by Quinn, Taryn
I rolled my eyes. Sure, if I had the strength of an ox, no problem. “I asked if you had a truck hoist?”
“A truck hoist?” he echoed, clearly not paying attention as he studied my car.
“Yes, to pull me out of the ditch.”
“No, I don’t have a truck hoist. What I do have should do the trick though.” He shut the door without grabbing my bread or any of my belongings, then climbed out of the ditch, pulled a cell phone from his pocket, and hit a button. Smugly, I might add.
This man did not have an air of friendly cooperation, that was for sure. As for neighborly concern? Nope. Nada.
After a minute, his smug expression flattened. His mouth thinned out and he gazed at his phone as if he’d misdialed. He hit a button again, waited, then yanked the phone from his ear. “What the fuck?”
I tried not to blanch. Of course, I’d heard swearing before. I was a college student, wasn’t I? But in my family home, we had a tip jar. Anyone who swore put in a five-dollar bill. Forget a one-dollar bill. My parents had wanted us to learn appropriate words swiftly, and parting with five dollars of our allowance had worked fast.
Pretty sure this dude didn’t have a jar. If he did, he’d probably smash it with one of his hamhock fists.
“Is there a problem?”
“No. Definitely not. The tow truck place isn’t answering. No big.”
“It’s New Year’s Eve.”
“You don’t say?”
I ignored his sarcasm and lifted my voice to speak over the growing wind. The darker it got, the more frigid it was growing outside. But I’d be damned if I shivered. If he could seem impervious to the weather, so could I. “If you’re not using a national company and instead supporting a local business, it’s not surprising. This is a holiday. Therefore, holiday hours.”
“Thank you, Miss Know-It-All, but I’m well aware of this particular company’s hours. It’s a family business.”
“Your family? Yet you don’t own a truck hoist?” I cocked my head. “Seems fishy.”
“I said family business, not my business.”
“Ah, like your dad? Or your brother?”
“Look, they aren’t answering, so we’ll have to just wait.” He glanced around at the gathering snow as if he planned for us to wait at the edge of the road.
If that was the case, I was definitely going to try to get back into my car. As much as I loved Mrs. Pringle, I knew my stomach was on the verge of roaring. That bread was going to be mine. I’d skipped lunch, and boy oh boy, I knew better than to take shortcuts. They never paid off.
“Okay. Well, thanks.” Even if he couldn’t be polite, I could. “I appreciate your…” But I wasn’t a liar. “Conversation.”
I couldn’t be certain in the near darkness, but I was almost sure his lips twitched. “Conversation, is it?”
I shrugged.
“Come on,” he said, indicating with his chin for me to head up the short incline to a dark, forbidding, tiny house.
Immediately, my back went up. And my spidey senses started to tingle.
Or that might have been my extremities due to frostbite setting in.
“No, thank you. I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’ll just stay here and call AAA.”
“You have AAA?”
“Of course I do.” I bit my lip, vividly picturing the expired notice on my desk at home. I’d paid that, right? It had been at the top of my To Do list, but with the holidays…
Okay, maybe not.
“You seem uncertain.”
“Not really.”
He gusted out a sigh. “It’s freezing out here. Let’s go inside and get warm. I’ll call the towing company again later.”
“If they’re not answering now,” I shouted over the wind, moving closer when my voice seemed to get sucked away, “what makes you think they will later? It’s a holiday. People are out celebrating.”
“Are you?” He pointed at himself. “Am I? No. Not everyone is in a fucking party mood. Now come on.”
When I didn’t budge, he gave me a stern look that made me half expect him to haul me over his shoulder like a sack of Maggie. Then he let out another of those windy breaths. “Please?”
My frozen face cracked into a smile. “Did that hurt?”
“A little. Not as much as my nuts shriveling up into my spine though.”
I swallowed. Along with not hearing a ton of swear words on a daily basis, I also wasn’t privy to men referring to their nuts as if that counted as ordinary conversation.
