She drank it up, lapping it greedily inside herself. Okay. So she wasn’t insane. It really was him. He was here. And this was okay. The two of them staring at each other, talking to each other was okay. There was no prison caging them in. Caging him in. No alarm was going to go off. No guards would rush in.
Now what?
“I heard you got out.”
He cocked his head, his blue eyes glinting beneath the bright fluorescent lighting of the convenience store as he studied her.
“Congratulations.” Oh, sweet Jesus. Had she just congratulated him on getting paroled? Like it was his college graduation or something?
“Thanks.”
Her gaze flicked over him. He looked good in regular clothes. The dark T-shirt and worn denim did amazing things for his body. Hell. Who was she kidding? She had seen him without his shirt on. He would look amazing in just about anything. A burlap bag with armholes wouldn’t detract from his body or looks. “How are you doing? You look well. I mean . . . are you well?” Awesome. Apparently she forgot how to talk.
“I’m good.”
“You’re working?” She winced. Now she sounded like his parole officer.
He angled his head, his eyes narrowing slightly as he nodded. “Most nights. I’m helping run my family’s place. Roscoe’s.”
She’d driven past the roadhouse bar just outside of Sweet Hill before. Rows of bikes were always parked out front. She knew it was an institution in these parts, but it had a rough reputation. It wasn’t the kind of place she would hang out. Not that she frequented bars in general.
“Good.” She nodded dumbly. It dawned on her then that she could say the thing she had wanted to say that day she showed up in the HSU and learned he had been paroled. The two simple words.
“Thank you.” There. She said it.
He simply stared at her. Looking at her so blankly, so stoic. The same way he had looked at her when he was inside the prison. Hell, maybe he didn’t even recognize her. That was a kick in the face. Frustration bubbled up inside her.
“I said thank you,” she repeated, her voice a little clipped.
He nodded slowly. His hair was a bit longer. Still short, but the dark cropped hair did not quite hug his scalp anymore. “I heard you.”
He was still cold. A damned robot. Was that all he would ever be? All he was? Disappointment bubbled up in her chest. She thought she had seen something in him . . . when those bullets had ripped through glass and he had thrown his body over hers, she thought there had been something between them. A connection that ran deep.
A man didn’t do that for just anyone, right? She had been so certain she had seen something more in him. Heat in his gaze as he was hauled away from her in the HSU.
She had thought he would say something in that moment if he could have. Touch her. Claim her like some warrior after a near miss with death . . .
God. She was reading too many romance novels to have such fanciful thoughts. This was reality. Not fiction.
She swallowed back against the hot lump clogging her throat. “I just wanted you to know that.”
“Okay. Sure.” He turned then and headed for the cash register, dismissing her like she was no one. Just some stranger. Not anyone that he had a bond with. Not anyone who mattered.
Watching him walk away felt like a slap in the face. Yeah, he was free now. Why would he want to waste time on her?
It took her a moment to make her feet move again. He was walking out of the store, not a glance over his shoulder for her as she stopped at the counter and paid for her ice cream.
The guys were still loitering in front of the door when she exited. Their gazes fell on her. The one that had tried talking to her earlier was ready for her. He pushed off one of the cement posts he had been leaning on. “Whatcha got? Some ice cream? I like ice cream.”
Rolling her eyes, she turned to head for her car. She definitely wasn’t in the mood to suffer some delinquent’s awkward attempts to hit on her.
Her eyes burned and she wished she had just stayed home. She wished she had never seen Knox Callaghan. Her last memory of him in the infirmary had been better than the memory of him turning his back on her at a convenience store. Almost to her car door, she fumbled with her keys to push the unlock button.
“You shouldn’t stop at convenience stores so late at night.”
She jumped and swallowed back a squeak, dropping her keys. She hadn’t even seen or heard him approach, but Knox was at her side, towering over her.
He glanced behind them and she followed his gaze, noticing that the boys were closer, the burrito-wielding guy who claimed to like ice cream hovering at the lead. They’d actually been following her toward her car, and she hadn’t noticed. She was too upset over her run-in with Knox to even pay attention.
The boys stopped and looked between her and Knox.
Knox adjusted his stance, bracing his legs and looking even more imposing. He nodded once at them. “S’up?”
The leader of the group eyed him. “Nothing, man.”
“Yeah? Then turn around and keep walking.” Knox stared hard at him, his blue eyes flinty, his jaw locked tight.
The boy sank his teeth into his burrito almost defiantly and turned around, walking stiffly back to his post at the front of the store, his two friends sticking beside him, casting shifty glances at Knox.
Knox faced her then and she realized they were standing really close. Closer than they had ever stood before. The top of her head barely reached his chin. “Uh, thanks. I’m sure I didn’t have anything to worry about, though. This is a pretty safe neighborhood.”
His lips twisted. “Never know what you’ll run into late at night at a gas station.” His head dipped a fraction closer and she felt his breath on her cheek. “You could even run into a dangerous felon.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You trying to tell me I should be afraid of you?”
He released a short huff of laughter as if that was the dumbest question in the world with the most obvious answer.
