Christ, he was turned-on, his boner not deterred by the cold ocean water. “No, I don’t think you’re a bitch, Cassie. You know I don’t.”
She stepped closer. “He, he had a gun,” she said on a shaky note.
And then shit, she was letting go. Not literally, unfortunately. Figuratively. He could see the tears sparkling on her wet cheeks, just streaming down as she wound her arms around his neck.
“Shh, shh.” He pulled her all the way to him. “Don’t cry, Cassie. It’s all right. Don’t cry, baby.”
And suddenly, inevitably, they were kissing, long open-mouthed kisses, not the tentative, light forays he’d allowed them before. He was tasting her, taking her, just as he wanted, burying his tongue in her sweet mouth. Self-control somehow, some way, in the face of her tears, had deserted him completely.
And she wasn’t helping.
The breathy little sighs, the way she leaned into him, all of it set him on fire. In two seconds she was beneath him on the grass, her thighs wide open, her lush tits pressing into his chest as he kissed her, and every erotic dream he’d ever had about her seemed in reach.
“Don’t stop,” she moaned. “Don’t you dare stop, Tommy O’Neal.”
Stopping wasn’t exactly top of mind right now.
She was half out of her skimpy two-piece and he was straining against his shorts and, Christ, he wasn’t stopping.
It was only when he was done and panting over her that he had the panicked thought.
Cassie wasn’t just another girl. She was special.
Oh God, what had he done?
Chapter Nine
Vincetti didn’t seem too happy that Cassie and O’Neal hadn’t come back down to the station with Evan. After a lot of hemming and hawing about recollections being kept fresh, etc., the cop finally deigned to take Evan’s statement. It was considerably shorter than it could have been since he left out anything to do with Andrea and claimed to be just walking by the grocery store when he heard the trouble.
A precautionary call to the state attorney general ensured Evan was allowed to talk to the prisoner alone before he was given his one phone call. Vincetti wasn’t too happy about that either. As he closed the outer door to the jails, leaving Evan with the prisoner, only cell bars between them, he said curtly, “Make it quick. We follow correct police procedure in this state, no matter who you know, and this scumbag is getting his one phone call. And then I want to talk to him about a suspicious homicide a little over a week ago of a guy who seemed like he might just come from the same neck of the woods. Knifed to death, bleeding out all over this cheap little apartment down the coast.”
Evan tried not to show any reaction. A knifing. Andrea had said she hadn’t been convicted of any crime. Shit. So she had killed whoever had come after her.
And now they had sent another. And she was on her own again. Fuck.
He nodded.
“What’s your name?” he asked once he was alone with the prisoner, assuming it wasn’t John Smith, which was the name the man had given the cops.
“None of your fucking business.”
Apparently a lead pipe to the head didn’t endear him to this guy.
“Fine. My name is Evan Reynolds. Does that mean anything to you?”
Somebody had given the prisoner an ice pack and he held it to his head, sitting on the cot in the cell, eying Evan resentfully. “Why would it?”
“Because you’re looking for a girl who means a great deal to me.”
“Oh yeah? Who says I’m looking for anybody?”
“The picture of her in your pocket does, though I’d say it was from eight years ago or so, right?”
The man said nothing, still eying him resentfully.
“Whatever he’s paying you, I’ll pay you ten times that. Twenty.” He never had picked up the Reynolds lesson about not bargaining with oneself. The man looked at him stonily. “If you tell me everything you know about why he’s looking for this girl.”
“Who?”
“Fredrico Stavros.”
* * * * *
Regina Wittenberg—recently known as Andrea Prentiss—looked out the window of her cottage at the sea, a world away from the view Evan was probably seeing right now, though eerily similar. She hadn’t picked this stone cottage nestled on a cliff in Malta because it reminded her of Maine. She had barely known Maine existed when she bought this tiny safe house, almost a decade ago. She had just liked the picture of it online and had purchased it, along with a handful of other small residences, each tucked respectively out in the middle of nowhere, as an insurance policy of sorts. So she would have somewhere to run away to, quickly, should she need it. She had never imagined so many years would go by before she would need it. Had never imagined her persona as Andrea Prentiss would be so successful.