He stopped and turned back. Another huff of laughter. “Hell, who knows why I did it? Just a whim. Who’s to say I’d even do it again?”
“Liar,” she challenged, something prickly hot spreading through her chest. She didn’t like his words. She refused to accept them. Refused to believe that they might be true and she was wrong about him. “You’d do it. For me. For Josiah and Dr. Walker. For anyone who was working in the—-”
“No. You’re wrong.” His eyes drilled into her, moving left and right as they stared into her eyes, and he inched closer, invading her space, the immense size of him eating up all the air between them and filling her up with his heat. “I did it for you.”
Then he was gone. A stinging curse burned on the air in his wake. He left her gaping after him, her heart pounding like a drum in her chest.
She stalled from sliding into her car, the small carton of ice cream sticking to her fingers. She adjusted her grip slightly, feeling brittle sheets of ice slide between her skin and the cardboard carton. It was cold in her hand but she felt so hot and achy that it felt good. She was actually tempted to roll the carton against her feverish cheeks, her throat . . . lower.
Panic welled up in her as she watched his retreating back. She shifted on her feet, certain that if he left now, she would never see him again. No. She couldn’t have that.
Sucking in a thick breath, she called out to him, “Knox!” Her voice rang out louder than she expected, and even to her ears there was a hint of desperation to it. Need and want. Her face burned hotter.
He stopped several yards away, not quite to the gas pumps yet where he had left his pickup truck. He turned to face her, his deep--set eyes almost black across the distance.
His expression revealed nothing. Impassive as ever. But just this sight of him—-that hard warrior body that seemed to belong to another time, when men wore chain mail and armor and knocking heads was a part of every day—-pulled at something deep in her belly and gave her all the encouragement she needed.
She had seen him in action. Quick and deadly as a viper. Fighting to defend and protect her with a searing intensity that she had never seen before. Or felt. And she had felt it. Felt him. Just as she did now. His gaze felt like a physical stroke over her body. Heat rippled over her skin.
She couldn’t forget that day. It wasn’t the horror that stayed with her. It was the memory of him. His raw power. His brutal beauty. The way his entire body had been a weapon. She wanted that weapon. She wanted him to turn it on her. To unleash himself on her.
She didn’t even know if he thought about her that way. If desire for her even entered into this thing—-whatever it was—-between them.
Tugging her cardigan tighter over her T--shirt, she held out the carton like it was some kind of proof, evidence that she was merely asking for something safe and innocent. Like sex was the farthest thing from her mind. She clung to it like the excuse she desperately needed it to be. “You like Cherry Garcia?”
THIRTEEN
YOU LIKE CHERRY GARCIA?
She voiced the question so innocently, as though she was asking him over for ice cream on a Sunday afternoon. Like he was some loafer--wearing choirboy from her church youth group with nothing on his mind beyond first base. It had been years since he stepped inside a church. He would likely go up in flames if he even tried.
He stared at her in front of the open door of her car and read the mortification gleaming brightly in her big eyes. She shifted on her feet, waiting for his response. It took everything in her to ask the question. He knew that right away, but he still couldn’t bring himself to answer her immediately.
It was a game. The question was whether he would let her play it. Let her pretend asking him over for ice cream wasn’t any invitation to fuck.
He didn’t do games.
Knox eyed her in her baggy T--shirt, her toes curling self--consciously in her flip--flops, wondering if maybe, in fact, she didn’t know what she was doing. Maybe she didn’t realize that he was the wolf and she the lamb. That inviting him over meant he was going to devour every inch of her.
He studied her wide eyes and shifting feet and decided, yeah. She didn’t know. Not fully. She couldn’t. She couldn’t fathom what she was inviting on herself. She probably thought they might kiss. Make out a little. As though that would be enough to satisfy the hungry beast prowling inside him, pawing at the gate, ready to be unleashed so that he could do all the dirty things burning through his mind.
“Yeah,” he heard himself answering, even though he had no idea what flavor Cherry Garcia was. “I like it.”
He couldn’t not go. He wasn’t that good or honorable. He wasn’t that strong. If she wanted to play with a wolf, then that’s what she would get.