Page 32 of Love Me Darkly
“Do what you gotta do. But while you’re at it, maybe consider that your investigation doesn’t involve you watching me at the club, or stalking me to my apartment, or dancing with me, or …”
She shook her head as if uncertain how to put the rest. Hell, Mateo wouldn’t know how to express it either.
“No,” he agreed, pulled in until the tip of his nose brushed along hers. “It doesn’t.”
He was moving without thinking, acting without discipline or restraint. It had begun to leech away from him the moment he’d pulled her against his body.
“My investigation doesn’t require me to think about you constantly, or worry that you’re in trouble, or fantasize about you dancing in that cage. It doesn’t require me to remember dancing with you like we were fucking with our clothes on and get so fucking hard I can’t think straight. It doesn’t require me to be obsessed with the smell of you, the vanilla and the musk, and …” he pressed his nose into her neck and inhaled, his breath coming out on a shaky exhale. “I can’t get it out of my head. I can’t get you out of my head.”
Her chest heaved with labored breaths as she stared at him without blinking. She slowly brought her hands up to his chest. Her chin trembled, but she steadied it and then tipped it up. “You can’t. I can’t. We … we can’t.”
No, they couldn’t. They shouldn’t. But Mateo had lost hold of logic a while ago. His defenses had crumbled into rubble at his feet, and nothing could have stopped him from acting on the urge that had fallen on him the second she’d tipped up her chin as if offering her lips. As if daring him to take what he knew he shouldn’t.
He gripped her jaw. “I have to. I have to.”
She whimpered as he closed in, then moaned against his lips, lighting him on fire like a single match stroke in a gasoline-soaked room. He went up in flames, consuming her with all the hunger tearing him up inside. He devoured her mouth with hungry pushes and pulls, forgoing any attempt at finesse or skill. He couldn’t think past the taste of her, the smell of her, the feel of her. Her lips were even softer than he’d expected, welcoming him in an embrace of flesh.
She kissed him back with just as much fervor, her hands sliding up until they were tangled in his hair. Her fingers tightened, wrapping around the strands, and he hissed against her mouth from the sharp sting. He tightened his hold on her jaw and tipped her head up, plunging his tongue in. She met it with her own, shuddering when wet flesh slid against wet flesh.
They were moving, feet scuffling and legs tangling as they went at each other, lips meeting and parting, tongues stroking, breaths panting. His back hit a wall, and she fell into him, hands reaching, touching him, sliding everywhere. His shoulders, his back, his arms. She grasped his hands and put them back to her waist, silently commanding him to hold her closer, tighter. He obliged, one arm banding around her waist and squeezing her against him until he was surprised she could breathe. But he could supply her air, and he did, groaning and gasping while feeling like he was drowning himself. He palmed her ass and squeezed, flexing his hips so she could feel how hard he was. Mateo descended into a place where there was only physical sensation. Melody kissing him, licking him, biting his lip. Melody squirming against him, her breasts teasing his chest, the mound between her legs teasing his cock.
He reversed their positions, spinning her so that her back pressed to the wall in his place. He grasped her thigh and wrenched it upward, opening her. She wrapped it around his hips and used it to anchor him, holding him between her legs. He took the other leg up and lifted her, pressing in, crowding her against the wall, all without breaking the seal of their lips.
But then there was more.
There was the line of her jaw, sharp and regal as he traced it with his lips. There was the point of her pulse, throbbing and thrumming against his tongue. There was the slender column of her neck, angled perfectly for him to taste. He took deep pulls of that intoxicating fragrance, trembling at the way it suffused him, a vapor entangling with his blood. He was drowning, falling and flying, melting and hardening at the same time.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“Melody,” she moaned. “Just Melody.”
He growled, biting her lip until she squealed. “Who. Are. You?”
She bit him back, harder than he had, until he tasted blood. She narrowed her eyes when he jerked his head back and licked at the copper drop. “Melody.”
At least she had dropped the ‘Johnson.’ They both knew her to be an illusion. She slid out of his grasp, and Mateo took a step back, then another. His lips tingled and his blood roared in his ears, almost blocking out her voice. It penetrated the haze, and he blinked, focusing on her mouth.
