“Did you really just say that to me?” I demand.
“Yes. I really just said that to you.”
“Do you expect me to reply with ‘yes sir, you hot, arrogant man, you’?”
“You can save that for the bedroom, sweetheart. But to be clear. You want to fight, bring it on. I’m still going to win. Otherwise, just go pack a bag.”
“Okay,” I say.
He arches a brow. “Okay?”
I hold up a finger. “On one condition and a deal.”
He closes the small space between us but doesn’t touch me. He just makes me wish he was touching me, the heat between us sparking hard and fast. “Does anything you’re going to offer include us being naked?” he asks, his eyes dark, hard, and hot.
“The right answer,” I say, “is ‘what do you have in mind, Jewel?’”
“I think we’ll both enjoy what I have in mind better,” he says.
My hand settles on the hard wall of his chest. “You’re doing that thing you do again.”
“The part where I make you want to fuck me the way I want to fuck you, or the part where I piss you off?”
“The part where you immediately try to stick me in a hole that you’re protecting, and I’ll admit that maybe that is the right decision. I’ll even pack a bag and go with you right now. If you would please—note the word please, which I rarely use—admit that you might not be objective about me because of us, and we might need to do this differently. Maybe, just maybe, we need to set a trap and convince the slayer this is over in our minds and that I’m alone. I’m unprotected.”
“If anyone is going to be bait,” he says. “I am.”
“I accept that could be an option, even if I reject it as a good one. The point is that we have options. Let’s talk to your team, and to Sierra, and see what she thinks will be the best plan based on the slayer’s psychological profile. But the deal is: I’ll agree to live with whatever decision we all make together, but you have to, too.”
His hands come down on my hips and he pulls me to him. “You’ll live with the team’s decision?”
“Yes,” I say, narrowing my eyes on him, “and why do I think I just lost this argument?”
“Because you did. The team believes you should take shelter. That came from Royce after he pulled together the best of our team, and they debated your safety. You can hear that from them yourself, but to be clear, if that changes, if they change their mind, I won’t change mine. I won’t agree to anything that puts you in danger.”
“And I won’t agree to anything that puts you in danger.”
“I’m a—”
“Green Beret. I’m aware of that, but to me you’re Jacob.” I push to my toes and kiss him. “And believe it or not, you can still die. So to be clear—”
I don’t get to finish that sentence. He kisses me and it’s no gentle kiss. It’s hard, demanding and possessive, but there is more. There is another nerve I’ve hit, an internal struggle inside him that I don’t try to contain. I want to know it. I want to know him. I slide my hands under his shirt, hot, hard muscle beneath my palms. He pulls his mouth from mine. “We don’t have time—”
“I know, I just—”
“Ah fuck it,” he says, pulling my shirt over my head, and tossing it moments before his mouth closes down on mine. Then his hands are on my breasts, shoving down my bra, teasing my nipples.
My hand finds his zipper, stroking the hard length of him, and that seems to set him off. He drags my pants down and licks my clit on the way to pulling them off my feet. A moment later, I’m on top of the counter by the refrigerator, legs wide, his hands cupping my breasts, before he’s suckling my nipples and I’m holding onto his head, wishing the man’s military cut left more hair for my fingers.
“Jacob,” I whisper, arching my back into him.
He’s kissing me a moment later, and touching me, and I don’t even know how or when his pants come down. Just that he is pressing inside me and lifting me off the counter, holding all my weight. Holding me in more ways than just my body, and in ways I let no one hold me. He’s consuming me in every way. A part of my life, in a split second, and he won’t let go. I don’t want him to let me go. I bury my face against his neck, but he doesn’t let me seek sanctuary there.
“Press your hands on the counter, behind you,” he orders.
I lean back, trusting him to hold onto me, and do as he says, my hands planted on the counter, my breasts thrust into the air. I have no control. He has all of the control and I am oddly, intensely aroused at this idea. His gaze rakes over my breasts. His cock drives into me. His powerful upper body flexes with every pump of his hips. I want to watch him. I want to devour every angle of his handsome, hard features, lost in pleasure, lost in what he feels, rather than schooled in that robot expression. But pleasure overtakes me with a sudden, fierce jerk of my body and I fade into my own panted breaths and barely hear the low, guttural moan that slides from Jacob’s lips.
He leans over me, hands beside mine, and shakes with his release, while I tremble with my own. At some point, his hand has settled between my shoulder blades, and my hands have found his neck, my chest pressed to his chest. “Holy fuck, woman,” he murmurs, pulling back.
“I’m not sure how to decipher the meaning of ‘holy fuck, woman.’”
“Me either, but I’m damn sure going to enjoy figuring it out.”
He grabs a roll of paper towels and tears one off, before offering it to me. He pulls out and I stuff it between my legs, because at moments like this, there is no beautiful. There is just wet stuff and oh shit, is that my bra, on the light above the island? Jacob pulls up his pants, and settles me on the ground. “I need something,” I say.
“Anything.”
“Anything?”
“Almost anything.”
“I liked the first answer better, but actually.” I point up and behind him and my reward is a low, deep rumble of laughter from his chest. He backs up and grabs the bra, and hands it to me.
“I really do like it when you laugh.”
He sobers instantly. “Then stick around and keep me laughing.”
“I’m not pushing you away.”
“And I’m not going to let you.” He kisses me. “I need to update Royce.”
I nod and he pulls his phone from his pocket, perching on a barstool, and holding a short, barely-there conversation with Royce, before saying, “I told him we are leaving here in fifteen.”
“That works,” I say, tugging on my boots and then pulling a plastic bag from a cabinet before walking to the fridge to retrieve the note. I reach for it and then hesitate, my mind starting to let go of tonight’s crime scene, to focus on the bigger picture. Jacob steps to my side. “What is it?”
“This saying is too close to what my uncle always said to me, and others, for that matter.”
“You said yourself that if the slayer knew you, he would know about your uncle.”
“Yes, or maybe he actually knew my uncle.”
“Your uncle doesn’t strike me as a man who would repeat butterfly stories.”
“No, but maybe the slayer wants to prove that he’s as good of a detective as my uncle. And that I am not.”
“You’re suggesting it really was Rodriquez.”
“No. Rodriquez got in the way. This person doesn’t want to die. This person wants to win the game. Or maybe he just wants the high of playing the game. He can’t do either dead.” I turn to face him. “Think about it, Jacob. This note on my refrigerator that said I wasn’t ready. Then two years later, it begins. The butterfly is my friend. The umbrella is my mother. The card to take me back to the note that uses words my uncle used often. My friend. My mother. My uncle. The path started and ends with my uncle.”
“No, sweetheart. Your uncle is dead. The path might begin with him, but it ends with you. And that means me.”