“Why?” His voice sounded gruff, animalistic even to his own ears. He pulled back to meet her gaze and found her staring at him through desire-filled dark eyes.
Her pretty pink tongue peeked between her lips, leaving a moist trail that glistened in the last dregs of sunlight, and his cock throbbed in raging demand. “Why what?”
When did the bashful, innocent Angel he remembered from those fateful moments turn into a siren seductress?
“Don’t toy with me, Angel.” He meant it to be a warning, but damned if he didn’t detect a certain amount of pleading in his tone. He needed backup. He needed Mitch. His buddy tended to be the harder one. He went for the women they shared with a no-holds-barred, no-room-for-argument attitude. He could manipulate a woman to the precise point they wanted her, uncover longings and needs she didn’t know she possessed, and move in to deliver the pleasure. No doubt about it, if Mitch was in Jacob’s boots right now, he would have Angel bent over the hood of her car with her sexy ass bare and ready for a good spanking after this little show of challenge.
Except after all she had endured, all she had escaped, they could never take her that way. They could never expose her to the thin rope they walked between sheer ecstasy and naughty pain.
“Why did I come looking for you?” She repeated his question with a flippancy that set off every alarm bell in his being. “Why are you asking something you already know?”
She relaxed in the cage he had created around her with his arms on either side of her hips. Before he could think to react, before he recognized the disaster about to unfold, he felt the last tenuous bit of space between them dissipate.
Angel’s body molded to his. Her soft curves settled against his harder planes. Her nipples beaded to sharp arrows that pressed at his chest and sent shards of unadulterated lust raining to his cock. In that moment, destiny took his balls in a tight fist with the surefire threat that it wasn’t the only part of him it intended to hold. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he didn’t stand a prayer in heaven of not touching her now. He pushed a knee between her slightly parted legs and rocked his hips forward, bringing his tormented cock flush with her flattened belly. Surprise flashed in her eyes, followed by a bolt of triumph that snapped the last thread of his control.
“I’m not coming to your rescue this time, sweetheart.” It damned near killed him before. Not just learning about the life she was struggling to escape, but being one of two men who had inadvertently put her on the right path to freedom, then turned and walked away. The gratitude that had masked the pain in her eyes had been tough enough to take. The promise of repayment that bordered on a convoluted sense of hero worship had been impossible to claim.
“Funny, it seems you already did.” Temper simmered in her tone, but the sultry seductress that possessed this new Angel in his arms didn’t surrender the fight. “Unless you’re thinking you’re going to leave me stranded here now.”
If Jacob didn’t know better, he might have thought she staged the whole thing. True coincidences didn’t happen often to his way of thinking, and this afternoon had been chock-full of them. Restless for reasons he couldn’t pin down, he had driven into town for supplies needed at the ranch rather than sending one of the hands or requesting delivery the way such business was usually handled. He had completed the errand sooner than he liked and stopped off at the Double Horn Saloon for a beer before heading back to the ranch. Timing put him traveling this lonely country road at a time when Angel needed him, same as it did fifteen months ago when he ended up at the Applebranch Mall for much of the same reasons, staring into the eyes of the woman who stole his heart and every bit of his sanity.
“What I’m thinking…” he drawled and lifted his thigh to her pussy. He swallowed a tormented groan when her hips started to move, grinding against the pressure. Hell, he couldn’t remember what he had been thinking! He started again, rephrasing the statement. “I’m betting you aren’t ready for the can of worms you’re opening, sweetheart.”
Challenge, unadulterated and fierce, turned her expression to one that would tease and torture him in his dreams for many nights to come. “Try me.”
Fuck. The crude word settled in his mind with every possible definition lighting it like a neon sign.
“Right here, Jake. Right now. Try me.”
Jacob stilled her gyrating hips with a firm grip of his hands and stared down at her. Few things surprised him these days, but Angel Dalton was shocking him clean to his booted toes. She dared him to take what he wanted right here and now and damn the consequences. He almost did it. Only one thing kept his control in check.
“Not here.” He dipped his head a fraction and let his lips hover above hers. “Not now. Not alone.”
Chapter Two
Pretty eyes, freckles, and a mane of flaming-red hair made Mitch Dallas stutter. He couldn’t explain it and didn’t bother to try. Lucky for him, or maybe not so lucky, depending on the point of view, he rarely came across a woman with such gems in her genetics.
“What can I get you, handsome?”
Nothing close to what you want to give me. Mitch settled on the barstool and regarded the bartender with a purposefully negligent look of disinterest. Misty Mathews topped the list of easy women in Sunset. Golden-red locks framed a freckled face with bright-blue eyes that might have made him stutter if it had all come naturally. He knew without a doubt the hair came from a bottle and suspected her true eyes hid behind colored contacts.
“Michelob ULTRA, bottle. I’ll open it myself.”
Misty’s siren-painted lips dipped to a disapproving scowl as she pulled a bottle from the nearby cooler and slid it, unopened, across the bar and straight into his hand. “Afraid I’m gonna slip some date-rape drug into your beer, cowboy?”
Mitch wouldn’t put it past her, but he didn’t say as much. He twisted the cap off the bottle and drank deep. “Nothing personal, just a preference.”
