by Lucy Gilmore
“Just the one criminal, and he’s hardly a mastermind of villainy.”
“That’s it. We’re going to the sheriff’s office and telling him what’s going on.” Zeke planted his feet in a stance that made the most of his physique. He wasn’t as tall as Adam and didn’t have the same cowboy leanness, but his shoulders were wide and powerful. With his arms crossed like that, he looked as though nothing and no one could ever argue with him.
Dawn did anyway.
“No way. Sheriff Jenkins will drag us in on theft charges. Or, worse, make us give Gigi back.”
Zeke released a snort. “Of those two possibilities, you think losing a dog is worse?”
Dawn thought of that sweet little puppy, her round little belly finally starting to swell with good meals and better care, and nodded. “Yes. And if you go to the authorities behind my back, I’ll deny everything. I’m a very good liar. I can even pass lie-detector tests. I dated an FBI agent once.”
“Of course you did.”
“He might have been making that up to impress me, but he was definitely affiliated with law enforcement in some way. Lila thinks he might have been the guy they hire to serve papers to deadbeat dads trying to avoid paying child support.”
Zeke tossed up his hands. “I don’t know why anyone even tries talking to you.” He cast a quick look around, though whether he was checking to see if his brother was around or if No-Pants Shotgun was hiding behind one of the bushes framing their front porch, Dawn couldn’t say. “If you won’t let me go to the police, what’s the point of telling me? Am I supposed to start carrying a shotgun, too?”
Dawn shook her head. “Of course not. He doesn’t actually know where you live. I was careful to lead him off the scent so he won’t know where to find us.”
“Is that a trick you learned from your FBI agent boyfriend, too?”
“He wasn’t my boyfriend,” Dawn clarified, “and no. It’s a trick I learned from being a woman living in the twenty-first century. The first rule is never to lead the murderers directly to your house. If they want to turn you into a skin suit, they’re going to have to do it in the street where the witnesses are.”
Zeke looked as though he had plenty to argue with in that statement, but he didn’t give voice to any of his feelings. He glanced at his phone and sighed instead. “I’d stay and try to talk some common sense into you, but I’m already late for open swim.”
“That’s good, because I don’t need you to treat me like I’m a child. I’m sorry that I dragged you into this, but I’m not sorry I did it.” She crossed her own arms and did her best to glare Zeke into submission. “Some things are worth the risk.”
“I have half a mind to tell Adam and let him deal with you,” Zeke muttered, but he didn’t make good on the threat. “Please be careful when you leave here tonight,” he said instead. “And for the love of everything, try not to steal any other highly valuable animals. One of these days, you’re going to end up getting us both killed.”
Dawn wasn’t sorry to see him go, and not just because his departure meant that she and Adam were alone in the house. She liked Zeke, she really did, but she didn’t always like that he saw her as a person to be humored—a person to be handled. There was nothing she hated more than that.
Doing things her own way didn’t make her wrong. It just made her Dawn.
The house was eerily silent when she stepped back inside. Adam should have returned by now, not to mention the two puppies who’d become his shadow. There was no sound of any of them scuffling around, but as she moved into the kitchen, she noticed that a bottle of Adam’s weird butterscotch-flavored liquor had been set out along with two glass tumblers.
With that, Zeke and No-Pants were all but forgotten. That bottle was a declaration of Adam’s intent, a promise that he planned on delivering. He really was like the silver-screen Clint Eastwood that way. A man of few words, yes, but one who could be trusted to keep them once they were uttered.
“Gigi?” she called, since the fastest way to find the man was to find the puppy who adored him. She probably should have called out Methuselah, since Adam was doing his best to confuse the poor animal, but she refused to give him the satisfaction. “Uncle? Where are you two hiding?”
The answer came as the thump of Uncle’s long, gray tail on the hardwood floor. Dawn turned down the hallway where the bedrooms were located to find both animals lying in a tangle of limbs in front of Adam’s closed door. Gigi blinked up from her comfortable position curled next to Uncle’s stomach before emitting a tiny, pink yawn.
