Second Chance Desire (Hot Moon Rising #8)

by Dominique Eastwick

  “Wait. You haven’t had sex in eight years?”

  “Have you been listening to a word I said?”

  “I thought you just weren’t interested because it wasn’t the same.” She reached out and placed both hands on his knees. “Is it that way for all of your kind?”

  “I don’t know. I have never asked, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s that way for me.”

  “I thought it was just me.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I have only slept with you.” Why did admitting that make her feel silly and nervous? “I tried, but, whenever I got close to someone, every fiber of my being fought it.”

  “You haven’t slept with anyone else in eight years?”

  She pursed her lips to contain a smile. “Have you been listening to a word I said?”

  One second she was sitting before him, and the next she was in his lap with his lips on her, feeding from her as if he hadn’t spent the evening kissing her senseless. When she was in his arms, everything seemed simple. She belonged there. But when he stepped away, she doubted herself and him. He pulled back. “Okay, so you need space.”

  “Space and time.”

  “Time.” He placed a kiss on her neck.

  “All of a sudden, you are very accommodating again. I’m starting to feel like I’m watching a tennis match.”

  “You said you hadn’t slept with anyone.”

  “That’s very chauvinistic. So if I had slept with someone else, you would still be pissy?”

  He growled. The idea didn’t sit well with him for sure. “We are not as different as you think.”

  Now she was confused. “What?”

  “Yes, it put me at ease that you haven’t slept with anyone else. But if you had, that wouldn’t be an issue. It was that you couldn’t sleep with anyone else.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “We are connected, and not just on my end.”

  “I never said it was.”

  “No, but you were able to walk away.”

  “I should have talked to you first, but I didn’t know how.” She laid her head on his chest. “In the end, I took the coward’s way out. If I hadn’t been in Basic then immediately shipped overseas, I might have tried to find you. I did go by the mechanic’s shop you were training at, but you were obviously not there anymore as you had finished your classes.”

  Charlie, Jesse’s partner, coughed from behind them. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “You need that statement?” Knox asked, helping her to her feet.

  “I do. I’ll just wait in the front,” he said awkwardly, moving back around the building.

  Emma grabbed her purse, tapping it to indicate she hadn’t forgotten it again. “I’ll call you.”

  “You know where I am.”

  “Are you going to kiss me good-bye?” She leaned into him.

  He lifted a hand but paused centimeters from her face. “Do you want to leave?”

  “I need to.” She indicated her clothes from the evening before. She didn’t plan to tell him she’d stuffed her underwear in her purse and was currently commando.

  “Then I can’t kiss you. Because one of us would end up flat on their back.”

  Images of him lying beneath her, her legs straddling his hips as she rode his cock, rushed through her.

  He sniffed the air and smiled. “Keep that image in your head for the next time. And you might want to bring some spare clothing to keep here.”

  “Oh.” She followed Charlie’s path around front, feeling Knox’s eyes burning into her. A split second before turning the corner, she lifted her skirt, showing him her bare ass. And then common sense hit and she ran.

  “Minx!” Knox yelled after her, but an old familiar humor colored his voice.

  Chapter Five

  Four days. The longest ninety-six hours Knox had ever lived. Even those hours in jail had passed quicker. Emerson was within reach, and he had promised he would give her some space. Other than sending her some flowers and her text thanking him for them, they had maintained, as she would say, radio silence. The plus side was he had worked harder and more hours than ever before. He had even finished her car but decided not to let her know until meeting for dinner at her place.

  Thursday night, he pulled up in her car. If she asked him to stay, great. If she sent him away after dinner, he could easily run home and would be so frustrated the run would do him good. Her childhood home was twenty minutes from the garage, in the middle of nowhere. He sat in the car for minutes, trying to get his raging hormones under control. Try as he might to keep it quiet, the whole pack knew his mate was in town and who she was. His alpha remained silent on the subject, but Knox felt the need to assure him no matter what happened he wouldn’t put the pack in danger again.

  “I know you won’t. It’s you I worry about.”

  The other packmates were tackier and razzed him at every chance. He had seen more of the pack’s cars for stupid reasons than ever before. But if they were hoping to catch sight of Emerson, they were all sorely disappointed. Emerson had spent her days far away from Knox until an hour ago when she called “Please come over tonight…now…hell five minutes ago”

  “I have to shut down the shop, shower, and then I’ll be right over.”

  “An hour, then?” She sounded put out.

  He had smiled at that. “You could come here.”

  “No. I want to show you where I grew up. I am hoping you can help me dispel some old ghosts.”

  “Just call me your friendly neighborhood ghost buster.”

  “I think you are mixing your movies up. You really need to see some new ones, by the way.”

  He could think of nothing better than sitting with her night after night and catching up on years of movies. Turning off the car, he finally got out. Opening the screen door to the outside porch, he made a mental note that the flooring was in desperate need of some work. Under his weight, the old boards creaked in protest.

