AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I shouldn’t let you get away with that when we’re trying to talk about something so important.” She was already curling into him, and he lifted a brow, all mock innocence.
“Me? I think it’s you that’s the problem here.” He kissed one side of her mouth and then the other. “You laugh too much. I think you do it on purpose to distract me from important subjects with this pretty mouth I can’t stop staring at.”
She wondered idly how it was possible for a man to look at her with that much heat and not cause her body to go up in flames. “You could do more than stare, if you want to be really distracted.”
“Do I want to be distracted?” He looked around at the pristine room and the bright sunlight pouring through the windows and her sheer curtains. “Here? In the middle of the day?”
She was already hooking her fingers under the hem of his shirt. They could form a line outside the window for all she cared. “I don’t think the neighbors will mind.”
He chuckled but helped her pull the shirt off. “I think I’ve awoken something in you. Not so prim and proper anymore.”
“If you don’t shut up and kiss me, Ethan, I swear?—”
But the rest of it was lost as he slotted his mouth over hers and set her nerves ablaze. His mouth was always so hot on hers, so demanding. He kissed like he wanted to meld them together and she had long since decided that she didn’t mind that thought at all.
Buttons popped when he tugged open her blouse, but she hardly noticed. That was a problem for Future Eloise to deal with. Current Eloise was busy having her mind thoroughly blown by a pair of rough hands that had pushed their way inside her ruined top to tug her bra aside and focus an indecent amount of attention on her breasts. She’d never been particularly fond of having her nipples touched, but something about the way Ethan did it made her toes curl.
Clearly, he knew what her body needed better than she ever had, and all she had to do was let herself be carried away. She could float, mindless on a sea of sensation as he fumbled with the fasteners on her skirt before giving up and shoving it up around her waist. A few extra seconds to tug her panties down her legs and unbutton his jeans and she was going to be getting thoroughly fucked on her living room rug.
She might even end up with rug burn. God, what would her mother think? A horrified sound escaped her; part laugh, part wine-induced hiccup.
Ethan stopped with her panties around her knees and frowned at her. “Are you okay?”
“I am perfectly fine,” she lied. “I was just thinking how very unlike me this whole thing is and how horrified my mother would be.”
“Oh.” He pulled a face and she laughed again, a full belly laugh that shook her whole body and made her exposed breasts bounce enough that she had to clap her hands over them to still the jiggle. That got his attention back on her body, but he still mumbled, “Maybe we could not talk about that?” under his breath.
“That’s an excellent idea.” Her cheeks were painfully hot—why did she have to always say the worst possible thing when they were having sex—but he was already moving past it, hands once again roaming to all her sensitive places, so she let it go without further comment.
Her body was humming, eager and ready, and she tried to pull him in the moment the condom was on but he had other ideas. She let him guide her until she was kneeling over the coffee table with her face pressed against the warm wood surface and his hard body curved over her while he nudged his knees between hers and pushed into her from behind.
It was absolutely ridiculous and still somehow achingly erotic that he could be so tender and possessive of her when she was splayed out across a table like a sacrificial offering. He knew just the right way to touch her, just the right things to whisper in her ear, to make her shake and tremble as much from that as she did from the orgasm that rocked through her.
Afterward, she lay on the rug. Boneless. Shameless. Utterly satisfied and sure of one thing. She was going to have to wear pants to work to hide the rug burn on her knees.
Twenty-Three
Getting into Kim’s office wasn’t as difficult as Eloise had feared it would be. She wasn’t about to get fired over this whole situation, no matter how insistent Ethan was that she needed to be stealthy, so she did this the way she did everything else—as honestly and by the book as possible.
Sun Valley had already started to pack up Kim’s belongings and it had been as simple as batting her lashes at Kim’s immediate supervisor. He was quite possibly the oldest man Eloise had ever seen and Kim had never liked him much, though she’d had less intense feelings than Sarah had for Dwayne. It made Eloise a little nauseous to pretend to flirt with him—his skin was so thin and wrinkly that it looked like crumpled crepe paper—but it was the only way to convince him to let her slip inside for a moment under the pretense of retrieving some sentimental items.
The man was gruff, and he mumbled under his breath about not letting people poke around out of idle curiosity, but Eloise saw him waver when the first tear had fallen, and she was alone in the office less than five minutes later.
Sure, he was going to know she’d been in here, but she wasn’t after anything except for information. Nothing that would be noticed if she left the room with it, so it couldn’t arouse suspicion or interest from the police or the company. All she had to do was find something useful, a task that seemed simple enough right up until the moment she opened the door to Kim’s office.
She took a deep bracing breath and looked over her shoulder at Kim’s boss. “It may take me a few minutes to find what I’m looking for.”
They both peered into the space, taking in the desk with its scattered papers and colorful decorations. There were odds and ends spread haphazardly throughout the room, crowded next to each other on the desktop and shelves on the walls. Kim had been thrilled when she’d gotten this little private space of her own, Eloise remembered now, because she’d always been too messy to share cubicle space peacefully with her coworkers.
Kim’s workload had already been passed along to someone else but her stuff didn’t look like it had been disturbed and Eloise wondered if Detective Chen had been able to do something to prevent it. It seemed from the outside like the cops weren’t making much progress, but then, it was unlikely that the detective had told Eloise everything that had happened behind the scenes of their investigation. She only took the information Eloise gave her and promised to look into it. The exchange of information didn’t go both ways.
Kim’s boss grunted as he stepped back. “Good luck, little lady.”
Eloise smiled tightly, surprised he hadn’t tried to pat her butt before walking away. He seemed like the old school type that genuinely believed that kind of thing was a compliment, but she wasn’t in the mood to deal with that today. Maybe she’d been spending too much time with Ethan, and he was starting to rub off on her, but she couldn’t imagine cheerfully tolerating that kind of thing again.
Her patience had thinned, and it no longer seemed like something she had to put up with. A dangerous thought, with her career depending on how well she went with the flow in a business like this. Another thing she’d have to deal with when all this was over, and the list seemed to grow longer by the day.
As soon as she had the office to herself, she set to work. Rifling through loose papers and checking the names on files, snapping pictures of Kim’s date book pages with her phone. Most people had switched to digital a long time ago, but Kim insisted she preferred pen and paper for scheduling. There were several entries in the weeks leading up to the murder, but nothing that jumped out to Eloise as an immediate red flag.
