Full Throttle (Black Knights Inc. #7)(56)

Glancing down at Abby, he was charmed to discover she looked like a drowned kitten. Her hair was plastered to her head, her eyes blinking against the pouring rain, and her succulent little mouth was back to forming the perfect O. Jesús Cristo! Did she have any idea what a temptation she was? Probably not. But, if things went his way, he was just about to show her.

“It’s a deal!” he yelled to Yonus.





Chapter Fifteen


“What the frickin’ sticks has gotten into you, Carlos?” Abby demanded incredulously, plopping down on the palm-leaf mat spread across the floor of the little ceremonial hut. “Is rain some kind of aphrodisiac for you or something?” she asked while twisting the water out of her sodden hair. “What’s with kissing the bejeezus out of me right there in the center of the village, in the middle of a torrential downpour, with our new buddy Yonus playing the part of the unwitting voyeur?” And FYI, your mouth should come with its own warning label: Caution! These lips have been known to melt ovaries!

And as if all those things she mentioned weren’t odd enough by themselves, there was the nutty way he’d thrown his head back, laughing up at the rain like he was…well…Gene frickin’ Kelly or something. Seriously, had there been a lamppost nearby, she wouldn’t have been all that surprised to see him gaily swinging himself around it. She couldn’t help but wonder if he’d contracted some sort of weird, psychedelic jungle fever.

She eyed him askance when he dropped down beside her, running his big hands over his face, sluicing the water from the black stubble darkening his jaw. He lowered his fingers, and she wasn’t all that surprised to find him grinning at her. Obviously, whatever jungle fever he’d contracted wasn’t the sweating/chills/vomiting kind, but the deliriously happy/laughing manically kind.

And then there was the stupid, adorable, tempting dimple.

“Don’t you know by now, mi vida,” he chuckled, the low sound reverberating inside her chest—Was it her imagination, or had his voice dropped an octave while his accent thickened into patented Latin Lover mode?—“that everything, given the right context, is an aphrodisiac to a man?”

Yep. So it wasn’t her imagination. Rolling her eyes—and trying with all her might to ignore the sudden burst of flames that ignited low in her belly—she opened her mouth to remind him that now was not the time and this was definitely not the place, when another flash of lightning blazed overhead. It created a strobe effect through the paper-thin spaces between the poles of bamboo that made up the walls of the hut. And a second later, the accompanying crash of thunder rattled the entire structure. The rain hammering against the leafy roof reminded her of the time her father had taken the family on a trip to see Yosemite Falls. And all of it combined seemed to highlight the fact that this little hut had become their island in the storm, a private oasis cutting them off from the rest of the world.

Emphasis on the word private.

And given the hot look in his eyes right now, that could prove to be very dangerous. She may have managed to resist him and his damned dimple and his pretty penis once, but she didn’t trust herself to be able to do it again.

Not the time or the place, remember? Yep. She did remember. But did he? Once again, she tried to remind him of the fact. But this time she was thwarted not by the lightning, but by Carlos himself. He suddenly leaned over, lifting her damp hair off her neck.

“You have a tattoo,” he said like it was an accusation.

Jesus, Mary, and Joe Cocker! She hadn’t been thinking when she’d wrung out her hair. The deep-red rose inked near her hairline was something she’d never meant him to see.

Thinking fast, she said the first thing to pop into her head. “Well, so do you. A lot of tattoos. And I’ve been meaning to ask you what they say.”

When he dropped her hair to hold out his wide hands, palms up so that the intricate black scroll on the insides of his flexing forearms was visible, she heaved a sigh of relief. She’d distracted him from asking her about the symbolism of her tattoo. And that was good. Just as now was not the time or place for kisses and hot Latin looks, neither was it the time or place for her confession. When they were home, when they were safe, when he could walk away from her and never look back, that’s when she’d tell him.

And forget the fact that her stomach hollowed out at the mere thought.

“This one”—he pointed to the words in Spanish sketched into his right arm—“says, ‘Mess with the best.’”

“Mess with the best?” She lifted an intrigued eyebrow.

“Sí.” He nodded, his dark, wet hair curling across his forehead. A drop of crystalline water glinted near his temple, and she was tempted to reach up and brush it away. “And this one says, ‘Die like the rest.’”

Mess with the best, die like the rest…

Her jaw unhinged as a shiver of awareness and…wariness…skittered across her nerve endings. When she looked into his eyes, into those deep, black eyes fringed by those thick, dark lashes, she didn’t see the handsome, happy-go-lucky medical student she’d known back in college. Instead she saw the man he’d grown into. The hardened soldier, the…take-no-prisoners, no-guts-no-glory warrior who’d taken his place. And not for the first time since he dropped back into her life, she couldn’t help but feel a bit of remorse. Because he never would have become this man, this hard-assed, battle-scarred man, if not for—