Off the Map (Winter Rescue #2) (7 page)

Not her best moment either way.

She tossed Voodoo Scott into the corner, where he hit the wall with a satisfactory thunk. “I hope he feels that one tomorrow, the jerk.”

As if by magic—the dark, scary kind—her front door thunked one time in a similar way. She thought for a moment she was imagining it, that too much wine and not nearly enough human interaction was having its eventual effect on her, but the knock sounded again.

Her misery decided it could use the company, so she got to her feet and pulled the door open with a flourish.

“Hey, Carrie.”

Her jaw landed somewhere south of her knees. “Scott? What are you doing here?”

He didn’t look her in the eyes, which was her first clue that he’d been possessed by demons. As the alpha in his own little canine world, he had a freakish attachment to staring at people until they caved under his will. Her second clue was when he cleared his throat and spoke words that had never before crossed his lips.

“I came to apologize for last night.”

She slammed the door in his face and turned the deadbolt, her heart pounding all the way up to her throat. It was that stupid candle of Lexie’s that had done it. There had to be some kind of supernatural powers in there to make the wax smell so good. She’d tapped into those powers and claimed Scott’s soul. That was the only explanation for this.

Another knock rattled her body, but it was just Scott re-announcing his presence. “I deserved that,” he called, his voice only partially muffled by the wood.

“What are you doing here?” she called back. “Who sent you?”

“No one sent me. Would you just open the door, please?”

She wasn’t falling for it. The second she turned the knob, he was going to transform into an evil spirit and possess her—mind, body, and soul.
Just like he did last time.
“What’s our secret code?”

The sound of his forehead hitting the door in a gesture of exasperation was unmistakable. “We don’t have a secret code, Carrie. Just open the door.”

“Oh, we have a code. Maybe if you try
very
hard, you’ll remember it.”

Pause. “You mean that one?”

Yes. She meant that one—the one they’d come up with one playful night with a pair of handcuffs and two of Carrie’s silk scarves. The one they’d never actually had to put to use, because neither one of them was all that good at being submissive.

It was a mistake to introduce the subject, though, because the moment she let her thoughts wander down that path, there was no retrieving them. Her thoughts were much too independent for their own good. They frolicked and remembered. They tingled to think of Scott pretending to lose the key to the handcuffs and vowing to keep her chained to his bed forever.

He groaned, sending a jolt of desire through her. He must have been remembering, too. “Banana Nut Muffins.”

She snickered in spite of herself. “What’s that? I couldn’t hear you.”

“Banana. Nut. Muffins.” His words were no louder than before, and she could almost feel him tensing up through the solid walnut door.

“Nope. I didn’t quite catch that. Once more? For old time’s sake?”

“Banana nut muffins!” he practically roared. “There—is that better? You win. I’m a horrible person who deserves to have the door shut in his face. I’m the jerk who could stand out here yelling in your hallway for years and still not earn enough penance.” He paused, his voice sounding from a distance as he said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ralta, but it’s important this time. I know we promised we wouldn’t yell anymore, but this is a matter of life and death.”

Carrie didn’t envy him at that moment. Her neighbor across the hall was scary. As the mother of three rambunctious boys who spent most of their time expelled from school, that woman could scare a full SWAT team.

“C’mon, Carrie.” More sounds of a heated discussion in the background. “Let me in. Mrs. Ralta is threatening to use her kids’ baseball bat on me.”

She probably would, too. Carrie was tempted to leave him out there to face Mrs. Ralta’s wrath, but she recalled the sound of Voodoo Scott hitting the wall earlier and cringed. Okay. This was starting to get really freaky. She’d been taught from a young age not to believe in magical forces—her dad had never even bothered to stick a gift from Santa under the tree—but Scott believed it, and that was enough for her. Faith via proximity.

She pulled the door open.

“I should just leave you out here, you know.” She didn’t miss the shadows under his eyes or the scruff of a jaw that hadn’t seen a razor since yesterday, but she forced her attention over his shoulder. If she concentrated only on how gorgeous and grumpy and miserable he looked, she’d lose this thing before it even began. “Hey, Mrs. Ralta. Sorry for the noise. I’m not sure I want to let Scott in. He dumped me last week.”

