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  Delly’s Last Night

  by

  Tracy Cooper-Posey

  This will be the last night in the life of Delly Alexander. A talented cat thief, Delly cracks one safe too many. The safe belongs to an old enemy, Neal Cadogan, who catches her red-handed and ties her up while he decides what to do with her.

  Neal and Delly were once lovers but the rift that separates them is filled with bittnerness. Now with Delly at his mercy, Neal takes his revenge, which reverts to a night of heated sexual need seasoned by years of lies. It is a sensual power-play with each determined to outsmart the other. But their warped passion is the key that unlocks the door on a decade-old conspiracy that will utterly change their lives.

  Other books by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Eyes of a Stranger, Contemporary Romance

  Chronicles of the Lost Years, Romantic Mystery

  Case of the Reluctant Agent , A Sherlock Holmes Mystery

  Dare to Return, Romantic Suspense

  Diana by the Moon, Historical Romantic Suspense

  Forbidden (writing as Anastasia Black), Erotic Historical Romance

  Red Leopard, Erotic Romantic Suspense

  “Solstice Surrender” in Winter Warriors, Erotic Paranormal Romance

  Heart of Vengeance, Historical Romantic Suspense

  Dangerous Beauty (writing as Anastasia Black), Historical Romantic Suspense

  Silent Knight, Romantic Suspense

  Lucifer’s Lover, Contemporary Romance

  Black Heart, Erotic Romantic Suspense

  Thief in the Night, Erotic Romantic Suspense

  Masquerade’s Mate, Erotic Historical Romantic Suspense

  “Cameo Role,” Erotic Romance/Horror

  Beth’s Acceptance (Writing as Teal Ceagh), Erotic Urban Fantasy Romance

  Ningaloo Nights, Erotic Romantic Suspense

  Betting With Lucifer, Contemporary Romance

  Solstice Surrender, Erotic Paranormal Romance

  Mia’s Return (Writing as Teal Ceagh), Erotic Urban Fantasy Romance

  Sera’s Gift (Writing as Teal Ceagh), Erotic Urban Fantasy Romance

  Eva’s Last Dance (Writing as Teal Ceagh), Erotic Urban Fantasy Romance

  Dead Double, Romantic Suspense

  Carson’s Night (Writing as Teal Ceagh), Erotic Urban Fantasy Romance

  Dead Again, Romantic Suspense

  Kiss Across Time (Writing as Teal Ceagh), Erotic Urban Fantasy Romance

  Beauty’s Beasts (Writing as Teal Ceagh), Erotic Urban Fantasy Romance

  Destiny’s Trinity (Writing as Teal Ceagh), Erotic Urban Fantasy Romance

  Blue Knight, Erotic Romantic Suspense

  Kiss Across Swords (Writing as Teal Ceagh), Erotic Urban Fantasy Romance

  Blood Knot, Erotic Urban Fantasy Romance

  Fatal Wild Child, Romantic Suspense

  Bannockburn Binding, Erotic Futuristic Urban Fantasy Romance

  The Royal Talisman, Erotic Historical Romantic Suspense

  See http://TracyCooperPosey.com for details on each title.

  Delly’s Last Night

  by

  Tracy Cooper-Posey

  A Stories Rule Publication

  STORIES RULE PUBLICATIONS

  A sole proprietorship owned and operated

  by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  This is an original publication of Tracy Cooper-Posey

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2012 by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Text design by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Cover design by Dar Albert

  Wicked Smart Designs

  http://wickedsmartdesigns.com

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  FIRST EDITION: February 2012

  Cooper-Posey, Tracy

  Delly’s Last Night/Tracy Cooper-Posey—1st Ed.

  Romance—Fiction

  But How Can I Tell If You’re Lying?

  Writing fictional stories about thieves is always enormous fun. I’ve featured professional thieves a few times now, but Thief In the Night, a very short story for Ellora’s Cave, was my first published effort that featured a cat burglar.

  Half the attraction, for me, is that once a character is working on the wrong side of the law, where lying become commonplace, then how does a Romance stand any sort of chance of flourishing, if a potential lover can’t trust that what the other person is saying is the truth?

  It makes for delicious fiction, and I expanded heavily on that theme in Blood Knot, six years after Thief In the Night was released. Blood Knot was both a full length book and a paranormal Romance, which makes it quite a bit different from Thief In The Night, but the essential dilemma remained: Truth is one of the first casualties among thieves, not honour, so how does one fall in love?

  Thief In The Night received marvellous reviews, including a nomination for Book of the Year from Romance Reviews Today Erotic. Not bad for a story just over forty pages long. But a few reviews remarked that they would have liked to have seen more about the characters, or just more story, period. As I wrote Thief In The Night right up to and nudging the upper limit of Ellora’s Cave’s boundaries for short stories at the time, I couldn’t make it any longer than it already was.