Hi, my nuts hurt. Pass the crackers.
“You, um, should definitely go inside then. That sounds painful.”
“It is. Come on. I won’t bite.”
“Are you sure?”
Now he did more than almost smile. He barked out a laugh. “Not unless you want me to, honey, and even then, I’m pretty sure you aren’t my type.” He tilted his head and lifted his voice above the howling wind. “I’m not into church girls. Even the ex-communicated kind, which does sound interesting.”
“It is. No, I’m not telling you.” I rubbed my mittened hand over my stinging cheeks. “What happens between a girl and her priest is private.”
“Wow. Some Thorn Birds shit? Kinky little thing, aren’t you?”
Was that actually approval I saw in his midnight eyes? They’d definitely warmed. Speaking of kinky…
“Hardly.” I sniffed, and not out of haughtiness.
I had to sneeze, and I had to pee. I was also freezing and starving and desperately in need of a long, hot shower.
Then again, did I dare get naked within the same four walls as this guy? Even if I wasn’t his type?
Serial killers had types too. They also didn’t kill everyone they met. I couldn’t be sure this guy was safe, but if I wasn’t in his target victim group, he could be a homicidal lunatic and I wouldn’t necessarily be in danger. Plus, I knew some judo.
Oh, the rationalizations a girl who urgently needs a bathroom will make.
“Okay. I’ll go inside with you. Briefly. Until we can reach the towing company. Otherwise, I will have many people out looking for me, and they will descend on your place like a swarm of locusts if I’m not home in a matter of hours.”
Much to my consternation most of the time. I was well and truly sick of being so overprotected by my family, though I loved them for their concern. It was just hard to have much of a life when you were watched like a rabid animal expected at any moment to go on a rampage through town.
In truth, I just mostly studied and worked, along with spending time with my bestie and my boyf—
Yep, not going there.
“Not if I tie you up and make you call them to say you’re okay and not to look for you. Then I might throw your chair in the basement and leave you without food and water.”
His voice was entirely too serious, which was how I guessed he was lying. It was a gamble, but I was going to bet that the usual serial killer didn’t advertise his intentions so brazenly. “You forgot to add that you’d have your way with me first.”
“Hoping, Red?” Before I could stammer out a response, he grabbed my arm and towed me behind him. “Not my type, remember?”
“I didn’t say yes,” I called.
He promptly ignored me.
After dragging me up a short snowy hill, we made our way up a scarcely shoveled path to a short set of rickety steps. He stopped to pick up some wood, then stomped up the steps and pressed his shoulder into the door. “Come on,” he shouted in my general direction before barreling into the dark house.
Hell, I didn’t even know if it was truly his. He could be an illegal squatter there for all I knew.
The fact of the matter was that I knew most of the people in Turnbull. This was on the outskirts, true, and the occasional person came or went without stirring my notice, but we lived in a small, self-contained area. We might be surrounded by trees and hills and blocked in by mountains of snow for almost half the year, due to our proximity to Lake Ontario,
but we kept track of our own.
Also, it was hard to make quick getaways when a snowpocalypse wasn’t a disaster so much as a way of life.
Biting my lip, I cast a quick glance back toward the road. In the time it had taken us to walk up to the house—though calling it that seemed to be an overstatement—my poor car had become even more buried. The snow wasn’t coming down in flakes now. More like pellets.
“Red,” he growled. “Forget the damn bread.”
Something about his irritation made me laugh. I clapped a hand over my mouth, then bent at the waist when more laughter rolled out. I couldn’t catch my breath and what breaths I could take were laced with ice. Crappy time to be on the verge of hysteria.
Guess my accident had shook me up more than I’d thought. Or else it was due to the man himself.
So I stood up straight, threw back my shoulders, and strutted inside in my giant boots to my beheading.
At least he’d turned on the lights. As I shut the door behind me and shifted to survey my surroundings, from down the hall came a string of curse words shot off in succession like gunfire.
