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I didn’t hate the way his arm felt around me. Warm and solid. Protective. As a rule, I didn’t cuddle or snuggle or any other verbs that applied to platonic canoodling. That kind of touching was unnecessary. Worse, it gave men ideas about the future.
Tears pricked my eyes at the memory and I cleared my throat to dislodge the annoying lump of emotion.
“They feel like your heart is tripping or limping. Like it’s out of sync and can’t get back in the rhythm. They’re harmless. More just annoying, really. But…”
That was when touch had stopped equaling comfort. My body wasn’t my own anymore. It had become a science experiment.
Whenever you’re close, everything is better. The closer you are, the easier I breathe, the less I feel like life is just a never-ending pour of lemon juice into an open wound that won’t heal. You take away the dark, the cold. And you remind me what it’s like to want to be here.”
“Short.” Truth be told, I preferred to sleep naked. But this wasn’t the kind of situation in which to divulge that information.
I was a light sleeper, which meant any noise or movement that happened within a hundred-foot radius woke me up.
She’d opened up just a crack, and what I’d seen beyond her sexy exterior had me wanting a longer, deeper look.
It was more powerful than any prescription I’d tried.
But having trouble come from a badge in my department? That wouldn’t stand.
“You wanna take a swing at me, do it. But understand that that’s got its own consequences and you’re about up to your ears in them already,” I warned. “Think on it.”
“You can run your mouth about brotherhood all you want, but the bottom line is you’re in this work for yourself. For the power trips you think you can get out of it. That’s not a brotherhood. That’s one pathetic kid trying to make himself feel like a big man. And you’re right, I’m not gonna stand for it. Neither are any of them.”
I wasn’t back. Not all the way yet. But it felt like I’d finally taken a step in the right direction. Maybe it was time to take another.
Lucian Rollins wore danger like it was custom tailored for him.
“Because there’s the damage a bullet wound does and the damage a broken heart does.”
Lucian’s frown was downright chilling, but I had the heat of temper to protect me.
“Ever wonder how long you can afford to care?”
“Thank you for saving my life, Xandra. I’m never gonna be able to pay you back for that.”
Right now, I felt like I didn’t have a damn thing besides a needy foster dog and a hole or two that would never be healed.
I filled her in on my day. All of it. It felt good. To share a kitchen. To share my day. Lina seemed genuinely interested. She sat on the counter and we talked as I sautéed chicken, peppers, and onions. Piper joined us with an endless parade of toys and laundry.
This connection I felt was real, tangible, and deep, but I didn’t know how deep it went for her. And I wasn’t about to scare her off with the level of my need for her.
It was an intimate position. And I wanted more as my blood went from warm to simmering in a heartbeat.
“Baby, it’s not a game to me. This is my life. You are the only thing in my entire existence that makes me feel like I’ve got a shot at finding my way back. I don’t understand it. And frankly I don’t need to. All I know is I feel better when I’m touching you. When I woke up this morning, I didn’t feel like a ghost or a shadow. I felt good.”
“But we’re playing with fire here. I mean, sooner or later, you’re going to get overly attached and I’ll have to destroy your fragile man heart. Not to mention the fact that we basically woke up dry humping.”
“‘There’s nothing I’d rather do than go to bed and not have sex with you, Nash,’” I said in a breathy, Marilyn Monroe imitation.
realized that as good as I am, sometimes it just comes down to luck. And I don’t want to count on that forever.”
Lina grinned and I felt that warm campfire-like glow in my chest. “Oh, Studly Do-Right, that rumor has been substantiated. It is official fact.” “Studly Do-Right?” “Something around town you don’t already know?” she teased. I closed my eyes. “Tell me that’s not my nickname.” She fluttered those long lashes at me. “But, Nash, I know how important honesty is to you.” “Christ.”
So the overprotective pain in my ass really hadn’t wanted Nash to know about our chat.
“You jumped the fence, Angel,” Nash said, smug and sleepy.
Holy hallelujah hotness.
“It’s not funny,” I groused. I was not a cuddler, and no man, especially not one depending on me to be his emotional support whatever, was going to change that.
His hard-on twitched against me, causing my vagina to throw a temper tantrum at being denied by the shorts I’d insisted on wearing to bed.
My vagina hated Lucian Rollins.
Lucian had a way of intimidating and impressing people. Often both at the same time. Today, however, he was only pissing me off.
“You’re like a vampire who stays up plotting how to cockblock his best friends.”
A white-hot anger clawed its way to life under my skin. Next to me, my brother tensed. “Fuck you, Lucy,” I said. “I am trying. I’m doing my PT. I’m going to the gym. I’m going to work.”
Did that blank spot in my memory hold the key? If I finally remembered how it felt to face death, would I be ready to live again? Wasn’t that part of what I was struggling with? I could put criminals behind bars, but that didn’t undo what they’d already done. I could stop them from doing it again, but I couldn’t prevent the first.
“You are not to go near Lina again,” I told him. “You can’t fucking threaten people on my behalf. Especially not her.”
Your father spent the last few decades numbing himself to life. What you’re doing isn’t much different,” Lucian said.
When Lucian Rollins kept tabs, that meant he knew what was in your garbage before it went out to the curb. It meant he knew what you were going to have for dinner before you did. The man had a gift for information gathering, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d wield it against me. Especially if he thought it was for my own good.
“You’re too good to let this end you. You need to claw your way out of this darkness if necessary and beat him. And you’re not going to accomplish that by distracting yourself with a woman you can’t trust.”
But I wasn’t about to explain to Justice that I was freaked out because there was something so irresistible about Nash Morgan that I was acting completely out of character around him.
And I certainly wasn’t about to voice my concern that Lucian was about to ruin it all even though I wasn’t sure I wanted “it all” in the first place.
“It was a feeling. Some kind of magic. A rightness, I guess. It definitely didn’t make any logical sense. On paper we couldn’t be more ill-suited to each other. But there was something so right about how it felt to be with him.”
“Of course you can,” she scoffed. I wished I’d gone to a bar instead of a café.
“But there are layers to it. You can fall head over heels for someone on the surface. You can find them attractive and exciting or, in Knox’s case, infuriating. And it can stop there. But the deeper you dig, the more pieces you see of that person, the further you can fall. That can happen fast too.”
She hit me with her full wattage grin. “Oh, honey. It just keeps getting better. The more you know and love and respect your partner, the more vulnerable you are together, the better everything gets. And I do mean everything.”
If Lucian hadn’t managed to convince Nash that I was a scheming, manipulative femme fatale over breakfast, maybe I could tell him why I was there and that I was kinda, sorta into him over lunch.
Without me noticing it, Knockemout had sucked me into its gravitational field. And it was up to me to decide whether I wanted to break free. Whether I was brave enough to see what those other layers were like.
The first time I’d met the woman, her resemblance to her twin sister, Naomi, was uncanny. It felt like I was meeting a literal evil twin. Only instead of a diabolical goatee, Tina sported the entitled attitude of a not-so-mastermind criminal.
