“You have no idea how badly I want to go back in there,” he growled, his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel tightening.
“I know. I’m lucky I have you, Liam. What if I’d been some other girl? I hate to think about what could have happened.”
“You don’t have to think about those things, Olivia. And you don’t have to worry, you’ll always have me.” He reached over and tucked a long chunk of her bangs behind her ear.
Before he could pull his hand away, she leaned into his touch, wishing the center console wasn’t separating them. She wanted to be in his arms so badly. She wanted his lips on hers, erasing the taste of beer and the memory of that man’s assaulting kiss.
Desperately, she wanted to replace it with Liam’s, letting him drown out every trace of her attacker. The request was on the tip of her tongue. She opened her mouth to ask him to kiss her—to wash it all away, but before she could speak, Liam whispered, “We’d better get going.”
Olivia bit the inside of her lip to keep from protesting. It saddened her to know there had been a time when she wouldn’t have had to ask. He’d have known exactly what comfort she needed and he would have given it to her—without hesitation.
He turned the key in the ignition, and the Camaro roared to life. Olivia sighed in frustration and leaned back in her seat. Her gut twisted with regret—ached with longing. Liam wasn’t an idiot. He could feel her emotions, her desires, which only meant that back there at the station, he’d intentionally denied her his touch.
She turned to look at him. He was “concentrating” on the road. “How long are we going to keep doing this, Liam?”
“I’m not sure. If I push it, we’ll be there in a few hours—”
“Stop it. You know that’s not what I mean.”
This time when he took his eyes off the road long enough to glance at her, she could have sworn she saw flecks of jade marbling his violet eyes.
“I think the more important question here is how long are you going to be engaged to marry another man? Perhaps in that answer, you’ll find the answer to your own question. You told Mitch you had no choice in this, but that’s not true—you do. I took you because I had to get some distance between you and Rowen’s legion. I respect your free will, Olivia, and your decisions. When this is over, I’ll return you to him in the same condition I took you.”
“And what if I don’t want to go back?” she challenged.
His brow arched with surprise, but he didn’t respond.
“Liam, all I’ve ever wanted was to be with you. I’m just sad that this is what it took to bring you back. Your timing could have been a bit better. Did you have to wait until the very last second?” She gave him a small smile.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Uh-huh, I thought you said you never lied,” she accused lightly.
“I am sorry about what happened. I’m not sorry that you didn’t marry Mitch.”
A bubble of half-hearted laughter escaped her. She didn’t know why. It certainly wasn’t funny—nothing about this was humorous. “Well, at least you’re honest,” she said with a mixture of teasing sarcasm.
He looked at her completely serious. His intensity was sobering. “Always…”
She looked away. It was easier than holding his gaze. Her hands fidgeted restlessly in her lap as she worked up the courage to ask him something she’d been wondering since he tossed her over his shoulder and stormed out of the church.
“Since we’re being totally honest with each other, then, I need to ask you something.” She waited for him to nod his consent before continuing. “If I had married Mitch, would you have left me?” In her heart she thought she already knew the truth, but she needed to hear it from him.
“No,” he replied, without a second’s hesitation.
And damn if she didn’t love him all the more for it. “Mitch told me if I didn’t come back, he was going to leave me.”
“He’s manipulating you. He had no intention of leaving you. He’s afraid he’s going to lose you, Olivia. That’s the difference between him and me.” Liam paused a moment before continuing, and the regret in his voice nearly broke her heart. “I can’t lose what I don’t have.”
A dagger in the chest would have hurt less than those words. He hadn’t said them to hurt her. He simply spoke what he believed to be true. The problem was his words couldn’t have been farther from the truth. “You have more of me than you’ll ever know,” she said quietly. “You have to realize that. If you feel what I feel, then you know where my heart really lies. Mitch knows it, too, I suppose.”
“I didn’t come here to take you away from him, Olivia.”
“I know,” she said, reaching over to interlock her fingers with his. “You can’t take from him what was never his.”
Chapter Eleven
“I wonder what happened here,” Rowen commented, pulling into the gas station. He parked the Buick next to a pump and climbed out. The flashing lights of the police car and ambulance blocked the entrance door.
“Aw hell…” Cale grumbled. “I gotta take a piss like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Looks like the warrior happened,” Haden chuckled, his voice laden with wry amusement.
Cale didn’t share his sense of humor. Human attacks from the angelic were nearly unheard of, not that the Homo sapien peasants didn’t deserve it, but it was against Universal Law for an angel to engage in violence against a mortal—they were too fragile—too weak. It just wouldn’t look good for the Big Man Upstairs if his angels were kicking the shit out of humans. If Haden was right, and Liam had indeed done this, then it should serve as a warning to them all that this angel wasn’t playing by the rules anymore. Only this cocky, arrogant prick sitting shotgun was too stupid to see that.
He watched from the back seat as the officer stood beside the ambulance, talking to a man making large gestures with his arms, his raised voice carrying across the parking lot. Cale rolled down his window to hear what the guy was yelling about as the ambulance crew loaded another man into the back of the rig.
“You don’t know if he did that,” Rhen countered. “An angel wouldn’t do this. These are mortals.”
