Love Is In the Air Volume 1

by Susan Stoker

  I gasped, but the sound was drowned out by the water and, when I looked over my shoulder, he was gone—taking his blue hands and unwavering protection with him.

  He’d dyed my hair.

  I felt my chest quake with laughter. It was a ridiculous and small thing—nothing compared to the fact that he saved my life. And yet, it was significant.

  Like a doorstop.

  A small jam he’d wedged into the door I’d opened to my new life after death. One I couldn’t get rid of no matter how many walls I built, no matter how many locks I installed. He’d placed a small piece of himself in my defenses that would forever keep a space open for him to enter.

  But I knew the kind of man Ace Covington was—he wouldn’t enter without permission.

  So now, it was up to me to make it clear that permission would never come.

  No matter how hard too many parts of me wanted to give it.

  5

  Ace

  Three days later…

  “You might want to see this,” my brother’s voice boomed over our intercom.

  It was the tone of his voice that sent me to my feet and down the hall in seconds, entering his office with a hard stare. “Arnell?” I demanded.

  It had been almost three weeks since the fire, one week since she’d left Covington Security headquarters to go stay with Zeke, and today was the memorial that motherfucker was holding for Addy. Faking tears for the world to see—for the world to sympathize. Because sympathy meant votes. Sympathy meant one step closer to the Senate.

  “Not quite.” He tapped on a few keys and then an image appeared on the giant projected screen on the wall to my right.

  My eyes narrowed, wondering for a split second why the hell he was showing me footage from the train station in Carmel Cove until I saw her.

  Hard to fuckin’ miss the blue-haired angel.

  “Jesus Christ. Where the hell is she going?” I spun and demanded.

  “Looks like she bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco for the eleven train.”

  I looked at my watch. “Fuck.” It was eleven-twenty.

  “I set alerts to ping anything with Addison’s name attached,” Dex said gruffly, spearing his fingers through his longer hair. "Should I let Zeke know?"

  My lips pursed hard. Not a good idea.

  Zeke loved his sister, but when it came to helping her deal with this, it was like he wanted to propel her by his sheer perseverance into her new life and leave all mention of Arnell behind. He needed to see she was okay almost as much as he wanted her to see it.

  But there was a kind of anger that came when the person who betrayed you went unpunished. A kind of anger I knew well. And if it wasn’t fed properly, it would fester into something that would never heal.

  “No.” I inhaled deeply. “I'll handle this.”

  Something planted itself inside me as I ran toward the burning limo—something that wove itself under my skin, deeper than my bones... something that made me see Addison Williams as mine.

  “Are you—” His question cut off as I was already out the door, yelling at him to monitor the station in San Francisco and let me know as soon as he picked her up on a camera again.

  Looked like I had to be faster than a speeding train if I wanted to save the girl this time.

  My gut told me this was going to happen. Looking in her eyes, my hands soaked with blue dye that was still staining to my skin, I knew she couldn’t let things go the way they were.

  And part of me couldn’t completely blame her.

  The man had built a whole fairy tale around her, only to betray her in the worst way possible. Not just with the lies and secrets. But he'd used her dream against her. He'd used her drive to help those women for his own fucked-up purpose. And that kind of shit stuck with the kind of person who wanted to do right by people who needed help.

  I walked calmly through the growing crowd, covering the sidewalk in front of the church like an oil spill—in black, their faces slick with tears.

  He put on a damn good show. Most villains did.

  "She's on the far side. There's a small group of trees."

  "Got it," I replied to my brother, my eyes narrowing in search of my target.

  My steps slowed when a hush rippled through the people around me.

  “I want to thank you all for coming out today to support me.” Arnell’s words rang out around me.

  I shouldn’t have bothered to look, but I did. I couldn’t stop myself. Sure, I knew what the mayor of San Francisco looked like. I’d seen him a handful of times on TV and in the news. But it was a different story looking at the man in person. Seeing the disgusting piece of shit pout around in his polished mask, garnering sympathy off the death of a woman he’d murdered.

  Or thought he did.

  “This has been one of the hardest weeks of my life—losing the woman I loved the way I did.”

  Small cries carried through the gathering.

  I stared. The slick politician in a black suit and long black trench coat. His hair in just enough disarray, his brow creased with enough of a furrow to suggest he wasn’t sleeping at night. But there were no bags under his eyes. In fact, any darkness seemed to be contained to the bottomless pits of his eyes that roamed the crowd, vacuuming up power like it belonged to him.

  My teeth locked so hard I wasn’t sure my jaw would ever come undone. I wanted to kill him. My spine jolted with the sudden urge. I’d killed a lot of men—a consequence of my line of work: to want to kill bad men. Especially the men who’d betrayed and targeted my unit... the men who were responsible for my team’s death.

  But this man—Mayor Mitch Arnell—I found I wanted to kill him more.

  He hadn't targeted combatants. He hadn't targeted someone he believed to be an enemy. He hadn't targeted a group of men trained to fight back and kill.

  He'd targeted women—women who'd come to him for help.

