Twist My Heart (Wicked Games Book 1)

by Brooke Taylor

  Every warm exhale against my ear sent trembling waves down through my bones. His ragged voice vibrated as he ground out the words, “Who the hell are you?”

  Mine came out desperate and trembling. “Does it matter?”

  “Shit, you could be married.”

  “I don’t have any rings.”

  “How old are you?”

  It took me a steadying breath to piece his concern together. Between his white-knuckled fists jammed down on the vanity ledge as if testing its structural integrity and my fingers clamping tight to his hips, I felt pretty sure trying to claim it would’ve only been one kiss would insult both of our intelligence. I wasn’t entirely sure what we’d started here, but from our panting breaths it was obvious neither of us would be satisfied with only one of anything.

  And I did look young, but not that young. Or maybe I was. I had no idea. No idea who I was or what I wanted, which was exactly his point. How could I truthfully consent to even one kiss with so little information?

  With a shove, he pushed off the counter. His body ripped away from mine in one fast pull, leaving me to struggle for air again.

  “I better take my shower now.” He turned to adjust the water as I backed out of the bathroom. Before he closed the door, I heard him mutter, “A cold one.”

  * * * *

  No good deed goes unpunished. This one undoubtedly would cost Nik dearly. The sooner he found Tigger’s friends, family, whatever…the better.

  He splashed icy water over his face, but it did little good at tempering the hot pumping of his blood. Lingering to pick her up at the gas station in Goodland had been a mistake. Sure, getting right back on the highway would’ve put him directly in the path of the tornado. But he would’ve been better off in what the weathermen were already calling an EF4, than in a hotel room with some jailbait vixen who didn’t seem to understand reason.

  Potentially jailbait. Most assuredly didn’t understand reason.

  He needed to get away from her before she had him doing something really stupid, like inviting her to go to the island with him.

  Take her to the hospital and let them sort it out. Is that so hard? Be on your way.

  Huh.

  Why was it so hard?

  Maybe because the way she’d threatened to flip him off as he was saving her life, then bullheadedly refusing medical treatment flat-out reminded Nik of the Team Guys, and he’d never turn away from any of them.

  Maybe because he’d felt entirely useless since returning stateside for stand-down phase and even more so having left the Teams.

  And maybe because he believed her fears went well beyond being caught in the tornado. For something to be more terrifying than a ravaging act of God…well, that kind of spoke to him.

  Nik had seen horrific things in the military, but finding Tigger buried and broken had punched through all his walls, slamming right into an old wound.

  A wrecked car…a lifeless, angelic face stained with blood. Cora.

  He yanked himself out of the memory with the same fierceness he’d used time and again in the haunting nightmares. Thrusting his face into the cold shower spray, he tried to erase the visions of Cora red with blood, her body buried under so much weight. No, this is different, he reminded himself for the millionth time. This girl survived. Everything turned out okay. She awaited him right on the other side of the door—living, breathing, and downright feisty.

  Truth was, everything was not okay. Despite the fact she could rattle off the answer to any mathematical equation he could throw at her. She had no memory at all, or so she claimed. She refused to go to the hospital, even though she had to have a concussion and no doubt needed some industrial-strength pain meds. But she was alive. Sweet-faced and innocent…

  Innocent. Huh.

  His memory snapped back to the field, when the sky had run out of rain, and to the all-too-familiar nylon-based polymer his fingertips skimmed. Before she’d even come to, his hand had passed over her abdomen in the darkness as he examined her for injuries, and he’d felt it. Glock 43, modified sights and grip, carried hot with a half-spent extended mag. No ID on her, no permit or badge, nothing to let him know if the gun was even hers. No…innocent girls didn’t tear out of gas stations driving straight into tornadoes with Glocks tucked in their waistbands.

  Then there was the blood. Her hoodie had been soaked in more blood than had been consistent with her injuries. He hadn’t realized it at first, given the rain and mud. But under the interior light of his Jeep he’d realized she was covered in it. Whose blood was it? She’d been alone at the gas station in Goodland. The female DOA under her truck had had a lot of blood loss. She’d looked to have been injured by the tornado, but he couldn’t rule out a gunshot wound as well.