“A warrior would,” Rowen said, dipping his head down to reply through the back window. “Especially if he was protecting the girl.”
Another man stumbled out of the building with his arm in a sling. He stood next to the guy standing beside the officer and began interjecting. The officer shot the man a shut-the-hell-up glower.
“That guy’s obviously drunk,” Cale said. “I bet the asshole on the stretcher is, too. I’m gonna go check it out.” He climbed out the back door, and Rhen followed. Maybe he wanted to stretch his legs, or maybe he didn’t want to get stuck in the car alone with “douche bag of the year.” Either way, it didn’t really matter.
“So, you say you’ve never met his guy before, and he just attacked you and your friend, right out of the blue, for no reason?” the officer asked, eyeing the shoulder-slung man skeptically.
“That’s what I said!” he slurred. “He just attacked us!”
“Did you happen to see the car he was driving?” the officer asked, looking up from his note pad. He didn’t look terribly committed to the investigation. Perhaps the asshole’s credibility was shaken by the fact that the dude was so toasted, he could hardly stand.
“A black Camaro,” the uninjured man answered, looking and sounding the more sober of the two.
“I don’t ‘spose you happened to see the license plate?” the officer drawled, scribbling in his notebook.
“No. He was parked on the other side of the pump.”
Cale looked at Rhen. With his preternaturally acute sense of smell, he could whiff the alcohol on that guy’s breath from twenty feet away. “This guy was asking for it,” Cale muttered under his breath. “Hell, I’ve only been around the bastard for sixty seconds and I already want to punch him in the face.”
“Too bad no one got the plate number. It wou
ld have saved us a lot of time and trouble if they had,” Rhen grumbled.
“At least we know what he’s driving now, and we didn’t have to kill any defenseless old men to find out. Imagine that…” Cale muttered, ripe with snark.
“You really hate him, huh?”
“Haden? Yeah, I do. Something’s not right about him. Don’t you feel it? I don’t trust that bastard.”
“You’re paranoid,” Rhen said dismissively, flicking his wrist as if he were shooing away a fly. “He’s tight with Gahn, so I’d cool it with the bad blood if I were you. Come on, let’s go,” he said, walking back to the car. “We ain’t gonna learn nothin’ else here.”
“I still gotta piss,” Cale grumbled, following him back to the car.
“Well?” Haden asked as they approached. Rhen folded his arms and leaned against the driver’s door, dipping his head to answer.
“He’s driving a black Camaro,” Rhen said. “It’s a bust on the plate number. You still want us to go back to Evercrest?” he asked Rowen.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of black Camaros on the road. Why don’t you and Cale take off. We’ll hook back up once he stops running with her, and then we’ll finish this.”
“Ok. We’ll be in touch.”
Rowen pulled away, leaving Rhen and Cale standing in the parking lot. They watched as the ambulance and police car pulled out behind them, each turning different directions.
“Come on,” Cale said, zeroing in on the guy who’d been talking to the police officer and was now walking toward a sweet cherry red convertible. “Let’s go get ourselves a ride.”
***
It was dark by the time they entered city limits, but the night lights still glowed brightly, lighting up the sky as if it were day. The traffic was bumper to bumper thick and the impatient blast of horns could be heard along with the occasional shout of profanity. Olivia watched in stunned silence as they passed people milling along the sidewalks, scantily clad women stood in the shadows of street corners. Flashing signs advertised casino shows and live entertainment everywhere she looked.
“So this is Vegas,” Olivia commented. “You sure you want to stop here, huh?”
“Yeah, there’s always a lot of commotion here. It’ll be a good place to hide you.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointedly, “and here I thought this was all a ploy so you could get me drunk and haul me off to a little white chapel to be married by a bad Elvis impersonator.”
Liam laughed, and the melodic cadence was music to her ears. She loved the sound of it. Who was she kidding, she loved everything about him.
“I’ll tell you right now, I’m a cheap drunk,” she teased, arching her brows flirtatiously.
Again, that rich chortle warmed her heart and she nearly melted in her seat. She’d spent the last several hours taking to heart what Liam said after they left the station. She could no longer keep lying to herself, or to Mitch. She couldn’t marry him, and she didn’t love him enough to pretend. It wasn’t fair to any of them to keep dragging this out.
If Liam hadn’t tossed his phone out the window, she’d call Mitch right now and tell him the truth—tell him that although she cared about him, she didn’t love him and couldn’t marry him. The one she loved was sitting right here beside her. Olivia didn’t know how long she’d have him, but she couldn’t bear the wall Mitch placed between them.
She wanted back what they’d once had. She wanted the intimacy, the passion, and although she knew it was going to hurt like hell when he left, at least she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life in regret from wasting what little time she did have with him. That she was certain of, because despite all the heartache she’d endured, never once did she regret, for even a second, the time she’d spent with Liam.
Olivia knew in her heart if something was going to happen between them, it’d have to be her that broke those boundaries. Liam was too strong, too rigid and self-disciplined, to ever cave to his flesh.