  But Thief In The Night went out of print in 2010, and now I’ve been able to expand the story, to include back story on how Delly and Neal met, ten years ago. The story has been extended by another whopping 33% or 20 pages. It’s now novella length, and no longer a “quickie.”

  I’ve renamed the story Delly’s Last Night, for that reason and because there are just too many stories with “Thief” in the title (try a search on Amazon!) . Finally, too, I get a good cover to go with the story!

  This is my Author’s Edition.

  Enjoy.

  Chapter One

  Chapter One

  Miami: June 27, 9:38 p.m.

  It wasn’t a butterfly landing in Beijing that tripped off the events that ended the life of Delly Alexander. It was a cook preparing a banquet in Miami.

  The harried cook put too much garlic in the sauce base, which caused Neal Cadogan to leave the awards ceremony abruptly and head for home two hours before he was even remotely expected.

  His car blowing a tire on the coast road half a mile from his ocean cliff-side home was part of the same run of incredible bad luck for Delly, even though it didn’t look at all connected. The lads who had intended to rip the Porsche off had been interrupted by Cadogan’s early return to his car.

  Pissed about losing the tidy profit they’d been counting on, they’d jammed the screwdriver they’d been using on the alarm under the hood into the rear radial instead. They were moving fast. They missed the soft side and hit the tread instead. It was steel belted, so the leak created was a slow one. Cadogan was nearly home before the rim hit the dirt.

  He’d glanced at his watch, at the mournful pouch of the flat tire and up at the dark high arch of his living room windows that looked out over the pounding surf. His stomach made up his mind for him. He headed home on foot, sliding through the night like a shadow.

  He moved through his dark,
silent house, heading straight for the bathroom off his bedroom. There was an old bottle of Gravol there that would calm his stomach nicely. Then he could worry about the car.

  Delly’s first introduction to the fatal chain of events happened then. When Cadogan threw the bedroom light switches and the room blazed with incandescent light, she had her right arm buried up to the elbow in the guts of the small wall safe hidden behind the picture that hung over the head of the bed.

  At the first blinding flash of light, she acted instinctively; she dived off the bed, tucked herself up into a ball, and let herself roll across the wide expanse of gleaming floorboards. As she slowed, she sprang to her feet and leapt for the sliding door she had opened earlier for just this sort of an emergency.

  She didn’t look to see who had walked in the room. Her face was covered, but the instinct was ingrained after so many years. She kept her face averted.

  She didn’t slow down, either. Whoever it was that had just walked into the room—and the chances were good it was Neal Cadogan—they would have to run around the huge bed in the centre of it if they wanted to catch her. No one was as fast as she was when she was hopped up on panicky adrenaline. No one.

  But as her fingers grasped the cool metal frame of the sliding door, she was sent flying forward through the air by a rugby tackle. Two big arms wrapped around her waist and hung on as they both slithered across the wooden flooring of the deck. She protected her head and face with her arms. There were metal chairs and a metal and glass table out there somewhere. She had been going to use the table to vault over the sides of the deck on her way down to the ground. If she was smart, she could still do it.

  She twisted around in the grip, and brought her left elbow down sharp and hard, intending to slam it into the man’s temple. She knew it was a man. He was too quick on his feet for a heavy woman, and he was strong. But the blow to the temple didn’t connect. He rolled quickly onto his back, bringing her with him, and her elbow smashed into the wooden flooring by his ear instead.

  She cried out, as her entire left arm went instantly numb, and tears spurted in her eyes.

  “You are a woman,” he said.

  He rolled again, so that he was over her. For a moment his weight pinned her hard to the floor, then it shifted and was gone. The arms around her waist picked her up. For a moment she was a limp rag doll, hanging over his arms.

  Quickly, she found her feet, used her good right hand to grip the big wrists at her middle for leverage and threw her head backwards. With luck, she’d break his nose and he’d be too worried about the pain to keep hold of her....

  But he must have felt it coming. Something tipped him off. He shifted and the back of her head connected with nothing but fresh air. She staggered backwards, for he was no longer behind her.

  Momentarily, she was free but before she could react, an iron-hard hand grabbed her forearm and she was jerked forward. Toward the bedroom.

  She struggled despite recognizing that no strength she could muster would break the grip on her arm. Struggling was better than meekly allowing him to lead her back into the room. Not struggling would indicate submission. Submission meant defeat. And she had no intention of being defeated. Not in this house. Not on this night of all nights. She had an appointment with Cassandra at eight a.m. and come hell or high-water, she would be there.

  He had her numb left arm in his grip. When they reached the side of the big, satin covered bed, he lifted it. She had no strength in the arm at all and the movement made her elbow flare with a shooting, silvery stab of pain that swamped her thoughts. She heard the metallic click through the throbbing in her head and looked up at her wrist. She was handcuffed to the tall bedpost, her arm up at the same level as her head.

  The man stepped back, studying her, his hands on his hips and a small smile touching his mouth.

  Neal Cadogan.

