by Joya Ryan
My pulse notched up another three beats per second and I tried to swallow down all the denial creeping up my throat.“And you think you can prove this theory?”
“Easily.”
Time to find my brain, call his bluff and show that he was wrong. At least, act as if he was wrong. “Then by all means, prove away.”
He took another step toward me, close enough so that I could smell him now. Rich and powerful. Everything about him screamed for me to obey. To listen. Maybe it was his build or his military background, but a “don’t mess with me” flashing sign on his forehead would have been more subtle than the alpha swagger currently dripping from him.
“If you wanted just a fuck, you’d be cold,” he said, moving closer still, but not touching me. “You’d be thinking of other things or feigning concentration.”
He tilted his head slightly to catch my gaze and I gave it to him. My whole body booted up like a switched-on motherboard and damn if he couldn’t hear my skin humming from wanting him to touch me. My mind flashed to the other night. When he was on top of me. His weight had felt so good. His body meeting mine in such a perfect way, like we fit. When he pushed into me for the first time, hitting deep, it was a moment of peace, of pleasure I had never experienced.
“You’re thinking about it right now, Emma,” he rasped. “I can see it on your face. You’re standing there, thinking about my cock. How it felt inside of you.”
A shudder rolled up my spine and my breath caught just slightly. He was right, I was thinking of it, and I couldn’t stop. The way he kissed me . . . everywhere. I couldn’t make my voice work and in that moment didn’t have to because he just kept going, reading me.
“Are you thinking about my tongue? How it moved over every . . . single . . . inch of your skin?” His breath fanned my face and I closed my eyes for moment, remembering exactly how he felt. How he made me feel.
I opened my mouth to lie, to tell him I wasn’t thinking of all the amazing things he did to me, but he cut me off as if knowing that was what I was about to do.
“Shrug it off, baby,” he whispered. “But like I said, you’re not cold. You’re hot. Flushed and I’d even bet — ” His hand slid beneath the front of my pants, into my panties, his index finger delving between my folds. In one quick motion he retreated and looked at his newly dampened finger. “Wet.”
He gave the sexiest, slyest, smile I’d ever seen and no matter how hard I tried, my body ached to admit the truth, just so that he would touch me again.
“There’s my proof, Emma.” He tasted his fingertip, the one that had just barely stroked me, and gave a low growl of approval. “Don’t play this game, because I’ll win. Every time.”
The kettle whistled just then and Rhys turned, took it off the burner, and walked out the front door leaving me breathless, confused and . . .
“That son of bitch.”
Horny as hell. And not in a general way. I was hot, wet and ready for one man. The same one who had just called me out, taken the upper hand in every way and we both knew it.
Chapter Six
“Once this whole thing is over and I get money, I’ll pay you back, you know,” I said, tapping my fork against the plate of pancakes the waiter had just set in front of me.
“You’re welcome,” Rhys said and cut into his steak.
“No, seriously.”
He looked at me from across the small diner table, and nodded. “I know, Emma. You don’t have to keep explaining this to me. Just say thank you and eat your damn pancakes.”
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
I unfolded my napkin, laid it in my lap and looked around. The little diner was quaint. A few customers sat at the counter next to the pie case and the whole feel was small-town middle of nowhere. Not the normal idea of what you thought of when you thought New York.
“Everything tasting good?” An older man with a short white beard called to us from behind the counter, smiling and waving at Rhys.
“Everything is great, Teddy. Best steak I’ve ever had,” Rhys replied and the old man smiled like Rhys’s approval was the single best thing he’d ever heard. It was the same kind of smile the waitress gave earlier when she dropped off our food. Was Rhys president of the diner or something? Or maybe this entire town? Because people kept glancing our way and tipping their hats at him. This town obviously loved their local hero. And I sat, silent. Maybe it was a city upbringing, but Rhys handled being paid attention to really well. Getting attention was a foreign concept to me. Much less getting positive attention.
