Chapter 25
Kat
Alex came home an hour later,looking tired. He found me sitting at the kitchen table, my legs crossed, my fingers tapping impatiently, a scowl on my face.
“Oh, fuck,” he said. “What did I do?”
“Did you know your piece of scum brother was in town?”
His gaze flickered, and before he spoke, I knew. “Yes.”
Now I was angry again. If I’d had another iced coffee, Alex would be wearing it. “You knew and you didn’t tell me?”
“I found out a few hours ago when he came to my office,” Alex said, shrugging off his jacket and scrubbing a hand over his face. “How did you find out?”
“He followed me in the park, and then he talked to me on the sidewalk.”
“What?” Alex dropped his hands. “Where was Byron?”
“He was there. He was surprised when Damon claimed to be your brother.”
“My staff doesn’t know anything about my family.” Alex walked to the cupboard in the kitchen, took out a bottle of whiskey from the back of a shelf, and then opened another cupboard for a glass. “You want some?”
“No. I’ve never seen you drink whiskey.”
“I don’t, as a habit. This bottle has dust on it.” He touched it with his fingertip and showed me, then poured some whiskey into his glass. “Today seems like the day for it. What did Damon say to you?”
“That he needed to talk to me.”
Alex raised his glass his glass to his lips and took a sip. For a man who rarely drank, he didn’t even wince as the whiskey went down. “That’s it? Nothing else?”
“I didn’t let him get anything else out. I threw my drink at him and left.”
Alex went still, his glass still held in the air. Then he closed his eyes.
“What are you doing?” I asked when he didn’t open them after a moment.
His voice was low. “Picturing it.” He savored it for another moment. “Goddamn, Kat. What drink was it?”
“An iced coffee. A large one. Full. I’d only had a sip. And I really wanted it. That asshole.”
“Goddamn,” he said again. “Have I told you that you’re incomparable? Because you are. Throwing your iced coffee at my brother. I could go down on you for days.”
I blinked. That sounded good, and suddenly I could go for it. I squeezed my thighs together in my jeans as the compliment warmed its way through my belly. “I’m a bit of a bitch,” I admitted.
“I don’t care.” Alex’s voice was rough and he opened his eyes, looking at me. “You’re a goddess. If any man can’t handle you, that’s his problem, not yours.”
We looked at each other. It was the nicest thing Alex had ever said to me—the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me. Despite the craziness of the day, I felt a smile touch the corners of my lips.
“What?” Alex said, watching my expression.
“We’re not fighting.”
His eyebrows rose. “Would you prefer that we fight? It’s kind of our foreplay. It would get us faster to the ‘going down on you for days’ part.”
I shook my head, still unable to stop the smile. “Alex, this is Damon. You and I are talking about Damon. And we’re not fighting.”
He took another sip of whiskey at the mention of his brother’s name. “Yeah, I guess it’s time to admit we’re not twenty anymore. For better or for worse. I guess he came to my office right before he creeped on you in the park.”
“What did he want?”
“You’re not going to believe this.” He set his glass, still with a sip of whiskey in it, down on the counter. “My shitty brother, who tried to steal my wife, who I went to prison for, who pretty much did nothing but take and deal drugs—my brother has spent the last eight years working for the DEA.”
I felt my jaw drop, my lips part. Of just about anything he could have said about Damon, that was the least expected. “The DEA?”
“A Fed who takes down drug traffickers, of all things. I assumed he was lying.” Alex’s tone was dry. “Damon always lied as easy as he breathed. He couldn’t show me ID, because he claimed he wasn’t DEA anymore. So after I kicked him out, I had my private detective do some digging. And for once, Damon was telling the truth. He was a DEA agent until three months ago, if you can believe it.”
I couldn’t. If Alex hadn’t verified it, I would never have believed it. Damon, taking some type of DEA entrance exam? Deciding he wanted to uphold the law? Going through whatever training DEA agents went through, taking the courses they had to take? Doing the job? The Damon I had known had lived to get high and get laid, preferably with me if he could talk me into it. He’d gotten by on the bare minimum, he’d had no ambition, and he’d loved nothing more than a good fight. Which was one of the reasons he’d gotten into a fight so violent with Alex that Alex had ended up in trouble.
