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But her mouth was ridiculously dry. The beers they’d consumed at the bar combined with their lovemaking had left her desperate for water.
She glanced up at Nick, smiling at the peace on his face. He looked younger in sleep, his features relaxed, his eye lashes shadowed against his cheeks. He seemed so familiar to her already, his face conjuring something comforting, something like home, even though they’d only known each other a few weeks, had only spent time together a a handful of times.
She swallowed against the sandpaper in her throat and eased out from under his arm, watching his face to make sure she wasn’t going to wake him. She hesitated over her clothes on the floor. If she’d been alone, she would have padded to the kitchen naked, but she wasn’t alone, and while Nick had been more tender and passionate than she’d expected, tending to her body with something like worship in spite of her scars, she wasn’t quite ready to traipse around naked in front of him if he woke up to find he was as thirsty as she was.
She reached for his rugby jersey and held it to her nose, then felt stupid. She was a grown woman, not a school girl. But she couldn’t deny the lust that rocketed through her body when she was hit with his scent.
She slipped from the bedroom and made her way down the hall on bare feet. The apartment was muffled by thick walls, the minimal sounds from outside — the clang of a trash truck, the rush of a car gliding by in the light snow she could see from a crack in the living room curtains — barely audible.
She went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water from the fridge, and leaned against the counter as she opened the bottles of vitamins she kept lined up on the counter. Research on their efficacy was mixed, but she didn’t take any chances when it came to her health and she didn’t like to miss days.
She tossed back the vitamins and washed them down with the water, then carried her glass into the living room. Her mind was fully awake, her brain beginning to travel down the roads she’d worked so hard to ignore in the past few hours.
Namely, Nick Murphy and what tonight meant for them both.
She was distracted by the buzz of her phone on the table pushed against the back of the couch, but when she reached it, she realized it wasn’t her phone but Nick’s. She remembered seeing it in his hand on the way up to her apartment. He must have set it on the table while she was locking the door behind them.
She was about to turn away when the screen lit up again. In the few seconds before it went dark she couldn’t help but read the message from someone named Clay that flashed on the display.
Richard Delaney has been on the guest list of every Frederick Walker fundraiser since 2009.
The room receded from view, and her heart seemed to skip a beat as the words made their way through the fog of her post-sex euphoria. She was suddenly cold, her skin rippled with gooseflesh. She was transported back in time, her body hurting and broken, her heart hollow from the loss of Samantha, Detective Delaney sitting on the edge of her hospital bed, his partner, the older man, standing behind him with sad eyes.
She shook herself free of the memory. The past didn’t matter.
What mattered was now. What mattered was why Nick Murphy was digging around in the life of the detective who’d worked her case. What mattered was the fact that he’d known about her accident — all this time he’d known — and he hadn’t said a word.
17
“You knew.”
She was sitting on the sofa wrapped in a blanket when he emerged from the bedroom, early morning light leaking in through a crack in the curtains. His eyes went to the phone in her hand — his phone.
She looked so small, but her bearing was the same as it had been the day she’d walked into the offices at MIS, the armor she’d worn then — the armor he’d worked to deconstruct — back in place.
He nodded. “I knew.”
“Why?” she asked.
There were a million questions hidden in the word. Why had he gone looking into her background? Why hadn’t he told her, if not in the very beginning, then at some point between then and now? Between the moment he’d helped her off the pavement in Copley Square and the moment he’d taken her to bed?
He started with the first one, walking to the sofa and sitting at the other end. “In the beginning, I was just curious about you.”
“In the beginning?”
“After you came to the office a couple of months ago,” he said.
“So you dug into my past.”
“No more than you’ve dug into mine,” he said.
She blinked, his point hitting home. “My background on you was part of my job.”
“And my background on you was survival.” He hesitated. “But I should have told you.”
Her laugh was short and bitter. “You think?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “At first I didn’t want you to think I was some kind of stalker.”
