Obsession Untamed (Feral Warriors #2)(18)

She watched him pace, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides like a man struggling to contain his temper. He was trying to get control. The realization slammed into her. The last thing she needed to do was make things worse by running again.

She forced herself to wait as she watched him warily. The streetlight filtering in through the sheer curtains played over his broad, bare chest, tripping in and out of the shadows created by the muscular definition. Scars, like claw marks, tore across his right nipple while a gold armband snaked around one thick upper arm. Even in the dim light, the man was a walking wet dream.

If she weren’t so wary of him, she might have enjoyed watching him. With his long legs, trim waist, and sculpted upper body, he was truly a feast for the eyes.

Minutes passed as he paced, the tension slowly leaching from the air.

“Do you follow football?” he asked, at last.

Delaney blinked. “No.”

“What’s your favorite television show?”

Her brows puckered with disbelief. “Why?”

An animalistic growl rumbled deep in his throat. “Your fear sets me off, and I want your mind off it.”

Delaney scowled. “I’m not afraid.” She didn’t show it. She knew she didn’t show it.

Like a cat about to spring, he swung to face her, his body rigid. “Don’t lie to me! I can taste it. No one else would know, but I know. You can’t hide it from me.”

He couldn’t possibly taste her fear. That was ridiculous. But it was hardly a leap for him to guess that she was afraid. Any sane woman would be under the circumstances.

He returned to his pacing. “What’s your favorite television show?”

Were they really going to play this game? “The news.”

He scowled at her. “Lame.”

His response inexplicably pricked her pride. “I don’t have time to waste on mindless shows.”

He stopped pacing and turned to her. “Your work is your life to the exclusion of everything else, isn’t it? You don’t even own a reading chair.”

“Excuse me,” she huffed. “What I do is important. I perform a valuable service to society by getting the monsters off the streets.”

The man snorted. “You’ll never get the monsters. You don’t even know what they look like, little girl.”

Delaney ground her teeth together, clamping her mouth shut before she said something she shouldn’t. Something that would make him even madder, turning a bad situation so much worse.

The man stopped his pacing and started toward her. “You’re pathetic, you know that? You got your life back, but you don’t even know how to live it, do you?” There was an ugly taunting quality to his voice that infuriated her. “You’re so hung up on your mother’s death you aren’t even living. Do you think this is what she’d want? You spending your entire life searching for her killer?”

She stared at him, shock vibrating through her body. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true. Oh God, of course it was true. “How…?”

“I heard you talking to the cat. It wasn’t much of a leap. You’re living an excuse for a life. You don’t even own a sofa or a picture that isn’t a crime-scene photo! Your life’s a joke.”

She felt as if her chest were caving in and at the same time exploding from the force of her fury. Damn him. Damn him.

She lunged to her feet and rounded on him. “You son of a bitch. How dare you judge me. How dare you?” She struck at his knee, a move that should have knocked even a man his size off his feet.

Yet faster than she could blink, she found herself flat on her back on the bed. Again. Blast it. She fought him, struggling with every ounce of strength she possessed. This was too much. Too much.

She reached for his sunglasses, intending to dig her fingers into his eyes and blind him, but he reared back out of her reach before she touched them. He grabbed her wrists and pulled them over her head, pinning them. Then he landed on the bed beside her, rolled onto his side, and pinned her legs to the mattress with one hard thigh.

“Let me go!”

“So you can claw my eyes out? I don’t think so.”

He grabbed her jaw with his free hand and kissed her.

She bit him. The taste of his blood ripped her back to her senses. Stupid, Delaney. Stupid, stupid move to risk setting him off again.

But to her amazement, he laughed, the sound rich and warm. Disturbingly nice. Then he bent his head and placed a kiss on her temple as gentle as a raindrop and lifted his head to look down at her, licking the blood from his lip.

She stared at him. “I don’t understand you.”

A half smile lifted his lips. “I’m not surprised. Fortunately, I do understand you.”

She grunted with disdain. “Hardly.”

“I know just how to make you mad, don’t I? And anger is so much more pleasant than fear, isn’t it, brown eyes?”

He leaned down to kiss her cheek as she stared at the darkened ceiling, speechless.

“You meant to make me mad?”

“It worked.” She heard the shrug in his voice, then shivered as his tongue stroked her ear.

But her anger only spiked all over again. At him for saying the things that had cut her to the quick. And at herself for letting them bother her so much she’d lost control and tried to attack him again.