by Lori Foster
She punched him in the stomach and he wheezed, then immediately flattened her against him so she couldn’t retaliate further.
“—and you obviously don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“Okay, so tell me. Who are these clowns who grabbed us and what are you going to do about it?”
He twisted to look down at her, and she lifted her face at the same time. Their noses bumped. Harry’s thoughts scattered, and he struggled to bring them back to order. It wasn’t easy.
“First I’m going to get you home and safe and out of my way. Then I’m going to get Floyd and Ralph, on my own ground, and pound some sense into them.” He hesitated, pondering his own words and the probability of enacting them. “Maybe. I still have to weigh my personal vendetta against a promise I made to get them both legally stopped.”
“A promise to who?”
“The friend who makes burnt sugar. He owns a shop in the area. Floyd and Ralph work for Carlyle as petty extortioners, and my friend refuses to pay. He’s been threatened, and I don’t take kindly to that sort of thing.”
“What had you planned to do today?”
As she asked it, her gaze dropped to his mouth and one small hand opened on his chest. She looked vaguely confused, as if dealing with unfamiliar feelings. Harry understood completely, since he was in a similar predicament.
He forgot to answer her for the longest time. He could feel that small palm, warm and still, like a brand against his flesh. It aroused him, and surely that was insanity.
“Harry?”
He forcibly shored up his flagging wits. “Today I was just sizing things up.” He touched her cheek where the bruise was visible, along with a little swelling. His tone lowered with regret. “Damn, I’m sorry you got hit.”
“I’ve had worse.”
Given her backbone and courage, he didn’t doubt she’d led a hard life, but hearing of it made him want to hold her closer, to protect her. They stared at each other while Harry’s fingers gently coasted over the bruise. If for no other reason than this, Floyd deserved to feel his fist, Harry decided.
“Answer me something, Charlie.” His hand cupped her cheek and she didn’t protest. He smoothed wet tendrils of hair away from her face, marveling at how soft her skin felt. Surely all women were as soft, but he couldn’t seem to remember.
She didn’t move away and he felt his heartbeat thud, felt his muscles harden. “Did you mean what you said about not being interested? Not at all?”
Her gaze met his, so close. “Interested in what?”
“A lover.”
“I don’t know.” She frowned, then looked at his mouth again. “I’ve never given it much thought.”
He drew a slow breath, filling himself with her scent. “And now?”
She looked away, then back up again with a sort of daring grin. “I admit I’m thinking about it.”
She was so bluntly honest, he smiled. Charlie might be demanding, but she would never be manipulative.
Her arms looped around his neck. “You know, Harry, this is turning into a romantic moment after all, isn’t it?”
Harry gently kissed the bruise on her cheek, his lips just grazing her skin, his nose nuzzling her temple. “Hmm. And I don’t even have my flashlight out.”
She chuckled. “I’m starting to like you, Harry.”
It was the chuckle that did it, low and husky. He turned his face and she met him halfway and their mouths met, open and hot and devouring. Oh damn, Harry thought with some surprise. He hadn’t expected this, hadn’t thought she’d be this way, avaricious and hungry, clinging to him as if she’d never been kissed before or was starved for it. He was the starving one, and the hunger had come on him so suddenly… It turned him on so much he groaned.
Sweeping one large hand down her back, he fondly cupped the adorable backside he’d admired earlier. Soft and sweet, the feel of her made him want more.
But before he could allow things to progress, he felt he owed her a measure of honesty. “Charlie, honey, listen a minute. I have to tell you something.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Getting discriminating on me again, Harry?”
He swallowed hard. Did she actually think he’d want to back out when he was shaking with lust? Not likely. “I’m not interested in a romantic relationship.”
She blinked at him in surprise. “Okay.” She tried to kiss him again, her hands clutching his shoulders.
He held her back with one hand, putting breathing space between them. “Charlie, I can’t make you any promises.”
She blinked twice, then frowned at him. “What are you talking about?”
