Searching for Cate

“Oh?” There was nothing short of mischief in her eyes. “Then what?”

He’d started this, but now he was the one who was hopelessly trapped. Trapped by the look in her eyes, by the smile on her face. By the feelings that were always there, just a hairbreadth beneath the surface, waiting to be summoned and pressed into service.

“You know damn well, what.” Lukas pressed a kiss to her temple. “It has to do with a certain sexier-than-hell FBI operative.”

Gazing up at him, struggling not to melt right there in his arms, Lydia batted her lashes at Blair Memorial’s leading cardiac surgeon like an old-fashioned femme fatale. “Anyone I know?”

“Maybe.” Ever so lightly, he brushed her lips with his own and ignited a fire in his veins. “Someone I definitely know better than you do.”

Because she was so well trained, Lydia didn’t stiffen, didn’t react. Lukas had said that before. That he knew her better than she knew herself. Until recently, she wouldn’t have taken exception to the point.

Until recently, she would have been the first to say that Lukas could see into her very soul, a soul that had been driven and troubled until she’d allowed him into her life.

But now, well, now he didn’t know her as well as he thought he did. Didn’t know that she was keeping something from him and would continue to do so for at least a while longer, even though it killed her to do it. But there were reasons for what she was doing, reasons she knew that her husband wouldn’t understand.

“Speaking of which,” Lukas murmured, his words heating the hollow of her throat just before he kissed it, “something bothering you?”

It was a struggle to keep her eyes from fluttering shut. She really did need to get down to the Santa Ana field office and Lukas was making it very, very difficult for her to keep her mind on her goal. She’d been rigorously trained to withstand anything the enemy might have to throw at her. But this was torture of an entirely different variety. Lukas was her weakness as well as the source of her strength.

“Other than the chaos of the world as we know it?” Lydia could feel her very core tightening. Yearning. Her husband had one hell of a bedside manner.

She heard him laugh softly as he took another pass at her throat. “Other than that.”

His hand cupped her breast, pressing lightly. Her mind began scrambling. “No, why?”

“You were talking in your sleep last night. I couldn’t make out the words.” He raised his head to look at her, a faint line of concern between his eyes. “And you were tossing and turning like a top. That’s something new.”

Anyone else would have used a far more modern comparison, she thought. But Lukas had spent his childhood living on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. It was a life that had deprived him of so many things that children even in his generation had taken for granted. For lack of other toys, he had probably played with a top as a boy. It might have been something that had been handed down from generation to generation, because on the reservation there was nothing else to give a child beyond love, which she knew her mother-in-law did with abundance.

Without realizing it, Lydia caught her bottom lip between her teeth. The answer to her husband’s question was very simple. But she couldn’t give it to him. God, but she hated keeping anything from Lukas. Still, there might not even be something to tell him. She wasn’t certain. But there was no way she could share her thoughts with Lukas. She knew him. The second he found out, he’d want her to restrict her duties. As would the department. And she couldn’t, not yet. Not until this case was over.

She was personally invested in the case, had been right from the start. If she was taken off the case or relegated to some desk, it would probably kill her. Or come very close.

Lydia gave him a half truth. “Just the case,” she answered vaguely, then before Lukas could comment, she added, “and frustration.”

His eyes narrowed as he looked up at her, momentarily abandoning the slow-moving siege he was laying to her body. “What do you mean?”

Her mouth curved wickedly. “Well, there I was, lying alone in that big, empty bed. My husband was gone, working late—”

He’d had plans of being home by six. Instead, he’d gotten home after eleven. There’d been complications. When he’d walked into the bedroom, Lydia had already gone to bed and was asleep.

“The operation ran over. Way over.”

Lydia nodded. They’d made a promise when they were first married that neither would upbraid the other because of the demands of their careers. Each felt that what they did was of paramount importance.

She smiled seductively now, not wanting him to think she was complaining in the true sense of the word. An intentionally dramatic sigh escaped her lips before she said, “Maybe if I’d had someone there with me last night, I wouldn’t have been so tense or tossed around ‘like a top.’”

