“That was a long time ago.” Nessa should have known he had investigated her. That was what he did. But she felt as if he’d been digging through her underwear drawer without her knowledge, and she hated that.
“And I need to have someone here who can open the vault if I’m unavailable.” Stephanie’s outrage almost equaled Nessa’s. “Really, if I needed assistance in running my bank, I would ask Mr. MacNaught.”
If Jeremiah noticed resentment from either of them, he gave no indication. “Why wouldn’t you be available?”
Eric muttered something under his breath.
“I’m ill sometimes, and I do take vacation—oh, why am I explaining myself to you?” Stephanie grabbed the drawers out of Eric’s arms. “Give those to me.”
He let go.
She staggered under the weight, then stepped into the vault and out of sight.
Jeremiah looked right at Eric. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘She’s never here in time to open the vault.’ That’s what I said.” Eric looked defiantly at Nessa. “Someone needs to tell them the truth, Miss Nessa. This isn’t right!”
“Mr. Mac has nothing to do with the bank. He’s an investigator,” she reminded him.
“Maybe so, but he seems like he’s got the chops to get things done,” Eric answered.
Stephanie stepped out of the vault in time to catch Eric’s last words, and the stupid boy betrayed himself with a blush.
“I’ve been thinking,” Stephanie said. “Your point about the vault is well taken, Mr. Mac. Therefore, I think it might be wise if you and Ionessa signed in to acknowledge you were entering the vault.” Picking up the clipboard with sign-in sheet, she offered it to Jeremiah.
He took it. “Why do you call her Ionessa?”
Stephanie blinked in astonishment. No one ever jumped her about that. “Because, um, isn’t that her name?”
“She prefers Nessa. I wouldn’t recommend muddying your reputation as a good manager by failing to remember a matter as important as your assistant manager’s name.” Jeremiah scribbled an illegible name on the list and handed it back.
“Of course, you would know so much about how to be a bank manager.” Stephanie’s scorching tones chastised him. “I’ll have you know I graduated summa cum laude from Tulane, and never did any of my business classes have a lecture about whether or not I should remember the name of someone like—”
“I would stop right now.” Jeremiah didn’t raise his voice.
But something about his tone must have slapped some sense into Stephanie, for she broke off with a gasp.
“Don’t.” Nessa touched his arm. “Really. It’s not necessary.”
He looked down at her again, and this time he showed emotion. She couldn’t read it. She didn’t know if it was passion or possessiveness. But she did know he didn’t give a damn about courtesy.
And Stephanie knew it, too.
He had betrayed too much to a woman so filled with spite, her eyes were muddy with it.
Stephanie’s hand trembled as she extended the sign-in sheet. “Here…Nessa.”
Nessa carefully wrote her name and filled in the time—six twenty-three p.m.—for both of them.
“Thank you, Nessa. Don’t forget that the vault will close automatically at seven, and unless there’s an override from the panel out here”—Stephanie tapped the electronic security—“it’s secure until Nessa or I or someone with a code opens it in the morning.”
“Thirty minutes is enough time for me to look around,” Jeremiah said.
Stephanie smiled—my God, that was a bone-chilling smile—and backed away, clipboard in hand. “You don’t want to spend the whole night trapped inside.”
Eighteen
Nessa led the way through the round door into the dim vault.
Frederick Vycor’s vault was long and narrow, about eight feet wide and fifteen feet long. The ceiling was ten feet high. A long counting table was fixed to the wall close to the vault door, and there Stephanie had placed the tellers’ drawers. An entire unit of oak shelves was built into the opposite wall and stacked with bills—fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds, all banded and official.
Jeremiah slowly walked around the vault, looking at the walls, the ceiling, the shelves.
Nessa watched him, a half smile on her face. “What are you looking for?”
“I’m being a tourist, wanting to see the scene of a legendary crime.”
She laughed. “No. Oh, no. Not you. Vulgar curiosity has never prompted any of your decisions.”
“You think you know me that well?”
“I don’t pretend to understand what makes you do what you do, but I’m quite sure you don’t waste your employer’s time with frivolous pursuits.”
“Quite right. I don’t.” He started the circuit again, his hands clasped behind his back, his gaze moving from point to point, assessing the vault. “What’s the construction, do you know?”
“Word is Vycor had the walls poured in twelve inches of concrete and steel.” She leaned against the wall, waiting while Jeremiah ran his hands over the far wall. “He was Hitler in his bunker.”
“Hitler? Because he ran the bank by the rules?”
“Because he was a ruthless pig who never bent the rules.”
“Do you bend the rules?”
He watched her as if he already knew the answer. “When it’s the right thing to do.”
“The right thing? As defined by you?” His tone goaded her.
She responded with rising ire. “As defined by someone who doesn’t routinely kick puppies or foreclose on widows.”
“For someone with your reputation, you’re very quick to make judgments.”
“With my reputation? What do you mean, with my reputation?”
“According to Mr. MacNaught—”
“The original puppy kicker himself!”
He began again, his eyes glowing with impatience. “According to Mr. MacNaught, you—” He stopped.
“I what?”
“Sh.” Jeremiah held up his hand. His head turned slowly toward the door.