“Do you always eat breakfast for dinner?” Rhys asked, returning his attention to me.
I shrugged and cut into my pancakes. “Sometimes. It’s my favorite food. Any time of day.” I glanced around again. The few people nearby were taking turns to look my way. I leaned across the table a bit to whisper to Rhys. “I thought I was supposed to be off the grid?”
“I grew up in this town and know just about all of the four thousand people who live here. Mase didn’t follow us and we’ll have to be coming into town anyway for some things over the next few weeks.” He leaned in a little, mirroring my movements and bringing us nearly nose to nose. His eyes zoomed in on mine. “I wouldn’t put you in danger.”
I wanted to say, I know, but I couldn’t. Something deep inside made me trust this man. Maybe it was the way he seemed to read me. Or maybe it was because the other night, when we had sex, that pull I felt to him from the moment I met him had solidified into some kind of connection. Either way, it was stupid for me to trust him completely, but I was having a hard time helping it.
“How do you know Mase didn’t follow us?” I asked.
He scoffed and smiled as if my question was absurd and took another bite of his meal. “I know.”
“Ah.” I raised my chin. “All that military background and now your security company. You must be good at what you do.”
He shrugged. “I have a limited skill set that I use to my advantage.”
I’ll say. Rhys was CEO of Striker Solutions, multimillion-dollar security company catering to the elite and entitled. He employed bodyguards, personal drivers and teams. The ultra-wealthy and powerful went to him for all their personal detail and security needs.
“Don’t you have to work? Don’t you need to be in the city to oversee things or something?”
“Oversee things?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed a bite of pancake. “You’re the CEO. I mean, you’ve got the build for a bodyguard and all, but you don’t actually sell your personal services, do you?”
“I just spent several weeks there taking care of various issues in the city,” he said, bypassing my recent question and answering my earlier one. “I have good people who can run things smoothly.”
Must be nice. “So this is like your vacation time?”
His eyes skated over me and a hot shiver broke over my skin. “Something like that.”
I took a big bite of pancake and hoped the sugar would somehow satisfy me. Too bad I was wanting something else. Something on the other side of the table. And like he pointed out earlier, I had yet to stop thinking of him, or that night. Which was a problem, since I had launched Operation Don’t Fall for Rhys Striker. Or at least don’t like him for more than a sex-buddy. Because damn it, my body was craving him bad.
“So.” I pushed the pieces of pancake around the plate in their syrup pool. “You know all this crap going on with me. Tell me something about you.”
The slightest grin nudged at his lips. “You’re not trying to get to know me, are you? Maybe because you like me?”
“No,” I shot out quickly. “I just figured it was polite to ask.”
He smiled. “Well, with charm like that, how can I deny you?”
His flirty little tease made me want to giggle. Then slap myself for wanting to do something as lame as giggle. Before I could ask him more, a chipper voice rang out behind me.
“Rhys?”
I turned to see a slim, redhead with per
fectly coifed hair, wide smile and bright blue eyes that matched her sweater set, walk our way. Suddenly, my brown hair felt tangled and the need to smooth my hands over my plain T-shirt was overwhelming.
“Sara,” Rhys said and stood up to hug her. She lingered in that hug a little longer than I thought necessary, but whatever. “How are you?”
“I’m great. Just ended my shift at the hospital and starting my shift here in a few minutes.”
“Wow, busy.”
“Yeah.” Sara smiled and her gaze roamed the entire expanse of Rhys’s body and there was definitely interest behind it. “Things have been pretty slow and all the nurses’ shifts are cut back, so I picked up a few here. I didn’t know you were back in town.” Sara’s eyes landed on me. “Oh, hello there.”
“Hey,” I said with my best smile, but for some reason it felt forced. Lacking. Definitely not warm and wide.
Rhys looked between us. “Sara, this is my friend Emma.”
