Frannie and The Private Dick (Night Fall Book 7) Read online

  How did he do it? How could a look, a growling inflection, and a hard shaft have her ready to crawl all over him? She’d never gone for the primitive type. But here she was, ready to go down on a man she hardly knew just to please him. She licked her lips in anticipation.

  Niall lifted his free hand and speared his fingers through her hair, urging her closer. “I’m a dick.”

  “Yeah, you are,” she breathed. She stuck out her tongue and aimed the point at the tiny eye on the crest of his burgeoning cock.

  His sex pulsed, and his fingers gripped her hair hard. He pulled her closer.

  Frannie didn’t give him what he wanted. Instead, she nuzzled his cock, smoothing her cheek along the satiny skin stretched taut over the tempered steel of his rod. She rubbed her chin, her nose, her closed lips along his length, drawing the musky scent of him deep into her lungs.

  She’d never given cocks much thought before, but Niall’s was a thing of beauty. Ruddy when engorged, like now, with a tracery of blue veins, it rose from his groin strong and proud like the rest of his body.

  Niall pulled her hair just hard enough to sting, and Frannie gave a husky laugh. But she was just as ready. She opened her mouth and swallowed the fat, blunt head of his cock, taking him deep inside until he butted the back of her throat. Then she drew back, suctioning hard, before gliding back down to meet their joined hands wrapped around the base of his penis.

  She spread her fingers on his shaft, and his slid between. Together they fisted around his sex, working in opposition to her suctioning mouth.

  His body trembled, and his hips pumped forward and back, his harsh breaths interspersed with moans.

  Frannie glanced up at his face and found his hot gaze watching her every movement. In that moment, she felt powerful. She had the vampire at her mercy. She reached between his legs and cupped the heavy sac that held the essence of his manhood and squeezed.

  “You’re a witch, Francesca.” Niall groaned. “Do you even know how powerful this thing is between us?”

  Oh, she did. But she wouldn’t let him use it to bind her to him. Never again would she be a man’s plaything. She gently scraped her teeth along his shaft.

  Niall let loose a blistering curse that made her laugh, but she kept up the torture, tonguing his length, sucking so hard she was sure she could bring up his come, twisting their intertwined fingers on his cock until he shuddered so hard she felt it to her teeth.

  Then suddenly, Niall tugged her hair, pulling her mouth away. With a move so fast she was left gasping, he flipped her onto her stomach over the stool and plunged his cock into her pussy, gliding easily toward her moist core.

  The legs of the stool rattled on the floor with his powerful thrusts. Frannie gripped the counter above her head to steady herself, and then pushed back to meet his hips.

  The hard, relentless pounding produced a wetness from her pussy that drenched her thighs and added a percussive consonance to the sounds of their joining—a sharp slapping sound that excited her all the more. Frannie spread her legs as wide as the stool would allow to feel the full force of his pounding on her tender flesh.

  Just as she was sure she’d never experienced a more wonderful fuck, Niall’s large hands parted her buttocks. The shock and anticipation of what he’d do next left her completely breathless.

  When the first thick digit pressed inside her ass, she thought she’d die from delight. When the second joined it, she screamed with pain and the most intense pleasure she’d ever known. When the fingers shoved in and out, matching the rhythm of his thrusting cock, Frannie knew she wasn’t long for this world.

  The orgasm that rocked her body pushed her higher than she’d ever flown, exploding like rockets inside her head. She heard an ear-piercing scream and sank into darkness.

  Niall Keegan had killed her again.

  *

  Niall whistled as he listened to the messages on his answering machine. He was feeling pretty pleased with himself. He’d left Frannie snoring peacefully in his bed. She hadn’t opened her eyes once since the orgasm to end all orgasms.

  Sated, his skin still tingling from the greatest sex he’d ever had, Niall was thinking life was pretty damn good.

  The door to his office opened, and a wide-eyed Frannie pushed through. She was adorably rumpled and wearing an old pair of his sweats with the arms and legs cut off. A pair so mutilated he didn’t remember owning them.