She lifted her chin. “Well, I’m not.”
The laughter faded from him. His gaze flicked over her face, taking in all of her features, scrubbed free without so much as lip gloss. “You should be, Nurse Davis.” Yeah, he was definitely annoyed with her. “I’m still that guy you knew behind bars.”
“Yeah. I remember you. I remember what you did for me in there, too.” She moistened her dry lips and her stomach tightened, clenching as his stare dropped down, watching the slide of her tongue. She was suddenly tempted to take the ice cream she purchased and roll it down her overheated throat.
He moved in suddenly and the air sucked out of her in a hiss. Until she realized he was only bending to retrieve her keys. Not to touch her. Not to do anything else.
He held her keys out for her to take. “Don’t confuse me with some hero. I’m as tarnished as they come.”
She opened her hand, palm up, and his fingers brushed her skin as he dropped the keys into it. He started to turn to go.
“Why did you do it?” she whispered so quietly she wasn’t sure he heard her. “Why did you save me?”
He stopped and turned back. Another huff of laughter. “Hell, who knows why I did it? Just a whim. Who’s to say I’d even do it again?”
“Liar,” she challenged, something prickly hot spreading through her chest. She didn’t like his words. She refused to accept them. Refused to believe that they might be true and she was wrong about him. “You’d do it. For me. For Josiah and Dr. Walker. For anyone who was working in the—”
“No. You’re wrong.” His eyes drilled into her, moving left and right as they stared into her eyes, and he inched closer, invading her space, the immense size of him eating up all the air between them and filling her up with his heat. “I did it for you.”
Then he was gone. A stinging curse burned on
the air in his wake. He left her gaping after him, her heart pounding like a drum in her chest.
She stalled from sliding into her car, the small carton of ice cream sticking to her fingers. She adjusted her grip slightly, feeling brittle sheets of ice slide between her skin and the cardboard carton. It was cold in her hand but she felt so hot and achy that it felt good. She was actually tempted to roll the carton against her feverish cheeks, her throat . . . lower.
Panic welled up in her as she watched his retreating back. She shifted on her feet, certain that if he left now, she would never see him again. No. She couldn’t have that.
Sucking in a thick breath, she called out to him, “Knox!” Her voice rang out louder than she expected, and even to her ears there was a hint of desperation to it. Need and want. Her face burned hotter.
He stopped several yards away, not quite to the gas pumps yet where he had left his pickup truck. He turned to face her, his deep-set eyes almost black across the distance.
His expression revealed nothing. Impassive as ever. But just this sight of him—that hard warrior body that seemed to belong to another time, when men wore chain mail and armor and knocking heads was a part of every day—pulled at something deep in her belly and gave her all the encouragement she needed.
She had seen him in action. Quick and deadly as a viper. Fighting to defend and protect her with a searing intensity that she had never seen before. Or felt. And she had felt it. Felt him. Just as she did now. His gaze felt like a physical stroke over her body. Heat rippled over her skin.
She couldn’t forget that day. It wasn’t the horror that stayed with her. It was the memory of him. His raw power. His brutal beauty. The way his entire body had been a weapon. She wanted that weapon. She wanted him to turn it on her. To unleash himself on her.
She didn’t even know if he thought about her that way. If desire for her even entered into this thing—whatever it was—between them.
Tugging her cardigan tighter over her T-shirt, she held out the carton like it was some kind of proof, evidence that she was merely asking for something safe and innocent. Like sex was the farthest thing from her mind. She clung to it like the excuse she desperately needed it to be. “You like Cherry Garcia?”
THIRTEEN
YOU LIKE CHERRY GARCIA?
She voiced the question so innocently, as though she was asking him over for ice cream on a Sunday afternoon. Like he was some loafer-wearing choirboy from her church youth group with nothing on his mind beyond first base. It had been years since he stepped inside a church. He would likely go up in flames if he even tried.
He stared at her in front of the open door of her car and read the mortification gleaming brightly in her big eyes. She shifted on her feet, waiting for his response. It took everything in her to ask the question. He knew that right away, but he still couldn’t bring himself to answer her immediately.
It was a game. The question was whether he would let her play it. Let her pretend asking him over for ice cream wasn’t any invitation to fuck.
He didn’t do games.
Knox eyed her in her baggy T-shirt, her toes curling self-consciously in her flip-flops, wondering if maybe, in fact, she didn’t know what she was doing. Maybe she didn’t realize that he was the wolf and she the lamb. That inviting him over meant he was going to devour every inch of her.
He studied her wide eyes and shifting feet and decided, yeah. She didn’t know. Not fully. She couldn’t. She couldn’t fathom what she was inviting on herself. She probably thought they might kiss. Make out a little. As though that would be enough to satisfy the hungry beast prowling inside him, pawing at the gate, ready to be unleashed so that he could do all the dirty things burning through his mind.
“Yeah,” he heard himself answering, even though he had no idea what flavor Cherry Garcia was. “I like it.”
He couldn’t not go. He wasn’t that good or honorable. He wasn’t that strong. If she wanted to play with a wolf, then that’s what she would get.
