The P.I. Who Loved Her. Tori Carrington

to free herself without touching him. An impossible task with him so near. She shifted to her right and he compensated for the move, leaning in closer. Her highly sensitive nipples brushed against the hard width of his chest a second time and she gasped, arousal heating her insides and a thrill of awareness tingling across every inch of her skin, exposed or otherwise. His hands caressed her arms and she shivered.

      “I…I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she whispered, overly interested in the nearness of his mouth.

      “Do what?”

      “Kiss me.”

      A maddening grin played on his all-too-tempting lips. “Then stop me.”

      He made the inches separating them disappear, pressing the solid muscles of his thighs against her legs, the scrape of rough denim against her tender skin excitingly erotic. His mouth stopped a hairbreadth away from hers, his minty breath fanning her heated cheeks, his eyes inviting her to finish what he had begun. She swallowed hard, incapable of stopping him…incapable of stopping herself. She groaned.

      Oh, how she’d missed the feel of him against her.

      Thrusting her fingers into his thick brown hair, she drew him the rest of the way, crushing his lips against hers, challenging him to a duel of tongues, an exchange of pleasure she’d never felt as powerfully with anyone else. He responded with consummate flair, pulling her bottom lip into his mouth and gently biting down on it, then claiming her in a way she remembered all too well. Liz’s entire body caught fire. She restlessly, instinctively sought closer contact. A low whimper caught in her throat as the ridge of his arousal pressed provocatively against the cradle of her thighs.

      Her hands were suddenly all over him. In his hair, tugging his T-shirt from his jeans, sculpting his firm backside. She couldn’t seem to touch him nearly enough. From rough denim to velvety hot skin to the thick strands of his hair, her hands sought something she couldn’t hope to define…not until his fingers found the skin over her rib cage.

      She caught her breath, her mouth stilling beneath his, her eyes locking with his half-lidded ones. Touch me, she silently pleaded. Her nipples strained painfully against the thin cotton of her shirt. Her chest rose and fell as she regained her breath and dragged in precious air. Irrationally, she thought she’d die if he didn’t touch her.

      His fingers slid up, gently cupping the underside of her breasts. Heat, sure and swift, swept over her in dizzying waves. Liz nearly collapsed to the floor in a puddle of shimmering need. One callused thumb moved over her right nipple. She moaned.

      “Ohh,” she whispered, tugging her mouth from his, trying to catch her breath, calm the thick pulsing of her heart.

      Mitch suddenly jerked back, taking his warmth with him. Liz propped her hands against her knees, filled with the sudden urge to laugh.

      The picture really was quite ludicrous. Yesterday she had been about to marry another man. Now she was practically devouring Mitch.

      This didn’t make any sense at all.

      “Why don’t we continue this conversation another time?” she asked, dragging the back of her knuckles across her swollen lips. “I have a lot of things I need to do today, and your kissing me isn’t going to help get them done.”

      His grin was decidedly devilish, despite the questioning glint in his eyes. “I didn’t kiss you, Liz. You kissed me. Remember?”

      Oh, yeah, she remembered all right. And if he didn’t leave now, she was going to pin him to the table.

      “Answer my question and I’ll be happy to let you get on with your list of chores.”

      Liz straightened. “Well, then, I think you oughta just strip and let’s get on with it.”

      He stumbled backward as if she had physically pushed him. The edge of the table stopped his progress. “What?”

      “That’s the real reason you came here, isn’t it, Mitch?” There was something wonderfully delicious about the expression on his face. “You came to get what you couldn’t have seven years ago.”

      3

      YOU CAME to get what you couldn’t have seven years ago.

      Mitch clenched his coffee cup, mulling over what Liz had said the day before. He shifted uncomfortably on the diner stool. He cursed, remembering how he’d beat a hasty retreat out of her house like a panicked roadrunner.

      It was past noon on Monday. The diner was packed. His coffee was getting cold. And he should be on the road to D.C., where he’d planned to catch up on some office work and check in with a couple of clients…as well as do some more checking on the ghost of weddings past and present. Instead, he was in the diner, gaping at the broken pieces of his sorry life, and staring at the bomb in a waitress uniform that had broken it.

      Leaving Liz’s house yesterday after relearning the taste of her mouth, feeling her hot, slick flesh against his, had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. How much he’d have liked to have slid his fingers up under the frayed hem of her jean shorts and explored the hot, pliant flesh there. How much he had yearned to claim—as she had so slyly suggested—what had been denied him so many years ago.

      But the instant she’d offered up what had once been forbidden fruit, he’d hightailed it out of there.

      He’d spent the bulk of this morning alternately taking cold showers—it was a hot day, damn it—and checking with the Virginia and Massachusetts state law officials. Several calls yielded no outstanding warrants. There was absolutely nothing on her listed at the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, including info on whether or not the Lexus was stolen. Not stopping there, he contacted the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles; the plates on the Lexus were hers, as was the Lexus itself, though he found it interesting that the Boston address in the DMV’s files was no longer valid.

      What bothered him was that he couldn’t verify one way or another whether or not she had skipped town before or after her wedding ceremony. An irritating clerk he had talked to at the licensing bureau refused to tell him anything that wasn’t already a part of public record and said she wasn’t his gofer. If he wanted the information, he’d have to go fish it out himself…when it was publicly posted in a week or two.

      At least his next call had gone better. He’d found Liz listed as owner of Braden Consulting in the State Board of Corporations’ books.

      He stared at the address and phone number to that business now and sucked in a deep breath, puffing his cheeks out as he released it.

      He stuffed the number back into his pocket, telling himself he should be more concerned with all the work that had gone undone around the McCoy place, and just when, exactly, he planned to head out for D.C. He’d wished Pops had been around, but the old man had been gone when he returned from Liz’s yesterday, and Mitch had the sneaking suspicion he hadn’t made it home again last night.

      Mitch sipped his cold coffee, masking the uneasiness twisting inside him like a twenty-foot length of knotted razor wire.

      Down the counter from him, he tuned in Moses Darton complaining about the puny size of his Heavenly Pineapple Ribs for the third time and asking Liz if she couldn’t scare up a bigger slab. She sighed in exasperation and slid the refused plate onto the counter to go back into the kitchen.

      “Your halo’s slipping, angel,” he said to her in a voice almost too low to make out in the packed diner. Hell, figuratively speaking, her halo had fallen off a long time ago.

      “After yesterday, I think you passed on the chance to call me angel, Mitch.” She tugged on the hem of her white skirt to hide the thighs he’d already taken an eyeful of.

      “Hmm.” He tilted his head, taking in his fill. He openly followed the line down the front of her uniform, then stared at her legs. “Maybe.”

      He watched that simmering, wicked smile light her eyes before she tugged up the edge of the Manchester Journal he held.