Dream Huntress (A Dreamseeker novel) (Entangled Ignite) (11 page)

The man had turned her into nothing but sensation and greed. And as talented as his hands and mouth were, they weren’t what she wanted. She put her hand under his chin and tilted his face up. Their eyes met. No words passed between them, but he seemed to have no trouble understanding her non-verbal plea for more.

Standing, he unleashed one more blinding kiss before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a condom. He held it out for her to take.

Maybe it was his way of asking if things should go farther, but she didn’t acknowledge the small interruption, just ripped open the foil pouch and rolled it onto him before logic could catch up with the driving need to be taken—hard—by Tyler McGee.

The feel of him, the hard length of him in her hand, was enough to stir the need into desperation. “I want you inside me. I need to feel you.” She pushed his pants lower and fisted a hand around him. With her back braced against the wall, she guided him into that first, breathtaking thrust.

Her body yielded easily, eagerly, despite his size and strength.

Appearing as lost as she was, he pumped into her with several hard thrusts and groaned. “Are you okay, baby?”

Don’t you dare give me time to think.

“Don’t you dare stop,” she said.

From that point on, he didn’t. The rhythm, just this side of frantic, hung between desperation and primal need. Every stroke, a new, deeper tangle of sensation. A magnificent sensory overload after a long, lonely sleep.

The way he moved, the way her body drew him so deeply inside, it was too much. Too pleasurable. Too frightening.

“Ty. God, Ty.” She shuddered and clawed at his skin as she cried out. The orgasm built, rippling at first, then growing fangs and shredding apart anything that resembled feminine control. She pistoned wildly with him, felt his teeth on her throat as he bucked into her with a violent climax of his own.

Her ears roared. Her eyes swam. Her skin was on fire. Her throat clenched fiercely against the need to sob. She tried to let her legs untangle from where they had been locked around his hips, but he leaned against her and held on tight. She pushed at his chest and felt a damp bead of sweat slick down between her breasts.

A cold, prickly reminder of the mistake she’d just made.

…

Moments later, Ty was still inside Jordan’s trembling body, wishing to God he was lying in a bed with her instead of pinning her against a wall. If he could have gathered even a morsel of control, he would have been gentler, made it last longer, taken better care of her.

He wrapped his arms around her tighter, holding her still when she tried to move. He wasn’t ready to let go yet, wasn’t quite to the point where he could separate from her body and survive. He let his lips travel her neck, graze her ear, and then slide into a kiss tender enough to show her everything he hadn’t taken the time to show her before.

At least he hoped it did. He hoped she could feel it, too. He wasn’t great with words, but whatever lightning had just struck between them would probably lose something in translation anyway. It was the most unexpected, superb sexual experience he’d ever had. One he very much wanted to repeat in about ten minutes, body willing.

“My God,” he said, kissing across her collarbone. “That was amazing. You’re so damn beautiful, Jordan.”

Her silence tipped him off that something wasn’t right. A slow-motion untwining of bodies followed.

“Are you okay?” he whispered in her ear, still trying to hold her. But her withdrawal was clear. Not just physically, but emotionally, too.

She pushed at his chest. “Ty, I think you need to leave.”

“What?” Leaving was nowhere near the agenda his mind had mapped out. He lifted her chin with a finger and saw tears glistening in her eyes. “Come on, don’t cry. I wasn’t that bad, was I?”

“I could describe what just happened in a lot of ways; bad wouldn’t be one of them.” She made a half-hearted attempt to smile, but tears began to roll. “You have to go now.”

Puzzled, he backed up and studied her. She quickly tugged on her clothes and tossed him his shirt. He disposed of the condom, pulled up his pants, and stepped toward her. By the time he wrapped his arms around her, she was fighting a full-blown sob.

“Shhh, baby. It’s okay.”

“Don’t.” She lashed out at him, pushing out of his arms. “Don’t do that. It’s not okay. I don’t have sex with random strangers. Maybe you live your life this way, but I don’t. This isn’t who I am.”

A quick bolt of anger lanced through him. She wanted to reduce what just happened to casual sex with a stranger? Damn! No one had ever pushed his buttons the way this woman could. “Did it feel like random sex to you, Jordan?”

She avoided eye contact. Her tears made his chest hurt, and guilt kicked his anger quickly to the side.

He’d wanted her from the first moment he saw her picking up glass from Buck’s floor. The fact that she’d wanted him in return had gone to his head tonight. There was no getting around the fact he’d lost control like a damned rookie.

Softly tugging her arms, he pulled her against his chest. “Don’t cry, baby. Please. I don’t usually jump this quick, either, but there’s something between us. There has been since the moment we saw each other. It’s more than sex. I care about you.”