  “You lied to me!” she said, staring at the gold lettering on the glass door. “It says right here, ‘Niall Keegan, Private Investigator’.”

  He folded his arms over his chest and sat on the edge of his desk. His body tensed in anticipation of another round with Frannie. “I wasn’t kidding when I told you what I was.”

  She stalked over to him, color staining her cheeks. “You know damn well I didn’t have a clue what you were talking about. ‘Dick’ isn’t what we call a private investigator these days. It’s what we call an asshole. You deliberately misled me.”

  Niall took her proximity as an invitation and grabbed her hips, pulling her between his legs. “And it was so easy to do.”

  She reached behind her to shove away his hands, but he adjusted his grip downward to cup her lush buttocks instead.

  “You’re an asshole,” she said, her chin jutting.

  “But I’m also a damn good fuck, aren’t I?” he growled.

  “That word!” She moaned and pressed her belly against the open vee of his legs. “You make me so angry—when does that turn me on?”

  Niall lowered his head and kissed her, raising her on her toes to bring her up hard against his burgeoning desire. When he finally drew back, Frannie’s eyes were closed and a smile curved her lips.

  Niall thought he’d discovered the trick to defusing her anger—just kiss her silly.

  Her eyes opened, and she sighed. “So when do I start?” she asked.

  “Looks like we already have. Question is whether you want it on the desk or where you’re standin’?”

  Frannie’s eyes widened. “You’re unbelievable! Do you think everything’s about sex?”

  Niall just stopped himself from nodding. Obviously, Frannie was looking for another answer. “’Course not,” he muttered.

  She shoved at his chest until he let go. She backed out of reach. “I was talking about working. When do I start?”

  “We talked about this a couple hours ago. Taxi driving is just a cover I use.”

  “So I’ll learn to be a PI.”

  “I work alone.”

  “You just made yourself a partner,” she said, tapping her bare toe.

  The frayed end of the sweats showed the top half of a logo. “Wait a second. What the hell are you wearin’?” he asked, his stomach plummeting.

  “Just a pair of old sweats. They have a drawstring so I can keep them up, but I had to cut the length. And I knew you wouldn’t miss this old T-shirt—it has a hole,” she said, poking her finger through the seam on the side to prove her point.

  Niall felt like his head was about ready to explode. “I love those sweatpants. I play basketball in them every Saturday night. And that T-shirt is my lucky Yankees shirt. The Yanks have won every home game I ever wore that shirt to.”

  “Oh.” Frannie dipped her head, uncertainty creasing her brow. “I’m sorry, but I needed something to wear. You ripped my dress to shreds. If you’d been there when I woke up—”

  Niall took a deep, calming breath. “You can file.”

  Her head snapped up, and her expression glowed. “Great! How do I do that?”

  He gritted his teeth and turned his gaze to the ceiling. Damn, it was going to be a long time until morning.

  *

  Frannie hummed as she finished rearranging the last of the manila files in the battered metal cabinet. Niall would be impressed with everything she’d accomplished while he was gone. She glanced at the clock on the wall. He’d said he’d be home before four. There was still time to explore the inner sanctum of his private office. />
  He’d left strict instructions that she was to stay out of his office, but Frannie was dying of curiosity to see what a PI kept in his desk. Would she find personal notebooks with all the really juicy details about the things he’d seen? Or photographs from his latest stakeout?

  She’d learned so much going through the files. They revealed an underside of life she’d thought only existed on the Lifetime network. Husbands cheating on wives with younger women. Husbands cheating on wives with other men. Women meeting lovers in smarmy hotel rooms. Businessmen hiding cash from partners. Businessmen screwing their partner’s wives.

  She couldn’t wait until she got her first case. Then maybe, eventually, she’d be an equal partner to Niall, and then maybe he’d see her as more than a convenience. She didn’t have any illusions concerning her importance in his life—he felt responsible for her. That they were compatible in bed was only an added bonus so far as he was concerned.

