Hell for Leather (Black Knights Inc. #6)(71)
Dagan released the big Texan, shrugging and thinking, well, like my mother used to say, there’s no use trying to make chicken salad out of chicken shit…
Chapter Eighteen
Three hours later…
Sitting in the plastic chair he’d positioned beside the door of the Noel Motel’s room number four, Mac closed his eyes and counted to ten. Twice. Then three times. And when that didn’t work, he went in for a fourth.
None of it helped. He was still hornier than a bull separated from the heifers in the herd. And why should that be, do you suppose? Well, because five minutes ago, when he knocked on Delilah’s door to hand her the turkey sandwich and bag of chips Ozzie procured from the local Subway, she answered his summons in her T-shirt.
In her T-shirt, and nothing else…
Oh, sure. She’d been wearing panties. Pink panties, to be exact. Pink panties with a little red bow on the front—not that he was obsessing about them or anything. Okay, so maybe he was obsessing a little. But, the pink panties alone wouldn’t have put him in this particular predicament—hot and hard and fidgety as a woodshed waiter—had they not also been paired with a clean white T-shirt that she’d donned after taking yet another shower. And let’s not even get him started on the earlier agony of what it had been like to sit outside her door, listening to water running inside, all the while picturing her naked and wet, because that was another issue altogether.
No. When he said she answered the door in her T-shirt and nothing else, what he really meant was that she’d been without a bra. And he’d been able to make out the shape of her nipples. Her decadent, rosy-red nipples. Those nipples he’d licked and laved and sucked just a few hours back. Those nipples that, despite everything he told himself to the contrary, despite everything he told her to the contrary, he wanted quite desperately to lick and lave and suck again.
Christ almighty. He was in a bad way. And it didn’t help matters that, for the last three hours, he’d been soundly chastising himself for the way he handled things after she flat-out asked him why he didn’t like her.
Didn’t like her? Was she crazy? Of course he liked her. What wasn’t to like?
But, in true guy form, when he tried to convey that it wasn’t her, that it was him, it’d somehow come out sounding all wrong. Accusatory, almost. And offensive, certainly.
“Holy shit fire, man,” he muttered to himself. “You gotta get it together.”
And while he was at it, he’d also do well to yank his head out of his ass. Because too much more of that kind of thinking, of obsessing about Delilah, about what he should or should not have said, about how gorgeous and sexy and flat-out provocative she was, and he might be tempted to say f*ck it to all his hard-earned life lessons, f*ck it to everything, and just give in. Give in to the needs of his body. Give in to her desire to see where things between them might lead…
But while he was damn sure he could pull off the first of those two things, he was also just as certain the second would be asking too much. He may like Delilah immensely, respect her grit and her spunk, but…God’s honest truth, he didn’t…well, he didn’t trust her. Or, more accurately, he didn’t trust himself around her.
Think of Jolene, he told himself. Think of that god-awful morning when the bank came to take the ranch…
And, yessir. That helped to instantly cool his ardor. Because, not counting the day his father died, the day he lost the Lazy M was the worst of his entire, sorry life.
It’d been gone. Just like that. The land his ancestors had worked for three generations. The big, rambling house that had seen the births and deaths of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. The cattle herd he’d helped breed, brand, and build. All of it was taken from him in the blink of an eye. And all because the blessedly few extra pennies that had been in the ranch’s coffers had gone to finding Jolene…
Lawyers, private eyes…hell, even a former police detective had milked the estate dry. And then the inheritance taxes had come due, followed by a balloon mortgage payment, and that was that. Game over.
Aimless, set adrift when his entire world, his entire future, was snatched from him, he’d enrolled in the criminal justice program at Texas A&M. Four years later, he was accepted into the FBI Training Academy. And a handful of years after that—thank you, U.S. government, for your zealous record keeping—he was the one to finally locate Jolene.
Living in California with some big shot movie executive, she was as lovely as he remembered. And even knowing what kind of woman she was—the kind to run out on her husband, her home, and…everything with only a simple Dear John letter reading I’m unhappy. I’m leaving—he’d still been amazed at how uncaring she’d been to learn he lost the ranch after his father’s death.
“Good riddance,” she’d told him. “That place was like a prison. I never hid how much I hated it.”
And that was true. If she’d expressed her loathing for the Lazy M once, she’d done it a thousand times.
“It was awful there. Endless days of housework, of staring out at boring ol’ fields and fat, smelly cattle,” she went on, tossing her long black hair over her shoulder. “I was the Belle of Lee County before the marriage. Did you know that?” Of course he knew that. It’s all she’d ever talked about. “I was respected and admired and invited to all the best parties.” Her blue eyes took on a dreamy, faraway expression before suddenly sharpening. “And then I moved out to the Lazy M.” Her top lip curled. “Where there were no parties. No people to respect or admire me. No excitement. No fun.” She shuddered dramatically, then turned her beautiful, vivacious smile on him. “So I did what was best for everyone and left.”