  And if it wasn't for the woman I saved and wanting to help her more than I wanted to punish him, I wasn't sure the lengths I would go to in order to bring Mitch Arnell to justice.

  I swung my head away, eyes honing in on a flash of blue in the distance—one moving through the crowd. Wearing loose gray jeans and a zip-up black hoodie, it was only wisps of blue that snuck out like sky behind a dark cloud. But the haunted and vengeful expression I saw on her face when she happened to glance briefly in my direction—but not recognize me—made my stomach twist into a steel knot.

  "Fuck."

  My feet carried over the pavement in seconds, placing me directly in front of her.

  "Ace," she choked out my name, stumbling back a half-step and pressing a hand to her chest, wincing with the pain her sharp inhale brought to her chest. "What are you doing here?" Her hiss was hot as it left her full lips.

  "Me?" I asked with a low voice, crowding her body with mine. "What are you doing here, Addy? This is dangerous and so fucking dumb—"

  "I needed to do something," she broke in and tried to maneuver around me.

  I gripped her shoulders and hauled her against my chest, carefully locking my arms around her, acutely aware that no matter how she tried to hide it, she was still recovering from her injuries. To the rest of the crowd, it looked like I was consoling her when really, I was capturing her.

  "Ace! What the—" She broke off with a small cry, biting into her lower lip when her efforts to escape my hold hurt her ribs and back.

  "You want to ruin your life, Addy?" I ground out over her, my body growing hot and hard feeling her softness pressed against me. "Because you almost lost it—and I risked mine to save it, and fuck, if you think I'm just going to stand here and let you throw it all away—"

  "What other choice do I have? Do you hear him up there? Using me—using my own goddamn death—to further his agenda." Her rage boiled with angry tears and she struggled against my hold, drawing a few curious glances from nearby mourners. "I can't let him get away with it." She shook her head furiously, like she didn’t care what other damage t
his did to her body as long as Arnell paid the price. “I can't—”

  Like the engine of a train barreling out of control, a low growl tumbled from my lips just before they crashed into hers.

  I silenced her with a hard kiss and shielded her with my body.

  Her lips were warm and soft—softer than I’d imagined and sweeter than anything I’d ever tasted. And though I expected a lot of reactions from the fiery angel of vengeance in my arms, I couldn’t say I expected the way her small hands fisted into my shirt and pulled me closer.

  Nor the way her tongue slashed out and demanded more.

  My chest vibrated with a low noise and I slanted my mouth, deepening the kiss and giving her the battle she craved. Our tongues lashed at one another, desire and frustration mingling into an unstoppable conflagration.

  And I took it all—welcomed it all. Tongue and teeth and tension—everything she’d come here with welled-up inside her, I took it from her before she unleashed it in a way that would harm her.

  I was a good man, but even a good man could reach the limits of his restraint.

  And when she pushed against me with a low moan, her tongue delving along the sides of mine and everywhere inside my mouth, I crashed hard against them. My hands lifted to frame her face, sliding back to fist the soft strands of blue I’d helped dye, pushing the hood of her jacket back in the process.

  My body that was always at attention around her now barreled into uncharted waters of want when I tipped her head so my mouth could consume hers. My cock thickened against my pants, throbbing painfully with a need I’d had to ignore for a whole damn week, and I knew she could feel the hard length wedged tight against her stomach.

  It didn’t stop her.

  She kissed me back like she was trying to find the lie that had to be buried between my lips—like she was desperate to find a reason not to trust this… to trust me.

  A gentle wave of applause rolled through the crowd, clapping a dose of reality against my head.

  I wouldn’t let this kiss become her reason.

  With a low, strained growl, I tore my lips from hers, leaving both of us panting.

  I still held her head and she still held my shirt, but the wall between us rose up with each passing second.

  “Why’d you kiss me?” she demanded, still breathing heavily from how she’d kissed me back.

  “To stop you from getting yourself killed.” My eyes flicked side to side, confirming that no one was watching us anymore.

  She rolled her lips together, air releasing in a low hiss when the distraction of the kiss wore off against the pain of her injuries.

  “Is that what you tell all your clients?” she asked archly, releasing her grip on my shirt.

  “Only the ones with blue hair,” I returned roughly, slowly lowering my hands to the sides of her arms. “Now, we need to go, so you can either walk with me or I can haul you over my shoulder and carry you to my car.”

  Her eyes widened, giving me one more unobstructed view of the lingering lust that glittered around their edges.

  “I’m perfectly capable of walking,” she decided tartly.

  “Right into trouble,” I groused under my breath and followed her out of the crowd.

  * * *

  “What are we doing?”

  They were the first words she’d spoken since we’d left the city, the ride passing in complete silence until I pulled into one of the smaller, secluded entrances to the beach.

  “Taking a minute,” I grunted, turning off the engine.

  I rounded the car and opened the door for her, meeting her resisting stare.

  “Unless you want to see your brother right now.”

  She took a second to carefully climb down from the seat, doing her best to hide the way each and every movement made some bruised, broken, or burned part of her hurt. Kicking off her shoes, she walked toward the sand in silence like she couldn’t escape everything about this situation—and me—fast enough.

