Wilde at Heart (2 page)

“No, my sister would kill me.” Shelby’s voice carried a permanent sensual rasp, the kind of voice that brought to mind twisted sheets and writhing bodies, and it worked on him like a drug, making him jones to hear her speak again.

Jane-slash-Jenna finally noticed him standing there and skidded to a halt. “Sorry, we’re closed. You’ll have to come back after the holiday.”

Shelby glanced over at him, at first uninterested, but then she did a double take and grinned. “It’s okay, Jana. Hey, Suit and Tie.”

Jana. Right. That was her name.

The older woman scowled. “You know him?”

“Yeah, and if I had to guess, he’s my babysitter for the night.” Shelby sighed and met his gaze. “Did Eva send you?”

Fuck, no. Eva would castrate him—slowly—if she knew he was here, but he wasn’t about to lay it all out on the line in front of an audience. “She thought someone should give you a ride.”

Shelby lifted a brow and he realized a half second too late how sexual that had sounded. He added, “Home. A ride home.”

“Of course she did.”

Stephanie made a face. “I don’t know why you let your sister boss you around like this. You’re a grown-ass woman.”

“I owe it to her,” was all Shelby said in reply, then shooed the two women toward the door. “Go on. I’ll see you girls in a few days. Happy New Year.”

“Same to you,” Jana said and left, still scowling at Reece as she passed.

“Happy New Year,” Stephanie chirped, but then paused halfway out the door. “Don’t forget I start student teaching on the fourth, so my availability’s going to change.”

“I’ve already left a note about it in the office so I’ll remember when I start the next schedule.”

“Thanks. You’re the best.” With a flirty wave at Reece, she followed Jana out. Shelby crossed to the door and waved as she clicked the lock into place then flipped the sign from
OPEN
to
CLOSED
.

“So,” Reece said, searching for a way to break the awkward silence. “They made you a supervisor?”

“Don’t sound so surprised.” She moved from window to window, drawing down blinds over the glass. As soon as the last window was covered, she whirled to face him, hands on her hips
. “Are you stalking me, Rolo?”

He made a concerted effort to relax his jaw before he broke his teeth. “My name is Reece.”

“It’s all candy to me.” She lifted a shoulder and breezed past him. “Do you honestly think I haven’t noticed all the drive-bys? And, c’mon, you used to be a one-coffee-a-day guy. Now you’re here at least three times a day.”

“Maybe I need the extra caffeine.”

Her nose crinkled. “You do look exhausted all the time, but I doubt caffeine will help with that. You should go on a vacation.”

“I don’t take vacations.”

“
Humph
. You really should. You need to pull that stick out of your ass before it does permanent internal damage.”

He closed the distance between them. “You have no fucking clue what I need.”

She paused on her way back to the register and glanced over one shoulder, eyebrow raised. Her piercing glinted in the overhead light with the movement. “Wow. That sounded like a threat. Or…was it a promise?”

Dial it back
, he told himself. He stopped, still a good five feet away from her, and released a pent-up breath. “I’m only here to give you a lift home.”

“Uh-huh.” She opened the register with a key and took out the cash-filled tray. “Well, I have some things to do first, so make yourself comfortable.”

She took the tray and credit card receipts into the back room. He waited a handful of moments and debated his own intelligence before he finally followed. Of course he was going to follow. He couldn’t seem to
not
follow this woman. As if he were a dog and she were his mistress in control of his leash.

And, okay, that thought should not have lit him up like a damn light bulb.

Jesus, he was a sick fuck.

He found her at a desk in the office behind the kitchen area, counting out the day’s bank deposit. Her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth in concentration, and the sight of the pink tip peeking from between her purple-painted lips was somehow both adorable and insanely erotic. For a second, he could only stand there and fantasize about all the things that tongue could do to him, and the room grew uncomfortably warm. He loosened his tie, tried to find a train of thought that was less…explosive.

“Uh, you seem to have settled into the life of a responsible adult.”