She looked so confused he wanted to shake her. He realized his hand still held her bottom and he gave her a gentle squeeze, then shuddered with the effects of that caress. Damn, he wanted her. Insane,
“Marriage.” He cleared his throat and managed to explain. “All those questions earlier. You were hinting about marriage and I want you to know, my plate is full right now. I have no intentions of getting even mildly involved with a woman.”
One side of her mouth quivered, and she bit her lip. Oh God, don’t let her cry, Harry thought, his body so tense he hurt, his mind feeling like mush.
She covered her mouth with her hand and a chuckle escaped. Harry frowned. In the next instant, her chuckles turned to uproarious laughter. “You,” she said between hiccups, “thought I was sizing you up for marriage material?” She laughed some more, not dainty feminine laughter. No, this was boisterous, unrestrained hilarity. “Good grief, I hardly know you!”
Disgruntled with her misplaced mirth and his unabated lust, Harry demanded, “Then why all the questions?”
“Actually, if you must know,” she said, trying to get herself under control and failing miserably, “I had thought to hire you.”
“Hire me for what, damn it?”
“To find out more information on my father.” She wiped her eyes, perched primly on his lap with her midnight hair hung over one eye giving her a seductive look. “That’s what I was doing there today. Spying on him. I haven’t seen him in almost eighteen years.”
Harry wanted explanations and he wanted them now. Who was her father? And why the long separation?
His arms were still around her, one hand still splayed over perfect buttocks. When she smiled, her dark blue eyes seemed to smile, too.
He wished now that he’d kept his big mouth shut.
She traced his mouth with a delicate fingertip. “You really are a wonderful kisser, Harry.”
Hope rose that he might be able to salvage this debacle, but then car lights hit the window of the gas station, and every thought other than protecting her slipped from his mind.
He shoved her off his lap and onto the dirty floor. “Stay there and don’t make a sound.” In the next second he was gone.
Bewitched
CHAPTER FOUR
************************************************************************************************
Charlie sat on the floor, her backside bruised, her lust squelched. Where had Harry gone? On hands and knees she crawled to the window to peek out. Just as her head lifted, Harry snatched it back down.
Hissing close to her ear, he asked, “Is there a particular reason you want to offer up your brains for target practice?”
“Where did you go?” Her words were muffled against his fly, and while there, she noticed he’d suffered quite a reaction to their kisses. Heaven help her, the man was hard.
“I was surveying our options, of course. Now be still.”
She quit squirming and sighed. Having her cheek pressed to an erection, her nose smashed against a muscled thigh, with no hope of any loveplay, seemed like a terrible waste, especially since this was the first time in ages she’d been interested in such a thing. “Do you have any suggestions?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”
At that moment, Floyd called out. “You might as well come on out of there!”
; Charlie whispered, “He certainly sounds furious.”
“Yes, well, maybe he knows you planned to toss him off the truck.”
“Ha! I think it’s probably his aching jaw where you slugged him that has the bastard madder than hell.”
He tsked. “Your language is a disgrace.”
“You have my face buried in your lap, but you’re worried about my language?”
Harry groaned, and his fingers contracted on the back of her head. “This is no time for your unregulated tongue, so keep quiet if you please.”
“We know you’re both in there!” Floyd growled. “There wasn’t no place else for you to go. Now come on out and maybe we won’t shoot you. We’ll just take you to Carlyle.”
Harry kept one large hand mashed against her head, forcing her to stay low, as he yelled out, “I have your gun, remember? Come anywhere near here and I’ll be obliged to put a bullet in you! At the moment, the thought doesn’t distress me at all.”
Curses exploded from outside the garage.
“He really doesn’t like you, Harry.”
“The feeling is mutual, I assure you.”
