Untamed Hearts 1: The Viper (7 page)

There was a quiet moment between them, one charged enough that Katie was actually breathless to be in his presence again after so long. Strangely enough, she could feel it off Marcos too. That electric frisson of need so overwhelming it actually showed on his face and translated into something tangible enough that even someone as romantically challenged as Katie could sense it. As if remembering they weren’t alone, Marcos cleared his throat and turned back to Grayson, his eyes narrowed in warning once more.

“Yeah, I’m gonna have to insist you get your hands off her.” He eyed Grayson’s hold on her arm pointedly. “
Now
.”

“I don’t know who you think you are—” Grayson started, but he let go of Katie as requested and took a protective step back from Marcos.

“He’s a friend,” Katie answered, her cheeks still burning in embarrassment and something much more carnal. “We met through Jules Wellings.”

It wasn’t a complete lie.

“Oh, fantastic,” Grayson spat, because Jules wasn’t exactly his favorite person after getting Katie a more than fair settlement in the divorce and severely depleting those money market accounts he was so proud of. “This is just the sort of person she would introduce you to. She’s married into a family of criminals and—”

“We have to go now.” Katie was so thrilled to see Marcos, even with the craigslist fiasco, that she grabbed Marcos’s hand before she could think better of it. His palm was just as rough and calloused as it had been the night of the accident. She looked up at him with a smile. “Late lunch. Early dinner?”

“Sure.” Marcos grinned back, before his gaze darted to Grayson once more in warning “Later, cabrón.”

The dismissal was obvious, and it made it clear that Marcos wasn’t used to men arguing with him. He almost gave the impression that he was doing Grayson a favor by dismissing him.

“You can’t just—” Grayson sputtered in disbelief, his eyes wide as he gave Katie a look.

“Your
girlfriend
is waiting,” Katie said sarcastically as she pointed over to Ashley, who was standing by her car now and not so subtly watching the exchange.

“But you barely know this guy and—”

“We’re taking separate cars,” Katie offered before Grayson made a scene with some ridiculous excuse to protect her, even if his apprehension around Marcos was palpable and more than a little thrilling. “Bye, Grayson.”

“I’m texting you later,” Grayson warned as he looked at Marcos with distrust.

Katie shrugged with indifference. “If that makes you feel better.”

“I’m over there.” Marcos pointed to his white truck as he pulled her away before any more could be said. “Follow you?”

“Sounds great.” Katie didn’t want to let him go, so she decided to walk him to his pickup even if they had an audience.

Katie couldn’t help but pull up short once they were out of earshot. She looked up at Marcos, knowing the stunned amazement had to be showing on her face as she asked the one question that had been on the tip of her tongue since he appeared like a mirage in the teachers’ parking lot. “You didn’t come all the way here just because of those messages—did you?”

“Yeah, I did. Been driving since yesterday afternoon.” Marcos’s voice was distant for such a stunning revelation. He wasn’t even looking at Katie. His gaze was on Ashley instead. “That woman’s his girlfriend?”

Katie couldn’t help but stiffen a little. She knew she wasn’t anywhere near as pretty as Ashley, but—

“That car’s had a new paint job. That’s not a factory color.” Marcos turned back to her. “What color was it before? Do you remember?”

“Ashley’s car?” Katie was so confused, but she glanced over to see Grayson open the hood to the red compact vehicle. “I don’t know. I try to pay as little attention as possible when it comes to her.”

“Maybe that’s a mistake,” Marcos said in warning as he looked back to Grayson and Ashley. She would have been insulted if his distrust for both of them wasn’t noticeable. “I have a weird memory when it comes to cars. That one looks
very
familiar.”

He turned to her and arched an eyebrow, as if expecting Katie to understand.

“Did you really drive all the way up here because of a few notes on craigslist?” Katie asked, because she could care less about Ashley or the car she drove. “Chuito told you what I said in Jules’s office, and you read them and just decided to come up. That can’t be true.”

Something on her face must have had Marcos forgetting Ashley’s car too as he gave her a thoughtful look and asked, “You’ve never seen the ocean? Really?”

