WHEN NIGHT FALLS
Silhouette Intimate Moments #1170
August 2002

“Half this damn town thinks I got away with murder,” he told her, clenching his hands into tight fists. He didn’t trust himself not to touch her, to see if her skin would be as hot as her eyes. “Not again. Not anymore. Not with Emmie’s life on the line.”

“You’re distorting the issue,” she said, and her voice softened. “This isn’t about before. It’s about now, your daughter, bringing her home. How many times do I have to tell you?” She paused, stepped closer. The fervor in her eyes outshone the stars in the night sky. “We want the same thing, Liam.”

Once, he’d insisted she use the casual version of his name. Now, the sound of it on her smoky voice struck him as entirely too intimate. “You want rules,” he corrected, trying to re-erect the walls he’d let fall into disrepair. “Procedure. You want to make your daddy proud. But you know what? It’s too late for that. What you do doesn’t matter to your father. He’s gone.”

“This has nothing to do with my father.”

“Doesn’t it?”

She shook her head, sending her loose hair swirling. “Not even close. You’re lashing out at me because I’m here, and there’s no one else.”

He winced, hating the hurt in her voice. That wasn’t what he wanted, just distance. Space. Objectivity. “I’ve got a punching bag inside if I just want to lash out blindly. That’s not what this is about. This is about the fact those rules you cling to aren’t going to bring my daughter home.”

She frowned. “Neither will carelessness.”

Frustration tightened through him. She didn’t understand, and he didn’t know how to make her. Didn’t know why it mattered so much that she did.

Silence stretched between them, accentuating the warm air rushing against his back from the open front door, the frigid night air cutting into his chest. He knew what happened when temperature extremes collided.

“There’s a difference between carelessness and calculated risk,” he said as levelly as he could. “I think you know as well as I do that rules are for the weak, and that’s what you’re fighting. Because you’re not weak. You’re strong. You were taught one thing, but instinct, your heart, tells you something altogether different. You realize rules hold us back, put parameters and restraints on desire like a wet strait-jacket.”

A strangled noise tore from her throat. “You’re actually going to stand here and tell me you reject rules because they’re like a strait-jacket to desire?” She looked like she wanted to press her hands to his chest and shove him backward, but she didn’t. She just glared up at him with those magnificent, expressive eyes of hers, her chest rising and falling with each jerky breath. “You? The one who calls himself entrepreneur and father, but not man? The one who keeps every crumb of desire locked so firmly away you might as well be a eunuch?”

Everything inside him went very still. “A eunuch?”

“A man who can’t—”

Instinct took over. Need. Without thinking, he took her shoulders in his hands and pulled her against him. Her eyes flared wide, her breathing caught. She stared up at him, lips parted, as though he held a switchblade in his hands, not the soft wool of her sweater.

Primitive satisfaction at finally rattling the unflappable detective spurred him on. Blood roared through his ears like a battle cry. His vision blurred.

“Let there be no mistake, detective. I can. And I do.” His mouth came down on hers, then. Hard..

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