My eyes widened. If he was trying to ease me into feeling comfortable before he struck, he wasn’t too good at it.
“Are you okay?” I asked carefully, darting glances right and left as I crept up the hallway to where his voice was coming from.
And stopped dead at the mouth of the sparse, rustic kitchen.
He was standing at the stove in nothing but a pair of silky black boxers with a spatula in his hand, poking at whatever congealed mess was in his dented pan. It was one like you’d see in a camping kit, meant to be used on nights under the stars and no other time, ever. But that was his home cookware.
Fit him somehow, as did the intricate swirls and lines of dark ink that wrapped around his muscular shoulders and biceps. More ink covered his back and sides. He was a human canvas, tattooed and rippling with muscle.
I didn’t find that arousing. That he was the exact opposite of my lanky, inkless ex was merely something I noted.
“Fucking burner is fucking out.” He stabbed at the red mass in his pan. Without sparing me a glance, he continued. “Why are you still dressed like a damn polar bear? Get out of those wet clothes. You were standing in a snowbank for a good fifteen minutes or more.”
“Polar bears don’t need clothing, as they have fur.”
That he only growled made me laugh. And cautiously unwind my scarf.
While he continued to fiddle with the non-working stove, I cleared my throat. “You have a microwave. Just heat up the soup.” Cautiously, I stepped closer and peered at the gross stuff he kept trying to stir. “That is soup, right?”
“Yes. Tomato. I was going to make grilled cheese to go with it. Can’t now, because fucking burner is—”
“Fucking out,” I finished, surprised by how liberating it felt to curse. There weren’t any tip jars here.
No furnace either apparently, as it was nearly as cold inside as it had been out. Or else I’d caught a serious freaking chill.
“Look at you. Your teeth are chattering.” He turned to me and yanked off my fuzzy hat, causing the long hair I’d tucked underneath to come tumbling out. He gazed at it as if he was surprised I had hair at all, then managed to shake off his shock and tugged off my earmuffs too.
Sound rushed into my ears, including the uneven hiss of his breaths through his tightly clenched teeth.
I raised my gaze to his. He was staring at me in a way I wasn’t used to from men. When a girl grew up in a small town with three strapping, overprotective brothers, you got used to guys being too afraid to take their shot. As such, I’d grown accustomed to dating the safe, parental-friendly boys. I liked them. They were predictable. No serial killers in the bunch.
None of them made my blood heat the way this one was with merely a heavy-lidded look.
He gripped my hat and earmuffs in his hands, crumpling them. This close to him, without even the buffer of his clothes, he seemed even more huge. Tall, muscled, dangerous.
I didn’t know that kind of male. Had never wanted to.
Until now.
“Keep going,” I said softly, challenging myself as much as I was him. I gestured to the rest of my outerwear. “Lots more clothes to strip off me, Wolf.”
COMING IN MARCH
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Unwrapped
Chapter 1
When plotting to finally lose your virginity, it was important to keep your eye on the prize.
In this case, the one between her legs.
A relationship? Not necessary. But someone she trusted was a must.
Caitlyn Sachs blew out a breath and gazed around the kitchen in her mom’s small place. Relationships were tricky business, as evidenced by her mother and her sisters’ issues with their significant others. It was hard to find a decent guy, one who wouldn’t feed you a line and then vanish when you turned your back. At least that was all she’d seen while growing up.
At almost twenty-five, Cait’s record was virtually spotless. Sure, she’d gotten her heart dented a few times, but she’d managed to avoid the trainwreck relationships her friends and family had been sucked into.
And that still-happened-to-be-a-virgin thing? Merely a technicality, because she’d certainly done her share of messing around. She’d done almost everything but the deed itself.
Multiple times.
But hell, she was tired of having the expectation of her first time looming ahead. She knew it would probably be shitty, so she needed to get on to having good sex. Finally. Her irrational fear of an unplanned pregnancy was getting old. She’d gone on birth control as soon as she’d made the decision to have sex, and she’d insist on condoms too.
