by Naima Simone
Shane nodded, though Tristan couldn’t see the gesture. “I’ll have her call you. I promise. After tonight, I can’t reveal where we’re headed, but I will keep you in the loop as much as possible,” he conceded. Shane loved Tristan like a brother, but with Fallon’s life in the balance, he refused to compromise any further.
“Fine,” Tristan agreed, though frustration still colored his tone. “I’ll call—Wait.” A pause. “Joy just came home. I’ll be in contact soon.”
The call ended, and Shane lowered the phone from his ear, staring at the dark screen.
“Either you’re really hot or extremely conflicted about what to cook,” a dry voice drawled from the kitchen entrance.
He glanced up, startled. He’d been so deep in thought, he hadn’t even heard Fallon approach. Returning his attention to the refrigerator, he reached in and withdrew a block of cheddar cheese and butter. “The conflict is whether to go with the cheese or the leftover Chinese. Since the takeout has been there since last week, I’m going with grilled cheese sandwiches.”
“Sounds good.” She entered the large kitchen, tugged a chair from under the large table, and sank down onto the seat. He studied her as he withdrew a pan and pot from under the counter. Though weariness still shadowed her pretty eyes like heavy storm clouds, a determined glint reflected in the gray depths. Her shoulders were straighter, and the hard, grim slant had disappeared from her soft, sensual mouth. Not necessarily a good thing since it conjured images that had his dick leaping like a damn cheerleader. “Who was that on the phone?” She propped an elbow on the table, resting her cheek on her palm.
“Tristan,” he said, opening a can of tomato soup and pouring it into the pot. Jealousy twisted in his gut. His friend had been able to protect her while Shane had been kept in the dark. Irrational, since Tristan led the investigation, but dammit, he should’ve been there for her, not his friend. Christ. He dropped the first sandwich into the pan. When did I grow a vagina? “He’s going to call later to get your statement about today and probably last night.”
“Okay.” Shooting from the chair as if a flame had been lit under the seat, she prowled the large room, tilting her head back to peek at the exposed beams, running her fingertips over the granite counters, examining the spice rack filled with seasonings he couldn’t pronounce much less use, but that Addisyn had insisted he needed. “I almost didn’t recognize Tristan when I first saw him after the shooting. It’s been several years. Are you two still close?”
“Yes.” Their friendship might be a little strained for a while after today, but as always, they would get over it.
“Hmm.” She arched an eyebrow, leaned against the counter bordering the stove where he worked. “I bet he’s pissed at you right about now.” Shane grunted, and she laughed. The husky chuckle slid under his shirt and over his skin, caressing him. He flipped the grilled cheese with unnecessary force. “I’ll take that as a yes. Where are your plates?”
He gestured to the cabinets to his right. “Bottom shelf.”
Within moments bowls and plates filled with steaming tomato soup and hot grilled cheese sandwiches set on the table. Stomach growling, he’d devoured a sandwich and emptied his soup bowl before glancing at Fallon. Half her grilled cheese remained as did most of her soup. She pinched off pieces of the bread and swirled her spoon through the creamy broth.
“Not hungry?” he asked.
Her head popped up, and she offered him a rueful smile, resting the spoon on her plate. “Not really. It’s good though,” she assured him.
“You need to eat. The food not only builds your strength and gives you energy, but it helps with your clarity,” he urged her. “And you’ve lost weight.”
Surprise flickered in her gaze. “Yeah, well having a front-row seat to murder kind of kills the appetite. No pun intended.” She cocked her head to the side, her eyes narrowing slightly. “How would you know if I’ve lost weight? It’d been over a year since we last saw each other before you showed up. Even then you barely looked at or talked to me.”
Wiping his hands on a napkin, he leaned back in his chair, studying the speculation in her hooded scrutiny, the hint of a curl at the corner of her mouth, the challenging arch of her dark brown eyebrow. The defiant gesture pumped lust through his veins, poking at the dominant side of him that hungered for her surrender to his touch.
“I noticed,” he murmured.
