Midnight Man (Midnight #1)(32)

She turned and their eyes met and the breath left her body at the heat and power of those gunmetal dark eyes. He was remembering, too.

“So,” Bud prodded, not looking up from his notes. “Let’s see if I got it straight. You can’t sleep, so you get up and go to the kitchen—“

With difficulty, Suzanne wrenched her attention away from John. She struggled to concentrate. “Yes. Well, no. First I went to the window in my bedroom, just for a second. It was snowing, very lightly. I love it when it does that, just a few fat snowflakes falling down. It was what I call an aurora borealis night—you know, when the clouds are low enough to reflect the lights from downtown?”

Bud nodded but John looked blank. Well, he wasn’t from Portland. Apparently he wasn’t from anywhere in particular. Though he must have spent some time in the south. There’d been a faint southern inflection in his voice, whispering in her ear as he thrust hard and fast inside her. She bit her lips. She couldn’t be thinking about this now.

“Suzanne?” Bud was looking at her oddly. Thank God he wasn’t a mind reader. “Go on.”

She couldn’t talk and think of John at the same time. She turned to look at Bud, like spot focusing while dancing. “So I was watching the lights reflected off the clouds when I realized that I was seeing other lights. Or rather a light. A focused one, flickering off the hedges. I watched it for a while, and couldn’t understand what it was.”

Bud rose and gazed out the window, measuring, then looked back at John when he sat down again. “A flashlight,” he said.

“From the office,” John confirmed.

Suzanne looked from one to the other. “Yes, you’re right.” How annoying. It had taken her at least ten minutes peering outside the window, puzzled, to reach that conclusion. “So I decided to go check to see—“

“Jesus, Suzanne,” Bud said, half rising out of his seat.

“You fucking what?” John roared, outraged. His hand crushed hers in a hard grip. “You’re looking at the flashlight of an intruder and you fucking go check it out! What the hell’s the matter with you, lady?”

Suzanne recoiled. It was the first time she’d heard him use what probably was a sailor’s vocabulary. She wasn’t used to being spoken to like that. She tried to jerk her hand out from his, but he held on tight. There was no breaking that grip, no getting away.

She wanted to be indignant, to respond icily to both Bud and John—John especially—but the truth was they were right. She hadn’t thought her actions through. Like last night—no, like the night before last—when John had lectured her on what she needed to secure the building.

Her mind simply didn’t run along those tracks.

Bud was scowling heavily now. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard and I’ve heard a lot in my time. You realize you might have an intruder in the house and you amble on over to see what he’s doing?” His deep voice was heavy with disapproval as he wrote in his pad. “Do you realize how reckless that is?”

Suzanne refrained from rolling her eyes. “Well, that’s not quite what happened, so you don’t need to raise your voice. I went to investigate what the light source was. Not having yet reached the conclusion that I had an intruder in the house like some lightning-swift people I know.”

Irony was lost on them. Bud was writing busily and John had released her hand to rise from the couch, gun in hand, and look outside the windows. He pulled back the curtains and peered intently out from first one window then the other. His broad shoulders blocked the entire window out. He stood watch for a moment, silent and motionless, then checked the door to the kitchen, the door to the bedroom. At each movement, he checked back at her as well, as if in the space of a few seconds she could disappear or someone could leap out from behind the couch to steal her away. He moved swiftly, silently, like a panther pacing the perimeter of a cage. When he returned to the couch, he placed the gun quietly back on the table, within reach. He placed his left arm again around the back of the couch, only this time he cupped her shoulder.

“Did you switch on the lights?” Bud asked.

“No,” Suzanne replied. She was suddenly struck by the idea that that might have saved her life. The intruder would have come after her immediately. “Good Lord, if I had—“ She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“It would be your blood spatters the crime scene unit would be studying right now instead of his.” John finished the sentence for her, his grip almost painfully tight on her shoulder. There were pale lines of some strong emotion—anger?—around his mouth.

Suzanne drew in a shocked breath. Her mind reeled at how close it had been. She remembered the intense feelings in the closet. How fiercely she wanted to live.

So close. She’d come so close to dying. A movement of her fingers, a flick of the light switch, and it would have been over. The blood drained from her face as she thought of what the intruder’s gun could have done to her.

Both Bud and John were watching her carefully. The low murmurs of the techs working the body drifted up. She felt foolish, and tired and completely out of her depth.

“Go on,” Bud said finally.

“Okay.” Suzanne bit her lip. “Okay, um, I walked through the living room, this room, and into the kitchen. I heard this noise. Like a—a thud. Like someone bumping into furniture. That’s when I realized that it was someone bumping around. In my office. The door was ajar. I peeked around the door and I saw him.”