She wanted to slap the man. “No, it’s something you say when you don’t know or can’t remember a woman’s name, isn’t it?”
He didn’t reply for a long moment. He didn’t avoid her stare or look contrite—he was too full of macho bullshit for that—but something told her she was right.
“You might be gorgeous and have the oral prowess of a god, but you’ve got the sensitivity of a doorknob.”
Thorn smiled. “An oral god, huh?”
“You are totally missing the point. A woman can’t relax for a man who doesn’t know her name and doesn’t care that he doesn’t know. She wants to be cared for, cared about, feel that she—”
“Some women just want the orgasm, baby. I find plenty who are more than willing to forego the touchy-feely shit in favor of a really good fuck. So all your little speech tells me is that you’re Cinderella waiting for Prince Charming.” He rolled his eyes. “This ain’t my department.”
Before Brenna could question what
that meant, Thorn climbed off the bed, grabbed the cell phone at his waist and stalked out of the bedroom.
* * * * *
Fuck.
“That went fabulously,” Thorn muttered to himself, stabbing numbers into the keypad of his cell phone.
He was hard as hell and in over his head. Normally, a woman with her problems, suggesting he learn to be sensitive? He’d be gone—in a hurry. But this one…no. Not yet, anyway. She’d challenged him, and he planned to deliver.
The way she smelled aroused the fuck out of him. That lily-fair skin contrasted with her honey-brown hair. It fell in waves to her waist and framed her small, curved body. The effect made her look like a some kind of fairy, fragile, sensual, mysterious. Not his usual type—he liked women who looked like they loved sex. The loud, obvious ones. But this woman had great tits and hips, both of which he adored. The taste of her bare pussy on his tongue drove him wild. The thought of fucking her sent his hormones into overdrive. He had to, at least once. But it was clear he was going to need reinforcements to do that.
On the fourth ring, he heard a froggy-groggy, “Hello?”
Thorn paused. “You sleeping or fucking?”
“Thorn?”
“No, it’s the Tooth Fairy.”
“Whaddya want. I’m sleeping.”
“Get your ass over here.”
“It’s…” Thorn heard some scrambling on the other end of the phone, “one fifty-four in the morning. What’s up?”
“I need your help.”
Cameron sighed. “Where are you?”
“Curtis’ bungalow in the Foothills.”
“You’re there with Brenna?”
Brenna. So that was her name. It was pretty, like her. It fit. When he came deep inside her, it would roll off his tongue.
“Yeah.”
“Do I want to know why you’re there with her in the middle of the night?”
“Probably not, since I tied her down to the bed and stripped her bare against her will. So you’d better come stop me, Detective.”
With a chuckle, Thorn hung up. That would get Saint Cameron over here in a hurry. And since he already lived on the north side of town, he’d be here quick.
Goody, the night was just getting started.
Chapter Four
Cameron pounded on the door to Curtis’ love shack. The unseasonably crisp fall wind whipped under the shirt he hadn’t bothered to button and around the bare toes he’d shoved into sandals as he’d grabbed his keys and run out the door.
What the hell was Thorn up to?
After a long minute, the door opened. Cameron fought the wind to shove his hair out of his face and behind his neck. He really meant to have it cut and kept forgetting.
There stood Thorn with a tight smile, an impatient tapping of his palm against his thigh…and a hard-on that strained his leathers.
So Brenna had the same effect on Thorn. Cameron didn’t know whether to laugh or pity the poor bastard.
“What do you mean you tied her up and stripped her down against her will?” he asked, barging his way inside.
“Just what I said. We made a deal—if I could make her come, she would tell me everything she knows.”
Not knowing Brenna well, Cameron couldn’t say for sure that Thorn was lying, but it sounded fishy.
“If you couldn’t?”
“I’d leave her alone. But we both know I can’t do that until we have some info on Curtis. We have to run the bastard down, and Brenna is our only lead.”
With the trial in five days? Yeah, he was feeling the heat. Curtis had skipped town and knew a thousand scumbags who would provide him a million places to hide. He didn’t want to play hardball with Brenna. Playing Thorn’s game, whatever it was, might cost him his badge. But when he looked into the faces of the slavers’ victims—old men and women forced to labor in fields or over sewing machines until they dropped, or young boys and girls stripped of their innocence in cruel brothels catering to the depraved—he was determined to give this case his all. Husbands and wives, parents and children, had all been separated, their lives forever changed. The American dream shattered because of greedy pricks like Lawton and his boss, Julio Marco.
Lawton had agreed to turn evidence for the state. The Feds wouldn’t comment on the condition of their case, so Cam wasn’t about to leave any stone unturned, just in case they had a big bag of nothing. His job was to make sure the state’s case stuck like Superglue. That meant hunting down Lawton. Brenna was his only hope at this point.
It sucked when his job played hell with his ethics.
“Agreed,” Cam told Thorn reluctantly. “What do you have so far?”
“Shit. Nothing about Lawton. She keeps swearing she knows nothing.”
“You’re not buying it?”
“Why would Lawton let some woman he barely knows and wasn’t fucking stay in his little mountain hideaway?”
“He wouldn’t.” Cameron sighed. “Anything else?”
“About her body, plenty. She’s a hot little piece with a bare pussy that tastes like ambrosia. But something’s wrong, man. She doesn’t just come when stimulated like other women. She’s looking for someone sensitive. That’s where you come in.”
Cameron frowned as a picture of Thorn’s head between Brenna’s slender thighs popped into his head. He wished he could say it disturbed him, but damn it, no. It aroused him. He’d never been the voyeur type and was never sexually fixated during cases. It had to stop.
“You think I’m going to arouse information out of her?” he asked.
“Yeah, do that sensitive shit you do best, she’ll fold like a lawn chair and start singing like a good churchgoer on Sunday.”
“Did you try straightforward questioning, without the fondling?”
Thorn nodded. “I wasn’t getting anything out of her. Then I got…distracted. Besides, interrogation isn’t my thing. I cuff ‘em and bring ‘em in. I leave all that evidence and confession stuff to you cop types.”
Cameron shook his head. Yes, Thorn’s ADD impatience would be an impediment to good investigation. His insistence on living his life through his dick would be a real issue when it came to questioning beautiful women like Brenna.
“All right, let me see her. I’m not touching her to get information out of her, Thorn. Sex isn’t a bet or a game or a deal. It’s people sharing their bodies and emotions, being close to each other—”
“Oh, vomit. You two are going to get along great.”
Thorn stomped off, deeper into the dark house. At least he’d had the foresight not to flip on lights, just in case one of Julio Marco’s hit men was looking for an easy target.
Down an adobe-tiled path that bisected the kitchen and family room area, Cameron followed Thorn. A wall signaled a dead end, then Thorn turned left and opened the door.
Soft yellow light glowed in every corner of the room, falling over Brenna’s bound, naked body, exposing every inch he’d been imagining since meeting her. Immediately, the nagging erection he’d been trying to shake for the last fifteen hours returned with a vengeance.
Damn. He had to get his mind off his cock, and what he’d love to do with it to Brenna.
“Too much light in here. If our friend Julio has one of his