by Leslie North
“Do I?” It was a stupid question, but then his brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders at the moment. He watched as she nodded, then leaned forward to kiss the head of his cock.
“I want more.” With a small grin, Olive took him into her warm wet mouth and Levon’s head fell back into the pillow, his eyes closed and his restraint unraveling by the second. It took everything he had not to thrust into her mouth, but he didn’t want to scare her. She was in control here, even if it killed him. Which it might.
Each kiss and lick and stroke and tug drew him one step closer to coming until finally, he felt that telltale tingle at the base of his spine and as his balls drew up tight. He did reach down then to place his hand on her head, not to push her down but to warn her. “I’m close.”
His cock sprang from between her lips with an audible pop. “Yeah?”
Then she went back down on him and Levon was lost. As his world shattered into a million iridescent shards and he came hard in her mouth, all he could picture was his sweet little lab partner with that dirty little smirk on her face, her hand wrapped around his cock and her body hot between his thighs. It was an image that would stay with him forever.
Finally, the exquisite pleasure died away and Olive crawled back up to lie beside him on the bed. She gave him a quick kiss, then settled on his chest, finally taking off those glasses of hers and setting them on the nightstand next to the bed.
“Was that good?” she asked, her breath across his sweat-slicked chest making him shiver.
“Heavenly,” he managed to say, fumbling with one hand for the covers he’d tossed aside earlier, and drew them up around them, tucking a stray lock of hair away from her exhausted face.
Well, that’s one way to distract the woman to keep her from leaving. Levon paused to gaze down at Olive as her breath evened out into the patterns of sleep, then allowed his own eyes to slip closed for a second. He had hours of reading ahead of him, he knew; he had purposefully put off poring over the info Olive had compiled earlier to avoid her noticing that it would take him a while. He could read just fine, as long as he was able to take his time and use all the tricks he’d picked up over the years. Thankfully, once he got through the reading, his retention of information was better than fine; it had to be, with dyslexia always dogging him like a demon and making him freeze up at the worst moments.
But every worst moment seemed far away when he looked at Olive. And it was up to Levon to keep it that way. She would be in his bed every night; she would sleep sound and safe, and the protector in him would be appeased, knowing that all was secure.
9
Olive woke the next morning and sat up in Levon’s bed, clutching the sheets to her naked chest and wondering how the hell she’d ended up there again. Last night she’d been dead set on leaving, and yet somehow he’d distracted her into staying. And by “distracted,” she meant given her several mind-numbing, toe-curling orgasms. The fact that she’d done the same for him only made her cheeks hotter and her brain more discombobulated than before. She gave the other side of the mattress a quick side glance. No indentation from his body. Huh. That meant he hadn’t slept here with her. So where exactly was he and what exactly was she going to do about her situation now?
As she got up and headed for the bathroom, more questions began to surface in her muddled head. Had he planned this? Had he executed a seduction as a way to keep her in his protective clutches? And why did his obvious conniving feel so... chivalrous?
Olive shook her head. Clearly she wasn’t all the way awake yet, but she knew a shower would fix her up right. She didn’t bother checking the time. It was Saturday; and fairly early on Saturday, at that. Probably around six o’clock; seven at the latest.
A mouth-watering smell drifted to her from the kitchen. Olive stopped in her tracks and sniffed the air, suddenly alert to the reality that awaited her in the other room: pancakes. And Levon. She didn’t know which promise struck her as more delicious, but why should a girl have to choose?
It was her head that ultimately directed her to the shower first; not her body, and definitely not her stomach.
She lingered in the shower for longer than was necessary, all the while fighting the urge to call out into the house for Levon to join her. Their encounter all those months ago had awoken something in her and now that they were back together again, the need was more ferocious than ever—a thirst for him that couldn’t be slaked. She craved him morning, noon, and night, and while their lovemaking had carried them both off into realms of pure bliss last night, it still wasn’t enough. She longed to have him inside her again, moving with her in slow sensuousness, driving into her with helpless surrender as she cried out—
Olive reached for the shower handle, and quickly twisted it to cold. She would pummel these thoughts into nonexistence if it took her all morning to do so.
Because pancakes weren’t just another pleasure she could partake in. They were a new variable, a concept to be picked apart and studied. Levon clearly enjoyed his role as her self-appointed protector, but making her breakfast was a new level of intimacy she wasn’t sure she was ready for. She didn’t have the luxury of indulging in fantasies or reading signals that weren’t there. No way was he in this for the long haul. If he was interested in something committed with her, he wouldn’t have walked away from their night together without giving her any way to contact him. And he hadn’t exactly rushed to reach out to her as soon as he got back to town. If it hadn’t been for their accidental meet-up in the shed, she wondered if she would have heard from him at all. There was nothing to indicate that he wanted an actual relationship.
And especially not with her.
When Olive finally presented herself in the kitchen, she was scrubbed clean and glowing. Her clothes were fresh, but her mood was considerably darkened. If Levon sensed her reluctance to join him, he didn’t show it. He left the electric griddle to cup her face in his broad hand and plant a gentle kiss on her temple. Then he pulled a chair out for her at the kitchen table and returned to building up a pile of golden-hued flapjacks.
