Wilde Nights in Paradise Read online

  “So is restraining order. Now are you finished?” She spun away and reached for the doorknob. “Because if you’re done making a fool out of yourself, I’m going back to work.”

  Guilt left a bad taste in his mouth. As the woman he once loved to distraction, she deserved better than childishness from him. They were stuck in this less than ideal situation together, so why make it more difficult by being a jerk? The end of their relationship hadn’t been her fault—that was one-hundred percent on his shoulders. And he was okay with that. Mostly.

  He caught her hand. “Libs, wait.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Fine. Libby.”

  “Assistant District Attorney Pruitt to you.”

  His jaw tightened against the barb in her tone. Her coldness toward him shouldn’t hurt. He deserved it and more. But, dammit, it did hurt. “All right, A.D.A. Pruitt, can we start over here?”

  Her ponytail flopped as she shook her head. “Not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re…you.”

  Another barb, and it cut deeper than the first. “The fuck-up.”

  “Yes. No.” Sighing, Libby rubbed her eyes under her glasses with the fingers of one hand. “Jude, I’m not the girl I was eight years ago, okay?” Finally realizing he still held her other hand, she shook off his grip and reached for the door handle. “And I don’t want any kind of relationship with you ever again.”

  Ouch.

  No, he thought and touched the ring in his pocket to anchor himself, not ouch. This had been his goal when he hurt her—but that was supposed to have been all there was to it. Hurt her, move on with his miserable life without her, the end. He never would have guessed the whole nightmare of a situation would come back to bite him in the ass now.

  Hand still on the doorknob, Libby stared at him over her shoulder as if she expected some kind of response to her declaration.

  “Well,” he said finally, “that’s unfortunate since your father hired me to be your bodyguard-slash-pretend boyfriend.”

  Did she just go pale? Maybe it was the harsh lighting in the conference room, but it sure looked like her complexion had lost a few shades of color when she spun back to face him. And, damn, there was that surge of guilt again. Even so, he couldn’t tell her any of the whys because the truth would be much more painful than anything he’d done to her.

  “W-what about the Marines?” she asked.

  “Officially out a week ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “And seeing as we now have to convince everyone I’m your main man,” he added after a beat of silence, “we need to learn to play nice with each other.”

  “Oh,” she said again, apparently at a loss for words.

  Another beat, longer this time.

  “So,” he prompted. “Can we start over?”

  Libby chewed on her lower lip, naturally drawing his gaze to her mouth. Christ, the dreams he’d had about that mouth…he could still taste her, too, from his earlier attempt at playing his part, which didn’t help dull the throb of need behind his fly. He remembered exactly how good it was between them and wanted that mouth on his again. And on other, lower portions of his anatomy.

  “Meet me in the parking lot after work,” she said finally, interrupting a particularly x-rated fantasy that had to do with her lipstick and his cock. “Jude, hello, did you hear me?”

  “Er, right.” He shook himself. “Parking lot. Gotcha.”

  “Five. Don’t be late. I need to get home.”

  “Sure. See ya around.” He gave a dorky half wave as she shook her head and opened the door. Cursing at himself, he stood in the empty conference room and shut his eyes.

  See ya around?

  Shit, maybe he was mentally stuck in the fifth grade. Where was his head?

  Okay, dumb question. As soon as he’d seen Libby again, his brain had migrated south. She just looked so good, all curvy and womanly, and the fire in her eyes every time she looked at him…

  Damn.

  She’d always been fierce, but as a young college co-ed, she’d kept it carefully leashed and hidden behind a sweet exterior. At least until they hit the sack, and then she’d rock not only his world, but his whole freaking solar system. Adult Libby—now she was something else. She all but crackled with passion. Made a guy wonder…

  And fantasize…

  And lust…

  Oh, man. He needed an ice bath, a-sap.