Unable to help herself, she nuzzled slightly into his lap. Harry jerked away. “Keep your head down, and no, don’t say a thing. In case you’ve failed to notice, we’re in something of a situation here. I need to keep my wits collected.” When she dutifully remained silent, he nodded. “Good. Now, I’m going to draw them to the back of the garage. There’s a door back there, and when they think we’re escaping out the back, we’ll make a run for the truck. Understand?”
He was all business, his eyes bright, his voice low, his body hard, poised for action. He impressed the hell out of Charlie, being so urbane one minute and so lethal the next.
“How can I help?”
“By not getting yourself killed. Now, do you understand everything I told you?”
“I’m not an idiot.”
He sighed. “I suppose I’m to take that as a yes.” He started to move away, then suddenly leaned forward and grabbed her by the neck. His mouth landed on hers, hot and hard, for the briefest second, and then he disappeared into the shadows. He managed to move without making a sound, causing her admiration to grow.
Charlie plopped down onto her backside and waited. She didn’t like waiting. She felt ineffectual and cowardly and the feelings didn’t rest well with her at all. She was used to taking action, to controlling things.
Floyd evidently didn’t like waiting, either. “I’m losing patience!” he shouted. “I’ll give you to the count of ten, then we’re coming in and shooting any damn thing that moves. Carlyle would rather have you dead than loose.”
Hurry up, Harry, she thought, listening as Floyd started a loud, monotonous recitation of his numbers.
Glass shattered at the back of the garage, followed by the sound of running footsteps. Cautiously, Charlie peeked over the edge of the window above her head. Floyd and Ralph stood frozen in the moonlight for a single heartbeat, then they cursed and ran hellbent for the back of the garage.
She waited until they were out of sight before she slithered toward the door Harry had kicked in, proud of the fact that she, too, made no discernible noise. She’d barely edged outside before a rough, hot hand clamped over her mouth and a steely arm closed tight around her waist. She would have panicked if it hadn’t been for Harry’s height, assuring her he was the one who’d accosted her.
Without struggling, she got dragged to the truck and roughly thrust inside through the driver’s door. Harry slid in beside her.
Seething, Charlie restraightened the huge coat she wore, holding the throat closed with a fist, and leaned close to whisper, “What? You thought I’d refuse your rescue and opt to stay with my buddy Floyd? Is that why you felt you had to manhandle—”
“No keys, damn it.”
She squeaked. “What do you mean, no keys? How the heck are we going to—”
He thrust the gun into her hand. “Watch out for the two stooges while I hot-wire this barge.”
Bemused, Charlie looked down at the gun in her hand, then to where Harry bent low beneath the dash, then dutifully out the window.
Hmm. There was something innately sexy about a man who could hot-wire.
It took him mere seconds. He’d just managed to fire the engine when Floyd and Ralph came stumbling back around the garage, their curses so hot Charlie’s ears felt singed, and that was surely impressive given she’d been raised hearing curses all her life. The two men literally jumped up and down in rage as gravel and mud slung off the spinning tires, embellishing Harry’s daring getaway. Ralph fired, and Charlie thought she heard a bullet or two hit the side of the truck bed, but it didn’t slow Harry. She waited, wondering if, because of the gunshot, he’d feel it necessary to put her head back in his lap.
She was slightly disappointed when he didn’t.
Harry didn’t say a word, concentrating instead on finding the main road and figuring out how to turn on the lights, the wiper blades, the heat. Charlie was just about to tuck the gun into her pocket when he retrieved it from her without a word.
She knew a struggle for the gun was useless, and she scowled. “Now what?”
Harry rubbed the back of his neck, glanced at her, his gaze moving over her from head to toe, then cursed slightly. “I think we’ll abandon this truck outside town. No sense in taking a chance that Carlyle or one of his cronies will recognize it and want to pull us over. We’ll grab a taxi to my apartment.”
