Page 60 of Hell or High Water

I didn’t like this.

“Of course,” I snapped. Who didn’t see flaws in the mirror?

He shook his head. “No, you don’t. There aren’t any,” he replied.

Before I could catch my breath from that response, his hands took the lace edge of my top and began pulling it up. I grabbed his arms to stop him, but it was no use. He was too strong. A deep, pleased hum vibrated through his chest.

“What about these? See a flaw here?” His voice dropped an octave, and his eyes darkened. His gaze was solely on my chest.

“I don’t know. I haven’t studied them that closely,” I said. My voice sounded breathless, but he was making it hard for me to inhale properly.

This time, the back of his fingers ran along the side swell of each breast slowly. “I’ve never seen a more perfect pair in my life,” he told me.

My already-hard nipples ached for attention, but he took the bottom of my top and tugged it down, covering them.

When he went to the waistline of my shorts, I tried to stop him again, but his teeth clamped down on my earlobe, distracting me long enough for him to tug them down enough to show my stomach. He caressed down the center with the pad of his thumb, still gripping my waist with his other hand.

“And here?”

“Yes. The freckle to the left of my belly button—it looks like a mole.” And I hated it.

The corners of his lips quirked. “Now see, I was just thinking how I wanted to start there and lick, nip, and kiss a path all the way down.”

He touched the freckle, then ran his fingertip down my stomach as I watched him. I sucked in a breath when he slipped it beneath the waist of my shorts. His breathing was heavy in my ear, and I shivered. Swallowing hard, I waited, aching for him to touch me already. Our eyes met as we stared at our reflection.

When his hand was under my panties, I made a small sound, and a wicked grin curled his lips.

“And this…” he said with a growl to his voice, then slid one finger over my clit, making my knees buckle. “Mmmm, this, I can promise you, has no flaws.”

I laid my head back against his chest as my eyes fluttered closed from the pleasure.

“You were never a six,” he whispered.

I forced my lids back open to look at him. He was watching me.

“And when you labeled yourself a six, I thought you were joking.”

Okay, so he was attracted to me. Did that change things? Because I wanted more of what we’d done. I just didn’t want to get attached and end up hurt in the end.

God, why did this have to be so complicated?

The sound of his phone ringing in the other room had him pulling his hand from my shorts and heading for the door without a word. I stepped over and grabbed the sink to steady myself. I stared at the girl in the mirror, wondering what had happened to her. I’d have never let a guy I had known less than a week touch me like that before. And the few who had touched me must have done something wrong because it had never felt like that.

I heard the front door open and close as Than spoke in a tone low enough that I couldn’t hear him. Whatever that was about, he didn’t want to know about it. He had secrets. Things he wouldn’t tell me. And I had to remember that.

“You can’t trust him if he’s not telling you things,” I whispered to myself.

Now, if only I could keep that in my head when his hands or lips touched my body, I might survive this.

Twenty-Seven

Than

My brother’s voice would have been enough to get my erection to go down, but the smell of Montana on my fingers while I held the phone to my ear was defeating that. I stepped outside, not sure what he was going to tell me or ask, and I didn’t want her hearing it. As much as I enjoyed being in bed with her and the things we’d done, I didn’t like her being scared. I wanted to ease her mind, but there was a limit to what she could know.

“Locke took my place on the west end,” Ransom told me. “It was an uneventful night for me, but Oz was on the north end and said there was a black Honda Accord that passed by four times in a two-hour time frame. It’s the main road, and it could have been nothing, but it was also around three in the morning. Oz got the license plate number and had it run. When Luther took his spot this morning, Oz went to the address attached to the tag. It was an older lady in her seventies who owned a B and B. She wasn’t there at the moment, according to the woman working the front desk. So, he got a room and is getting some sleep, and then he’s going to do some investigating.”

It wasn’t much to go on. The driver could have been going to get things at the twenty-four-hour grocer twenty minutes away and simply forgot something and went back. It was unlikely the elderly owner of a B and B here would have anything to do with this.

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