The Seven-Day Target Read online

  Nick had grown strangely quiet. His jaw was set firmly and his body was tense.

  Libby stuttered a sigh, her breath jagged. “I’ve never been good at emotions. I’ve never been comfortable with telling people how I feel or what I want.” She folded her hands and unfolded them, then rubbed her fingers together. “I’ve led a...measured life. I plan for the future. I meet my goals. I don’t like surprises. And all of that was fine when I assumed there would always be a tomorrow.”

  “There’s going to be a tomorrow, Libby.”

  “We can’t know that. If you hadn’t stayed with me this week, there may not have been a now. I can’t assume there’s a tomorrow. Not anymore. And there’s so much left to do.” She slouched her shoulders and stared at the floor, which was nearly covered in white photocopied documents. “Nothing is how I wanted it to be. I thought I’d be married or at least in love. I thought I’d be on my way to being a judge. I thought...I’d be a mother.” She swallowed tightly as her eyes began to water.

  Nick shifted to his knees. “Don’t talk this way. There’s going to be time for all of those things.”

  “No.”

  She looked straight at him. The life-or-death situation her stalker was supposed to put her in tomorrow could end in death; nothing was certain any longer. She should tell him the truth, right now. Tell him about that doctor’s appointment that had changed both of their lives. Ask him to forgive her for breaking up with him before he could break up with her. Maybe show him that when she’d set him free, she was only trying to be noble. Even if it didn’t seem that way.

  She blinked back the tears. Who was she kidding? She couldn’t tell him any of those things. If he wasn’t angry with her, he’d think she was pitiful, and she couldn’t bear either. “There’s no more time,” she sniffed. “I only have tonight.”

  He spoke slowly, as if he was weighing every syllable. “And what do you want, then? What do you want if tonight is all you have?”

  She looked into his dark eyes. “I don’t want to be alone.” The words came from some deep place that she hadn’t known existed. “I want to be with you.”

  The minute she said it, her pulse went wild. She couldn’t believe those words had come from her. She’d never been so honest. Not in an emotional way. As she sat on the arm of the couch waiting for Nick to digest that last statement, she felt as if all of her clothing had been suddenly stripped away. She trembled against an unseen current.

  But he was quiet. She watched him watch the floor as he weighed his response, hesitating and deep in his own head. Her heart thundered in her chest as the silence stretched, continuing into uneasiness. She’d opened herself up, and she’d made a terrible miscalculation. “Say something. Please.”

  A shadow crossed his face as he turned to look at her for the first time since hearing her confession. “You know I’m not going to leave you tonight. I promised you that already.”

  Her heart plummeted to the pit of her stomach. He was rejecting her. A hot flush of shame smeared her cheeks. She’d practically asked him to sleep with her, and he was rejecting her. She was a complete fool. When she spoke, her lips trembled. “I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  She stumbled to her feet, feeling unsteady. He rose and tried to take her hand in his, but she pulled it out of his reach. “Libby, I confused things last night. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Forget it. I have.”

  “Wait.” He reached out to grab her by the arm. “Please wait. Let me explain.”

  There was a rushing in her ears. She didn’t want his explanation. She didn’t want his pity. “You don’t need to explain anything.” She tugged at her arm. “Let me go.” He released his grip.

  She walked toward her room, stepping around the piles of documents on the floor. All of that information and hours of research, and they weren’t any closer to finding out who was after her. Someone wanted to kill her, and would it have killed Nick to be a little more sympathetic?

  He ran in front of her to stand in the doorway, blocking her retreat. “I don’t know what you want. You rejected me.” She was startled to hear the still-raw pain in his voice. “You told me that you didn’t love me and that you never had.”

  Libby paused as a resounding pang struck her square in the chest. She recognized her own words. Hard words, designed to hurt Nick, to punish him for wanting to join the FBI and move her away from Arbor Falls. To punish him for wanting a family, because that hurt more than anything. They were words designed to make him hate her as much as she’d hated herself when she said them. Even now, almost three years after she’d uttered them, they packed a punch when thrown back at her.