She held up a finger in a classic
hang on
gesture and finished counting, then wrote down the amount and stuffed the bills into a plastic deposit bag. She dragged her tongue over the flap and sealed it closed, then smirked up at him. “Word of advice, Hershey. Insulting me is not the best way to get into my skirt.”

“It’s Reece. And what makes you think I want into
your
skirt?”

Her gaze dropped pointedly to the front of his trousers. “That boner you’ve been rocking since you walked in wasn’t enough of a clue? Unless you’re just
really
turned on by coffee. In that case, weird. But to each his own.”

Reece shifted on his feet and, as unobtrusively as possible, folded his hands together in front of his body. At that moment, he kind of wished he’d melt into the floor, because the heat burning across the back of his neck almost surely meant he was blushing. And he
didn’t
blush. Goddammit. “It’s not…uh, I-I’m not…”

“Oh, you mostly certainly are, sweetie.” Standing, she gathered the deposit bag and turned to the wall safe behind the desk. Once the money was closed inside, she propped herself on the edge of the desk and studied him, amusement dancing in her eyes. “You’re cute when you’re flustered. I like that about you.”

“I don’t get
flustered
.”

She raised a sculpted brow and the hoop there glinted in the overhead lights. Her expression said it all—
the hell you don’t
—and frustration roared through him, chasing away the embarrassment. Nothing ever went smoothly when Shelby was involved. Nothing was ever easy, and if he had any goddamn sense left in his head, he’d bail out now.

Instead, he dropped his hands to his sides and stalked forward, not entirely sure what he planned to do until he caged her against the desk with an arm on either side of her body and crushed his lips to hers. He just couldn’t stand not knowing if her kiss was as spicy as her attitude. And, holy fuck, she
ignited
in his arms as if he’d set a match to her. Fingers raked through his hair, nails dug half-moons into his scalp. Even though he was the one who had her caged, he suddenly felt trapped, captured.

Never breaking contact with his mouth, she pulled herself up to sit on the desk and used his tie to drag him into the spread vee of her legs. His mind scrambled through all the reasons they shouldn’t be doing this.

She was Eva’s little sister.

Cam would kill him.

They were in her boss’s office…

And his body was saying
who the fuck cared?
He needed her out of his system. He needed to be able to think straight again and not like a teenager with his first crush. Most of all, he needed her to scream his name. His
real
name, not the stupid candy-themed nicknames.

He broke away from her lips and went to his knees in front of her, trailing his hands from her hips to her knees and then back up her inner thighs.

She wasn’t wearing panties. Why did that not surprise him? And she was all slick and soft and she moaned when he parted her, slipped a finger inside. Her inner muscles clenched, and he liked the tremble that shook through her body. He added a second finger, watched her head fall back and her nipples bead against the fabric of her tank top. He smiled before adding his mouth to the action, tasting her, circling her clit with his tongue until she finally cried out something that might have been his name. He couldn’t tell with the roaring inside his head and his own body about to combust—

Shit. What was he doing?

He jerked away from her and, panting, stumbled several steps back.

“Reece?” His name came out on a surprised gasp. “What’s wrong?”

Jesus. What wasn’t? This was all wrong. His attraction to her and…everything. “I should…leave. Yeah. I’ll go.”

She was leaning back on the desk with her thighs parted, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, but at his words, she bolted upright. “
What?
”

He still tasted her on his lips, and it took far more willpower than he imagined to walk the six feet to the office door. “Go home, Shelby. This never happened.”

“What?” she said again.

“This. Never. Happened. And it won’t happen again.” He couldn’t look at her as he stepped into the kitchen. Ran trembling
hands through his hair. Took a moment to gather himself…

And only then did he notice the smoke, stinging his nose with a strange burned coffee scent. Thick and black, it billowed along the ceiling, poured in from the front dining area, where he saw the dance of fast-moving yellow flames.

Jesus, no wonder he was dripping sweat. He hadn’t heated up. The room had.

“Fire!” He whirled to grab Shelby from the office, but she was already behind him. Fear chased away her indignant expression, and her complexion drained of color, leaving her so pale her faded purple lipstick stood out in stark contrast.

