by Nana Malone
"Yes, thank you all very much. But I will remind you both that I do not need a mom."
I heard Adam grumbling something back. I ignored him and hung up. I might not like the fact that they were all over my business, but they did have a good point. Friend or foe, Jax Reynolds was dangerous, and I for one had no intention of getting hurt again.
Jax…
By day two in the safe house, we were ready to kill each other. It was a tight space, and it was hot. It was always warm in the islands, but the heat wave had temperatures nearing the hundreds. Mayzie was uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable. And every time I could see the shiny sweat on Neela's shoulders or breasts, I thought back to that night, and it would start all over again. The pounding in my blood, the desert in my mouth, the inability to swallow, wanting her, needing her.
And then realizing it wasn't ever going to happen again because she hated me.
For the second time that night, I woke up drenched in sweat, unable to sleep.
Oh, and also my damn dick was still hard. I'd taken care of that problem earlier. I thought if I could just take the edge off, I wouldn't walk around wanting her, needing her.
I could smell her damn shampoo everywhere throughout the house. I’d thought living with her at Willa’s house was bad but living with her in the bungalow was worse. It was a more confined space. Every time she stepped out of her bathroom, her scent was all I could smell. I was losing my damn mind. I'd been living in a permanent state of semi-hardness since we’d moved in.
I glared at the ceiling, willing it to be at least close to five, so it would make sense to get up. I concentrated so hard with my brain, I thought I'd actually pulled it off. Then I rolled over to check the clock, and it was not 5:00. More like 1:30. "Fuck," I mumbled.
I couldn't get her out of my damn head, and it was becoming more of a problem.
Well, you're still not allowed to sleep with her.
It was more than that though. It was like she was this unseen itch. The more I tried to ignore it, the worse it got. And God help me if I did scratch that itch. It just itched more. Nothing I did made it go away.
Finally, I swept the sheets back from the bed. They were soaked through, so I needed to change them and grab a shower.
What were the chances I could start my damn day at two in the morning?
Slim to none.
Before I stepped into the bathroom, I quickly checked the security perimeter. All was good. There would be an unholy racket if it wasn't, but everything was fine.
Or relatively. I knew that something was up with Neela. She'd been on that Sat phone forever the day before. I was pretty sure she was working with her team, trying to decipher the ledger, but she wasn’t saying a damn thing to me about it.
And I knew from what she’d said earlier that she had some work to do while we were here. But her phone conversation had seemed more intense than basic client stuff. I could tell it was getting to her that she didn't know how long we would be here, who was after her, or any of those vital and important things.
In the shower, I turned the water hot to ease the chill out of my bones. It seemed counterintuitive since I'd been so hot before, but my sweat had chilled me. My body remembered exactly what had woken me up.
The scent of her was all around the bathroom. Her honey and lime permeated everything. The shower was still damp, which meant she'd been in here recently. Had she showered before she'd gone to bed?
Sure enough, the shampoo bottle was slightly uncapped. I couldn't help but lean forward and take a sniff. Mate, you’ve lost it. And what do you know? Blood rushed through my dick.
As the water sluiced down my back, I dropped my forehead to the tile and muttered curses under my breath as I glared at my dick. "Mate, we have to get this shit under control." But he wasn't in any damn mood to listen
He knew what he wanted. Her.
“Well, think of something else because it's not happening.”
I wrapped my hand around the base of my dick and gritted my teeth when it jerked in my palm. Christ, one whiff of that damn shampoo and I was half out of my mind with need.
As water rinsed over my body, I used a pump of that honey-citrus softness and smoothed it over the length of my erection. I raised an arm on the shower wall, my body shaking with desire.
I had this under control. I smoothed it slowly at first, from a down stroke to a softer one up, rubbing my palm over the sensitive head, then back down on repeat. Over and over, thinking of her gloved tight around me, squeezing me with her inner walls, making my head explode.