That got the older woman’s frown to lift a little. She was raising those three boys all on her own after her husband walked out on her, so she probably loved a good woman scorned tale. “Did he now?”

“Yep. Do you want to know why?”

“That I do,” Mrs. Ralta said just as Scott hissed, “Carrie—can we please skip this part? Now isn’t the time.”

Of course it wasn’t. That was because she was the one holding all the cards for a change. She held his gaze, those dormant brown-black eyes sparking to a lively wrath, as she answered her neighbor.

“He didn’t know how to recognize a good thing when he held it in his arms,” she said, her voice clear. “Eight months of my life I gave him, and he failed to appreciate what kind of a gift that was.”

Mrs. Ralta just clucked and turned to re-enter her apartment. “None of them do, honey. None of them do.”

Scott grabbed her by the upper arm and practically dragged her into the apartment. She should have been outraged at being manhandled like that, especially coming so soon on the heels of what had been building up to be an apology, but it was the first time he’d initiated physical contact with her since their breakup.

It was impossible to go from constant touching—a gentle hand on the knee or a firmer one between her thighs, an early morning tug-of-war over the blankets ending in a late-morning tug-of-war of an entirely different type—to zero contact without there being a clear measure of intent. From the moment Scott stormed out of his laundry room holding the vest aloft, so furious he could have heated the entire block with the brimstone of his gaze, he’d made every effort not to touch her. It was if he knew even the whisper of his finger on her skin would unravel everything.

And it would. It did. It
was
.

“Why is it so hard for you to hold a conversation like a normal human being?” He managed to get them both inside with the door shut, but his hand was still on her arm, ruining her ability to come up with a clever and timely retort. Those five fingers pressed hard enough to make an impression but not cause pain. Those five fingers touched so much more than just her skin. “It’s like you’re trying to cause me the most embarrassment possible.”

“That’s because I am.”

“But I came here to apologize.”

“You came to apologize for yelling at me last night—not for the way you ended things between us. That gives me the right to retain my anger, should I so choose.” She glared. “I choose.”

He grabbed her other arm and pulled her close, his eyes still brimstone, his body warm enough to support an entire solar system of its own. Even though he’d come in from the cold, he only had on a long-sleeved flannel that he’d pushed up to his elbows, his jeans worn and faded in all the right places. How nice it must be to hold so much anger you walked around with a space heater in your pants.

“I’m sorry, okay? I was upset last night, and I said things I shouldn’t have. I was upset the day we broke up, and I said things I shouldn’t have then, too. I’m an asshole. You didn’t deserve to be treated like that, and I didn’t deserve you. Happy now?”

She should have been. This was the moment she’d been waiting for, the epic grovel, the man of her dreams holding her so tightly she couldn’t escape even if she wanted to. But this wasn’t real. It was a result of the voodoo magic—it had to be. She’d never seen a man less excited about either apologizing or holding her in his arms.

“I’ve been better,” she said. “I heard you apologize, but I didn’t really feel it, you know?”

He groaned and tipped his head back. “Do you want me on my knees? Is that it? Would that help speed things along?”

She pretended to consider it. “I do like you on your knees, but speed isn’t exactly the goal there.”

He dropped her arms and stepped back, a man walking away from a bomb. “Oh, no you don’t. Don’t you dare try to seduce me right now.”

“Relax, Scott. It was a joke.”

“If it was a joke, why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because that’s the normal position my eyeballs take when I’m in the same room as another human being.”

“It is not. I’ve seen your eyes around other people. You bat them and look adorable and do whatever you can to get your way—but you don’t look at them with that gleam.”

She had a gleam? Unable to help herself, she batted her eyes at him, basking in the idea that he found her adorable. She
was
adorable, but that was hardly the point. “I can’t help that I’m naturally alluring.”

“You’re naturally annoying—that’s what you are. Would you please let me finish apologizing now?”