Sara was obviously also happy about my title of “friend” because I saw even more of her perfectly straight teeth shine as her lips stretched, if possible, into a bigger smile.
“So nice to meet you,” she said.
“You too.” I looked at Rhys. He was obviously done offering up any more information and the silence stretching between all of us was getting awkward. “How do you two know each other?”
Rhys glared at me, but Sara beamed and answered with delight. “Rhys and I were high-school sweethearts.”
Of course they were. And wasn’t that just adorable. She looked like the perfectly sweet kind of woman who cooked and gardened and went to farmer’s markets on the weekends. The kind that dressed up for family photos and knew how to baste a turkey.
“Oh my gosh, speaking of that,” Sara said and tapped Rhys’s chest with the back of her fingers. “Did you hear Mr. Ferguson is retiring?”
“I hadn’t,” Rhys said.
Sara just gave a cutesy little laugh. “He must have caught us a dozen times behind the bleachers.”
I looked between her and Rhys, having no idea who they were talking about but gathering that Rhys and Sara got busy back in high school, which I was pretty sure was the main point she was trying to make.
Rhys looked at me. “Mr. Ferguson was the P.E. teacher at our high school,” he offered, and I nodded. Feeling more awkward than anything else, listening to Sara recount her teen years of happy moments in a gymnasium with a guy I was growing more and more increasingly aware that I wasn’t good enough for.
While she had been planning the theme for homecoming, I was sleeping under a bridge. Not much we could relate on. The contrast just delivered another shot of the reality that I was beyond out of place here and with Rhys.
Yet something in my veins simmered just enough to make me take notice. A weird emotion was coming in, some kind of feeling that bordered between anger and annoyance.
“Well, I’ll let you two get back to your dinner.” Sara glanced at my pancakes and frowned. “But we should catch up some more, Rhys.”
She brushed Rhys’s shoulder and I wondered if she’d ever clawed at them the way I did.
Whoa, where had that come from? The thought that these two had a history was not sitting well with me and frankly, that was silly. There was no reason to compare my relationship with Rhys to his with Sara, mostly because Rhys and I didn’t have a relationship.
Of course he had past girlfriends, not that I was currently one.
Ugh, this was terrible! I had no reason to be . . . what was this feeling crashing into me? Jealousy?
Whatever it was, it sucked and didn’t seem to come with much logic.
“You still have my number, right?” Sara asked and I recognized the hair flick anywhere. She was totally flirting. And I was sitting there in wrinkly clothes, no makeup and eating breakfast for dinner like an eight-year-old. I glanced at Sara. She probably ate salads regularly with a shot of wheatgrass on the side.
I rubbed a finger against my temple because my brain was about to implode. I’d never compared myself so much to another woman in my life. Emotions were taking me over and were starting to make me sick. I felt lacking on a whole new level.
“Yeah. Good to see you, Sara.”
“You too. And nice to meet you, Emma.”
I smiled and Rhys sat back down as Sarah pranced her perfect, pink Capri-wearing ass away.
“How are your pancakes?” Rhys asked, cutting into his steak again as if we weren’t just interrupted by carrot-top-Mc-Stepford-wife.
“Good,” I said. “Oh, hey, you know what we should talk about?”
He glanced up. “What?”
“Her.” I hiked a thumb in the direction Sara left in.
His concentration was instantly back on his dinner. “Not much to talk about.”
“You guys were high-school sweethearts, then what?”
He shrugged. “I proposed.”
My jaw hit the table. I was not expecting that. He was going to marry her?
Of course he was, I mean look at her. She was wholesome, and her hands looked all soft, like the most work she did was on crafting or scrapbooking. Plus, she was a nurse for God’s sake.
“Wow,” I breathed. “So what happened?”
“I enlisted, got shipped overseas and we broke up.”
“I’d really love for you to elaborate right now,” I said, balancing my chin on my fist, throwing his line from earlier back in his face.
