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She shook her head. “There’s no place to hide it effectively, and I wouldn’t want Wagner to suspect. If I’m not back in an hour, then come looking for me. But I can guarantee you, I’ll be back before that.”
He still wasn’t moving.
“I’ll need to get past you, John.” A tired smile pulled at her lips as she watched him.
God she loved him. There was something about him now, just as there had been before, that drew her irrevocably to him. She wanted to curl into his arms again and for a little while forget that the world around them existed.
“Not yet.” He stepped forward, his hands moving to her hips before he pulled her against his body.
She felt his erection instantly. There was a hunger, a need in his touch as his hands stroked down her back to cup the curves of her rear before moving back to her hips.
She was waiting on him when his head lowered, when his lips brushed against hers. Her hands slid to his neck, her fingers dipping into the cool strands of his hair as her lips parted for him.
His kiss was like a fire in winter. A sweet benediction of pure hunger, of need. Beneath his kiss she felt both cherished and ravished. Flames leapt through her system and seared her nerve endings as she fought to hold on to her senses just enough to remember what the hell she was supposed to be doing here.
Because in John’s arms it wasn’t as though she could actually think or plan for anything past the brush of his lips or the touch of his tongue.
Long sipping kisses revived that part of her that had grown weary and too tired to face another day of the deceit and manipulations. His hands stroking along her back, beneath her shirt, touching her flesh, caressing it, brought the warmth back to her body and left her sighing in need against him.
“Hurry back,” he whispered against her lips as her eyes opened languorously to stare into the dark recesses of his gaze. “I need you tonight, Bailey.”
“And tomorrow night?” she whispered. Though it wasn’t tomorrow she worried about. It was eight days from now, when this investigation wrapped up, one way or the other; when Warbucks was either revealed or triumphant over them. It was then that her heart would need answers.
“I need you every night.”
He needed her, but they were both aware that they couldn’t always have what they wanted. That sometimes, you were just left holding an empty heart and an even emptier life.
“I’ll hurry,” she promised as she drew back from him. “Be waiting for me.”
“Always,” he promised.
She just wished that were true.
CHAPTER 16
BAILEY SHOVED HER HANDS in her pockets as she made her way from the second-story wing—where her and John’s suite was located—to the other side of the house, where Wagner had been assigned a suite.
The structure was huge, more mansion than cabin. It was ostentatious and glittery and a waste of money in the extreme, she thought.
But it was also a work of art in places. She couldn’t take that from it. It just wasn’t her, any more than her parents’ cabin was her.
Moving past the nearly soundproof doors of the other suites, she took several long minutes to make her way to Wagner’s. She ignored the sound of a door opening behind her and the quiet click of it closing. She wasn’t afraid of being attacked, yet. That would come later, if it came at all.
Someone had paid Orion to leave her alone, to let her live despite how close she had come to him several times. Whoever that person was, they wouldn’t allow her to be killed here, within familiar territory. Especially not after the attack by Landon Roth.
Stopping at Wagner’s room, she knocked softly and waited until he opened the door.
He had been drinking. He held a glass in his hand, and the scent of whiskey that surrounded him, though faint, was a testament to the fact that it wasn’t his first of the night.
“Come in.” His tone was cold, icy.
She had rarely seen Wagner like this.
“I only have a few minutes before John will notice me missing,” she told him as she stepped inside the suite and looked around slowly.
The room was immaculate. The bed was made without the first indication to suggest that anyone slept in it.
“I seem to be pouting tonight, according to Father.” He lifted the whiskey glass with a sardonic smile. “It rather sucks when your father falls from the pedestal you’ve placed him upon.”