When she looked at him like that, there was very little he could do to resist her. And there was no desire to. He could feel his body hardening in response to the look in her eyes.

He’d been exhausted when he’d walked in last night. Exhausted, but exhilarated. There was nothing he’d wanted more than to make love with her then. Disappointment had nibbled away at him when he’d found Lydia asleep. But it never occurred to him to wake her to satisfy his own needs.

Right now, he pretended to lament the lost opportunity. “If I’d known that, I would have woken you up.”

Lydia sniffed. “Yeah, yeah, big words after the fact.” She placed her hands on his biceps, loving the way the muscles felt under her palms. “I guess I’ll just have to take a rain check.” Lukas dropped his hands from her waist and lightly tugged on the towel she had wrapped around her. She raised her eyes to his face, barely keeping hers straight. “What are you doing?”

“Unless I miss my guess,” he said, giving the towel a final tug, “preparing for rain.”

Lydia laughed as her damp towel hit the floor, pooling around her feet. Along with her resistance. Still, she was honorbound to make an attempt at a protest. “Luke, I have to get to the office.”

He filled his hands with her hair, bringing her mouth to his. She felt his breath on her lips as he promised, “You will.”

Everything inside of her was turning to the consistency of oatmeal. “I mean, like soon.”

Amusement etched itself into his features. “I’ll be quick, I promise.”

Any kind of resolve she might have been able to muster on short notice evaporated like icicles in the hot August sun. She had never been able to resist Lukas, not even from the very first. And then she’d been armed with determination, resolved not to allow herself to fall for the tall, dark, handsome surgeon. As if she had any say in the matter, even then.

They’d met under the most dire of circumstances. She’d burst into the hospital E.R., accompanying a man she’d shot not fifteen minutes earlier. He’d been the grief-stricken parent of a young girl who had overdosed on drugs she’d gotten from someone dealing at the mall. Extremists had tapped into his grief, making use of his knowledge of demolitions. Only timing and a huge amount of luck had allowed her and her former partner to partially foil his plot to blow up the mall.

She’d arrived at the hospital determined to bring her wounded “suspect” to justice. Lukas was only concerned with saving his life.

All in all, it hadn’t been the best setting for love to take root, but it had. Strongly. But then, she hadn’t counted on the determination of a man like Lukas. Despite their years of marriage, she could feel her head beginning to spin, her pulse beginning to race as his lips roamed over her shoulders. God, she hoped that would never change.

“Just not too quick,” she cautioned.

Stripping off the pajama bottoms that had just barely been clinging to his hips, Lukas caught her up in his arms.

“Your wish is my command,” he told her just before he brought his mouth down on hers.

And made the world disappear.

Chapter 6

The moment she got behind the wheel of her vehicle, Lydia transformed. She was no longer Lydia Graywolf, the proud, contented and very much in love wife of a prominent cardiac surgeon. She was Special Agent Lydia Wakefield Graywolf, a dedicated operative who had given her all to the bureau.

At times, she found the system restrictive, the regulations frustratingly binding. But when she came right down to it, no better system existed within the country, certainly not outside it. And until a better one did, she was determined to remain working for the bureau in one capacity or another. That meant being a field operative, and she wanted nothing to change that. Not yet.

Again, a pang of guilt slipped through her. She banked it down.

Not now, she told herself sternly. There was time enough for that later, when she was a hundred percent certain.

Lydia glanced at her watch. Silver-banded, blue-faced, it had been a gift from Lukas on their first wedding anniversary. The irony of it was, without knowing his choice, she’d bought a similar one for him.

Just showed that they thought alike, she mused. Kindred spirits that had found each other.

She wasn’t late—yet—but she certainly wasn’t going to be early the way she wanted to be, either.

Pressing down on the accelerator, Lydia gunned her engine. She made her way from Bedford to Santa Ana taking surface streets. The Santa Ana Freeway was a bear at this hour of the morning. Traffic was known to come to a dead stop with a fair amount of regularity. She didn’t have the patience for that this morning.