“Oh, Gigi. You’re killing me.” Dawn squatted down and offered the smaller dog her hand, but she’d already fallen back asleep. “You can’t go falling in love with Uncle. That’s not how this is supposed to work. He’s a hardworking service animal and you’re… Well. Not.”
Uncle yawned, too, an almost apologetic look in his sleepy gray eyes as he tucked his head possessively over Gigi’s resting form. Dawn should have been delighted to see him taking such a deep and unprompted interest in his malnourished protégé, but she mostly wished she’d never brought Gigi here in the first place. It would be almost impossible to separate these two now that they’d become a bonded pair. Impossible and cruel, and that was the one thing she was determined not to be. The poor animal had suffered enough already.
It was with conflicted emotions that she rose to her feet and dropped a light knock on Adam’s door. The sound elicited no response, so she clicked the handle and pushed the door open a crack.
“Hello?” she called. “I know you’re in here. Your watchdogs are keeping a vigilant lookout.”
The only answer was the distant patter of water over tile. It took Dawn all of two seconds to place that sound, and only one more to suck in a sharp breath at Adam’s audacity.
“Oh, hell no.” She marched across his bedroom, taking quick note of the familiar sparsity of it—everything in neutral tones, nothing scattered over the tabletops, the only clutter a set of headphones on the side table that Adam used to listen to audiobooks. It had felt strange at first, this room with no pictures or knickknacks, every single item of clothing and sock tucked exactly where it was supposed to be, but she liked it now. There was something profoundly comforting in so much constancy.
There was also something profoundly appealing in it, but that wasn’t what Dawn intended to focus on right now. Without knocking this time, she pulled open the adjoining bathroom door.
“You’d better not be doing what I think you’re doing in there.” Without waiting for a reply, she reached for the hem of her dress and pulled it over her head. “If you’re wasting even an ounce of your stamina, you’re going to pay dearly for it.”
The blur of Adam’s naked body behind the semitransparent glass wasn’t clear enough for her to make out all the details, but the scent of his alpine shampoo and the fact that his hands were up near his head seemed to indicate that he was only washing his hair.
Still. She wasn’t taking any chances. Not when she could practically feel the slide of his wet skin under her fingertips.
She wriggled out of her panties and unclipped her bra, making short work of the disrobing process. In fact, she was so quick that Adam barely had time to utter a protest before she pulled open the door and joined him inside the compact shower.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Zeke is—”
“Already well on his way to swim practice,” she finished for him. “We’re alone in the house. I think the real question is, what are you doing?”
She glanced down at his glorious nudity, marveling, as she always did, that a man could be so perfectly molded without hours of careful and strategic weight lifting at the gym. She’d dated enough gym rats to know that most men had to work very specific muscles to get that buff, sculpted physique so prized by Hollywood and Instagram influencers. Adam, on the other hand, never did anything that wasn’t
related to this ranch. He didn’t have time for gym memberships, and even if he did, he’d probably scoff at the notion of spending energy working on something as silly as physical appearance.
Not that it seemed to matter to his body in the slightest. His thighs were a perfect picture of masculine power, his abdomen flat without being overly defined. Most of his musculature was in his arms and across his chest, a testament to all the heavy lifting required in a place like this.
And his ass, well… Dawn bit her lip. She could only be glad that he was face-to-face with her right now. There was a lot to be said for full frontal, but his ass made her feel unnatural things. It made her want to do unnatural things.
“I was afraid you’d gotten started without me,” she said when all he did was continue to stand there, his head soapy and his body on display. “I had all sorts of punishments planned.”
His laugh was slightly mocking. “Just having you here is punishment enough, wouldn’t you say?”
Considering how robustly he was adapting to her presence in his shower—and she hadn’t even touched him yet—she wouldn’t have said that at all. “It doesn’t look like you mind. In fact, I’d have to say you’re about to enjoy every second of my presence.” She paused and held her hand out to catch the drops cascading from up above. “This water is freezing, by the way. How can you stand it?”