See, she was thinking practically.
“Marnie, settle those kids down. I can’t think with all this racket,” Mrs. Sachs said, bracing the hand that held her spatula on her hip.
“Jeez, Mama, what do you want me to do? Stuff something in their mouths?”
“Maybe. If it’ll quiet this place down, then yes.”
Cait braced her head on her hand and tried not to breathe in the scent of burnt onions and too much perfume.
She could be out Christmas shopping instead of dealing with the insanity of home. Home meant her younger sisters and their babies and her frustrated mother.
Cait understood frustration. Just not the same kind. Hers was all situationally based.
She sighed. Eh, she didn’t feel like shopping right now. Too much on her mind. But she could be getting a manicure. Maybe even seeing a movie with one of her best friends, assuming she could drag Tristan away from his desk or Matthew away from the game on TV. But no, she’d come home to do her duty, though at the moment she would’ve preferred to be anywhere else.
They were her guys. Her center in all ways. And maybe after this weekend, one of them would be that much more.
Perhaps one of them would be her lover, at least temporarily.
It wasn’t like she could choose between Matt and Tristan. She loved them both equally. Plus they were hot as hell. That the three of them lived together in the loft above Tristan Design, their graphic design business, only made it that much easier to coordinate. Slide in, slide out, cross the hall, and shut the door.
This weekend, she’d make her proposal. Whether that proposal would be well received was anyone’s guess, but she suspected that was part of why she felt so antsy tonight.
She needed to speak up before she chickened out.
Another reason she’d chosen to sleep with Tristan or Matt. This would be on her terms. She could control the parameters, say when it began and when it ended. They’d never push her.
In the meantime, she had to push herself and get home. She had a deflowering to arrange. Though in her case it wasn’t deflowering so much as a…deadheading. She grinned. Yeah, that worked. She’d be snapping off a worn-out worry she’d carried around way too lon
g.
She rose to her feet as her mother and her sister Marnie started arguing about how they’d fit a nursery into an already crowded three-bedroom apartment. Before she could leave, her baby sister, Valerie, rushed through the back door into the kitchen, her golden hair hidden by her hooded sweatshirt. Under her arm she carried the basketball that seemed to be her constant companion. Keeping her eyes straight ahead, she jogged through without stopping.
“Val?” Cait hurried forward to grip her elbow. Out of all of them, Val was her favorite. At fourteen, Val was a straight-A student and already on the varsity basketball team. “Where’s the fire?”
“Gotta study,” she said, not meeting Cait’s gaze.
“Midterms week, huh? One reason Christmas sucks.” Smiling, Cait rubbed her shoulder. “Grades still good?” she asked, raising her voice above her mother and Marnie’s argument. Thank God her other sister Ginny had finally herded Marnie’s two kids and her own two into the living room. “Should we expect another perfect report card?”
Val yanked back her sweatshirt, revealing the sunny twin ponytails she usually hid under hoods and ball caps. “Grades are fine.”
Cait frowned. Normally Val was a chatterbox, but tonight she seemed unwilling to say much at all. Strange. Maybe the family drama was getting to her. “You know, you could always come stay with me at the loft for a couple of days,” she said in an undertone. “You could get more studying done.”
“No, thanks.” Val gave her big sister a weak smile. “I just lock myself in my room.”
“But you share a room with Ginny. How can you get any privacy?”
Val gave her an odd look. “Why would I need privacy? All I ever do is schoolwork and play basketball.”
That was a good thing at least. Val was so smart and pretty and athletic. God, she didn’t have to settle. And she wouldn’t, if her older sister had anything to say about it.
“Basketball going okay? I’ll be at the game on Sunday. Can’t wait to watch you guys destroy the Thundercats.” She grinned and waited for Val to grin back.
She didn’t.
“I’m not going to be playing Sunday,” she whispered.
