Her head snapped back up and she stared at him, obviously shocked. "What?"
"Just when were you going to let me in on that little tidbit of information?"
At this inopportune moment, Johnny returned with the peas and onions. "Here you go, Kate," he said with false cheer. "Sorry it took me so long, the veggie box is kinda buried in moosemeat."
She was still staring at Jim with her mouth open and no sound coming out. Jim was still glaring at her. Johnny looked from one to the other and said, "You know what? Van's having some trouble with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, getting the movers and shakers straight, Willie Hensley, Tyonek, all those guys. We've got a test on it tomorrow in History of Alaska class. I think I'm going to drive over and help her out."
He fetched a daypack from his bedroom and swept the books and papers on the dining table into it with more efficiency than finesse. "Don't worry about me," he said, still cheery, "I'm sure An-nie'll give me dinner and a bed for the night."
Still nothing from the tableau vivant at the kitchen counter.
Johnny looked at Mutt. "You want to come with?"
Mutt cocked one ear and bent a reflective gaze on Kate and Jim, but in the end decided she didn't want to be compared to a rat deserting a sinking ship, and sneezed a polite refusal.
"Yeah, well, just try to stay out of the line of fire," Johnny said, and left the building. A moment later the Arctic Cat started up, followed immediately by the sound of it moving up the track to the road and out of earshot. Truth to tell, he was a little surprised at getting away with it, the twenty-five-mile drive alone through a cold winter night. He was heartened at this apparent evidence of faith in his maturity.
Meanwhile, back in the house, Kate had barely registered his departure. "I-," she said. "I-"
He was suddenly and thoroughly fed up. "Yeah, you," he said, rounding the counter. She slapped off the burners and turned to face him. "You don't trust me not to be sleeping with anyone else. You don't trust me enough to inform me of crucial evidence in an open murder investigation."
"But I didn't-"
"What do you trust me for, Kate?" He looked down at her and the anger whipped itself into a white-hot flame. "Oh hell, we both know what you trust me for," and he picked her up off her feet and kissed her so hard she felt her lip split.
She squirmed, her feet dangling a good foot off the floor, pushing against his shoulders, bending herself backward so she could free herself enough to speak. "No, Jim, wait-"
This only inflamed him further. "Wait, my ass," he said, and started for the stairs to the loft.
Mutt came to her feet at that, her yellow eyes wide. "You stay right there," he told her. "This is between us."
Mutt looked uncharacteristically indecisive. Attack or stay? Was Kate in trouble or not?
Meanwhile Kate began struggling in earnest. "No, Jim, stop, you don't understand-"
"I understand plenty," he said, starting up the stairs.
She was strong and slippery but he had more muscle mass than she did, as well as a longer reach, and he managed to hold on until he got them upstairs. He didn't so much drop her to the bed as throw her at it. She bounced once and tried to scramble to the floor.
"Oh no you don't," he said, and 220 pounds of outraged male dropped full on her, driving all the breath out of her body.
"Jim-," she said, her voice a squeak of sound.
"Shut up," he said, kneeing her legs apart. He was fully aroused, hard against her. "Just shut the hell up."
She fought him, she really did, but he ripped the white T-shirt over her head and left it to tangle her hands before he went for the buttons on the fly of her jeans.
"Jim, don't," she said frantically, "not like this."
"Just like this," he said, ripping open her jeans and shoving them down. He kissed her again, not so much a caress as a claiming, rough and demanding.
This time she kissed him back, biting at his lips, his jaw, setting her teeth into his throat almost hard enough to draw blood. He growled and bit back and he wasn't gentle. Her bra went somewhere and his teeth were at her breast and her panties went next, shredded and tossed. His hand was between her legs, forcing entry, demanding a response, and she couldn't stop it any more than she could stop the sun rising or the rain falling, she arched up into his caress with an involuntary groan.
He laughed once, low in his throat, his hand moving. "Yeah," he said. He could feel the heat rising up off her body in a scorching wave, and he reached for his fly, only to find her hands there before him. A second was too long to wait, and then he was there and sliding home, and she moaned, a long, drawn-out sound compounded of pleasure, relief, and fury, arching up in demand. He didn't bother with preliminaries, he started moving, long, slow, hard strokes, in and out, in and out. "Jesus," he said, breathless, "babe," he said, "Kate," he said, "oh Kate oh holy shit Kate, Kate, Kate!"
His eyes went dim but he felt her body tense like a strung bow and he heard her shout something, what he never knew and she couldn't remember. A blinding flood of pleasure and release started at the base of his spine and flooded up over his body like lava, burning out every living nerve end he had, leaving a wasteland of scorched earth and gray ash behind.
SEVENTEEN
He was gone when she woke up the next morning. On the whole, Kate was relieved. She rolled to the edge of the bed and to her dismay her legs wouldn't support her at first. When she felt confident enough to get to her feet, she staggered a little before she found her balance, and though she hated to admit it she was walking a little splay-legged on her way into the bathroom, where she ran a tub of water as hot as she could stand it. She let herself down into the tub with gingerly care and soaked until the water went tepid, by which time she was marginally mobile again and grateful for it.
The clothes she had been wearing the day before were beyond repair, even the jeans, the fly torn open and one of the buttons missing. She hunted for it but it was not to be found. With a sigh she bundled up T-shirt, jeans, bra, and panties and went downstairs. From her place in front of the long-dead fire, Mutt looked up and gave her a long yellow stare, eyebrows pointedly raised.
"You just shut up," Kate said, and went into the kitchen to find that Jim had left her a fresh pot of coffee. She thought about pouring it out and making her own, one untainted by Chopin hands.
Wasteful, though, and hypocritical. All her anger at him had been seared away over the long and tumultuous night. She winced into a seat at the table, and sipped coffee and watched the sky lighten in the east. Mostly cloudy, and the thermometer mounted outside the window showed the temperature at ten above. She'd miss the sun of the past week but she would welcome the warmer weather. They all would.
There was a tendency to dwell on the events of the previous evening. She forced those memories into a corner of her mind and shut the door on them, for now, turning her focus to the startling revelation Jim had made, that had knocked her so sideways she couldn't even- No, Kate, she thought fiercely. Focus.
All right. First, she had to consider the source. Howie was a congenital liar. Truth was such an alien concept to Howie that it might as well have a green card. Anything that came out of Howie's mouth had to be evaluated in the context of Howie's life, known associates, current misdemeanors, and planned felonies. There ought, in fact, to be a frequent felony plan for Howie. So many felonies and he got so many free days in jail. Oh wait, they already had one of those.
On the other hand, Howie was also capable of recognizing the truth as a commodity, with market value, which value might be exchanged for protective custody in the event Howie felt his life threatened.
Kate got up and poured herself some more coffee. She noted that half the coffee cake was gone, as well as a loaf of the white bread, most of the fried liver, leaving the rest congealed on the bottom of the frying pan, and all of the mashed potatoes. Jim had been hungry this morning.