“Oh, you weren’t done? By all means, don’t let me stop you. I’ve got no plans this evening. Take all the time you need.”

He glowered and tensed up even more, looking less and less sorry by the minute. “You could gloat a little bit less, you know.”

“I could, but I’m not going to.”

“This isn’t an easy thing for me to do.”

Nor was he particularly good at it. But all she said was, “If you wanted easy, Scott, you chose the wrong woman.”

“Don’t I fucking know it,” he said, and she was back in his arms. This time, he wasn’t pushing her inside the apartment—he was just pushing, period. Against her, against the foyer wall, his lips crashing into hers with the searing heat he carried inside him.

If she’d been prepared for the embrace, she might have had a fighting chance at stopping him. Not only did she possess a mean left hook when the situation called for it, but she also shared the agility of the rest of the SAR team, her body ready for situations of high intensity.

But it was too late for this particular brand of intensity. Her hands were against his chest, and she could have pushed him away, but what was the point? He was furious, and he was kissing her, and nothing was more intoxicating than those two things combined.

He knew it as well as she did. With a jolt, she found herself being slammed against the wall, her whole body tingling with the double sensation of force and desire. She didn’t have time to think too much about it as Scott’s mouth pushed deeper into hers, the red hot seething he normally kept at a simmer rushing to the surface with the slide of his tongue against hers.

It was a sensation she knew well and enjoyed thoroughly. Every ounce of his hard, compact strength had her pinned in place, his muscles so inflexible against her it was like being held by machine rather than man. It was the perfect position for him to take full possession of her mouth, his lips and teeth and tongue furious in their assault, punishing her and priming her at the same time.

“You’re such a bastard,” she said with a sound somewhere between a sigh and a moan.

And then it was her turn.

She curled her fingers in the hair at his nape, forcing his head up, and pushed one thigh between his to gain the physical advantage. Already growing hard against her, his erection finished the task it had set out to do, becoming a stalwart reminder of how much they both still felt for each other—at least physically.

Physical stuff was easy. Physical stuff required nothing beyond the requisite body parts and a general understanding of how to use them—and their body parts understood each other perfectly.

He groaned against her lips, sending her whole body vibrating. “God, I’ve missed you.”

It was all he had to say to send her blood pumping and her heart soaring. With the full force of her body against his, she pushed him toward the opposite wall.

He didn’t hit hard, and he didn’t seem to notice that they’d changed positions, but Carrie knew. She knew it in the way her entire body melted against him, chest to chest, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. She knew it in the way it was her turn to kiss him, taking out her fury in the taste of him, oddly sweet, almost like Lexie’s cupcake candle come to life.

Sweet, however, was the last thing she felt about the throbbing between her legs, an emptiness that hurt almost as much as Scott leaving in the first place. Determined not to lose this moment, she ran her touch up the flat plane of his abdomen, slipping one hand under the hem of his shirt so that the heat of his bare skin left a brand on her palm. With a tug, she had the button of his jeans undone, his cock so close she could practically feel the silky head under her fingertips already.

“Carrie, I—”

She kissed him harder. This tangle of tongues and lips wasn’t going to solve anything, and this urgent need to run her hands all over his body would only end in heartbreak. But she didn’t care. She was used to it.

With Scott, it had always been this way—even in the beginning, when he’d looked at her as though she was the best thing in his life instead of the worst. Every touch of their lips had been illicit, a mad-dash goodbye that started before they barely had a chance to say hello.

Which was for the best, really. Carrie knew a thing or two about saying goodbye.

Scott’s hands began taking on a life of their own, repeating her gestures so that his palm hit the soft skin of her belly and inched upward toward her bra. She moaned into his mouth and rocked her pelvis against his, encouraging him to continue along those lines, but, as always, Scott’s desires ran counter to hers.

Before he even got to second base, he groaned again. And this time, instead of telling her how much he needed her, wanted her, couldn’t live without her, he stepped back. The separation between them would have been absolute and complete, except he bound her wrists in his grip and held her there.