Page 28 of Dark Terror
Gabe laughed. “Of course you don’t.”
Cara quietly shut the door. The last thing she wanted was to cause trouble for Gabe, and she had no desire to be where she wasn’t wanted. Not that Gabe had said that, but she had to be an inconvenience to him. And if he was as attracted to her as she was to him, then Harry was right. She needed to find someplace to stay.
Before getting the text, she would have been comfortable going to a hotel, but that was out now. And she wasn’t about to put any of her friends in danger. Maybe the cops had one of those safe houses, a place no one knew about.
She eyed her phone as if it was a coiled snake ready to strike and told herself she was being silly. She forced her feet to move. Just as her fingers touched it, someone knocked on the bedroom door. She shrieked.
“Cara?” The door opened, and Gabe rushed in. “What happened?”
For the second time in minutes she pressed her hand over her pounding heart. If this kept up, she’d do the killer’s job for him and keel over with a heart attack. And for the second time in only days, she flew into Gabe’s arms.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”
He stroked his hand along her back, soothing her. As much as she wanted to stay here in his arms where she knew she’d be safe, she hadn’t forgotten his conversation with Harry. She put her hands on his chest, intending to push away, but her hands had other ideas. They liked how he felt against her palms, liked the flex of his muscles under her fingertips. And because they liked those things, they decided to stay right where they were.
She looked at her hands—the ones that had glued themselves to him—as if they were foreign objects, completely out of her control. At what point had she lost her mind? A killer was stalking her, his intentions for her as clear as day. And what was she doing?
Feeling up Gabe.
In her defense, he was the best feel up she’d ever experienced. And who could blame a girl for having the hots for a man who looked like him, whose mere touch had her panties trying to figure out how to fall off on their own if she wasn’t smart enough to do the job of removing them herself.
“Cara?”
She jerked her disobedient hands from his chest. “Sorry,” she mumbled, feeling the heat in her cheeks and knowing they were bright red.
“I’m lost here,” Gabe said, his gaze focused on her with an intensity that either unnerved her or that she liked. She wasn’t sure which. “Did something happen?”
Oh yeah. Something sure did. Regardless of her vow, she wanted to get it on with a cop, like right now. Yep, she’d lost her mind.
“Cara,” he said again after she backed away from him. “Something scared you. What?”
Him. He scared her. She was suddenly and totally onboard with throwing her no-cop rule out the closest open window and allowing herself to have some fun with him. But she wasn’t about to tell him that. So she told him about the other scary thing.
“I got a text.” She toed the phone toward him with her shoe. “My password is ‘librarians go deeper’. No caps and no spaces.”
His gaze shot to hers. “Is that true?”
“Well, duh. We go deep in our research.”
“Deep?” His voice sounded strangled.
Had she really just said that? “I mean, we read everything. Lots of everything,” she said between her fingers. EvenFifty Shades of Grey, and although it wasn’t her favorite romance, she’d had some sexy tingles when reading the book. She knew lots of erotic scenes in theory from reading, but she’d never experienced the kind of sex where she was left mind-blown when it was over.
The look he gave her came within a hair’s breadth of breaking the last thread holding her panties together. It was a look of pure, hotlet’s have sex this very second.
Yes, please.
And then he logged into her phone and read the message. His eyes went from warm and sexy to stone-hard cold. “When did you get this, Cara? A few minutes ago,” he said, answering his own question after reading the time stamp.
Gabe lowered his eyes back to the words their subject had texted Cara. He knew each word by heart after reading the message the first time, but he needed to hide the urge to kill a man from her too-observant eyes.
Harry could be disappointed in him all she wanted. He didn’t care. Cara was his to protect. His father had fallen for Gabe’s mother because of a mere scent. Well, he liked Cara’s scent, for sure. It was more than just that, though. He flicked a glance at her, and something in his heart softened at seeing she’d picked up Cricket and was holding the little dog to her chest again.
Gabe’s gaze roamed over her, and when she caught him studying her, pink tinted her cheeks. He liked her tendency to blush. Made him want to see where else he could make her body blush pink.
Actually he liked everything about her. Her soft heart—even for the ugliest dog on the planet—her resolve to be brave even though she was afraid, her compassion for others, and that blue streak in her hair to honor the memory of her brother.
She was a fascinating mix of toughness and vulnerability. She was also sexy as hell with those long legs, the full lips he wanted to kiss for hours and hours, her perfect ass that he wanted his hands on, and the gold-flecked brown eyes that expressed her every emotion. Right now they were darkening as her gaze rested to his mouth.