She raised a hand to her mouth. “Oh my God.”

“Where’s the nearest exit?”

She pointed across the kitchen to a spot on the far wall. Where the smoke was heaviest, naturally.

“Yeah, of course it’d be there.” He stripped off his suit coat and wrapped it in a makeshift bandana around her face, tying the arms behind her head.

“Wha—what about you?” she sputtered.

He untucked his button-down shirt and lifted the front to cover his mouth and nose. “All right?”

She shot a glance at the thickening smoke and firmed up her shoulders. Nodded. Her show of bravado would have been convincing if he didn’t feel her trembling when he closed his hand around hers.

“Stay low. We’ll be out of here in no time.”

Chapter Two

T
he walk to the fire exit seemed endless, each step taking them deeper into the blackness, until Reece shoved open the fire exit and pushed her out ahead of him. Shelby’s eyes and lungs burned, scoured raw by the smoke that rolled from the door behind them, thick and black. It seemed to reach out and wrap itself around them as if it planned to drag them back inside to their deaths.

Her heart was trying its damnedest to swan-dive out of her chest. When she saw those first dark tendrils creeping across the ceiling, she had never been more frightened in her life. Which was saying something, since she’d landed herself in some pretty scary situations over the years.

But the whole time, Reece never let go of her hand, and she drew strength from the connection. It calmed her. Allowed her to function past the fear that threatened to paralyze her. If she had been alone, she honestly didn’t know if she’d have made it out of the building
.

Across the street from The Bean Gallery, the shock finally caught up to her, and she lost her footing on the ice-slickened sidewalk. Reece was right there, his arm a solid weight around her waist, keeping her upright. She tilted her head back, stared up at him through blurry eyes. His tidy white dress shirt was no longer tidy or white, and soot streaked his face, coated his hair.

“I have you,” he said softly and tightened his grip.

Reece Wilde—genius, workaholic, millionaire muckety-muck—had
her
, the girl from the way wrong side of the tracks. And he wasn’t just slumming it for a night like she first suspected. Oh, no. Because if that was the case, he wouldn’t want to be publicly associated with her in any way other than through their siblings’ upcoming marriage, and he’d be outta here before the fire department showed. Instead, he looked as if he had no intention of leaving. Which maybe was a good thing since he was all but holding her up at the moment.

No, tonight hadn’t been about slumming. Had it been his clumsy attempt at…courting her? He was just that type of guy to court a woman, all hero with a core of pure goodness and solid honor. He was the type of man to stick around. His freak-out in the office when she would have let him do just about anything to her on that desk proved as much, made her realize how uncomfortable he was with the whole idea of a slam, bam, thank you, ma’am.

So, yeah, he’d stick around. Maybe for good, which kinda scared the hell out of her, because she didn’t do permanent anything. Except for her tattoos, but that was different, because they were the storybook of her life, the forever-present reminders of her mistakes and her triumphs. But in every other aspect of her world, she was completely, 100 percent anti-permanent. Hell, even her hair color changed every other week.

Reece was the human equivalent of tattoo ink. She was henna.

But for a moment, with his arm around her and the heat of his body easing her shocked shivers, she did wonder…

Oh, no. What was she thinking? She so wasn’t about to rehash
Pretty in Pink
with him. For one thing, he didn’t need her kind of trouble in his life.

She shrugged out of his arms and turned to watch the fire eat away her one chance at a normal, straight-and-narrow life. Smoke and flames roiled from the broken front window and blackened the outside brick. She rubbed her hands over her eyes and only then did she realize his suit coat was still wrapped bandana-like around the lower half of her face. She yanked it off and scrubbed away the tears that made her vision go all wavy.

Dammit, she loved that place. Had put her heart and soul into it. And now it was gone.

A siren wailed somewhere close by. The firefighters were on their way, which meant her sister, detective extraordinaire, wouldn’t be too far behind. And along with her sister would come Reece’s brother.

“You should go,” she told him, still staring at the flames. “We both know Eva didn’t send you here tonight. You’ll catch hell from Cam.”