She looked at the door, wondering if she dared take Anspaugh up on his offer to have someone replace her. He was a supervisor, requesting her assistance, providing another agent to cover her. It was a legitimate solution.
Somehow, though, she sensed Wyatt wouldn’t see it that way.
Besides, she didn’t totally trust Anspaugh. He had such a big chip on his shoulder about her boss, she couldn’t count on him to send over somebody really good to protect Sam.
No. She couldn’t do it. If Anspaugh called back, she’d just have to make it clear she was not abandoning her post. Hopefully they could string Peter Pan along, get him on the line, and tomorrow she would be there to help reel him in.
It wasn’t an ideal solution for her, personally, but it was the professional one. She owed Wyatt her loyalty. And she owed Samantha Dalton the best protection she could give her, not a pass-off to someone she didn’t even know, who had no idea of the kind of crazy man who was after her.
“It’ll work out,” she mumbled, talking more to herself.
“If you say so.”
When a knock suddenly sounded on the door to the suite, Lily leaped up, gesturing for Sam to remain quiet. She skirted the wall, not approaching the entrance head-on. They had not ordered any food; no one was supposed to know they were here. Sam hadn’t even contacted her family members, who, she said, were used to her being out of touch and wouldn’t miss her.
Her hand on her service weapon, Lily moved to the peephole, looked out, and saw a familiar face. “It’s okay,” she said, reaching for the handle.
Definitely okay. As she opened the door, she nodded in decision. Because a solution to her problem had just landed in her lap.
She was going.
Alec didn’t seem too happy about playing babysitter. He’d agreed, when Lily had asked him to step in for a couple of hours, but he sure wasn’t smiling about it. Sam had the feeling he wished one of his fellow agents had been the one to swing by the hotel with a suitcase of clothes and toiletries from her apartment.
She knew why. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be around her. She suspected the problem was that he did, a little too much. And he didn’t entirely trust himself to be alone with her in an anonymous hotel room.
Which was why, since Agent Fletcher had departed a half hour ago,Alec had been sitting on a chair by the window, far from the couch where she sat. His very posture discouraging conversation, he’d spent his time looking out at the cityscape. He’d answered a few questions-mainly confirming that they found nothing suspicious in her apartment-but beyond that had managed only a few comments asking whether she was hungry and if the room was too cold.
Finally, she’d had enough of it. “Would you please stop acting like you’re afraid I’m going to jump on you?”
He jerked his head to stare at her over his shoulder. “Excuse me?”
“For heaven’s sake, Alec, you’re sitting over there with an invisible chastity belt wrapped around yourself, as if you’re in need of protection. Like you have to be stern and pissy to keep the horny divorcée from tempting you into letting down your guard while on duty.”
He half coughed, or might have laughed. “Horny divorcée?”
Sam stood and crossed to the window, staring down at him. The lamplight didn’t extend far into this corner of the room. His face was bathed in shadow, so she couldn’t tell if those sensual lips were smiling or those amazing green eyes glinted with humor.
“I get it, okay?” she said. She wrapped her arms around herself, surprised by how much cooler the room was over here. “Despite what happened last night, this thing between us isn’t going anywhere else until the case is over. I’m not Eve. I know I can’t seduce you, and I’m not going to try.”
He slowly rose to stand before her, so close she felt the warmth of his body and the brush of his clothes against her own. The chill permeating the glass windows was suddenly banished, pure heat washing over her. His voice thick, he admitted, “It’s because you could that I’ve been staying put over here.”
She managed a weak whisper. “Could?”
“Seduce me,” he admitted. He lifted a hand, brushing the tips of his fingers across her cheek, sliding them into her hair. The touch was simple, restrained, nonsexual, but also loaded with possibility. She could tilt her face into his palm, kiss the pulse point at his wrist, whisper a plea for an even more intimate touch.
“You could make me forget what I’m doing here tonight and what the stakes are.”
“Really?” she asked. Part of her reacted with pure excitement, knowing she could make something happen between them tonight if she pushed it. Another with pure feminine pleasure that this amazing man genuinely wanted her.
“Yeah. Really.”
“I’m not much into the seduction game,” she whispered, “and I know I should retreat to my separate corner and let you keep this barrier in place. But I can’t deny a big part of me just doesn’t want to.”
“Ditto.”
A helpless moan emerged from the back of her throat when he touched her neck, sliding the side of his thumb against the vulnerable flesh beneath her earlobe. Sam closed her eyes, remembering what it felt like to have a man’s hands on her body. Acknowledging how much she’d missed it.
It had been so long. A year since her divorce, months before that since she’d realized how thoroughly her husband had betrayed her and had cut him out of her life. She’d grown cold and hard. Her nerve endings had dulled, her skin desensitized during all that time without any type of human connection.
All those sensations came roaring back with a vengeance, warmth turning into fire, want becoming desperate need.
“This has never happened to me before,” she said, unable to resist lifting one hand to his chest, running her fingers as lightly there as he was on her neck. “I mean, something this physical, this soon.”
She wondered if he could say the same. Alec’s innate charm and the glimpses of flirtatiousness she’d witnessed said he had a lot of experience with women. But his tension and aloofness also said that part of his life might have changed when he’d nearly died.
“It’s not just physical,” he admitted, not sounding exactly happy about it. “I want you, but I also like you, Sam. I think I could like you a lot. I don’t want anything to happen to you, especially not on my watch.”
She understood. He wasn’t stopping her, wasn’t pushing her away. With a few more whispers, the soft press of her mouth on his throat, perhaps, she could probably have what she wanted. What they both wanted.
Tempting. Oh, God, so tempting.
“So would you do me a favor?” he asked, even as he leaned down, his face so close to hers they exchanged breaths that further dispersed the chill. “Would you walk back over there and sit down?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. Instead, he leaned even closer, until that last sliver of space between them disappeared and their lips touched.
No frenzied, frantic kiss like last night, this was a soft caress, a gentle plea. Even a promise that there would be more to come, later. When the time was right.
He lifted his mouth from hers far enough to whisper, “Please?”
Breathless and every bit as aroused by his tenderness as she’d been by his hunger the night before, she still somehow managed to nod. “Okay.”
“Thank you.”
On shaky legs, she retreated. Part of her should have resented that he’d done the unimaginable and kissed her before shooing her away. Another recognized that he’d been unable to stop himself, any more than she’d been able to refuse.
Resuming their previous positions, they descended into silence for a few minutes. She could think only how lucky it was that they were in a two-room suite. If there had been a big, king-size bed between them, she didn’t know that she could have come down off of red alert back to just orange.