Breathe (Colorado Mountain #4)(80)

“What does that mean?”

“It could mean a lot of things, honey. What it means most is that we gotta talk to this kid. He’s not registered in school. He’s not reported missing. He’s like a ghost and kids aren’t ghosts unless serious bad shit is going down. We gotta push the breakthrough tomorrow and get him talkin’. You gonna be up for that?”

She nodded immediately and Chace ran his hand up her back, pulling her closer as he did and dipping his face to hers.

“You gotta go gentle but you gotta get a good result. If you don’t, I’m steppin’ this shit up another way. We need him safe. We need him fed. So, it sucks, baby, but we need him in the system.”

She slid her bottom lip to the side and bit it. She often bit her lip. She often licked her lips. He’d learned to read why she did both. He didn’t see the slide and bite often but it usually meant she was either very nervous, feeling more than her normal shy or a little bit scared.

“He’ll be okay,” Chace assured gently.

She let her lip go and asked quietly, “What does stepping stuff up mean?”

What it meant was setting Deck on the kid. Deck would find him. Deck wouldn’t be outrun because he wouldn’t give up. And Deck would likely scare the shit out of the kid.

He didn’t tell her that.

Instead he said, “I’m still figurin’ that out. But we’ll hope we break through tomorrow. Yeah?”

She nodded.

Then she changed the subject.

“A professional?”

He shook his head and told her softly, “Police business, honey. Can’t talk about that.”

“The murder last night,” she guessed.

“Yeah,” he answered and she pressed in closer as her eyes went from holding his to studying him.

“That was unfun,” she whispered.

“It was but it’s also something I can’t talk about,” he replied.

“It brings up Misty,” she pushed and Chace sighed.

“Yeah, baby, it does.”

“You should –”

“No,” he cut her off.

She pressed in closer, opened those bubblegum lips of hers to say something and serious as f**k, she got closer, in his tee, with him on his couch, she pushed it, he’d give her anything she wanted.

So he had to shut this down.

“Give me this,” he said quietly and quickly she shut her mouth. “This day, with you after what you gave me last night. This one day, you and me and food and TV and champagne with the hamburgers I’m makin’ tonight and all of it good. All clean. All normal. All right. No Misty. No murder. No history. None of that garbage. Just us. You had what you had to give me last night to give once and I had it to get once. We shared that and it was beautiful. So let’s keep it beautiful, just us for a day. Tomorrow we can try to talk to abused kids and let the world back in. Today, tonight, give me,” he tightened his arm around her and finished, “this.”

“Okay,” she whispered immediately and he hadn’t even had to use the word “baby”.

Chace stared down into those blue eyes in that pretty face with those extraordinary cheekbones all of it surrounded by her fantastic hair looking up at him with warmth and understanding in her eyes and he knew in that instant he was falling in love.

Christ, he could have none of the beauty that met his eyes, her heart-shaped ass in his bed, the gift of her virginity and only have her giving in last night and just now when he needed her to and calling her folks to ream their asses about hassling him and it would have started happening.

But he had all of that and her being a geek, her imagination, her humor, her immense care for a kid she didn’t know and f**k him, he wasn’t teetering. He was halfway gone.

Ty and Tate had this. One was a brunette. One was a blonde. Neither of them were shy.

Both of them gave this.

Jesus. He got it.

And he had it in the curve of his arm.

Fuck, he wanted to make love to her.

Fuck.

He couldn’t without maybe causing her pain.

So he did what he could. He kissed her. He did it soft, he did it long, he got his hands up her shirt and she got her hands up his.

When he broke the kiss, he asked her softly if she wanted popcorn and to watch another episode of Psych. She grinned at him huge because she did.

Before they settled back in the couch with a bowl of microwave popcorn and cans of soda, he informed her she was again spending the night.

Not that it was a question.

But her answer?

She directed another huge-ass smile at him.

Then she whispered, “Okay.”

Chapter Eleven

Round Two

Six oh three the next morning

“Baby, wake up.”

I drifted out of sleep, my eyes opening and at what I saw, I was certain I was still dreaming.

Chace, sitting on the edge of the bed in a pair of those long, loose running shorts and one of those skintight running shirts that had the awesome stitching and a collar that went halfway up his neck, both navy blue.

How had I never seen this? I’d been avidly watching him for years. I’d even seen him run and this was on numerous occasions. He was usually wearing track pants and one of those tops with the half-zip at the throat (an outfit that was also awesome but not near as awesome as this one) or loose running shorts and a tee. Granted, if I got a look at him somewhere mid- to end of run, his shirt was plastered to him with sweat. Which, for Chace, was a good look.