  Chapter Three

  “You’re still here?” Libby stopped short in surprise when she exited her office to find Jude camped out on the floor beside her door, his long jean-clad legs outstretched, his head tilted back against the tiled wall. His eyes were closed until she spoke, but he hadn’t been sleeping. He thrummed with suppressed energy.

  “Where else would I go?” he asked.

  “How about away?”

  Jude released a long breath. “Christ, woman, you really know how to hold a grudge.”

  “And you really know how to break a young girl’s heart.” He opened his mouth to reply, but she didn’t want his excuses. She didn’t care to think about the catastrophe that was their past, didn’t know why she’d felt the need to bring it up, and shrugged as if it all meant nothing. “Just…forget it.”

  “For now,” he said.

  Lovely.

  On his lap lay a closed folder and she didn’t have to strain to guess what it was: her dossier. She nodded toward it, desperate for a subject change. “Learn anything interesting?”

  “Yeah.” He smacked the folder against his palm and pushed to his feet. “You father is right to worry. You’re not taking this threat seriously enough.”

  “C’mon. Not you, too. It’s all harmless crap.”

  “It’s escalating.”

  “That’s bull.”

  “Go over everything for me,” he commanded. “From the beginning. When did it all start?”

  She faced him as disbelief roared through her. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I rarely am, but in this case…”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk about it. You and Dad are worked up about nothing and I refuse to give this…stalker…one nanosecond more of my time.”

  “Fuck me,” Jude said. “Some things never change, huh? You’re still so freakin’ stubborn, knocking my head against a wall would be more productive than talking to you.”

  She conjured up her sweetest smile and waved a hand at the wall. “Knock yourself out. Please.”

  Jude scowled. “Libs—”

  Her heart clenched. “Don’t. You lost your right to use cutesy nicknames eight years ago.”

  With a heavy sigh that moved his wide shoulders, he corrected himself. “A.D.A. Pruitt, I need to hear the whole story from you. Your version, not some watered down—or trumped up—report.”

  Sure, now he had to go and be all reasonable.

  “All right.” She hitched the strap of her purse higher on her shoulder and started walking. She didn’t wait to see if he was following. He was. He even had the audacity to reach out and take her hand. She tried to pull away, but he only tightened his fingers.

  Okay then. If he really wanted to go through with this ridiculous charade, she could manage it as far as the parking lot.

  “It started about a month ago,” she explained. “Right after Richard ‘K-Bar’ Niles made bond. Little things, at first, like a paper doll under my car’s windshield wiper. I just brushed it off, but then the dolls started showing up with fewer clothes. Then with no clothes. Then the letters started.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Things like ‘see me now?’ and ‘I’m here.’” A chill clawed through her at the memory despite her best efforts to repress it. “The worst was ‘I’m waiting for you.’ Then I started getting phone calls on my cell and videos sent to my email. Always a distorted voice saying the same types of things as the notes.”

  “And the videos?”

  They stepped into the elevator and she hit
the button for the ground floor. After the doors slid shut, she tried to pull her hand away from his. He held on and gave her a smile that was all challenge.

  Giving up on the possibility of getting her hand back, she answered his question. “Same voice, but the picture is usually of a paper doll or blacked out. I saved them all if you want to see them. The first video frightened me enough that I finally told my father about it, and he overreacted and hired you.”

  “I don’t think he overreacted.”

  Yeah, he wouldn’t. For as different as Jude and her father were, in some ways they were very much the same. The elevator dinged and the doors opened to the lobby, which she always thought looked more like the waiting area of a dentist office than a government building.

  “Do you agree that the threats are from this gangbanger you’re going to put away?” Jude asked.

  “They’re not threats,” she told him.

  “What would you call them then?”

  “Not threats. None of them are overtly hostile. Just…creepy. If I took this to a courtroom and named them threats, the defense would hand me my ass on a silver platter.”

  “But do you agree with the possibility of K-Bar’s involvement?” Jude persisted.

  “Yes. He’s trying to frighten me. He has been from day one. I had to get a restraining order against him to stop him from harassing me from prison.”

