Their mouths met again in a long, wet, ravaging kiss. His fingers were still inside her. He felt her touching him. Hands on his erection, closing around him, stroking.

He broke away and looked at her, and her blue eyes looked back into his, glazed, yet ready….

He moved against the length of her with a renewed impetus of passion. He wet her breasts with his tongue, drew moist patterns down her torso, laving her navel. He parted her thigh with a quick thrust of his hands and fell between them, making love to her with the intimate caress of his tongue.

She cried out, fingers knitting in his hair, tugging. He endured the pull. In seconds she climaxed. Blood thundered and pulsed painfully in his aroused penis, and he rose above her, sliding into her with the force of his passion. Searingly hot, wet, she gloved him….

He moved with a fevered, urgent rhythm, losing all sense of thought and reason with the sheer force of his need. He gritted his teeth together hard, trying to remember that he wanted her with him, drowning in the tantalizing scent of their sex, in the erotic feel of her flesh, being within her. Her hips pulsed with his to a frenetic, desperate beat. Then his climax exploded violently from him, and he wrapped his arms tightly around her, drawing her harder and harder against him until he heard a cry of release spill from her lips once again….

He rolled her over and held her against him, content in the feel of intimacy that still pervaded him. She was naked, sleek with sweat, her back curved to his chest, her skin against his own. He touched her again, lightly, drawing a line from her shoulder down her spine, over her hip and the curve of her buttocks.

“Now I know why I’ve stayed away from you so long,” he murmured softly.

“Why?” she murmured.

“You’re pure temptation, Madison.”

She shifted, turning in his arms, smiling slightly. “So are you.”

“Well, thanks, but somehow…Never mind.”

“Why did you accuse me of reading your mind?” she asked him softly. “Do you still think I’m a witch?”

He pulled her slightly closer. “Yes, you’re definitely a witch. You cast spells. Men fall in love with you, just seeing you on the page of a magazine. They’d die to have you.”

“They?”

“And I’ve been thinking about walking down the hallway and bursting into your room with almost the exact same words.”

“Oh.”

“‘Let’s get on with it!”’ he murmured. “I think something awful would have happened if we hadn’t come to this. I would have exploded.”

“Surely not!”

“Little pieces of me would have landed all over south Florida,” he told her gravely.

She smiled, but then her smile faded. “Like that poor woman!” she said softly.

He shook his head, realizing what he had said. “Worse,” he assured her, and she had to smile, resting her head against his chest. “Well, we did get to it.” She was quiet for a few minutes. He absently smoothed her hair, engrossed in the feel of it against his flesh.

“I should go back to my own room now.”

“Don’t even contemplate the idea.”

“But—”

He lifted her chin so that he could look into her eyes. “That was the best sex I’ve had in my entire life. And if you think that I’m just going to let you walk out of here now—when you’re wet and ready and in my bed already, when we don’t have to go to dinner, have drinks, figure out how to get one another’s clothes off or anything—you’re nuts.”

She stared back at him. “Funny, isn’t it? I thought that I was curious. That I just needed…”

“One good shot?” he inquired dryly.

Madison stared at him steadily. “I thought we’d be at the get-on-with-the-rest-of-our-lives bit by now.”

“Are you there? Done with me?” he demanded.

“I wish I was!” she said honestly.

“But?”

“I suppose I shouldn’t have come here. Except that I was going crazy, I had to know—”

“Are you done sleeping with me?” he asked, interrupting impatiently. “Have you had all you want?” She hesitated, staring at him, irritated by the bluntness of his demand. “Well?”

“That’s an incredibly rude question.”

“It isn’t rude. I’m dying here. Well?”

“Blunt, crude.”

“It’s an honest question. Answer it.”

“No,” she admitted angrily.

“Good.” He found her lips and kissed her, in greater control than he’d been when she first came naked into his arms, licking, nipping, teasing, playing, until a rise of passion seemed to stir them both once again.

Then he was inside her again.

And it was true.

It was the best sex he’d had in his whole life.

It didn’t matter in the least to Trent Adair how late it was getting. He could keep at it all night. He stared down at the page he was working on, deeply pleased.

Chief Inspector Jésus Hernandez hunched down by the corpse, shaking his head in dismay as he fought the nausea that bubbled in his stomach. With each murder, the killer was mutilating the body with a greater fervor.

She had been a beauty—once.

Young, with hopes and dreams in the crystal blue eyes that now stared sightlessly toward heaven. Perhaps, in her dying moments, she had traveled the path of her soul skyward. Hernandez could only pray that it was so.

For what lay on the ground, the remains of her mortal person, was a tragedy, a crude jest against the hopes and dreams of the young. She had been neatly dissected, her organs removed and displayed about the body, her head nearly severed, the line of blood around her neck so thick that she might have been wearing a gaily colored ribbon…

He sat back staring at his words. He smiled, pleased.

Damn, he was getting good, and he was going to get published before any of them even knew that he was trying to write a book. He’d kept it a secret, not wanting anyone to think that he meant to get help from Jordan, or use Jordan’s influence in any way to help him. He could do it on his own.

The scene was downright gruesome.

Good, but gruesome.

And very different from what Jordan Adair wrote. This was far more graphic.

Real.

Morning came.

Light filtered through the shades into the bedroom.

Kyle awoke slowly, then wondered at first, a frown furrowing his brow, if his dreams hadn’t grown frighteningly tangible and far too graphically erotic.

But no…Madison was there. Lying beside him.

Naked.

Still sleeping deeply.

Which was nice. Talking to each other this morning was going to be awkward; he was glad she was asleep, because he just wanted to watch her for a while. She was stretched out on her stomach, her hair a wild red tangle around her shoulders and over her back. She’d casually kicked the sheet aside, so she was barely covered at all, and he had a nice long look at her. Naked—and relaxed. There was only so much he had seen in the sheer heat of passion. It was good to look at her at his leisure now.

She did have the world’s most incredible back, long and sleek, caped now with the fall of her dark auburn hair. Her legs were very long and shapely. Madison didn’t have the anorectic look that characterized so many fashion models; she was in superb condition, slender, but sleekly muscled. Really nice, tight, rounded buttocks.

He wouldn’t allow himself to touch. She might awaken.

But he frowned suddenly, leaning over and pushing aside a corner of the sheet that created a shadow on the right side of her hip.

There…just below where a bikini line might fall, was a tattoo. Tiny, discreet, very pretty.

Yet it made his blood run cold.

A rose.

A bloodred rose.

11

Kyle moved so abruptly that he startled her awake. She rolled over, nearly jumping into a sitting position. He found himself watching as her emotions swept clearly through her eyes: realization of where she was, and dismay that she was still there.