Lawman by Lisa Plumley Page B

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now...if you had a mind to try."
    Heavens! Suddenly, she tingled with
awareness of her situation, caught fully beneath a man's body for
the first time in all her twenty-eight spinster's years.
    "I don't believe you do," he said.
    "Have a mind to hold you back?" Megan did
her best to give him a steely look. "Gracious, agent Winter, you do
flatter yourself. What do you think I've been trying to do these
past few minutes, except get out from beneath you?"
    His gaze challenged her—but it was the
unexpected sweetness of his smile that jolted her heart.
    "I can't say what you've been trying to do.
Only what you've done. We're closer than before, thanks to all your
squirming."
    He was right, drat him. As though his words
had made that fact truer than ever, as though they'd brought her
fully alive at last, Megan's senses grew inexplicably keener.
    Around her, the air filled with Gabriel's
scent and her own, with the fragrances of rose water and tobacco
and lingering traces of the tangy amole soap the maids used
to launder the hotel linens. The coverlet took on a cloud softness
she hadn't noticed before. The fine-spun wool of his suit sleeves
rubbed over her bare wrists, and the fabric's tender abrasion only
heightened all else.
    She heard her own indrawn breath, and felt
his chest rise against her in turn. On the fireplace mantel, the
clock ticked off the moments between seeing and feeling, between
awareness and whatever action their nearness would give rise to.
Was this what it meant to be ravished, after all? If so....
    If so, she could never succumb. Especially
not while Gabriel Winter was her enemy. Biting her lip, Megan tried
to sink into the warmth of the coverlet beneath her and escape in
that way. As she'd expected, though, his body only settled more
firmly on hers.
    "Not that I'm complaining," he went on. "To
my mind, lying still doesn't have much place in bed." Now his smile
seemed surpassingly devilish, given the circumstances. "Are you
hoping to see the worst—and the best—of me? You will, if you keep
wiggling like that."
    Panicked, Megan squirmed harder to release
herself. This predicament had all the makings of a French-novel
heroine's ruination! Despite her comments to Addie, she was in no
way prepared to step between those scandalous pages herself. With a
strength born of need—and hopes of dislodging Gabriel's hold long
enough to scramble from beneath him—she thrust her hips toward the
high, pressed-tin ceiling.
    The sound that rumbled from his throat was
something between a masculine moan and a half-formed plea. It froze
her in place.
    "If you know that's true, then let me go!"
she cried. Had he no sense at all? If her nearness pained him
enough to cause the throaty, needful groan he'd just given, then
why did he want to continue it?
    "Let you go?"
    With the practiced expertise of a man
accustomed to evaluating all that came near, Gabriel took in the
sight of her lying beneath him. His perusal felt soft and warm as a
caress, but his flinty gaze told another story. One that mingled
with the past he'd only alluded to?
    "Damnation," he muttered. Briefly, his eyes
flickered closed, then opened again on another curse. "If I had the
brains of a jackass, I would."
    Sensing an opening she might use, Megan
stilled her restless squirming. "Do it then. Let me go," she urged.
"You don't need me for finding my father. You have those other
agents, all over the hotel, to—"
    "Ahh, but I do. I do need you."
    I do need you . Gabriel was the first
person she'd ever heard say so. Sadly, he only wanted her as bait
to capture her father. However sugared his words might be, she
couldn't afford to forget that fact.
    "Pshaw, agent Winter. You said yourself
you've tracked dozens of men. Whatever could you need me for?"
    "For finding the truth," he said bluntly.
"For finding the facts you don't want to face any more than...hell.
I never should have left you here alone."
    "Finding the truth? You don't believe it
when it's staring