Every Move You Make. Tori Carrington

Mariah said, squaring her shoulders and looking everywhere but at Zach. “Where did you say this damn suitcase was?”

      4

      WHOA, COWBOY.

      Mariah could swear she was shaking. She eyed the avalanche of suitcases, then Zach Letterman’s wide, hard chest, and swallowed hard. The problem was she wasn’t sure what bothered her most—that a few measly suitcases were to blame for her shaken demeanor, or Zach Letterman.

      Definitely Zach Letterman.

      She covertly lifted her hand. Definitely shaking. She smacked the hand back to her side and made a fist.

      Okay, so for those few moments it had felt good to be pressed against his hard male length as if she was a damsel in distress and he the brave hero. Even if he’d only been protecting her from suitcases. She’d breathed in the crisp scent of his shirt, felt his large hands pressing against her back, and felt…different somehow. At least different from the way she’d felt with any other guy. She was used to the smell of chewing tobacco and sweat. But somehow she got the impression that when Zach sweated, he smelled like cologne.

      It didn’t make any sense, really. All her life she’d been around real cowboys. Men who hiked up their pants and puffed out their chests and made it their mission in life to play the role of heroes. Yet whenever any of them had tried to help her, she’d shunned them. Felt insulted. Had even broken her leg in three places once in her haste to show she could take care of herself. Her horse had rolled and caught her underneath.

      Yet let a few bags fall to the floor and she was hopping into a Yankee’s arms and batting her lashes as if she wasn’t capable of tying her shoes right.

      “I’ll be darned,” James said, breaking into her mental musings.

      Zach moved up next to the man and Mariah moved to the other side. Before them sat no fewer than fifteen suitcases, all hanging open and gutted, their contents mixing with the next.

      “I take it this isn’t the way to go about searching for bags,” Zach said dryly.

      “Heck no, it ain’t.” James kicked a few steps forward. “All the stuff gets mixed up then.” He threw his hands in the air.

      Zach looked down at something he’d taken out of his front pocket. “Blue canvas suitcase with blue leather straps.”

      Mariah noted that all the suitcases that had been opened matched that description.

      “The guy,” James said.

      “The guy? What guy?”

      He waved his hand. “You know, the one who got here just before you looking for a wedding dress.” He looked around and Mariah followed his gaze, finding no other person in sight. At the far end of the warehouse, a door clanged. She couldn’t say for sure, but she’d have chanced a guess that the man in question had just left the building.

      Zach frowned and glanced at her. “I don’t have a very good feeling about all of this.”

      Mariah had to admit she felt the same way, but she wasn’t about to admit that to him. It reeked too much of the damsel-in-distress situation. “We’re talking about a wedding dress here.”

      “A wedding dress our client is paying through the nose to locate.”

      James wasn’t paying attention to them. Instead he was stepping through the small piles of clothing. A moment later he said, “Forgot one.”

      Zach leaned closer. “If the dress is in there, that means the guy who got here before left without it.”

      “Maybe he found the dress he was looking for.”

      “Only one dress in this lot,” James said.

      James unzipped the bag then flopped the lid open.

      Sitting in the middle of wads of balled up tissue paper sat the wedding dress in question.

      “Coincidence,” Mariah said.

      “Fact,” Zach countered.

      “WE’RE BEING FOLLOWED.”

      Zach stared in the rearview mirror through the back window of the rental car, watching another sedan shadow their moves. He didn’t miss Mariah’s exasperated roll of her eyes.

      “We’re not being followed. Maybe the driver is going to the same hotel we are. Have you thought about that?”

      Zach sat forward and straightened his suit jacket. Ever since discovering that they were too late to catch the last flight out to Houston, Mariah had been a tad bit cranky. When he’d asked why, she’d said something about not having her toothbrush. Zach told her he always carried an extra and she was more than welcome to have it. He’d barely heard her murmur, “What kind of P.I. carries an extra toothbrush?”

      Okay, so since Jennifer had first given him the case this morning, he’d felt a little let down that it had been something so menial, so unexciting. His meeting with Denton Gawlick and his wife had gone smoothly, no red bells. They were renewing their wedding vows next week and needed to have the dress, simple as that.

      Then they’d arrived at the Unclaimed Baggage Center to discover someone else was looking for a wedding dress in a suitcase similar to the suitcase in which they’d found their dress. That is the client’s dress.

      Zach pulled at his tie, which had grown a little tight around his neck. The mere mention of a “their” in the same sentence with “wedding dress” was enough to choke off air.

      Hey, he was just as willing as the next guy to stand in front of an altar, only he intended to be ready for it when it happened. Of course his longtime girlfriend Kym had found out the hard way that he wasn’t anywhere near ready for it now. After two years of dating, of mingling their lives, she’d come out and asked him to marry her. That the proposal had come on the heels of his explaining to her what he planned to do, namely pass over control of his tool and die business and pursue what she subsequently called this “P.I. thing” hadn’t helped matters. That he didn’t want to get married had been his response. Kym hadn’t given him a chance to add the “yet” he was sure had been about to come out of his mouth. She’d up and walked out on him, never to be heard from again. Well, except for a voice-mail message telling him not to bother retrieving anything from her apartment because there was no longer anything there to retrieve. The whir of what he’d suspected was her garbage disposal on the other end of the line hadn’t sounded good.

      “You’d think the rental car companies would make sure their vehicles had air-conditioning, wouldn’t you?” Zach said.

      “That’s okay,” Mariah said, closing her eyes against the hot breeze wafting in the open window. “I don’t like air-conditioning anyway.”

      Zach gazed at her. At the warm stains of color on her smooth cheekbones. The dots of moisture on her forehead and long, long neck. The way her damp T-shirt clung to her small breasts. Of course she’d say that. She was used to the heat south of the Mason-Dixon line. Dealt with it on a daily basis.

      He settled back against the seat but he couldn’t say it was comfortable. The truth was, looking at Mariah Clayborn made him think of crisp sheets and sweaty bodies. Namely his and hers. Entangled together. Beads of moisture sliding down her elegant neck and over the crest of a breast and pausing there, waiting to be licked off.

      “Are you okay?”

      Mariah’s voice surprised him out of his reverie. “Yes, I’m fine.” If you counted being in a high state of arousal fine.

      It wasn’t like him to be so…obsessed with the idea of sleeping with somebody. Of imagining how her thighs would look pressing against his hips instead of a horse’s back. Or how her mouth would purse just so as she fought to catch her breath.

      Zach wiped the sweat from his brow.

      “You don’t seriously think someone’s still following us, do you?”