Something dark appeared and vanished in her heavy-lidded contemplation. “Can I ask you a question?” she requested, reclining in her seat, mimicking his pose.
Oh hell. Can I ask you a question guaranteed the person on the receiving end wouldn’t like the inquiry. The only thing more certain to make a man’s balls shrivel in fear was Can we talk?
He nodded.
“Did you really hate my kiss?” Her gaze dropped to his mouth, lingered, then lifted to meet his once more. “Or did you actually like it?”
Shock slammed into his chest like a sledgehammer only to be incinerated by a backdraft of searing hunger. He slowly straightened, every pint of blood in his body pouring into his cock. Like it? One taste of her, one suckle of his tongue, and he’d nearly hiked her ass up on his mother’s kitchen counter and buried his face between those perfect thighs, desperate to discover if her sex possessed the same rich vanilla flavor of her mouth.
“Like it? No,” he said softly, staring at her lush bottom lip and the full, dimpled top one. Her lashes lowered. “I fucking loved it,” he growled. “Too much.”
Her eyes widened, and her low gasp resounded in the room. A part of him acknowledged admitting the truth was a colossal mistake. What purpose would it serve? Especially when he couldn’t—wouldn’t—act on it.
Almost a year ago, Chayot Grey, a friend and co-owner of Liberty Security Services, a firm that often contracted GDG employees to assist on their jobs, had almost lost the woman who was now his wife to a deranged stalker. Watching his friend, who’d suffered so much, finally find the love of his life, had ignited a desire inside Shane.
A home. Family. As much of a dinosaur as it made him sound, marriage. For the past few months, he’d dated women, but hadn’t found that elusive one who stimulated his brain as well as his body. Still, veering from that purpose to indulge in a casual affair with a woman who was strictly off-limits defined lunacy. Because he had a feeling one time with Fallon wouldn’t be enough. But it also wouldn’t last. Passion so hot meant it would only burn out quicker—and with more damage. Including his relationship with Addy for fucking her best friend.
You’re dumber than two boxes of rocks, his cock sneered. And his brain chose that moment to jump the common sense ship and join his Johnson.
Because, goddamn, she was gorgeous.
Fallon was his siren song: beautiful, so damn hard to resist. But giving in to his hunger—his craving for her—would only end in pain, hurt feelings, and estrangement. No doubt though. It would end.
“Then why did you push me away? Tell me you weren’t interested? Treat me like I’m Typhoid Mary?”
He leaned forward, frustration and need sharpening his voice. “What would you have had me do, Fallon? Fuck you during your birthday party—”
“Yes.”
The blunt, raw “yes” ricocheted off the walls, gaining volume with each rebound until the word throbbed in his head, his chest, his erection.
“And then what?” he ground out past a throat tight with lust. “Become fuck buddies? Because that’s all I had to offer you. Fallon, you’re my sister’s best friend—”
“But I’m not your sister. And who said I wanted more?” She leaned forward, again aping his movements. “You insist on shoving me into this box that makes you comfortable. Makes me less threatening. But what if I just wanted to fuck you? No strings, no commitments, just sex. Just pleasure. Just you inside me. Filling me. Stretching me. Branding me. What if I just need to be taken?”
Their harsh breathing boomed in the room, expanding and expanding until it seemed to cram every c
orner and available space. …I need to be taken… As in now, not back then. Lust razed through him, damn near consuming him. All the reasons why he should keep his distance from her, maintain a guard-client relationship, evacuated his head like a storm-threatened city. Damn logic…
“Fallon,” he rumbled.
His phone vibrated in his pocket, announcing an incoming call. With a low curse, he removed the cell and glanced at the screen.
Tristan.
Relief and disappointment comingled in his chest. Relief because his friend’s timely—or untimely—call had aborted a rash action Shane would no doubt later regret.
And disappointment because of the same reason.
“It’s Tristan,” he said, extending the phone across the table. “He’s probably calling to take your statement.”
Fallon accepted the cell, her gaze fixed on him. Desire, confusion, and another shadowed emotion darkened her eyes—eyes he had to look away from or he’d end up grabbing her from the chair and making sure only the desire remained.
