Skin Deep (Station Seventeen #1)(74)

“Yeah. You home?” Gamble asked without pretense.

Kellan swiped his way into the building with his electronic key card, stepping into the empty lobby and hitting the button for the elevator. “Copy, jackass.”

“That’s all I needed to hear,” Gamble said. Leave it to a Marine to set their code word for the all-clear to jackass. “Later. Jackass,” he added, and Kellan could swear he heard an oh-so-rare smile in the guy’s voice just before he disconnected the call.

“Nice talking to you, too,” Kellan said to the dead air, a small huff of laughter crossing his lips. Sharp around the edges or not, there were far worse people to have his back.

The elevator arrived seconds later and he stepped on, looking down at the cell phone still in his hand. Scrolling through his list of contacts, his finger hovered over the icon labeled Moreno, his brain doing the yes-no-yes-no dance the whole way to the fourth floor, and screw it. He might have some ironclad impulse control in all other situations, and Isabella might be more than your average badass. But DuPree was a psychopath who had killed two people in direct connection with her investigation, and she’d taken Angel’s death as hard as he’d expected. Kellan needed to know Isabella was okay.

Shit. For all her tight-lipped caution and chin-up bravado, he missed her. And dangerous or not, he wasn’t quite ready to lock that feeling away with all the rest.

His finger came down on the icon two seconds before the elevator doors opened, but it wasn’t the sound coming through his phone that shocked him into place as soon as he stepped into the corridor.

It was the sound of someone else’s phone, ringing from a few doors down, that blew Kellan the fuck away.

“Moreno?” He blinked, certain his weary, bleary eyes weren’t cooperating with reality. But Isabella looked up at him from the spot where she’d been sitting outside the door to his apartment, her cell phone in her hand and a look of total shock on her face.

“Hey, I…are you calling me?” she asked as she stood, and Christ, could Kellan be any less suave?

“Sorry, yeah.” He hit the end call icon with the edge of his thumb, and her phone fell silent. “I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“Oh.” Isabella nodded, her hair spilling forward to shield her eyes. “Sorry to just show up like this. I’m sure you’re really tired. Or, you know. Maybe busy. This was probably a bad idea.”

Kellan lowered his brows in confusion, and what was that look on her face? “No. I’m glad you’re here.” His smile lasted only briefly before he asked, “So, are you okay?”

“Not really. No. I mean, I’m safe,” she added, likely in response to the swift step he’d just taken in her direction and the tactical stare he’d just lasered over either side of the narrow, empty hallway. “But yeah. I’m not okay.”

“You’re not hurt,” he said, and looked like his tactical tendencies weren’t on the shelf just yet.

“No.”

“Are you hungry?” While he might not share the chef-level cooking gene with Kylie, he could still throw together some basics. She needed to eat if she was going to keep up her strength for this case.

But Isabella shook her head. “No.”

Remembering the look on her face when she’d arrived at yesterday’s fire scene, he quietly asked, “Is it Angel?”

She didn’t answer. Unable to help it, Kellan reached out, his fingers tracing the curve of her cheekbone. “This isn’t your fault, Isabella. You had no way of knowing DuPree would find out you’re a cop. You were doing your best to keep Angel safe.”

A laugh crossed her lips, although the sound held no humor. “I don’t…I really don’t want to talk about what happened to Angel, if that’s okay with you.”

“Okay. Then what do you want?”

Isabella leaned her cheek against his hand for only a second before stepping in to obliterate the space between them. “I want you to let me come inside.”

Her mouth met his in a rush, and holy hell, he could taste her for a month and still not want to come up for air. Capturing her face between both palms, Kellan slid his fingers through the sweet, coconut-scented fall of her hair, holding her in place so he could lay claim to every last bit of her mouth. But for as much as he took, Isabella took it right back, kissing him harder and faster until they were pressed together from mouth to chest to hips with no sign of stopping.

“This,” she murmured, sliding her hand between Kellan’s legs. “I want this, right now.”

His cock jerked at both her touch and her demand, and yeah. Yeah, not stopping sounded like a Nobel Prize-winning idea.

The elevator rumbled softly from a few doors down, momentarily breaking the spell. “Inside,” he said against her mouth, groaning at the friction of Isabella’s lips on his as she nodded a fervent yes. He managed to get his key in the lock on the third try—thank you, raging hard-on—and they spilled into his foyer in a flurry of hot kisses and near-desperate grabs at body parts and clothing. But damn it, he and Moreno had been put on high alert for a reason, and the ingrained defenses of his training weren’t going to let go of him, no matter how badly he wanted to pull off her jeans and fuck her right on the spot.

“Wait,” Kellan grated. “Need to check the apartment, just in case.”