“You’re sure?”
Nik nodded at her in the rearview. He was sure he didn’t need sleep, but that was about all he was certain of.
Thea reluctantly curled up on the backseat next to Titan and quickly drifted off. Watching her from the rearview mirror, Nik envied her ability to fall asleep with so much weight on her shoulders. Her closed lids shielded him from her eyes, but not from the intoxication he felt from being near her.
In the past twelve hours, he’d wanted to kiss her, kill her, and every sordid thing in between. Instead he’d tried to reason with her, to intimidate her, and even to scare her away. And he’d failed miserably at every tactic.
Maybe he was running away with her. He didn’t care. He’d saved her and he damn sure would protect her. Failure was not an option, even if it meant keeping her closer than he was ready to let her get.
Nik braked, slowing the Jeep down to a crawl as traffic backed up. The site of the tornado’s damage path came into view. It was for the best Thea wasn’t awake. In the light of day, the scene looked a thousand times worse than under the cover of night. All manner of responders and volunteers were still working the wreckage, but Nik’s eyes cut straight through the battered field to Thea’s crumpled white truck. Next to it a woman wearing a black pencil skirt whose dark hair looked to be pulled back in a bun surveyed the vehicle. Appearing alongside of her was a man in a navy windbreaker with large yellow lettering on the back. FBI? Something wasn’t adding up.
A black Chevy Tahoe was parked on part of the road not littered with debris. The same SUV that had been racing after Thea in Goodland? Damn. Why would the Feds be involved with an illegal snatch-and-grab on a dog? Thea had hit the nail on the head—there had to be more to this. But what else could she have been involved in?
It wasn’t too late. He could take the exit and hand her over. Wipe his hands clean of the situation and meet up with the guys as planned. Be lounging on the beach of an exotic hedonistic island in less than twenty-four hours without a care in the world.
He glanced up to the rearview mirror, straight into Titan’s hard stare as the dog stood protectively over Thea’s sleeping body.
Nik dropped his nose and eyed the German shepherd over his sunglasses. “Don’t even give me that look, dog.”
Chapter Twelve
I awoke to a muted world, my hearing muffled. From my position in the vehicle’s backseat, I could make out the tips of evergreen trees and an occasional sheer rock wall through the tinted windows. My head pounded. My bones ached. Then it came back to me—the tornado. My mind cataloged those memories easily, but still nothing from before. “Nik?”
“Right here, Tiggs. How you feelin’?”
I half-smiled, half-winced—glad to hear the warmth returned to his voice, yet everything inside of me railed painfully against moving. “Where are we? I feel…ow.”
His masculine rumble filled the car. “Just ow?”
“Really ow. Bad ow.” I reached to feel what my head was resting on and stroked Titan’s fur. His wet nose pressed cold against my fingertips.
“I bet. Really bad ow is the worst. Here.” He handed me a bottle of water. “You’ll need to stay hydrated. We’re almost home. An ice bath should help the soreness.”
“Home?” Ice bath? That couldn’t be right. “Why can’t I hear you? Everything sounds fuzzy and far away.”
“It’s the altitude. Pop your ears.”
Altitude? “We’re not in Kansas?”
“Not anymore. We’re in Colorado, near Estes Park. You slept hard the whole way. My cabin’s up the road.”
“Didn’t you say you came from California?”
“I did. Our base is in Coronado, but my house is in Estes,” he clarified as he picked up his buzzing phone. After glancing at the screen, which I could see was littered in messages, he dropped the phone back in the cup holder.
“Everything okay?”
“Depends on who you ask.” He grinned into the rearview mirror. Between the baseball hat and his sunglasses most of his face was hidden, but damn, he still looked hot as hell. And I probably looked like really bad ow.
I sat up despite my revolting muscles and head throbbed incessantly. As he sped from curve to curve, it was a struggle to stay upright. I started to yawn, but a loud ripping noise shocked me into shaking it off. “What the heck was that?”
“What was what?”
“The screeching noise.”
“Screeching? Probably your ears starting to pop on their own. Haven’t you ever…? Oh, guess you wouldn’t remember, huh?”