Then she heard it, too. The ticking of the timer. The smooth sound of steel hinges gliding toward…
They both sprang toward the door. They hit it precisely as the lock clanked shut with a solid clank.
“No!” Nessa slammed her hand on the cool steel. “Hey!” The sound of her fist was feeble, barely carrying to her own ear.
Jeremiah stepped back and glanced at his slim gold watch. “I have 6:50 p.m.”
Nessa glanced at her watch. “So do I.”
Jeremiah pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped it open. “There’s no cell service in here.” He shut it again. “Of course not.”
“I wonder if the power went out during the storm and the timer is off.” Nessa rubbed her forehead with both her hands, trying to absorb the horror of getting into a fight with Mr. MacNaught’s personal insurance investigator, then getting him stuck in the vault all night…. With her.
“Anything’s possible. That is not, however, my first suspicion. I suspect Decker may have reset the timer.”
Nessa remembered Stephanie’s smile, the one that resembled a wolf about to dine on Nessa’s entrails. “Of course. You’re right. She hates me.”
“I’ve begun to realize that. Nor is she fond of me.”
Nessa gave a single, startled guffaw. “You kicked her out of her office.”
Jeremiah didn’t laugh in return. He didn’t smile. He didn’t move. He just looked at her.
And all she could hear was silence.
The walls were so thick. Stephanie had perpetrated the perfect practical joke. The bank was empty of customers. The tellers had left. Eric…poor Eric. Stephanie could browbeat him into doing whatever she ordered, and if she said to leave without securing the premises, he would.
No one would miss them. Jeremiah and Nessa were locked in for the night.
The aunts would get worried and notify the police
. The police would put out a bulletin. Everyone in New Orleans would know she’d gone missing. And in the morning when the door was opened—there wouldn’t be one person who didn’t know that Ionessa Dahl had spent the night with that tango-dancing Yankee insurance investigator, and no one in their right mind would look at Jeremiah Mac and believe they’d spent the hours counting money. Because men might be clueless about him, but no red-blooded woman could look at Jeremiah Mac and not think sex.
She couldn’t look at him and not think sex. And the way he was looking at her made her suspect that the weekend away and the day spent apart did not, as she had hoped, mean he wasn’t interested in her. It meant that he had briefly backed off and now would seize his opportunity.
She might be lonely. She might be horny. But here, in a vault so protected from sound she could hear nothing but the rush of her breath in her lungs, where the two of them were so isolated, she was very aware that sex with him was likely to be dark and emotional and far, far too addictive.
She pressed her back flat on the door and beat a useless, panicked tattoo with the flat of her hands. “What are we going to do?”
His gaze fixed on hers. He slid his jacket off his shoulders, draped it on the counting table. Strolled toward her. Leaning one arm on the door beside her head, he very deliberately placed his other hand on her thigh. The heat of his palm burned through the linen to her skin, rendering her…immobile. Caught in the net of his eyes.
She began to breathe slowly, deeply, trying to get in enough oxygen to maintain her hold on good sense.
When he began to crumple the material in his fingers, lifting the hem in a slow, bold rhythm, and the cool air washed over her bare skin, she realized there wasn’t enough oxygen in the world.
He bunched her skirt at her waist and asked, “What should we do?” His voice rasped as he repeated her question. He used his large hand to span from the jut of her hipbone to the cotton-covered cleft between her legs.
A single thought sliced through her consciousness—out of a drawer filled with cheap, old panties, these were her oldest.
Good timing, Nessa.
“What should we do?” he repeated. His fingers stirred and stirred again, shocking her, arousing her. “What we have wanted to do since the first moment we laid eyes on each other.”
Nineteen
For the first time, Nessa believed, really believed, Jeremiah’s story about being an escort. Because right now, she would pay him to sleep with her. She’d seen the movies, she’d read the books, but nothing in her life had come close to the fantasy. Yet the way he touched her, so intimately, promised that sex with him would be all she’d ever imagined.
And when he slipped one finger beneath the elastic of her panties and lightly, so lightly, touched her clit, rapture hummed through her. With eyes wide open and every sense centered on her pleasure, she moaned. Faintly, but so clearly she heard herself, and knew he heard her.
There was no pretending. Not now.
His broad chest lifted in a long breath. He smiled, a dark, satisfied lift of the lips. Taking the narrow waistband of her panties in both his hands, he ripped it apart.
She gasped, startled by the implied violence.
She was alone with him. So alone. No one knew they were here. And she barely knew him, this man with the battered face, this man who shrugged off a gunshot.
Did she have a choice?
Would he hurt her if she refused?
Would he hurt her if she yielded?
He saw her wariness, but typical man, he misread her. “Don’t worry. I’ll buy you new underwear.” He dropped the shreds of her panties, and they fell around one ankle. “I’ll buy you a hundred pairs of underwear, just for the privilege of seeing you in them.”
Okay. He might not make conversation worth a damn, but he knew the right thing to say.
Gathering the hem of her skirt, one side in each hand, he lifted it to her waist and used it as a rope to imprison her against the door. Looking down at her bare legs, at her feet in their red heels, at the juncture where the small strip of curling hair barely covered her. He smiled that dark smile again, and sank to his knees.
