Ghost Dance (Tulsa Thunderbirds Book 3) (13 page)

“And my purse!” I called out after him.

He let out a grunting sound, but a moment later, he was back with my wheelchair, my purse resting on the seat. He dropped it off without another word and left, closing the door behind him. I cleaned myself up as best I could without bathing, and I dealt with emptying my bladder before calling out for him.

He still hadn’t bothered getting dressed. I bit down on my lower lip, taking in every inch of his body. Dima’s chest, arms, and legs all bore a light dusting of dark hair, but he wasn’t anywhere near as hairy as I’d expected, considering the state of his face. But now that I could see him—
all
of him—in the light, the rest of his tattoos were almost all I could look at.

They were everywhere. The words on his right hand. The husky on his neck. There was a stained-glass Madonna on one thigh and an intricate Celtic cross on the other. Still more ink covered his ribs and chest, and he had a full sleeve on one arm.

“What?” he demanded. “Never see a naked man?”

“Just wanted to see all your artwork.”

He held out his arms, as though putting himself on display, and turned around, showing off his entirely too perfect ass as well as an enormous eagle that spanned his upper back and shoulders. “Might be new art. You clawed me enough.”

“There are some red lines,” I murmured. “Want me to ink them in for you? Make them permanent?”

“Scratch me like that again, and who needs ink?”

“Is that an invitation?”

“You finished?” he grumbled in lieu of answering, spinning around to glare at me.

“Yeah. I’m finished.” I tossed the used washcloth in the laundry bin.

He stalked over and picked me up. Only, instead of taking me back to his bedroom so I could get dressed again, he carried me downstairs.

“What are you doing?”

“Lunch is ready.”

“So maybe we should get dressed and eat like normal human beings,” I countered. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t paying me any attention. I felt like nothing more than an annoying fly, buzzing around his head, with the way he was treating me again. “People could see us through the windows,” I hissed.

“It’s blizzard. Who’s going to see?”

You will
, I thought to myself, heating up even though it shouldn’t matter. We
had
just rutted each other like wildebeests, after all. He’d been inside me, so what was the harm of him seeing the outside? Besides, I’d just gawked at him and studied every inch of his body, memorizing the lines of his tattoos.

However hypocritical it might be of me, though, I couldn’t shake the urge to find some way to cover myself. I shifted my arms over my chest.

Dima glanced down at me, his brow raised, and chuckled. Then he dumped me in a chair at his dining room table and stalked off to the kitchen. A minute later, he came back with a couple of plates and some sandwich fixings.

“Can I have a blanket?” I asked, reaching for the multi-grain bread.

“You want to look at me but not let me see you?”

“There are kids in your neighborhood, aren’t there? Surely they’ll be out building snowmen and having snowball fights. You want them to see me?” I rolled my eyes. “But seriously, I’m cold.”

“You weren’t cold a few minutes ago.” He loaded his sandwich with half a container of sliced turkey, but I didn’t miss the innuendo in his words.

“I had an enormous Russian blanket a few minutes ago.”

“Want me to put you on my lap? I can make you hot again.”

All he had to do to make me hot again was look at me the way he was right at that moment. I felt all flushed and fluttery, which wasn’t normal for me. Not at all. The last man who’d been able to make my insides melt like that was Wade Miller, but his heated looks and suggestive talk hadn’t come close to producing the kind of melting intensity that Dima could wring from me in a single glance.

“Is that a threat or a promise?” I asked, finding some new gear that bordered on being saucy. I wasn’t sure where this version of London had come from, but I kind of liked her.

“You tell me.”

I licked my lips, and his dark eyes followed the path of my tongue. Promise. That was
definitely
a promise in his gaze. “Eat your sandwich, Dima,” I said, putting the finishing touches on my own. “You might need your energy.”

“Need more than energy to deal with mouthy woman for days.” As if to prove his point, he got up and started brewing a pot of coffee. Then he took two cups out of a cabinet and passed one over to me. “Think we might both need it.”

A great, bubbling laugh billowed out of me. I was having way too much fun with him.

APPARENTLY, DIMA LIKED
being naked. Or maybe he liked keeping
me
naked, and so he was remaining nude in order to justify my state of undress. I wasn’t sure which it was, but after my initial discomfort and embarrassment, I couldn’t say I minded too much.

He’d brought me back to the living room after lunch, setting me down on the couch before loping back into the kitchen for a minute.

