Kai swung into Flick’s driveway and cut the engine to his Jeep. Half of his mind was on the guns Flick pointed out and the other half of his mind was on the long-haired, red-eyed girl sitting next to him. He wanted to follow her into her house, strip her naked, and take himself on home, but they had an agreement, and she was vulnerable, and he wasn’t that much of a bastard and...crap.There were reasons why he couldn’t do that, and even more reasons why heshouldn’tdo that. But right now, with her light perfume in his nose and her hair in a messy knot he wanted to rake his hands through, he didn’t give a shit about any of them.
Except that he did. He wanted what was best for her and, unfortunately, sleeping with him probably wasn’t it.
Flick turned in her seat and leaned her back against the door. Kai wanted to tell her to get out of the car and head on in, but the words wouldn’t form on his tongue. He tried to make himself get out and walk around the car to open the door for her, but that wasn’t happening either. So he’d just sit here, like a dweeb, in a wait-and-see holding pattern.
God, he was pathetic.
“So, that’s the secret,” Flick said, lifting her knee onto the leather seat.
“I’ve heard of a lot worse. Caravaggio murdered a pimp over a prostitute and then tried to castrate the dude. Gerald Ford was a male model. And Mozart was into some weird sex shit,” Kai tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. “A house full of furniture isn’t that big a deal.”
“Caravaggio?” Flick asked, bemused. He couldn’t blame her. He had a mind full of trivia.
“Late sixteenth-century Italian artist. Revolutionary and known to be, at the time, the most celebrated painter of his time. My favorite painting by him isNarcissus. It hangs in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Rome,” He watched, amused as Flick’s mouth fell open, and resisted the urge to shut it with his. She thought she’d had him pegged as a rough, tough ex-Special Forces soldier who read spy novels and liked his guns. He did like guns, and he did read spy novels, but he never assuaged his thirst for knowledge and was constantly jumping from subject to subject as the mood took him.
“I sawThe Denial Of Peterat the Met when I lived in New York.”
Kai lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “You lived in New York?”
“For a couple of years,” Flick poked her finger into his bicep. “Caravaggio was considered the first great representative of the Baroque school and was, even in his lifetime, considered to be rebellious and basically a pain in the ass,” Flick sent him a cool smile. “I’ve lived in lots of places, Manning. I might be living in a small town now, but I can, and do, still read.”
So that was what his foot tasted like.
“My point was...” What the hell was his point? Oh yeah, right, the messy house. “...that while your aunt’s house might be filled with stuff, it’s not filled with newspapers and trash and takeout containers. Or cat corpses.”
“Big whoop. It’s still filled to overflowing, and Pippa and her siblings are going to have a coronary when they realize she’s all but broke.”
“That’s what you’re not understanding, Flick. There’s money in that house. That Beretta shotgun is worth a hundred K, and there were two or three pistols that I know will raise between three and five k each. Your aunt might have a problem, but she certainly isn’t short on taste.”
Flick’s sigh filled the car. “Good to know, but there’s still the little issue of her being branded a hoarder and a loser by everyone when all this gets out.”
It had been a long time—okay, never—since he cared what anyone outside his tight circle of friends thought about him, so her concern was foreign to him.
“Is that such a big deal?”
Flick’s laugh was deeply sarcastic. “In Mercy, gossip central? When you’re the matriarch, the queen bee, the standard one must aspire to? Hell yes!” Flick cocked her head. “You don’t understand that, do you?”
He really didn’t. “I’m not good at the games played in small towns like these. I understand battlefields and the streets. It’s pretty simple out there: bad guy wants to kill me, do not let that happen.”
“There are different types of death, Kai, and, to Gina, real death would almost be preferable to her losing her social standing, to losing the respect of her children, her peers.”
Different strokes, Kai thought. “I hear you, but the reality is that you’re not going to be able to remove that amount of stuff, quickly, without raising some eyebrows. And that raises the question, how did she accumulate that amount of stuff without anyone noticing? And how did it get upstairs? She must’ve had some help. Some of that furniture is damn heavy and needed men and muscle.”
Flick, normally as sharp as a spear tip, took a little time to see where he was going with that line of thought. When she did, her eyes widened. “I never thought of that! Someone has to know, but who?”
“It could just be a random delivery company that doesn’t give a rat’s ass what they’re delivering as long as they’re getting paid.”
“It would have to be an outside contractor, because if it was someone local then we would’ve heard about it,” Flick rubbed the tips of her fingers over her forehead. “God, I’m tired.”
He could see that. Pushing open his door, Kai got out and walked around the hood of his SUV to yank open her door. Flick swiveled in her seat and he placed both hands on her hips to lift her down. The gesture was unnecessary, she wasn’t that tired, but he wanted his hands on her any way he could get them. Then she looked up at him, and the desire that she mostly kept hidden flared in her eyes. Confirmation that she liked his hands on her as much as he did.
Kai wasn’t an angel and he sure as shit wasn’t a saint so he did what any man in his situation would do—the only thing hecoulddo. He slid his arms around her back and she responded by arching into him, her stomach pressed against his dick, and opening her mouth under his. He couldn’t get enough of her taste. It was all Flick, feminine and fantastic, and it made him feel both wild and weak. As his tongue slid over hers, he lowered his hands and gripped the back of her thighs, and boosted her up so that her inner knees rested on his hipbones. He swung around and leaned his butt against the back door of the SUV and felt her sink into him, surrendering to the pleasure sparking between them.
He swallowed her moan and skimmed one hand up her back, pulling the hem of her t-shirt up to explore the bumps of her spine, the luxury of her skin. He held her with one hand under her butt and allowed his other hand to flirt with the cord of her thong, the silkiness of her hips exposed by her low-riding jeans, that special, ultra-feminine spot on her rib cage where her breasts flared.
And she just held his face and kissed the hell out of him. This was pure, unadulterated desire, as honest as a bullet, as powerful as a drone strike. It was heat and want and craziness...Kai felt his balls contract when she sucked his lower lip into his mouth and then pulled away to feather kisses on his chin, his jaw. Her lips rasped over his stubble and her teeth grazed his jaw, heading to the area where his jaw met his neck.
“If you keep doing that I promise you that I will rip your clothes off. Right here, and right fucking now.”