After Hours (InterMix)(42)

I sighed. “Fine. Take me home, then.”

“As you command.”

I exited ahead of him, waiting on the sidewalk until he’d paid the tab and emerged from the bar.

He rounded the truck and stood by my door, but didn’t open it. His gaze said, Come here, and for no good reason, I did. He circled me, fairly pinning my body to the passenger door with his, staring down from a mile above me. No passerby would have any doubt we were more than colleagues, but all at once, I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything aside from his nearness and size and heat, my annoyance forgotten and excitement primed, but my face set in a willful mask of weary apathy.

“I thought about you when I got home that night,” he said, too gruff to be called a whisper, but too soft to be overheard. His breath warmed my skin and stirred my hair. “I stroked myself, tight and slow, with a palmful of lube, and thought about how good you’ll feel.”

My breath froze as my heart raced. I felt something I never had before—a wateriness in my legs as all of my physical consciousness drew tight in my belly, leaving my extremities to wobble and submit. I was weak in the knees. I’d always thought that was just an expression.

“I’ve put myself to sleep every night since the first time I took you here, thinking about you. About us.”

Ditto.

“Come home with me,” he murmured.

I felt my blasé façade falling to pieces. “No.”

Gently, slowly, he took my hand and slid it between us, cupping my palm around the length of his cock, hard as sin behind his fly. A dozen people could have seen, and still I didn’t care. I kept my hand limp—not that it mattered. He was in charge. He rubbed my palm up and down, making me measure him. If any other man on earth had done this, I’d have named it sexual assault and called the cops the second I broke away. But this was Kelly. And this was his f*cked-up, patented approach to seduction. And pathetic as it was, it was totally working.

“Not tonight,” I amended.

“Soon.”

“I don’t know.”

His hand went still, clamping mine tight to his erection. “You want this, same as me. You feel all this.”

All this, meaning his cock? No. All this as in, this force between our bodies, lust like ropes hugging us tighter, tighter the longer I resisted him.

“So what if I do?”

“What’s the harm in us hooking up? We’re both single adults. Why waste this?”

Why waste this?

Fuck. It was a bull’s-eye shot, an arrow sticking dead center, thrumming from the impact. It was an ace tossed out to trump my entire hand—my good sense and self-respect and professional standards all bested by three little syllables.

All I could manage to say was, “Not tonight.”

Kelly stepped back and guided me to the side with a big, warm palm on my waist, then unlocked and opened my door without ever taking his gaze off my face. I held his eye contact the entire time, though I doubt I took a single breath. I got settled, relieved to be off my shaky legs. Kelly slammed the door, then stooped, making a cranking motion.

I unrolled my window. He leaned his arms along the door, and pushed the lock down with a click.

“Not tonight,” he said. “But real soon, sweetheart.”





Chapter Seven


My schedule the following week was only thirty-six hours—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Unbelievably luxurious after my initial week, forty-eight hours in Starling plus another six completing restraint training on my so-called days off.

I dodged off-the-clock Kelly pretty effectively through our next two shifts. We saw each other in the hand-off meetings and around the ward, of course, but I ducked him during breaks and at Tuesday sign-out, dawdling in the nurses’ station with my paperwork until I knew he’d have left for the day.

Work itself was manageable. I played checkers with Lonnie no less than five times in those two shifts, and lost every game. Not on purpose, either. It was as if those thick lenses let him peer inside my brain and anticipate my every move. And the more he proved himself superior to me, the more tolerable I became. He even sat next to me at lunch on Wednesday, when he could easily have taken another seat.

At some point I’d made an interested noise at his mention of being a Vietnam vet and self-proclaimed historian of the war, and for better or worse, he’d started treating me like his one-woman lecture hall. It beat being a target for sexually charged pizza crusts, at any rate. And if the stories he told were true, it was actually proving a fairly interesting course. I took to calling him “Professor,” which seemed to please him monumentally, and he took to calling me “kid.” I’d have preferred “Ms. Coffey,” but it still beat “bitch agent.” Progress.