“Answer it,” he ordered more harshly than he’d intended. But goddamn, when a man’s zipper was tattooing his dick, politeness was a stretch. He waited until she swiped a thumb across the screen and lifted the phone to her ear. Then he jerked to his feet and strode from the kitchen.
And far from the only woman who’d ever chipped away at the control he’d always prided himself on.
The only woman who’d ever made him furious, frustrated, and hard at the same time.
The only woman who’d ever had him running scared.
Chapter Eight
For the second time in as many nights, Fallon stared up at a bedroom ceiling surrounded by deafening silence. Well, deafening except for her own pathetic words circling in her head like a Tilt-A-Whirl on crack.
But what if I just wanted to fuck you? No strings, no commitments, just sex… Just you inside me… What if I just need to be taken?
Fallon groaned, slapping her palms to her flaming face. Jesus. How could she have said that to him? Hadn’t she humiliated herself enough over Shane in the last twelve years? Yet, one appearance with his Terminator come-with-me-if-you-want-to-live routine, and she was practically throwing her pitifully wet thong at him.
Like it? No, I fucking loved it. Too much.
It’d been his shocking, almost brutal admission that had punched her one-way ticket to Cray-cray-ville. After the day she’d had—waking up alone after falling asleep next to Shane, informed the murderer she was set to testify against had escaped custody, almost being fireballed to death with FiFi, whisked away to Shane’s home—she’d been desperate to forget. To dwell on something other than her short life expectancy. Expecting his usual silence or one-word replies to her more outlandish questions, he’d blown her away like her FiFi…
Un-unh. Too soon.
She heaved a sigh, rolled to her side, and switched her obsessive staring to the wall.
Still, pathetic mortification aside, she’d been honest.
From the moment she’d met Shane at thirteen years old, she’d sensed the steely core of honor inside him. Later, as a soldier, he endangered his life and safety every day for the citizens of their country, and now with his company, he did so again. He hadn’t needed to promise her he would protect her—it was what he did. What he’d been created for. That honor, integrity, steadfastness had drawn her to him. Well those and the utter hotness that was Shane Roarke.
Yet, he wasn’t for her.
He desired the whole shebang. Marriage. A family. A Ward-and-June-Cleaver existence she recognized was an utter lie.
Growing up with her parents, she’d had box seats to the disaster of marriage. Especially when one person loved more than the other. The damage it wreaked on the children was—irrevocable. Fallon no longer flitted from man to man like she used to, but that didn’t mean she was on the search for Mr. Right who would walk her down a flower-strewn aisle. She’d ceased that destructive behavior out of love for herself, not because she wanted marriage. “Love for herself” entailed breaking the man-eater cycle her mother had started. It included owning her own business, being financially and emotionally independent, and finally, finally, proving she wasn’t a replica of her mother.
Not that any of that mattered a tinker’s damn. Except for the one admission that sounded as if it’d been dragged through a field of broken glass and abraded with sandpaper, Shane had never minced words with how he felt about her.
In his mind, they had no future. And if she gave herself a reality check, she knew deep down that he was right.
“I need a drink,” she muttered. And not tea unless it contained a shot of something hard and eighty proof. Surely even Shane had something to take the edge off stashed in his nearly empty kitchen. Or maybe he had a couple of bottles in the den she’d glimpsed earlier. Only one way to find out. She flung the covers aside and scooted out of bed.
Tugging down the T-shirt that would fit Shane’s large frame but dwarfed her more petite one, she slid soundlessly across the hardwood floors on bare feet and exited the guest bedroom. Complete silence wrapped around her like suffocating bubble wrap.
In her apartment, nighttime traffic, the raised voices of late partygoers, and muffled music had always lulled her to sleep. Here, the silence heightened the sense of loneliness and isolation. Even though Shane slept a couple of rooms away.
Shane. In bed. Did he sleep naked or in the boxer briefs he’d worn at her apartment? Did he hog the entire bed or confine himself to one side? If so, which side? She grimaced. Now she couldn’t purge the image of a naked Shane sprawled across his mattress, sheets tangled around his lean waist. Great.