“Were you up all night?” Olive wouldn’t admit to having searched for an imprint beside her, even though she had.
“I was up for a while,” he admitted, “but I did manage to get some rest.”
She wondered if he’d slept on the sofa in the living room instead, and if so, why. Before she could ask, though, he changed subjects.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, setting a heaping pile of pancakes before her and drizzling them with syrup. “Say ‘when’.”
Except she was too wrapped up in her own thoughts to notice until they were all but drowned. Levon isn’t anything to you besides an old friend... and the father of your child. Okay, so maybe that is something. But he’s definitely not your boyfriend. She used her fork to move aside the top few soggy pancakes for the less soaked ones beneath before prompting him, “So... you were thinking?”
“I think you should stay here until the gang is dealt with.” Levon rested his forearms on the table for a long moment, his direct gaze holding hers. “It’s safer, and it’s more efficient for exchanging information. Besides, with you assisting me, it shouldn’t take long.”
Olive opened her mouth to argue again, but darn it, maybe he was right. She was an asset to his case and with his brawn and her brains, the whole thing should be over quickly. Finally she exhaled slowly and nodded. “All right. I can agree to that,”
“Good.” Levon tucked into his pancakes with relish. “Now that’s settled, we need to discuss our stakeout later.”
“I’m sorry. What?” Olive’s fork squealed across her plate as she blinked at him. “You’re taking me on a stakeout? What happened to your whole ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ alpha guardian thing?”
Levon gave her a look and patted his mouth with the corner of one of last night’s pizza delivery napkins. “It’s not ideal to have you there, but you’re safest when you’re by my side. If you need another reason, which I know you do, t
hen I’d like you to help I.D. some of the faces I might see. If you see any of your students or former students entering or leaving the hideout, you can tell me in real-time.”
“‘Hideout’?” Olive repeated, her analytical mind turning over that new information. When the realization dawned on her, she sat back and crossed her arms over her belly, annoyance and a bit of pride at his skill niggling inside her. “You already know where it is, don’t you?”
His slow grin made her pulse trip. “Of course.”
While he devoured his stack of pancakes, she nibbled on her first one, trying to work out exactly how he was able to leap so far ahead of her on this case in such a short time. “What were you doing last night?”
He looked up at her, mid-bite. “Reading through the data you compiled.”
She should have known. Olive took a sip from the mug of tea he’d set beside her plate earlier. “And that’s how you figured all this out?”
“That plus what I received from my SSoF team.” He shrugged and swallowed another bite of breakfast. Olive could only be impressed. Where he put all that food, she had no idea, since there wasn’t a spare ounce of fat on him. Just muscle. Sleek, smooth, sensational muscle.
Down girl.
Irritated with herself for falling into the smutty pool again, Olive took a huge bite of pancakes and stared down at her plate, speaking around the food in her mouth. “Do they contact you often?”
“At least once a day. More if they find something important about the case I need to know about.”
Olive swallowed, then sipped more tea. One thing was for certain. Levon Asher was an excellent pancake maker, on top of all his other talents. As the sugar slowly entered her system, her curiosity grew. “Do they call or text you or email?”
Levon raised a brow at her. “Are you always this nosy?” She started to answer, but he held up a hand, laughing. “Wait. No. I know the answer. Yes. You are. That’s something else I remember about you from all those study sessions. You were never content to just let things sit as they were. You always wanted to dig deeper, always had to understand how things work and why.”
Her lips compressed and her teeth ground together. Some people considered that curiosity a negative, but for Olive her persistent need to ask questions was a good thing, especially as a scientist and teacher. If you didn’t wonder about things, you never learned. Asking questions was her way of solving problems. But that Levon might see it as a nuisance stung, way more than she wanted to admit. Just when she thought they were turning over a new leaf, when she thought he might see her, the real her, and appreciate who she was. Ugh. She’d thought Levon was different, but maybe he was just like all the other men she’d dated. Intimidated by her big brains and eager to assert their testosterone-laden dominance over her. Well, if that was the case, he could just go and suck it.
She was about to tell him so when he stood to clear away his empty plate, his smile kind. “Please don’t take that the wrong way. Your intellect is one of the things I like most about you.” He gave her a slow once-over. “Among many other things. You, Olive Owen, are sexy as hell.”
Well then.
Maybe she hadn’t been so far off the mark after all.
To hide her ever-increasing blush at his frank perusal, she lowered her head and took more bites of her pancakes, eager to shift the spotlight off of her and her crazy, chaotic attraction to this man. “So, tell me more about this stakeout we’ll be doing later.”
“... you know what? If this is what an evil hideout looks like, then I want to join a gang,” Olive said as they pulled up outside the outdoor shopping mall on the edge of Harper’s Forge. Mid-afternoon sunshine streamed down on the brick and stone arcade in the middle of the place, surrounded by half-vacant storefronts. This was hardly the location she’d expected at all. From what he’d told her this morning at breakfast, she’d been expecting a scene straight out of a Tarantino movie, complete with sword-wielding villains and black-leather clad badasses. And while there was the usual crowd of harmless juvenile delinquents milling around the town’s gaming arcade, and a group of dark-clothed Goth kids sucking down enormous sodas, they were hardly the killer-gang material she’d envisioned. Still, as he pulled into a parking spot at the end of a long row of cars and cut the engine, she had to admit her pulse pounded a bit harder. Maybe from adrenaline or perhaps from all the syrup she’d eaten at breakfast, hard to tell which at this point.