  He knocked and, through the window in the door, watched her approach. The late afternoon sunshine streaming in from the other room backlit her full figure beneath her gauzy sundress. His wolf screamed mine. Did she sense it? She stopped, staring at him through the cracked glass pane until he couldn’t take it anymore and opened the door. She remained frozen to the spot. He didn’t stop until he had her in his arms, his lips covering hers. She worked his shirt from his waistband, and when her palms made contact with his stomach, he pulled away. “Slow…you wanted slow. If it kills me I will give it to you.”

  She moved toward him. “Kissing me is fine.”

  “It won’t end there, as well you know.” The house, worn and tacky, didn’t appear to have been updated in the last couple of decades. “So this is your home.”

  “This is where I lived as a child. This was never a home.” She pulled him into the kitchen. “I have a veteran’s group coming tomorrow to take all the furniture away.”

  “All of it?”

  “Yes, there’s nothing here I want to keep. There’s nothing but bad memories in this house.”

  “Tell me.”

  She gnawed her lower lip. “Can I offer you a soda, iced tea?”

  He shook his head.

  “Will it bother you if I drink?”

  “I don’t drink. I don’t expect anyone else not to.”

  She pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge, reached into the cabinet, and pulled out a plastic cup he recognized from one of the barbeque places in the next town over. The cabinet was empty except for some paper plates. She took a large gulp before leaning against the counter. “My mother was not what you would call motherly. She paid her bills on her back or knees or from any position she could con men out of money.”

  “She was a prostitute?”

  “She was somewhere between prostitute and mistress. The men who came to her were upper middle class. Men who couldn’t afford a high-class mistress but wanted that kind of life. I was to call them all uncles, and yet she
was never faithful to any of them, even the one or two who offered to marry her.”

  “It couldn’t have been easy for you, living like that.”

  “It was a revolving door of hook ups. She put money into two rooms—her bedroom and her bathroom. She would sit in the living room in a silk kimono, one of the many gifts bestowed on her, smoking clove cigarettes and watching her soaps, waiting for the next guy to show up.”

  She tried to pour another glass, her hands shaking, and he grabbed the bottle, filled her cup, and recorked the bottle before putting it into the fridge.

  “I might want more.”

  “Believe me, it will only numb the pain. Nothing will take it away.”

  “I know you’re right. God I hate this house.” The doorbell rang. “Pizza.”

  She moved into the other room, returning a second later with two extra-large pizzas.

  “You remembered.”

  “That you love pizza and eat a lot of it? You would be surprised. I have forgotten very little of our month together. Let’s eat this in bed.”

  “Well, now, that is a combination I can’t refuse.” Relieving her of the boxes, he followed her to the room at the end of the narrow hallway. They passed three closed doors before entering a room decorated in pink and lace. “I think a unicorn threw up in here.”

  She paused, made to say something, thought for second then braced herself before looking at him through lowered lashes. “Are there actually unicorns?”

  “Not to my knowledge.” It was a reasonable question, and he didn’t want her ever feeling like she couldn’t ask him something. “I take it pink was your favorite color growing up.”

  “How did you guess?” She closed the door, and he couldn’t help but notice her shoulders relax and her demeanor ease. A glint of brass caught his attention.

  “Why the dead bolt?” He dreaded the answer as much as he needed to know. She’d never been raped because she had been a virgin the first night they’d been together, but so many other things could have damaged the spirit of an innocent little girl.

  “One night, one of my mother’s boyfriends stumbled into my room, half asleep— Calm down, it’s not what you think. He flicked on the light. I sat up in the bed. He was flushed and glowering. At the time, I thought he was angry at me. I didn’t understand. He backed out into the hallway, and I heard him yelling at my mother.” She flicked the lock, bringing home the dead bolt. “The next afternoon, I came home from school to find the same man in my bedroom again. He was installing this on my door. ‘If I stumbled by accident into your room, another man might do it on purpose. Trust no one,’ he said. He bought me a small fridge, a TV, and installed a phone line in my room.”

  “He was being protective.”

  “I discovered a couple of months later he had two children who went to school with me. His son approached me in high school, once, wanting to know if I was like my mother because if she was good enough for his old man, he sure wouldn’t mind keeping it all in the family.”

  He saw red at the thought of another man assaulting her in any manner. “Someone should have been there to protect you.”

  “Jesse protected me. His family took me in when things got too rough at home, and, as soon as I graduated, I got the hell out.” She grabbed the pizza and plopped down on the bed. “You and I met just as I was finishing my EMT certification class and just hours after I enlisted. Could you stop standing over me?”

  He lay next to her, propped on one elbow, and reached for a slice of pizza with his free hand. “Better?”

  Like a magnet, she leaned in to him. “Much. Now, I’ve told you my ugly past. Tell me what landed you in jail.”

  “There isn’t much to tell.”

  “No fair. Now, spill.”