Katie’s cheeks were hot again as she remembered what note that little tidbit was revealed in. “Never,” she confirmed rather than give in to the shyness.

“Early lunch. Late dinner,” he repeated her words from earlier as his gaze ran over her in another hot sweep that left her feeling warm and tingly in a way she’d never experienced before. “We’ll eat and talk.”

Chapter Six

Marcos rubbed at his arm, feeling his Los Corredores tattoo like a brand as he looked at Katie across the booth in Hal’s Diner.

He knew this was a mistake.

He’d known it since he pulled into the Garnet High School parking lot and spent forty-five minutes searching for Katie’s long honey-brown curls in the dying afternoon sun. He watched the sea of high schoolers spill out of the large brick building and studied their young, hopeful faces pensively because they were so very different from the teenagers he knew. These were kids with a whole lifetime of opportunity in front of them, and Katie was part of the reason for that.

She made the world a little brighter just by being in it. She helped shape young minds and got them ready to face the world. What the fuck was Marcos doing with his life? He’d dropped out of high school after his mother died, and that was the nicest part of that particular story. What he did after he left school would give most people nightmares for the rest of their lives, and he didn’t even have the decency to feel bad about it.

For a lot of years, he’d wondered if he had a conscience at all, or just an ingrained code of conduct that taught him to obey a different set of laws than most people followed.

Now he could thank Katie for finally proving that he
did
have a conscience. He wasn’t supposed to be here making her eyes glow like they had since that moment at the school when her asshole of an ex-husband forced Marcos to step in after he’d already decided Katie didn’t deserve his kind of trouble. He had just made the decision to leave, head over to Chuito’s for the night, and then go back to Miami to start stripping the cars in the warehouse and work on forgetting the idea of two negatives making something positive. There were no pretty, sweet gringas in his future. Women like Katie weren’t meant for guys like him, yet here they were, because the second he’d seen her ex-husband grab her, he couldn’t help but go to her. He was still congratulating himself for not killing the uptight prick.

He wanted to tell her to turn and run the other way. Instead he was glancing at the menu, berating himself, and willing some sort of strength to keep this friendly rather than give in to the throb in his cock that hadn’t subsided since they sat down.

“You’re really quiet.” Katie’s cheeks were pink, and she bit her lip nervously before she asked in a hushed voice, “Are you okay?”

No, he was anything but okay, but he was saved from having to explain when the waitress walked over, pad in hand.

“Can I get y’all something to drink?”

“Hey, Melody. I can’t believe you came back to work,” Katie said to the waitress. “How old is that baby now?”

“A little over three months.” The waitress smiled at Katie. “I’m just filling in. I’m so busy with the shelter. I really don’t have time to work for Hal anymore, but I help out if he needs me.”

“That’s nice of you. I’ll just have water.” Katie glanced to her menu. “Meatloaf still the special for Friday?”

Melody nodded. “Sure is.”

“I’ll have that.” Katie handed Melody the menu before she looked to Marcos. “What about you?”

“Um.” He frowned at the menu again with his thoughts so scattered it made something as simple as ordering difficult. “I guess I’ll have the same. Water. Meatloaf. That works.”

“Okay.” The waitress took his menu from him. “Mashed potatoes good for ya?”

“They’re excellent,” Katie assured him, and Marcos nodded in agreement.

He saw the waitress, Melody, give Katie a look and a smile before she left. That had Marcos looking around the diner, and he noticed the waitress wasn’t the only one who took an interest in the two of them sitting in the corner booth. He felt self-conscious and could just imagine what they were saying about him.

He didn’t exactly
blend
in this town.

How the hell did Chuito deal with it?

“I guess we should’ve gone somewhere else,” Marcos mumbled when they were alone again. He unrolled his napkin and worked on setting out his silverware as he avoided Katie’s eyes. “They’ll probably be talking about you now.”

“Probably,” Katie agreed, though her voice was warm and excited in a way he didn’t expect. He looked up at her to see her smile was wide and pleased. “Girls like me usually don’t go on dates with fighters. Not that this is officially a date, but—”

“Chica.” He groaned and rubbed a hand over his eyes as the lust and guilt collided violently enough to have a headache forming. Knowing she was so fucking pleased to be here with him wasn’t making any of this easier. “I’m the last guy you should want to be on a date with.”

