My Killer Vacation(56)

“I know, Myles. I…”

“What?”

“I haven’t gotten that far. As in, the future. A future where you’re my boyfriend. I haven’t imagined what would come next if we were together. It hasn’t even entered my mind.”

Now he looks angrier than ever. This man is so confusing.

“I just want to be with you now,” I murmur, sitting up straighter in his lap, ghosting my mouth over the rapidly beating pulse at the bottom of his neck, my hand smoothing up the front of his shirt. “I need to be with you. Just for now.”

I work my lower body in a slow circle on his lap, but he grabs my hips before I can complete the revolution. “You’re hurt.”

Mouth pressed to his ear, I whisper, “Being hurt only makes me need you more.”

The car pulls to a stop outside the rental house.

Myles blows out an unsteady breath. “Shit.”





Chapter 16





Myles





* * *




Our shoes have been left at the front door and I’m carrying Taylor through the house. I’m half hoping Jude is home to provide a distraction, half hoping he’s not.

Okay, fine. A lot more than half of me is hoping we’re alone. Maybe even all of me. But I should not be bringing this woman up the stairs to her bedroom. Christ, she was just attacked. My fucking blood is hot, it’s cold, I don’t know what it is. All I know is when I saw her lying unconscious on the floor, my world tipped sideways. I’ve never felt that combination of ice-cold fear and violent rage before and I never want to again. This is why I am a bounty hunter. I don’t get attached to anyone.

I can remain emotionless. Robotic. Efficient.

It’s too late for that now. With Taylor.

I’m a storm of feelings over her. So many that I can barely pick them out of the blurring whirlwind and try to define them. I’m protective of her, proud of her, lustful to the point of pain, adoring and confused. Because I know, I damn well know that if I fuck her, I’m going to grow even more attached and leaving is going to gut me, yet here I am, putting one foot in front of the other. Holding her against my chest like she’s fragile, maybe to try and fool myself into forgetting she wants to be treated—manhandled—like she’s far from breakable.

My stones are aching. My head is crowded. My chest is a fucking crime scene after she was assaulted on my watch. Mine. All because I missed a detail. Again. I missed something. But she’s kissing my neck and I’ve got a cock that could punch a hole in a window and damn…she’s growing more adept at teasing that spot under my ear by the second, her teeth closing around my lobe and tugging. Licking. Kissing.

She told me in the Uber that she hasn’t considered a future for us.

As much as that messed with my head, it’s very convenient for me to believe her promise right now. That she hasn’t considered us long-term. It takes away the guilt over hitting and quitting a girl who should be carried to the wedding altar on the wings of a dove. Brought home to mom. Given whatever she wants until she’s deliriously happy.

I’d never be able to do that. I don’t know how.

I can’t even protect her.

That thought has me stomping extra hard into her bedroom, kicking open the bathroom door and striding to the shower. Settling Taylor onto her feet and twisting the knob into the on position.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting you warm.”

Maybe…maybe I can resist this. Maybe I can deposit her into the shower and wait outside, last another day without giving in to my raging hunger for this woman. Sex has never been anything but a diversion for me. An itch to be scratched. But it would be a commitment with Taylor, no matter what she says. Even if she really means what she says about this being temporary. A need for now. My heart and head would make the commitment. Mine. As in, I’d be committing her to memory for the rest of my life. Could I just go on about my business alone once I know she exists? I don’t know. I have no fucking clue.

“You’re still cold, right?” I ask, gesturing to the shower.

She nods.

The bathroom is already beginning to fill up with steam.

She’s two feet away from me with her bandaged head, asking me for comfort with her incredible green eyes. I’m hanging by a thread and it frays even more. And more when she looks down at the outline of my erection, wets her lips…and strips off her tank top.

Oh yeah.

Fuck. Those tits.

That tank top must have had one of those built-in bra things, because she sure as shit isn’t wearing one now. Just those tight pants—

And they go next. Slowly. She hooks her thumbs in the waistband and bends forward, sliding the material down her hips, over the smooth globes of her ass. Leave the bathroom, I order myself, when her thong is on fully display. But I’m glued to the spot. What man wouldn’t be with this fucking princess giving him a striptease, steam from the shower making her tits and belly and shoulders and cheeks dewy? Making her glow? Especially when the princess wears her underwear just this side of tight and when she straightens, kicking away her pants, there is nothing left to the imagination.

“That pussy might as well be out. I can see every little inch of it.”

She steps into the shower, letting herself get covered in warm water, and watching the thong get plastered to her sex, I start to pant, my hand tightening on the edge of the glass shower door. “If you want it out, make it that way,” she murmurs, her voice blending in with the pelting water, making this all sound like a dream. Yeah, a dream. Reality drifts further and further away as she soaps her body. Her chest and thighs and her panties. She soaps up that sweet mound right through the purple material and I lose it. My reservations hit the deck and I reach into the shower, wrap an arm around her waist, ripping her out of the stall with a growl.