Of course, like most brilliant men, he was broken—probably beyond repair, and Nina knew better than to give in to the idiotic side of her that wanted to help him. To fix him.
“You should know better, woman,” she mumbled to herself, shimmying out of her leather pants. “You can’t fix a man. You sure as shit can’t fix a man who has no interest in being fixed. And you damn sure can’t fix an Aries lawyer. He could be a psychotic murderer for all you know. He said so himself.”
When the door of the bathroom creaked open, sending the room flush with light, she yelped and snatched up the terry cloth towel that she’d thrown over the edge of the bed.
But it was too late.
As she tugged the towel over her baby blue bra and panties, Jack’s mouth had already dropped open from where he stood in the doorway.
A towel was wrapped around his bare waist, hanging onto the V at his hips by the grace of God, because the knot he’d tied in it was so loose it seemed all but useless.
His hand was full with every piece of that complicated gray tuxedo, and the fabric tightened under his hold as his eyes took their second voyage of her body.
Nina tightened the towel at her breasts with one hand, crossing one thigh over the other as she stroked her hand over her curls.
Jack held up the clothes in his hand.
“Just, throw them there…” She spoke with a strangled voice, motioning to her leather pants and cami top, which she’d piled up on the bed.
Jack leaned out of the doorway, just enough to send the abs on his stomach contracting as he tossed his clothes on top of hers.
“I need the pants and the shirt, but I’ll never wear the jacket again,” he said, standing tall and meeting her eyes across the room. “It’ll cover you up.”
She gave him a tight smile.
He didn’t smile back, disappearing behind the door and slamming it shut once more.
3
Twenty minutes later, he emerged, just as gorgeous as she remembered, but this time, gorgeous with smatterings of shower water glistening on his golden skin.
She almost cursed from where she was digging her nails into her knees from the desk chair. The fucking nerve of this guy, to be so beautiful.
He lingered in the doorway, holding her eyes.
With every second that passed he was less and less adamant about avoiding her gaze, and it was throwing her into a whirlwind she could hardly take.
She tightened his tuxedo jacket around her naked body, crossing her legs. “Clothes are in the wash. Should be done in about ten minutes or so. The heater is right next to the closet, so if I hang them right away, they should be dry by morning.”
He shifted, his hand going to the knot in his towel. “Does the washroom not have a dryer?”
Her eyes fell to that knot. “It was painful enough putting that beautiful suit in a washing machine. Drying it would simply be too much to bear.”
“No need to be so diplomatic with a piece of cloth I’ll never wear again.”
She held her arm up. The cuffs of his jacket hid her fingers. “Thanks for letting me cover up with your jacket.”
“Like I said, I’ll never wear it again once I get home, so…”
She sat taller. “Home?”
He sighed. “Greenwich Village.”
She was stunned. He’d given it to her. She’d been expecting him to tell her to mind her own damn business, to look away from her, to do everything he could to disconnect.
“Sounds about right,” she said. “A Greenwich boy. Clean as a whistle on the outside, nothing but grit underneath. Maybe even a few feline-sized rats hiding quietly in the shadows. The kind that only show their faces on the darkest nights.”
“And where are you from?” Jack threw up a hand when she went to answer. “Don’t even tell me.” He chuckled. “Bronx.”
She clicked her tongue.
His smile grew smug. “How did I know?” He laughed. “Bedford?”
“Fordham, you fucking jerk off.”
“Fordham,” he roared. “So your rats don’t even hide in the shadows. They come at you in broad daylight, nose to nose, demanding your cut of the rent.”
She looked away from him with a roll of her eyes. “Yeah, it’s easy to laugh from your billowy cloud in The Village. It’s not so funny when you’re living it.”
Jack pushed off the doorsill and made his way into the room.
Watching him, she lifted the iPhone she’d placed on the desk.
He froze at the sight of it.
“This was in the pocket of your slacks. Thank god I found it or the machine would’ve destroyed it,” she said. “No money, no ID, and literally, bleeding from the head. You have two hundred missed calls. Surely there is, at least, one person in this bunch who can help you.” She held his phone out to him.
He didn’t budge. “No, thank you.”
“Two hundred missed calls. Two hundred. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He came to a stop in the middle of the room, sighing.
“You told me you didn’t even have your phone.”
“I lied.”
“I believed. You must be a good lawyer.”
“I’m a great lawyer.”
“We just almost died. There’s not a single person in the world you want to call right now?”
“Is there anyone you want to call right now? If there is, I’m happy to unlock it for you.” He held out his hand to take the phone.
She straightened, letting her phone clad hand drop into her lap.
He held his hands out at his side. “Look at that. We do have something in common.”
Her eyes fell, and she stood from the chair, moving to the edge of the bed. She held the phone in both hands, staring down at the lock screen.
His voice came over her shoulder. “See; this is a two-way street, doll. You don’t get to ask me presumptuous questions, and then turn your nose up when I throw the same questions right back at you.”
She looked at him just as he came up next to her. “Don’t call me doll.”