  Frannie had had enough being a mere convenience. She wanted to be someone’s reason for existence—someone’s whole life. If that someone wasn’t Niall, she’d just have to keep her eyes and her heart open. Although the thought of ever leaving Niall left her cold. How had he wormed his way into her heart so quickly? Vinnie had seduced her all through Catholic school and for years beyond before she’d given him her virginity.

  Taking a seat in Niall’s leather chair, she rolled back and forth with a negligent kick of her foot, pondering where to begin her sleuthing. She turned the cards in his Rolodex, but didn’t see anything that smelled of seamy secrets, and then pushed around the papers in his in-basket, finding nothing other than invoices and a few scribbled phone messages.

  Then she pulled out the large drawer on the left pedestal of his desk and hit pay dirt—a whole new set of files marked “DVs”.

  “DVs? Delinquent Vouchers?” She pulled out a file and rifled through its contents. The photos and illegible notes seemed much like the contents of the files in the main office.

  “Dumb villains, maybe?”

  The door to the outer office creaked open, and her heart skipped a beat. Niall couldn’t find her snooping through his drawers. Frannie leapt from his chair and circled the desk, picking up the stack of invoices in his basket. Then she pretended not to hear his footsteps as he approached.

  He reached around her and laid a folder in his basket. “I thought I told you this room was off limits,” he murmured.

  “I finished filing,” she said over her shoulder, “so I looked for more work I could do.”

  When he leaned down to kiss the side of her neck, she neatly sidestepped him and turned to give him a blinding smile.

  His expression was cautious. She’d left him confused by her seemingly contradictory behavior. She’d had hours to think about her predicament. A little doubt would do him good.

  She carried the stack of invoices into the main office, set them on the table next to the copy machine, and started running them through the feeder. “How did your stakeout go?” she asked nonchalantly, glancing over her shoulder.

  Sighing, he straddled her vinyl-upholstered chair backwards. “It was a bust. Kowalski really was working late tonight.”

  “Sounds pretty boring.”

  “Deadly.”

  “I bet if you’d had company, time would have flown,” she said, unable to resist the little dig.

  “We’ve been through this; I work alone.”

  She shrugged as though his answer didn’t matter. “I’m just saying I might have a better appreciation for what you do if I accompanied you once in a while.”

  “Uh huh. Something could go wrong. I might be distracted.”

  Frannie faced him, keeping her face schooled in a serious expression. “No, you wouldn’t. I’d be quiet as a mouse. I could take notes.”

  He smiled wryly. “If you haven’t noticed, I can’t seem to be in your company for longer than five seconds without getting hard. I’d say that’s a pretty big distraction.”

  “Bragging?”

  His eyebrows waggled wickedly.

  Sensing a weakening on his part, Frannie walked toward him. “We could have sex before you start work—”

  “We will anyway.”

  She raised one eyebrow. “Oh, we will? Or more to the point, will anyone else be with you other than yourself and George there?” she said, with a pointed glance at his groin.

  Niall scratched his stubbling beard. “You’re not goin’ to leave this alone, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  He took a deep breath. “All right, you win. But only if the case is routine, and only if you promise not to interfere.”

  Frannie grinned and drew a cross on her chest. “Cross my heart.”

  “The next time Mr. Kowalski steps out on his wife, I’ll take you with me.”

  Frannie clasped her hands in front of her. “Really?”

  He nodded.

  “You won’t be sorry.”

  “I already am,” he muttered. He pulled a notebook from his inner jacket pocket and tore out a sheet. “I need to get this filed.” He walked to the file cabinet, pulled out the upper drawer, and thumbed through the folders.

  Frannie waited for his reaction.

  “Where’s the Kowalski file?”

  “Under ‘P’.”

  He glanced back at her. “Why ‘P’ and not ‘K’?”

  “P’s for Polish.”

  One dark eyebrow quirked upward. “You’re filing by nationality?”

  “Well, I started filing strictly alphabetically when you left, but there were so many ‘S’ names I decided we needed another sub-category.”

