Chapter Seventeen

Garrett jolted awake, and not because he was finished sleeping.

There was someone in the house.

It was dark, but he had no conception of what time it was. He heard nothing, could see nothing, but knew beyond doubt there was another person in the house with him. It was an unmistakable sense of presence.

He grabbed for the Glock in the top drawer of the bed stand, discarded the idea of clothes. Instead he threw off the bedcovers.

Naked, he eased into the hall, his heart pumping hard. It was dark, but there was a light at the end of it, dimmer than the living-room light would have been. In the kitchen, then . . .

He stopped at the end of the hall, pressed against the wall, and steadied his weapon as he strained to hear.

There was a soft, hydraulic swish. Refrigerator?

He carefully stuck his head around the wall of the hall to survey the dark living room. No one. Then he crossed the hardwood floor in swift steps, stalking barefoot, holding the Glock in a double grip before him, and peered around the separating wall into the kitchen.

Carolyn stood at the refrigerator, blond hair cascading around bare golden shoulders. She wore nothing but a clinging cream silk teddy and held a dripping bottle of Cristal, and looked as out of place in his little kitchen as a runway model in a trailer park double-wide.

She swiveled on showgirl legs, surveyed Garrett’s Glock and his nakedness, and smiled a cat smile. “I hope you got some sleep. We have celebrating to do.”

She poured champagne into the two flutes she held carelessly in her left hand and walked barefoot and pedicured across the kitchen tiles to him. She stopped in front of him and gently pushed the gun aside. “Sorry,” she said briefly, barely glancing at it. She put a glass in his hand and clinked her own against it, then drained the flute as she leaned forward against him. There was nothing but the thinnest silk between his now aching hardness and the warm wet of her. Garrett ground himself forward as he drained his glass, then pushed her against the counter, pushed the silk aside, and eased the length of his shaft into her. Carolyn laughed deep in her throat and wrapped one sleek thigh around him as he bent her back on the counter, tearing the silk of her teddy down, exposing lush breasts that he pressed his palms into, feeling hard nipples against his hands as he thrust; spearing, slamming, into the wet suction of her cleft. He moved his mouth to her breasts, sucking greedily as he clutched the globes of her ass and his aching cock plunged deeper and deeper and she gasped into his ear. And as he ground himself into her, he had a flash of dark hair spilling on creamy skin and a gleaming dagger between perfect breasts and the thought made him explode in molten, volcanic waves, with an inarticulate cry as he collapsed into Carolyn’s heat.