The Viper (Untamed Hearts #1)(25)

Now he was questioning all those good intentions.

Marcos had never done well with rules. If something tried to harness him, he almost immediately started pulling at the leash, fighting and snarling like a pit bull who’d been damaged by life.

He looked at his phone, noting the time and remembering he still had the police report from the accident in his glove compartment.

With her home address on it.

His mind was screaming at him, reminding Marcos of every sin he’d ever committed and comparing it to Katie’s nice, orderly life spent molding the minds of eager young people, helping them reach their highest potential.

Kids like Juan had been.

Marcos needed to keep his Boricua ass on that couch. Even if it meant Katie’s life was never anything more than safe and boring. Lord knew, boring was better than the alternative. The fast lane was cruel to everyone eventually.

Marcos, more than anyone, knew it.

But he got up and pulled on his jeans anyway.





Chapter Eight


Katie couldn’t get into the romance novel. She was high-strung and antsy. Lightning crashed outside, and she jumped as the storm raged and the rain tapped against the windows. She should curl up and go to sleep, but she couldn’t relax. She’d checked craigslist on her phone at least a hundred times tonight, even knowing Marcos would never reply that way.

He had driven from Florida to avoid it the first time.

And it was very hard not to be flattered over that fact.

Katie wasn’t one of those women like Ashley who got lots of male attention. She’d always been kind of invisible to them. Not bullied. Just completely unnoticed. Not fat, but certainly not thin. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Unbelievably pale, even at the height of summer. She didn’t have a big personality or an overly sweet nature. She didn’t cook very well, nor did she have a high-powered job.

Her feminine market value was low.

She didn’t scream good wife material any more than she screamed sex goddess. It was probably the reason she’d jumped on Grayson the second he showed interest in her wits, if nothing else.

It was also the reason things soured so quickly, because Katie wasn’t a doormat either. She wasn’t able to just put up with the bullshit to keep a man. Since her divorce, she’d grown used to the idea of spending her days teaching and coming home alone, knowing she’d eventually retire to her little house like spinsters did from days gone past.

She spent a lot of time wishing she were more creative. Women like that were supposed to knit, weren’t they? That wasn’t happening, so she considered buying a cat instead. She was too practical not to try to plan for a simple but lonely future.

Until Marcos had showed up and disabused her of all those notions.

She checked her phone again like a lovesick fool, knowing it was probably sad to do so. Nothing from Marcos, just a bunch of texts from Grayson. Each one was more desperate and annoying than the last. It seemed he was stepping up his game since the little incident in the parking lot.

This was starting to become a real issue. She wished he would date Ashley and just leave her alone. She was so tired of him.

Katie was still pondering it when her doorbell rang.

She was so distracted, she didn’t bother to remember that it was past one in the morning. In fact, she forgot everything that had kept her strung tight and anxious all evening.

She was thinking it was Grayson. It was the first day of spring break after all. That could motivate him to stay up past eleven, and his texts were borderline stalkerish.

She grabbed her robe off the hook on the bedroom door and tied it on to cover her nakedness, because she had crawled into bed earlier in nothing but a pair of pink lace panties. The boldness it took to post that invitation on Missed Connections left her feeling frisky, and sleeping naked was one of the small benefits of living alone.

And that was when it hit her all at once.

The Missed Connections post.

The pink panties, uninspiring when she thought of Grayson being on the opposite side of the door, felt totally different when she considered the other possibility.

She looked past the window in the front room, her heartbeat now throbbing in her ears, her legs shaky, a pulse of something hot and undeniable between her thighs. Through the rain, it was hard to see the vehicle in the driveway.

“Who is it?” she called, her voice caught between a rasp of hope and fear.

She wasn’t even sure what she wanted the answer to be. Grayson was annoying but safe. She could snap at him and send him on his way like she had the thousand other times he’d shown up at her door.

As for the other possibility…

“You know who it is, chica.”

Katie sucked in a startled breath, that combination of fear and lust slamming directly into her solar plexus.

Ohmigod. Ohmigod. Ohmigod.

He showed up.

What seemed like a great idea two glasses of wine into her bath, was a lot more terrifying when the possibility was looking her in the eye, and she was wearing nothing but pink panties and a shaggy blue robe she’d had since high school.

Her eyes were wide as she stared at the door.

“You don’t have to open it,” he said on the other side, his voice resigned rather than angry, as if he could sense all her fears in the silence. “It’s probably better if you don’t.”

That wasn’t very comforting.