Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(16)
“I think you are going to have a much harder time pretending you like me than I will pretending I like you, Detective. Have you considered that?”
He balked a little and lifted a hand to circle his fingers around my wrist. I wondered if he felt my pulse kick at the touch.
“I do whatever it takes to get the job done.”
Oh, I bet he did. I smirked up at him and lifted up on tippy toes so that our lips were almost touching. I expected him to recoil, to back away in haste, but he didn’t. Instead his tongue darted out to lick across the curve of his bottom lip, and I almost groaned out loud.
“Prove it.” I whispered the challenge and then held my breath to see what this scary, sexy man would do once the gauntlet was thrown down.
He didn’t disappoint. He never did.
Chapter 4
Titus
PROVE IT.
Those odd, dark blue eyes flashed the challenge at me and I couldn’t resist it. Not the challenge or the girl. I didn’t like that she got under my skin. I hated that she was right at the center of this mess with Roark, and it really, really grated across my already taut nerves that even with no makeup on and looking like she hadn’t slept a wink, she was still the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen. I didn’t want to notice that. I didn’t want my dick to twitch when she touched me¸ but it did, which was going to make pretending to be infatuated with her easy and so much harder at the same time. She knew it too.
Prove it.
Okay. I would prove the shit out of the fact that I could do what I had to do in order to make this scheme of mine work. I could pretend to like her, which really was the only thing that would be fake. I couldn’t reconcile the way my pulse leaped every time she turned that midnight-blue gaze on me with the fact that she had orchestrated a man’s murder. She was beautiful but she was also deadly. She was just as hard as this place we came from, and I’d had enough of the city hammering against my foundation, as it was. Lusting after a woman who had it in her to be just as cold, and just as calculating, as any other criminal I locked up on a day-to-day basis was nowhere for my head to be while I was on the brink of war with her deranged ex-lover.
I was pissed off when I bent my head toward her. I was mad at myself. I was mad at her. More than all of that, though, I was furious that either one of us had to be in this situation in the first place. Every time I turned around, another bad thing or bad person was nipping at my heels. It was getting harder and harder to stay a step ahead. Eventually I was going to trip up and go down and there would be no one left with any kind of conscience in this place, no one left that cared about justice and righteousness.
That anger had my hands shaking as I reached up and used my thumbs to tilt her head back so her mouth was pointed up at me. I didn’t have much time to date, didn’t have the patience for a woman who didn’t understand that I was trying to save an entire city from itself and that my job took up most of my attention and energy. The women I did date were never the right height, or the perfect size, and they sure as hell never looked as luscious and as tempting as this woman did. No one had ever fit me the way she did and that pissed me off even more.
Everything about her was a test of my will. The way her dark eyes flashed when I lowered my head toward her parted lips. The way her hand trailed up my chest to curl around my neck as I got closer and closer. The way she breathed out a soft little sigh that tickled my mouth when I finally touched my lips to hers. It was supposed to prove a point. It was supposed to be an act of defiance, and maybe it was for a split second, but then it was nothing but a kiss and I forgot who she was and what it was supposed to be about. After that half a heartbeat I just wanted to kiss her and keep on kissing her until both of us were naked, and I was balls-deep inside of that perfect, traitorous body of hers.
Her mouth was soft, which was a lie because she was not a soft woman. She tasted sweet, which was also a lie. She might look like a dream and taste like dessert, but I knew there was a lot of tart underneath that pretty outer shell. Her tongue darted out and the very tip of it touched the center of my bottom lip, and before I could consider what I was doing, I was kissing her like I kissed a woman I wanted, not like a woman I was trying to resist.
I had my hands tangled up in her long hair and was using that leverage to back her against the flimsy door in the hotel room. She hit it with a little gasp of surprise and I took full advantage of the way her lips parted to dive right inside. I wanted to devour her. I wanted to eat her up. I wanted to stay in this moment where all I could feel was her heart thudding against mine and her nipples hard and tight against my chest. The way her mouth moved on mine made it so that there was no world that was falling apart around me. There was no city on the brink of ruin that I felt responsible for, there was just this woman whimpering as I forced her legs apart with my knee and stroked her questing tongue with my own.
I felt the bite of her fingernails cut into the skin at the base of my neck. I felt her hips arch up to meet mine when the fullness between my legs lined up perfectly with the softness between hers. It was almost scary how well we meshed together. I wasn’t a small guy and often felt like I had to rein myself in when it came to the opposite sex. I didn’t want to intimidate or come across as threatening, but with Reeve I didn’t have to worry about it. She took everything I was throwing at her and returned it in a way that had me letting the leash I kept on all of my frustration and aggression slip a little. Things deep down inside of me roared and awoke from where they typically slumbered. She didn’t even seem fazed that I still had my gun clipped to my belt, where it felt like it permanently lived. She kept her hands up around my shoulders and let me ravish her like she was my last meal and I was a dead man walking. I had never felt starved for anything in my life until my lips touched hers.