“Why? It won’t mean anything. It doesn’t change what’s going on with us. Crossing that line whether you see it or not doesn’t make this act we’re putting on any different.”
Always the cop with the interrogation and the need for a motive. I cocked my head to the side and he groaned as the long strands of my hair slid across the full curve of my breasts.
“You take care of everyone, always. Maybe I want to take care of you.” I lifted an eyebrow and slicked my tongue across my bottom lip. “This is happening, Titus. Fight it all you want but you can see it coming from miles and miles away.”
We stared at each other in silence for what felt like a solid minute and then he threw his head back so that it thumped against the door with a bang and let go of my hand at the same time. “I usually avoid trouble when it’s headed my way.”
“Not this kind of trouble.”
I got his zipper the rest of the way down, excited about my victory for more than one reason. He wasn’t giving in to me for good, but he was giving in to me for now and that was good enough. I laughed a little as I pulled his pulsating cock out of the confines of his underwear. He was impressive everywhere. I wasn’t surprised. He was the best of the best, so of course his dick would have to fall in that category as well. He jerked in my hand as I rubbed my thumb on the tip where the evidence that despite any reluctance his mind might have, his body and the wild inside of him was loose, leaking out and calling to me.
He grunted in response as I dropped to my knees in front of him. It wasn’t my favorite position to be in for any man, it smacked of weakness and submission, but here it felt like power, like taking what was mine. I didn’t care about the appropriateness of the time or the location. All of that faded next to the way he burned in my mouth as I sucked him in and played with him. His eyes had drifted to half-mast and all I could see as he watched me was a storm of swirling silver. He was still fighting, he refused to move with me, refused to touch me . . . at least he did until the beast woke back up as I twirled my tongue around and around the aching tip. I was just adding my hands to the mix, curling a tight fist around the base of his erection, when suddenly his hands where in my hair and he was moving into me.
“You’re fucking dangerous.” His voice was hoarse as he slowly started to give me what I wanted. I hummed in agreement and used my other hand to hold on to the impossibly tight globe of his ass. “Why can’t I resist you?”
He sounded angry, but he didn’t stop moving and I had to really concentrate on what I was doing because once again he wasn’t soft or easy and that was a whole lot of man to try and handle. God, did I want to handle him in a million different ways. I squeezed my hand even tighter and tilted my head back just a little when he guided me with rough hands.
His eyes were open all the way now and they were trying to melt me onto the bathroom floor with their intensity. I saw his broad chest start to rise and fall more rapidly. I felt the way his cock quivered all along my tongue as I hollowed my cheeks and sucked him down as far as I could stand. I felt the muscle I was holding on to flex so hard it felt like stone under my touch and then he swore at me again and it was all over in a hot rush of desire and some more bad words.
We were both breathing heavily as I rocked back and then climbed to my feet. We watched each other like combatants instead of almost-lovers, and I turned around without a word to clean the blood off my face and to get dressed. Caring about this man was hazardous, and if Conner didn’t end up pulling the trigger first, the feelings I had for Titus might very well be the end of me.
I pushed my hair back after I got myself situated and looked at him in the mirror, where I could see him watching me as he zipped up his pants.
“I don’t know, Titus, but if you can’t resist me, maybe you should stop trying so hard. In this place you never know what pile of shit tomorrow is going to hand you, so having something that makes you feel good for even a second needs to be valued.”
He shoved his hands through his hair and then reached down by his hip to twist the door open. There was no hiding what we had been in here doing. It was all over him. I was all over him and he was most definitely stamped all over me. I loved it.
“You shouldn’t be what makes me feel good, Reeve.” There it was. The harsh reality of the way things were between us. Him on one side of the divide and me always on the other.
