“Yeah.”

“You’d want that?”

Right now, at this particular moment, he wanted that more than anything. Curling up to sleep with Alani each night, waking with her snuggled warm at his side each morning and making love to her at every opportunity…what wasn’t to like?

Making himself perfectly clear, Jackson said, “Move in with me.”

“Oh.” Near to hyperventilating, she said again, with more meaning, “Oh.”

Oh, what? Was her reaction shock or lack of enthusiasm? He didn’t know, and at the moment, he didn’t care. “Move in with me,” he said again, with more insistence.

“Why?”

The question threw him. He gripped her shoulders and gave her a gentle squeeze. “What do you mean, why?”

Pragmatic, she said, “You asked me to live with you. I want to know why.”

He hadn’t expected an inquisition, but maybe he should have. Nothing with Alani would ever be simple.

The right words to convince her burned his throat, but they’d sound like melodramatic crap, and he wasn’t ready to go there yet.

He bent and kissed her hard. “I want time with you. Time without all the interference, without threats and the constant moving from one place to another. I want to be alone with you, without tripping over your damned brother or Dare.”

She shrugged. “Where I go, they usually show up.”

Yeah, he knew that, but at his place they’d have a lot more privacy. “If you’re there with me, you can help me finish my house. You have great taste.”

“No more naked lady statues and wall art?”

He felt her weakening and grinned. “Not unless it’s a picture of you.”

“Not in this lifetime!”

“Spoilsport.” He kissed her. “We could swim, go boating. Decorate, cook. And we can get Grim acclimated to his new place.”

“You’re saying we could have…fun?”

“Yeah.” Fun pretty much described how he felt about his time with Alani.

After she thought about it, she lifted up to kiss him sweetly on his bottom lip. “And if we’re under the same roof, we could have sex whenever we wanted.”

He locked his jaw and said, “Sunup to sundown.” Not that he could be lukewarm about unhindered sex with Alani. But it meant more than that to him, so he needed it to mean more to her, too.

“I never thought of myself as the type of woman to shack up.” She gave a delicate shiver. “It sounds rather salacious, doesn’t it?”

The phrase insulted the hell out of Jackson. Did she see this only as an opportunity for more experimenting? “I wouldn’t call it that.”

“Then what?”

Was she egging him on? He couldn’t tell. “I want us to live together. You don’t have to call it anything else.”

“I like the idea.”

“But?”

She touched his jaw. “With my job, my brother, our separate responsibilities, how would that work, exactly?”

Jackson concentrated on the simplest problems. “I’m not that far from your office, right? When I’m not off on a case, we could bounce back and forth, maybe stay at your place two days a week so you could catch up.”

“I suppose I could work off the computer the rest of the week, ordering and organizing.”

“There, you see? Problem solved.” Hoping to seal the deal, he kissed her again. “And your brother might as well get used to it, right?” He stared hard through the darkness, wishing he could see her face. “What do you say?”

“Well…”

As time stretched out without her replying, he felt scraped raw from the inside out. He’d never before asked a woman to live with him. He’d rarely ever asked a woman to stay over at all.

Finally he couldn’t take it; his temper snapped. He stretched up on stiffened arms and glared down at her. “Jesus, woman, are you doing math? It was a simple enough—”

“Yes.”

His heart dropped and then exploded in frantic pounding. “Yes?”

She slid her arms around his neck, and he heard the smile in her voice. “Yes, I’ll move in with you.”

Relief obliterated his exhaustion. Alani kissed his shoulder, shifted her legs under his, and crazy as it seemed, he felt himself getting hard again.

He caught her mouth with his own and went about devouring her. Tomorrow, he’d tell her about the plan to head back to his apartment. And before they left Dare’s, he’d explain that Arizona would always be a part of his life. He’d tackle the danger and her brother. Tomorrow.

One way or another, he’d work it all out so that Alani would remain his.

ARIZONA DECIDED TO CALL Jackson at four in the morning.

Like most normal people, he was probably expecting the call to come at a more reasonable hour. And now that he had a new squeeze, she’d just bet he was all cozy under the sheets with her right now. Normally, she’d give him a little more time.

But it wasn’t to be.

After catching a few hours of shut-eye, she’d gone out on the hunt again. Tooling around the truck stops, she’d asked too many questions and deliberately stirred up suspicions.

Finally she’d gotten a bite.

No idea if one of the cars trailing her was owned by the same yahoos in the silver BMW. But maybe. Until she got them, every last one of them, she wouldn’t feel complete. She’d remain only a piece of a person. A brain, a heart—but no soul. No real substance.