Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(33)

The result had been instantaneous.

Instantaneous lust.

Cripes.

She shivered now. The memory making her squirm until Peanut raised his scarred, furry face and slanted her a disgruntled look.

“There are other beds you could be sleeping in, you know,” she told him.

His response was to lift one hind leg behind his head and begin meticulously cleaning his balls.

“Well, that’s a succinct answer if ever there was one,” she grumbled, flopping onto her back and throwing one arm over her eyes.

She’d tried, oh, lordy, how she’d tried over the past three months to forget about that day. To forget the expertise of his mouth and hands. To forget the way she’d responded, with such abandon, giving herself over to him.

And for the most part, during the daylight hours, she was successful.

The nights were another matter.

At night, she couldn’t push the memories away. Often awoke with her fingers between her legs trying to ease the ache her dreams built. And now, lying in bed with Nate only two doors down, her usual powers over the past were lost, and it all played out again. Her mind’s eye supplying vivid, graphic detail.

Hot.

His broad palm had been so hot when he’d brushed it along her cool thigh, under the short skirt she’d been wearing, never hesitating as he pushed aside the lace and elastic of her thong. His rough thumb had been unerring when it landed on the hot knot of nerves at the top of her sex to circle slowly.

Big.

His calloused fingers had been so big when he’d gently pressed one, and then another, inside her.

What had followed was more a visceral recollection than an actual memory. Because her brain had ceased to work at that point. She’d become strictly physical. A thing of liquid bones and racing blood. An entity made solely of desire, of want.

Her mouth remembered the taste of him as his tongue plunged and retreated. Her breasts tingled with the memory of his broad chest and the friction he’d created while moving against her. Her fingers itched in recollection of the tense and release of the lean tendons and heavy muscles of his forearm, the one that’d been angled down between their bodies.

At the time, she didn’t know when she grabbed him whether she wanted it to stop or go on forever, so she simply clung.

She remembered the explosion of her release, of screaming his name and then crumpling into a boneless heap in his arms. And she remembered her astonishment when he simply held her for long moments, murmuring nonsensically and rubbing his hand up and down her back before bundling her up and carrying her back to the Jeep.

She shivered again, and Peanut stopped licking himself just long enough to direct an annoyed mrrreow directly toward her face before returning to his mission of impeccable nuts.

“You keep that up and you won’t have any hair left,” she advised him before throwing back the covers and padding to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror over the pedestal sink and grimaced.

Crapola.

She wanted Nate Weller.

There was no more denying it.

At a distance of a thousand miles, it was easy to blame her behavior that day three months ago on soul-tearing grief. But being here and seeing him? It made it impossible to continue to deceive herself.

That itchy feeling, the tightening of her scalp whenever he came within ten feet of her, her inability to stop jabbering like one of her kindergarteners? They were all the result of her impossible physical reaction to him.

And that something about him that always irritated her to no end? Well, that was simply the hurt and frustration she felt knowing he didn’t suffer any similar difficulties.

She’d been a fool not to understand it before, or maybe she’d just been afraid. Afraid of everything he made her feel. Afraid of everything he made her want. Afraid of…rejection.

Double crapola.

She huffed out a breath and splashed her hot face with tepid water. It was all too much. Too complicated.

Turning off the tap, she patted her face dry with a fluffy turquoise towel. She was never going to get any sleep tonight, so she might as well head downstairs and see if anyone else was up. Maybe Becky was in the mood to share a glass of wine—a big glass of wine—and commiserate with her about the unceasing frustrations of men.

Tying the satin belt of her robe, she peeked out into the quiet hallway. All the lights were off, including the ones downstairs. A faint glow of yellow pooled below only one door.

Nate’s.

Wouldn’t it figure?

The one person she didn’t want to share of glass of wine with, especially a big glass of wine. Sufficiently lubricated, she didn’t trust herself not to attack him, tie him to the bed, and sit on his face.

Of course, there was something she’d like for him to clear up…





Chapter Eight


“C’min,” Nate murmured, looking up from the screen of his laptop where Ozzie had dumped—er, the kid preferred the term transferred—all Grigg’s email correspondence from the last three years. He’d volunteered for the onerous task of finding out just how often his partner, his best friend, his sole confidant, had flat out lied to him and rest of the team and done jobs for the FBI.

As if that wasn’t enough to put the shit-icing on top of this crap cake of a day, now Boss was back at his door.

What more could the man possibly have to ask him?