I fought the urge to growl, ‘No, guess not’. I didn’t like seeming like an idiot about something clearly so simple. “Tell me how to get this popping nonsense done.”
“Pinch your nose, blow out hard.”
I did as instructed and immediately regretted it. “Holy frick! Is there blood coming out of them?” My fingers came back dry while the sound of Nik’s rumbled laugh came in loud and clear. “It’s a miracle. I can hear you laughing at me again. How do I unpop them?”
“Sorry, Tiggs, you’re stuck listening to me now.”
“It’s a good thing you have a sexy voice. And Wanda did call you a keeper,” came out before my slothful filter caught it.
He turned away from the rearview as he shifted in his seat. The sunglasses hid any emotions showing in his eyes, so I had to venture a guess. “What? Not good with compliments?”
He turned the Jeep off the main road. “They’re fattening for the ego.”
“I’m sure your ego is as rock solid as your abs.” My filter had no chance against a backhand like that, but it was totally worth the sexy jaw flex he responded with.
* * * *
‘Home.’ Nik hadn’t realized how infrequently he’d used the term until he’d said it to Thea. He’d say ‘going to my cabin’, ‘my house’, ‘the mountains’, ‘Colorado’, ‘the States’. But never ‘home’. Home was a place with family, and the only family he had were the Teams. The base was his home. A home I’ve just given up, he reminded himself.
The cabin wasn’t so much a cabin really, more like a well-built log house. Three bedrooms, two baths, a walkout basement turned man cave with workout room, and a deck with an amazing view of a timber-filled gorge, twenty acres of which was his. It’d welcomed him back from various tours and deployments as well as a few casual vacations with buddies. At the end of the day, it was simply a building with an awesome view.
He pulled into the garage and proceeded to let Titan out before helping a stiff-legged Thea unfold herself from the backseat. He’d only brought his best friends, Coop and Leo, and a few other military buddies here. Never any women. Women were more of a recreational activity for him—something he did in town for a few hours, not much different from a golf game, movie, or getting a massage. He supposed it made him an asshole, but he figured he was doing them a favor really.
Sorry, Wanda, I’m no one’s keeper.
Inhaling a deep, cleansing breath of mountain air, he found himself curiously watching Thea take in the one place on earth that was his alone. The retreat had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view teeming with dense stands of lodgepole pines. Quaking aspen groves stood out against the dark rock outcroppings with their slender trunks decorated in mottled white bark. Impressive ponderosa pines towered overhead, while narrowleaf cottonwoods dug their roots into the river rock and sandbars along the valley streams.
The fall foliage in these upper mountains, with the heart-shaped aspen leaves turning from silvery green to bright gold, was world-renowned, but now, the late spring meant a rainbow of colorful wildflowers blooming. The melting of the snow-capped mountains filled the rivers as they roared down to the valley. And if you were lucky, you might catch a few spotted elk calves bobbling along with the herds as they stopped for a drink.
Thea pointed to a nearby blue spruce drenched in warm sunlight. “The smell in the air…is it from those?”
Nik shook his head while gesturing to a pondero
sa pine. “When the sun hits the bark it smells like butterscotch cookies.”
“And the noise?”
“The noise is from those.” He pointed up to the green aspen leaves trilling in a thunderous rustle with the breeze, the sound like a massive flock of butterfly wings batting the air to take flight. “It’s one of my favorite sounds out here.”
Thea smiled in agreement before exploring further, touching different textures, bending down to pick up pinecones and rocks as she appeared to ascertain their respective weights in her palm. Like with the food at the diner, she seemed to recognize most things in a conceptual form, but lacked the expectation of experience. It was fascinating watching her mind work to fill the memory gaps. From her intense focus, her brain must’ve been whirling like a highspeed computer processor writing in missing chunks of code.
She crouched down and ran her fingers over a patch of snow. A few thick white drifts still collected in the shadows despite the heat of the midday sun and summer approaching. Pinching some, she rubbed it between her fingertips. Her brows quirked up as she cocked an adorable half-smile. Catching his stare, her eyes went round and her cheeks flushed pink. “Sorry,” she said as she flashed a thin, embarrassed grimace. “I know how childish I am to you.”