He fought a smile. “You just have such a baby face…” His eyes fell.
She watched it happen. Watched his walls fall and then reconstruct themselves, over and over. He must be so exhausted, she thought. Imploding the same towering walls, over and over, just to turn around and rebuild them all over again.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, insinuating I need to be humbled,” she said. “You’re the most arrogant person I’ve ever met.”
“I am not arrogant.”
She howled, meeting his eyes over her shoulder. They held each other’s gazes for a moment before she looked down at the supplies on the bed. “Sit down already so I can get a look at your head.”
Holding the towel at his waist, he plopped down on the bed and swept up the remote that sat on a tray in the middle of it.
Nina went to work on his gash as he clicked on the TV. Over her shoulder, she heard a news channel talking about the hurricane.
“Upgraded. Again.” Jack breathed. “Category 4.”
“Jesus.” Nina froze in the middle of cleaning his wound, turning to watch the television as well.
Images of bridges collapsed, bodegas submerged, and trains flooded sent her heart into a state of panic. “That’s my train.” She nodded to the television, where the 6 train station looked like an underwater graveyard. The news station rolled footage from one train to the next, Uptown to Brooklyn, all underwater. “Do you see your train?”
“I don’t take the train.”
She almost whopped him across the head. “Of course you don’t.”
“Looks like the rats in Greenwich Village are going to start charging me rent too.”
“They sure as hell aren’t living in the Subway anymore. The ones that haven’t drowned anyway.”
The female newscaster’s voice carried over a photo of the departure screen at JFK airport. ‘CANCELLED’ dominated the screen in bold red letters, zooming down, line for line, until
the word was reduced to nothing more than a glaring red blur.
“Looks familiar,” Jack grumbled, recalling the departure screen at Chicago International.
“If you had a fancy Manhattan vacation planned this week, you don’t anymore. JFK, LaGuardia and Newark airport have all closed, indefinitely, with extended ground stops that could easily stretch into next week.”
“Shit,” Jack spat.
“Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and even the MTA have terminated service as well, and as of this broadcast, have no immediate news on when service may resume. New York City hasn’t seen this kind of devastation since the early 1900s. Experts say it could take years of rebuilding before The Big Apple is back to the city we know and love.”
“It took five hours to bring NYC to its knees? This is insane.”
Soon, they were sitting side by side on the bed, Jack’s wound still unattended, leaning forward on their knees. They took in one image after the other of their decimated city.
“This is going to take months… years to reverse,” Jack said.
“We’re never going to get home.” She looked at him. “I suppose that’s good news for you. Doesn’t seem like you’re itching to get there anyway.”
“Likewise.” He blinked lazily and met her eyes.
Her gaze fell to his lips. His did the same to hers. Something zapped through her, and she leaped to her feet, making the bed bounce under her quick departure.
“I don’t want to be there, I have to be there,” she said, moving away from the bed, away from that feeling.
She waited for him to ask her why. Why did she have to be in New York so badly?
He didn’t.
After pulling herself together, she returned to the bed and went back to his wound.
Minutes later she was pressing a disinfectant wipe into the cut. Now that he’d showered, she could see that it wasn’t deep—definitely not hospital worthy—but the kind of tiny cut that could bleed for days.
“All of us here at Channel 5 News send our prayers to the victims of the historic Hurricane Nina as she continues wreaking havoc, her devastation claiming nearly the entire northeastern region. Back to you, John…”
“Hurricane Nina.” Jack winced at the persistent sting of the wipes. “How ironic.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“A destructive cyclone swoops in, unforeseen, and wipes out every poor cad with the misfortune of being in its way. There is no other name to call it but Nina…” He lifted his eyes to hers. “Nina.”
“I’d advise you not to fuck with a woman who is handling your pretty face, Aries.”
A smirk tugged the corner of his mouth.
“Go ahead and smile,” she said. “It takes a lot of hard work to be so consistently miserable, you know. It’s so much easier to just smile.”
“Taking the easy way out is what’s wrong with the world today. The easy way is rarely the right way.”
“You sound like an old ass man. Like you’re about two seconds from pulling a camo-print Vietnam Veteran cap out of your back pocket and plopping it on your head while blaming all your bullshit problems on Michelle and Barack Obama.”
“Like I said, the easy way is rarely the right way.”
“Because the right way is obviously to walk around spitting poison in everyone’s eyes.”
“Obviously.”
“Who broke you, Aries?”
Jack’s eyes fell back to the TV, and the slow smile that had been spreading across his face fell with it.
“Ah.” Nina watched it happen, tossing wipe after wipe, all of which were soaked in his blood. “Is it the same woman you’re running from? Is she the one who broke you?”
His lips tightened.
“If you had any idea how much your face talks, you wouldn’t work so hard shutting the whole world out. Your face just welcomes it right back in. Your face snitches on you.”
He sighed.
“What’s your face telling me? Well, I’m glad you asked, Aries.” She ripped open the largest bandage in the tin. “Your face is telling me that you found yourself a woman just like me. A cyclone who swept in unforeseen, and wiped you out. A natural disaster who managed to blast open your hard shell just enough to get a peek at the pearl gleaming underneath. And, for whatever reason, she threw it back.”
