you pay to get my car out of here. Teachers aren’t exactly rolling in dough like fancy New York City attorneys, but I have a rainy-day-slash-Louboutin fund.”
A smile stretched across his obscenely handsome face. “A rainy-day-slash-Louboutin fund?”
“Yeah, it’s money I set aside every month in case of emergency…or the first-ever Louboutin clearance event. Whichever comes first.” I let out a groan and looked back at stupid Nathan Pollard through the glass door. “This month, it just happens to be pouring.”
Reaching out, he hooked his pinky with mine and shot me a grin. “Maybe, but we’ve stood in the rain together before.”
And with that, a warmth rushed through my veins and he gave me back the boy who’d stolen my heart all those years earlier.
He dropped my hand in the very next beat, but together, we walked back inside.
I signed the paperwork while he typed out a text at warp speed on his phone.
And then, side by side, we walked out to an assigned parking spot number to find my car, with four flat tires and both of the side-view mirrors broken and hanging from cables.
I wanted to cry.
I wanted to go full-fledge Nora Stewart rabid-dog wild woman on the entire crooked Clovert police department.
I wanted to turn around, walk away, and never look back.
But when Camden dipped low, put his lips to my ear, and whispered, “Keep it together, Chuck,” all I could do was laugh.
I lay on my bed in the hotel, my chest heaving, naked as the day I was born, my cock pissed off and deflating against my thigh. That fucking bastard and my eyes had spent all Goddamn day trying to kill me.
Yeah, Nora was fucking sexy. This was not new information. Yet I’d spent my day trying not to stare at her ass in those tight skinny jeans—or consequently adjusting my dick when my eyes had found the task impossible.
And the touches. All the fucking touches.
Hooking her arm with mine when we’d walked into Joe’s barbershop, her soft curves molding to my side.
Her thigh pressed against mine as we’d sat on the loveseat in his office, filling him in on everything from my chat with the prosecutor to which repair shop we’d had her car towed to.
Don’t even get me started on the way her shirt had gaped in the front when she’d bent over her menu at the burger place we’d gone to for lunch. Her breasts were still carved into my subconscious from our one and only night together. I did not need a reminder of how perfect they were.
And because she was Nora, the living and breathing embodiment of every dream and fantasy I’d had my entire life, I could have gotten off just from sitting across the table and listening to her talk.
Long story short: I was fucked and not in a good way.
My cock twitched at the memories, and I let out a groan, pressing my head back into the pillow. I’d already wrestled that son of a bitch into submission once in the shower and once not even thirty minutes later when he’d refused to chill the fuck out and tuck into a pair of pants without tenting the front.
And he was already swelling again?
How the fuck was I supposed to make it through dinner at Nora’s house with my cock trying to claw his way out every five fucking minutes?
I should have canceled. We’d swapped cell numbers, so I could even just puss out and send her a text about how I was tired and couldn’t make it.
But she was cooking, and when I’d dropped her off, she’d declared after the day she’d had she didn’t want to do anything but have some wine and catch up with an old friend.
And I was a sucker who would have done any and every damn thing in the world to make her happy.
Fuck. Me.
I stood up, walked over to my suitcase, and dug out a pair of boxer briefs. They weren’t quite the straightjacket I needed to keep myself in check, but they would have to do. My phone started ringing from the worn-out wicker nightstand next to the bed, and I hopped over, pulling my jeans on one leg at a time.
“Hello,” I said, doing the button-and-zip routine.
“You have one fucked-up family,” a deep voice rumbled across the line.
I planted a hand on my hip. “This is not news to me. What do you have for me, Leo?”
Leo James. Former DEA agent turned owner of Guardian Protection Agency turned