The rush of electric acceleration ran down my spine, and my knees buckled. Fuck me. I coughed a curse. Legs too weak to hold me, arms certainly too weak to keep my face off the tile.
Neela Wellbrook was going to be the end of me.
Once I finally got my legs back under myself, I turned the water to frigid and forced myself to stay in the spray several seconds longer than I thought I could handle.
When I finally turned off the water, I dragged in a deep breath. We needed to accelerate this plan. Either have Bipps pay for a round-the-clock armed guard in one of those safe smart houses or apply more pressure to our most likely suspects. We needed to find out the threat to Neela and Mayzie's safety, or I wasn't going to make it.
I still didn't bother with the light. What was the point? Instead, I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around my waist and quickly got out. I was going to find a way to deal with this. I’d made the choice of coming to stay with her instead of Trace. I needed to live with my choice.
Yeah, because you overestimated your ability to keep your thoughts to yourself.
The crazy thing for me was that considering how long I'd been with my ex, I hadn't thought of her nearly as often as I thought of Neela, the woman I'd known for barely a month.
That's because you're obsessed with her.
Was I? Hadn't needing her gotten me into a lot of trouble? I needed to see her for who she really was. Dangerous. The problem with that was the more I saw, the more I liked.
It took me a couple of towels to make my hair dry and then I brushed my teeth again. I don't know why, but the action was automatic. I finished brushing, and just as I was sliding my toothbrush into its holder, I saw the handle of the door turning, and I froze.
When it pushed open, a sleepy Neela shuffled in, eyes half closed, heading straight for me.
I held my breath, unable to move and not sure what to say. Then she reached up. Instead of hitting the medicine cabinet, her finger dusted over my pecs. With a squeak, she snatched her hand back, and her eyes bolted open. "Oh my God."
"Relax, it's just me."
She blinked her eyes. "Jax? What the hell are you doing in the bathroom?"
"Well, it's a bathroom, so a couple of guesses there."
"Why are you in here so late?"
"I just had a shower."
All traces of sleepiness were gone now. Her hot gaze pinned to my pecs and roamed down. "I—wh—what are you—?"
I gritted my teeth and tried to refrain from saying some dumb shit like, ‘Hey, beautiful, my eyes are up here.’
Yeah, I was an idiot. I liked that she was looking at me, but if she kept that up, I was going to have another erection. And I was pretty sure she would not appreciate that.
"Sorry, I didn't know you were in here. I just woke up sweaty, and I had a headache, so I thought would just get um—what is it called—"
"An ibuprofen?"
She nodded slowly. "Yeah. One of those." Her eyes drifted back to my chest.
A warm flush of pride crept through my chest as her face reddened. "Is there something you need, Neela?" My voice had automatically lowered an octave.
She licked her lips then, still staring at me like I was a steak and she had been starving for weeks. "No, I—I’m just going to go back to bed."
But she didn't move. She didn't budge. Instead, I shifted around her. "No, I'll go. You probably needed the bathroom, so I'll just—"
I t
ried to shift around her, but she was still staring at me, lips parted, eyes drinking me in, hands twitching. Rubbing up against her was inevitable and unavoidable. I knew she could feel every inch of me.
All.
Nine.
Of.
Them.
To distract her, I blurted out, "I um—I used some of your shampoo." God that was dumb. If she asked me what for, I’d need to lie convincingly.
She nodded absently as her gaze stayed on my chest. "Oh, okay. Why couldn't you sleep?"
I could lie and tell her I was too hot. Although that was only part of the truth. But then I told her the whole truth because I was tired of lying to her, to everyone, to myself.
"I was dreaming of you."
Eight
Neela…
My dream was awesome. I couldn’t even begin to explain how awesome on the scale of awesomeness. Jax was with me. As he was in most of my dreams the last few weeks.