  He cleared his throat. “That was a…creative solution. But I don’t need another sub-category, I need to find the file.”

  Frannie stepped beside him, pulled out the folder, and handed it to him.

  Niall rested his arm on the top of the cabinet, and asked, “So where’s Hughes?”

  Guessing Niall wasn’t too pleased with her ingenuity, Frannie squirmed beneath his stare. “Under ‘G’,” she said, her words clipped.

  His face was starting to turn red. Frannie would never have figured him as a man so resistant to change.

  “Why ‘G’?”

  Frannie folded her arms over her chest. “For Great Britain.”

  “His family’s Irish.”

  “That’s why it’s in ‘G’,” she said, barely holding onto her temper.

  “Ireland is not part of Great Britain!” he said from between gritted teeth.

  “No need to get huffy,” she said, retrieving the Hughes file. “I’ll just put it under ‘I’.”

  “And where will you put Mr. Rijik? He’s from Iceland.”

  “Iceland? I thought he was Norwegian.” Frannie began to see his point, and her shoulders slumped with dejection. “He’s in the ‘Ns’.”

  “Love, maybe you should stick to the alphabet.”

  “Fine.” She walked over to him and leaned into his chest. “I don’t think I’m much help in the office.”

  Niall wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “Did you take any messages?”

  “No. Your machine does a better job of that than I do.” Frannie rested her head against his broad chest, drawing comfort from the sound of his steady heartbeat. She’d never convince him of her worth at this rate. “Maybe we should just go to bed.”

  Niall groaned, hugging her tight, and then pushed her away. “Not just yet. We need to retrieve your clothes from your old apartment, or next you’ll destroy my favorite Knicks T-shirt.”

  She glanced up at his face. “Vinnie will be there.”

  His expression held no emotion—that in itself was a little unnerving. “Would you rather I go alone?”

  Frannie’s imagination leapt through every worst-case scenario, and she shook her head. “No. I need to say goodbye, and tell him it’s over.”

  “I imagine the bastard’s already figured that one out.”

  *

  Niall stood
behind Frannie as she rang the doorbell, his shoulders bunched, ready for a fight.

  The door opened a couple of inches, and one side of Raeline Curtis’s face peeked from the narrow space. Upon seeing who stood outside the door, her blue eye rounded. “Oh shit! Oh shit!”

  Frannie gasped and stood stock-still.

  “Hon, who’s at the door?” Vinnie’s shout sounded muffled and distant from within the apartment.

  Niall bit back a triumphant grin. Vinnie’d already moved on.

  As Raeline nervously removed the chain and opened the door wide for them to enter, Niall slipped his arm around Frannie’s waist. Her back and shoulders were rigid. He had to nudge her to get her to move inside the room.

  “I’ve come for my things,” Frannie said flatly, never once glancing at Niall.

  “I’ll just get a suitcase,” Raeline said, backing away from them before hurrying to what Niall presumed was the bedroom door. “Everything’s right where you left it.” Raeline slipped through the door and closed it behind her.

  “She was wearing my bathrobe,” Frannie muttered.

  Niall glanced around, curious to see Frannie’s imprint on her former home. Creamy yellow walls and a plum-colored velvet sofa were clues to her vibrant, passionate nature. His own apartment seemed sterile and bland next to the color and energy of this room.

  The door swung open a moment later, and Vinnie stepped out, tucking a shirt into his pants.

  “Here we are again,” Niall whispered next to Frannie’s ear and gave her waist a comforting squeeze before stepping away.

  “Uh, Frannie! Jeez, you look great.” Vinnie crossed his arms in front of his chest, and then dropped them. He stared, sweat popping out on his forehead. “Rae’ll be out in a minute. She’s packin’ your clothes.” He cleared his throat. “I know how all this looks, but—I thought you was dead.”

  Niall had to fight the urge to flex his muscle and give the scrawny little wimp a scare. What the hell had a gutsy little firecracker like Frannie ever seen in this man?