Serengeti Sunrise - By Vivi Andrews Page 0,29
gang up on Landon, but you didn’t let them. I would have fought with him. I remember how surprised I was when I didn’t even have to shift. But Leonus was even more surprised than I was when you stepped in, like you’d never interfered before. I’ve always wondered why you didn’t. And why, that day, you did.”
Tyler’s hands stilled on the engine components. “Why do you ask?”
Because that was the moment I started falling in love with you.
She shook her head, in denial of the thought. This wasn’t love. She wouldn’t let it be. She hadn’t needed a hero then, but having him step in with his armor shining had linked them somehow.
“I have a theory about why you didn’t,” she said. “Landon’s always had big sweeping ideas of changing the whole world, but you strike me as more focused. Ava… Michael… You only fight personal battles. I think Leonus was betting on you not lifting a finger for a stranger, but for some reason that wasn’t a good bet.” Zoe wet her lips, unaccountably nervous. “I guess I was just wondering if that reason had anything to do with me.”
She was able to ask only because he wasn’t looking at her. When he raised his eyes to hers, the words turned to sawdust in her mouth.
“Doesn’t that make me less noble? If I wasn’t doing it for the justice of it, but only to get laid?” Tyler slowly advanced on her, and Zoe found her feet retreating without any direction from her brain.
“But you didn’t get laid. If you were only doing it so I’d feel indebted to you, why didn’t you ever come to collect?”
“Isn’t that what I did last night?”
“You waited over a year to claim your prize? I don’t think so.” Her back bumped against an SUV with the side paneling shredded by some lion’s claws.
Tyler kept advancing until his chest brushed hers, using his superior height to loom over her in that way that never failed to make her internal organs melt like butter.
“Why, Tyler?”
He bowed his head and buried his nose in her hair, inhaling deeply next to her ear and then whispering the words into it. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.” He rested his hands on the SUV on either side of her so his forearms brushed the sides of her waist. “I’ve had this compulsion to protect you since the second you walked through that gate.”
“I don’t need you to protect me.”
“I need to. You belong to me, Zoe. And you drive me mad when you put yourself at risk. I thought I could control it. I thought if I didn’t give in to it that I would stop wanting to claim you, but it never worked.”
Her breathing accelerated, fueled by the mix of arousal and panic his words inspired. “I don’t want a protector.”
“Tough,” he growled against her ear, his body leaning into hers until she could feel his strength pressing her back into the door panel. “We don’t always get what we want. I wanted to be free of my obligations and leave here for good, but I stopped thinking that way the second I realized you were mine to protect.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” she said, her argument slightly less effective due to the breathy gasps that were all she could manage with his hands sneaking under her shirt to her braless breasts beneath. “You can’t be both the big, strong protector and the no-strings lover. It doesn’t work that way.”
He lifted her, guiding her legs around his hips and pinning her hard against the SUV. “We both know no strings was never an option.”
His mouth slammed down on hers, driving any protest she might have made out of her mind. He consumed her with the kiss. He shrugged out of his coveralls, and Zoe lowered her legs long enough to help the stiff cloth drop to his ankles. As he kicked it off, she quickly stripped out of her own jeans and T-shirt. Then he fell back on her in a hungry frenzy. His hands were filthy with engine grease, but Zoe didn’t care. She wanted them on her everywhere, smearing tracks of dark grease across her skin.
Tyler was forceful, commanding. He spun her away from the side door and bent her over the table he’d been working at earlier, her ass raised like a gift. He nudged her feet wider and stroked a calloused hand over the curve of her buttocks as Zoe