COLE (Dragon Security Book 1) (22 page)

Kate

“She’s pretty,” I said, as we walked into the house.

“Who is?”

“Your girlfriend. Is she older than you?”

Donovan didn’t answer. He simply moved around me to grab a soda out of the fridge.

“Hungry?”

I brushed past him, kicking off my shoes and dropping my bag in the living room.

“Why do you feel this need to hide things from me?”

“Who said I was hiding anything?” He glanced at me as he cut open a bag of frozen vegetables, pouring half the contents into a saucepan. “There are just some things that I don’t feel you need to know.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re my client, not my friend.”

For some reason, that cut right through me. I spun on my heel and started for my bedroom, but then I turned around again.

“How can you divide things up like that? We practically grew up together.”

“We did.”

“And then you left—”

“—at your request.”

“It’s just stupid. You know everything about my personal life. Why can’t I know about yours?”

“Because that’s not the way this works.” He turned from the chicken he was cutting up. “I need to know about you because that’s the only way I’m going to protect you.”

“So we spend the next few days living together and I’m not supposed to ask personal questions?”

“You can ask whatever you want. I just won’t promise to answer them.”

He turned back to his work, tossing the diced chicken into the saucepan with the frozen vegetables.

“What are you making?”

“Stir fry.”

I shook my head, going to the stove and taking a sauté pan out of the drawer underneath. I grabbed his saucepan and tossed the concoction inside the new pan, pouring a little oil over the whole thing so that it wouldn’t stick.

“You have to give it all room to cook evenly.”

“Thank you,” he said, wiping his hands dry since he’d just washed them, ignoring everything I was doing behind him.

“Where’d you learn to cook? Or am I not supposed to ask that, either?”

“Ash.”

“Ash cooks?”

He glanced at me, catching the sudden interest in my voice. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk.”

I shrugged. “You can kiss women in front of my bank, but I can’t ask questions about your boss. That’s really fair.”

“I didn’t kiss her.”

“You did. I saw you.”

“She kissed me.”

“And that makes a difference?”

“It does to me.”

“Who is she, anyway?”

He was quiet again, clearly uninterested in quelling my curiosity.

I pushed the meat and vegetables around with my spoon, my anger stewing just like the food. “Do you make a habit of letting women kiss on you while you’re at work?”

“I thought we had this conversation last night.”

“Did we?”

“You seem awfully obsessed with my romantic life.”

I glanced at him and caught the teasing light in his eyes before he turned away, taking a long swallow of his soda. I found myself almost wishing I was that bottle. A stupid thought if there ever was one. But then my eyes moved over his hands, and I remembered how those hands felt on my skin, how the heat from his palm on my breast made me gasp once upon a time.

“You’re blushing again.”

“I am not.”

I turned my attention back to the food, pushing it off the burner.

“It’s done.”

He came up behind me to look, purposely pushing his body up against mine. But he was the one who was surprised when I turned and slipped my finger through the space between the buttons on the front of his shirt and tugged him a little closer.

“I think you like playing games with me. I think you like to keep me in the dark because you get off on the fact that I’m curious at all.”

“Who’s playing games with whom?” He brushed a piece of hair away from my eyes, his fingers lingering on my cheek. “One minute you hate me and the next you act like a jealous bitch.”

“You don’t know a bitch if you think—”

I never got a chance to finish what I was trying to say. He kissed me. Not a subtle, brushing of the lips, but a hard, passionate kiss that threatened to push me back onto the hot burner even as his hand came around my waist and caught me. I could feel his tongue against my lips, could feel him knocking and asking for entrance. And even though I knew I shouldn’t, I opened to him. I pushed myself up on my tiptoes and I kissed him back, my tongue dancing with his before he pushed it out of the way and made an exploration that was more thorough than any I’d experienced in a very long time.

I slid my hand up over his jaw and felt his muscles moving just under my palm. His hair was too short to bury my fingers in, but I could still hold him close, so much closer, even as my other hand wandered over his waist, sliding under his jacket to touch his denim-covered ass. His body was so tight, his thigh moving between my legs like a tree trunk. He pushed himself so close to me that I could feel the pressure of him against my throbbing clit, my skirt riding up along my legs to give him all the access he could want. As his hand slid over my hip, he gripped my thigh and pulled my leg up against his side.

I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d wanted to. There was something primitive about the way my body responded to him, something that overrode all the common sense that normally ruled my actions. My fingers curled and buried themselves in his flesh, pulling him close and refusing to let go. However, he clearly wasn’t as lost in the moment as I was.

“I’m sorry,” he said, letting go of me and stumbling backward. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

He glanced up at something high on the wall, clearing his throat as he stumbled back against the opposite counter. I followed his glance, but I couldn’t see anything. If there was a camera there, it was very small.

“Enjoy your dinner,” I said.

I rushed out of the room, grabbing my things and hiding away behind the closed door of my bedroom.

Fuck him!

If he didn’t want me, that was his problem. Not mine. I was beautiful. There were dozens of men who’d be willing to share my bed tonight. All I had to do was pick up a phone and call one of them. What did I need him for?

So why did I feel like he’d just crushed my heart under his heel?

***

I don’t know when I fell asleep. I thought I was never going to sleep. I watched a dozen episodes of
Friends
on Netflix, so many that my brain was beginning to feel like mush. It was sometime after I switched to cable and the lifetime movie of the week reruns that I finally drifted off, I guess. But I felt like it had only been a few seconds when I felt him shake my shoulder.

