by Jill Shalvis
He cupped a hand over his ear. “I’m sorry?”
“I need your help! Are you deaf?”
“Nah, I heard you.” He smiled at her. “I just wanted you to say it a couple of times.”
With a sigh, she lay back on the bed. “You’re a jerk.”
“I know. Oh, and you’re stripping yourself this time.”
“Why?”
“Because my brain fails when I strip you.” He waggled a finger at her shirt, a stretchy number that was hugging her curves and messing with his brain pretty badly. “Get moving.”
“You’re so romantic.”
Brody opened his mouth and then shut it again, deciding not to touch that one with a ten-foot pole since it happened to be true. He didn’t have a romantic bone in his body. Well, other than the one that wanted to indeed strip her and then kiss every inch of her body as he exposed it. But since what he wanted to do after that involved him stripping, too, he kept it to himself.
Then he heard the unmistakable hum of a cell phone vibrating from somewhere close. “You?”
“It’s just my alarm. Can I have some tea?”
“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “I’ve fallen for that one before.”
“No, really.” Her big eyes met his, all warm and soft and hurting. “I need some tea. I told you, I can’t take my medicine without it, or it tears up my stomach.”
“I thought you were done with the meds.”
“I thought so, too.”
He looked her over for a sign she was just fucking with him again, but she really did look pale and weak. “Okay, but if you’re gone when I get back, I will find you.” On that ridiculously empty threat, he left the room, then waited a minute, pressing his ear to the door.
He heard nothing.
Deciding to take her at her word, he made his way to the front desk, having to admit that a big hotel would have been nice for the room service alone. He asked for hot tea. The woman there took her sweet time making it, too. By the time he had a tray in his hands, he was nearly crawling out of his skin with impatience.
Once again, he swiped Maddie’s room key, watched the lights flicker green, giving him the go-ahead, but when he turned the handle, the door didn’t budge.
She’d bolted the door. “This isn’t funny, Maddie. Let me in.” When she didn’t, he headed next door to his own room, walking directly to the connecting door.
She wasn’t in her room.
His heart dropped into his gut until he realized the shower was running. Okay, so he’d overreacted. He sat on her bed and waited.
And waited, trying not to picture her in there, naked and soapy and wet . . .
Then he saw the cell phone on the nightstand, which immediately distracted him. With only a small zing of guilt, he flipped it open and checked her alarm. It was off. He moved directly to last received and dialed calls. Nothing he recognized. Then he got to text messages, where the last one stopped his heart.
Be late and Maddie pays, I promise you.
No longer feeling so patient, he knocked on the bathroom door.
Nothing.
A bad feeling curled in the pit of his gut right next to where his heart had dropped. He waited another minute and then decided the hell with this and broke in.
The room was filled with steam pouring over the top of the closed shower curtain. “Maddie?”
More of that silence.
Okay, so clearly they were going to do this the hard way, not that that was any big surprise. “I snooped on your phone and saw the text.” With a quick jerk, he pulled the curtain aside. “And—”
And Maddie sat on the shower floor, head on her knees in rare defeat as the water pounded down over her, and the sight absolutely broke the heart still sitting in his gut.
Steam rose all around her but did not quite cover her. Nor did her hair, plastered to her shoulders. Not looking would have been physically impossible, but still, he wasn’t prepared for the visceral punch the sight of her gave him. “Maddie?”
She didn’t move.
Resigned, he stepped over the edge of the tub and got in with her.
With a sudden gasp, she bolted upright, giving him a quick flash of her pale, shocked, horror-filled face.
And more. Way more.
Water ran over her in rivulets. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open in a silent scream, and two things hit him at once.
One, she hadn’t been ignoring him—she really hadn’t heard him coming in because she’d been asleep.
And two, he’d caught her in mid-nightmare.
Processing the information took a moment because she was naked, dripping wet, and extremely earth-shattering, heart-stoppingly gorgeous. Which is the only explanation he had for how she managed to wrap her foot around the back of his knee and tug so that his leg collapsed.
He fell like a ton of bricks to the floor of the tub, where he lay being pelted by the shower.
What the hell?
He blinked through the water raining down over the top of him to focus in on the very naked, very wet, very furious woman, hands on her hips, standing over him, glaring into his face.
