Page 14 of Suck This

I could hear people fighting, arguments about money, kids, what one woman was going to do for the rest of her life.

As my heightened senses scanned the area, I frowned when I couldn’t even hear her running footsteps any longer.

So, she’d stopped.

But where?

I started walking on silent feet, stopping when I heard the scuffle of something that sounded like a body against asphalt.

The swish of a shoe dragging across loosened gravel. A low male curse.

Then I sensed the heightened heartbeat.

The same irregular heart rate that I’d been obsessed with—only in this instance it was beating way too fast. Much faster than her regular heart rate.

I took off running and arrived at the scene of my worst fear within seconds.

I’d spent the last few nights replaying in my mind why exactly I couldn’t have an affair with the woman.

She was soft. She was weak. She had an irregular heartbeat that I knew would kill her one day soon, and she was Austin PD’s golden child.

No, I had to stay away from her.

Or at least that’s what I told myself.

Looking at her now, a man smacking her around while he hurriedly tried to rip his jean’s fly open, I realized that I couldn’t stay away any longer.

With a vicious growl, I leaped the remaining distance that separated me from Acadia and snapped the guy’s neck.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

Acadia, in shock, stared at me with helplessness, then threw herself at me.

It was a surprisingly fast move for a woman that was living on borrowed time. One second she was lying there, weeping, and the next she was in my arms, and I was pulling her in tight.

“You’re warm,” she breathed.

I snorted. “Yes.”

I didn’t mention that I’d drank from someone as I waited for her to come back out of her house once she’d arrived home from that heinous ball that I was forced to go to. It’d been one of her neighbors. I could tell because she smelled faintly of the woman in my arms, meaning they spent at least some time together at some point this evening.

She was smart enough to figure it out. And not to say anything.

Asking sometimes got you an answer you weren’t ready to hear.

“I just nearly died,” she whispered. “He would’ve killed me.”

I didn’t know about that, but he definitely wasn’t there to give her a little tickle play, that was for sure.

“I…”

The familiar whirrurp of a squad car had me sighing.

I’d, of course, heard them coming.

However, I was a glutton for punishment.

I was also screwed.

---