“But I do, and you’re just going to have to learn how to deal with that.” I swept past him back out into the strip club, hoping he wouldn’t see the way my knees wobbled. I flipped my hair and shoved my hands in my pockets assuming he would guide us to the door. We had definitely made an impression tonight, and if Conner had eyes in the club, there was no missing the way we had just come out of the same bathroom all rumpled and sexed up. Mission accomplished, even if my heart and my ego had taken an equal pounding with Titus’s last harsh words.
I was surprised and a little annoyed when he stopped in front of one of the stages where Nassir was standing with Chuck. I saw both men give me a once-over then smirk at the dark-haired cop. The lights suddenly went down and an old, bluesy jazz song started to blast through the sound system. I shifted my gaze to the stage as a burning-white spotlight suddenly hit it and a girl dressed in a way-sexified, old-timey gangster outfit strutted her stuff onto the stage. She had the fedora. She had the suspenders. She had a gun stuck in her garter belt. She even had a lit cigar clamped between her teeth as she sashayed around the stage in platform Mary Janes. I tried not to bristle as all three of the men stopped what they were talking about to watch her as her white button-up blouse hit the floor, quickly followed by her tiny black skirt. She had a great body and she was really working the crowd, but even with the blinding stage lights it looked like she was staring right at where Titus was standing.
I huffed out a breath and turned my head as a body moved up next to mine. Key had gotten dressed and she was now sporting a puffy eye but she still looked better than anyone had the right to. She grinned at me as I glared at her. “You hit like a girl.”
I snorted a response. “Those shoes of yours are deadly.”
“Why do you think I wear them all the time?” She stuck her leg out and I noticed she did have crazy pointy and tall heels on even though she was now dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She tilted her head to where the men appeared engrossed in the erotic scene on the stage. I wanted to kick Titus. “You’re gonna have to brawl with more than just me for him. You’re gonna have to fight Bax, the city . . . hell, you’re even going to have to throw down with him if you want him.”
I lifted an eyebrow as the music picked up and seemed to get louder. The girl was now down to nothing but her G-sting and she wasn’t dancing so much as she was writhing on the stage. She looked like she was making love to an invisible man.
“I’ve been fighting every single day of my life. Sometimes I think all I have left is fight.” If anything was worth the fight it would be any time I had with Titus before things inevitably blew up around us.
She gave me a real smile, not the one she used to con men out of money or get people to think she was just a dumb stripper. It made her look like an entirely different person. She went from a sex goddess to a normal woman, one that just happened to be amazingly beautiful.
“Fighting is all any of us know inside and out. It’s exhausting.” I muttered my agreement and seriously considered reaching out to pinch Titus in the arm as the girl on the stage acrobatically shifted to her feet and slinked to the edge of the stage. She spit the now stubby stogie out of her mouth much to her audience’s delight and pulled the gun she had in her leg band out of the garter. She pointed it out into the crowd. I thought it was a toy, maybe filled with water or those little plastic caps that made cute popping noises.
I was wrong.
Before she pulled the trigger, I was hit by a truck. Not really a truck but getting slammed to the ground with Titus’s full body weight sure felt like it. Gunshots echoed through the club, as did screams of pain fr
om both men and women as the gun continued to go off. I heard Titus scream something at Nassir and then he was gone, his hands flying to where his gun rode on his hip. I went to scramble up after him but bodies were everywhere, running for the door trying to escape the melee. I turned my head to see where Key had ended up and gasped when I saw the bright red bloom of crimson that was decorating her chest.
On my hands and knees I scrambled across the floor, trying not to think about how gross that was, until I got to her. Her gray eyes were wide open and I could hear that she was gasping for air. A few moments ago she had tried to kick my ass and now she looked like she was dying right in front of me. I put my hands over the bullet wound and told her, “Hey, you can’t go anywhere. This place needs you.” I meant the city, not the sleazy strip club, and I hoped she knew that. “You get me, Keelyn.” Her eyes drifted closed and I pushed harder on the wound.
Her blood was hot and stick as it leaked through my fingers. “Key?” No response, so I pressed even harder and hollered, “Honor!”
