Devious - Lisa Jackson [154]
Hot, arcing thrills spasmed through her veins. Hotter and faster as his fingers and tongue explored her. Her mind was filled with the want of him, her body demanding more as he slid upward, keeping her legs parted with his body, kissing the perspiration from her skin.
With a moan, she touched the strident muscles of his shoulders and arms, her fingertips brushing his skin, causing the flesh to tighten.
“Careful,” he warned as she skimmed her hands lower, across the washboard of his abdomen and along his hips.
“Never.” She kissed him with wild abandon, savoring the salty taste of him on her tongue, drinking in the fresh scent of him, rediscovering the planes and angles of his body. The corded, long muscles of his arms, the thick strength of his shoulders and chest, the tight bunch of his buttocks, and the hard flesh of his thighs.
She touched him everywhere, kissed him where she could, pleasured him as long as she dared before he pulled her upward into his arms. Then, holding her fast beneath him, he levered himself upon his elbows and, looking into her eyes, slid her knees farther apart with his own.
She gasped as he hovered over her.
Then she waited.
Licked her lips in anticipation.
But he didn’t move.
Just stared down at her.
“Slade?” she finally said.
“Yeah?”
“What is it? Why aren’t you . . . ?”
His smile stretched wide then, a white slash caught in the moonlight streaming through the open window.
“I am. In time.”
“In time?”
“Uh-huh.” He smoothed the hair away from her face, and she felt his hands tremble. “I love you, Valerie,” he said, his voice gruff with sincerity as he thrust deep into her. “Goddamn it all to hell, I love you!”
Could she do it?
Really?
Leave St. Marguerite’s forever?
Lucia swallowed hard and skimmed down the darkened hallways of the convent on her tiptoes, making certain she didn’t create any sound whatsoever. Her hastily conceived plan that harkened back to the waywardness of her youth, rather than to her time at St. Marguerite’s, had been forming in her brain for the past twenty-four hours, gelling. Perhaps if she left now, before the voice became louder, more insistent, she could save the life of another nun.
Maybe even her own.
Heart thudding, sweat collecting between her shoulder blades and on her palms, she hurried past the sconces, set low, her shadow passing like a ghost behind her, the long hallways seeming endless and narrow, closing in on her.
Around every corner, she expected to run into someone or something, though she didn’t know what. Didn’t want to know. The voice in her head was quiet tonight, but she was scared out of her mind that she would hear it again and that it would force her toward another gruesome death scene where one of her friends, another woman who had pledged her life to God, would be dead, skin cold, eyes lifeless.
She shuddered and kept moving, down the stairs, her feet as quiet as moth’s wings. Along the corridor past the chapel and farther to the back door of the mother superior’s office she hurried.
Over her own shallow breathing and the clamoring of her heart, she thought she heard the drop of a footstep, the scrape of leather against the old, hard floors.
You’re just imagining things. No one is up. No one is following you. You’re the only one stalking around in the middle of the night.
But that wasn’t true, was it? Sister Camille had been walking the halls around midnight, and so had Sister Asteria, right? The police thought they had made it to the crime scenes on their own two legs. And hadn’t she herself seen someone escaping the chapel on the night of Camille’s death? Then there was Sister Edwina—hadn’t Lucia seen her walking the halls late at night?
They weren’t the only ones.
Lucia stopped.
Held her breath.
Closed her eyes and listened, her ears straining.
Was that a footstep?
Or not?
Had whatever she’d heard stopped?
Opening