  Maybe Tigger was an undercover cop? Could explain the gun and her possible involvement with the other girl. But if she were a cop, why would she be so adamant about avoiding them? Crap. He should’ve handed her over when the policeman had shown up. But damn, he’d already tucked her Glock into the back of his own waistband for safekeeping. If it turned out the gun had been used on the DOA or stolen, would a cop buy he’d taken it off an innocent-looking young woman with no memory? Even if he did, some cops didn’t appreciate military folks jumping in and taking charge, even if Nik’s motive was simply to protect himself should she have woken up in a panic.

  She had yet to ask about the gun or even look for it. Either she truly had amnesia or she was doing an amazing job of pretending to.

  If he’d been active, Nik would’ve analyzed her antsy behavior differently back at the gas station—everyone was a potential hostile where he was used to working, especially bouncy, honeytrap-types like Tigger. One of the many reasons he kept it in his pants when deployed. He was stateside, though, no longer active duty. He’d been pulled off a long stretch of highway, and restless as hell after a particularly crappy final deployment and the utterly ridiculous decision to wait to get laid until he got to the island with his friends. So, yeah, he’d assessed things with an eye toward a different kind of takedown than he should’ve. And now here he was with her and her dog—her dog!—in his hotel room with no sign of them heading on their merry way any time soon.

  Rule number one. Don’t listen to your cock, no matter how convincing the suave motherfucker can be. Lesson learned.

  Until the next time…

  He’d already sent a text to Coop and Leo to let them know he was alive. Nik claimed he needed to take the Jeep in for repairs, buying himself a day, tops. He didn’t dare tell them the truth. Coop would never let him live it down. A Good Samaritan mission which should’ve been over an hour ago wouldn’t be an acceptable excuse to delay plans, no matter how hot the girl or how many guns she had. And Leo… Hell, Nik could already sense his wheels spinning hard in reverse.

  Leo: The tornado’s a bad omen. I know it.

  Leo: Maybe we shouldn’t go to the island.

  Coop: STFU and stop being such a wuss.

  Coop: All that Bermuda Triangle stuff is bullshit.

  An omen? For fuck’s sake. Nik left it to the brothers to argue over ridiculous superstitions, he had enough crazy on his plate with Tigger and Titan.

  He toweled off his body. Neither the cold shower, nor the vivid replay of the evening’s events had done much to help him forget how much Tigger turned him on. But without more intel on who she really was, there would be absolutely no tiger or tail for him tonight. Which meant it would be a freaking long-ass night keeping his hands to himself while making sure she didn’t die. Last thing a Navy SEAL needed was a practically naked dead girl in his hotel room. Shit!

  Nik whipped the towel around his waist and pushed open the door. Sure enough, she was folded up on the floor next to her German shepherd, comatose.

  When she didn’t respond to his voice, he squeezed her shoulder. Tigger’s eyes shot open as Titan objected in a flurry of spit and razor-sharp teeth. Guttural growls and blasting barks had Nik’s back against the wall as she grappled
for the beast, holding him off.

  “Just trying to wake you up,” Nik rushed to explain. The bathroom doorjamb dug into his spine as he worked to keep the towel around his waist from falling.

  “Well, I’m wide-awake now,” Tigger groused as her eyes focused in on his body. The pathetically small hotel towel covered him about as well as his T-shirt covered her. Which was not at all. Her lips turned up at the shift in his towel caused by the flexing of his abs…and a much less well-behaved body part. If he caught another glimpse of her pale pink ass cheek peeking out from under the white cotton hem of the T-shirt he’d loaned her, said other body part would be able to hold the towel up all on its own.

  He cut his gaze sharply to her eyes, hoping to find sanctuary there. But who was he kidding? They were like double shots of whiskey, both in their coppery color and the sharp-edged way he buzzed off them. Her focus swayed and danced as she kept taking him in. It had nothing to do with her head injury and everything to do with her being a flame that would likely burn the shit out of him if he touched it. And after being pressed up against her once, he didn’t want to just touch it. He wanted to roll his body in it. Burn, baby, burn. He ripped his attention to her ear, his front teeth snapping together in a nip. His eyes flared. Was there any place safe to look at on this woman?

