Fatal Reckoning (Fatal #14)(30)
“I can do the first part. The second thing might be harder. Will you call me if you need me?”
“Who else would I call?”
He gathered her into his embrace, their bodies responding to each other the way they always did when her skin came into contact with his.
Because she couldn’t resist him, she rubbed against him suggestively.
“I thought you were hungover and cranky.”
“I am.” She curled her hand around his hard cock and stroked, drawing a deep groan from him.
“Babe…”
“Hmm?”
“We don’t have to.”
“I know, but I want to.” No one could take her mind off her grief and stress the way he could. And even with her head pounding and her stomach feeling iffy, she wanted him.
“Scotty…”
“Celia will get him up.”
He kissed her neck and fondled her breasts. “You sure you feel like it?”
“I definitely feel like it, but there’s a very real possibility my head could actually explode.”
“We’ll go nice and easy.” His words and lips rendered her powerless to resist him, not that she ever wanted to do that. “I’ll give you my magic elixir for hangovers.”
“Even after brushing my teeth, it’s possible my breath stinks like sewer gas.”
The low rumble of his laughter echoed off the shower walls. “Thanks for the warning.”
“I’m serious. It’s a toxic waste dump in there.”
“I’ll steer clear.” He pressed her against the shower wall and lifted her effortlessly, which she found ridiculously sexy. “Hold on to me. I’m right here whenever you need me.”
“That makes everything that’s wrong better.”
“I would do anything to spare you this pain.”
“I know you would.”
He slid into her and dropped his head to her shoulder, holding her tight against him as he throbbed inside her.
Nothing in the world could top the high she got from making love with him. Sam buried her fingers in his hair and held on tight to her love. She was thankful for him every day, but never more so than at times like this when he seemed to know what she needed before she did. And as he moved slowly and carefully so as not to jar her tortured head, she was able to let it all go and be carried away by him.
They came together, gasping and clinging to each other, and when she floated down from the high, she realized her head didn’t hurt as badly as it had before, which made her laugh.
He scowled playfully at her. “Are you mocking my technique?”
“Hardly. I’m celebrating your hangover elixir.”
“Did it work?”
She tipped her head to the left and then the right, waiting for the pain that didn’t come. “I think it did.”
“Then my work here is nearly finished.” He withdrew from her and got busy washing her while she leaned back against the wall and let him tend to her, knowing he needed that as much as she did. Watching the play of his muscles, the fall of his hair over his forehead, the morning scruff on his jaw, she was tempted to take one more day off to spend with him.
But then she thought of that goddamned wooden box that contained the ruined body of her father, and her resolve returned with a fiery thirst for vengeance. She straightened out of the slouch she’d fallen into under his tender ministrations and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
“I wish there was more I could do.”
“People say it will take time.”
“We’ll get through it, no matter how long it takes.”
Knowing he would be by her side through it all made the unbearable slightly more bearable.
“Let’s go get our littles up and spend some time with them before I have to go.”
* * *
NINETY MINUTES LATER, she walked into HQ for the first time in ten days, entering through the morgue entrance to avoid the media scrum planted outside the main doors. Lilia had reported receiving hundreds of requests for interviews from reporters wanting to know how she was handling her father’s death. How did they think she was handling it? She’d asked Lilia to release a statement that said Second Lady Samantha Holland Cappuano and her family deeply appreciated the outpouring of condolences and sympathy since the death of her father and that she would have no further public statement about her loss.
You’d think that politely worded request would take them off the scent of a story, but alas, the bloodhounds were still salivating.
Between Nick’s shower elixir, six hundred milligrams of Motrin and two cups of coffee, she was feeling slightly more coherent than she had upon awaking. However, she still felt “off,” the same way she had after her father’s shooting, when she’d waded through every minute of the unfolding nightmare with an unrelenting ache in her heart. In some ways, that had been worse than this. As sad as she was to know she’d never see him again, the weeks after he’d been shot, when they’d been forced to confront the new reality of his devastating injury, had been among the darkest days of her life.
Sam went into her office, flipped on the lights and sat behind her desk, searching for the mojo she usually brought to the job and hoping it would find her as the day progressed. Firing up her desktop computer, she began the arduous task of sifting through ten days’ worth of emails. She’d been so busy last week with Alden and Aubrey that she’d barely looked at it and couldn’t find the wherewithal to bother now with emails about mandatory training or time-sheet updates or anything other than what she was there to do.