  Jude fell silent for a moment, his brows drawn together in an expression of concentration that was so very familiar. “Maybe,” he said finally.

  She sighed in exasperation. “Well, if not K-Bar, who else would it be?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “You do kinda have a knack for pissing people off.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Hey, I didn’t say it was a flaw. It’s a knack. A propensity. No, a forte. That’s a good one. Forte.” He exaggerated the accent on the word and let go of her hand long enough to hold open the building’s front door. As soon as they were both through, his hand found hers again. “I want you to make up a list of other possible suspects that I can give to my brothers for background checks.”

  “That’s not necessary. They don’t need to waste their time.”

  “Nah, Reece’s only pleasure comes from running background checks. God knows the dude has no life to speak of. Would you really deny him?”

  A cloud of dust danced across the pavement and clouds lumbered toward the city from the east, dark and foreboding, promising a storm. The gusty late spring wind still held enough of a hint of winter that it ripped the heat from her body, but with Jude’s hand encircling hers, she didn’t feel the chill. That hand, so familiar and yet so different, rougher with more calluses than she remembered…it could give pleasure like she hadn’t felt since he last touched her.

  Too bad it wasn’t attached to a different man.

  As if sensing the direction of her thoughts, he stopped walking and turned her bodily to face him. He’d done a lot of growing up in these last eight years. When she met him in college, he’d still been handsome in the way of a teenager, wholesome and fresh-faced. Now, no trace of that twenty-one-year-old boy remained in his chiseled jaw, wide shoulders, and shadowed pale blue eyes. He towered over her, making her feel petite when she hadn’t qualified as petite since middle school. At five-eight, she was constantly fighting a battle against her size ten jeans and more often than not, she lost due to long hours at the office, lots of on-the-go food, and no time for a daily workout. She had wide-load hips and D-cup boobs and never thought of either as sexy—until Jude looked at her with that hot gleam in his eyes.

  God, why couldn’t he have gained a hundred pounds and lost all his teeth in the last eight years? She hated that she was still attracted to him.

  “Fearless Libby,” he said in such a low tone, she almost couldn’t hear him over the wind. She saw the kiss coming. Could have avoided it, but dammit, she wanted it. Wanted to know if having his mouth on hers was as erotic as it had been earlier when he’d kissed her in the hallway.

  He dragged his lips over hers, back and forth, back and forth, a barely there caress that lit her up from the inside like a human torch. It wasn’t fair how her body responded instantly to him when she’d spent years having to coax even a mild reaction from it. After Jude devastated her life, sex had become a chore rather than a pleasure, and she’d taken to avoiding even the most casual of encounters. And now here he was again, offering part of what she’d once had. Offering what she burned for, what she shouldn’t still want.

  She nipped at his lip, punishing him for making her ache with desire like this, but he didn’t back away. Instead, he took that as an invitation and the taste of him filled her mouth as he invaded and claimed. She gripped his shoulders, needing the rock solid weight to steady herself. Her head roared with a jumbled mix of outrage and don’t-you-dare-stop.

  No, wait. That roaring sound wasn’t her head. A…car?

  Jude yanked away with a curse and before she fully grasped what was happening, he folded his body into a protective shield around her and spun them to the left. She felt a jarring thump, heard Jude grunt in pain, but he didn’t let go of her as they rolled across the pavement. The car with the noisy engine whipped past in a flash of blue and a squeal of tires as it fishtailed out of the lot.

  “Damn,” Jude breathed and helped her to her feet again. Her knees wobbled. He steadied her with a hand on her shoulder. “You okay, Libs?”

  “Yes,” she said, eying him up and down. He had a tear in the thigh of his jeans and seemed to be favoring his right side. “Are you?”

  “Bumper clipped my leg, but he wasn’t going fast enough to do any real damage. I’m fine.” He grinned. “Better than fine. This is the most fun I’ve had in weeks. Feels good to get the adrenaline going. Wanna have sex?”

