Read Ramagos, Tonya - Running from Angel [Sunset Cowboys 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Online
Authors: Tonya Ramagos
Ramagos, Tonya - Running from Angel [Sunset Cowboys 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (2 page)
“What would you say if I told you I was simply out for a drive in the country?”
He leaned in the last fraction of an inch. The warmth of his breath fanned the fine hairs on her ear as he whispered, “I would say it’s awfully interesting that you came across my part of the country when Tennessee is full of wide-open spaces.”
She lost. Her body went all wonky and took every ounce of sensible thought with it as his scent of spice and confidence swamped her. The truth spilled from her on a heated sigh of erotic need. “I came out here looking for you.”
Doom never smelled sweeter.
Jacob closed his eyes and breathed deep. Herbal shampoo and female arousal wound through his system like a ribbon of silk and tied a knot around his balls. He had stayed away from her for well over a year. He kept the vow he and Mitch had made with the keen understanding that it had to be done no matter the personal cost, only to come across her in his neck of the woods today spilling sultry challenges and tempting him to distraction.
A smarter man would hit the ground running. He should head back to his truck and drive away without a second thought. He knew too much about her past, about himself, and about Mitch. Safety for each of them lay in the miles they had put between themselves and this woman. He should be leaving dust tracks in his efforts to put that distance back again. The town limits of Sunset were less than ten miles up the road. One phone call and he could have a tow truck out here with an able-bodied mechanic in twenty minutes flat to help Angel get on her way. Instead, he asked the question that would surely lead to disaster.
“Why?” His voice sounded gruff, animalistic even to his own ears. He pulled back to meet her gaze and found her staring at him through desire-filled dark eyes.
Her pretty pink tongue peeked between her lips, leaving a moist trail that glistened in the last dregs of sunlight, and his cock throbbed in raging demand. “Why what?”
When did the bashful, innocent Angel he remembered from those fateful moments turn into a siren seductress?
“Don’t toy with me, Angel.” He meant it to be a warning, but damned if he didn’t detect a certain amount of pleading in his tone. He needed backup. He needed Mitch. His buddy tended to be the harder one. He went for the women they shared with a no-holds-barred, no-room-for-argument attitude. He could manipulate a woman to the precise point they wanted her, uncover longings and needs she didn’t know she possessed, and move in to deliver the pleasure. No doubt about it, if Mitch was in Jacob’s boots right now, he would have Angel bent over the hood of her car with her sexy ass bare and ready for a good spanking after this little show of challenge.
Except after all she had endured, all she had escaped, they could never take her that way. They could never expose her to the thin rope they walked between sheer ecstasy and naughty pain.
“Why did I come looking for you?” She repeated his question with a flippancy that set off every alarm bell in his being. “Why are you asking something you already know?”
She relaxed in the cage he had created around her with his arms on either side of her hips. Before he could think to react, before he recognized the disaster about to unfold, he felt the last tenuous bit of space between them dissipate.
Angel’s body molded to his. Her soft curves settled against his harder planes. Her nipples beaded to sharp arrows that pressed at his chest and sent shards of unadulterated lust raining to his cock. In that moment, destiny took his balls in a tight fist with the surefire threat that it wasn’t the only part of him it intended to hold. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he didn’t stand a prayer in heaven of not touching her now. He pushed a knee between her slightly parted legs and rocked his hips forward, bringing his tormented cock flush with her flattened belly. Surprise flashed in her eyes, followed by a bolt of triumph that snapped the last thread of his control.
“I’m not coming to your rescue this time, sweetheart.” It damned near killed him before. Not just learning about the life she was struggling to escape, but being one of two men who had inadvertently put her on the right path to freedom, then turned and walked away. The gratitude that had masked the pain in her eyes had been tough enough to take. The promise of repayment that bordered on a convoluted sense of hero worship had been impossible to claim.
“Funny, it seems you already did.” Temper simmered in her tone, but the sultry seductress that possessed this new Angel in his arms didn’t surrender the fight. “Unless you’re thinking you’re going to leave me stranded here now.”
If Jacob didn’t know better, he might have thought she staged the whole thing. True coincidences didn’t happen often to his way of thinking, and this afternoon had been chock-full of them. Restless for reasons he couldn’t pin down, he had driven into town for supplies needed at the ranch rather than sending one of the hands or requesting delivery the way such business was usually handled. He had completed the errand sooner than he liked and stopped off at the Double Horn Saloon for a beer before heading back to the ranch. Timing put him traveling this lonely country road at a time when Angel needed him, same as it did fifteen months ago when he ended up at the Applebranch Mall for much of the same reasons, staring into the eyes of the woman who stole his heart and every bit of his sanity.
“What I’m thinking…” he drawled and lifted his thigh to her pussy. He swallowed a tormented groan when her hips started to move, grinding against the pressure. Hell, he couldn’t remember what he had been thinking! He started again, rephrasing the statement. “I’m betting you aren’t ready for the can of worms you’re opening, sweetheart.”
Challenge, unadulterated and fierce, turned her expression to one that would tease and torture him in his dreams for many nights to come. “Try me.”
Fuck
. The crude word settled in his mind with every possible definition lighting it like a neon sign.
“Right here, Jake. Right now. Try me.”
Jacob stilled her gyrating hips with a firm grip of his hands and stared down at her. Few things surprised him these days, but Angel Dalton was shocking him clean to his booted toes. She dared him to take what he wanted right here and now and damn the consequences. He almost did it. Only one thing kept his control in check.
“Not here.” He dipped his head a fraction and let his lips hover above hers. “Not now. Not alone.”