  “I really hurt you.” She saw it in the tension between his brows and in the way his mouth was shut tightly. The evidence was all over his face. “Nick, I’m sorry.”

  “I adored you, you know that? I would’ve done anything for you. I worked hard to establish myself so we could have a future together. A nice house, little Nicks and Libbys running around.” He wavered slightly. Then he slid his hand to the back of his neck. “I don’t think you know how much I loved you. I don’t think you ever knew.”

  Her chest was tight. She knew that he’d surprised her with flowers on her car when she’d had a bad day at work, or brought her to sit beside the bench at Arbor Falls when she needed to talk. She knew that Nick had discovered a million little ways to make her happy. No one since Nick had ever come close. Maybe she’d taken him for granted.

  “I think I know now,” she said softly.

  His shoulders relaxed by a fraction. Libby was emboldened to continue. “But we couldn’t have had a future together. You didn’t accept me and my goals. Not really. You wanted me to give up everything. You wanted me to leave my family and my career so that you could get what you wanted from your career. It wasn’t fair to me.”

  Even as she said the words, she realized she was talking about much more than their careers. Maybe they could have eventually reached a compromise with their jobs. But fundamentally he needed her to be someone she wasn’t. She could only disappoint him.

  His shoulders tensed again. “I should have known better than to listen to your father.”

  She started. “My father? What in the world does he have to do with this?”

  Nick folded his muscular arms across his chest. “He never approved of me, told me that he didn’t want you wasting your time with some low-level cop. Then one day he let it slip that he admired FBI agents and that if I wanted to marry you, I should better myself by becoming one.”

  Libby’s stomach dropped. “He told you to be an FBI agent.”

  “I expressed an interest and he encouraged me, indicating that this would be the way to win his approval. And I wanted his approval. I wanted him to approve of us.” Nick paused and shook his head. “He knew full well that I’d be relocated once I was admitted. New agents aren’t stationed in Arbor Falls, it’s too small. He told me that he’d help in whatever way he could and that after I completed my rotation, we’d be able to return to Arbor Falls and he’d pull strings so that you could pick up right where you left off with the D.A. Now let me guess—while he was encouraging me to join the FBI, he was encouraging you to stay in Arbor Falls. I’ll bet he told you that you deserved better than that and that I’d be stealing you away from your family and ruining your career.”

  Yes, that was pretty much exactly what her father had said. He’d said that Nick was selfish to even consider such a dangerous line of work, that he was only thinking of his own need for excitement. He’d told her that he knew for a fact that once she left her position with the D.A., it would be nearly impossible to come back. Tension drew her brows closer. Her father had encouraged their breakup. All of those nights she’d missed Nick, all of those years lost, and her father told her that she’d done the right thing and deserved better. That Nick was selfish and incapable of putting her first. She’d never told her father about her infertility, but he’d convinced her that Nick would
never let Libby stand in the way of something he wanted. And Nick wanted a family.

  And yet her father had lied to her. Nick had joined the FBI thinking that career would be better for them, not just for him. He’d thought he was putting their future first. Her stomach spun. Her father had exploited Nick’s devotion to her. She’d been all wrong about both of them.

  He continued. “So I was supposed to give up my career? To stay in Arbor Falls so that you could stay at the D.A.’s Office?”

  “I don’t know!” She threw her hands into the air. “I don’t have any answers, either. But what’s done is done. It’s clear that we didn’t belong together. That we still don’t. Otherwise it would have been easy.” She folded her arms.

  His laugh rose from deep in his chest, but it was edged with a gentleness. “Is that what you think? That it should have been easy?”

  “Yes. Love should be easy if it’s love.”

  He paused. “And is that why you said that you didn’t love me? Because things between us weren’t perfect and easy?”

  No. She’d said it because she wanted him to leave without asking questions, and hadn’t that been the perfect thing to say? But she supposed she had also said it because their relationship was so damned complicated. Perfect and easy would have been nice.

