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  He’d gotten that about her from the very beginning, which was what made him so dangerous. If she let him in, really let him in, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to kick him out in the morning.

  His hard length pressed against her core, a rock solid reminder of exactly what she needed right now, a momentary escape with someone who knew the score. Nothing more. “Are we going to flirt or fuck?”

  “Babe, I’m going to rock your world.” His palm skimmed the outside of her thigh, sliding under her skirt until he cupped her ass and squeezed with just the right amount of pressure to send a delicious shiver through her.

  Oh my God, she couldn’t think when he touched her like this. Hard. Demanding. Promising exactly what she knew he could deliver. “That’s a big promise.”

  “Like I said before…” His long fingers curled around the back of her lace thong, pulling the material taut against her wet folds. “I’m a big guy, and you know I always deliver.”

  …

  If it killed him, Cam was going to deliver on that promise. He didn’t have much to offer a woman. He was a junkie’s kid with a questionable moral compass. He didn’t have a plan for tomorrow, let alone the rest of his life. And he sure as shit didn’t stay in any relationship longer than a month or two—but he could show a girl a good time and distract her from her troubles. Everyone had a talent, and that one was his. He’d never been so glad about that as he was at this moment with Drea.

  He released the lacy gold strip of her thong, used his hands to anchor her against him, and turned around. In two long strides, he crossed over to the dining room table, where he laid her on her back across the wood like a dessert to be feasted upon—and feast he would, until she forgot about all of the awful things that had happened today.

  He slid his palms up each of her strong thighs, pushing her skirt up until it bunched around her waist and showed off her gold lace thong. The sight of her spread out before him, wet, willing, and wanting, elicited something primal within him—almost territorial.

  He brushed his thumb along the material’s center, slowing each time he brushed touched her sensitive clit. The sound of her soft moans hinted at what was to come. There’d be more than quiet ecstasy before he was done. “Do you want to know what I’m going to do to you?”

  “Yes.” The single word came out as a tortured whisper.

  “I’m going to taste every single inch of you until you can’t think about anything else but how good you feel.” Sliding his fingers upward, he hooked them into the elastic band of her thong and slowly inched it down until they it to the floor. “Then I’m going to do it again.”

  He kneeled before her, then encircled her ankles and lifted her feet to his shoulders. The position gave him the perfect angle to touch her everywhere.

  She lifted her hips off the table, urging him forward. Tempting didn’t even begin to describe the moment, but he wasn’t letting her off the hook that fast. He turned his head and traced a path with his lips across her dark skin, from her ankle to her knee. Her breath quickened, and her hands fisted on the table, but from the tension in her muscles, he could tell she was still thinking about today.

  Time for a change up.

  He flicked his tongue across the underside of her knee in the one spot guaranteed to make her scream—but not in ecstasy.

  She bowed and yanked her long leg out of his grasp. “Dammit, you know I’m ticklish there.” She laughed, and finally, her face softened.

  “Really?” He pulled her leg back in place across his shoulder. “I’d totally forgotten.”

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  “I guess I’ll just have to make it up to you.” He lowered his mouth to her wet folds before she got a chance to make a snarky comeback, and she let out a throaty moan. Sometimes a surprise was just what she needed—he knew it even if she didn’t.

  Soft and warm, she melted beneath him even as he pushed her closer and closer to exploding. Sucking. Licking. Tasting every bit of her. It was the only mission that mattered. Drea wasn’t the only person lost in the moment and trying to forget. Her fingers threaded through his hair and pulled him closer to her core. He swirled his tongue around her clit, then increased the speed and pressure, matching the undulations of her hips until she came against his lips.

  He watched the rise and fall of her chest as she came back to reality, and it struck him just how different she was from the women he normally dated.

  It wasn’t that she was black—he was the United Nations of dating.

  It wasn’t that she was smart—empty heads never did it for him.

  And it wasn’t that she didn’t take shit from anyone—a little sass made the chase so much sweeter.

  It was something he couldn’t nail down. Something that defied an easy label. Every day of his life up until this moment had depended on him being able to read a situation and the people involved in a heartbeat. That he couldn’t do that with Drea made him twitchy. In his former life in the shittiest parts of Central and South America, that itchy feeling meant impending explosions and multiple rounds of live ammo being fired at his head.

  He needed to pull back and regroup before the situation exploded in his face. Moments like this were all he was good for, and he was good with that—or at least he always had been until Drea. Being with her made him…made him want to be more and he couldn’t do that if he always did what the old Cam had done.

  He tugged her skirt down, covering her before he lost his will to resist everything she offered. “Go to bed. We’ve got a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

  She blinked her eyes in confusion. “But—”

  “Goodnight.” He put enough steel in his tone to make sure she knew he meant it, but it was more of a reminder for himself.

  Chapter Five

  “Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.” - Coco Chanel

  Scrunched up on a couch that would only make a decent bed for a munchkin, Cam squinted against the morning light and took stock just like he did first thing every morning. The ankle he’d fucked up during a parachute drop in Columbia was a five on a ten point scale. His right hand, the one that had gotten messed up during a hostage rescue in Thailand, was tingling, but at least it hadn’t gone numb while he slept. His back, however, ached like a ninety-year old after completing twenty-thousand burpees. He’d been damn good at his former career, but damn, it had left a mark.