Slowly, he lifted his eyes back to hers.
“And you don’t have the damnedest clue why.” She began easing the bandage over as much of the cut as she could, careful not to catch his hair. “Do you?”
Jack lifted his eyebrows.
“Don’t move your face,” she warned.
“Please finish.”
“Have I struck a nerve?”
“Only every single nerve that has ever existed inside of me since the day I was born. Twice.”
She laughed.
***
After tending to that petulant Adonis and his oozing wound, Nina couldn’t help moaning as the hot shower water smashed against her skin. It felt like heaven on earth as it soaked her hair, flattening it to her face and seizing every inch of her body. She closed her eyes and stepped directly under the spray, trying to push the vision of that Aries lawyer—and the white towel clinging to his strong waist by a hair—out of her mind.
She couldn’t. After soaping her hair and body from head to toe, washing the residue of the day’s events away, she went to work trying to get rid of the residue that man had left on her from the moment she’d laid eyes on him. There wasn’t enough soap in the world to get that job done, let alone in the half-full shower dispenser that was one good swipe from coming off the grimy tiles of that shower wall completely.
Bracing her hand on the wall, she allowed her eyes to flutter shut as the shower water splattered her face, and she pushed her fingers past her belly button and over the lips of her pounding pussy.
She bit her bottom lip as she pushed her fingers inside, letting them slide over her slippery walls. The pleasure claimed her as she pictured the unsmiling face that had left her so wet and ready. As her orgasm built with each stroke, she couldn’t help but wonder if the moisture on her forehead was a result of the hot shower water or the natural condensation that accompanied her orgasm, so powerful it hit her like a bulldozer and nearly brought her to her knees.
***
After brushing her teeth with the plastic wrapped, mini toothbrushes in the bathroom, Nina carefully put the brush back in the plastic and emerged. She caught eyes with Jack across the room. He’d switched out the towel for his black boxers, and hadn’t thought it necessary to put on his undershirt. In the midst of hanging their wet clothes in the closet, he looked over his shoulder and caught her eyes, but Nina couldn’t hold his gaze. Not when his bare back was beckoning her, so wide and rigid, covered in strong lines that he didn’t even have to flex to bring to fruition. He looked like someone had carved him into existence, and she had to look away.
The guilt of knowing what she’d just done in the shower to the thought of that face, that body, and even that borderline abusive attitude, had left her feeling like some sex predator. She feared he could see it every time he looked at her.
He kept reminding her that she should be worried. That he could be a killer. A sadist. A man who wouldn’t hesitate to tie her wrists to the bedpost the moment she drifted off to sleep.
She bit her lip, confirming that she was crazy when her mind actually celebrated that last idea.
Oh, that Aries lawyer. How wrong he was.
He was the one that should be afraid.
“Thanks for hanging the clothes,” she said before holding up the plastic toothbrush. “We should keep these toothbrushes. Who knows how many days it’ll be before we’re able to get back home. We might become backpackers against our will.”
“Come tomorrow; we won’t become anything.” Jack finished hanging the last of the clothes and turned to her, clasping his hands. “Because we are going to get on a train and leave one another’s lives forever.”
“We’re going to be on the same train, to the same city. You don’t have a dollar to your name, and you refuse to call any of your Greenwich Village friends for help. Of course we’re going to be in each other’s lives.”
Jack pressed his lips together and held her gaze; then he looked toward the bed. “I’m going to sleep,” he said, staring down at the carpet and moving across the room. Pulling back the sheets and blankets on his bed, he snuck a look at her.
When he saw disgust gleaming in her eyes, he followed her gaze back down to the bed, and cursed under his breath, leaping backward.
Ants. Hundreds, maybe millions, of ants had collected over a giant red stain in the middle of the white fitted sheet.
“Jesus,” Jack cringed, jolting and slapping his bicep as if he could already feel the ants crawling on him.
Nina shook her head and backed away, even though she was on the other side of the room. She pointed to the bed. “I don’t even want to think about what that stain is, and why those ants are so attracted to it.”
“This place is a goddamn dump.”
“Well, you did ask the receptionist for ‘a room, any room, I don’t care which one.’ ”
“Looks like she took my words very literally,” Jack mumbled. Staring at the bed as if the ants were planning some sort of sneak attack, he leaped toward Nina, joining her on the other side of the room with his lips poked out.
“You look like a little boy right now.” Smirking, Nina moved to the other bed and pulled back the sheets on that one. “My bed looks good.”
“Lucky you,” Jack grumbled, plopping down in the desk chair and slamming his forehead on the desk.
“Come on,” she said, climbing under the sheets. “Don’t be silly. You’re not going to sleep at that desk.”
“I’m sure as hell not sleeping in that bed.”
Nina pushed back the sheets and blankets on her bed, running her hand along the small sliver of space next to her.
Lightning Strikes (The Almeida Brothers Trilogy #3) Page 4