CHAPTER TWO
Colt
I’d been sitting in the parking lot for twenty minutes. The engine had ticked itself quiet as I decided what I needed to do.
There was no denying it anymore.
I wanted her.
Not in any clean, easy way. Not in the kind of way that led anywhere good.
I wanted her under me, taking everything I gave her, exactly the way I’d always done it—rough, controlled, no hesitation, no softness to get in the way.
Sex had never been complicated for me. It was physical.
Necessary. A way to burn something out of my system before it built into something worse.
No staying. No getting attached. No pretending it meant more than it did.
That’s what this should’ve been.
But it hadn’t been that from the start.
The first Friday night I’d come down the mountain with my brothers should’ve been like any other—have a drink, ignore everyone, leave.
But she’d been behind the bar, looking me straight in the eye like she didn’t see the things most people saw when they looked at me.
Like I was just a man, not something they needed to give space to.
Charlie Jones had torn my control to shreds in a single glance, and I’d known right then I wasn’t getting it back.
For three years I’d kept everything simple.
I’d come back from my last deployment wired differently.
It had taken the better part of a year before I could sleep in a bed without a wall to my back.
Before I stopped flinching at sounds that weren’t threats.
I still woke up during the middle of the night reaching for something that wasn’t there.
My brothers knew not to touch me when I was like that.
I’d learned fast that simple was the only way to keep the darkness from running the show.
Work. Isolation. Women when I needed them, nothing more than that.
No names that stuck, no faces I thought about after I walked out the door.
Just bodies and release and done. That was the only way it worked. The only way it stayed clean.
Charlie didn’t fit into that scenario.
Today, she’d be behind the bar, getting ready for the day, moving with that confident swagger. Her generous curves would strain against another tight t-shirt and her jeans would hug that generous ass—an ass that had been starring in my fantasies for weeks.
Fantasies that included her curvy body under mine, over mine, doing every dirty thing I could think of to it.
Things I’d been jacking off to for the past six weeks.
Her on her hands and knees or her legs thrown over my shoulders as I pounded inside her or licked her clean.
I wanted to mark every inch of that pale skin with my tongue and my teeth—hell, my cum—and make sure she knew exactly who she belonged to.
She was built exactly right. All that softness and those wide hips and the way she moved like she’d made peace with her body even when she hadn’t.
I watched her long enough to see both things at once.
The confidence in how she handled the bar.
And the split second when she caught a man’s eye and braced, just slightly, like she was waiting for his expression to shift.
That flinch she covered so fast most people wouldn’t catch it. I caught it every time. And every time it made something inside me rise, possessive, that had nothing to do with wanting to fuck her.
The darkest part of me, the part that hadn’t touched softness in years, wanted more than one night. It wanted to keep her. Wanted her to stop being a stranger and start being mine in every way that counted.
But that wasn’t how this worked.
That wasn’t how I worked.
My body tightened anyway, already reacting, already halfway there just from the thought of her. Fast. Automatic.
I was fucked. Completely, utterly fucked.
The smart thing to do would be to start the truck and drive back to my cabin.
Forget about the way her laugh settled inside me and stayed.
Forget about how her eyes sparked when she was pissed off.
Forget about the way she met my stare head-on when everyone else in this damn town knew better than to look at me like that.
Forget about all of it before it turned into something I didn’t want and couldn’t control.
But I wasn’t being smart.
Not today.
I got out of the truck.
The bell chimed when I pushed inside.
The bar was quiet — no crowd yet, just the particular stillness of a place between purposes.
Morning light came through the front windows and caught the dust motes and the water stain on the ceiling and the general honest shabbiness of the place Charlie Jones had inherited and was slowly, stubbornly making her own.
I scanned the room automatically. Exits, sightlines, potential threats. I still couldn’t walk into a space without doing it. Some habits die hard.
Charlie was behind the bar, clipboard in hand, running her Saturday morning inventory with the focused efficiency of a woman who didn’t waste time.
As I came in, she reached up to turn a bottle slightly.