  “Nik?”

  Nik didn’t dare respond. The way her tongue clicked teasingly across his name had him desperate to drop his towel, rip the T-shirt off her, and hear her moaning it in pleasure.

  Amused and gravelly, she asked, “What exactly are you needing?”

  Apparently, fucking therapy. Because shit, even the cut at her hairline held together with a row of freaking white Steri-Strips had his lip curling over his incisors, his tongue rolling hard and wet against the back of his teeth as he envisaged he was a male lion laving her wounds as he mounted her from behind. Damn, Steele, some twisted shit, even for you.

  Titan snapped again, jaws clacking hard with each bark as if reading Nik’s lascivious thoughts. The dog meant business and Nik sobered up quick. Remembering he had a legitimate and chaste reason for waking her, he shouted over the loud echo of barking, “Since you refuse to go to the hospital to have your brain scanned, we’re going to go old-school concussion rules.”

  She called the dog off again and Nik continued, lowering his voice. “If you don’t wake up every hour and appear coherent, I’m taking you to the ER using whatever force necessary.”

  The every-hour thing was overkill, but she didn’t need to know it and he desperately needed to get some semblance of control over the situation. It very well could come down to whatever force necessary with this woman.

  The evil snarl tugging at Titan’s muzzle hadn’t lessened. Nik needed to suppress that situation as well. He narrowed his eyes at the animal. “Easy, Lassie, I wasn’t going to hurt her. I saved her. Remember the whole ‘Timmy’s in the well’ routine? Forgotten, huh? Now you want to act all Cujo with me? Nice gratitude.”

  Nik grumbled, realizing he was arguing with a dog. A dog! Coop would have a freaking field day with this.

  Titan’s lip twitched and a half-growl, half-whine emitted from his throat as he begrudgingly lowered back down. Nik moved cautiously around the pair as the dog gave a quick indifferent lick to the top of his paw. No doubt the canine version of the middle finger.

  Chapter Six

  “Don’t you think…” I adjusted myself on the hotel bed, sitting up and crossing my legs under the white duvet before propping my chin on my hands. “I mean, well… I know it sounds crazy, and maybe it is, but everything happens for a reason, right?”

  Nik’s jaw flexed. I’d learned he flexed it whenever he wanted to do something to me he couldn’t allow himself to—kiss me, kill me… He flexed it a lot.

  This was a kill-me one.

  He was the picture of exasperation. “I asked you about pizza, not the meaning of life.”

  It had to be frustrating, my evasiveness whenever he turned our conversation in such a way as to probe into my past. But after nearly four hours of incessantly mining for memories, I was done. Done! I desperately wanted to sleep. I was so nervous I wouldn’t wake up and he’d haul me off to the hospital, I’d forced myself to stay awake as long as he did. If only he’d quiet down enough to eventually drift off. But no. The questions had no end. Each time I shut down, Nik piped up—Think about schools. Can you remember any schools you might’ve gone to? Do you think you lived on a farm? In a city? What is your favorite food? Favorite color? Song? Movie? Pizza?

  Blah blah blah.

  Why couldn’t he have been like Titan? Titan didn’t care if I remembered where we used to live or what we did yesterday. He liked the memory-free version of me just fine. He also liked toilet water, but still… Why couldn’t Nik let it go?

  I’m sure he thought he was being helpful. But his eagerness for me to regain some knowledge of who I really was, and more importantly who I belonged to so he could return me, grated.

  For him I was a mere blip of a few crazy hours in his thirty-some-odd year life. But for me, he and Titan were everything. Like literally. Everything.

  There he was, sitting in the most uncomfortable-looking chair as he had for the past four hours, with those green eyes as hard and sharp as the shards of glass I’d been buried in. He looked so cute mad. He looked handsome as sin the rest of the time. Downright scorching coming out of the shower. Those arms…and chest…and abs, oh my. Such a shame I didn’t know the command for Titan to snatch his towel away.