Her eyes popped open and she snapped at me, “Don’t call me that.”
I laughed a little and then was roughly pushed aside by hard hands. I looked up at Nassir as he sank down on his knees next to us. Without a word he stripped off his expensive suit jacket and tossed it to the ground. It immediately got trampled under fleeing feet.
“You can’t die.” His voice was harsh as he pulled off his pristine white shirt and balled it up into a makeshift bandage as he pressed it to the nasty wound. The situation was dire, but even so I took a second to admire the landscape of smooth, burnished bronze skin he revealed. Nassir wasn’t built like a mountain like Titus, but he sure was pretty and I’d had no idea the enigmatic club owner had a massive tattoo that covered his entire back. From shoulder to shoulder and all the way down his spine and even into the top of his tailored slacks ink marked his skin. I couldn’t make out what the scene was and it wasn’t the right time to take a good look at it.
“I can do whatever the hell I want, Gates. You don’t own me.” Key wheezed the words out as she struggled to breathe.
To which he growled, “I would if you would let me.”
I was glad Key sounded like she had some of her natural fight back and now that some of the smoke had cleared I wanted to make sure Titus was all right. I didn’t know what was up with those two, Key and Nassir, but it was intense and slightly suffocating.
Titus was kneeling next to Chuck, who also seemed to be bleeding pretty heavily. My gaze darted to the stage and I cringed when I saw the dancer crumpled like a lifeless doll in a heap. I didn’t need to wonder if she was dead or not, the steady trickle of blood from the side of her head was a clear indicator. She was too young to meet an end like that. The gun was still clenched in her hand and there was scattered money and the scent of expelled gunpowder everywhere. It looked like a scene out of a Tarantino movie.
I made my way over to Titus and breathed a silent sigh of relief when his eyes darted up to mine.
“I knew something was off. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I kept staring at her, trying to figure out if I knew who she was or if I had seen her somewhere before . . . I thought she might have a warrant out or something. It was the fucking gun. I should’ve known it was real.”
Chuck grunted and asked Titus to help him up. “It’s my job, man. I’m the one that should’ve seen it.” His dark eyes drifted over to where Nassir was leaning over Keelyn. “Better get some help for her quick. If that girl dies he will lose his ever-loving mind.”
“I already called it in.” Titus put his hands on his hips and survived the carnage that surrounded us. “Who was she?”
Chuck was poking at his shoulder and I saw him totter on his feet a little as he prodded the wound. I reached out a hand to steady him and all three of us looked to where the girl had fallen. I wondered if it was Titus who had taken the shot or one of the other guys.
“I don’t really know. Nassir hired her on to replace the girl we lost on the docks. She told him she was a student and just needed some extra cash. You know how crazy he is about security. She would have had to pass his background check.”
Titus shifted on his feet and reached behind him to collect a kicked-over chair. He shoved it at the big bouncer. “Sit your ass down before you fall over.” He scrubbed his hands over his face and narrowed his eyes as he surveyed the scene. “It could be Roark.”
I fidgeted nervously and nodded a little to show I agreed with his logic. “The girl he killed looked like me, but she also worked here. He knows how vital Spanky’s is to the Point and to Nassir and Race now that the Pit is gone. Conner could have planted her inside here.”
He didn’t say anything but I could see him considering my words carefully, so I added, “He’s handsome and charming. He knows exactly what to say to get you to believe you are the only one for him. She was young and probably was just an innocent college kid. He knows how to pick his targets. Maybe she was supposed to try and destroy Spanky’s from the inside out and he heard that we were here tonight, so he upped the game. She was staring at you, Titus. That first shot was meant for you.”
I was sure of it, and I was sure Conner had a hand in this and I could see by the stony expression on his face that Titus agreed. Just then the doors to the club burst open and EMTs with gurneys rushed in. Keelyn and Chuck weren’t the only ones injured in the cross fire and everyone was watching Nassir like he was a bomb about to go off.
