the crazed, porn-star acrobatics that had always defined her ex-husband’s ineffective work in that area.

  Each subtle, precise move of Danny’s fingers convinced her he had all the time in the world to devote to pleasing her. The truth of their situation was more troublesome, for sure, but not right now. Right now there was only his desire to protect, his hunger to please.

  For the first time in hours, she didn’t feel a suffocating pressure to rush, to dig, to solve. Didn’t feel a need to do anything other than luxuriate in the pleasure Danny was managing to give her with one skilled hand, one hand and all of his senses, which he’d tuned to the frequency of each wave of pleasure coursing through her body.

  With his other hand, he reached down and gently brushed her bangs back from her forehead. Something about the combination of this tender gesture and the hungry ministrations of his fingers sent her to the edge. She bit back the scream that wanted to erupt from her, a scream of surprise as much as bliss.

  When was the last time an orgasm had gripped her this suddenly and totally? She couldn’t remember. Which was a good sign the answer might be never. Was it the stress of the situation? The sense of doing something reckless and forbidden? It didn’t matter. It was powerful enough to obliterate her thoughts as she gasped into lips Danny suddenly brought to her own.

  It was the first time he’d dared to look away from the door since they’d started this hot little session. When she opened her eyes and stared up into his, an aftershock of pleasure rippled through her.

  “Where’d you learn how to do that?” she whispered.

  “From you.” His answer baffled her. “Seriously. No magic to it. Just take a woman who’s given all of herself to other people for as long as she can remember, and tend to her needs with no thoughts of your own.”

  “Given the way most men are, that sounds like magic.”

  “If you say so, Eliza.”

  “I do. I do say so.”

  He kissed her again, gently. Then he sat up straight and returned his gaze to the door as he gently stroked her bangs back from her forehead, reminding her of the combination move that had filled her with pure bliss. Danny Patterson was defined by delicious contradictions. He gave pleasure while offering protection. He could flirt while speaking with the voice of reason.

  Her girlfriends, and her mother, and her grandmother, for that matter, always preached the gospel that a man could only be one thing. Bad boys were always bad, even if they could rock your world between the sheets. That was fifty percent of what made them bad, of course. The good fifty percent. But still. A bad boy was a bad boy and you didn’t marry bad boys because whenever they weren’t going down on you, you usually wanted to pitch them headfirst into a jet engine.

  Good boys, on the other hand, were better at listening and keeping their promises than making your toes curl. But as long as there were showerheads and romance novels, you could make do. And you’d always have a nice, loyal companion once you dried off.

  God, how she’d always loathed this logic. Had hated how it controlled most of the women in her family, in her life, forcing them into rushed, jerry-rigged relationships with guys who weren’t even close to being the one. But she’d never met a man whose very being disproved any of it.

  Until now.

  Danny Patterson was good and bad at the same time: a savior with a sweet mouth and dirty fingers. Fingers he was now gently licking clean of her essence after working her over in a way that made her feel delightfully violated. Now he politely, gently buttoned her jeans and smoothed them into place. He curved an arm around her and snuggled her closer into his body so he could keep watching the door while he savored their combined warmth.

  “So…do I get an A?” he asked.

  “Okay. You have to quit that now.”

  “Aw, come on,” he whined. “We can have a little fun with it, can’t we?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see. Maybe once we’re out of this cabin.”

  “After all, you’re the one who just called me a nice boy.”

  �
��I remember.”

  “So…I’ll repeat the question.”

  “A plus, you sexy bastard. With a gold star and a bunch of extra credit.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Can we be done with that now?” she asked.

  It was kind of hilarious they were having this intimate exchange with the two of them back in their previous positions, her head resting on his lap as he sat cross-legged with his back against the wall, both of them staring at the padlocked door. She’d make a note to laugh about it later, once they were truly safe.

  “For a little while. Sure.”

  “Danny…”

  “Yes, Eliza.”

  “We’re gonna get out of this cabin, right?”

  “What’s the rush? I can think of plenty of other things I can do to your body without taking my eyes off the door.”

  “Be serious, Danny.”

