get you killed. I don’t know why I aid and abet you.”
“’Cause you can’t get enough of my bod,” she said, grinning as she stood up and wrapped her arms around his waist.
“You’re the trained health professional, Ms. Paramedic. What do you think?” he asked, prodding her with an erection that always grew like Pinocchio’s nose when she got within a dozen yards of him.
Sam rotated her pelvis against him and chuckled. “I think if I don’t take care of this immediately, you could suffer a serious…backup.”
“Speaking of backing up…” he said, turning her around while nibbling small kisses across her eyelids and down her nose to her throat. He backed her through the door and down the hall to their bedroom.
They were so engaged in the hot exchange neither saw the obstacle until their feet were tangled in it. They went tumbling across the threshold and landed on the carpet. Somehow Sam managed to come out on top. She always did. Matt looked down at what they’d tripped over—the ruins of her good black suit.
“As long as we’re down here, might as well make the ride worthwhile,” he said, rolling her onto her back.
Chapter 4
Sam let him pull off her old chenille bathrobe while she worked the snap on his jeans and carefully lowered the distressed zipper. By the time his tongue danced from one bared nipple to the other and back, she had worked the denim over his buns and he kicked the pants away. She arched into his delicate caresses as she buried her hands in his thick black hair, urging him on.
“Talk about steam-cleaning the carpet,” she murmured. “I’m gonna have rug burns…again.” She didn’t sound particularly concerned.
“It serves you right,” he growled as he felt her hands play along his back, down to curve around his butt. “Hussy.”
“Hunk.”
“Sammie, oh, Sammie,” he murmured, gliding inside the sleek wetness of her body.
Was it always this good? Only with Matt. Always with Matt. Sam wrapped her legs around him as he moved in her, slowly, gently. She could feel the springy hair on his chest abrade her sensitized breasts, making her nipples tingle and draw into even harder little points. “I’ll…give you…exactly one hour…to cut this out,” she whispered breathlessly.
But when he started moving faster, she bit his ear and said, “An hour, remember? I can’t last…if you don’t…ahhh.”
“Who says you have to last?” he asked with a wicked chuckle, feeling her body spasm around his. Matt concentrated on control. Dames did have the advantage when it came to coming. And his little Sammie had to be the world’s champ.
When he renewed his sensual assault with slow precision, Sam took a moment for the world to stop spinning. Then she took control. She was little but she hadn’t earned a black belt in judo without developing some serious moves of her own. With one heel and a lift of her hip, she rolled them over until she was on top, breathless, grinning triumphantly down at him.
“How…the hell…do you…do that?”
“In judo, it’s called mat work.” She chuckled, running her hands proprietarily across his hard pectoral muscles and tracing the narrowing pattern of black hair in its downward descent.
“We gotta…work out…more often.” Now it was Matt’s turn to be breathless. The view inspired it. He looked up at the most sensational pair of knockers he’d ever seen, standing high and firm above a slim waist and flared hips that perched neatly over him. Oh, my, yes…yes! Her sensational body, especially the breasts, had been the first thing he’d noticed about Sam Ballanger the day they met.
The day she kidnapped him at gunpoint.
But as she worked her magic on him, kissing and caressing, moving only the way she could move, memories of that incident faded. He felt the wild exhilaration building. When she tossed her head back and cried out his name, he let go with everything in him.
Sam lay prostrate over his much larger frame. When her heart returned to some semblance of a normal beat, she raised her head and looked over at the clock. “You’re off, Granger. Only fifty-four minutes.”
He came up from the carpet with her in his arms, growling, “Then I’ll just have to practice more.” With that he tossed her onto the bed and dived after her.
When they’d finally exhausted each other, they lay side by side on the pillows. Sam reached up and smoothed one devilish black curl away from his forehead. She always liked this time afterward. The quietness. Just pure relaxed enjoyment, being together with no words necessary. Raised in a big boisterous family, Sam was good at arguing, always had a quick comeback. She’d had to, as the only girl and the eldest of seven Ballanger children. But she’d never learned flowery talk. Didn’t want to. And with Matt she didn’t need to. If only he would come to his senses about Aunt Claudia’s money, everything would be perfect….
Pushing that disturbing thought away, she said, “I should get back to Pat about Elvis. He may have something for me by now.” She didn’t move.
“Yeah, I guess you should.” He didn’t move, either, even though he had two deadlines tomorrow. Just because he’d been nominated for a Pulitzer for his exposé of Russian mafia activities in Miami didn’t mean he could rest on his laurels. Besides, the Pulitzer Committee didn’t meet to decide the winners for four months yet.
They lay quietly until the annoying beep of the bedside phone broke the spell. Matt reached one long arm behind him and groped for the accursed thing, then pressed Talk and grunted, “Granger here.”
Sam recognized Patowski’s cigarette-roughened voice on the line but waited until Matt handed the phone to her. “Speak of the devil and up he pops,” he whispered grumpily, climbing out of bed and grabbing his jeans. She admired the view of his bare buns while he slid worn denim up his long legs and stalked off toward his office.
“Whatcha got for me, Patty?”
“Don’t call me Patty,” Patowski groused, starting their usual ritual of ethnic insults. “I’m a Polack, you’re the Mick,” he added, beating her to the punch.
Sam rolled off the bed and walked into her office, seizing a notepad and pencil as he talked.
“Your pally Elvis P. Scruggs—by the way the P doesn’t stand for Presley—it’s Peter—he had an interesting childhood. A local bad boy from grade school on in some podunk township in the panhandle. Took a joyride in the sheriff’s patrol unit, snuckered to the gills on moonshine.”
“Guess that might tend to piss off the local constabulary,” Sam said dryly.
“Especially since the sheriff was his father.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Old man was a real hard-ass. Wanted to charge him with GTA but since he was still a minor, it didn’t stick. Sealed court records. I had to do some pretty fancy footwork to come up with the bits and pieces I got.”
“That your subtle way of saying I owe you, Pat?”
“You damn betcha you do.”
Sam