And he was doing the most delicious things with his mouth and his fingers, and I was flying. His hard length was pressed up against me, insistent. His fingers were playing adeptly over my clit, and his hot mouth was pressed against my breast, sucking me deep. And around deep pulls, he murmured how beautiful I was, how he couldn't get enough.
But then, as the ecstasy started to spread through my body, the euphoria coming for me, there was an earthquake. We were shaking. Shaking him lose from my breast, prying his fingers from me, and I held on as tightly as I could. "No, Jax, don't stop."
The shaking stopped for a moment. But something had broken the magic. He had stopped sucking on me. He’d stopped driving me toward orgasm. And he was watching me, carefully. His mouth was moving as if he was trying to tell me something. But I couldn't hear the words, and the shaking started again.
Earthquake.
And then suddenly, I was yanked out of the dream, away from his hot embrace into the cold, harshness of the night. "Oh my God, what?"
Jax was there in person. "Wake up, it's time to go."
"What's happening?” That was a dream? Oh my God, it had felt so real.
His intense blue stare was on me again as if he wanted to ask me something, but he shook his head. "We don't have time for that. Shoes, jacket, now, baby. Go time."
I knew exactly what go-time meant. It meant, 'Come the fuck with me, ask no questions, and I'll keep you alive.'
I jumped out of the bed, the sheet tangling around me, trying to keep me where I was, as if it too knew that I needed to finish that dream. But there would be no finishing that dream tonight. Real Jax was making me do things. Real Jax was making me run, again.
He'd already gotten me in the habit of putting everything away in our go bags before we went to sleep. So it was just a matter of grabbing Mayzie in her sleep sack, putting my backpack on, sliding my shoes on and grabbing a jacket. Never mind that I was in a t-shirt and boyshorts, not perfectly proper attire. Not that I gave a fuck. If he was saying go time, it meant danger.
"Come on."
He had Mayzie's other bag and his one bag. He also had a weapon.
Just seeing him hold a gun and how he handled it almost like a lover, I wondered how in the world I could have ever thought he was a manny. He was so at home with the gun.
He pressed his fingers to his mouth and held up a tablet, showing me movement on the south room wall. Someone was inside our goddamn safehouse.
I blinked rapidly and then nodded, praying that Mayzie stayed asleep. I grabbed the baby carrier and rapidly latched her in, praying to God I could move quickly enough.
Jax wasted no time. When we were at the back door, he held up his night vision goggles, and I could almost see the tension rolling up his shoulders as if he was relaxing. "We've got a clear path. See those trees over there, almost intersecting at the corner of the gate?"
I nodded. "Yeah."
"That's where we're going."
"Are we going over the gate?"
He shook his head. "No, we're going through. You hit the right place and that opens right up. There's a secondary car well off the path through the backwoods for half a mile. There is a car waiting there for us, okay?"
I frowned. "But we have a car."
He sighed. "We have to go through there to get it." He pointed the direction of the garage. And since the garage was not connected, we'd be open as we ran to it. "Oh, lead the way. I got this."
"Are you sure you don't want me to carry her?"
"Nope, let's go."
He was right. We were in danger, and I was asking questions. Dumb. So dumb. I could ask all the questions in the world wherever we wound up. With a deep breath, he was out the door, gun at the ready.
But then there was a series of beeps from his watch, and he cursed. “Change of plan. Go back in the bedroom, through the bathroom, and into the second bedroom. If I’m not in there in three minutes, climb out the window, head for the west corner of the gate, and then head for the shore. Use the sat phone to call for help.”
“What? I—”
But he shoved me toward the bedroom and flipped the safety off his gun.
He really would protect us with his life.
It was still the last thing I wanted. What I wanted was my old life back. Simple. Uncomplicated. Where people weren’t trying to kill me every minute.
Except, I wanted that life with Mayzie in it. We’d had a rough start, but after a month, I didn't understand how she hadn’t been mine all along.
You have Jax to thank for that.
I did have him to thank. He might be a liar, but he was great with Mayzie. Better than great. I probably wouldn’t have survived this long without him.