Nik’s blood stilled. “Where did you get that idea? I don’t think you’re childish at all.”
“You called me a child earlier and here I don’t even know what snow feels like or what makes the sounds I hear.”
Shit. He felt a punch to his chest as surely as if he’d taken shrapnel to his armor. The only reason he’d made the child dig in the first place was because he couldn’t seem to control his own immature, teen-boy response to her. He could do better.
“Most things I can piece together quickly, but other things…surprise me.”
He strode over to a clean drift, scooping some up. “You can taste it, the snow.”
Thea followed his lead, cupping the icy powder in her own hand as she watched him bite a chunk. Her pink tongue whisked the sparkling white surface. With a delicate rasp of her teeth, she scraped the snow into her mouth. Nik imagined the dry flakes turning into an explosion of cool liquid dripping through her like it did him. Her brows quirked up and her smile widened, matching his.
Out of the corner of Nik’s eye, he caught Titan hiking his hind leg over the patch Nik had scooped from. Knowing exactly what was up with the sly maneuver, he shot the dog a laser-sharp glare to put the bratty beast in his crosshairs. This piece of earth here in the Colorado Rockies was Nik’s territory first, thank you very much. To Thea he cautioned, “Don’t taste the yellow snow. Ever.”
A honeyed laugh poured from her. “That’s one of those things I can quickly piece together. But thank you, Nik,” she said as she lifted another pristine scoop to her chill-kissed lips. Before she took another taste, she tilted her head, her eyes twinkling like whiskey on ice as she regarded him. “For always surprising me.”
She spun on her toe, the filmy white skirt flaring about her knees. Her wet fingertips trailed the hand-hewn logs as she took the stairs to the wraparound porch where she then gazed out over the valley. A breeze lifted and coiled through her hair the same way it did with the Aspen leaves.
“Takes your breath away,” she murmured, moving into the warmth of the sunlight.
Nik’s lungs seized. Yes, you do.
Nik pried his predator’s stare off of her and busied himself by gathering his bags from the back of the Jeep. Watching her lick the snow had already made his jeans uncomfortably tight. Seeing the sunlight outlining her naked body through the dress made them downright unbearable. He was aware she didn’t have underclothes. Acutely aware. He’d disposed of everything she’d worn the night of the tornado in a dumpster east of Denver. It’d taken iron-tight control to keep his imagination from going rogue. But now the hazy seductive image of pure woman was gloriously burned on his retinas, which made everything so much harder. Most notably his cock. He ached to unzip his jeans for a little relief, but knew it would be damn fucking creepy of him and he already felt pretty damn fucking creepy for having brought her here when his dick refused to be controlled in her presence.
“Down, boy,” he growled as he adjusted himself. Titan responded with an insolent huff. “I wasn’t talking to you, dog, but so reassuring to know you’d actually obey.”
Nik wiped his forearm across his brow as he flipped his baseball hat around backward.
What was he thinking? That he’d fix all Thea’s problems with a phone call or two? Help her get a lawyer or something and she’d thank him with crazy, wild sex? Time to cut back on the pornos, Steele. No, that wasn’t who he was or why he’d made the choice to bring her here. She was a person who needed assistance, no different from the various people he’d been fortunate enough to help throughout his career. As with those individuals, he’d extracted her from a bad situation, patched her up a bit, and transported her to safety. Soon it would be time to walk away.
Easy.
Heck, this job didn’t even involve RPGs being launched at him.
As he scanned the back of the Jeep to ensure he’d gotten everything, Titan pushed past him, hopping in.
“Hey!”
The dog ignored him, per usual, digging his snout deep under the seat. With a few nipping tugs, Titan dragged a bag out.
“What have you got there, boy?”
It looked like what had once been a quality leather purse until it was dragged through the mud. Titan must’ve grabbed it from the tornado’s debris field when Nik had been tending Thea’s wounds.