“I won’t help you,” she declared. “But I won’t rat you out either.”
Mateo wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, coming away with another drop of blood. The sight and taste of it didn’t affect him like it should. It made him want to press her back against that wall and brave her teeth again. It made him want to spill his blood at her feet until she was satisfied. It made his cock twitch at the thought that he’d like to return the favor.
He had already stated what needed to be said. Instead of reiterating his intention to mow down anyone involved—including her—he stared back at her in silence. She stood there for a moment, seeming to wrestle with what to do or say next. She apparently figured it out, because without another word, she scooped up her jacket and threw it on. She shot him a look over her shoulder that clearly said he should be gone when she got back. Mateo leaned against the wall and folded his arms over his chest. The slam of the door echoed through the room like a gunshot.
Only when her footsteps had faded down the steps did he breathe again. The exhale was one of relief as well as exhaustion. His inhale was overwhelmed by vanilla and musk and that spicy thing that had Mateo by the balls. He couldn’t breathe without pulling her in. Couldn’t look around this space without seeing her everywhere. Couldn’t close his eyes without feeling her, tasting her.
He tore from the living room, ripping open the sliding door to the balcony and going out the way he’d come. He couldn’t move fast enough to be away from Melody and her apartment, from the scene of his own destruction and the principles he had left lying on the floor along with his resolve.
The night had gone completely dark, leaving him cloaked in shadows as he circled back to his car. His hands trembled as he started it, even when he gripped the wheel so hard the leather creaked against his palms. Taking a deep breath, he lay his forehead against the wheel and closed his eyes. It smelled like a new car in here, like leather and clean linen air freshener. But Melody still clung to his clothes. Her touch still burned everywhere her hands had been. His lips still prickled and stung from her kiss and her bite.
“Fuck,” he whispered. Then he screamed, “Fuck!”
Throwing his head back against the seat, he scrubbed his hand over his mouth, hard enough to drag another drop of blood from the puncture in his lip. But he couldn’t escape what had just happened, what he had allowed to happen. Later on, when he had calmed down and regained control of his faculties, he would think over every word that had been said between them. Mateo would consider the evidence of her false identity and her financials and try to figure out what it meant. He would push forward with this case as he had done from the very beginning. Until then, he would work to bring himself back under the iron control that had ruled most of his life. He was a soldier, a disciplined senior agent, and a profiler. He made decisions based on what was tangible; what he could see, hear, and touch. So far, everything tangible told him that Melody was dangerous. What he felt didn’t matter in the end. Unless Darcy’s search on her turned up something new, he’d remain in the dark about it. Until he caught her in a crime. Then, he would be forced to do what was necessary.
No matter how difficult that might be.
Mateo drew his sidearm from its holster as he crept on silent feet toward the back of an old, Victorian-style house. Things had moved at breakneck speed over the past twelve hours, leading to two raids happening in the city of New Orleans at the exact same time. Jones had uncovered the location of what they were pretty sure was the ‘NOLA house’ referenced on the wiretap. Real estate purchases made by Valemont Holdings numbered in the dozens, but Jones had narrowed it down with the other parameters Mateo had suggested. Frequent neighbor complaints and multiple police visits had marked the place as suspicious. Darcy’s recovered satellite imaging revealed that there were often white vans parked around the back of the house—vans like those he’d seen at the Berenger Warehouse. The place had been raided once after several anonymous tips identified it as a brothel, but local law enforcement hadn’t found a thing. Mateo knew they would find exactly what they had come looking for this time. Suede and his crew gave no indication that they knew the feds were on to them. Which meant they wouldn’t be in a hurry to move the trafficked women.
With the wiretap and Jones’s and Darcy’s findings backing her up, Carlisle had pursued a warrant for the NOLA house on top of the one she’d requested for Berenger Warehouse. The approvals had come back after half a day, and the raids were planned to occur at four-thirty a.m. on opposite sides of town. Mateo didn’t want a raid on one place to raise the alarm in the other. Evidence could be made to disappear pretty quickly, and he didn’t want to give them an inch of breathing room. So, a federal task force had been called in to handle the warehouse raid. Mateo would lead his own team in infiltrating the NOLA house.
