Riskier Business (Crossing the Line 0.5)(3)

“Troy?”

Immediately, he straightened. As if he hadn’t expected her to enter the bathroom behind him so quickly. As if she could wait. When he turned to her, Ruby’s chest went tight. Anxiety. Dread. Love. All three emotions waged a battle on his face. Then just as quickly, his expression went blank. He held out his hand to her, gaze tracking down her naked body slowly. Heating. Planning.

“Come here.”

She slid her palm over Troy’s, let him help her over the rim of the tub. Ease her against his hard body.

Using his hips, he pushed her back onto the slick wall, lips moving over her neck. “Help me take away the ache, baby. You know how bad it gets when I don’t f*ck you in the morning.”

Ruby wanted so badly to forget the look she’d seen on his face. The trepidation she’d witnessed. But her love for this man wouldn’t allow her to leave him hurting for some unnamed reason. To distract her with her one weakness. Himself. When he leaned in to kiss her, she placed a hand on his chest to hold him back. “Something’s wrong.” Her whisper was nearly swallowed by the pelting water. “Talk to me, first.”

His eyes squeezed shut, then opened slowly, containing a predatory glint. She couldn’t shake the intuition he was hiding something, but when he hit her with the full force of his magnetism, her thoughts tended to scatter. And he well knew it. “Talk to you?” His hands molded to her bottom and lifted, seating her on top of his slippery erection, levering her against the wall with the use of his hips. Ruby moaned, ankles automatically locking behind his back. “What would you like to hear? That my girlfriend has become my obsession? That I can’t think past getting inside her? Every. Single. Hour.” He punctuated each word with a devastating upward thrust, then kissed her hard, tongue moving over hers, claiming her. She felt his mood shift rapidly as his mouth ravished hers. From seductive to desperate. It sent warning signals to her brain. “I won’t let you go. I won’t let you go back to that,” he rasped. The kiss deepened briefly, fiercely. “Have to keep you safe.”

Somehow his words broke through the fogbank of lust, dragging Ruby back to where she could breathe. “Let me go, Troy? Go back to where?”

He buried his face against her neck, his chest rising and falling with rapid breaths. She wrapped her arms around him and held him close, trying to stifle her alarm and failing.

His tortured gaze finally met hers. “Your father is back in town.”





Chapter Two


Troy felt Ruby go completely still against him. Where seconds earlier she’d been wet and pliant, her body had grown stiff, her expression guarded. Reminiscent of how she’d looked the first time they’d met, when she’d been hustling for a living. When she’d been distrusting of everyone and everything. Especially a cop like him. That distrust had almost ripped her away from him. After his job and her criminal past bleeding together had caused her to literally bleed, he’d vowed never to let anything harmful touch her again. Here it was, though. Too soon. Right on their doorstep.

In a move that only increased his disquiet, her legs went limp, dropping from around his waist, her hips twisting to unlock their bodies. It alarmed him, this automatic shield she raised. As if he needed another reason to be f*cking anxious or worried for her safety. The safety he’d worked so damn hard to achieve. After leaving the pain of losing his best friend and partner behind back in Chicago, his fear of loss had been challenged by a pool hustler who never looked before she leaped. Ruby had finally met him halfway after months of compromise, and with the utterance of a single sentence, he felt it slipping away. If he didn’t think it would scare her, he’d have already put his fist through the bathroom wall.

Helplessness was a living thing inside him. Briefly this afternoon, he’d considered not telling Ruby about Jim Elliott’s return. One look at his rap sheet told Troy he could easily have her father picked up for some bullshit misdemeanor. He had outstanding warrants in several states, and had violated his probation by leaving New York in the first place. Troy could have used the threat of imprisonment to send Jim packing. Out of Brooklyn. Away from his daughter, who’d finally managed to get her life together despite her father’s atrocious parenting skills.

Ruby would have never been the wiser.

He’d picked up the phone several times to make the call, but ultimately couldn’t do it. If she ever found out, they might not recover from the betrayal. Trust was everything between them, and Troy wouldn’t violate it, no matter how much he hated seeing the strongest person he knew shrink before him when presented with her greatest weakness.

Her love for a man who’d neglected her, endangered her, then abandoned her.

“What…what did he want?” Ruby asked numbly.

Troy hesitated for a split second and she tensed, trying to move farther away. Visibly angry at him for even considering holding back. He gripped her arms and kept her still. “He wants to see you.” The words felt like they were strangling him. “He…it sounds like he has some sort of proposition.”

Tell her I’ve got an offer she’ll want to hear, specifically.

“Oh.”

Looking down at her shell-shocked expression, he wanted to rage at the unfairness of it. Since graduating from business school, Ruby had found an investor to get her custom pool cue business off the ground. It had taken off virtually overnight, her skill perfected by her own experience playing the game and connections she’d made with pool players over the years. After one of her designs was featured in a billiards magazine last month, an article he’d framed and hung in their bedroom, she’d been buried with requests for her unique custom designs. Troy was so damn proud of her, of everything she’d done despite the disadvantages of her upbringing. She’d finally come into her own. Now this news had swung in like a wrecking ball, threatening to dismantle it all.