Page 105 of The Woman Who Couldn't Scream
“So I can’t compete against a black belt. But Carl Klineman was Nauplius’s bodyguard. He was the best. How did someone manage to kill him? Whoever it is—”
“Is scary.” She had a point, not one that he liked, and she had admitted something she did not intend. “I said you were using me, and I was right. You believed an assassin was after you and you were using me as a shield.”
“I believed Carl about the assassin, and yes, I used you as a shield.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
He did. “Because I want you. So you trust me not to kill you.”
She scooted forward on the ottoman, signed with her hands between her face and his. “I also trust you to make me forget.”
“Forget what?”
“Forget everything but you.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Merida expected enthusiasm, passion, kissing, sex… forgetfulness.
Instead Benedict stood, walked to the window and looked out.
Feeling instantly stupid and rejected, she scrambled to her feet. Maybe, once she’d asked, he was no longer interested. Some men needed the chase. Benedict had not been that way before, but for them, “before” was many years ago.
Maybe, after hearing the sordid details of her marriage to Nauplius Brassard, he wasn’t interested. Or maybe he intended to kill her now. She wouldn’t have thought so, not without sex, but when it came to Benedict Howard, she had proved herself woefully inadequate in reading his character.
Still. She stood there, feeling awkward, thinking she should call the police herself, knowing she had just discovered a body, one she could not explain and didn’t dare try.
Benedict walked to the light switch and flipped it down.
Now, in the distance, Merida heard police sirens.
“The police,” Benedict said. “They’ve come to investigate my call.” He turned away from the window and paced toward her across the floor. “And to answer you—yes. I can make you forget.”
Oh. First he made sure they would be uninterrupted.Thenhe focused on her.
This kiss was no hands-off seduction. This was body to body, hands, lips, tongues, a blast furnace that incinerated her fears and memories, lifted her to her toes in a futile attempt to get closer to him, to his heat.
The darkness in the room was city dark: night dimly illuminated by the neighbors’ porch lights, the sky washed by the distant downtown bars, restaurants and stores. Now red and blue lights flashed through the window and she had the sense that they were hiding, she and Benedict, here in the dining room, reaching for each other in the dark.
He backed her toward the table, lifted her onto the flat surface, onto the ironed linen tablecloth. He stripped off her shoes, her workout pants, her hoodie, T-shirt, bra and panties, and flung them in a wad toward the leather chair. He stepped back and viewed her, perched on the table like a statue of Venus. “My God,” he whispered. “My God.” As if the sight stung him to action, he disposed of his jeans, underwear and shoes in a hurry and without a bit of grace.
She smiled.
How flattering.
He climbed onto the table.
She scooted back to make room.
He caught her ankle, spread her legs, slid her and the tablecloth beneath her toward him. Leaning over her, he put his mouth to her clit… and his heat brought her hips off the table. She writhed, she strained, she came. Violently, explosively… silently.
He was not silent. “That’s it,” he murmured. “That’s what I want for you.”
Abruptly she was back in the past, years ago, learning to make love, discovering what it was like with a man who reveled in a woman’s response, encouraged it, waited for it…
She shook her head.No. Don’t remember.
