Hookers?
I almost breathed it aloud.
Instead, I covered my mouth with my hand, my fingers touching my greedy lips. But that was stupid. Because that only made me want to touch myself more. I couldn’t help it. I dragged my index finger once across my top lip.
Like a match to a flame, it reignited me. My God, those kisses. My lips were bruised from Michael’s mouth. He’d imprinted himself on me, and I felt him everywhere—on my skin, inside my organs, and deep in the dark, protected corners of my heart.
And yes, most exquisitely, between my legs.
If I’d stayed a moment longer at the club, I would’ve grabbed his hand and dragged him to the restroom. Even the return to my hotel had felt terribly long, a new and cruel sort of torture as I’d walked with a wet, needy ache between my thighs.
For so long, I hadn’t let myself feel a thing. Now, I was nothing but nerve endings rubbed raw, cells crying out for relief.
The elevator dinged at the seventeenth floor. I practically vaulted out of the open doors and down the hall in a mad dash for my room. I reached it, fumbled for my key card from the back pocket of my jeans, slid open the door, and stepped inside.
My room was dark and cool, and the lights from the Strip winked through the windows. The door shut behind me with a heavy groan.
My breath was hot and fast, my hands even faster. I dropped my purse to the floor, unbuttoned my jeans, and dipped my hand into my panties.
I groaned, my fingertips slipping through my wetness.
This was what happened when you banished sex, what happened when you extradited it from your life, your heart, your bed. When you told yourself you weren’t ready, that you’re better off without it. I hadn’t wanted anyone to touch me, and I hadn’t even touched myself in a long time.
I couldn’t stop now. I was a rocket, flying to the atmosphere, hell-bent on a jet-fueled trip to the stars. The floodgates were unleashed, and I stroked myself, riding my own hand urgently as a flash of images sparked before my closed eyes. Michael’s kisses. Michael’s lips. His voice in my ear. His teeth. He hadn’t kissed me like that before. Like he wanted to consume me. Bite me. Fuck me hard.
“Michael.”
I moaned his name, feeling its familiarity yet utter newness on my tongue as my fingers flew faster. There, standing against my hotel room door, breath tumbling rapidly from my lungs, sex on my brain, I made myself come for the first time in two years.
My orgasm slammed into me, fast and sharp as a hot knife. Seizing my body. Lighting me up. Racing across every inch of my skin. It was everywhere, rapid and furious, pulsing, and over far too soon. I was left panting, and not nearly sated enough.
His name fell from my lips once more.
I didn’t feel cold tonight.
I was burning up.
My body was alive again, and I feared I would become addicted to this feeling before my heart was ready.
9
Michael
The dog’s legs flew, like a flip-book at high speed, as I cruised down the trail.
No one ever beat the dog. Not even Colin, and he’d recently finished the Badass Triathlon. But today I was a few footfalls behind Johnny Cash, and my brothers Colin and Ryan were eating my dust.
Pent-up lust could do that to a man. Desire could drive me to finish faster, push harder, focus more intensely.
With sweat slicking down my chest and my heart pounding, I ran as the sun peeked over the hills at Red Rock Canyon. My thoughts cycled between the bare-bones one-foot-in-front-of-the-other adrenaline and sheer, unrepentant want.
Last night was intense, sure. But it was only physical. It had to be that way. My ex-girlfriends had simply been wrong. As I whipped around a switchback, the black-and-white border collie in my crosshairs, I felt more confident than ever that my past relationship woes were never about Annalise. I wasn’t a player. I didn’t have a string of three-and-out dates trailing behind me. I’d had plenty of serious girlfriends over the years. I hadn’t settled down with any of them because I simply hadn’t met the right woman.
Not because I was hung up on her.
That was so not the case.
As the dust churned up beneath my sneakers, my mind flashed back to Katrina’s comments a year ago. I’d been with her for ten months, but taking things to a serious level had never crossed my mind.
When she’d ended it, she’d simply shaken her head in frustration and said, “You’re in love with the past.”
I’d scoffed, doubtful. “What does that mean?”
“Ask yourself. I’m done trying to figure you out.”
“There’s nothing to figure out. What you see is what you get.”
“Well, what I’m getting isn’t enough. You’re stuck someplace else, Michael.”
My quads burned from the fast pace on the dusty trail. Stuck. Ha. I was fine. Work and family were all I needed. Besides, I had too much going on. Business was booming, and the investigation into my father’s death had gotten its first big break in ages last month when the police had arrested the getaway driver.
I was stuck on absolutely nothing.
Seeing Annalise had proved that, hadn’t it? I wanted her, but I wasn’t caught up in her. I’d be a stone-cold idiot to be hung up on someone who’d moved on more than a decade ago.
That kiss had proved it, I reasoned, as I neared the trailhead.
That was enough to get her out of my system.
Except I couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss.
That intoxicating kiss.
That fucking kiss, which had ignited all my fantasies last night. She’d felt like fire in my arms, and just as hard to contain. But I’d craved the danger, the risk of touching her. Of what it might do to me to have her.
It would either free me or wreck me.
Those thoughts powered me the final feet to the end of the trail, where I caught up quickly to Ryan’s four-legged best friend. Johnny Cash panted hard, tongue lolling from his snout. My heart beat furiously as I pressed the spigot on the water fountain. “Here, boy,” I called, giving the dog first dibs on the water as Colin’s relentless pace bounded closer.
“You bastard. You on the juice now?” he shouted as he caught up.
“No. Ryan is. That’s the only way he can manage to finish within a minute of us,” I said, panting.
Colin laughed as I took a drink of the water, then stepped away from the fountain for Colin to get his shot. When Ryan arrived, wiping his palm across his brow, I adopted a look of feigned disgust. “I see your almost-married life is slowing you down,” I said, teasing my brother, who’d recently gotten engaged.
“Nothing slows me down. Not ever,” Ryan said. “I let you win.”
“You wish.”
I wandered over to the wooden fence that edged the lot, parking my foot on a post to stretch. Colin and Ryan joined me, and Johnny Cash trotted behind, slumping in a furry black-and-white heap at Ryan’s feet.
“Listen. We’ve got some things to figure out,” I said, diving into a conversation I’d told my brothers we needed to have on our run today. “I was thinking we need to take care of Marcus when shit starts going down. Probably even sooner.”
Colin nodded, shoving a hand through his dark hair. “Definitely. I’ve been talking to him about what to expect. He’s already working on transferring to another college out of state,” he said, breathing hard as he stretched his quads after our five-mile run. “That way he has a real reason to get out of town without his dad knowing he’s been giving key details to the detectives. He’s looking to go to school in Florida.”