Damon had never been sorry about that. He had loved it. He had lived to destroy things and make trouble.
I tried to picture him in a suit, flipping open a badge and doing whatever you saw federal agents do in TV and movies. I failed.
Then I put it together.
“If he was DEA, then he knows something about my case,” I said.
Alex nodded. “So he says.” He still seemed as reluctant to believe anything out of Damon’s mouth as I was. “It explains why the detective told you the feds were involved. He was also the man who was looking for you at Knoxy’s a week ago.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Of course he was. What does he want to tell me?”
“I didn’t let him get much farther than you did. I told him he was a liar and kicked him out of my office.”
“My case has something to do with drug deals.”
“So it seems, yes.”
I dropped my hand and looked at him. Our gazes met again.
“You know what this means,” I said.
Alex winced. “I’m hoping you’re going to say that it means we’re going to forget about Damon and go on with the rest of our lives. But I have a feeling that isn’t it.”
“It isn’t.” I wasn’t any more enthused than he was. “But Alex, we have to face it.”
He picked up his glass again and downed the last of his whiskey. “I know. It means we need Damon, of all people. We need to know whatever he has to tell us. We need to let the past go. We need to trust him.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “Good thing he left me his number.”
I stared at that piece of paper, my stomach churning. It was just a phone number, but it gave me a sense of dread. Not because of Damon, though Damon was part of it. Damon fucking Blake was just the bad omen of things to come.
Things were going to change. I didn’t know how, but I had the feeling it wasn’t going to be good.
Whatever it was, I wasn’t ready. But I had no choice.
So I did what I had to in order to conquer the fear. I fell back on the one thing that had made me feel safe and secure since that day in the hospital in Nashville. When I didn’t want to feel the fear and the dread, when I didn’t want to face what was next, there was always something that was guaranteed to make me feel good.
I stood and advanced on Alex. I took the piece of paper from his hand and dropped it.
His eyebrows went up, his gaze locking on mine.
He knew me. He knew what the look in my eyes meant, what I was thinking. When we weren’t fighting, we had always been able to read each other’s minds.
Being timid was not my style. I pulled my sweater off over my head and dropped it on the floor on top of the phone number. Now I was standing in front of him in only my jeans and my bra.
Alex let his gaze wander lazily over my body, very much like a man who has seen it a hundred times and never gets tired of appreciating it. A muscle in his jaw flexed.
I leaned in and brushed my lips against the line of his jaw, rough because he hadn’t shaved in a few days. I let the tip of my tongue touch his skin, tasting him as I made my way toward his earlobe.
When he spoke, his voice was rough. “You’re seducing me.”
“How observant of you,” I said, putting my hands on his shoulders and running them slowly down his chest as I nipped his ear. “I thought I was being so subtle.”
He took a shaky breath, and I felt his muscles tense beneath my palms. I also felt the deep warmth of him, the way his heart beat a little harder. I could feel the pulse in his neck. I always had this effect on Alex, and right now I reveled in it. I loved the fact that with a few touches I could make this big, hard, complicated man fall under my control. I loved that his gorgeous body became all mine while I had him this way. I loved that I could make him submit, exactly the way he could make me submit. He was my other half, my equal. I’d never been with another man who came close.
I loved Alex. I always had, to tell the truth.
He touched me at last, his hand traveling up my bare back to my hair, which he wound lightly over his palm. The soft tug on my scalp made me shiver, and my nipples went visibly hard in my bra. He pulled me flush to his body, so I could feel everything, even through his clothes.
“What are you up to, Kat?” he said in my ear.
I could never fool him, even when I had him like this. Still, he wasn’t going to get out of me the fear and dread that I was feeling. “I want to know if you taste like whiskey,” I replied. Because I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted that more than anything.
Alex knew it, so of course he made me wait. His mouth touched where my neck met my shoulder, and I shivered again. “Maybe I’ll put my whiskey mouth between your legs.”
It was getting harder not to lose my mind. “Promises, promises.”
His hand wound a little tighter in my hair, and I let out a breath that was half a moan. A sound of surrender.
A smile touched the corner of his lips. Then he kissed me.
He tasted like whiskey.
And eventually, he did everything he promised.