  He preferred to forget that part of his life. “I got drunk one night and took on the defense line of Georgia Tech.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. And I would have been fine. Probably would have landed in the drunk tank and been released the next morning, but I was a belligerent ass and accidently struck the officer then I broke my restraints. They thought I was on acid. Three Tasers eventually landed me on my ass. I have never reined in my world so hard with so little ability. To this day, I don’t know how I did it. If it had just been me, I think I wouldn’t have been able to hold the shift. But my pack…? I saw one of our females at the edge of the crowd, her eyes pleading, and I locked onto her as a lifeline.”

  “Did your pack know about me?”

  He took a bite and placed the half-eaten piece back in the box. They needed to talk about the past, but it still tasted like dust. “I told my alpha about you pretty quickly. I needed him to know I had found my mate and she was human.”

  “Why? What business was it of his?”

  “He’s the leader. It’s on him to protect the pack, and we had been dealing with some issues. I was in Miami, trying to learn how to fix our vehicles, but I was still one of his sentinels. I answered to him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, when you were ready, I was to bring you home to meet the pack.” He remembered too well how unready she was. “If I had known asking you to come with me back home that weekend would send you running, I never would have asked.”

  “I don’t do family well.”

  “I understand now. What are you going to do with this place?”

  “No idea. Perhaps hire a bulldozer.”

  “You should burn the fucker to the ground.”

  “That’s a thought.”

  They ate in compatible silence. Knox polished off one whole pizza and two slices of the other.

  “Will you stay tonight?”

  “I can. I just need to let the person watching the shop know I won’t be back till morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Derek likes to have someone keeping an eye on the area around the shop. One of our pack females was assaulted and kidnapped outside the convenience store. Scientists have always wanted proof of our kind. It’s important to protect the pack from outside threats. It’s also why we don’t talk to anyone until we are certain of their loyalties.” He pulled his phone out of his back pocket and typed a text before leaving the phone on the end table. He dug keys out of his front pocket and dangled them before her. “Forgot to give you these.”

  “My car?” She fiddled with the keys.

  “I drove it back tonight. It’s all fixed.”

  “But you didn’t even give me the estimate. How much do I owe?”

  “How can you think I am going to charge my mate to fix her car?”

  “That has nothing to do with any of this. You have to let me pay you.”

  “Are you sending me a bill for my stitches?”

  “Don’t be silly. This is not even in the same class. You had to pay for parts. I used a five dollar needle and thread.”

  About to disagree, he paused, realizing the most delightful thing about having her as mate was the ability to stop her from arguing in the best of ways. Pulling her head close, he kissed her until all fight left her.

  “Let’s get some sleep.”

  “Sleep?”

  “I think you need to feel safe in this house, and I won’t taint what we have by making love to you here.”

  She snuggled into his embrace.

  Chapter Six

  From the pit under a 1987 Lincoln, Knox could see the red pickup truck drive by for the umpteenth time that morning. It had been sitting outside the convenience store the day before when he returned from Emerson’s. That in itself hadn’t raised his hackles. The guys had sat on the lowered tailgate, drinking energy drinks. He assumed they were waiting for noon to buy some beer. The three men were anything but subtle with their stakeout.

  What were they looking at or for? Or whom? Knox informed Derek of the suspicious activity so no wolves would shift in the area. Knox didn’t know if this was another group on the hunt to find shifters, but none of the possible scenarios in his head was innocuous.
So far, they hadn’t stopped again or headed into the diner. So as long as they wanted to waste their gas driving up and down in front of his shop on the most boring stretch of real estate in Florida, who was he to care? By this point, he had memorized the engine’s rumble, so he knew long before they were in sight who they were.

  “Do you think there is a reason these racist pigs are driving up and down the street?” Cedro asked when the truck roared by for the tenth time that hour.

  “What makes you think they are racists?” The swastika tattoos on their arms gave them away, but he wanted to know what Cedro thought. The boy had a good head on his shoulders and might have seen something Knox missed.

  “Well, when I went next door to get a soda before coming to work, they called me a few choice words, and they weren’t very kind to one of the other customers either.”

  These guys could be associated with the skinheads from the previous weekend. But what their end game would be he had yet to figure out. And it had been almost a week since the incident. But even for small-brained bigots, time meant planning. “Did they say anything else?”

  “No, but I think Mr. Ferguson was about to call the cops when they finally left.”

  “And now they are cruising in circles.” Well, at least things weren’t stale and boring. “Here they come.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Hear the low rumble then the catch of the exhaust. There…there….”

  “Yeah. So how many times have they passed us?”

  “Twenty that I have counted. Ignore them, but listen. When there is a delay or it seems like they are changing up their pattern, I want you to make sure you are in the back room.”

  “Why do you think they are going to do a drive-by?” Though the boy tried hard not to show it, Knox could smell the fear now coming off him.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t take chances.”

  Forty-five minutes and thirteen drive-bys later, the sound of heels tapping on the cement floor brought his attention from the underbelly of the vehicle. Emerson sat on the steps leading down to his pit. The car’s bumper blocked his view of her face, but it didn’t hide what she was missing. “Emmy, you seem to have forgotten your underwear.”