She neared the staircase, but paused. Was he awake? When she’d hid—retired, not hid, retired—to her bedroom earlier, he’d disappeared into the den off the living room. Had he come upstairs yet?
Before she could convince herself seeking him out in the middle of the night was a bad idea, she continued down the hallway. The last door on the right stood ajar. Shane’s room. Easing closer, she strained to hear over her thundering heartbeat. No sound escaped the open door to spill out into the hallway. He was probably asleep. And the possibility of vodka was calling her name. Still…
Pressing her palm to the door, she pushed it open, widening the crack a fraction.
Holy shit.
Pearlescent moonlight streamed into the room through the windows, cascading across the floor and the rumpled sheets…
Across the bare chest and thrusting hips of the straining male who fisted and pumped his cock.
God he was beautiful.
Black sweatpants covered his long legs and most of his hips, shoved down far enough to bare taut skin and the delicious cut of his hip bone. Ridged abs were etched in stark relief as he drove into the tight grip of his fist. Damn. She swept her tongue over suddenly dry lips. She’d guessed the night before that the bulge beneath his briefs hinted at an impressive erection. But, good God, seeing was believing. He. Was. Huge. Each stroke over his stiff cock required use of his arm, not just his wrist.
Desire and greedy lust poured through her, stiffening her nipples into diamond-hard points and pooling between her thighs, until her sex spasmed with an empty ache. Flames licked over her skin, and beads of sweat dotted her palms and chest.
That should be her hand working his dick with an almost punishing hold. Her fingers sliding his stretched skin back and forth over the bulbous cockhead. Her touch causing him to arch and groan in raw abandon.
Reluctantly, she drew her fascinated gaze away from his hips and traveled up his torso to his face. Her breath snagged in her throat. If she’d thought him beautiful before, the tortured pleasure twisting his features transformed him into something that defied description. The tendons in his neck stood out as his head pressed into the pillow. Though thick lashes hid his eyes, erotic hunger stamped his face in the skin pulled tight over his sharp cheekbones and his lips drawn back in a sensual snarl.
What was he thinking
about…who was he thinking about? Irrational jealousy flared inside her chest for the woman he imagined fucking. Was it a tall, slender blonde? A petite, slim brunette? Anyone but someone with her light brown, unruly curls and curves.
His hand sped up, and the rasp of his breathing roughened. She stared, captivated, as he drove in and out of his fingers, faster and harder. Her nails dug into her palms as she fought to remain hidden in the shadowed doorway instead of crossing the room, climbing on the bed, palming his cock, and finishing the job.
“Fallon.”
I’m busted. I’m so freaking busted. Shock and fear gripped and shook her like a rag doll. How had he known she was standing there? And what would he do now? Yell at her? Berate her… Invite her in, replace her hand with his? Push her head toward that straining, beautiful, hard flesh to impale her mouth? Oh damn. But her feet remained glued to the floor as a wondrous, knee-liquefying thought crashed against her skull.
He doesn’t know I’m here. And he’d growled her name. Her name. Was he fantasizing about her while bringing himself to pleasure? The possibility shot a spiral of blistering heat through her, culminating in a swirling pool of fire between her legs. What was he imagining? Her vivid, and obviously very nasty, imagination supplied a variety of answers. Her sucking him deep into her mouth. Her riding him to oblivion. Or maybe his mouth on her while she returned the favor at the same time?
Cream spilled from between her folds, dampening her panties as her clit swelled and pulsed in favor of option number three. What should she do now? Leave—hightail it out of there before he realized he had an audience of one? Or stay. Enter that room, climb up on the bed, and turn fantasy into reality.
Her heart lodged in her throat, her stomach clenching in sharp need, anticipation, and fear. What if she went to him and he rejected her…again? The idea of sleeping in his SUV for the foreseeable future didn’t sit well with her. But if he turned her away with a harsh “Not interested” like before, his vehicle’s backseat would be her new home, because she wouldn’t be able to stay in the same house with him.