Mayzie was sleeping like the dead in her little sleep sack. I grabbed the bag he’d dropped and slung it over my shoulder, cross-body style, and ran back into the bedroom with her.
I needed a weapon. Something. What if Jax didn't catch the intruder?
There was an umbrella hanging behind the door.
Praying that Mayzie kept silent, I crept back into the room, tiptoed over to the door as quietly and gently as I could, and slid it off the hook. It would have been a lot easier if I didn't have to hold the baby.
I eyed the bed sheet. That might be too big. Then I remembered the cot in Mayzie's room with a twin sized mattress. And there were sheets to fit it in the closet.
Carrying the baby, the umbrella, diaper bag, and my go bag, I ran back to the room and grabbed the sheet that I would need. I eased her back into the crib gently, put the bag and my makeshift weapon down, and set it all up.
Once I had Mayzie strapped to my back, many thanks to my improvised bed sheet, I grabbed the cross body and my umbrella weapon, then went back to the door.
At the door to the living room, I listened closely. When I heard tussling and grunting, I dared to ease it open and peeked around.
Jax was fighting with someone.
Someone smaller.
I knew it was stupid. I knew it was dumb. But still, I ran into the fray as if I could do anything to save Jax. He was basically every action movie star I’d ever seen in my life. And he looked like he was trying not to kill the person in his arms.
He grunted. "Stop fighting. I won't kill you if you stop fighting." Then there was a slice. Something glinted in the moonlight and I screamed out. "Knife."
They both turned. Unfortunately, Jax was focused on me, and the smaller intruder almost got a piece of him. He jumped back just in time, but it gave the intruder the opportunity to pull a gun.
I didn't even think. I just ran out with my umbrella raised high, ready to strike, aiming for the intruder's arm.
It was only when I was within a step that a trick of the light stopped me. "Willa?" No. I shook my head. Willa was dead.
I froze.
Jax had his gun back in his palm. "You two know each other?"
I stared at the intruder, mouth agape, praying that Mayzie was still asleep.
She wasn't making a sound on my back, but that didn't mean anything beca
use I wanted to shield her from this if I could.
My dead best friend grinned at me. "Neela, oh my God. I'm so glad I found you."
"You're not dead?"
"Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
Another beep of the alarm sounded on his watch, and Jax cursed and glared at her. “You bring some friends?”
Willa shook her head. “No. but there are people after me. And—”
He shook his head. “We don’t have time for this. Let’s move.” To Willa, he said, “Come with us or stay. I don’t care either way.”
Shell-shocked, I followed him. My mind teetered around like a drunken sorority girl as it tried to make sense of what was happening. Mayzie snuffled on my back. Quickly, I modified the makeshift sling so she sat against my chest, then I pressed her head against me and did as I was told.
Luckily, she’d slept through our little adventure so far. She was too busy sucking her thumb, and given the way she was twitching, she was having her own little baby dreams.
Outside, the grass felt cool as it tickled my ankles. It was a bit longer than when we got there, probably thanks to the rain for the last few weeks. We took so little with us when we ran. I was sad looking back at the house. I'd gotten used to it. Maybe it hadn't been home, but at least it has been somewhere safe to lay our heads for a few days. Now I was already missing it.
Behind us, I heard movement. I didn't dare turn around. I just kept crouched, marching behind Jax. Willa was to my side. Suddenly, he stopped then jumped behind me and Willa. He began walking backward, watching our backs. "Keep moving to the gate." His voice was a harsh command.
I heard a twig again, and this time he fired his gun without hesitation. I watched, stunned as he fired, but there was barely a sound. Only a small pfft.
"Keep moving."
My heart hammered in my chest. The sweat was already forming on my brows, but I did as I was told. I had to get Mayzie to safety, then I could freak out and pay attention to the sticky sweat that I could taste at the back of my throat, the swimming in my head, and the shaking hands.
