“Yet here you are with your hands on me,” she pointed out. “Pretty ballsy of you.”
“My brother was surprised you’d let me get this close to you with said balls attached. It got me wondering. What if?”
“What if what?”
“What if you like me touching you as much as I like touching you?”
I was close enough to kiss her. It would be easy enough to lean down and close the distance. To feel that smart mouth under mine and taste those secrets. Something about this felt so right. So fucking inevitable.
“All right. I’ll play. What if I do?” She had flecks of gold and topaz in those brown eyes that were sizing me up.
“What if you let me get closer?”
She quirked an eyebrow. “Exactly how much closer?”
I took half a step into her, bringing my body flush with hers. Every nerve in my body fired to life at the contact as if she were jumper cables and I was a dead battery.
“As close as you’ll let me. I don’t just want this, Angelina. I need this.”
“Are you saying you want me to be some kind of emotional support fuck?”
“I’m sayin’ I want to get as close to you as you’ll let me. The closer I get to you, the better I feel. Like right now,” I said softly. “I feel like I can finally breathe easy.”
She brought a hand to my chest and pressed it there. “That’s…a lot of pressure.”
“I know it,” I admitted. This wasn’t looking for a one-night stand. This was a quest for an anchor. Something I could hang on to in the storm. “Cards on the table?”
“Why stop now?”
“There’s a whole lot of reasons why you should say no. Not the least of which is I’m damaged enough to know there’s a chance I might not ever be right again.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” she said with a quirk of those soft, full lips.
I skimmed my hands up her arms and then back down just to feel the softness of her sweater, the warmth of her body. “Knox doesn’t want us anywhere near each other.”
“Too bad for him I hate being told what to do,” she said, bringing her other hand to my chest. She pressed it there and I leaned into the touch.
“I hate surprises and I don’t tolerate lies. Not even the little ones.”
“I despise boredom and routine. Some would even say I invite drama.”
“Until this summer, I was pretty set on finding a wife. Starting a family,” I confessed.
She let out a nervous laugh. “Okay. That one scared me a little. Now what are you set on?”
“Feeling alive.”
Her gaze locked on mine and it felt like the midday sun warming me down to my core.
“And you think I can help with that?” she asked.
My heart was beating strong against my sternum. An answering pulse echoed throughout my body, warming my blood, stirring my cock. “Angel, you already have.”
Her eyes went wide and I wondered if I’d gone too far.
“You’re not my type,” she said finally.
“I know.”
“I’m not planning on sticking around.”
“Got that too.”
“You just said you were looking for a wife, Nash.”
“I was. Now I’m just looking to get through the day.”
She blew out a breath that I could feel.
We kept getting closer and closer. Standing in the middle of her mostly empty apartment, we filled the space around us with heat. Her breasts brushed my chest, bare feet skimming the toes of my boots. My breath stirred her hair.
“Need to ask you something else,” I said.
“If it’s my mother’s maiden name and the last four digits of my social security number, I’m going to realize this is a really elaborate scam.”
I ran a finger down her sharp jaw. “Do you like it when I touch you?”
A shiver ran through her. “Why?”
“You know why. But I want you to say it. Cards on the table.”
Her face softened. “I don’t seem to mind when it’s your hands doing the touching, hotshot.”
“If that changes, I need to know. Immediately.”
She hesitated before nodding.
“Yeah?” I pressed.
She nodded again. “Yeah.”
I took one of her hands from my chest and slid it over my shoulder. Then I did the same with the other. She felt warm, alive, and so fucking soft against me. I shifted my weight to one foot, swaying us to the side.
“We can’t slow dance to the Struts,” she pointed out as the driving beat of “Could Have Been Me” thumped.
“Looks like that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
She let out a shaky breath. I brushed a fingertip to the pulse in her neck. Despite her calm exterior, her pulse fluttered under my touch.
“Is you monitoring your heart rate part of that near-death story?” I asked her.
She paused midsway, then bit her lip, looking uncertain for the first time I could remember. “I think maybe we’ve had enough honesty for one night,” she said.
I didn’t agree. But I was a patient man. I’d unravel every one of those secrets she held back until she was laid as bare as I was. I tucked her head under my chin, then slid my hands under the hem of her cardigan to touch the skin of her back. Breathing in the scents of shampoo and laundry detergent, I held her to me like she was precious cargo and swayed.
I was hard again. One thing was for sure, Lina Solavita knew how to make a man feel alive.
I was so focused on absorbing all the soft and warm she had to offer that Lina reacted to the knock at the door first.
“This shower curtain ain’t gonna hang itself, Chief,” Mrs. Tweedy bellowed.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
“I guess you’d better go,” Lina said, her arms slipping free of my neck.
“Guess so. Think about what I said?”
“I might not think about anything else,” she confessed with a wry smile.
Gently, I cupped her face in my hands and moved in. But instead of going for those full lips that parted when I was just a breath away, I pressed a kiss to her forehead.
“Thanks for the dance, Angel.”
TEN
SWEATING WITH THE OLDIES
Lina
Knockemout’s gym was like the rest of town: a little rough around the edges and a lot interesting. It was a long, low metal building with a gravel parking lot. At 7:00 a.m., it was respectably full of motorcycles, minivans, and luxury SUVs.
I’d spent a good portion of the night tossing and turning, thinking about Nash’s proposition. I wasn’t used to a man getting under my skin or into my head like that. I hoped a good workout would help me shake out the obsessive rumination about exactly how close Nash wanted to get to me. Or how close I was willing to let him.
I was tempted. Very tempted. It was exactly the kind of rush the old me would have jumped at. But wasn’t it time to break old patterns? To learn to make better choices?
Besides, if I let the man into my bed, he’d want to get close. And close meant I’d run the risk of Nash discovering my practically insignificant omission of the truth, which he would definitely view as an act of war. And this was why I didn’t do things that remotely resembled relationships.