“Mm-hmm.”
“Most men like when a woman yields to them.”
She snorted. “Not a revelation.”
“That’sthe thing; that right there, that fire spirit inside you only seems to fuel me. I have a feeling it would incinerate a weaker person. At the crash site that first day…if I wasn’t the sheriff I would have been fired. But that fire, I couldn’t help but try to hold on to it. Something more powerful than sense wanted me to know what it would be like to just take hold of you.”
He turned into her hold and wrapped his arms around her. “So I threw you over my shoulder and did exactly that.”
“Then smacked me on the ass.”
“Every damn time I see you it’s all I want to do.”
She bit his left pectoral. It was like violence was her love language as well as her first line of defense.
“Can I tell you something else important?” She nodded against his chest. “When you’re in bed beside me...I sleep.”
“Umm…I can’t pretend to know how you were raised, Santi, but that’s generally the purpose of beds, to sleep.” He popped her on the ass, and she yelped before settling again.
“I sleep too,” she admitted softly.
He held her tighter, bracing.
“He called you. Derrick. The man who has been disturbing your peace.”
She tried to pull away but he wouldn’t let her, and eventually she stopped cursing, stopped resisting, and looked up at him.
“He didn’t say much, just that you needed to answer your phone, that he had to tell you something important.”
“That he’d discovered my location and ratted me out to my mother under duress of threat.”
“I would’ve told you sooner, but I discovered the body in the lake during my late morning swim.”
She jerked back, alarmed. “What body?”
“A man who has been missing for nearly two months.”
“The spirits of the lake kill him?”
“Purely human.”
She returned to silence.
“I’m going to say something important now, and you may not like it.”
“That hasn’t stopped you before.”
“Oh, it won’t stop me now, I’m just prepping you.”
“Let me have it.”
“That fiancé you had—and I’m just saying this from the perspective of a man interacting with another man—he was never meant to be more than a few dates for you. If you had been honest with yourself, you would’ve accepted that a long time ago.”
She tried to pull out of his arms again, but he held onto her until she understood this was exactly how this conversation was gonna go. No pulling away, no hiding from the hurt, just them locked in until the hard part was over. And if she couldn’t tolerate that, he would know if this could move beyond something sexual.
She sighed explosively. “Exactly how long were you two talking?”
He spread his legs wider and pressed her hips deeper into the junction of his spread thighs.