  If he was lucky, he could get a round of yoga stretching in before Drea woke up and emerged from her room. In one fluid motion, he tossed the blanket off and sat up. That’s when he saw her.

  From his vantage point on the couch, he could only see the back of her, but what an amazing view. Her long, shapely dark brown legs emerged from a pair of zebra-striped shorts that clung to her round ass like his Victory motorcycle hugged the highway’s curves. She wore a matching tank top, leaving her lean, muscular arms bare.

  It took less than a single breath to forget every ache and pain he’d noted only a minute before. All he could think about was her and how bad he wanted her—on the small couch, in her bright purple bed, or against a wall, he didn’t care. In the early morning hour, he was close to losing every bit of self-control he’d clamped onto last night.

  “Damn.” He muttered the word to himself, but Drea must have heard him because she turned around.

  If the view from the back was phenomenal, the front made his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth and his dick stand at attention. Her skin glowed in the morning sun coming through the window, and the soft light outlined her every luscious curve. An inch-wide line of skin showed where her top didn’t quite reach the rise of her shorts. The temptation to lick his way from east to west across that bare strip nearly knocked him back into the couch.

  “My eyes are up here,” Drea teased, pulling his attention north. She held his gaze as she sipped from the orange Color Me Awake coffee mug cradled in her long fingers.

  Lucky fucking cup.

  She licked her lips and held the c
up aloft. “Want some?” She held it out and—

  A nearly silent crack sounded and the cup shattered in her hand. Thick shards of ceramic exploded outward, and Drea yelped in surprise.

  “Get down!” In one fluid move, Cam leapt up from the couch and sprinted the six feet to the kitchen.

  He wrapped an arm around her narrow waist, pushed her down, and shoved her into the corner, away from the open window where the bullet had entered. He used his own body as a shield and blocked her in. “Don’t move.”

  His gaze flickered from one possible entry point to another—the door, the kitchen window, the living room window, and the bedroom door. Their options boiled down to hunker down or scatter, both of which sucked. Thirty long seconds passed. Each one lasted at least a minute.

  He readied for whatever came next. Another shot through the window? Forced entry? But either the shooter was lying in wait for a better shot…or he was gone.

  He wanted to believe in the latter, but why would an assassin take a shot if he didn’t intend to finish the job?

  There was only one way to find out, but he wasn’t risking Drea’s life on a lousy situational read.

  “If I say run, do it.” He spared a glance back at her. She looked more pissed off than scared. Good. That would help her keep her head straight if he ended up bleeding out on her kitchen floor. “Don’t wait for me.”

  Hyper alert for noises coming in from outside, he stayed low and made his way over to the broken mug. He trained his gun on the open kitchen window and took in the sight line from the fractured cup across the narrow alley to the roof of the building behind Drea’s. A shadowed figure scurried from the industrial sized air conditioner to the rooftop stairwell door leading inside the building.

  Cam couldn’t go. He damn well couldn’t stay. But he had to do something.

  Hoping he was making the right choice, Cam swiped the phone off the counter and handed it to Drea. “Call 911 and stay low.”

  A second later, he was halfway to her front door. How quickly could the shooter hit the street? What was the best place to cut him off?

  “Don’t go.” Drea’s words weren’t a plea or an order, but something in-between.

  In his old life, it was easy to compartmentalize. The person or thing they were rescuing was a package to be retrieved. There wasn’t any emotion to get in the way of achieving the objective. This time it was different. She hadn’t asked for any of this. Not for the shooter to attack her, and not for Cam to protect her. But they were stuck in this together, at least for now. It was hard enough to walk away from her bed. Like it or not, there was no way in hell he could walk away with her life on the line.

  The doorknob felt cool in his overheated grip. “I can catch him.”

  He could. He would. And then he’d beat the ever loving shit out of him.

  The phone rang in her hand. The sound blared in the quiet room.

  She looked down at the receiver as if it were a live grenade.

  The call could be a coincidence. He wanted to believe that, but his instincts told a different story. And he trusted his instincts. They were what had kept him alive when everything had gone to shit in Cambodia a few years ago.

  He released the doorknob, then strode over and guided her a few steps over so the refrigerator blocked her from the window. Then he put himself between her and the door. If someone forced their way in, they’d have to go through him before they ever got to her.

  “Put the phone on speaker,” he said.

  She did.

  “Do you know who this is?” a voice rasped.

  Eyes wide, she shook her head. “No.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure your protector will fill you in later.”

  Cam’s blood curdled. How many times had he heard that voice through the thin walls separating his mother’s bedroom from the living room where he slept? He could be half deaf and he’d still recognize Diamond Tommy Houston’s signature two-pack-a-day wheeze. Tommy had come a long way from enforcer to crime boss since those days, but he was still as deadly as ever.

  “You have two choices, Miss Sanford,” Tommy continued. “Get out of town or die.”