  “Pizza. Imagine a pizza.”

  Ugh.

  “I’m all good imagining something else right now.” My gaze slid the length of him. “Why don’t you tell me about your tattoos?”

  Or better yet, let me get another look at them.

  Nik threw his head back, banging it against the chair. “It’s like you’re not even trying,” he said to the ceiling.

  Oh, I was. Trying to get him distracted. It just didn’t appear to be working very well.

  How could I explain to him that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the person who drove into the tornado? That woman and everything attached to her was essentially dead. He might’ve cared about who she was, but I couldn’t have cared less.

  I had no emotions about her.

  Zero.

  Well, not entirely true. I did have one emotion about her. I was pissed.

  She showed incredible stupidity to put herself and Titan in such terrible danger. Incredible stupidity! And given the overwhelming sense I was running from someone, I gathered she’d probably done something very bad to boot. Prying about for even more things to be angry at her over was the last thing I wanted to do.

  “What if I don’t remember anything because I’m not supposed to?”

  Nik closed his eyes, but he wasn’t going to sleep. Oh, noooo… He was way too disciplined. No, the kill-me look he’d thrown meant he was plotting to get rid of me. Before he could figure out how to re-bury me in the tornado debris, I grumbled, “Fine. What do you want to know about pizza?”

  After a long silence, he calmly asked, “Are you hungry? I’m hungry. I’m sure there’s one of those all-night diner places nearby.”

  “Yes!” I yanked the covers back and hopped to my feet, biting back a wince as my bruised body objected to both the motion and the impact. “But a wise man once told me I wouldn’t get very far dressed like this.”

  His green eyes raked over me. And there it was in all its glory—the kiss-me jaw flex.

  * * * *

  Nik had to get his ass out of the hotel room, away from the beds and every other surface he’d debaucherously fantasized about utilizing. What kind of pervert was he? She was injured. Undoubtedly had brain trauma for crissakes. He’d been thankful she’d left the bathroom door open when she showered, because he’d worried she might faint. But hearing her strip down… Imagining the water cascading over her skin… Smelling the soapy, Tigger-infused steam had smothered out every saintly thought in his mind. Al
l two of them.

  He wanted her every which way but loose and being in a hotel room was not helping. By sun up, his sanity would be completely unraveled. A location change was in desperate order.

  She had a point, though. He couldn’t very well take her to breakfast in only his T-shirt. A T-shirt that had spent several hours now bragging to him about the curves it got to cling to. And he’d never forget the freaking show-and-tell session in the bathroom rivaling any wet T-shirt contest he’d ever fantasized about. How he hadn’t ripped the son of a bitch off her by now was nothing short of a miracle.

  He strode from the room, leaving Tigger to wait while he went in search of clothes to cover her up with. The hotel lobby sat abandoned except for the perfectly styled, even at four in the morning, receptionist.

  Dylan was in his early twenties, with blond hair so pale it could only have come from a bottle and a face so smooth and sculpted it might’ve been molded from artesian clay. And Nik was man enough to admit the dude even smelled sexy. He was the perfect blend of Ken and Barbie and seemed like he’d be more of a fit as a swank Manhattan hotel concierge than the front desk, graveyard shift at the Siesta Inns and Suites, Middle of Nowhere, Kansas.

  He cast Nik some flirty side-eye before greeting him with a syrup-voiced, “Well if it isn’t Mr. Steele, my most favorite guest. How can I be of assistance at this hour?” The fashionable clerk had checked Nik in earlier and thanks to a fifty-dollar bill had very graciously overlooked the strict ‘No Dogs’ policy.

  “I have another favor to ask.”

  “Ooh, woof woof.” The way Dylan’s smile skyrocketed to his impossibly bright turquoise contact lenses, Nik felt certain this favor would require more than General Grant’s influence. Perhaps a founding father was in order. Ever the consummate professional, Dylan didn’t so much as blink when Nik set a hundred-dollar bill down while requesting women’s clothing.