She shook her head. “You don’t even know me. You have no idea who and what I am. What we just did had
nothing
to do with caring.”

He started playing it back. Did he push her to do something she hadn’t wanted to do? Damn. He could deny it, deny what he was feeling when he’d walked into her place tonight, but it would be a lie. He moved closer again, lifting a hand to touch her, but she backed away.

“Jordan, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen quite this way. If I pushed too hard or—”

“Ty, stop.” She said it harshly, as if she were scolding him, trying to snap him out of his guilt. “There were two of us participating, both quite eagerly, as I recall. I’m not fragile. You didn’t push me, for Christ’s sake, and you’re not stupid. At any point tonight, did I look like I was doing something I didn’t want to do?” She swiped at the tears.

“Okay,” he said. “Then I guess I don’t understand the problem.”

…

The problems—as in plural—were many.
I’m an undercover cop. I had sex with you. You work for Arlo Buck.
She wanted to scream, “Pick one.”

She’d had sex with him. Mind-blowing, blood-curdling, vibrating sex. With a stranger, more or less. With someone who could be involved in foul play, although every cop instinct she possessed said that wasn’t the case. She wasn’t sure how many rules and moral boundaries she’d broken, but she could pretty well bet if he ended up arrested on any charges, she’d find out quickly. “I just can’t do this. You need to leave. I’m sorry.”

He reached for her one more time.

The insanity of it all was that she’d clearly made a mistake but desperately wanted to make it again and again. Instead, she avoided his touch, shot into the bedroom, and slammed the door.

When she finally heard him let himself out, she broke down. Checking to make sure he was gone this time, she struggled for answers and reasons. There had to be an answer as to why she’d chosen to throw away years and years of good, respectable police work. There must have been some reason for giving into lust and need, but at the moment, she couldn’t think of even one.

Chapter Seven

Sometimes sanity felt like a judgment call.

Jordan didn’t consider herself crazy. Of course, dreaming about dead people, hearing them, feeling what they felt just moments before their deaths was not something most people would consider sane.

Allowing herself to be fucked mindless by an employee of the Bucks wasn’t leaning heavily in the direction of sanity, either.

Guilt. Regret. Anger. Humiliation. If it was a self-destructive emotion, she’d wallowed in it since the moment Ty walked out of her door several hours earlier. It all boiled down to one thing.

Shame.

She’d cared more about sex than she had about her badge. The entire case was in jeopardy now, not to mention her career. Even if they arrested Arlo Buck and he ended up on trial, her involvement with Ty could be the one thing that set Buck free again. The thought of it was sickening. It had taken approximately ten minutes to negate over ten years on the job.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

McGee had better not push his luck and try to score an encore performance of last night. The sooner both of them moved on, the better.

In just a few short days, how had a lazy, sexy smile and two hypnotic, silver eyes done so much damage to her status quo? She wasn’t some idiot who had sex without thinking first. Well, last night she had been, but usually—no. Never.

Then he’d had the nerve to apologize. As if he cared. As if it was all an innocent mistake.

Damn Tyler McGee.

He’d made good time with her, she’d give him that. Him and his stupid I’m-going-to-take-care-of-you charm. What, three days she’d lasted against it, and she was an undercover cop. Most of the idiot women in Buck’s would probably just surrender the first night and save themselves the time and trouble.

Does that make them the idiot, or me?

Unprepared to face anyone until her shift started at four p.m. sharp, she took every long-cut possible on the way to Buck’s.

Whether to confess to Bahan or not was another huge dilemma. He’d trusted her, worked with her, come up with her cover, and she’d blown it. If the situation were reversed, she’d have never forgiven him. She didn’t expect anything less.

However she spun it, sleeping with a suspect, or a witness who might have vital information—no matter how remote the possibility—was inexcusable. Not that she’d gotten any of that vital information before she jumped him.

No
, she told herself.
He jumped me.
That was the story, and she was sticking to it.

Oh, God, did it matter who jumped whom? They’d dived into each other like starving wolves with one tiny sliver of meat between them.

On the surface, it had appeared to be just good,
okay great
, sweaty, toe-curling sex. But it was everything that lay under the surface that was beginning to bother her most. The genuine concern she knew Ty felt over Warren Buck. The way he’d stepped back and offered to leave when she herself couldn’t find that kind of resolve. The complete shock on his face when she’d kicked him out.

Her heart told her that those weren’t the actions of a man pushing drugs for Arlo Buck. If she were wrong, if her instincts had veered that badly off track, she had no business carrying a badge any longer.

As luck would have it, Ty was in the parking lot when she pulled into Buck’s. His muscular arms were folded over his chest as he leaned back against his truck. The taut black material of his shirt stretched across his broad shoulders. He wasn’t handsome in that classic boy-next-door kind of way, Jordan decided, but if you liked big and rugged with fuck-me eyes and a country swagger, he’d be your crack cocaine of choice.