Titus’s cop buddies showed up, and all of a sudden I was just the girl he was fooling around with in the bathroom and not the other half of the team that was here to take down a criminal mastermind. I sighed heavily and went over to the bar to pour myself a drink and wash even more blood off my hands.
There was always more blood, always more violence and mayhem, and I hated feeling like my decision to come back had increased the volume and frequency on both those things.
It was good to be home. Sigh . . .
Chapter 8
Titus
IT HAD BEEN A couple of days since the shootout at Spanky’s, and once again I was buried in work and avoiding Reeve like she had the plague.
Tracking down witnesses was impossible. It wasn’t like the people that spent their off-hours at a strip club wanted anyone to know where their hard-earned money was actually going, and when I found the family of the girl who had been behind the massacre, I was stunned that she was indeed just a normal college girl with a mom and dad who lived in a nice house up on the Hill. Her parents had no idea that she was dancing at Spanky’s, and when I told them she had shot the place up and injured no fewer than five people, they were stunned. It was completely out of character for her, and according to them, she had never even seen a gun, so they couldn’t believe she was capable of pulling one on a roomful of people. So not only were they tasked with burying their daughter, they also had to process that they really had no clue who she had become or what she had gotten herself into down in the bowels of the Point.
It seemed like Reeve’s theory that Roark had sunk his claws into the girl might have some merit. People did crazy things in the name of love. I just didn’t have it in me to tell her that she was right. If my head hadn’t been spinning, if everything inside of me hadn’t been tugging ferociously at the leash to get at her, to get in her, to have her no matter what common sense said, I would’ve noticed the gun was real. I was watching the girl take off her clothes dispassionately. No naked girl was ever going to compare to the one that I had almost nailed on the counter in Spanky’s bathroom and that was just a hard-and-fast fact. But there was something about the stripper that bugged me. I just couldn’t place it because my head was still thundering with lust and my nerves were still jangling with want.
I should have spotted the tiny .22-caliber from a mile away, but all I could see was Reeve on her knees in front of me with all of that dark hair of hers tangled in my hands as she turned me inside out with a creative twirl of her tongue and the perfect scrape of h
er teeth. She knew how to work me over and take such good care of me at the same time. I was trying to keep her alive, trying to keep myself alive, and maybe, just maybe, get both of us out of this situation without broken hearts.
She wasn’t helping. I could see it in her eyes when she looked at me. She cared. I didn’t think a girl that made the kind of choices she did, who had to look out for herself above all others to survive, could be that empathetic, but it bled out of her and got all over me. She cared a lot. About me. And I wasn’t sure what to do with that. I was the one always worrying about everyone, about everything. I had never had someone else in my life that was concerned for me and for my well-being. It made my resolve to stay away from her even weaker than it already was, and goddamn, did I want to see what else she could do with that clever mouth of hers.
I jerked my head up when my office door suddenly opened and an older man dressed in khaki pants and a white polo shirt waltzed in and made himself comfy in the chair across from my desk. He had steely-gray hair and a flinty face that reminded me of Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All he needed was a ratty poncho and a cigar.
I closed the case folder I was going over and leaned back in my chair. I didn’t know who the guy was but everything about his posture and the way he made himself comfortable as I assessed him screamed “cop.” We tended to be able to spot our own no matter what branch or badge we might carry.
“Can I help you?”
The stranger crossed his ankle on his knee and started tapping his fingers on his leg. “I sure as hell hope so, son, otherwise we’re all going to be neck-deep in a bloodbath.”
His voice had a quiet drawl, not exactly a southern or even a Texan twang, but there was some country to it, so I put him from somewhere around Virginia or the Carolinas. I lifted an eyebrow at him and waited for him to formally introduce himself. He watched me silently for a long minute before a weathered grin cracked his face.
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