“What…?” Still he held her against the door, but she tugged against his restraint.
He used his body to separate her legs and touched his lips to her, a kiss so light she barely felt it…yet it sent a sizzle along her nerves.
Catching his hair in her hands, she lifted his face to hers. “I never allow anyone to do that to me.”
“Never?”
“Never.” Oral sex was too intimate. And it left her too vulnerable.
“Then it’s a good thing I haven’t asked permission.”
She tightened her grip on his hair, fighting to keep his face turned up to hers.
“Remember how I worked my way through college?” he asked.
“Yes.” She couldn’t control him, and shuddered as his breath ruffled her hair and washed over her supersensitive skin.
“I know what I’m doing. I can make you come right away, or I can hold you just on the brink for hours. I can make you so crazy with bliss you can’t speak, or I can make you remember every touch, every lick, every time I graze you with my teeth and fuck you with my tongue.” He kissed her again.
“No.” He made her so horny, she was wet right now. But if she spread her legs and let him look there, taste her there, she’d be embarrassed and…“Just sex,” she said. “Let’s just have sex.”
“No, Ionessa. It’s never going to be just sex. Not with us.” He looked her in the eyes. “I want you. I want to taste you. I want to smell you. I want my fingers inside you. I want to put my skin against yours and become one with you. I want to slide my dick into you and make you scream with pleasure. I want to make love to you in every way possible…. And then I want to do it all over again.”
Her fingers forgot to hold him and fell away. “For a man who never had to talk, you do pretty well.”
“It’s you. You make me want to goddamn write poetry.” His head dipped, and he kissed her there again. “But I’d be lousy at it, so you’d better let me do what I do best.” He kissed her again. And again.
Finally, she realized he was waiting for permission. Permission…yet still he held her tethered against the door.
So that was the kind of man he was—unscrupulous and crafty. And she was locked in the vault with him. “Okay.”
The word was barely a breath, but he heard her.
He slipped his tongue into her folds, delicately opening her to his exploration, and sighed as if in satisfaction.
The sight of him kneeling before her gave her a jolt of some emotion she should be ashamed to claim—she felt as if he were a supplicant, and she liked the idea that she held power over him.
Then he took her clit between his lips and sucked lightly, and delight slammed her against the cool metal.
Yes, there was power here, but it wasn’t hers.
He used his teeth lightly, so lightly, yet each motion exposed a new nerve, and once that nerve was exposed, he showed her pleasure with his tongue and lips.
Her eyes slid closed as he assaulted her with all the expertise at his command, and proved he didn’t lie—he knew how to take a woman to the brink of orgasm and hold her there while she writhed in desperation.
By the time he came to his feet, she’d been pinned to the door for hours, for years, wanting sex, wanting him, with a madness that touched her soul and would never completely be vanquished. She grasped his lapels and tugged him to her, kissing him fiercely, tasting herself on his lips and knowing that she had to have him—now.
“Unbuckle my belt. Unzip my pants.” He took a condom out of his back pocket. “This is up to you.”
It was so not up to her. She had no choice now but to do what he wanted so she could get what she wanted.
She fumbled with the belt, opening it only with his help, then carefully unbuttoned and unzipped him. His trousers dropped to his feet and he kicked them aside, and for th
e first time, she had an inkling why he wanted her to take the initiative.
The erection that lifted his boxers wasn’t like any she’d seen before. Jeremiah was a big man, and this…
He observed her expression, every flicker of her eyelashes, every tremble of her lips, as she cautiously lifted the elastic away from his waist and lowered his underwear.
Her heart, already pounding, took a leap compounded by anticipation and fear. She didn’t think this would be easy…. But he’d utilized every bit of expertise at his disposal to make sure she couldn’t turn back.
He ripped the foil packet open and slid the condom over his dick, and the faint glisten made her think, Lubricant, and thank God.
She placed her hands on his shoulders; they trembled.
As he slipped his palms inside her thighs, the silence grew heavy and dark. He spread her legs wide, lifted her without seeming effort, positioned himself with his hips against her hips and his dick…his dick was hot and dark at the entrance of her body.
He pressed inside her.
She was tense, tight; she was making penetration difficult, but she couldn’t help it. She hadn’t had sex for so long, and never like this: half-dressed, standing up, with a man she barely knew, in a place hidden from the world, cocooned in silence and so aroused she wanted to scream.
Yet despite her body’s resistance, he slid inside the first vital inches.
She caught her breath.
He wasn’t brutal. Quite the opposite. But he was big. Too big.
She tried to get away, but he adjusted her. Lifted her. Lowered her. Pressed again, gained another few inches.
She groaned. He filled her, stretched her. This was too much.
He watched her, his green eyes so intense, lit by the light of his clever mind and his greedy desire.
She couldn’t escape his invasion, not of her mind, not of her body.
She shook her head, denying him, and that made him thrust. For the first time, he moved on her aggressively. He pulled back and thrust again.
“No,” she whispered.
“Yes.” He thrust again and again, his penis rubbing inside her, his pelvis pressing against her, his hold tight and controlling.