  She clenched her teeth together, to make herself stay silent, and tugged experimentally at the handcuffs. There was a little give in them and she studied them carefully. Was there enough give? Could she turn her wrist, slipping them around, twisting the chain between the cuffs to the point where the links would be forced open?

  “Good point,” he said softly. “We don’t want you turning them until the links give way, do we?” He strode to the bedside cabinet and delved in the drawer. Delly bit back her reaction—a mix of surprise and dismay that he had read her thoughts so easily.

  He pulled out a second set of cuffs and moved around the bed to where she stood at the foot of it. He reached for her right wrist, which she pulled out of the way.

  He laughed. It was low and quiet. “You really have no idea who you’re dealing with, do you?” He stepped up close to her, backing her up against the bed. He wrapped his arm around her waist once more, pulling her up against him hard. This time she couldn’t prevent the gasp that escaped her. Even as she gasped, his hand slid down her wrist and the cuff was snapped over it.

  He lifted the cuff to the opposite bedpost. Delly fought him every inch of the way. It was her right arm, which hadn’t been injured, and she was strong for a woman. She fought and tried to draw her arm back to her side. He smiled and applied more pressure, until the cuff was close enough to slip around the bedpost with a soft, final ‘snick’.

  She was now effectively immobilized. She couldn’t twist her way out of the cuffs with two arms anchored to two different bedposts. He took advantage of her helplessness. He grabbed the back of the hood, ripped it from her head and stepped back to study her.

  She shook her hair out of her eyes, her heart sinking. Well, it was done now.

  He spread the jacket of his tuxedo and planted his hands on his hips. “Delly Alexander.” He didn’t seem to be surprised at all. His eyes narrowed. “You’ve changed your hair since I saw you last.”

  “That was ten years ago, Neal.”

  “And your eyes, too. You’ve done something to them. They used to be green.”

  “Yeah, they used to be,” she said softly.

  He nodded his head. It was a small, thoughtful movement. He was wearing a modern tuxedo, but the tie was hanging loose. The black hair swept back from his forehead, showing the widow’s peak. His eyes commanded attention, as always. They were silvery grey and it was hard to look away from them. The first time she had met Neal Cadogan, she had been unable to get rid of the sensation that he could see all the way through her. That he could see all her thoughts. Which meant that he understood her completely in a way that no one else could.

  Unlike hers, his eyes hadn’t changed a bit.

  It was Neal who looked away first. He went into the bathroom Delly had inspected briefly before tackling the safe. She heard cupboards opening. Then he re-emerged, carrying a pink bottle, that he swigged from a couple of times before dropping it onto the coffee table that sat between the sofa and arm chair at the other end of the long room.

  He glanced at her, his expression still thoughtful, as he slipped passed the coffee table and rummage in the drawers of the old roll top desk sitting against the wall beside the big picture window. He straightened and headed back toward the bed. He had a flick-knife in his hand. As he approached her, he hit the button and it sprang open. To Delly, the steel glinted in the subdued light in the room.

  “The way I see it,” he said, his voice still soft, still low. “Is that I’ve caught you in the middle of a criminal act, before you had a chance to actually steal anything. And now I have a choice.” He stopped in front of her. “Do I call the police, or do I let you go?” He weighed the knife in his open hand. “The fact that I know you does add an interesting spin to the question, doesn’t it?”

  She kept her mouth shut. Nothing she could say would encourage him to let her go. He was playing with her. Neal Cadogan was not the sort of man who would forgive this sort of debt. There was a fine line between his brows that hinted at anger held back.

  Then, suddenly, the anger was right there—open, hot and raging. “Why were you knocking off my house?”
he demanded, his fist around the knife. “Why?”

  “You’ve got better than five hundred grand in diamonds and currency in your safe.”

  He stepped closer. “Why me?”

  She managed a shrug. “You’re rich.”

  “You knew this was my house.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I’m a thief, but I’m a good one. I checked it out before I came in.”

  “Knowing it was my house didn’t stop you? Didn’t even make you pause?”

  She clenched her teeth together again. Then, when the compulsion to spit the truth at him had faded, she said carefully; “We knew each other once, ten years ago. There’s nothing from that time that would give me reason to reconsider.”

  “You’ve got a lot better at that, too,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Lying.”

  She looked him square in the eye. It was pure defiance. She was afraid, but had no intention of letting him see it. So she lifted her chin and pushed it out. “I’ve got very good at a lot of things you thought I was useless at.”

  The hand without the knife grabbed the back of her head, and held it still as his lips pressed against hers. It was less a kiss than a physical assault. She could almost feel his anger radiating from him as waves of body heat. His lips seared themselves against hers.

  She tasted him. He was sweet and hard and, combined with his scent that drifted around her, heady.

  Her response was unplanned, uncalled for. She couldn’t possibly feel any sort of physical need or response for the man she had spent the last decade hating with a passion that verged on mania. But just as he pulled his lips from hers and pushed away like a man staggering from an unexpected blow, she felt her own insides roll over, making her almost dizzy.