London Bridges

to rush any of this. The whole idea was to make it last, to pay attention to each detail, each button, the feel of the fabric, the tiny bumps of anticipation on Jamilla’s skin, and on mine, the difficulty catching our breath, the tingle in our bodies, the electricity, sparks, whatever goodness came our way that night.
    “You’ve been practicing,” she whispered, and she was already a little short of breath. I liked that.
    I laughed. “Uh-uh. Actually, I’ve been practicing the art of
anticipation.
”
    “Like this next button?” she asked.
    “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
    “And the one after that?”
    “I don’t know how much more of this I can take, Jamilla. I’m not kidding.”
    “We’ll have to see. We’ll just have to see. I’m not kidding, either.”
    When Jamilla’s blouse and my shirt were undone, we slowly pulled them off. Meanwhile, we kept kissing, tickling, scratching, nuzzling, ever so slowly. She was wearing perfume and I recognized it as Calèche Eau Delicate. She knew I liked the scent. Jamilla loved a light scratch all over her body so that’s what I did next. First the shoulders and back, then her arms, her beautiful face, the long legs, her feet, then back up her legs again.
    “You’re getting warm . . . warmer,” she sighed, and laughed very deep in her throat.
    Then we slid back off the bed and stood together, swaying and touching. Finally I took off her bra and held her breasts in my hands. “Like I said, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
    I didn’t, either. I was hard, so hard that it hurt. I slid down and knelt on the Oriental rug. I kissed Jamilla down there. She was strong and confident, and maybe that’s why I liked kneeling before her like this. In awe? Out of respect? Something like that.
    Finally I pushed myself up again. “Okay?” I whispered.
    “Okay. Whatever you say. I’m your slave. Your master? A little of each?”
    I went inside Jamilla while we were still standing, dancing in place, but then we tilted down and dropped onto the bed. I was lost in the moment, lost in Jamilla Hughes, and that was exactly where I needed to be. She was making these tiny sighs and gasps that I loved.
    “I missed being with you,” I whispered. “I missed your smile, the sound of your voice, everything.”
    “Ditto,” she said, and laughed. “But especially that tat of yours.”
    Moments later, five, maybe ten minutes, the phone on the nightstand began to ring.
    For once, I did the right thing—I knocked the damn thing onto the floor, then covered it with a pillow. If it was the Wolf, he could call back in the morning.

Chapter 101
    THE NEXT MORNING I headed back to the Idaho Rockies. Jamilla and I shared a cab out to the airport, then took separate planes going in different directions. “Big mistake. Dumb move,” she told me before we parted. “You should just fly to San Francisco with me. You need some extended R and R.” I already knew that.
    But it wasn’t going to be. Corky Hancock was the biggest lead we had, and the surveillance on him had been tightening. There was nowhere Hancock could go in the state of Idaho and not be watched, or at least listened to. There was surveillance on his house, the surrounding acreage, even the stand-alone barn. We had four mobile teams on him, with four more in the wings if needed. Since I’d left, aerial surveillance had been added to the mix.
    In Idaho, I attended a meeting of more than two dozen agents assigned to the detail. The meeting was held in a small movie house in Sun Valley. The movie
21 Grams
with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts was playing there in the evenings, but not during the day.
    Senior Agent William Koch stood in front of us. Tall and gangly, impressive in his way, he wore a chambray shirt, jeans, scuffed black cowboy boots. He played the local guy to a T, but he was nobody’s fool and he wanted us to know it. The same was true for his CIA counterpart, Bridget Rooney, a confident, dark-haired woman who was smarter than a whip.
    “I’ll make this pretty simple for everybody. Either Hancock knows we’re here or he’s just unbelievably careful by nature,” said Koch. “He hasn’t talked to anybody since we got here. He’s been online—eBay for fishing rods, a couple of porn sites, a fantasy baseball league. He has a girlfriend named Coral Lee, who lives nearby in Ketchum. Asian American girl. Coral is definitely a good looker. Corky
isn’t.
We figured he probably spends lots of money