  “We’re gonna be fine, Eliza. I promise. Soon as this storm lets up, Coop’s gonna be on our trail if he isn’t already. First place he’ll go is the ranch and first thing he’ll see will be my patrol car all shot to hell.”

  “Yeah, but how will he find us here?”

  “We’re not that far away, for one. And second, a bunch of us worked the cattle roundup that night so it’s fresh in everyone’s minds. We were all right here in this cabin getting our supplies together just a few weeks ago. He’ll find us, I promise.”

  “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “You really were thinking this all the way through, the whole time. Even while we were running from those bastards.”

  “Yep.”

  “That’ll get you an A plus too.”

  It wasn’t just a quick escape he’d plotted as windows shattered and gunfire cracked the air all around them, but a rescue plan as well. She found that as sexy as his smile, as sexy as what he’d done to her with his fingers and his focus and his sensitivity to her bliss. Blame four years of being with a man whose solutions to the problems he kept bringing down on their house were anything but. Just snappy answers he’d pulled from his ass at the eleventh hour.

  She didn’t need a man to take care of her, but it sure was nice when one was up to the task.

  “You start to feel drowsy, you let me know, okay?” she said.

  “Is that your way of telling me you’re feeling drowsy?”

  “Kinda. Yeah.”

  “All right, well. Don’t you worry. I’ll wake you up if I need to.”

  “Good.”

  “But I won’t need to.”

  “All right, well…”

  The next thing she knew she was coming up out of a dead sleep as something slammed against the cabin’s door with enough force to bring the entire structure down.

  She was standing before she knew what was happening.

  The fire in the stove still burned. But the stack of wood in the corner was shorter by a third. And there was a new, soft light all around her. Daylight, she realized. Or the earliest, faintest version of peeking in around the edges of the boarded up window and through little cracks in the walls it had been too dark to see the night before.

  My God, how long had she slept?

  Gun raised, Danny was advancing on the door.

  “State your name!” he bellowed.

  A voice on the other side. “The fucking sheriff of fucking Surrender, Montana. How’s that, you crazy dipshit?”

  Danny took a deep breath. His entire frame sagged.

  He holstered his gun, undid the padlock, and threw open the door. There stood Cooper MacKenzie, in uniform, with the same dazzling eyes that were practically the man’s signature.

  Cooper said, “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you might know something about these two dead jackasses out here in the woods.”

  6

  “I want to see them,” Eliza said.

  “Trust me,” Danny answered. “You don’t.”

  He’d just returned to the cabin after taking to the woods with Coop and the three locals he’d deputized for the very simple reason they all owned Ford pickups capable of making the drive there. An access road led to the Flynns’ hunting cabin, but it was as iced over as the rest of the town, which meant even once the snow had died down, a twenty-minute drive had taken their search party almost three hours.

  Danny had seen some bad accidents since he’d joined the force. But the bloody scene Cooper had led them to halfway down the hill was one for the books, that was for sure.

  “Danny––”

  “I know. I know, Eliza. I get it. They tried to kill us so you need to be sure they’re dead. So trust me. They are. They are very, very dead.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Explorer got stuck about halfway down the slope. Looks like one of them got out to push and then he got stuck in the snow. So the other one got out to help get him get the Explorer unstuck. And that’s when the Explorer decided to get unstuck at just the wrong moment and it went sliding backward down the hill and now… Funny thing is the Explorer made it out okay but that’s because their heads cushioned most of the, you know…”

  “Oh, wow,” she whispered, going pale.

  Her hands shook around the plastic coffee cup one of the guys had given her. She no longer had the stomach for the steaming brew, that was clear.

  “How stupid were these guys?” she asked, once she had control of herself. “What, were they meth cooks or something?”

  “Explorer’s a rental, apparently. So they weren’t from around here. And IDing them isn’t going to be the easiest, given they don’t have heads anymore. They’ve got IDs on them but they’re probably fake. We’ll run them anyway. See what turns up.”

  Cooper stepped inside the cabin and closed the door behind him with a loud thunk intended to get their attention.