Apparently, she liked fuck-me eyes, because her mouth nearly watered as she pulled up next to him. She took a deep breath, scrambling for some form of composure. It was damn hard picturing Ty as a suspect. Harder yet to cut him loose, especially now that she had intimate knowledge of what lay beneath the shirt and jeans.

But it had to be done. Right now.

“We need to talk,” he said before she’d even gotten out of her car. “Jordan, things got out of hand very quickly last night, and for that, I’m sorry. Please give m—”

“Stop saying you’re sorry. I was there, too. I’m a big girl.” She stepped out of her car and glanced at her watch. “It’s over now. Let’s just forget it happened. We both better get inside.”

He caught her wrist but dropped it quickly when she shot him a warning glare. “Warren and Arlo won’t be here for another hour,” he said. “We have plenty of time.”

He stepped closer, narrowing the distance between them to just a few dangerous inches. His face was marred with stress and emotion. “What the hell is going on with you?”

Of all the damned men in the world, she had to find the one who wouldn’t want to have hot, mind-blowing sex and then walk away with no strings. He wasn’t going to make this easy. The throbbing pound of her heart shot into high gear.

She sucked in some air, then let it out slowly, searching for the right words. “Last night…Well, I shouldn’t have let it happen, but after it did, I didn’t handle the whole thing very well, and I’m sorry.”

“Jordan, I understand if you hate me.”

His hair was a mess. His beautiful eyes were smudged with dark circles. His clothes were rumpled. He looked like he’d had a hard, sleepless night.

God, he was gorgeous.

Why tenderness washed through her so deeply at that moment, she couldn’t have said. “Ty, I don’t hate you—”

“No, let me finish.” He covered his eyes with one of his hands and then rubbed it down his face. She noticed the unconscious routine, knew he would then drag his fingers back through his hair. And he did. It was his classic one-two move of frustration. She’d seen it a lot in the last few days. Which was an accurate, if not promising, summation of their relationship.

He reached out and took her hand. “I don’t have a very graceful way of saying this, so I’m just going to say it. I feel like I should apologize for what happened.” He lifted her fingers to his lips and tenderly kissed them. “But I bet if we both were truthful, neither one of us would be a damn bit sorry. Still, I didn’t come over with the intention of things happening quite like they did. I want a chance to show you who I really am.” He flashed the brilliant Tyler McGee smile. “I can be downright romantic if you let me.”

Christ. All she could think was that Jordan Delany—immune-to-love, take-no-prisoners, justice-to-the-death cop—had a horrible, destructive crush on a man whose eyes were nothing short of mesmerizing. And he was working at Buck’s as head of security.

“Ty, you didn’t do anything wrong last night.” In fact, he’d done everything just a little bit too right.

“Sure, that’s why you kicked me out.”

“There were two of us. I’m perfectly able to hold my own when I need to. The truth is…Well, the truth is I didn’t want to say no. I could have. I didn’t want to.” Looking at him stripped her of the ability to lie. “I wanted you as much as you wanted me. It was—”

“Incredible. Amazing,” he offered.

Her lips curved, and she shook her head.

“Mind-blowing, life-changing,” he continued with his trademark smile.

“Shut up, you idiot.” He actually had her grinning in spite of the train-wreck of a mess she’d made. “I was going to say mutual. You don’t have anything more to feel guilty about than I do, but I’m sorry—it can’t happen again.”

“It will happen again,” he said without pause or question. His rapid-fire response raised her hackles.

“It won’t.” She volleyed the words back.

“So, you snap your fingers, and it’s over. Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“I really thought you were smarter.” He leaned cheek to cheek with her. His warm breath caressed her skin. “I don’t think you’re any better at controlling this thing, attraction, or whatever it is, than I am. Are you, Jordan?”

She shivered and closed her eyes. The manipulation was obvious. Unfortunately, so was her body’s reaction. Her heart ached to tell him he was right.

But then he said, “We can make this work.”

That brought it all into focus. He thought there was a “we.” She stepped back and took a deep breath, attempting to clear her senses of everything Tyler McGee. “I can’t do this with you. I told you there was no room in my life for a guy.”

Looking disgusted, he narrowed his eyes, propping his hands on his hips. “Yeah, I can see how those twenty minutes you gave me would really take a toll. What aren’t you telling me?”

The man was a fucking dog with a bone. “There’s nothing to tell. You want more, I don’t. It’s over.”

He clearly wasn’t interested in her half of the conversation. He wagged his finger as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “I’ve got a bad feeling there’s something going on between you and Warren. Something a whole lot uglier than some simple, harmless flirting. If you need help—”

“I can’t have this out with you right now.” She held up her hand to cut him off. “Whatever
is
between me and Warren is my business. My shift was supposed to start a couple of minutes ago. I need to go.”