“Don—”

“Shh,” he said, pressing two fingers to my lips.

He was shirtless, but he had on a pair of jeans and sneakers. And a gun. He had a gun in his hand.

He tugged my arm and pulled me out of bed, his arm wrapped around my waist as he led me back down the hall to the living room. We were nearly to the garage and the SUV when I realized he was taking me out of the house wearing nothing but a shirt.

“Donovan, I don’t have any clothes on.”

He didn’t respond. He simply pushed me out the garage door and set me unceremoniously in the passenger seat of the SUV. Then he came around and climbed behind the wheel, pulling out of the garage so quickly that he probably left tire marks on the cement floor.

“Where are we going?”

“There’s a safe house about a mile from here.”

“Safe house?”

“There’ll be clothes there.”

He didn’t say anything else. And I was frightened enough not to ask anything else.

After a short drive, we pulled into the garage attached to a nondescript house in the middle of a street that sported dozens of nondescript houses. Donovan came around the side of the SUV and helped me out, keeping his arm around my waist as he led the way inside.

“We’re here,” he said. But it was pretty obvious he wasn’t talking to me.

The house was about the same size as mine. The kitchen was larger, big enough to sport a small table in the back corner. It was open to the living room, which appeared to be empty from where we were. And there was a small hallway that led to the back of the house, presumably where the bedrooms were.

Donovan led the way to the living room and directed me to a couch.

“What’s going on?”

“One of the motion detectors went off outside your house.”

“Someone was there?” I asked, starting to stand, but then realizing I really had nowhere to go. I sat back down, searching his face, looking for the fear that would send me into a panic. But he was calm, his eyes gentle as he returned my stare.

“David has a crew checking it out.”

“Shouldn’t he call the police?”

“If they find any evidence that someone was there. He didn’t pick anything up on camera, so it could have been a false alarm.”

“But you were concerned enough to drag me out of bed and bring me here.”

“You can never be too cautious in these circumstances.”

I sat forward and buried my face in my hands. I was fighting back the fear, but this…it seemed to make this whole thing seem a little more real. Before, it was just my dad being overcautious. But now?

“You should go change,” he said. “There’s women’s clothing in the bedroom at the back.”

I dragged my fingers through my hair and straightened up. “I’d rather just sit here for a minute.”

“We’re going to have company very soon. You should probably go change.”

I stood. “Come with me.”

His eyes moved slowly over me. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“I don’t want to be alone. What if someone was outside my house? What if they saw us leave, if they followed us?”

“No one followed us.”

“You can’t know that for sure.”

He hesitated, but then he offered me a hand. I took it and let him lead me down the hallway. There were four doors that opened off of the hallway. He stopped at the last and pushed it open, flipping on the light as he stepped inside. It was a large room, made larger by the fact that there were no furnishings. But the closet door was open and there were dozens of clothes hanging there of all different sizes, colors, and styles. It was like a storeroom for a retail store.

“Take whatever you want,” he said.

I clung to his hand a moment longer, not so much afraid of letting go as afraid that it might be the last time he would willingly touch me. What if they found the guy after me outside my house tonight? Then he’d be gone, he’d disappear just as I told him to do ten years ago.

“Kate?”

I turned into him, sliding my hand over his chest. There was a tattoo on his chest, just above his heart, that I hadn’t seen before. It was small, which was probably why, just two letters and a date.

I pulled my hand away as if I’d touched it to an open flame.

“Why do you have that?”

I felt him stiffen. His hands moved over my upper arms, a sort of caress that did nothing to still the battle that was suddenly going on inside my head.

My brother’s initials and the date of his death were tattooed on Donovan’s chest. There were no other tattoos, no other marks. Just my brother’s initials and the date of his death.

There was something wrong about that. Something that spoke to the impact of that event on Donovan that I’d never allowed myself to think about.

But this was the guy who set up the situation that led to my brother’s death. He was the one who put into motion a prank that he knew wouldn’t go well, the one who made it look like the most dangerous, most violent boys on campus had done it. He was the one who knew those boys would seek retribution. He knew they would likely show up to the beach party the majority of the graduating class attended that night. He knew my brother was there. Alone. Unprotected.

He had no right to grieve my brother. He killed him.

Yet…he’d lost his best friend with the events of that night.

I stepped back, shaking my head as I did, as though that movement would make my thoughts all line up and make sense. Donovan grabbed my arms again, pulling me around and pressing me up against the wall beside the door.

He made a little growling sound, like a groan that swallowed something he desperately wanted to say. And then his mouth was on mine, back exactly to the place it’d been when he pulled away from me in the kitchen of my house earlier this evening. I melted against him. I couldn’t help myself. As angry and hurt as I was, his touch just had this power over me that I couldn’t deny.

Was it wrong to want the man I blamed for my brother’s death?

I don’t know, but I couldn’t help myself. I ran my hands over his chest before wrapping my arms around his neck, pulling him closer to me, as I hooked one leg over his hip. He slid his hand along that leg, tugging me upward so that I was barely standing on my tiptoes as he held me up with the weight of his body. And then that hand slid further up the back of my thigh until he had my ass in his palm, his fingers seeking places along the edge of my panties that hadn’t been touched in much too long. I shifted my hips, giving him more access, wanting more.