  There were some situations that sand under your feet, the settling sound of the crashing ocean, and the soothing salt in the air could fix. I wasn’t sure this was one of them, but it just might help.

  “What do I do now?” She spun and demanded, her arm wanting to sling wide before it quickly remember it was dislocated only a few weeks ago. “What could I possibly do—” And then she stopped. Like her mind ran into a wall, her words, the agitation making her body shake, the wet pooled in her eyes—it all stopped.

  Her head reeled to me, a hollow look settling over the most beautiful face I’d ever seen.

  “I hate him,” she said quietly, carefully crafting each word so I knew it was the first time she'd admitted to this. “I hate him, Ace. For what he did to those women. For what he’s doing to me.”

  I took a few steps forward, leaving only a handful of heavy inches between us. "Did."

  "What?"

  "What he did to you," I told her, my voice weighted, watching her brow crinkle with slight confusion. "Now, Addy, it's up to you. The way it is... the decision I made that night... there's nothing more he can do to you. Nothing more you can do to a dead person."

  "I just—" She huffed and trembled with the strength it took to hold back all of her emotions and her pain, and I just wanted to hold her until she trusted me enough to let them go—to let me carry them for a little.

  Instead, I reached for her shoulders and held her at arm’s length.

  I shouldn't be feeling the way I did about a woman in her position, after everything she'd been through. I shouldn't have kissed her. I shouldn't continue to think about kissing her.

  Her shoulders caved a little under my touch, ready to let go of some of the weight of her guilt if she'd just let them.

  "What do I do? What did you save me for if not to stop him?"

  "Jesus Christ," I swore under my breath, my fingers tightening. "I didn't save you for him—to take care of him. I saved you so that you could live—so you could have everything he tried to take from you." I grunted, trying not to lose myself in the golden flecks in her eyes. "Everything you deserve."

  She eyed me warily, shifting her weight but didn't shake off my touch. "I'm not going to let it go."

  "I'm not asking you to," I rasped. "We're going to continue to watch him. We're going to continue to look for cracks—for faults. No one gets away with evil forever."

  "Promise?" Her tongue dragged over the fullness of her lower lip.

  One more thing I shouldn't have done, but hell, if the look in her eyes didn't make me want to promise her the world. "Only if you promise that this ends here—this reckless pursuit of revenge. Can't keep chasing after you." My eyes flicked away and I cleared my throat. "Not like that, anyway."

  Her lips parted and just as quickly as the flash of want heated her gaze, she doused it away.

  "I promise," she murmured.

  "To..."

  She shot me a glare. "To not recklessly endanger myself anymore."

  "Good." I nodded. "Let me catch the bad guys. You focus on healing and doing all the things that piece of shit tried to stop—helping, living, loving." My voice caught on the last word.

  Addy was the kind of woman who took down a man's heart hard and fast.

  Her head snapped back and the forcefully shook side to side. "Not going to happen."

  "Which part?" I demanded.

  She inched backward, sliding out from my grip, my hands dropping to my sides. "The last one."

  I hated how she couldn't even bring herself to say it. "I promised to not recklessly endanger myself, and that includes endangering my heart."

  "Right, but Mitch—"

  "Betrayed me. He. Betrayed. Me." Each word was punctuated with a slight dip of her chin, and out of everything she'd said—insisted—this hit me with the most force behind it. "I trusted him, and he broke that trust—he tried to break me." She inhaled sharply. "You told me in order for me to live, Addison Williams had to die."

  The rumble of displeasure from my chest com
peted with the steady crash of waves in the background. I didn't like where this was going, but just like the tide, I couldn't stop her from going in this direction.

  "Well, that includes my weak, betrayed heart." She folded her arms across her, like she was shutting the final doors in the fortress around her heart.

  "Dammit, Addy—"

  "No." She held up her hand, stopping my advance and met my glare. "You want my promise, this is it. I'll promise not to endanger myself, but it means all of me, body and heart. Take it or leave it."

  My jaw tightened, knowing what she demanded.

  To stay safe, she wanted to lock herself away. To stay safe, she needed to lock her feelings away—her hate for Mitch and with it, the possibility of being with someone else. Of loving someone else.

  "Fine," I ground out, brushing her hand away and coming to stand right in front of her. "But then this is my promise. I promise I won't give up."

  "Until Arnell gets what he deserves?"

  I held her eyes for a long second, keeping her tethered to my answer for as long as I could because as soon as I spoke, the link would be gone. According to her promise.

  "Until you both do," I said with a low voice. If she could wield her promise like a double-edged sword, so could I. "Until Arnell gets his punishment... and until you realize that a good man will never break your trust or your heart."

  She inched closer, and for a second, I hoped for one more kiss—one last taste. "Or his word?"

  I exhaled slowly, accepting the choice before me—to keep her safe or to have a shot with her. "Or his word."

  And with those words, I swore to protect her—to one day, get her justice.

  And to prove that her betrayed heart was always safe with me.

  Ace and Addy’s scorching and suspenseful story continues in BETRAYED, the first full-length standalone in my Covington Security series. Read Here.