The cold truth was that he had gone too long without a woman.
He had turned down other women since he got out. Working at Roscoe’s, he’d had plenty of opportunities. At the end of a work week, everyone was looking to blow off some steam with a quick, meaningless fuck. But no one had tempted him. No one felt right. After living in a drought for almost a decade, he didn’t want to feast on a crummy P&B sandwich. He wanted steak.
And Briar Davis was that. She’d filled his thoughts since the first time he saw her. This unattainable gem, too bright, too expensive, too good for the likes of him. Even when he got out of prison he had thought about her. He still fucked his hand like he was stuck in that concrete hole with visions of her running through his head.
Turning the corner and seeing her in that convenience store aisle had been like entering the seventh circle of hell. Seeing her. Confronting the one thing he had convinced himself he couldn’t have. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Even though he was a free man, he wasn’t free enough to have her. He’d never be that free.
She bit her bottom lip and something exploded in his gut. A deep, visceral reaction that made him want to leap across the distance and take that lip with his own teeth. Take her. He steeled himself with a hard breath, clenching his hands into fists at his sides.
“Would you like to come over for some?” She held out that damned ice cream again and nodded in direction of the town house complex he had passed before stopping for gas.
He nodded once. Before she changed her mind. Before he changed his. Good girls like her didn’t invite felons over for ice cream. Apparently she missed that memo.
“Great,” she said all breathy and with forced brightness. “Um. Just follow me.”
He watched her for a moment as she got into her car and reached for her seat buckle. Then he turned and made his way to his pickup, climbed inside and started the engine. It almost felt like a weird out-of-body experience. Like he was watching someone else follow this nice clean girl back to her apartment. Killers like him didn’t get invited over for ice cream.
But she knew what he was. A smart girl like her, she had to know. She knew his hands were dirty, his thoughts dirtier. Even if she only guessed at a fraction of his thoughts when it came to her, that was enough to send her running in the opposite direction.
But she was still inviting him over.
He flexed his hands on the steering wheel and waited a moment before shifting into drive. He followed her onto the road and turned left, then waited as an electric gate slid open for them. She must have a remote opener in her car. They passed through a brick entrance and around several buildings until she parked in front of a rock fence. This late, most of the parking spots directly in front of the town houses were occupied. People were snug on their couches, watching reruns. He had to park several spots down from her car. She waited on the sidewalk for him, holding her small pint of ice cream that had to be softening in the warm night.
She still wore that smile. The sweet one that looked strained and uncertain. It almost made him turn around and leave. Almost. If he wasn’t such a selfish bastard.
She led him up a set of stairs and his gaze fixed on the shape of her legs in her skintight yoga pants. Her loose T-shirt and cardigan drifted up enough that he could see the bottom of her ass and the upside down V of her inner thighs meeting her crotch.
His mouth dried and he bit back a groan when she reached the top of the stairs, taking the sight away. Her baggy scrubs had always covered her up. Except that day those fuckers tried to rape her, ripping off her pants, and he had seen all that peaches and cream skin . . . including those little panties and the shadow of hair beneath the pale pink cotton that hid her sex.
He shoved the memory away. It felt wrong to remember her like that, in that moment. That knowledge of her, the sight of all that skin and the soft texture of her thighs under his rou
gh hands, was a stolen thing. He didn’t have a right to that. It was tainted.
He hated having seen her like that, but he couldn’t unsee it. He couldn’t fully chase it away or keep the memory from bursting in on him like a flash of light in the darkness, an unwanted intruder as he stroked himself off in the shower or his bed at night.
She let him inside her home, gesturing at the cozy space with a wave. She’d left the television on and a show he didn’t know played on the flat screen.
“Have a seat.” She nodded to the couch. Slipping out of her cardigan, her hands shook a little as she dropped it on the back of the sofa. “I’ll make us some bowls.”
It was his turn to feel uncertain as she left him alone in her living room full of nice things and entered the kitchen. He rotated in the small space, the wood floors creaking under his weight as he noted the soft, clean colors. Pewter-framed photos of some cute kids sat on a wood media table beneath the flat screen attached to the wall.
Knox stepped closer to examine the images, noting the parents standing proudly behind the children. The mother was a bit heavier than Briar, but she was young and bore a strong resemblance to Briar. He guessed they were sisters. They had the same fresh girl-next-door-faces and curly hair.
He heard the sound of a cabinet closing and the clink of glass. “Would you like a drink, too?” she called out. “Water . . . I have beer, but I don’t guess that actually goes well with Cherry Garcia.”
He followed her voice, moving silently into the kitchen. She was scooping ice cream into bowls on the counter, her back to him. He studied her for a moment, the soft skin at her nape and the copious amount of coppery-brown hair piled into some messy concoction on top of her head.
He approached, stopping an inch behind her, not touching, but she stilled anyway, sensing him at her back. She didn’t turn around, but he heard the change in her breathing. The shallow rasp. Like she couldn’t get enough air.
His chest tightened as he absorbed her warmth. Even this close, it was like a current connected them. All of him felt coiled and ready to snap like a contracting spring.