“Thank you.” The words landed on me like a rough caress.
“Of course. When I told you I thought you might need a friend, I meant it. That means if you need me . . . I’m here.”
He nodded, though it seemed reluctant. As if he were crossing an invisible line by agreeing. “Okay.”
I nodded back, shocked that he’d yielded. “Okay. I’ll . . . talk to you later. Just”—I fisted a hand over my heart—“please let me know if you or Frankie need anything at all. I’d really like to know how she’s doing. I know I’ll be thinking about her all day.”
With that, I turned and headed for the door. I needed to get out of there.
Clear my head of the foolish ideas that had begun to spin. This foolish impulse to jump into torrid waters when I couldn’t see the bottom. To sate the churning need that prodded at my consciousness.
Most of all, I wanted to respect him. The space he so clearly needed.
But I had no idea how that was going to work when it was starting to hurt when I walked away.
12
Rex
I watched her escaping down the hallway.
At least, that was what it felt like. Like she was fleeing. Putting as much space between us as possible.
She should.
Maybe she was smart enough to run from whatever steadily built in the atmosphere whenever we shared the same space.
Ominous and powerful and unrelenting.
Her footsteps were swift, that silky mound of chestnut a complete disaster where she had it twisted high on top of her head. It left the creamy, delicate flesh of her neck exposed.
I itched, fighting against every single emotion I couldn’t allow myself to feel.
Fuck.
I needed her out.
Gone.
Away.
Where she couldn’t confuse, corrupt, and confound.
Where she couldn’t riddle my mind and tempt my hand.
Where she didn’t hold the power to squeeze between the cracks she continually chipped and etched into my spirit, like the exterior I’d built didn’t even exist. The girl eased into those spaces that were meant to remain closed off and shut down.
Not that it seemed to matter.
The tension only amplified the farther she got. Her footsteps grew fainter, but the space between them ignited a new kind of gravity.
Everything grew taut and tight and rigid. The air. My chest. My thoughts.
Drawing me in a direction I knew I shouldn’t go.
But standing there? I had no power. Because her scent still lingered around me, clouding my senses.
My mouth watered. Cherry and sugar. So goddamned sweet.
I was suddenly inundated with the way she’d felt against me two nights ago.
Her warmth and her comfort and that fucking insane body that made me lose my mind.
It’d been in that foolish moment when I’d given in to temptation when I should have been chasing her away. A single brush of her body had heated every inch of me. My cock harder than it’d ever been, desperate for a different kind of taste from the one she’d been offering. Fuck. How badly had I wanted to get lost in the slick heat of her tight body?
Every perfect curve seduction.
Every defined inch sin.
But it was the way she’d looked at Frankie when we’d rushed through the emergency room doors that had tipped me to uneven ground.
The floor crumbling from under me.
Logic shot. My feet were moving without my brain ever giving me time to calculate the consequences.
But right then?
I didn’t fucking care.
Didn’t care what this would cost.
I stalked down the hall and through the living room.
The air sparked with every determined step.
She was already down the porch steps by the time I caught her by the wrist, and she gasped one of those throaty, sexy sounds that shot straight to my dick.
Fuck it all, if that simple contact point didn’t ignite to an all-out boil. Heat streaked through my veins, eclipsing everything. Reason and sanity and judgment.
I whirled her around. In a second flat, I had her back pressed against the front of my truck where no one could see us. My fingers tangled in that mess of unruly hair, our faces a breadth apart. My heart stuttered when those innocent eyes latched on to mine, so wide and confused when she realized I had her pinned.
Just like me.
I crushed my mouth to hers, because I had no fuckin’ time for hesitation. I just needed to feel something different from the constant turmoil that raged inside. For just a moment, touch on something that felt like hope.
Even when I knew it was so fucking wrong.
On a sigh, she opened for me. Her lips so damned soft when they began to move with mine.
Sweetly.
Tentatively.
I coaxed and prodded, needing more. My lips tugged and nipped at the soft plumpness, my mouth growing hungrier with each desperate pass. Begging for the kind of reprieve I was terrified only she could give.
She gave. Her breaths turned ragged when I swept my tongue into the well of her mouth for a taste.
God. I was right.
So damned sweet.
I deepened the kiss. Taking more with each lick of my tongue. Or maybe it was Rynna who was stealing bits of me with each nip and tug of those full, full lips.
Lust.
It consumed me.
Blinding.
Constricting my cells and straining my muscles.
I pressed every rigid, hard line of my body into all her soft curves. Overwhelmed. Aching in a way I hadn’t in years. Like maybe if I got close enough things might not hurt so bad.
“Rex.” It was all a whimper when she sank her fingers into my shoulders, and her touch became just as desperate as mine.
Her kiss just as mad.
Her hands coasted from my shoulders down my arms, hitting my biceps where we were skin on skin. The contact burned in the most blissful kind of way, and I sucked in a shattered breath when she was pushing up under the sleeves of my T-shirt, fingertips tracing across the tattoo etched on my arm.
I groaned.
In pleasure.
In agony.
I didn’t know.
“Rynna,” I grated at her mouth. I cupped that bewitching face in my hands before I glided my palms down her neck and tipped back her head. “I don’t even fucking know you. How is it possible you have this kind of hold on me?”
The words were a jumble of incoherency. I moved my mouth down over her jaw. I was sure I was getting drunk on her breaths, getting lost in the crash of her heart that hammered with the thready beat of mine.
My hands trailed down that body. That body that had taunted me since the moment I’d seen her come barreling out of her grandmother’s door. I traced her shoulders, moving across the hollow of her throat, trailing down her chest.
Maybe I’d known it then. That this girl would wreck me. Because I could feel myself coming apart. Piece by piece.
She sighed a barely audible, “Yes.”
Fuck.
What was I doing?
But my dick was so on board, and all the reasons this was the damned worst idea I’d had in years went galloping into the distance.
I palmed one of those gorgeous tits, her nipple firm beneath the thin fabric of her tank.
She gasped and pushed harder into my touch.
“Shit,” I muttered. Maybe it was that very second that insanity took me over, because I didn’t care that we were outside. That someone might hear us.
Instead, I edged back to look at her where she writhed against the grill of my truck, her chest arching with her need for me, her lips swollen and sweet.
Everything shook around me.
An earthquake.
Trembling and cracking and crumbling.
I yanked down the collar of her tank and exposed her.
She was braless. Her tits just shy of a handful, skin so smooth, nipples a dusky pink and pebbled tight.
“Gorgeous,” I rumbled before I ducked down to lap at the peak, drawing her rosy nipple between my teeth.
She drove her fingers in my hair. Pulling. Begging. “Rex. Oh my God . . . please.”
I growled, my mouth moving upward through the valley of her chest, my nose nudging beneath her chin to grant me access to the snowy skin of her neck.
Her pulse beat an erratic, unsteady thrum.
I latched on to it. Sucking her flesh into my mouth as I slipped my hand down her side, over her hip, and down to her knee. I hooked her leg around my waist, all too quick to press my eager dick to the overwhelming heat that blazed from her pussy.