Chapter 5 #2
Once she was de-furred and he had the heater going, she told him how to get to the museum.
“Make a left here.” She pointed down 4th street.
Adam did as he was told. “Pull a U-turn at the end of the road and then you can park anywhere along the road here.” Again, he did as she directed.
Then he put the truck in park and looked out his window at a bunch of old buildings that lined the road on the other side of a small fence.
“All I see are a bunch of run-down buildings.”
“Not just any run-down buildings,” she told him. “There are forty-four authentic mining town buildings that are filled with thousands of artifacts and represent a mining town between 1860 and 1900.”
“This was an old mining town?”
“Yup. Some of the buildings are on their original sites. But most of them were moved here from abandoned camps in the area.” She paused and stared past me out the window. “It’s not the kind of museum I’ve always dreamed of working in, but I like it.”
“You wanted to work in a museum?”
“Yeah. It’s always been my dream job. I’m working on my Master’s degree in fine art.”
Adam stared at her as the sun set over the horizon and the streetlights flickered on. There was more to this small-town girl than he knew.
“Anyway, I’ll just be a minute.” She opened the door and hopped out.
“Wait,” he called. “I’ll help you.” Adam told Rocky to stay in the back of the truck and followed her around the fenced-in buildings to what looked like a storage building.
Faye pulled a set of keys out of her coat pocket and unlocked the padlock on the door.
She put the keys back in her pocket and swung the door open.
Inside, the room was temperature controlled at what felt to be about sixty-five degrees.
She flicked on the lights, and Adam looked around at a room full of boxes and shelves filled with what appeared to be old artifacts. “What is all this?”
Faye followed his gaze. “It’s a bunch of old things that we aren’t using in the buildings right now. We swap them out every once in a while…” She let the sentence fall and turned to look at him. “Look, I’d like to explain what happened.”
Adam crossed his arms over his chest as his eyes found her in the dimly lit room.
She looked so contrite, it was all he could do not to close the distance between them and hold her and tell her everything was going to be okay.
However, he knew if he did that, she’d never have the chance to explain herself with his mouth covering hers.
And he really shouldn’t do that. This fake relationship was exactly that—fake. And that’s the way it needed to stay.
“I’d just finished up the morning rush at the coffee shop,” she started. “When Jeff came in.”
Immediately, Adam’s skin began to crawl with the urge to shift. Dropping his arms, he took a step toward her and stopped. “What did he do?”
“Well, nothing really,” she told him. “I mean, nothing physical, if that’s what you mean. He just leaned over the counter and kept throwing questions at me.”
Adam narrowed his eyes. “What kind of questions?”
“Questions about you. And me. And how we got together. He still doesn’t believe we are. Together, I mean. And next thing I knew, I’d blurted out that we were engaged just to shut him up and get him out of there.”
“Did it work?”
She nodded, and the tension slowly seeped from Adam’s shoulders.
“I think all I did was piss him off, though.” Then she sighed.
“Anyway, I’m so sorry. He must’ve run off and blabbed to Margo, who, of course, told the entire town in record time.
” She paused again. “I don’t know why I said something like that to him.
I just panicked. But I’ll fix it. Actually, I’m going to tell everyone that we’re not really together at all.
It’s not fair of me to ask you to do something like this. You don’t even know me.”
No, but he’d really, really like to. “What about your unwanted admirer?”
She gave him a helpless look that tore at his chest. “I don’t know what to do about him.
But I’ll deal with it. He’s not your problem.
He’s mine.” A self-depreciating smile played around her sweet lips.
“I don’t even know what I ever did to make him like this.
I mean, I was always nice to him, but I try to be nice to everyone.
” Her eyes, when she looked up at him, were entreating. “I must’ve done something—”
Adam had heard enough. He closed the distance between them and grabbed her chin, forcing her to look at him. “Whatever’s happened between you and this guy, it wasn’t your fault, Faye. Some guys just don’t know how to take no for an answer is all.”
She gave him a grateful look, and rested the palms of her hands on his chest as he released her chin. He felt the heat of her touch all the way through his thermal shirt. “Thank you for saying that. But the truth of it is, you don’t even know m—”
His mouth was on hers, her lips pliant and surprised beneath his own.
Adam kissed her softly, carefully, cupping her face between his palms so she couldn’t pull away.
Her skin was as soft as silk beneath his fingertips.
Tentatively, knowing he shouldn’t, he tasted her, probing between her lips with his tongue until she opened for him and let him inside.
A low growl rumbled through him as her fingers dug into his chest and her hands fisted his shirt, hanging on tightly. She tasted sweet and warm and innocent.
She tasted like HIS.
One hand moving to grip her soft hair, he wrapped his other arm around her and pulled her closer until her breasts pressed into his chest and his cock swelled against her stomach.
His lungs rose and fell with harsh breaths, breathing in her scent, pulling it inside of him until there was nothing else but Faye.
The smell of her, the taste of her…the feel of her.
Her arms wrapped around his neck, and Adam’s wolf purred with pleasure, sensitizing his skin and warming his blood. He stepped forward, trying to bring her even closer. He wanted to feel her against him, skin to skin. Wanted to crawl inside of her until there were no barriers between them.
Faye stepped back as he moved forward until there was nowhere else for her to go and she was pressed against the shelf behind her.
Adam ran his hands down her back and over the sweet curves of her hips, then hooked them beneath her thighs and lifted until her ass was on the edge of the shelf and her legs were wrapped his waist. He rolled his hips, growling deep when his rock-hard cock slid along her core.
Holy shit. He was about to come in his jeans.
Thank the gods they weren’t his Brunello Cucinelli’s.