Misty braced her hands on the beer cooler peeking from beneath the bar and leaned forward. The pose offered him a clear shot straight down her V-neck T-shirt. Though he enjoyed big tits as much as the next guy, the view she so unabashedly gave him didn’t move him in the least. “And the cold shoulder you’re always snubbing me with, is that just a preference, too?”
“Naw, that’s personal.”
Colored contacts or not, anger still managed to turn the electric blue to a dangerous shade of gray. “You’re an ass, Mitch Dallas.”
“Maybe, but I’m an honest one.” That comment garnered him a snort that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. Mitch drained the rest of the beer and nudged the bottle toward her. “I’ll take another beer.”
“Unopened, yeah, I get it now.” Misty snagged another bottle from the cooler, slinging it like a pro across the well-oiled bar. “That way you know you’re safe from me pouring it over your head.”
Mitch nearly smiled at that. “Now you’re catching on.”
“So who is she?”
Leave it to a woman like Misty to decide his disinterest in her could only be blamed on his attraction to another woman. Trouble came in that he couldn’t claim she was entirely wrong. His hankering for a specific other woman had created a hell of a disinterest in any other female for far too fucking long. That didn’t mean he felt like putting the topic up for discussion.
“Don’t you have work to do?”
Misty’s brow winged up as she cast a cursory look around the nearly empty Double Horn Saloon. “There are barely twenty people in here tonight, and so far you’re drinking faster than any of them. Then again, Jacob is still ahead by two, but at the rate you’re going, I’m thinking you’ll catch up pretty fast.”
“Jacob was in here today? Was he alone?” Too late, Mitch realized how his question sounded after Misty’s previous accusation.
“Yeah, he was here and she, whoever she is, mind you, wasn’t with him either, if that’s what you’re asking.”
No, she wouldn’t have been, because the last Mitch checked the she in ques
tion was doing a damned-good job at building herself a new life back in Applebranch. “I was talking about his brothers. Royce and Clint weren’t with him?”
Misty scoffed. “You’re kidding, right? Even little brother Jacob can’t manage to get Royce and Clint Shelton out from between Taryn Aldean’s legs these days.”
Mitch figured he couldn’t argue that point, so he didn’t bother to try. It made him wonder, though, why his buddy Jacob set to knocking back a four pack on a weekday afternoon when the man all but swore off drinking after meeting Angel. He’d spent countless weeks attempting to drown his desire for a woman he couldn’t have in a vat of whisky and beer.
Angel Dalton. Mitch hadn’t been too far behind his buddy in his quest to find a different poison to counteract the effects of her. As innocent and scared as she was beautiful, turning away from her should’ve been easy. Damned if it hadn’t taken his moving to another city to regain some semblance of the sanity he left at her feet the day he walked away from her in the Applebranch Mall.
Because he never fully walked away. Staying in Applebranch, being in a position as a police officer that afforded him the opportunity to find out anything he wanted to know about her, kept the noose around his neck and cock. He had needed to know she would be safe, couldn’t sleep at night or function by day without being confident the bastard who hurt her was out of her life for good. And in watching over her, he only succeeded in ratcheting up his level of want for her more.
“You know, cowboy, a bartender sees things.” Misty tapped the bar in front of him, catching his attention. “You’ve had something stuck in your craw since you strutted back into town, and I’m thinking that same something’s got Jacob all hot and bothered, too. Nothin’ personal, sweetheart, but if it is a she, you boys are in a hell of a lot of trouble, ’cause she’s got you wrapped.”
Mitch’s frown deepened as Misty gave the bar another tap before sidestepping to tend to a new customer. He figured he probably deserved the sweetly veiled sarcasm after his own asshole-ish remarks. As for the rest, he would be damned if he would ever admit to being wrapped by any woman, let alone one he met for all of a half hour in a mall food court and kept tabs on for the better part of a year.
Silently cursing a blue streak, he pushed a hand through his hair and commenced downing beer number two.
“What have you been doing with yourself?”
Jacob Shelton moved with a grace few men possessed in a kitchen. Angel sat at the round oak table, her elbows propped on the surface in front of her, her chin resting in one hand, and simply watched him move. Oh yeah, she could sit like this for hours. She centered her focus on his back, on the light play of muscles at his shoulder blades as he moved his arms. She wanted to feel those muscles beneath her fingers. She wanted to dig her nails into his flesh as he pushed his cock inside her pussy. She wanted to claw her way down his back until she could palm his ass and pull him deeper, urge him harder inside her.
He shot her a questioning glance over one shoulder and held her gaze just long enough to make her squirm in her chair. Sweet God Almighty, who knew watching a man make a pot of coffee could be such a frigging turn on?
“This and that.” Thinking about you, anticipating this moment, hoping like hell I would know what to do with you if I got you.
She still wasn’t so sure about the last. He did a lot to bolster her confidence on the side of the road. She now felt certain the returned desire she had seen in his eyes all those months ago had been real and not a figment of her own desperate wishes. She had been blindsided that day, not just by her ex’s sudden, violent appearance but by the intense needs that slammed into her when Jacob and Mitch intervened. She never felt emotions so immediate, so debilitating, before or since. More, she never experienced such dark, wicked longing.