“I can’t.” He reached out and turned the knob to a much warmer temperature. “But it was the only way I could keep myself from, ah, getting started without you.”
That was all Dawn needed to hear to have every nerve ending in her body thrumming. Call her crazy, but self-imposed preventive torture had to be one of the hottest aphrodisiacs on the planet.
She stepped under the spray and allowed the water to surge over her. The shower was so small that there was no way to do this without their bodies coming into contact. It wasn’t much to start out with—the brush of her nipple against his chest, her hip pressing against his—but it was enough. Especially since Adam was so soapy that everywhere they touched was smooth and slippery.
Smooth and slippery were two of Dawn’s favorite adjectives when crammed naked into a compact space with a man, so she made the most of it. Turning this way and that, letting a small moan escape as the water crashed over her head and washed away the grime of the day, she became a body in constant motion.
Adam noticed—and in a big way. With a groan, he reached down and gripped her just below her waist, his fingers pressing into the roundest parts of her hip. “Stop wriggling around like that, dammit. I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing.”
She laughed at how irritated he sounded—a strange thing when he was so obviously not irritated with her right now. “Then duck your head, stupid. I’ll wash your hair for you. I’ll wash anything you want me to. Just tell me where you’d like me to start.”
“I thought we were going to have a drink first,” he grumbled, but he lowered his head enough so she could reach it. “I had a whole plan.”
“I hate plans,” she replied and threaded her fingers through the wet, soapy strands of his hair. Her nails weren’t very long, but she used what she had to massage his scalp, tilting his head this way and that as she rinsed. “They take all the fun out of everything. Why don’t you tell me about what you had in mind instead?”
He hadn’t yet let go of her hip, and at this request, his fingers dug even deeper into her flesh. “You don’t deserve to hear it.”
She laughed and renewed the wriggling undulations that had unsettled him so much before. The movements were intended to entice Adam to the point where he had no choice but to pin her up against the shower wall, but she’d underestimated his ability to hold himself in check. Her arms were starting to turn to gelatin, and her legs were throbbing with the desire to have him between them, but he seemed able to control his limbs just fine.
“Fine,” he said and ran his free hand along his jawline. “The first thing I was going to do is shave. Otherwise, it’s going to feel like sandpaper against your lips later. Or between your thighs. I hadn’t yet decided where I was going to focus my attention.”
She stopped all movement at once. Despite the fact that they were surrounded by water, her mouth went dry. “Why not both?” she managed.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have as much time as I’d like. I figured I was either going to have to start at the top and work my way down, or start at the bottom and see where my tongue ended up. It was turning into a kind of dilemma, to be honest.”
“It just so happens I love sandpaper,” Dawn said. She reached for the shower knob. Enough of this wet, steamy foreplay. She was going to kiss this man soon or die trying. “It’s my favorite thing. On my lips, between my thighs, pretty much anywhere you’d like to rub it…”
His hand dropped over hers before she managed to get the water turned off. “I’ve never understood why you’re always in such a hurry. Some things aren’t meant to be rushed.” He gave a gentle tsk before grabbing a razor from a clip on the shower wall and pointing it at her. “Here. You do it.”
She looked at the razor but didn’t reach for it. “You want me to shave you?”
“I want you to be naked with me for five minutes without forcing me to move faster than light,” he replied, his voice low. He gave the razor a wiggle. “I want you to have to focus on something that isn’t my cock.”
She took the razor. “Well, I don’t see why you’re always determined to take things slow. There’s something to be said for a hard, fast shower quickie.”
Partly out of a desire to punish him for eking this process out, and partly because she was thrilled that he was so determined to make this worth the wait, she nudged him into a more comfortable shaving position. As this entailed her legs spreading open and straddling his in a semistanding position, comfortable was a matter of debate. Their bodies were touching in all the places that throbbed and yearned for more, and it would have been incredibly easy for her to shift a little bit to the right and feel the full glory of him inside her.
