Julie Walker - Hell for Leather

Throwing herself back on the blue and orange comforter, causing the bed’s rusty springs to squawk in complaint, she tossed an arm over her tear-hot eyes. And that’s when a strange thundering sound, almost like that of an earthquake, rumbled in her ears. It was immediately followed by the bedroom door flying open with such force the knob stuck solid in the sheetrock. She sprang upright—Fido doing the same, popping from his corner with a sleepy-eyed yorp—in time to see Mac lowering his biker boot from where he’d kicked the door open. He charged into the room in a fighter’s stance, his big, black Glock up and at the ready. The rest of the Knights piled in behind him, weapon’s drawn, faces like death masks in the dim light of the bedside lamp.

“What the hell?” she gasped, a hand clutching her throat.

“You okay?” Mac asked, quartering the room like a…well, like a pro, she supposed.

“Of course I’m okay.” Although, in all honesty, that was pretty far from the truth.

“We heard a thump,” Ozzie explained, holstering his weapon and bending to shake Fido’s paw. The dog, never having met a stranger and too silly to recognize the danger of four locked-and-loaded men, had wagged himself over to the group, thinking this was all some sort of hugely fun game. He was sitting and offering his front leg in greeting.

“I…” Delilah had to swallow and try again. “I had this crazy idea when I was showering that Uncle Theo called and left a message.” She pointed a finger she was dismayed to note was shaking at the iPhone lying in the middle of the shag carpeting. “When I realized it was all in my head, I got a little…” Hopeless? Infuriated? Dismayed? Frustrated? All of the above? “…disappointed, and I spiked it into the ground.”

“What about that groaning sound that followed?” Mac demanded, having shoved his gun into the small of his back and risen from his fighting stance. He crossed his arms over his chest, the gray of his T-shirt hugging his bulging biceps and pulling up just enough to show the bottom links of the barbed wire tattoos inked there. Now normally, she preferred a man when he was all decked out in a biker jacket. There was just something about the way the leather hung on a guy’s shoulders. But Mac? Well, suffice it to say, she liked him just as he was right now. Dressed in nothing but faded jeans and a too-tight T-shirt that accentuated the width of his chest, the slimness of his waist, and the flat expanse of his washboard belly. Yeah, there was just something about the sheer height and breadth of him that…well…it just did it for her. Did it for her every which way.

Which just proved how delusional and exhausted she really was. Because the dead last thing she should be concerning herself with right now was the sorry state of her nonexistent sex life.

Still…they had—she bent to retrieve her phone, pushing the power button and checking the time—about an hour before they were scheduled to start knocking on doors. And there had been that look on his face back at BKI headquarters when she’d accidently kissed him smack on the mouth, not to mention the honking big hard-on he’d popped out in the front yard. So maybe…yeah…maybe she should be concerning herself with her nonexistent sex life. Maybe that’s just what she needed to keep the helplessness and hopelessness from driving her shithouse crazy for the next hour.

A plan began to take shape…

* * *

“Delilah?” Mac asked worriedly. She was wearing a strange look. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“Huh?” she blinked up at him, her face even more beautiful scrubbed free of makeup, the deep red highlights in her damp auburn hair catching the glow from the lamp and burning like living fire. And then, Lord almighty, there was that T-shirt. He’d swear it was thin enough to blow off in a stiff breeze, and it hugged her curves so lovingly that had she been braless he’d have been tempted to eat his own ammo.

Of course, the swift kick to his libido was about as welcome as a porcupine at a nudist colony, because not only was he not changing his mind about getting involved with That Woman—he wasn’t—but he also felt like a complete cad for lusting after her when it was obvious she was bone-weary. As his dear ol’ dad had liked to say, she looked like she’d been chewed up, spit out, and stepped on.

Poor little gal… Which reminded him…

“We heard groaning,” he repeated.

“Oh.” She shook her head, as if she needed the physical inducement to rearrange her thoughts. “That…uh…that was me, too. Just feeling a little beaten down by the…weight of it all, I guess.”

And, yessir, that was enough to punch through his tough exterior straight to his soft, gooey center. Taking a deep breath, he gave her the only piece of advice he’d ever found to be one hundred percent true one hundred percent of the time. “Hard times don’t last, darlin’. But hard people do. You gotta hang tough.”

Her throat made a clicking sound when she swallowed. And, damn it all, he hadn’t meant to make tears spring to her eyes, but that’s just what he’d done.

“I’m…um…I’m going to go make that call to the CIA,” Zoelner said, fleeing the scene. The coward.

“I’m going to…uh…feed the dog again,” Ozzie said, grabbing Fido’s collar and hauling the panting, wagging canine into the hall, proving that he, too, was yellow as mustard.

Mac turned to lift a brow at Steady, wondering what his excuse might be. To his utter exasperation, the man didn’t even attempt to come up with a justification for his departure. He simply made an oh, shit face when he saw Delilah’s over-bright eyes and turned on his heel, escaping into the hall, slick as a whistle, pulling the door out of the sheetrock and closing it behind him.

All of ’em are worthless as teats on a bull when it comes to a woman’s tears, Mac inwardly groused. But when he turned back to Delilah, it was to discover the wetness had miraculously vanished from her eyes. And not only that, but she was stalking—yes, stalking; it was the only way to describe that slow, rolling gait of hers—toward him.