“What does chica mean?”

He lifted his head, giving her a bemused look he couldn’t hide. It occurred to him that, with a few small exceptions like the past few trips to Garnet, he hadn’t ventured out of his turf. When he was ten, he’d moved from Puerto Rico to Miami, where Spanish was still the preferred language, at least in the areas he hung out in. Hell, even the gringos knew what chica meant in Florida.

“It means, uh—” He thought for a moment. “Girl, I guess.”

“You guess?”

He gave her a smile he couldn’t hide, because there was something about her that was so incredibly endearing as she tucked strands of curls behind her ears and looked at him with open curiosity.

“It can be an endearment.” He shrugged. “Like baby or something. It’s not rude.”

“Oh.”

Katie’s grin was pleased. She blushed once more, and it had his mind sinking back into that dangerous territory as he wondered if that pale skin of hers flushed pink like that all over. He imagined her rosy and sweaty, breathless as he touched and licked her until she came over and over again.

That had always been his thing.

Watching a hot girl come was his drug of choice. That was the reason his mother had to change their phone number so many times when he’d been in school. He’d discovered too young the high he got from getting a girl off. When other guys his age were sinking into drugs or alcohol, he was sneaking into girls’ bedrooms and going down on them.

He hadn’t had many girlfriends. He wasn’t boyfriend material. He never had been, but he was a good time, and all the women in his neighborhood knew it. He was “different,” as Mia not so casually put it.

Jesus, he wanted to taste Katie. To feel her fingers in his hair and her thighs shaking as he sucked on her clit and then fucked her pussy with his tongue. Just once, so he knew her flavor. So he could remember what she sounded like. He’d probably be in a prison cell again one of these days again soon. His father was
still
in prison in Miami and wouldn’t be seeing daylight for another ten years. That was a lot of fucking years, and Marcos would need something to sustain him. None of the other girls had given him that. They’d always just left him looking for something new.

But with Katie, he suspected she’d be different. She was so sweet. So fucking innocent. Everything about her was soft in a way that drove him crazy. He’d never met a girl like her before, and sitting across from her knowing he wasn’t supposed to touch her was driving him crazy. He had to look back to the table to keep himself from eyeing her, because the white blouse she was wearing was a V-neck that dipped down just slightly, showing off the curve of nice, full tits.

He also couldn’t help but remember the way her very studious khaki pants clung to her ass in the best way possible. How that prick in the parking lot had gotten to tap an ass like that was completely beyond Marcos. This woman could get any guy she wanted, but for some reason, she was oblivious to it.

“You know he’s full of shit, right?” Marcos asked as he went back to straightening his silverware rather than look at her.

“Who’s full of shit?” Katie sounded mystified, and Marcos didn’t blame her. He knew he’d been cryptic since he’d gotten there.

“Your ex. That crap about you not being a ten.” He practically growled the words, and he glanced up at her again, seeing the way those large honey eyes widened in surprise as if she couldn’t believe he’d have a different opinion. “That’s bullshit. Where I come from, you’d have guys crawling all over you.”

Katie laughed. “I doubt that.”

“Don’t doubt it.” His gaze slid downward once more, unable to stop himself from indulging in a quick glance at the curve of her tits. “Never come to Miami. I’ll definitely go to jail.”

“For what?” she asked with amusement.

“Murder, probably. They’d be all over you, and I’d have to kill them. Without finesse.”

He cleared his throat and looked away again, feeling exposed and wondering what it was about this woman that had left him vulnerable since the moment he ran into her. The whole reason he’d gotten the job at Sebastian’s to begin with was because of her. He thought it was the guilt of the accident, but now he realized it might be something entirely different. A part of him had wanted to be good enough for a woman like this. She’d worried about him that night, even while injured, and it stayed with him.

He reached across the booth before he could stop himself and grabbed her left hand to pull it toward him. He could see the scars, still pink against the otherwise pale flesh of her forearm. He reached over with his other hand and touched the scars thoughtfully.