The Other Man(22)

“Missed you, too, sugar,” he rasped, pulling my face closer to his.

I gritted my teeth, pissed off by his attitude, and more pissed off by my body’s increasing reaction to it.  “Really?” I asked archly, a sarcastic bite in my tone.

“Really.  It’s going to be a rough night for you.  That little kiss out on your porch has gone and pissed me off, so I’ve got some frustration to f*ck out of my system.  But first, I need you to wash your mouth out.

Who did he think he was, telling me what to do?  If anything, it should be the reverse.

I was pretty much old enough to be his mother.

He set me on my feet, and I backed away on unsteady legs.

I went to my bathroom, bending over the sink to brush my teeth, but only because I thought it was fair.  I’d want him to do the same if he’d just been kissing some other woman.

My eyes shot up as he gripped my long hair, wrapping it around his wrist once, twice, slamming his hard-on against my ass.

“You can’t even begin to know how screwed up it was for you to kiss Dair like that.”

I blinked at his reflection in the mirror, spitting out my toothpaste.  A chill ran through me.  Fear.

“How-how do you know his name?” I gasped.

He gave me one of his cold smiles, his eyes scary, even while he kept rubbing against me from behind.

“I know a great many things about you and your life, Lourdes.  And there’s a thing you should know about me.”

I didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know.  He was really freaking me out now.  But it seemed called for.  “What?”

“It’s unwise to rile me.”  He reached his free hand around me, cupping my sex crudely.  “This is mine.  It will go much better for all parties involved if you stop questioning that.”

My body was throbbing, but it was a distraction I didn’t want right then.  I wanted to focus.  He didn’t get to say a thing like that and not explain himself.

“How?”  My voice was a hoarse whisper, but I got the word out.

“How is it unwise?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, voice gaining strength.  “How do you know ‘a great many things about my life’?  How’d you know his name?”

“I told you I work in security.” He paused.  His fingers never stopped moving, rubbing, stroking.  “It’s part of my job to,” longer pause, “vet anyone I might be,” longest pause of all, “seeing.  And also, anyone they might be seeing.”

I mulled that over, or tried to.  He shoved a finger inside of me, but I still managed to tell him, voice as firm as it could be with a quaver in it.  “I’m not okay with that.  Don’t do it again.  It’s an invasion of my privacy.”

He pulled his finger out, both of his big hands going to my hips.

He gave me a pretty scary look for that.

I knew it should have made me more scared.  All of this should have.

So why didn’t it?

It was becoming clear to me that infatuation could trump caution.  Lust like this overrode my instincts, making them hazy, distant.  I couldn’t focus on them, let alone heed them.

Heath was just too distracting to me.  Even now, when I was angry and more than a touch frightened of him, all I could focus on was how he was reacting to me.

He had all of these little tells I was starting to notice, ones that told just what level of pissed off he was.

Nostrils flaring.  Teeth clenching, followed by his jaw flexing were pretty typical.  But tonight, with him more pissed than I’d ever seen, he was doing all of that and added into the mix was him biting his lower lip like he just couldn’t help himself.

Perverse as it was, and in spite of myself, a part of me kind of loved it.  It was hot.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said in a soft growl that somehow almost managed to be a croon.  “You heed what I said.  You keep away from Dair, and I won’t pry into your business anymore.”

“Him specifically?” I asked, baffled by it.  Did he have a problem with Dair in particular?  Or was this jealousy a more generalized thing?

It would have been much better for my ego if it were the latter.

“Him specifically.  Stay the f*ck away from him, okay?”

Apparently it was not.

“It was not okay to—were you—were you actually spying on me?”  I barely got the question out.

Barely kept the line of thought in my head.  One of his hands had gone to grip into my hair, pulling, while the other snaked back down to my sex.  He pushed two big fingers into me, working them in and out at a rough rhythm.

He was distracting me, deliberately, blatantly.

And, damn it all, it was working.

What I’d just learned should have been the brakes.

I was old enough to know the difference between an intriguing man and one that was f*cked in the head.

“You’re upset,” he noted.  The way he said it, something about his tone, told me that he hadn’t expected that, like me being upset about being spied on was totally out of left field.

“You’re crazy, you know that?” I spat at his reflection.

He didn’t disagree, instead bent down and put his lips to the nape of my neck.  “To say the least,” he murmured into my skin.