  “Yes.”

  She couldn’t read Nick’s response—relief? Understanding? His face was softer now, although she didn’t see what there was to be so relieved about. She’d explained why she hadn’t loved him, not told him that she’d been wrong to say such a thing. “Maybe you didn’t love me, either. Not really. You told me that I was difficult to love.”

  His mouth tensed into a thin line. “I was hurt when I said that.”

  “You said that I was uptight. Obsessive-compulsive. That I lived for control and that was an absurd way to live, that I can’t expect to control every aspect of my life.” She paused. “I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to loosen up a little.”

  He sighed. “I never had trouble loving you, Libby. Sometimes your quirks were annoying, like your wacky diets. But you were always easy to love. I hate that you’d want to change because of something I said.”

  “Not just because of something you said. Because I don’t like who I am sometimes.”

  Like now, when she was an emotional mess. Her insides had gone to puddles, as if there was nothing holding her up. How many times had she rehearsed this moment when she gave Nick a piece of her mind? She hated that when that moment came, her voice trembled.

  “I wish I was the kind of person who lit up the room and made other people laugh. I wish I could kick back and enjoy a few drinks without thinking about a vehicular homicide case I’ve got sitting on my desk or the first-degree murder that started with a backyard cookout. I wish I could...lighten up.” To be more like Nick, who could be spontaneous and angry and passionate without giving a damn about what others might think.

  “Lighten up?” His eyebrows shot upward. “You’re idealistic. You dream of a better world. That’s serious business, and I’ve always loved that about you. Your focus, your drive. Hell, I’ve worked hard to be more focused.”

  She looked away from the gaze he fixed on her, and she felt a warmth creep up her neck. This was all too much exposure. “Well, now that this is all cleared up, I’m going to bed.”

  “Libby.” Her name on his lips was a statement in itself, filled with any number of unspoken words. “Don’t leave like this.”

  “Why not? We’re both tired. I see no point in dwelling on the past.” She couldn’t help the way her voice pitched, revealing her hurt. It was all wrong. She’d told him too much, and everything was all wrong.

  He walked forward, took her hand and brought it to his lips. His mouth was soft as it crested the knuckles of her fingers then lighted on the sensitive skin on the underside of her wrist. Libby sucked in a breath, unable to take her hand back and not wanting him to relinquish his control over her.

  Nick came closer still and tucked a hand around her throat, cupping her jaw. She parted her lips without thinking as he stroked her mouth with the pad of his thumb. “I told you,” he whispered, “I’m not leaving you alone.”

  He lowered his mouth to hers, pressing softly at first, testing her response. She reached her arms around his waist, pulling him closer as the room slid away in that moment. His mouth was warm and his kiss skillful but reserved, familiar but brand-new.

  He broke the contact gently and slipped his fingers between hers to lead her into the dark bedroom, flipping on the soft light of a table lamp. Even in that dim lighting Libby could make out the impressive outline of his arousal. Her knees felt soft, and her stomach went to knots. She’d never wanted anything as much as she wanted this moment with Nick.

  He tugged at the strap of his leather belt, clicking metal, pulled it through his jeans and tossed it to the floor. He began to undress, lifting his shirt off and balling it before throwing it across a chair. She didn’t even think of wrinkles—her focus was drawn to the ripples of his abdomen. He unbuttoned his pants, and Libby realized that she was fully dressed, watching him with her mouth slightly agape. “Nick, what—”

  She’d been about to ask him what she was supposed to do. It wasn’t as if she was a virgin. He’d been her first, but that was years ago. Still, she felt a newness in the experience, an uncertainty about the steps in the dance ahead.

  “Last night I was in charge. Tonight it’s your turn.” There was no humor in his voice as he stood before her, fully naked and fully aroused. “Take control, Libby.”

  He climbed onto the bed and stretched on his back. Libby froze in place. “I don’t...usually...”

  “You know what to do.” He tucked his hands behind his head. “Anything you want or nothing at all.”