“About a year in, she cheated on me.”
I had to bite my lip to keep from calling Sara a nasty name.
“How is that possible?” I asked, truly upset because Rhys was freaking amazing, and not just to look at.
“Well.” He set his fork down. “When a man and woman are attracted to each other, and they want to share their feelings in a physical way — ”
“Not what I meant.” I rolled my eyes and he just grinned and went back to eating. “I mean, how could she cheat on you? You’re like . . .”
Amazing. Hot. Sexy as sin. Funny.
His smiled widened, waiting to hear how I’d finish the statement. “Careful, Emma, it sounds like you’re about to give me a compliment.”
“I don’t rag on you. You make it sound like I’m some bitch that never has a nice thing to say.”
“I know you say nice things, you just choose not to very often,” he said, again with that teasing tone.
“Quit changing the subject.”
“There’s nothing more to say, really. It was hard on Sara when I left. I was gone for a long time. She needed someone, I wasn’t there and he was.”
“That’s no excuse,” I muttered. “You act like this isn’t a big deal.”
His eyes landed on me and I knew right away that he was waiting for the irony of what I had just said to hit me. And it did. Hard. He had just said the same thing to me. But what was more interesting was realizing that Rhys dealt with things the same way I did. He brushed things off. Pretended that it wasn’t a big deal.
Maybe that was part of the reason I connected to him the way I did? Because how we coped was similar, the crap we dealt with was the only thing different.
“Sara still wants you. You know that, right?” I said.
“That’s history.”
“Did you meet someone else?” His steady gaze landed on me, causing a buzz of raw lust to poke every single vertebrae and I fumbled to clarify. “I mean, after you two broke up. Did you meet someone?”
He went very quiet, any sign of the breezy, seemingly carefree conversation we were just having gone.
“I was overseas for a long time, Emma. I met a lot of people,” was all he said.
Not an answer, and if there was one thing I noticed, it was avoidance. Whatever happened with Rhys over there, whoever he met, was something he clearly didn’t want to talk about.
I studied my pancake, trying to figure out how every passing hour, things got more complicated. More involved. Operation Don’t Fall for Rhys was failing.
&n
bsp; ~
I peeked out of the bedroom and into the dark living room. Rhys was sprawled on the couch, asleep. I had tried for hours to unwind enough to sleep, but couldn’t get my mind to turn off.
I tiptoed from the bedroom and into the bathroom, careful not to wake him. Maybe a warm shower would relax me enough for me to get some rest.
I stood in the stall and let the water run down my shoulders, the steam enveloping me. It did little to calm my brain.
Ever since our earlier conversation at dinner, I couldn’t stop thinking about Rhys and what he was hiding. There was so much I didn’t know about him, and yet, I trusted him. Why? Why was he different?
My mind churned out the same answer it had for the past several hours: I don’t know.
Maybe I needed more information before I would figure out the reason behind my weird responses to him. Never once had I felt true jealousy until tonight. I knew right away it wasn’t a healthy thing to feel or admit to. This backwoods, small-town, polite people world made me feel more and more inadequate every second.
In the city, even back when I was dirty and on the street, I knew what I was. Owned it. Made it work the best I could. But here? It was like all my flaws were easily seen. And every area I was lacking in was more noticeable because I had stared down a woman today that looked the part. She looked like the kind of woman that belonged with a guy like Rhys. And that woman wasn’t me. Would never be me.
Stepping out of the shower and feeling more tense than when I entered, I dried off and wrapped the towel around myself, knotting it in the middle of my chest. The smallest things were annoying me. Like my hair hitting the middle of my back. I usually I kept it a bit shorter but hadn’t thought of haircuts lately. Either way, it wasn’t sculpted into a pretty mid-length bob like Sara’s.
I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the same thing I always did. Exhaustion. Dark circles were under my eyes and I felt exactly how I looked. Letting out a deep breath, I opened the bathroom door and —