“Damn it.” His eyes could change like a bloody damned mood ring. Right now, a cold, hard concrete gray snapped out at her. “Jordan, he’s a spoiled brat, not to mention an alcoholic. He’s got a hell of a temper, and he’s lit every night of the week. I’ve asked around about him; he’s bad news.”

He cupped the back of her neck and drew her close. The move was quick; she looked up, inhaling sharply at his intense glare. He leaned in and covered her lips with his.

The kiss was soft, a shocking contrast to the hard lines in his expression only moments ago. Her legs began to melt like candle wax under the heat of a flame. Her head tilted back, allowing the smooth, gentle stroke of his tongue better access to her own. It should have been a short, simple kiss. One she should have dodged. But it turned out to be neither short nor simple.

The man’s lips could coax any reasonable thought right out of her head. But it was the soft bite and tug on her bottom lip that had her arms springing up around his neck. Every single nerve craved him. The roar of a car barreling down the road finally made her peel herself off him and inspect her surroundings.

After the car passed, he stepped closer again, murmuring into her ear. “Warren Buck can’t make you feel like that.”

Nothing
had ever made her feel like that. And it was reason enough to end whatever this was before it began. “This
won’t
work. I
cannot
have this in my life.” She pushed away quick and hard. “I’m not with Warren, but I won’t make him angry, either. He does seem to have feelings for me, and I need this job. If you care about me at all, you won’t come between us. I can’t afford for Warren to think there’s something going on between you and me.”

“He can’t fire you because you’re interested in someone else. That’s completely childish.”

“And just the kind of thing he would do, don’t you think? I have to go. Don’t come near me in there. I mean it.”

…

The woman made his blood boil. In good ways. In bad ways. He’d known her less than a week, and quite possibly, she’d be the death of him.

It didn’t make sense. She didn’t make sense. There was more to her story than met the eye. He’d bet everything he owned on that fact. She was smart. Good personality. Sexy as hell. And she no more belonged at Buck’s than he did.

Don’t come near me in there; I mean it.

Her words tore at him. She claimed she wasn’t interested in taking things farther, but her body spoke a truth she couldn’t possibly deny. She wanted to dismiss what happened between them as a primal, sexual mistake. Maybe it had been primal and sexual, but mistake? Not likely. She’d admitted to the attraction, and he knew they weren’t over.

But he’d give her time to come to terms with it all. He’d play it slow. Steady. Controlled. Give himself time to figure out what the hell kind of hold Warren Buck had on her. He hoped she hadn’t done something illegal with the Bucks holding proof. Warren Buck would love nothing more than to have a woman like Jordan in his bed, even if it took blackmail to achieve it.

Ty was with his crew in the corner of the club, going over proper takedown procedures, when Warren sauntered in. He was loud and obnoxious and carrying on with a couple of his friends. By the time the place closed, Warren could work up a good drunk. Apparently, he’d gotten an early start today.

Determined to ignore the idiot, Ty continued working with the bouncers. He’d finished the official meeting and was talking about scheduling problems when a couple of the guys lost interest and started mumbling.

“Warren is seriously drunk,” Big Tom whispered. “And he has a major hard-on for Jordan.”

Ty’s gaze zeroed in on Warren.

“Jordan, come here, darlin’. Take a load off those amazing legs.” Warren’s obnoxious voice echoed off the walls of the mostly empty club.

Ty stared in Jordan’s direction; he couldn’t help himself. Warren Buck had his hands on her hips. Ty’s jaw clenched hard enough to grind his teeth into dust, but he’d choke down the anger. If this is how Jordan wanted it, so be it. He turned back to his guys, determined to ignore anything Warren said. The problem was, he could hear everything the bouncers were saying.

“She ain’t giving it up to him,” the other bouncer whispered. “He ain’t in her league.”

“This is my girl, right here.” Warren boasted loudly in front of his two friends. “She likes to play hard to get, but she’s gonna come around real soon to the idea of the two of us together.”

“See what I mean,” Big Tom said. “Depends on how bad she wants to keep her job. I’ve seen his moves when he comes in drunk like this. He’ll pull her in the office or a VIP room in a couple of minutes. If she likes the money here enough, she’ll give.”

With that, Ty felt the top of his head lift right off his body. “We’re done here.” The look he pinned on the two mumbling bouncers was sharp enough to cut diamonds. He stepped toward them. “Is Warren like this all the time?”

“Not usually. But only because he’s scared of Arlo. His old man damn near drop-kicked him the last time he was this drunk in here. They had a huge fight, and everyone in the place heard Buck tell him he better straighten his ass out or he was cut off.”