Low Pressure

whimper to her throat that she was powerless to contain.

While working on his back, she’d tried to remain indifferent to the shape of his buttocks beneath the thin cloth of his shorts, but now the temptation to put her arms around him and test the firmness of those taut muscles against her palms was almost too powerful to withstand.

She wanted to say To hell with everything and lean forward, nuzzle that enticing ribbon of hair, then follow it with her lips down to his sex that was so seductively close it made her weak with yearning. To take Dent into her mouth, to taste him…

Another sound issued from her, but when she moved, it wasn’t to put her hands on him, or to kiss the skin that smelled of soap and man, of Dent. Instead she pushed his caressing hand aside, stood up, and edged round him.

“Don’t be cute, Dent. This is hardly the time—”

Whatever else she was going to say—and later she couldn’t remember—was left unspoken. He reached for her as she made to go past him, pulled her to him, and closed his hand around her jaw to tilt her face up. “You grew up to be a hell of a woman, Bellamy. The way you worked that gear shift was a major turn-on.”

If last night’s kiss had been a flirtatious invitation to misbehave, this one was a lesson in mastery. It was possessive, carnal, and dominating to a degree that alarmed her. Not that she feared him. She feared her susceptibility to him, feared the forbidden wish that he would do to her at least some of what his kisses portended.

But she resisted being completely drawn in, and, sensing that, he raised his head and released his hold on her face, but only in order to slide his hand down over her breast. He plumped it and tugged gently on her nipple with his fingertips as he nudged the vee of her thighs with his erection.

“Let yourself think about something else for a little while,” he coaxed, whisking his lips across hers. “Relax and have some fun for a change.”

Then he captured her mouth again. Relax? Impossible. Not when her body was urging her to draw him in, to partner with his tongue. She wanted to drive her fingers up into his hair and hold his head steady while she lost herself in his intoxicating kiss.

Instead, she forced herself to do nothing, to respond with neither ardor nor aversion. She willed herself to go perfectly still and react to nothing.

Quick to realize that he was the only one engaged, he angled his head back and searched her face.

“Daddy said you would try to get the last laugh on us by sleeping with me.”

He let go of her immediately. “Oh, that’s what Daddy said. That explains the deep- freeze treatment.”

The gashes on his face had reopened and were bleeding, making him appear even more dangerously angry when he stalked to the closet and reached inside to yank a pair of jeans off a hanger. He pulled them on with abrupt, jerky motions, but when he tried to button them, he helplessly raised his hands to his sides. “This could take a while.”

Bellamy flushed hotly, but not from embarrassment. She gestured toward the rumpled bed. “Did you really expect me to get into bed with you when you haven’t even changed the sheets from the last one?”

He plowed his fingers through his damp hair. “Look, I left her here the morning I flew you to Houston. I hadn’t thought about her till we came through the door and I saw the bed. I don’t even know her name.”

“You didn’t care to ask?”

“No.”

“Just like you didn’t care that Susan had others while she was dating you?”

“Why should I have cared?”

“You didn’t love her? Even a little?”

“Love her?” He laughed. “Hell, no. I was a horny teenager, and she put out.”

“And that’s all my sister mattered to you?”

He put his hands on his hips. “How much do you think I mattered to her?”

“You mattered enough to make her furious when you showed up at the barbecue late. I think she would rather you not have come at all than to—”

All the blood seemed suddenly to drain from her head. She fell back on a wave of dizziness, but the image in her mind’s eye was crystal clear: Dent, astride his motorcycle, gesturing angrily at Susan, who was splendidly, gorgeously in a rage that matched his.

The memory had popped open like a three-dimensional greeting card, gaudy and stark in detail. Bellamy’s breathing became as rapid and choppy as her heartbeat. “You were there. At the boathouse. With Susan. Before the tornado.”

He swore and took a step toward her. “Bellamy—”

“No!” She stuck both hands in front of her, palms out, then clasped them to the sides of her head as she put words to the tumbling recollections. “Susan didn’t come back from the boathouse with the beer-drinking group. I got worried, thinking she might be sick from drinking too much. It was such a hot, muggy day, and I thought…”

“Listen. Let me explain.”

“I went to look for her, didn’t I?”

He said nothing.

“You know I did. Because… because you saw me watching the two of you, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“Bellamy—”

“All this time,” she cried, “you could have told me! Why didn’t you tell me that I was remembering wrong? Why didn’t you—” The answer became obvious in a lightning bolt of clarity. “You weren’t flying with Gall. You didn’t have an alibi. You were in the state park, and you were fighting with Susan.”

For several moments, neither moved, then she lunged for the door and pulled it open.

“Fuck! Bellamy!”

She bolted through the doorway with such impetus that the only thing to break her fall from the second-story breezeway was the metal guardrail. She landed against it hard, banging her pelvic bone painfully. She gave a cry of pain, then another of fear as Dent’s hands closed around her upper arms.

Her sharp cry caused the two men on the parking lot below to look up. They’d been lounging against the hood of a car, but Rocky Van Durbin came instantly to life. He shouted, “There!” and pointed her out to his photographer, who was at the ready. The flash on his camera exploded in bursts of blinding light.

Dent wrenched Bellamy’s gripping hands off the guardrail and hauled her back into the apartment, then kicked the door shut.

He vented his frustration on the door, beating his fist against it to emphasize each eruptive, foul word. His impulse was to tear down the stairs and make Van Durbin sorry he had ever heard of Denton Carter, then go to work on the photographer and destroy his camera.

But when he’d suffered similar ambushes following Susan’s death, and again during the NTSB’s investigation into the near crash, Gall had been there like a flea in his ear, warning him against impetuous reprisals. “Reporters thrive on angry reactions. You want to beat ’em at their game? Ignore ’em.”

The gash on his cheekbone was throbbing like a son of a bitch, and when he wiped his face the back of his hand, already bleeding from the cuts on his knuckles, came away streaked with brighter, fresher blood. He figured the cut on his back had reopened as well.

When he turned into the room, Bellamy flinched, which made him all the madder. “If you’re more scared of me than you are of them, you know the way out.”

He left the path to the door clear for her as he retrieved his blood-soaked jeans from the bathroom floor and fished his cell phone from a pocket. He then strode into the kitchen and consulted the telephone number for the complex manager, which a previous tenant had penciled onto the faded wallpaper.

Viciously he punched in the number, and the call was answered almost immediately. “Yeah, that notice you put in everyone’s mailbox last week? About the guy who exposed himself to a woman in the North Unit? Uh-huh. Well there are two guys in the parking lot of South. They’re taking pictures through people’s windows with a telephoto lens. I’m almost sure it’s the same two I saw talking to some little girls on the playground this afternoon. You’d better call the police. Okay. Bye.”

He disconnected and looked over at Bellamy, who hadn’t moved or taken her wide gaze off him. “That ought