“Why your apartment?” Not that she’d complain. Her curiosity over Harry grew more rampant with every moment she spent in his company. From his place, she could call her sister, and then maybe they could finish what they’d started at the garage. She glanced down at Harry’s lap, but the interior of the cab was too dark to tell if he still reacted to their little interlude. She liked it a lot that she’d turned him on. In all her life, she’d seldom had the opportunity, or the desire, to indulge in lust. But with Harry, well, she was more than a little intrigued.
“I think we need to talk, to figure out what we’re going to do.”
Charlie sighed, then carefully ventured a suggestion. “I don’t think we should call the police.”
Harry stilled for a moment, smoothly switched gears, then nodded. “Okay, I’ll bite. Well, not really, not unless you wanted me to, and then it’d be more appropriate to say nibble—”
“Harry.”
“Why don’t you want to contact the police?”
“Because I can’t see any way for you to explain this without telling them I was there, dressed as a guy, spying. And I’d just as soon no one knew about that.”
“I can see where that would be a tale you’d hesitate to broadcast. But as it so happens I don’t relish involving the police, either.”
“And your reasons are?” When he only slanted her a look, she poked him in the side. “No way, Harry. I told, now it’s your turn.”
“You told very little, actually.”
“I’ll get into more detail once I’m warm and dry and have time to reason a few things out.”
“I suppose that’ll have to appease me.”
“Give it up, Harry.”
He didn’t want to, she could tell that. He gave her a grudging look that almost made her smile. “I promised my friend I wouldn’t involve any of the other people in the area. They’re older proprietors, like Pops, and they aren’t excessively fond of the police right now.”
“You mean Pops—the guy who runs the store we were in before Floyd decided to play kidnapper?”
“That’s right. They’ve contacted the police a few times in the past over other situations—loud music, loitering, things like that. They were pretty much told that since they’re in a run-down, high-crime area, they have to expect a certain amount of that sort of thing. The police offered more surveillance, but the elders didn’t think that was enough. They were determined to take matters into their own hands, which of course would be dangerous.”
&n
bsp; Even as she nodded, Charlie wondered if her father was one of the men being bothered. It seemed likely. She felt a moment’s worry before she firmly squelched it. Her father deserved nothing but her enmity, and that’s all he’d ever get. He’d never been there when she needed him most, but she’d found him now, and he could damn well pay. What she wanted from him—financial assistance to get her sister through college—had nothing to do with emotions or family relationships.
The rain started again, and they settled into a congenial quiet. Harry reached over and pulled her to his side. It wasn’t quite as nice as his lap, but he was warm and firm and secure, and she took comfort from his nearness, though she’d never have admitted it.
As they neared the outskirts of town, Harry nudged her with his shoulder. “It’s regretful things got interrupted back there.”
“Yeah.”
He cleared his throat. “If you’re interested… ”
“Yeah.”
Laughing, Harry pulled the truck up to the curb and turned the engine off. He tilted Charlie’s face up and kissed her softly. “There’s nothing coy about you, is there?”
She raised a brow. “Should I pretend I’m not interested? That’d be dumb, Harry, since I don’t get interested all that often.”
Harry fought a smile, and lost. “So you’re telling me you’re not easy after all?”
Charlie snorted. “Most of the men that frequent my saloon could tell you I’m usually damn difficult.”
“No! You? I’ll never believe it.”
Charlie smacked his shoulder. “Smart-ass.”
Chuckling, Harry said, “Wait here. I’ll call us a taxi.”
He left the truck and trotted to a pay phone across the street. Charlie watched him go, admiring his long-legged stride, the way he held his head, the natural confidence and arrogance that appeared as obvious as his physical attributes. He was a strange man in many ways, his lofty wit and cultured diction in opposition to his easy acceptance at being kidnapped, shot at and holed up in a greasy garage. He’d stolen a truck as easily as if such a thing were a daily occurrence. Though it was apparent to Charlie he’d led an expensive, well-bred life, he hadn’t so much as sniffed at her admission to owning a saloon, or the fact that for the most part, she was an obvious gutter rat, born and bred on the shadier side of life.
