“Are you still awake?” Her voice was soft as it drifted down from somewhere above me.

This time I let the groan out so that it vibrated my chest, and shifted so that I was sitting up. I dropped my head into my hands. “Yeah.”

“How was work today?” There was a hint of dry humor in her tone. I sighed and threw myself back against the couch cushions and laced my fingers behind my head.

“Really?” I sounded like a dick but I couldn’t help it.

It was her turn to sigh. “We’ve been doing this a week, Titus. Each day that goes by, you get tenser and more tightly strung. Something has to give. We’re supposed to be lovers. We’re supposed to be unable to keep our hands off each other and making Roark crazy with jealousy. All you’re doing is avoiding me. I’m just trying to figure out a way to make this easier for you.”

The padding of her bare feet sounded on the stairs. “There is no easy. I’m working a murder investigation where I know who is responsible and I can’t even find my perp to question him. It’s like all those years hunting Novak while he carved holes in the city only to watch him walk away all over again. I don’t want to lose again.”

I turned my head when the cushions next to me depressed as she sat down. I had to bite my tongue to keep it from rolling out of my mouth like a horny teenager. Even in the barely-there moonlight all I could see was miles and miles of long, naked leg and endless amounts of ebony hair. Her shorts and tank top revealed more than they covered and it didn’t take X-ray vision to see that she didn’t have a bra on. Goddamn, this girl was going to be the end of me. Things big and wild started to swell inside of me.

“The sooner we start to rub this in Conner’s face the sooner he’ll make his move. Stop tiptoeing around what needs to be done.” I flinched involuntarily when she reached out a single finger and gently stroked down the deep frown lines that were etched in my forehead over my nose. “Maybe then you can actually get a full night’s sleep. You’re going to run yourself into the ground, Detective.”

I caught her wrist and yanked it away from my face. Her touching me wasn’t a good idea, for either one of us. Rumblings from the things I kept so carefully locked down turned into howls of hunger.

“Tomorrow I’ll take you to get some clothes that actually fit, and then we can hit up some really visible places in the Point so that way, even if Roark doesn’t see us, other people will and the word will out be on the street.”

She pulled her hand free and used it to spear her fingers through her long hair. The motion pushed her breasts up higher, making them strain against the thin material barely covering them and making me grunt as I watched the way her nipples obviously tightened under the weight of my gaze.

“Where exactly are you thinking we should go?”

It took me longer than it should have to come up with a coherent response. With this woman, listening to her breathe was more of a turn-on than anything any other woman had done for me or to me. She shoved all of my common sense and resolve straight into my dick, where it turned into want and desire so thick and heavy it actually hurt as it throbbed behind my zipper. It wasn’t just the parts of me long denied that she called to, it was all the parts of me that could desire and want her that listened to her song so carefully!

I wanted to shift a few inches over because I could feel electricity arcing between our bare skin. In hindsight I realized I should have left my T-shirt on when I crashed for the night. Between the two of us there were too few articles of clothing to keep us from feeding off of each other’s heat. “I think we need to stop by Spanky’s. That gives us the opportunity to be out where the kind of people that need to see us are and it also gives us the opportunity to show Nassir that you’re with me. Plus, if for some reason Roark does make a move, we won’t be alone. Chuck will be there and Nassir always has armed security staff manning the joint. It won’t be an uneven fight if Roark makes a move with a minion instead of doing it alone.”

She crossed her legs and I jerked my gaze up to hers to see if she’d done it on purpose. She had. Her dark blue eyes reflected the glow of the moon and I could see that she was just as affected by my nearness and half-dressed state as I was by hers. This was going to explode all over the both of us, and when the smoke cleared we were going to be picking out shrapnel forever. I had a sinking suspicion the wounds we were inevitably going to leave on each other were the kind that never managed to heal all the way through.

“I used to work on the hair of a lot of the girls from Spanky’s when Ernie was running the place for Novak. Most of them were really sweet, even the girls that did more than dance. It sucked that once they got in the business there was no way out. Novak owned them.”

There was a drop in her voice. She must have felt the same way while she waited and waited for him to collect on that massive favor she’d owed him.

“Nassir takes better care of the girls that work for him than that. He’s picky and he makes sure they are protected and taken care of. He won’t keep anyone on that isn’t loyal and quiet, that includes his clients. I’ve tried to bust him on solicitation charges more than once, but no one ever comes forward as a witness. He’s the one taking care of the arrangements for the girl on the docks, so I think he cares about them in his own scary, silent kind of way.”

She hummed a little noise and my balls instantly tightened at the thought of what it would feel like if her mouth was wrapped around my cock and she was doing the same thing.

“They should have someone there to help them when they want out. That’s what’s so awful about this city. Once you’re in, there doesn’t seem to be any way out. A girl can get on a stage and be lured by all that money she can make stripping when she’s eighteen or nineteen, but what’s after that? Suddenly she’s thirty and all she knows is selling sex and the streets and what shot does she have for anything else?”

“Are you speaking from experience?” If she ever took her clothes off for money, entire countries would end up broke.

“No. Just from what I heard when they were in my chair and then from watching how quickly my sister got sucked into it all. There is no escape once the Point has you.”

She leaned her head back on the couch and shifted her eyes up to the ceiling. I thought I saw a sheen of moisture dance across the navy-colored surface but then she blinked and it was gone.