“Getting my life together,” she admitted after a long pause. That got her another over-the-shoulder glance. This time his gaze held an understanding that wound through her chest and helped to calm the butterflies in her belly.
“Glad to hear it.” Heartbeats passed before he broke eye contact. He pulled two cups from the nearby cabinet and filled them with coffee.
Making small talk with this man proved hard enough without the weight of silence settling between them every few minutes. Unease didn’t factor into the equation, at least not for her. She could be content in his company without uttering a word. The words that needed to be spoken, however, the ones they both seemed intent on avoiding as long as possible, created a thick awkwardness in the air.
“It took a while.” She gave him a half smile when he handed her one of the cups of coffee and watched as he took the seat across from her at the table. His attention never left her, though it did move over her from time to time. Her flesh prickled with the sensations of his gaze on her neck, her arms, and her chest. Her nipples beaded to the point of a deliciously anticipatory pain as he hesitated his focus on her breasts before slowly lifting his eyes to hers once more.
“Sometimes it’s meant to.” He was taking a trip down memory lane and knew she was right there with him. That much she saw in the depths of his eyes. She saw his thoughts, too, and realized he believed her to be weaker then, maybe even now, than she had truly been.
“What you prevented that day wasn’t the first time he got that violent, but it was the last. It surprised me only because I was already inches away from being out.” She wanted him to know that, to understand his presence and her inexplicable desire for him had nothing to do with her breakup with Mack. She hadn’t latched onto that moment, to him or Mitch, as a way to freedom. Nor had she sought them on the rebound. She had relied on herself, on her own confidence and bravery, to break away, and she let her heart and deepest desires guide her now.
“He would’ve gotten more violent.” Jacob lifted his cup and sipped his coffee as he studied her over the rim.
Angel couldn’t argue with that. Mack’s violence, the abuse he inflicted, had become increasingly worse through the course of their relationship. It amazed her to the point of astonishment the hell a person could put another through in such a short time.
“I never planned to give him a chance.”
Jacob slowly lowered his cup, one corner of his mouth inching up in a hint of a smile. “You’re feistier than I remember.”
“You caught me on a very bad day.” His grin stretched a little more, and she felt the effects of it sizzle through her system.
“Yeah, I suppose I did.”
“You both did.” Awareness flashed in Jacob’s expression, and his earlier words reverberated in her memory. Not here. Not now. Not alone. She could still feel the heat of his breath as it fanned her lips, still marvel at the enormity of the desperation that had burned through her as she had waited for a kiss he didn’t give her.
Angel let another span of silence fall between them before she put voice to the question burning the tip of her tongue. “Has he responded to your text yet?” She had seen Jacob reach for his cell phone when he rounded the front of the truck just before climbing in beside her, back on the side of the road. Whatever he had texted had been short, an SOS call, perhaps? “That was Mitch you were texting, right? I would hate to think you were carrying on a conversation with another woman when you had one sitting in your truck you were about to bring home with you.”
She meant the last as a lame joke, but he didn’t crack a hint of a smile. Instead, he leveled a look at her full of enough guarantee to rock her hormones.
“When he responds, you’ll know it.”
Angel held that gaze and absorbed the certainty of his words. “He left Applebranch.” She didn’t need Jacob’s confirmation of the fact but caught his almost-imperceptible nod just the same. “He came to Sunset.”
“You went looking for him.” Jacob’s words were as much of a statement as hers had been, a show of knowledge between the two of them that proved neither had let that fateful day rest.
Angel made a sound that was half laugh and half resentment. “A
lot of good it did me. I couldn’t get anyone on the APD to tell me what happened to him, where he went, if he ever planned to return. It was like he was there one minute and gone the next.”
“That’s not too far off from how it really happened.”
“Why did he leave?”
Rather than answer her, Jacob asked a question of his own. “So when you couldn’t find Mitch you came looking for me?”
Though her cheeks heated, Angel admitted to the one thing she figured would erase any further doubt about her intentions today. “I knew if I found one of you, I would find the other. You’re a package deal, right? That is what you meant when you said ‘not alone,’ right?”
“I’m starting to think you understand more than we’ve given you credit for,” Jacob mumbled and pushed away from the table.
Angel let her lips slide into a slow, triumphant grin as he moved past her on his way to the kitchen sink. “Then there should be no question about whether or not I’m ready for the can of worms I’m opening.”
She tossed his earlier words back at him. Maybe they weren’t entirely true. In her quest to find Mitch and, later, to find Jacob, she uncovered stories about them that sent her desires for them to all new heights. She learned Mitch and Jacob were indeed what she called a package deal. If a woman wanted one of them, she better be prepared to please them both. Angel wanted them both with every ounce of her being. That want, coupled with the mountain of other rumors she managed to drag out of the townsfolk, exposed other longings within her, too arousing to be evil, despite their specifics. Rumors of control, of bondage and requirements for submission, whispered at a world she knew little about but burned to experience.
Ramagos, Tonya - Running from Angel [Sunset Cowboys 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Page 2