  Libby huffed out a breath in disbelief. “You’re insane.”

  “Depends on your definition. So is that a no?”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes danced. “Yes?”

  “No! I meant yes as in yes, it’s a no. I mean—” She threw up her hands. She never got tongue tied, and yet couldn’t seem to string two coherent sentences together around him. But at least she could stand on her own two feet now without wobbling and she had a sneaky suspicion he’d put her on the defensive for just for that reason. “I’m going home.”

  “Good.” All the laughter faded from his expression. “Nobody can try to run you over there.”

  “What?” She stared up the street where the car had disappeared. “You think that was on purpose?”

  “Yeah, I do. And it was meant for you because as far as I know, nobody’s out to kill me.”

  “If they knew you, they would be,” she said between her teeth. “It was just an accident, Jude. That car wasn’t aiming for me.”

  “Twenty dollars says you’re wrong.”

  “All right.”

  He pointed to something over her shoulder. Dread turned her stomach sour as she spun and stared at the windshield of her Subaru Impreza.

  WATCH OUT.

  The words screamed at her in blood red paint and a nude paper doll had been stuck to the trailing line off the T like an obscene exclamation point.

  “No.” She swayed again and Jude slid an arm around her waist to steady her.

  His expression hardened and he all but dragged her toward a black truck parked three spaces down from her car. He opened the passenger side door and lifted her into the seat. Numb, she stared at the dashboard, barely noticing when he climbed into the driver’s side and started the engine.

  Someone was actually trying to kill her.

  Holy hell.

  “We got a problem,” Jude said.

  She glanced over to lash out with a derisive, “No shit, Sherlock.” Not very original as far as comebacks went, but she wasn’t exactly at the top of her game.

  Except he wasn’t speaking to her. He held a phone to his ear.

  “An attack,” he added. “There was another message on her ca
r. Yeah, another doll, too. Then someone tried to run us down with a blue four-door sedan, possibly a late model Ford Taurus. I got a partial plate number.” After that, whoever was on the other end of the line did most of the talking. He nodded once, then again, then said, “Okay,” before hanging up.

  “Who was that?”

  He slid the phone back into his coat pocket. “Your father. He’s going to meet us at your place.”

  “Oh. Great.” Here she’d thought this day couldn’t possibly get any worse and now she had to deal with Jude and her overbearing, overprotective father at the same time. “I thought you two hated each other.”

  “We’re Marines. Personal feelings don’t factor into missions.”

  “Missions. Right. I’m just another mission.” She told herself not to let that hurt and failed miserably. The dispassionate tone he’d used burrowed under her skin and tweaked at her nerves. She angled her head at him. “Personal feelings don’t factor into anything for you, do they? You avoid emotion like leprosy.”

  “Pretty much. Emotion is messy.”

  She slumped in back in her seat. The jabs she kept taking at him weren’t wholly deserved, especially after he saved her from becoming a road pancake, but she just couldn’t seem to help herself. The man pushed all of her buttons—good and bad—and right now, she needed the distraction he presented. Anything to take her mind off the image of that car headed directly toward them…

  Oh God, why wouldn’t her hands stop shaking?

  She rolled her fingers into fists on her lap and clenched her jaw to keep the trembles from traveling up her arms and into the rest of her body.

  For once, Jude didn’t raise to the bait of her snide remarks. He studied her for a second, then reached over and covered both of her hands with one of his.

  “Jesus, your hands are half froze.”

  She tried to pull away, but his grip tightened. She wasn’t going anywhere until he allowed it and that knowledge grated. “Let go of me.”

  To her surprise, he did and turned up the heat, angling the vents her way. But, being Jude, he couldn’t leave it at that. “You used to like when I touched you.”

  She still did, a little thrill dancing through her belly at every contact, but she’d bite off her own tongue before admitting it. “I was young, stupid, and horny back then.”