Tracing my touch over the slightly callused fingertips, I lift my head and meet her hooded gaze. This close, I glimpse the small mole that punctuates a corner of her mouth. Note the faint shadows bruising the skin under her eyes. Wonder what put them there. “These callouses are pretty new,” I murmur, continuing to trace the roughened skin. “And no doubt they match the ones on the bottom of your feet.”
She tugs back her hand, and I plow both of mine into my coat pockets. My fingers curl into my palms, trying to capture the memory of how soft and smooth her skin felt under mine.
“I thought you might need to vent about your shitty day, not my choice of career paths,” she snaps. And there are the specks of light blue. Like stars in a midnight sky.
Yeah, but as long as I’m standing outside keeping her talking about herself and inhaling her flowers-and-fruit scent, it prevents me from dwelling on the job offer my brother extended this afternoon. Or the career opportunity that’s waiting on me thousands of miles away from home, the flood of texts filling up my phone even now. The nightmare images of blood, tears, and pain that lurk in the darkness of my brain, anticipating the moment I close my eyes. Images from my past and my present.
“You have things you don’t want to talk about. Secrets.” I nod. “I get it. Sorry for prying.”
“You have things you don’t want to talk about, too,” she says softly.
Again, I nod, slower this time, part of me wondering what the hell was in that beer to have me admitting this to her. The other part…just wants her to make it better.
Apparently, I’ve lost my ball sac along with my mind.
“Look.” I rub a hand over the back of my neck, glancing from one side to the other. Maybe eying the mouth of the alley as an escape route. “Thanks for coming out here but—”
I break off, frowning as I catch the small shiver that ripples through her frame. Acting on instinct, I move forward, blocking her body from the wind with mine while shrugging out of my coat and draping it over her shoulders. I’m a born and bred Chicagoan, a Southsider, so forty degrees won’t break me. Though she has her own coat on, it’s made for a California fall, and mine will provide added warmth.
Her eyes flare, surprise and a flicker of heat sending those stars glittering again. An answering rush of desire pitches and heaves inside me.
“Tell me something you don’t want to talk about,” she murmurs, stepping closer. She tips her head back, and my gaze drops to her pretty mouth before lifting to meet her eyes.
I’m not into sharing. Hell, since I was twelve, my life has been aboutnotsharing—
“My brother offered me a job opportunity that most people would kill for. Would be damn fools for passing up.”Shit.
For a moment, her eyes narrow as she silently studies me. “And you passed it up,” she says.
“Yeah.” And Knox’s disappointment when I turned him down still eats away at me.
“Why?”
Because for once in my life I want to be known as Jude Gordon, talented tattoo artist, instead of just “Hard Knox” Gordon’s younger brother.
Because my older brother’s shadow is a cold, lonely, invisible place to live, and lately it’s become uninhabitable.
The selfish, self-serving words shove against my vocal cords, but I push them back. Some things you can’t say aloud. They’re painful enough admitting to yourself because they sound whiney and ungrateful.
“I wasn’t completely honest with you earlier,” I rasp, needing to change the subject, to wash the bitter taste of failing the ones I love, the ones I’m supposed to protect, from my mouth. And she can do it. Her taste. Her tongue wrapped around mine. Her bare, smooth skin connected to mine by hard-won sweat. “True, when I walked into the bar tonight, I wanted a diversion, an escape. I saw you, and then wanted you. I wanted to fuck you.” I lower my head until her small puffs of breath forming soft clouds in the air ghost over my lips. “I still do.”
Chapter Three
Jude
Her eyes dilate until the midnight sky almost swallows up the stars. So I was wrong about how desire would affect her gaze. Need doesn’t light it up but darkens it.
I could drown in those bottomless blue depths.
“Does that put me in the same category as the other assholes in this place?” I ask, already knowing the answer to that question. It’s a resoundinghell yes. But I push forward. Mainly because I can’t stop myself. With her, the stop button on my mouth—my brain—seems jammed, stuck. “Am I an asshole because I’m wondering if you’ll scream in bed, or will you moan your pleasure? Or maybe you don’t make a sound at all. I would be lying again if I said I don’t want to find out,” I murmur, aware that I could be forcing her to ditch me like LeBron abandoning the Cavaliers. Or I could be stoking that hunger I glimpsed, making it blaze fiercer, brighter. At the moment, I don’t know which one has me more on edge. Which one I want—or need—more. My indecision doesn’t stop my mouth from running, though. Apparently, it knows which option it’s voting for. “Does that make you want to slap my face? Tell me to fuck off? Or are you now picturing the same thing? You spread wide for me, thighs squeezing my head, fingers trying to tear my hair out as I tongue fuck you?”
Her lashes lower, hiding those amazing eyes from me as another shudder quakes through her body. This time, though, I doubt it’s from the cold. Not when a strangled half groan, half sob escapes from her. Not when her hands grip the front of my shirt.
Not when she rises on her toes and opens her wet, hot mouth over the base of my throat.
“Goddamn,” I growl, my fingers tangling in her dark hair, fisting the strands, holding her to me. Electric pulses crackle up and down my spine, transforming me into a human tuning fork.
Her teeth graze my skin, and it’s not gentle or timid. No, that rake of teeth has a hint of meanness in it that has my dick hard enough to pound a nail through the brick wall behind us. I tighten my grip in her thick, soft-as-silk hair and jerk her head back.
