Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

And if her smile picked up my spirits, it was nothing compared to what Grace’s did when I pulled up to my three-decker and saw her sitting on the front porch. She was wearing a forest green canvas field jacket that was four or five sizes too big for her over a white T-shirt and blue hospital scrub pants. Usually the bangs of her short auburn hair fanned the edges of her face, but she’d obviously been running her hands through it during the last thirty hours of her shift, and her face was drawn from too little sleep and too many cups of coffee under the harsh light of the emergency room.

And she was still one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.

As I climbed the steps, she stood and watched me with a half-smile playing on her lips and mischief in her pale eyes. When I was three steps from the top, she spread her arms wide and tilted forward like a diver on a high board.

“Catch me.” She closed her eyes and fell forward.

The crush of her body against mine was so sweet it bordered on pain. She kissed me and I braced my legs as her thighs slid over my hips and her ankles crossed against the backs of my legs. I could smell her skin and feel the heat of her flesh and the tidal pull of each one of our organs and muscles and arteries hanging as if suspended beneath our separate skins. Grace’s mouth came away from mine and her lips grazed my ear.

“I missed you,” she whispered.

“I noticed.” I kissed her throat. “How’d you escape?”

She groaned. “It finally slowed down.”

“You been waiting long?”

She shook her head and her teeth nipped my collarbone before her legs unwrapped themselves from my waist and she stood in front of me, our foreheads touching.

“Where’s Mae?” I said.

“Home with Annabeth. Sound asleep.”

Annabeth was Grace’s younger sister and live-in nanny.

“You see her?”

“Just long enough to read her a bedtime story and kiss her good night. Then she was out like a rock.”

“What about you?” I said, running my hand up and down her spine. “You need sleep?”

She groaned again and nodded and her forehead hit mine.

“Ouch.”

She laughed softly. “Sorry.”

“You’re exhausted.”

She looked into my eyes. “Absolutely. More than sleep, though, I need you.” She kissed me. “Deep, deep inside me. You think you can oblige me, Detective?”

“I’m a hell of an obliger, Doctor.”

“I’ve heard that. You going to take me upstairs or are

we going to put on a show for the neighbors?”

“Well…”

Her palm found my abdomen. “Tell me where it hurts.”

“A little lower,” I said.

As soon as I closed the apartment door behind me, Grace pinned me against the wall and buried her tongue in my mouth. Her left hand grasped the back of my head tightly, but her right ran over my body like a small, hungry animal. I’m usually on the perpetually hormonal side, but if I hadn’t quit smoking several years ago, Grace would’ve put me in intensive care.

“The lady is in command tonight, I take it.”

“The lady,” she said and nipped my shoulder, not very lightly, “is so horny she might have to be hosed down.”

“Again,” I said, “the gentleman is happy to oblige.”

She stepped back and stared at me as she pulled off her jacket and tossed it somewhere into my living room. Grace wasn’t a big neat freak. Then she kissed my mouth roughly and spun on her heel and started walking down my hallway.

“Where you going?” My voice was a tad hoarse.

“To your shower.”

She peeled off her T-shirt as she reached the door to the bathroom. A small shaft of streetlight cut through the bedroom into the hall and slanted across the hard muscles in her back. She hung the T-shirt on the doorknob and turned to look at me, her arms crossed over her bare breasts. “You’re not moving,” she said.

“I’m enjoying the view,” I said.

She uncrossed her arms and ran both hands through her hair, arching her back, her ribcage pressing against her skin. She met my eyes again as she kicked off her tennis shoes, then peeled off her socks. She ran her hands over her abdomen and pulled the drawstring on her scrub pants. They fell to her ankles and she stepped out of them.

“Coming out of your stupor yet?” she said.

“Oh, yeah.”

She leaned against the doorjamb, hooked her thumbs in the elastic band of her black panties. She raised an eyebrow as I walked toward her, her smile a wicked thing. “Oh, would you like to help me remove these, Detective?” I helped. I helped a lot. I’m swell at helping.

It occurred to me as Grace and I made love in my shower that whenever I think of her, I think of water. We met during the wettest week of a cold and drizzly summer, and her green eyes were so pale they reminded me of winter rain, and the first time we made love, it was in the sea with the night rain bathing our bodies.

After the shower, we lay in bed, still damp, her auburn hair dark against my chest, the sounds of our lovemaking still echoing in my ears.

She had a scar the size of a thumbtack on her collarbone, the price she had paid for playing in her uncle’s barn near exposed nails when she was a kid. I leaned over and kissed it.

“Mmm,” she said. “Do that again.”

I ran my tongue over the scar.

She hooked her leg over mine, ran the edge of her foot against my ankle. “Can a scar be erogenous?”

“I think anything can be erogenous.”

Her warm palm found my abdomen, ran over the hard rubber scar tissue in the shape of a jellyfish. “What about this one?”

“Nothing erogenous about that, Grace.”

“You keep evading me about it. It’s obviously a burn of some sort.”

“What’re you—a doctor?”

She chuckled. “Allegedly.” She ran her palm up between my thighs. “Tell me where it hurts, Detective.”

I smiled, but I doubt it was much of one.

She rose up on her elbow and looked at me for a long time. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said softly.

I raised my left hand, used the backs of my fingers to brush a strand of hair off her forehead, then allowed the fingers to drop slowly down the edge of her face, along the soft warmth of her throat, and then the small, firm curve of her right breast. I grazed the nipple with my palm as I turned the hand, moved it back up to her face and pulled her down on top of me. I held her so tightly for a moment that I could hear our hearts drumming through our chests like hail falling into a bucket of water.