Chapter 14
“Did I hear you say you snooped on my cell phone?” Maddie demanded.
“Yes.” On the floor of the shower, fully dressed, drenched, Brody glared back at her. “And you neglected to tell me that if Leena doesn’t make it to the meeting you’re trying to stop her from making, you pay.”
Maddie had no intelligent response, so she kicked at the inch of water in the bottom of the tub, splashing an already drenched man. She wanted to hurt Rick for the nightmare. She really needed to hurt him. Instead, she splashed Brody again.
“Hey—” He spit out a mouthful of water and came up on his knees, his shirt plastered to his tough body like a second skin as he held up his hands. “I’m not the bad guy here!”
Another kick of water helped, but her breath was still hitching, her body coursing with fury, hatred, adrenaline. Never mind the cell phone threat, she was caught on the stupid nightmare she hadn’t had in years, but she’d had it now and she couldn’t erase it from her brain.
She’d been sixteen again, back on that last night on Stone Cay, sleeping until she’d heard Leena cry out. Running through the compound trying to find her, running, running . . . desperate to find her—
“Maddie—”
She kept splashing him, and with an oath, a string of oaths really, he managed to surge to his feet and grab her, holding her against him.
But that just really did her in. She was so furious she saw stars, and yeah, way back in a corner of her mind, waaaaay back, she knew it wasn’t Brody that was making her so crazy with fear and fury and guilt, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t care.
Her nightmare had reminded her of a time when she’d been young, alone, helpless, and in her head, she was there again. Memories, none good, had crashed down on her, pelting her, hurting her, killing her. “I can’t—” She shook her head wildly. “I can’t—”
“Sh-h.” He softened his hold. “Shh, it’s okay.” He pulled her in against him. “It’s okay, Maddie, you’re okay.”
But it wasn’t. In spite of the hot water, she was cold, iced to the bone, and even worse, she couldn’t control herself. Yet somehow, Brody’s voice came through, achingly soft and so gentle she couldn’t handle it.
“I’ve got you,” he was saying, holding her to his big, steaming hot body while the storm raged both outside the building and within her. “It’s me, Maddie, just me.”
Pride and ego kept her struggling, but he just held her tighter. “Come on now. Stop.”
“I can’t.” She fisted her hands in his drenched shirt, feeling that welcome heat of his body coming through, the comforting steady beat of his heart, and she gripped him for dear life. “I can’t stop.”
“I’ve got you now; you’re not alone.” He was holding her, his hands on her bare skin, his grip easy, soothing, firm.
He had her.
He real
ly had her. And unlike any other time when she’d been falling apart, there was someone to catch her. It was then, reeling from that, still shaking from the dream, still bombarded by memories, still wanting to scream, wanting to fight, that she horrified herself by bursting into tears.
At Maddie’s first sob, Brody’s heart cracked right open. There was nothing more wrenching than a woman’s tears, and that it was Maddie, strong, tough Maddie, made it all the more so.
Scooping her up against him, he turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub. Grabbing a towel, he tossed it over her the best he could and moved out of the bathroom. The main room was dark, but lightning lit it up, followed by a crack of thunder that rattled the window.
He set Maddie on the bed, planning on doing anything to make her stop crying, anything at all. He’d promise her the moon if he had to. And once he got her to stop, he needed to get her dressed, preferably in a suit of armor, because they were not going to the bad place again—that being the place where his brain ceased to function properly. And then when she was no longer naked or breaking his heart, he was going to make her talk. “Maddie.”
He expected her to try to karate chop him again. Or maybe dive under the covers and pretend he didn’t exist.
She was good at both.
Instead, with the only sound in the room being the driving rain and wind coming from outside, she curled toward him, pulling him down over the top of her.
“Mad—”
Her fingers shut him up, brushing over his mouth. Then she replaced those with her lips, while her hands ran down his arms, over his back, trembling, needing . . . It sucked him right in.
She sucked him right in.
Her mouth was on his, warm and salty, and somehow sweet, so damn sweet.