He took the small black purse without any resistance from Titan. Inside was a stacked and wrapped wad of bills he guessed to be significant, an off-market temporary phone, a thumb drive, a bottle of sparkly red nail polish, a crocodile-skin wallet with the ID of a woman named Seraphina Westin, an extra extended magazine for the Glock and a box of bullets. So much for his first notion. This was not some random purse the dog had grabbed. It was a female version of a go-bag. Thea Gale was running from something or someone, and likely this was before the incident at Animal Control.
He tucked the purse into his own duffle, wanting to do a little research on the ID before he showed it to Thea. Given how she’d reacted to finding out the gun was hers, he figured the purse’s contents were not going to go over well either.
After disabling his home security system from the app on his phone, he unlocked the front door, dropped his bags, and proceeded straight for the wet bar. Thea followed, allowing her eyes to unabashedly rove the contents of the house. She was no doubt finding it oddly bare aside from basic furniture.
“What’s your poison?”
“My poison?”
“Alcohol. What do you drink?”
“I don’t remember, remember?”
Nik’s stomach tightened, but the kick had already been felt. “Sorry, I keep forgetting.”
“Yeah, I have the same problem.” She winked when he caught her eye. “Ba-dum-cha! I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
“You got it, Tiggs.” He poured two double-sized shots of Jack Daniel’s. As he handed one to her, her fingers stroked across his. The brisk touch stirred up all the dirty thoughts he’d tried in vain to settle.
“Might take it easy,” he cautioned, as much to himself as her. But as she moved toward the floor-to-ceiling windows and more damn sunlight, he had to knock his shot back to keep from staring. A smooth, familiar burn slid down his throat, filling his stomach with the same explosive heat already firing in his groin.
“Are you…?” Her eyes teased over his body, slamming to a stop at the obvious bulge in his pants.
Her eyebrows popped up, indicating he’d surprised her again.
Hell, darlin’, I’m full of them.
He probably should’ve been more discreet, but preventing a woody around her was becoming a full-time job with shitty benefits. Besides, what was the point of trying to hide it when his dick was bound and determined to get her attention
? Fuck, even a ghillie suit wouldn’t have concealed the bastard.
He curled the side of his mouth up. “Am I what?”
Hard for you?
Aching to have your body wrapped around mine?
Desperate to be inside of you?
Yes. Yes! And hell yes!!!
She managed to respond with, “Going to take it easy?” while full-on staring at his crotch. Shit. Was she asking if he’d be taking it easy with the whiskey or his cock? Didn’t matter, her thickening voice had already stroked up his spine, curled around his throat and cut off his air. It was a good thing he’d downed the shot when he had or he might’ve spewed alcohol clear across the room.
Damn. She had no clue the impact she had on him. How much control he had to exercise around her and how quickly his grasp on it was slipping. He set his jaw as he ratcheted down what little hold he had left.
Pouring himself a quick refill, he fired back his own double entendre. “I always go easy on the second round.”
A lie on both counts. He downed round two hard and fast, the clank of the shot glass colliding with granite betraying his words.
Her eyes flickered with amusement as her tongue tested the rim of her shot. Maybe she knew exactly what she was doing. Maybe she was the one who was full of surprises. But if she didn’t quit tempting him, she’d find out exactly how hard and how many rounds he was willing to go at her.
Chapter Thirteen
I breathed the liquor in… Sharp and fiery. Dipping my tongue into the golden liquid, I felt a numbing sting envelope it. Tingles cascaded across my scalp, dripping down the back of my neck.
Why’d he finish his so fast when it feels so darkly enticing?
I pushed my tongue in deeper, catching the sharp edge to Nik’s gaze. I didn’t understand the desires this body was having—the way it buzzed and warmed and swelled along with the images in my brain whenever he looked at me. Especially the way he was now. Like he was looking at my flesh, but he was seeing into my soul.
I braced as he flashed that slow grin of his. He was good at that grin. I imagine he probably broke a lot of hearts with it. I was beginning to fear for my own if I wasn’t careful, and I hadn’t been very careful so far.
Twist My Heart (Wicked Games Book 1) Page 8