  “Eliza,” he said. “What do you say we get you back to the station?”

  “Sure. That sounds fine. Danny?”

  “I need a moment with Danny, actually,” Coop said. “You go on ahead with Fred and Bill. They’re waiting outside.”

  Leave now, without Danny? her expression seemed to say.

  He gave her a nod and a smile; he tried to keep the latter professional, but apparently it held a trace of what he’d done to her the night before because as soon as Eliza had stepped past him and through the door, Coop cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow.

  Once they were alone, the sheriff said, “I oughta ring your neck for taking off your radio.”

  “Funny. She said the same thing.”

  “Or fire you. I could always fire you.”

  “That too. ‘Course if you do that first then you don’t have cause to ring my neck.”

  “Says who?”

  “The law.”

  “Oh, good. So we’re gonna give the law precedence now? That’s rich, Patterson. That’s real rich.”

  “She’d be dead if it wasn’t for me, Sheriff.”

  “I’m aware of that. And for a while there, I thought you were both dead, which is why I’m in a better mood right now than I should be.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following.”

  “We found your patrol car around midnight last night but we couldn’t see three feet in this storm and there was no driving in it. That said, I had Greyson stay up at the Laughlin Place just in case any of you came back. But that was the best we could do until the storm weakened.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that, Sheriff.”

  “Well, it wasn’t my favorite thing, knowing one of my men was out here and not being able to do a damn thing about it. And if you’d turned tail and come back to the station when I’d said, it wouldn’t have happened. But then…”

  “Eliza would be dead.”

  “Pretty much. And the whole thing gave me some time to work the phones, get in touch with her ex-husband. That’s when things got interesting.”

  “Did you reach him?”

  “No, I reached the FBI agents who stopped him from boarding a flight to Australia last
night at LAX. If his inbound plane hadn’t been diverted because of the same front that’s kicking the shit out of most of the plains states, they probably would have lost him.”

  “Wait a minute. So he’s not being held hostage?”

  “By the FBI, yes. And I believe they call it in custody. Tell me. What does Eliza know about her ex-husband’s business dealings?”

  “She thinks he got involved in stolen cars. Something about guys who’d use visas that were about to expire to buy luxury cars and then drop them on a ship for Asia where they’d resell them.”

  “Well, that’s one way of putting it. Lance Laughlin, it turns out, was keeping paperwork and holding stolen cars for one of the largest Russian mafia-run car theft rings in the country. In history, maybe. In fact, these guys were running so many stolen cars through the Port of Los Angeles, Lance figured they wouldn’t miss a couple Porsche Panameras.”

  “Lance gets threatened by the Russian mob so he sends Eliza out here to get some cash for them and then he tries to hop a plane? I’m not following.”

  “Because the story starts much earlier. The Feds took down the major players in this ring a few weeks ago and ever since then the underlings have been fighting over the scraps. What our friends with the Bureau think is that our dead guys out there were two errand boys who knew what Lance was up to and came asking for a cut of the cars he stole once the big fish were out of the pond.”

  “So why send Eliza out here to get the money?’

  “How much did she know about what Lance was up to?”

  “She said she asked some questions, but when he got evasive, she didn’t push. Divorce was almost final by then. What does that have to…”

  And then it hit him like a ton of bricks.

  “I know,” Coop said when he saw the expression on Danny’s face. “Give yourself a minute to take it all in. It’s a big one.”

  “He sent her out here to get killed. ‘Cause she asked a few questions.”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Walk me through it if you can, Sheriff. It’s been a long night.”

  “Okay. So Tweedle Shithead and Tweedle Headless down there come knocking on Lance’s door, asking for a cut of the stolen stolen cars. Lance tells them the money’s buried on his family’s property in Surrender. And those idiots are dumb enough to believe him. So while they’re booking tickets to Kalispell, Lance thinks, Damn. Lucky break! I better flee the country before more of this mess shows up on my front step. But first, there’s the small matter of his ex-wife, who asked a few too many questions. So he picks up the phone and sends her out here to have a run-in with two of the stupidest and greediest assholes in the history of West Coast organized crime.”