  “What...is this some sort of weird therapy?”

  “Yes. Didn’t I tell you? I’m a psychotherapist now.” Nick smirked good-naturedly. “For God’s sake, Libby. It’s sex. This is where you get to loosen up if you want, though to be honest, I’ve always preferred a stern mistress.”

  She approached him tentatively, then boldly reached out to stroke his side. The muscles tensed and quivered, and Nick sucked his breath through his teeth. “Go ahead. I won’t even tell you to hurry up and take off your clothes.”

  “Don’t rush me,” she scolded him with a smile as she trailed her fingertips down his abdomen. Every square inch of him had pulled hard and tense, though some spots were evidently harder than others. He really was beautiful, composed of sharp angles and straight lines, his skin soft and smooth in the light of the lamp. And he wanted her. She grasped his length in her fingers and felt a shiver at the groan her touch elicited.

  She disrobed slowly, teasing him, feeling her own arousal intensify as he watched her with a longing that she’d never seen before. She flung her shirt at him, and he reached up to catch it in one hand. She tossed her camisole at him and laughed as it bounced off his chest. He never took his eyes from hers except to trail his gaze down her body with a combination of pain and admiration. She’d never felt so powerful in her life.

  “I’m not going to beg you.” His eyes were half-closed as if he was in some kind of delightful agony. “But I wouldn’t mind if you sped up a little.”

  “I don’t have any such intention,” she replied as she lowered her lips to his and slid her tongue into his mouth. His kiss had been chaste. She wanted to taste him fully, to satiate the hunger for him that nothing else satisfied. He responded with a growl from the back of his throat and arched up to thrust his tongue against hers. Libby pushed him back against the bed with a gentle hand. “Not so fast.”

  She was going to savor him, to enjoy the way he needed her. Watching him shiver at the slightest of her touches filled her with awe. He desired her in spite of who she was, or maybe because of it. She wished she could save this feeling, put it in a bottle and carry it with her.

  “You’re beautiful.” Nick’s voice was strained as he watched her. As
she straddled him and leaned forward to run her tongue teasingly along his neck, he released another agonized groan. “Please.”

  “Now, now. You said I was in charge.” She proceeded down his chest with soft, tantalizing kisses.

  Her long hair swept across his skin as she moved, and he reacted with a series of gasps. “Libby. I can’t take much more.”

  She sat up, and he reached for his pants. He removed a condom from his pocket and tore the wrapper.

  “Please tell me you don’t just carry those things around with you.”

  He shook his head. “Believe me, honey, my sex life is about to get much better than it has been in a long time.”

  Hers was, too.

  He stretched onto his back and she mounted him, taking him inside of her with one slick movement. She moved slowly, teasing both of them as their bodies met, then parted. He palmed her breasts, squeezing them gently, and then pulled her down toward him so he could take the tight bud of one nipple in his mouth. She continued moving, feeling the tension inside of her build as he bit the side of her breast lightly and moaned into her soft flesh.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t take it.”

  He didn’t need to apologize. She didn’t mind that he gripped her hips and turned both of them over onto the bed. She certainly didn’t mind as he claimed her like a man possessed, with hard fast thrusts and a thin layer of sweat coating his skin. Moments later she was lost. She dug her nails into his muscular shoulders and arched her back as wave after wave of pleasure rolled over her. When she was finished, she collapsed with a sigh as Nick stiffened and groaned his own release into her ear. He fell beside her on the bed.

  He stroked her hair back from her face as they lay side by side, their limbs intertwined. “Libby, I’m sorry.”

  “For that? You have nothing to apologize for.”

  “No, not for that. For everything before that. For asking you to give up everything for me. It wasn’t fair.”

  She traced his face with her fingertips, lingering on the rough stubble on his chin. “I’m sorry, too. In my own way, I was trying to get you to give everything up. I resented that you were joining the FBI, and I wanted you to stay. I just didn’t know how to come out and say it.” She brushed her thumb across his cheek. He took her hand and kissed her palm.