Raw Deal (Larson Brothers #1)(66)

Maybe he could give it all up for her. Maybe. He didn’t know. When he really started to itch for a fight, he needed it. It wasn’t just something he did. After all these years, it was a part of who he was, it was the answer to any problems he had, the only way to soothe the savage beast within that roared to be set loose.

But maybe he’d found another way. A touch from the woman lying next to him and he was as docile as a kitten.

As if she sensed him looking at her, she opened her brown eyes and a smile curved her lips. “You look like you’re thinking hard about something,” she said sleepily, then engaged in a long stretch that drew his attention to the way her shirt pulled tight over her breasts and her nipples poked against the fabric. He slid his hand across them, interrupting her, and she laughed, flattening to the mattress again.

“Thinking about you,” he said.

“Well, I’m right here.”

“Yeah, I like that about you.”

Savannah rolled toward him and tugged the sheet away from his hips, leaning over to kiss a path down his abs to where his cock began to twitch in interest. He groaned, putting a hand to her soft dark hair, loving the feel of it tickling his skin as she went down on him, sucking him to rapt attention. When he stood hard and ready, she straddled him, still wearing her gray nightshirt and those funny thigh-high socks, and guided him to the warm, wet entrance hidden from his view.

His f*cking soul left his body as her tight heat swallowed him whole, her head falling back in shared ecstasy, his fingers clutching her thighs so hard it had to hurt. He reached the end of her and it still wasn’t enough; he wanted more. More of her body, more of her life, more of her.

“Yessss,” she whispered, beginning to move in sensual undulations that let him feel every part of her. All he had to do was lie back and watch the beauty of her seeking her pleasure from him, finding it, taking it.

And when they lay side by side sweating in the afterglow, she lifted her left hand to her face . . . and he caught a glimpse of it.

Her fourth little pink heart tattoo was on the outside of her left ring finger, right where a wedding ring might cover it up.

Mike didn’t know how he’d missed it before, but seeing it made his mouth run dry. It was sort of a thing I did to determine who I was going to marry.

She would probably freak the f*ck out if he let her know he’d seen it, so he clamped down on the words and let the moment go. Imagine a woman like her wanting to link her life to a guy like him. Of course, it was only a silly game she played, but still, it cast a brooding pall over him that he didn’t understand.

“Are you okay?” she asked later, when they’d both reluctantly rolled out of bed and sought more sustenance in her kitchen. He liked her little apartment; it was warm and cozy and feminine and . . . her. Though he found his eye drawn too often to the family portrait hanging on her living room wall—Tommy with all the people who still mourned him.

“Yeah,” he said, going for a reassuring smile and wondering if he quite managed it. Savannah tossed him an apple to go along with the sandwiches they’d put together.

“Looks like the rain let up a little,” she observed, leaning over to gaze out her kitchen window. “Do you want to go for a walk or something?”

Hit bit into the apple, chewing slowly for a minute as he considered his next words. “There is something I’d like to do,” he said after swallowing, “but I’m not sure how you’ll feel about it.”

She turned from her window, lovely but grim faced, her tousled dark hair falling over one shoulder. “You want to go visit Tommy, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said, absently turning the fruit around in his hands while he monitored her expression. “But it’s up to you, of course.”

“I think I would like that,” she said softly after a moment. And she smiled, a little sad, but sweet all the same. “I’d like that a lot.”



Often, soon after his mother’s death, Mike had gone out to her grave to cry or to rage at her or to just sit in silence and wonder what the f*ck it was all for. All the pain, all the unfairness. Soon enough he’d given that up when he realized it wasn’t for shit, that everybody ended up another stone in the ground like countless others, and all anyone had control over was the time they had left.

Being at the cemetery again, at Savannah’s side, brought back the horrible day of Tommy’s funeral in a rush, and he felt a blunted sense of the helplessness he’d experienced that day. He hated it, but at least he was going to finally get what he’d come here for. To see up close the final resting place of the man he’d put there.

“They seal the tombs up after a burial,” Savannah explained quietly as they navigated the mazelike pathways. “There’s a plaque with all the names of our family members buried there. It goes back well over a hundred years.”

“Is that a little unsettling?” he asked, taking her hand. The air was thick and humid under a dense gray sky, mists of rain still falling intermittently. Savannah carried an umbrella in her other hand but didn’t have it open. She’d pulled her long hair through the back of a baseball cap, claiming it was so frizz-prone she would look like a poodle after being out in the damp. “I mean, knowing you’ll be there someday. I know a lot of people buy their plots early, but . . .”

She shrugged. “It’s kind of comforting, actually, at least to me.”