The stretch pulled everything tight across her big, beautiful breasts and I stood in the doorway for one full second just — looking.
Yep. Fucked.
She was built like something out of a fever dream.
Full and soft and completely unselfconscious about it, and every time I watched her move I had to have a stern conversation with the part of myself that wanted to back her against the nearest wall and show her exactly what all those curves did to me.
She turned at the sound of the bell. “You’re here.”
“Said I would be.” I walked over and sat my toolbox on the end of the counter.
“I half expected you to change your mind.”
“I don’t change my mind.” I let my gaze drop to her mouth, letting her watch me do it. “About anything.
She went still for exactly one second. Just long enough for me to know it landed.
She felt the weight of what I wasn’t saying and she didn’t step back from it.
That was the thing about Charlie Jones—she stood her ground even when standing her ground was the dangerous choice.
I’d watched her handle every man who walked through the door—the drunks, the flirts, the ones who thought a woman behind the bar was an open invitation.
She handled them all with that sharp mouth and those steady brown eyes and not one of them had ever rattled her.
I wanted to rattle her.
“So.” Her chin came up, that particular Charlie reflex. “Are you ready to fulfill your side of the bet? Come to fix my bar like a good boy?”
I smiled. Slow and deliberate. I had never smiled at her before. “Are you ready to fulfill yours?”
She hesitated for just a moment. Just long enough for me to know I’d gotten to her. “Not yet.”
“Not yet,” I repeated, tucking a loose strand behind her ear and letting my fingers trail along her jaw. I needed to touch her.
She cleared her throat. “There’s a lot to do.”
I nodded. “I expected there would be.”
The taproom had been a Lone Mountain institution since before I could legally drink.
Everyone knew Charlie’s uncle hadn’t left her an inheritance, more like an albatross around her neck.
And women like Charlie Jones didn’t wait for someone else to manage their problems. They handled the damn things themselves.
Which could be an issue. Her accepting help from me. My overprotectiveness. Hell, the way I wanted to possess her. I leaned against the bar, adjusting the fit of my jeans.
“First there’s the leak,” she said.
She pointed at the water stain over the pool table area, and it was worse than I’d realized. Of course, I hadn’t been paying attention to it yesterday. All my attention had been on her ass as she’d leaned over the table. How I’d wanted to cover her with my body, audience be damned.
“It’s been getting worse,” she said. “I think there’s a pipe problem in the bathroom upstairs.”
“I’ll need to check the plumbing. Could be simple, could be more complicated.”
“How complicated?”
I looked at her. At the worry she was trying to keep out of her voice. “Hard to say until I get up there.”
She blew out a breath and leaned her elbows on the bar.
I watched her shoulders straighten to carry the weight of the list she was about to recite.
“The upstairs faucet drips constantly, the back door doesn’t lock properly, three ceiling fans don’t work, and I’m pretty sure there’s a family of mice in the storage room.
” She paused. “The heat doesn’t work upstairs either, which is going to matter at some point.
The jukebox eats quarters. And the lights flicker. ”
Every instinct I had was urging me to fix it all. Call in my brothers and redo the whole damn place. But I couldn’t—she’d show me the door with a swift kick to my ass if I tried. That didn’t stop me from wanting to.
“So you think you’re up to it, McAllister?” An adorable pink blush spread across her cheeks when she realized what she had said.
“More than you know.” I let a slow grin spread across my face. “I have everything I need to get the job done.”
She rolled her eyes and headed for the stairs in back. “This way, hot-shot.”
Her apartment was small and warm and completely her.
Books everywhere — worn paperbacks on the kitchen counter, stacked along the windowsill, two on the bathroom floor. A blue quilt on the bed I caught a glimpse of through the open door.
I found the problem in the bathroom fast — a slow leak at the toilet hookup, trickling down inside the wall. Sneaky bastard. It was the kind of thing that got worse for months before it announced itself.
“Wrench,” I said, crouching beside the toilet.
She crouched beside me to get it from the toolbox, her hip brushing my shoulder, her voice right at my ear. “This one?”
“That’s the one.” My fingers grazed hers when I took it.