Lady Luck (Colorado Mountain #3)(2)

So there I was, waiting for a soon-to-be ex-con to walk out of prison.

I sat in my car in the hot sun, no breeze flowing through my opened windows thinking that it seemed like I spent a lifetime doing this kind of crap to steer clear of shit. It was exhausting. I was tired of it. Bone tired. And scared. Because I knew the odds were against me that I could stay clear of it. With Shift in my life and my number on his phone, someday, he’d need me to do something and it would be something where I’d get hit with shit.

I had to get out.

I glanced at my watch to see it was twelve oh seven then I glanced down the tunnel again and something was moving through the shimmers. That path was long and the heat on the day was immense so I didn’t see much but something made me keep watching.

And as the thing moving through the shimmers formed into a man, I kept watching as my breath started sticking in my throat.

Then the man kept getting closer, coming into focus through the heat waves and my breath grew shallow as my body got still.

I didn’t blink. I didn’t move. I just watched that man coming at me and my car.

Then he got even closer and my body moved for me. I didn’t tell it to move, it just did. Without taking my eyes off him, my hand reached for the door handle, released it and I unfolded out of the car, losing sight of him only when the roof was in my way for less than a second.

Shit.

Shit, shit, f**king shit!

He was huge. Huge. I’d never seen a man that big. He had to be six foot five, six foot six, maybe even taller.

His shoulders were immensely broad, the wall of his chest was just that. A wall. His h*ps were narrow, his thighs enormous. He was muscle from neck down, pure, firm, defined muscle. I saw it through his skintight black t-shirt, his tattooed arms, his jeans that tightened on his thighs as he moved.

His hair was black and clipped short on his head, another tat drifted up his neck.

His jaw was square and strong. No stubble. Clean-shaven. His brow was heavy, his eyebrows black, arched and thick but the left one had a line through it, a scar that matched the smaller one under the eye.

But this scar did nothing, not one thing, to mar his utterly perfect features. Strong, straight nose. High, cut cheekbones. Full lips. His eyes were shaped like almonds, turned slightly down at the sides and ringed, even when he was the width of my car away, I could still see, by thick, curling black lashes.

That said, his face, though sheer male beauty, was blank. Scary blank. Expressionless. Completely. His eyes were on me standing in my opened door watching him round the hood and turning with his movements. But there was nothing in those eyes. Nothing. Void.

It was terrifying.

Ronnie and Shift didn’t hang out with good people. There were the dregs of society but even dregs had dregs and the dregs of the dregs were who Ronnie and Shift hung out with. Again, it didn’t happen often but it wasn’t like I hadn’t come into contact with some of these people. And I didn’t like being around them but I learned a long time ago to hide that.

But this man, Ty Walker, was something else.

I did not think he was the dregs of the dregs. Or even the dregs.

I just had no idea what he was except downright terrifying.

I made an almost full circle as he cleared my door and walked a half a step in, pinning me between him and the car and I had to tilt my head way, way, way back to look up at him.

It was not an optical illusion, a trick of the heat waves. He was tall and he was huge.

And also, his eyelashes were long and curly.

Extraordinary.

I’d never seen eyes that shape, lashes that thick and curly. I’d never seen any single feature on any living thing as beautiful as his eyes.

He stared down at me with his beautiful but blank eyes and my only thought was that he surely could lift one of his big fists and pound me straight through the asphalt with one blow to the top of my head.

“Uh… hey,” I pushed out between my lips, “I’m Lexie.”

He stared down at me and said not a word.

I swallowed.

Then I said, “Shift wants a call the minute you’re out. I, uh…”

I stopped speaking because he leaned into me with an arm out and I couldn’t stop myself from pressing my back into the car. But he just pulled my cell from my hand, straightened as he flipped it open, his gorgeous eyes staring at it as his thumb moved on the keypad. Then he put it to his ear.

Two seconds later, he said in a deep voice that I felt reverberating in my chest even though he was three feet away, “I’m out.”

Then he flipped the phone closed and tossed it to me.

Automatically, my hands came up and I bobbled it but luckily caught it before it fell to the asphalt at our feet.

“Keys,” he rumbled and I blinked.

“What?”

His big hand came up between us, palm to the sky and I looked down at it to see his black tats and the veins sticking out on his superhumanly muscled forearm.

“Keys,” he repeated.

My eyes went back to his beautiful ones.

“But… it’s my car.”

“Keys,” he said again, same rumble, same tone, no impatience, no nothing and I got the sense he’d stand there all day fencing me in and repeating that word until I complied.

I swallowed.

Hmm.

I was thinking I didn’t want to spend the whole day in the hot sun having a conversation with a mountain of a man where his only contribution was one, one syllable word.