As the Camaro crawled down the streets of Sin City, she emotionally broke up with Mitch, vowing to make it official the next time she spoke with him and promising herself she wouldn’t spend another night being denied her heart’s desire.
Liam’s humorous chuckle ebbed. “As tempting as you make it sound, not once was Elvis in our wedding when I imagined it. So, I think you’re safe there.”
Olivia froze, her heart battering inside her chest like a butterfly trying to escape its net. “You have?” Her voice was nothing more than a broken whisper. “You’ve thought about our wedding?” That was just about the most romantic thing she’d ever heard, and it took nearly all her self-control not to throw herself into his arms right then and there.
“Of course I have. You’re not the only one who wishes this could have been more.”
Before she could get her shocked mind functioning enough to work up a response, Liam pulled into the turn-around of a skyscraping hotel. He parked the car and reached across Olivia’s lap, opening the glove box. A thrill of heat shot through her core when his chest pressed against her arm, his hand skimming her thigh.
“Did you take the valet key out of here?”
“Uh-uh…” She shook her head, her throat too dry to respond beyond an airy grunt. All too soon, he found the key and the hard, warm heat of his body was gone. Liam shut the glove compartment box and climbed out of the car. He handed the key to the valet and opened the passenger door for her. Offering his hand, she gladly accepted it, letting him help her out of the car.
Olivia tried to think of how many times Mitch had ever done something as thoughtful and effortlessly considerate for her as this, but she couldn’t remember him ever being that chivalrous.
“I bet you’re ready for a hot shower,” he commented, grabbing her bags from the back seat and slinging a duffle strap over his shoulder. He glanced back and gave her a smile that made her knees go weak.
“More than you know.”
***
The first thing Olivia did when they got to their room was head for the shower. She’d been in there so long the humidity had breached the small gap between the door and the floor. Her vanilla-jasmine scent saturated the muggy air, bringing Liam’s senses online and honed in to the fact that this woman was in the next room, very naked… And very engaged, he reminded himself, to quell the surge of liquid heat flooding his veins and rushing south.
Holy hell, he needed to get out of here. Sitting in the room and breathing in her scent wasn’t doing either of them any favors. He stood to leave and had taken a few determined steps in the right direction, when a thud echoed in the shower, followed by a muffled curse.
Reflexively, he turned about-face and headed for the bathroom. Pausing at the door, he tapped lightly. “Olivia?” He could hear her saying something, but couldn’t make it out through the door and hiss of the shower.
“Olivia? Are you all right? Do you need something?” he called through the door. No answer, just the muffled echo of her voice being drowned out by the blasting water.
“I can’t hear you, Olivia. I’m coming in,” he warned. With a mental command, the lock instantly disengaged as he turned the door handle. Liam opened the door, took a step inside the sauna of a bathroom and abruptly stopped. A wall of hot steam enveloped him, and his heart slammed inside his chest at the sight of Olivia silhouetted through the sheer mist-covered glass. He could hear what she was saying now—she was singing. No wonder she hadn’t been able to hear him.
Standing there frozen, he tried to do the right thing—turn around and leave. But as many times as he commanded his body to move, it refused. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. The rapid beat of his pulse pumped adrenaline through his veins, setting fire to his last few threads of control. A tortured groan rumbled in his chest. He wasn’t even aware it had escaped him until the hauntingly beautiful melody abruptly stopped.
As she bent to turn off the faucet, he couldn’t stop his eyes from traveling the length of her body—from the slender reach of her arm, to the rounde
d curve of her breasts, down to the gentle flare of her hips and long, exquisite legs...
Seeing her like this ushered in memories he’d been better off forgetting, but couldn’t, because every second he’d spent with this woman had been permanently seared into his brain. The memory of those arms wrapped around him as her fingers traced the muscular plane of his back, her breasts crushed against his chest, and those legs…those long legs, tangled with his… Another tortured groan tore from his throat, except this time, it sounded more like a feral growl.
Oh shit… He needed to leave—now!
The shower ceased, and Olivia’s voice hesitantly broke the silence. “Liam?”
The arid click of his throat as he swallowed was his only answering response. He willed his thrumming pulse to heel and took a deep breath, pulling in the necessary oxygen so his brain could begin putting two rational thoughts together again. But he only succeeded in drawing Olivia’s scent deeper into his lungs.
The shower door slid open, just far enough to reveal her beautiful face and the arch of her slender shoulder. He crossed a booted heel over the other and spun around. Jacking his hand into his hair, he stuttered an explanation. “I…I heard a thud, and then you yelled. I knocked, but you didn’t answer. I was worried—”
Her light, feminine laugh cut him short.
Funny…? She thought this was funny? The fire inside him burned his veins to ash, the ache in his groin nearly doubling him over. This was not funny. “I fail to see your humor,” he ground out through clenched teeth, his control ready to snap its leash any second. He wondered how funny she’d think it was when he marched over to the shower, tossed her over his shoulder, caveman style, and hauled her into the bedroom.
Just because he couldn’t have sex with her didn’t mean there wasn’t a hell of a lot of other things he’d like to do to her between the sheets. She gave him way too much credit—put too much faith in his altruistic nature.
The Redemption Series Page 42