“They might not look like much at first glance,” Levon said, squinting out the windshield at the crowd before them. “But trust me, you underestimating them is what they want. The less attention they draw to themselves, the harder they are to find and capture.”
“So, you really think the gang members are here today recruiting?” Olive still couldn’t see it, but had seen enough proof of Levon’s instincts to trust him. She leaned to get a better look around, memories of high school blending with the scene before her now. “Remember how all of the ‘bad crowd’, all of the neglected kids in and out of juvie, used to hang around here when we were in school? From what I’ve heard in the news and the gossip from my students, it’s only gotten worse since then. Even with half these places closed down, the number of mall rats has doubled.”
“Hmm.” Levon settled in with his paper cup of coffee they’d gotten at a drive-thru. “Never really hung with that crowd.”
Olive hadn’t either, but she had heard things, even back then. She adopted a similar slouchy pose to his, one elbow resting on the window sill while she held her cup of tea with her other hand. She had no idea how to act at a stakeout, other than what she’d seen in the movies, but she was determined to mirror him. If he trusted her enough to bring her this far, then she wouldn’t disappoint him. Not to mention he’d said the recon they were doing today was low-risk, and only “minimally dangerous”, so why not relax a bit?
Except her thudding heart had other ideas, excitement sizzling through her veins like lit gasoline. Of course, being this close to Levon in a confined space wasn’t helping either. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to stop noticing his long, strong fingers wrapped around his coffee cup, and flushed thinking how he’d used them on her, in her, her last night...
“What are your plans for the future?” Levon asked out of the blue, jarring her out of her erotic thoughts and making her choke on a swallow of tea.
“Uh, what?” she asked once she recovered, swiping her mouth with the sleeve of her sweater, then pushing her glasses up her nose. Seriously, she hadn’t expected him to go so deep so quickly... hearing herself think that, she blushed. “Why do I suddenly feel like I’m the one being staked out?”
“We haven’t really talked about it, Olive. And I think I have a right to know.” He turned to her, blue eyes piercing. Searching. For what? “You’re going to be a mom soon. Clearly you love teaching. But I can’t help thinking—you never left the town where we grew up. Hell, you never even left the high school.”
Her face burned hot beneath his stare and she fought to maintain eye contact with him. But she had nothing to be embarrassed about, damn it. “I did leave—I went to college. Then I came back. So what? Lots of people stay in their hometowns.” She couldn’t keep the challenge out of her voice. Was Levon really intimating she should be ashamed of her choices? Ashamed of her life? Well, screw him, if that was the case. “We can’t all run around the world like superheroes.”
He scowled, then snorted and turned away, staring back out at the arcade. “I didn’t mean it as an insult, Olive. I just…” He shrugged and shook his head. “I just always thought you were destined for more.”
“More? Like what?” She did her best to keep the sharpness from her tone and failed miserably, if the pointed look he gave her was any indication. Olive swallowed hard against the lump of hurt in her throat over his disappointment in her. She shouldn’t have been surprised. People were usually disappointed in her when it came to things outside of her smarts. She should be used to it by now. Except comi
ng from Levon, the rejection hurt. Badly. Maybe she wasn’t a rocket scientist. Maybe she hadn’t moved out of Harper’s Forge. But she had nothing to be ashamed of. She had made a good life for herself and would make a good life for their baby when it came, with or without him. She took a deep breath to ease the pressure constricting her ribcage, then said quietly, “It’s not my fault you had your lab partner built up in your head, Levon. What, did you expect me to go off and win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry? I bet you certainly didn’t expect me to wind up single and pregnant in the town where I grew up.”
Guilt flickered through his blue eyes, and she felt an odd sense of satisfaction at that. Good. Let him know he really stepped in it with that one.
Levon didn’t reply right away. He always liked to think things through, she remembered.
“Take your time.” She settled back into her seat. “I’m not going anywhere. Just make sure the next thing you say is exactly what you mean.”
He cursed under his breath and scratched at the bristle coming in on one cheek, staring out the window again. “I did a deep dive after running into you seven months back.” His dark brows knit, as if he were searching hard for the right words, his expression defeated. “Look, Olive. I know about all those papers you’ve had published... all that side research... you’re obviously way overqualified for your job. I know you love your students and you’re a hell of a teacher to these kids, but you could be doing so much more than teach high school. You could be helping so many more people.”
Olive’s mouth dried and she focused on the tea in her hand. He’d researched her?
“I may not be smart, but even I recognize genius when I see it. Not just genius either, Olive. Greatness. And you have it.” The truth in his tone rocked her harder than anything else he’d said thus far. He said it with the certainty of a man who had just glanced out the window and proclaimed the sky blue.