21
Zeke pumped allthe disgust and anger at himself into his leg muscles.
What the hell was wrong with him?
From the moment he’d spotted Liv behind the wheel, his body had come alive with a familiar hum of anticipation.
He’d tried. Tried like hell to keep things professional. Tried to think of her as one of the guys. Someone who had information he needed.
Ask the right questions. Get the answers. Move on.
He’d failed. His damn inconvenient curiosity about her had sparked and ignited and burned.
While she spoke about what sounded like a terrible freak accident, one question burned in his mind above all else until he thought for sure she saw smoke billowing from his ears.
Did you love your husband?
No, that wasn’t quite right.
Do you still love your husband?
Yeah, there it was. The question that would send him to hell.
“Blackwell, you fuck-wad.”
The roll of tires sticking to hot asphalt caught his attention. His hands ground into fists as Liv drove by. He didn’t look in her direction. Didn’t dare.
One glimpse of her slightly parted lips, and he would cave like a steel door against a block of C4. He followed her vehicle until it turned into the parking lot at the end of the road.
Two minutes.
He had two minutes to get his head screwed on straight and quit panting after Olivia Westcott like a sex-starved sixteen-year-old.
In an attempt to master himself, he forced his thoughts toward the text he’d received from Sardoff two nights ago. The antiquities dealer had received word that a sword matching Lupos’s description had recently been sold to a private collector in Asheville. The buyer was none other than Nicola St. Martin, the same collector in possession of the informant’s vintage doll.
Who was this St. Martin woman? Did she gain possession of both artifacts through legal means? Or through the black market? All questions he hoped Sardoff could answer for him before their recovery. The more he knew going in, the better.
The cotton shirt in his pocket mocked his attempt to control his thoughts.
Touch me. Bury your nose in me. Draw in my sweet vanilla scent.
He should have said to hell with courtesy and given the soiled T-shirt back to her. The small weight against his thigh made him think of her hand. How her palm had warmed his flesh while she took him into her mouth—
His cock stirred.
“Fuck!”
Closing his eyes, he ground to a halt and bent over. His fingers dug into the side of his knees while he willed himself to think about spreadsheets and inventory and the gray hair he’d found that morning.
When he had his libido under control again, he straightened and stared down the empty road. The last thing he needed right now was to get involved with a grieving widow whose son had seen a baseball kill his father.
Zeke could barely manage keeping BARS operational at the moment. Phin seemed to be one wrong job away from leaving, Cruz chafed under his leadership style, and Rohan would eventually get tired of mediating the whole mess.
He raked a frustrated hand through his sweat-damp hair, hating the feeling of losing control. The only high point in his life right now was a solid lead on Lupos’s location. The rest of it—his business, his career, his family—they were all on a downward spiral, and he had no idea how to stop it all from hitting the bottom.
One thing he did know. He couldn’t take on another responsibility. No matter how beautiful or tempting.