I took the time to check my phone for messages. There were five of them—one from Gray telling me he would do his best to calm Mom down, three from Mom with her worried sick about me and threatening to force Dad out into the weather to come and get me if I didn’t respond within the next five seconds, and one from Dad reassuring me he had no intention of venturing out in this stuff no matter how many fits Mom threw but requesting that I at least respond soon so she’d calm down. I shot off a few replies, smiling and shaking my head the whole time.

When Dima returned, he had another cup of coffee for each of us. He set them on the table and took a seat next to me, stretching his long legs out in front of him to cross them at the ankles.

His eyes continually roved over my body, settling on my breasts more often than anywhere else, so I had no qualms about giving him the same sort of assessment. Only I didn’t obsess over his dick. Don’t get me wrong—I liked his dick. A lot. I liked what he did with his dick even more, and at the moment, he was already hard again. But the rest of his body gave me much better clues about the man hiding underneath all that ink. Like the Madonna etched into his leg.

His thighs were big and muscular like those of so many hockey players. I reached over and traced a fingertip along the outer edges of the Madonna tattooed there.

He flinched.

“Don’t tell me that hurts,” I teased.

“Doesn’t hurt.”

“Then what?”

He shrugged and almost imperceptibly inched away, under the guise of angling his body so he could look at me more fully. “Personal.”

“We’ve gotten a hell of a lot more than personal,” I pointed out.

“Just fucking. Fucking isn’t personal.”

“Oh, isn’t it? Silly me. I was under the impression that sex was one of the more intimate things two people could do.”

“You ask too many fucking questions.”

“I didn’t ask about the Madonna.”
Yet
. “I just touched it and you jerked away like I’d burned you.”

“I could touch you and make you burn.”

I had no doubt about that, but I wasn’t in the mood for him to constantly deflect me. I ran my hand up his thigh, flattening my palm over the center of the design and letting his leg hair rasp against the sensitive skin of my hand. When I got close to his hip, his dick jerked to attention.

Dima eyed my boobs and licked his lips. “You don’t have tattoos.” It wasn’t a question.

“No.”

“So why you care so much about mine?” he demanded. Glaring right at me. Holy heck, he was hot as sin when he got mad. His whole body vibrated with intensity, his muscles taut and tense under my fingers, like he was ready to run. Or pounce on me.

I’d much prefer him pouncing on me since I had no way to chase him down. Maybe I should poke and prod a bit more… “Why do you get so defensive every time I try to learn who you are?”

“You know who I am. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“What? You want to hear I nearly killed Sergei? That’s what you want?” His eyes flashed brown fury, and he clenched his hand into a fist at his side.

“Is that what you think happened?” I asked.

“It’s what I know. Got drunk. Got in car. Caused a wreck. Sergei almost died.”

“But he didn’t die.”

“Lost his leg.”

“He did. Lots of people lose their legs. Hell, half the guys on the Para-Pythons team have lost at least one of their legs. They got blown up by IEDs. They had car accidents. All sorts of things have happened to cause people to lose limbs.”

“But I caused it.”

“Sergei got in the car, you know,” I pointed out. “He had a choice.”

“Not his fault. I drove the car.”

“He didn’t have to get in it with you, though. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Don’t want to talk about Sergei any longer,” he grumbled.

“So what do you want to do?”

For a few more moments, he kept glaring at me, so intensely I almost melted beneath the heat of it. But then his gaze dropped to my breasts again, he unclenched his fist, and he twisted one of my nipples between his thumb and forefinger.

I gasped in a combination of surprise and desire.

“Hurts?” he asked.

“Yes.” The word croaked out of me as he rolled my tit around, putting more and more pressure on it. Somehow, there seemed to be a direct connection between my breasts and my sex—a fresh wave of moisture filled me, leaving me hot and slick and aching for him in no time.

“Good.” Then his mouth was on me, and I forgot all about his tattoos, at least for the time being.

I WAS ROYALLY
screwed. Nothing else quite fit the situation I found myself in.

It was bad enough that I couldn’t keep my fucking hands off of London. But to make things worse, every time I
tried
to act like a grown man with a brain—one that lived in my head, not my cock—she went and started prying again. I’d left briefly to go blow off some steam and use the snow blower on my neighbors’ cars, sidewalks, and driveways, like I’d intended. Other than that, though, the only way I’d managed to get her to leave my past alone was to take her back to my bed.