He instantly went from feeling sorry for her to feeling like a fly about to get stuck in a glue pot…

“What are you doin’?” Mac demanded, attempting to don that inscrutable mask of his, but failing to manage it. For one thing, Delilah could read the wary suspicion in the flash of his narrowed eyes, and she could see the muscles in his jaw jerking, causing that adorable dimple in his chin to twitch.

The sight worked on her like a Tom Hardy nude scene, warming her blood, tickling her womb, and making her realize that one: Mac fully clothed was much hotter than Tom Hardy in his birthday suit—imagine that, if you will. And two: She was right to do this. Because they’d been circling each other like a couple of heavyweight boxers for way too long, and it was way past time for one of them to throw the first punch and see where the match-up would take them.

Besides, what did she have to lose? The one man in the whole world who loved her just as she was had mysteriously flown the coop. And if he didn’t come back to her alive then she didn’t know—

No. Don’t think about that now.

And, okay, so that was sound advice. Because what would happen later, good or bad, would happen later. There was absolutely nothing she could do about that. But she could do something about this.

So make like Nike, and “just do it.” Mmm, hmm. Alrighty then…

“What am I doing?” She cocked a brow, hoping it looked as sexy as it felt. It’d been a hell of a long time since she tried to work her feminine wiles, which meant she was rustier than the springs on Charlie Sander’s bed. “I’m finding a way to take my mind off my uncle for the next hour or so,” she told him, lowering her chin so she could stare out at him from under her eyebrows. Was it coming off like she wanted it to? Like a look of pure seduction? Or was it more of the creepy/stalkery type of expression?

In all honesty, it was hard to tell. Especially since the big idiot just stood there. Blinking at her. But then, just when she was about to try another tactic…bingo! She’d managed to pull off pure seduction after all, because Mac gulped. Like, she seriously heard an audible gulp and saw his Adam’s apple bob in the long, tan column of his throat. If she’d been a cartoon villain, this is the part where she’d rub her hands together and laugh maniacally.

“H-how were you plannin’ to do that?” he managed, uncrossing his arms and glancing behind him like he was considering making a run for it.

She pointed a finger at her face, stopping a mere foot from him. “You know what I’m planning to do. It’s written all over my face.”

“Sex.” Mac said the word like one might say mucus—with a bit of a lip-curl. For a brief moment, just one split second, she was taken aback. But then she recognized his act for what it was…

“Yes, sex. Or something close to it,” she taunted. “And you can drop the uninterested shtick right now, Mr. McMillan.” That sounded a little like Marilyn Monroe saying Mr. President, didn’t it? Yes, it did. And, booyah! “I know you want to.”

She lifted a hand, walking her fingers up the breadth of his chest until she could lay her palm over his heart. To her intense satisfaction, the organ was racing at breakneck speed, belying anything he might try to say to contradict her last statement.

Yeah, that’s right. I still got it! If it wouldn’t have ruined the mood, she’d have pumped a fist.

“Wh-why would you think that?” he asked, blinking rapidly, breathing rapidly.

“Because I felt how hard you got when you were lying on top of me.”

“That was just…uh…just the adrenaline.”

“Bullshit.”

He gulped again. “Okay. But you can’t expect me to…just…fall into your trap.”

“What trap is that?” She loved this feeling of power. Loved that, for the first time in nearly eighteen hours, she could push the panic and fear aside and concentrate on something she might actually be able to accomplish. Namely, the bedding of one Bryan “Mac” McMillan…

“Cut the crap,” he growled, glancing pointedly at her boobs. “You know what trap it is.”

She smiled, making sure the expression was a little sly, like a cat watching a canary. “You see something you like, cowboy?” she murmured, moving toward him, putting him to the shark-bump test. You know the one Great Whites use to see if their prey is weak enough to go without a fight?

It worked just as she’d hoped. The instant her hip touched his, he sucked in a breath, his nostrils flaring. As they stood there, toe-to-toe, heat poured from his big body. It made her realize the air in the room around them was close and cool, but it was his nearness that caused goose bumps to erupt over every inch of her skin. She curled her bare toes into the thick carpet as her nipples furled into tight, deliciously painful buds.

Mac noticed her body’s reaction. Even in the dimly lit room, she saw his pupils dilate. And when he licked his lips, those deceivingly soft lips? Well, it took everything she had not to shimmy up his body like an electric worker shimmies up a pole.

“You think men are led around by their dicks, don’t you?” he asked. “You think all we want is sex.”

“No.” She shrugged, watching him narrowly as she inched just a tiny bit closer. “I think men want beer and whiskey, too. Pretzels. Football on Monday nights and—”

“Yeah, I get it.” He nodded jerkily, rubbing a finger down the length of his wonderfully crooked nose. “We’re just a bunch of shallow, two-dimensional creatures, slaves to our most basic desires, and—”

She pressed a finger over his lips. A zing of sensation tripped up her spine when his hot breath tickled her skin. “Why are you trying to change the subject?” she asked him. “And why are you fighting this?”

“I’m not fightin’ anything,” he scoffed, but there was a spark of…was that fear in his eyes?

But, why?

And then it occurred to her that she might be going about this all wrong. That maybe the best way to blow through Mac’s thick, prickly barriers wasn’t to come at him sledgehammers out and swinging. He was the standoffish sort and this blatant, in-his-face attack might be doing the opposite of what she intended…frightening him into running screaming in the opposite direction. But, what then? How was she supposed to accomplish her task of turning him into putty in her hands?