“Maddie—”
Or at least that’s what he tried to say, but it was hard to talk with her tongue stroking his, not to mention the sheer, heart-stopping sensation of lying over the top of her while she was nothing more than a drenched, sleek, quivering form of mouthwatering curves. Naked curves. He couldn’t possibly think straight. In the back of his mind, he knew she was trying to distract him, just as he registered it was working all too well, and then her hands tugged at his wet shirt.
“It’s your turn to strip,” she murmured, her voice all husky from her tears and barely audible over the sound of the storm raging outside.
Strip. He knew it was such a bad idea, but was getting caught up on the why. He had a reputation for being big and bad, but mostly, that was all attitude, and despite what women always said, they really didn’t tend to fall for big and bad.
At least they hadn’t been falling for him.
He’d had several relationships that had lasted longer than a few dates, but nothing in a long time, especially not this past year when he’d done little but work night and day to get Sky High Air off the ground.
So it’d been a while since he’d been naked, but he remembered how to get there. What he didn’t remember, ever, was having a woman be so desperate for him that she was trying to climb into his skin, and it was just odd enough—especially for Maddie—to make him put his hands on her arms and pull back to look into her face. “You are Maddie, right?”
She went utterly still for one beat, then turned back into the wild woman with superhuman strength, but she was done catching him off guard, thank you very much. Pinning her to the bed, he stretched out over the top of her to hold her down. “Okay, it’s you. I’m sorry, I—”
But she wasn’t listening; she was busy trying to kill him again, so he threw a leg over hers, drawing her hands up over her head to get a better grip on her.
Which she absolutely did not appreciate. “Get off me or I’ll—”
“Kick my ass?”
“I mean it!”
“A minute ago, you were kissing me like your life depended on it, and now you want to kick my ass?”
“A minute ago, you hadn’t stopped to chat and then confused me with my twin sister!”
“I’ll never make that mistake again,” he promised and leaned in again so that their mouths were only a fraction of an inch apart. His initial shock at finding her in the shower had faded so that now he could go back to appreciating the situation.
That being him, fully dressed, drenched to the skin, plastered to her, also drenched and not dressed. He pressed his face to her neck, which was warm and soft, and inhaled, letting the scent of her fill his head.
“Kiss me again, damn it,” she demanded.
She’d kissed him before, but now probably wasn’t the time to point that out. Not with her wrapped around him, not with her voice still thick from the tears that had taken them both by surprise.
He wasn’t a complete idiot. He recognized that she was most definitely back to distracting him, and you know what? Mission accomplished. At least for the moment, with her mouth racing across his jaw, her fingers working the buttons on his wet material, getting only halfway before she gave up trying and tugged. Buttons flew, and she yanked the shirt off his shoulders.
“I need to get there,” she said. “To the kissing and then . . .”
He liked the sound of the “and then.” She was soft and wet, and he was primed and ready to go, and had been for too long to count. She couldn’t get his zipper down, so she ran her fingers over him, then tried to slip her hands into his pants, which he wanted her to be able to do, so he gave her a little room and then could still hardly breathe for what she did to him.
“Help me,” she whispered.
“Whatever you want.”
“Hurry.”
Except that. “Is there a fire?”
“I like it fast.”
Yes, and if she kept outlining him with her fingers, fast would be no problem. But he didn’t want fast. Nope, he wanted slow and deliberate, so he could remember every little detail for the fantasies he was going to have about this for the rest of his life. So he grabbed her hand in his, brought it to his mouth to slow her down a minute.
Or two.
Or for an hour.
“That’s not fast,” she pointed out.
Normally, impatient would work for him, really it would, but not now, not with her. He rocked against her, pressing her back against the mattress, again burying his face in her neck, pressing his mouth to her skin, taking a little lick because he wanted a taste. He made his way up her throat to her jaw, then headed toward her ear because he needed a bit of that, too—
“Brody, damn it.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” He loved her ear. Small and delicate with all those sexy silver hoops.
She slid her fingers into his hair and he nearly purred, but then she tightened her grip, painfully so, and tugged. “Kiss me!”
“I was.”
“Here! Like this!” And still holding his head by the ears, she tugged him up and locked her mouth on his. She used her tongue, which he also liked very much, and then, as if she needed to ensure he stayed with her, she arched up and wrapped her legs around his waist.
A move that pretty much guaran-ass-teed he wasn’t going anywhere.
Ever.