Page 49 of Lawless in Leather

Damn. She’d slept with him and she didn’t even know that. Which was exactly the sort of thing she’d told herself she wasn’t going to do. No leaping into things too fast without thinking.

The sound of the water died and a minute or so later, Mal emerged, dressed with his hair wet around his face. He smiled at her. “I called Ned. He’ll pick me up in about ten minutes.”

Ten minutes wasn’t long enough to figure this out. Then again, right now, she wasn’t sure ten days would be. Or ten weeks.

“How do you like your coffee?” she asked.

“Black. One sugar.” He came over to where she stood. Looked down at her a moment. “Everything okay?”

She nodded. “All good.”

His eyes narrowed. “Not the most convincing delivery of that line.” He stepped closer then, before she could argue, lifted her up so she was sitting on the counter. He leaned in, kissed her nose. “Stop thinking so hard,” he said. “If I didn’t have to get on a plane today then we’d still be in that bedroom. I’m not making a quick getaway, I promise. I don’t want to go.” He kissed her then, softly. Coaxing with his mouth until her lips parted and things went wild again. He pulled back, rested his forehead on hers. “Damn.”

She waited a few second while her breathing slowed. “I think we screwed up the timing on this one.”

“It’s only until Thursday,” he said. “Time will fly.”

“It had better,” she said. She didn’t think it would, though. She was going to be counting the hours until he got back. And that was worrying. She kissed him again. Just one more time. And then she did the sensible thing and let him drink his coffee and walk out her front door.

Chapter Eleven

Mal made it to Deacon by eight, skinning into the meeting of his security team just on time. To his surprise, Alex and Lucas were sitting with the rest of the guys.

Alex lifted an eyebrow as Mal put his coffee—Ned, thank goodness, had brought coffee when he’d picked Mal up and had, even better, brought a whole thermos full—down on the conference room table.

Mal ignored Alex. He wasn’t going to explain why he was the last one to arrive at his own meeting.

Because that would only lead to inconvenient questions about the reasons. And he was in no way ready to talk to Alex and Lucas about Raina.

Too soon.

Not when he could still feel her hands around him, feel her nails digging into his shoulders and the strength of her body, sleek with dancer’s muscle, moving with his.

Good God.

He’d never found it so hard to drag himself out of a woman’s bed before.

When he’d walked into the kitchen to see her standing there wearing nothing but a short silky robe as red as her hair, it had taken an inhuman amount of effort not to grab her and haul her straight back to the bedroom. Or even just down onto the nearest flat surface.

Eyes on the prize.

He had a job to do.

Thinking about Raina wouldn’t help. Of course, there wasn’t a chance in hell that he’d be able to stop thinking about her, so what he had to do was shunt those thoughts off to one side for now. Think about Deacon and the Saints. Get the job done.

Situation normal.

He hoped.

He cleared his throat and turned on the tablet he’d brought into the room with his coffee.

“Okay, guys,” he said as the buzz of conversation died and his team focused on him. “Good job yesterday. So let’s go through it and figure out what we can do better next time. Chen, why don’t you start?” He nodded at the wiry dark-haired man sitting next to Alex. He’d seconded Chen Sung from MC Shield to run the crew here at Deacon for a few months. They’d met in the army. Good man in a fight. And a brilliant mind for spotting trouble before it started.

Which reminded him, he needed to get Chen’s report on Raina’s truck. He’d asked him to go over the tapes from the parking garage last night. See if Chen could spot the knife-happy perp anywhere.

But business first. Get through the meeting; then there would be time for tapes and tires before he had to leave for Baltimore.

Chen started talking and Mal made himself pay attention. He nodded when Chen suggested a change in the security patrol patterns and times to better match the key movements in the crowd at change of innings and the end of the game. Then Chen passed the ball to Lee Reynolds, who went over the couple of problems they’d had with gates and security scanners.

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