Page 53 of Tempt Her

Mateo caresses my cheek. “We gotta be careful. As much as we may want to, this isn’t a game. There’s lots to lose.”

And just to remind us, a ringtone cracks the air from the phone in Mateo’s pants around his ankles.

“Fuck,” he mutters. “The boss is on his way back.”

CHAPTERFIFTEEN

The smell hits me first. Those muffins of hers; they’re delicious. Luke told me how she makes them for her father, who’s ill.

Secretly, that touches my sick heart.

I know Stacey Evans is a good person. I know we’re all more than our surface. It’s what’s in someone’s actions that matter. And most of what I’ve seen of Stacey is kind, smart, funny, and stubborn. That’s what makes her marriage so goddamn infuriating.

Walking back into this house, it clearly belongs to Gentry Evans.

Golf gear is everywhere. Like he needs praise—fucking trophies and accolades hang on every wall. Southern style invades this place like the asshole wants to stay in the racist past. Plantation “decor” is everywhere, and the symbols are clear—this man is as evil as the history of the land we live on now.

But none of this is Stacey. I can sense it.

She doesn’t belong here.

When my eyes land on her in the kitchen, with her hair hiked into a cute ponytail while she boxes up her muffins for her dad, she doesn’t belong with Gentry. I know it.

I just can’t do shit about it.

“Hey,” she mumbles at my return.

“Hey,” I mumble back as I step through the kitchen, trying to mind my business, but then… I catch it…

The smell of more than muffins in this house.

It’s the smell of sex. The aroma of lust and rules broken mixed with the scent of the two men I love the most.I know their musk.

Twisting my chin, I glare over my shoulder, and she’s watching me, worried, confirming my raging suspicions.

I take the stairs so damn fast; I don’t remember my steps into the guest bedroom, where I find Luke and Mateo painting.

Where I can tell they just fucked her.

Clocking that someone’s taped over the camera in the room; I set my fury free.

“Three hours,” I roar. “I’m gone for three fucking hours, and I can’t trust you two!”

Luke turns to me, his love for Stacey growing along with his boldness. “Yes, sir. I told you we want her, and we won’t lie about it.”

Mateo’s quiet, lifting his chin; he and I have a different relationship. Not better. Not worse. History binds people in different ways.

My history with Mateo?

I don’t know who saved who more.

Mateo, when he saved my life in the gym I belonged to. He worked there, cleaning up the sweat of others and having to smile about it. Then one day, I was doing shoulder presses overhead as a blinding pain torched my chest. It stole my vision. I’ve survived IED explosions, but I’d never dropped so fast.

All I remember next was Mateo beside me in an ambulance. Apparently, he’d given me CPR until they arrived. I had no one else to stay with me in the hospital, but he did as they ran tests and adjusted my blood pressure meds.

In one day, Mateo went from a stranger, an imposing man I’d see at the gym, to the man who saved my life, to my best friend and a love I don’t want to live without.

And how I saved Mateo?

---