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Thirteen
The Krewe of Hunters’ offices often used several of the large chain hotels and had business accounts with them.
In Front Royal, they’d chosen a local establishment, which was once an old tavern that had welcomed travelers as far back as the early seventeen hundreds.
It wasn’t elegant or new; it didn’t offer a dozen showerheads or any other luxuries.
But it was nestled on a grassy slope surrounded by lush pines and flower gardens lovingly tended by the owners.
And the rooms offered fireplaces with carved mantels and beds with plush mattresses.
Red immediately found himself a spot in front of the mantel, where he curled up on a soft rug in front of two rocking chairs.
His back was to them, as if even the dog wanted to offer privacy and time alone for just the two of them.
The baths had been remodeled in the 1980s and as Mark and Colleen quickly discovered, they were something to manipulate.
They’d been digging.
They’d found a corpse.
Showers were a mental necessity as well as a physical one.
But they crawled over the awkwardly high rim of the tub to step in together. He stood behind her with his arms around her, as they first let hot water spray over them, easing muscles and minds. Then he found the soap and slid it along the slick beauty of her body. She turned to him, and as their arousal grew, they moved more, eager to stroke and touch and kiss one another.
But when he took a step back to allow the spray to fall over his well-soaped chest, he slid and wound up sinking down to his butt with Colleen falling backward on top of him.
“Are you all right?” she asked quickly, twisting in his arms as best she could in the confines of the tub.
He laughed. “Butt bruised, but fine, and maybe...”
“I think we’re clean,” she said.
“As clean as we can get.”
She struggled up with both of them laughing. They crawled out of the tub, grabbed the deliciously fluffy yellow towels the owners kept, and tried drying in the bathroom. They were drying themselves and one another, and laughing again at the lack of space, finally moving into the bedroom and falling on the bed to finish the task—or half finish the task.
“Bruised butt!” Colleen teased, her eyes an emerald fire. “Poor baby!”
“Hey! Not a poor baby here.”
“Ah, and I was going to try to make it all better, Mr. Macho.”
“Not a Mr. Macho either,” he protested.
She laughed, crawled over him, found his mouth for a deep, rich kiss as hot and sultry as the cascade of water had been. She slid against the length of his body to continue erotic kisses here, there, and all about. She teased him and then became erotically intimate until he twisted, pulled her into his arms and to his side, savored the sweet slick feel of her, tasted her, breathed her, fell into a realm of desire that seemed to encompass his soul as well as his flesh.
They made love, laughing at first, the laughter fading as passion took over, and then holding each other tight in silence.
He loved just holding her, he realized, as much as he loved making love to her.
And he wondered about himself.
He knew his past had marred his relationships before; his past and his present. It just didn’t make sense to get too close to someone when his work constantly took him away, when his work wasn’t something that could always be explained.
He knew Krewe members often wound up together. They had working relationships and personal relationships. When their spouses or significant others had work in other fields, they at least still saw the dead. They were never forced to live a lie. And maybe...
He didn’t want to think. It was too soon. It was better to take time away from the deadly tension of the case they were on and let the future come. But as he held her, he thought about his biological mother and father. And he hoped somewhere in the great beyond, they had both found peace and happiness. He liked to think his father had seen his mother as a beautiful human being rather than just a stripper.
He wished he could have known him.
In whatever Mark’s relationships had been, he had never been anything but monogamous.
He’d seen the lives of strippers, even if he’d been too young to understand what some did for a real income at the time.
Colleen came up on her elbows at his side, looking down at him worriedly.
“Are you okay?”
He smiled. “With you? Always,” he told her.
“Who would have thought?” she asked.
“Right. Because I’m—”
“Superior?” she said.
“What?”
She laughed. “Well, you were not particularly welcoming at first.”
He arched a brow. “Am I welcoming enough now?”
“You’ll do,” she teased. “For the—”
He laughed. “Don’t you dare say ‘moment.’ I swear, I’m not Mr. Macho, but a man does have an ego in there somewhere.”
She laughed again. “And I sincerely doubt you lack confidence, Special Agent Gallagher.”
“Aw, well, I doubt you lack it either.”