  “Why?” The single word ripped from her throat, half curse and half question.

  “The why is for me to know. All you need to know is that you need to stay away from the cops so they won’t be able think about anything else but finding you. You’re going to be my little distraction,” Tommy continued.

  “You killed Ms. Orton?” she asked.

  “That pleasure was someone else’s.”

  “You wouldn’t mind telling us who did the deed, would you?” Cam asked.

  Tommy laughed. “And make this easy for you? You know me better than that, Mr. Hardy. Besides, it won’t matter who really killed Natasha, not when the police are going to pin her death on your friend.”

  “You can’t know that,” Drea sputtered.

  “I do, because it works well for my purposes, and I always get what I want. What happens next is your choice, but you need to decide right now.” Tommy stated his terms in his signature black or white style. “Leave town and lead the police on a merry chase, or die and force them to scramble around looking for you, because believe me when I’m done there won’t be a body left for them to find.”

  Cam craned his neck and scouted out the rooftop across the alley. The sun reflected off something in the shadow of the air conditioning unit. A second shooter.

  Fury rippled off of Drea’s skin. “Of all the stupid—”

  “She’ll go underground,” Cam said.

  “Perfect.” Tommy answered as if he never expected any other answer.

  Of course Tommy wanted her to run. If she was innocent but stuck around, it was only a matter of time before the police figured out she wasn’t guilty and caught scent of whatever grander scheme Tommy was working on connected to the Ortons. But if she ran? Tommy could do whatever the hell he wanted. It all made sense in a twisted and sick fucked up way.

  “Only guilty people run,” Cam said. “She’s your distraction.” What the hell was Tommy up to?

  “Now you see,” Tommy said, as though he sensed Cam putting it all together.

  “How long?”

  “Forever plus one day.”

  “Forget it,” Drea sputtered. “I’m not just walking away from my life. I don’t understand.”

  “All you need to understand is that either you do what I want or you end up dead.”

  She scoffed. “And if I go to the cops?”

  “You’ll end up in jail wishing you could die faster,” Tommy said. His voice slithered down from a jovial uncle to that of a stone cold psychopath. “Think of it like a vacation. You can either serve out your function on a beach somewhere in a country without an extradition agreement, or I can personally see that you spend it in a coffin after a well-timed accident.”

  The silence tightened around them as sharp as a razor wire. As bloodthirsty as he was brilliant, the crime boss didn’t make idle threats. Whatever his reason for coming after Drea, he had a legendary habit of holding grudges, and thanks to the dirty cops on his payroll, he had an uncanny ability to settle any debts. No wonder so few people crossed him and lived to tell the tale.

  “My man has an itchy trigger finger, Miss Sanford. What’s it going to be?”

  Cam could see the answer on her lips, the instinct to fight back at any cost. But this time, it would be her life. He held up his hand, then grabbed the marker hanging from the whiteboard on the fridge and scrawled a message for her in block letters: Fight another day.

  Her gaze flicked from the message to him and back again. After a moment, she said, “Yes.”

  “Good.” Tommy paused. “I suggest you think long and hard before you connect with your friends on or off the police force, Mr. Hardy. Despite her demons, your mother was a clever woman, and I’d like to think the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. But if it did, well, I won’t give you the same choice Miss Sanford just received.”
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br />   The phone went dead.

  Cam’s fingers itched to fling the phone across the room so he could watch it shatter against the wall, but that wouldn’t solve a damn thing. They were well and truly screwed. He used more care than necessary to hang up the phone.

  “Who was that, and why did I tell him anything except to go fuck himself?” Drea asked, uncertainty shaking her voice.

  “That was Diamond Tommy Houston, micromanaging crime boss, drug kingpin, and overall shithead who kills with impunity inside the Harbor City lines. He personally knocked off a district attorney, and the cops still won’t pin it on him. Mostly because he has some key cops in his back pocket.”

  “That asshole? I’ve never heard his voice before. How does he—” She gasped and stepped back until the refrigerator blocked any further escape, anger burning in her gaze. “How does he know you?”

  Not how she thought. “My mom was his mistress for years until her heroin addiction went from quirky to an embarrassing liability.”

  Calling his childhood educational wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the kind of schooling people expected. He’d learned to make mac and cheese with water instead of milk in third grade, knew to avoid his mom’s boyfriends by fifth, and had perfected being anywhere but home by sixth. Not that anyone knew that part of it. People tended not to dig very deep when they thought he was just a shallow asshole who slept around. He’d created the perfect cover, so perfect he’d even begun to believe it himself. But he’d begun to hate the lie just as much as he despised the truth.

  She blinked slowly, the wheels turning inside her pretty head, but she didn’t look away. She held his gaze, neither pitying him nor shying away in horror.

  The whole situation had gone fubar in record time. Now it wasn’t just the police closing in on Drea, it was the most powerful crime syndicate in Harbor City. He needed to get his head wrapped around this cluster before something else blew up.

  He glanced out the window at the opposite rooftop and saw light reflecting off the shooter’s scope. Looked like Diamond Tommy wasn’t taking it on their word that they’d vacate.