But that wasn’t the game. For whatever stoic moral code Adam lived by, they were going to make this as painfully prolonged as possible.
“I can’t hold this position for very long, or I’m going to slip and accidentally slice your jugular,” she warned. “You’d better hold me in place.”
Actually, she did enough spin class at the gym to be able to brace her thighs like this for hours on end, but she wanted to feel his arms around her. This seemed as good an excuse as any, especially when he grumblingly did as she asked. Those oh-so-powerful forearms, made for catching cows and hefting bales of hay, wrapped around her. His hands spanned the smallest curve of her waist, the glide of his skin over hers like falling down a long, wet chute.
“This seems like a trap,” Adam said, every muscle of his body tensing around hers.
“You’re the one who wanted a precoital grooming session,” she pointed out. “Do you normally use any kind of product? I don’t see any shaving cream.”
“Third bottle on the right. Between the conditioner and the shower cleaner.”
Like most parts of Adam’s house, the shower was neatly and simply organized, every item in its place. Dawn had no idea how long it took to get a house like this—with every end table in a perfect location, every spice in the kitchen arranged to be quickly and easily pulled out—but she liked it. So few things in her life were like this. Her own bedroom was a haphazard whirl of discarded outfits and lost earrings, her shower a smorgasbord of broken razors and empty shampoo bottles that needed to be thrown out.
“Seems like dangerous work, putting a blade against your skin without being able to see what you’re doing,” Dawn said as she filled her palm with a handful of white, lightly scented foam. “But you never seem to have any nicks or cuts.”
Since she was busy lathering him up, all he could offer in reply was a soft grunt.
&
nbsp; “I know, I know. It’s because you’re not in a hurry to get it done.” She moved her fingers in a circular pattern along the sharp, finely chiseled lines of his jaw. “Adam Dearborn is a careful man, a meticulous man. When he sets about doing a thing, he does it all the way.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“It’s not,” she replied, tilting her head to view her handiwork. She’d missed a small spot near his ear, so she reached up and finished the job, her hand lingering to touch the side of his face a moment too long. “It’s the opposite of how I do things, that’s all. No one has ever accused me of being careful. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I know how.”
She’d meant the words playfully, a light banter to keep this whole shower situation moving along to its natural and inevitable conclusion, but Adam’s hold on her tightened. One of his hands was pretty much cupping her ass by this point, but he hadn’t strayed too far from neutral territory.
“I trust you,” he said simply.
“You shouldn’t. I could easily hurt you.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “You could cause me pain. But I think you’ll find that I’m not so easy to crack.”
She didn’t argue with him. Adam Dearborn definitely wasn’t an easy man to crack. She’d spent the last six months trying to find a hole somewhere in this ironclad exterior of his, but nothing seemed to work. Nothing she knew how to do, anyway.
If there was one thing she did know, however, it was the landscape of this man’s body. If she could paint, she’d have been able to perfectly re-create his likeness on canvas. If she were a poet, she might be able to describe every scar that told the tale of his youth. Unfortunately, she was neither of those things and never would be.
She was Dawn Vasquez, decent at training puppies and great at sex. It wasn’t much of a curriculum vitae, but it was all she had.
Although she’d done a lot of things with men in her lifetime, this was her first time shaving one. As soon as she started, she realized why. Nothing could have prepared her for the sheer intimacy of running the safety blade over Adam’s jaw. She couldn’t hear the scrape of his stubble giving way under the pounding of the shower, but she felt the low rumble of it. Over his strong, wide cheekbones. Down his square jaw. Skipping lightly over the scar that ran from the bottom of his chin to the side of one ear—an accident he laughingly referred to as the time Phoebe had thought it would be a good idea to rearrange the living room furniture. She even took a moment to press her thumb in the small divot in the middle of his chin before moving the razor over it. Each part of him took on new meaning as she explored his skin at such close proximity.