Chapter Two
Pretty eyes, freckles, and a mane of flaming-red hair made Mitch Dallas stutter. He couldn’t explain it and didn’t bother to try. Lucky for him, or maybe not so lucky, depending on the point of view, he rarely came across a woman with such gems in her genetics.
“What can I get you, handsome?”
Nothing close to what you want to give me
. Mitch settled on the barstool and regarded the bartender with a purposefully negligent look of disinterest. Misty Mathews topped the list of easy women in Sunset. Golden-red locks framed a freckled face with bright-blue eyes that might have made him stutter if it had all come naturally. He knew without a doubt the hair came from a bottle and suspected her true eyes hid behind colored contacts.
“Michelob ULTRA, bottle. I’ll open it myself.”
Misty’s siren-painted lips dipped to a disapproving scowl as she pulled a bottle from the nearby cooler and slid it, unopened, across the bar and straight into his hand. “Afraid I’m gonna slip some date-rape drug into your beer, cowboy?”
Mitch wouldn’t put it past her, but he didn’t say as much. He twisted the cap off the bottle and drank deep. “Nothing personal, just a preference.”
Misty braced her hands on the beer cooler peeking from beneath the bar and leaned forward. The pose offered him a clear shot straight down her V-neck T-shirt. Though he enjoyed big tits as much as the next guy, the view she so unabashedly gave him didn’t move him in the least. “And the cold shoulder you’re always snubbing me with, is that just a preference, too?”
“Naw, that’s personal.”
Colored contacts or not, anger still managed to turn the electric blue to a dangerous shade of gray. “You’re an ass, Mitch Dallas.”
“Maybe, but I’m an honest one.” That comment garnered him a snort that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. Mitch drained the rest of the beer and nudged the bottle toward her. “I’ll take another beer.”
“Unopened, yeah, I get it now.” Misty snagged another bottle from the cooler, slinging it like a pro across the well-oiled bar. “That way you know you’re safe from me pouring it over your head.”
Mitch nearly smiled at that. “Now you’re catching on.”
“So who is she?”
Leave it to a woman like Misty to decide his disinterest in her could only be blamed on his attraction to another woman. Trouble came in that he couldn’t claim she was entirely wrong. His hankering for a specific other woman had created a hell of a disinterest in any other female for far too fucking long. That didn’t mean he felt like putting the topic up for discussion.
“Don’t you have work to do?”
Misty’s brow winged up as she cast a cursory look around the nearly empty Double Horn Saloon. “There are barely twenty people in here tonight, and so far you’re drinking faster than any of them. Then again, Jacob is still ahead by two, but at the rate you’re going, I’m thinking you’ll catch up pretty fast.”
“Jacob was in here today? Was he alone?” Too late, Mitch realized how his question sounded after Misty’s previous accusation.
“Yeah, he was here and she, whoever
she
is, mind you, wasn’t with him either, if that’s what you’re asking.”
No, she wouldn’t have been, because the last Mitch checked the
she
in question was doing a damned-good job at building herself a new life back in Applebranch. “I was talking about his brothers. Royce and Clint weren’t with him?”
Misty scoffed. “You’re kidding, right? Even little brother Jacob can’t manage to get Royce and Clint Shelton out from between Taryn Aldean’s legs these days.”
Mitch figured he couldn’t argue that point, so he didn’t bother to try. It made him wonder, though, why his buddy Jacob set to knocking back a four pack on a weekday afternoon when the man all but swore off drinking after meeting Angel. He’d spent countless weeks attempting to drown his desire for a woman he couldn’t have in a vat of whisky and beer.
Angel Dalton. Mitch hadn’t been too far behind his buddy in his quest to find a different poison to counteract the effects of her. As innocent and scared as she was beautiful, turning away from her should’ve been easy. Damned if it hadn’t taken his moving to another city to regain some semblance of the sanity he left at her feet the day he walked away from her in the Applebranch Mall.
Because he never fully walked away. Staying in Applebranch, being in a position as a police officer that afforded him the opportunity to find out anything he wanted to know about her, kept the noose around his neck and cock. He had needed to know she would be safe, couldn’t sleep at night or function by day without being confident the bastard who hurt her was out of her life for good. And in watching over her, he only succeeded in ratcheting up his level of want for her more.
“You know, cowboy, a bartender sees things.” Misty tapped the bar in front of him, catching his attention. “You’ve had something stuck in your craw since you strutted back into town, and I’m thinking that same something’s got Jacob all hot and bothered, too. Nothin’ personal, sweetheart, but if it is a she, you boys are in a hell of a lot of trouble, ’cause she’s got you wrapped.”
Mitch’s frown deepened as Misty gave the bar another tap before sidestepping to tend to a new customer. He figured he probably deserved the sweetly veiled sarcasm after his own asshole-ish remarks. As for the rest, he would be damned if he would ever admit to being wrapped by any woman, let alone one he met for all of a half hour in a mall food court and kept tabs on for the better part of a year.
Silently cursing a blue streak, he pushed a hand through his hair and commenced downing beer number two.
“What have you been doing with yourself?”
Jacob Shelton moved with a grace few men possessed in a kitchen. Angel sat at the round oak table, her elbows propped on the surface in front of her, her chin resting in one hand, and simply watched him move. Oh yeah, she could sit like this for hours. She centered her focus on his back, on the light play of muscles at his shoulder blades as he moved his arms. She wanted to feel those muscles beneath her fingers. She wanted to dig her nails into his flesh as he pushed his cock inside her pussy. She wanted to claw her way down his back until she could palm his ass and pull him deeper, urge him harder inside her.