I press my hands against his hard chest, intending to push him away. I'm not a weak woman. I lift, hard and heavy, several times a week. I practice Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I can take down men several times my size. But this man? I can't budge him. I lean my head back against the wall and take him in for the first time.
It'shim.
The man from the street. The one being chased and shot at.
A few strands of silver stain the inky hair at his temples. His chest heaves from exertion, and sweat streams down his jaw and sheens his forehead.
He's devastatingly gorgeous.
As in my pulse skips. My mouth goes dry. My legs feel weak.
Footsteps echo on the street, layered with male voices—close and getting closer.
His huge, hot, heaving body smashes into mine, pressing me into the wall, crushing my curves against his hardness.
My pulse races.
What's going on?
"You're saving my life, that's what," he says, his voice barely a whisper, lips moving so close to mine I can feel his breath.
I must have spoken out loud.
"Saving your—" I barely get the two words out…
His mouth slants against mine, one hand cupping my jaw, the fingers of the other digging into my hip. I taste sweat from his upper lip, but then the shocking depth and intensity of the kiss takes over, and I'm lost in his mouth, in the way his fingers splay over the swell of my ass, the way his thumb sweeps over my cheekbone.
It's a commanding and expert kiss.
A panty-soaking kiss—quite literally, in my case.
The footsteps draw closer, and a light shines on us. I turn my face toward the light, squinting; the man buries his face in my neck, kissing my throat, as if he's too enraptured to bother with the intrusion.
"Do you fuckingmind?" I snap, burying my fingers in the hair at his nape, not at all faking the way my knees shake as he kisses my throat, my clavicle, my breastbone…
It's them—the men in the body armor with the machine guns.
Who the hellisthis man? Who are these men? Why are they chasing him and shooting at him?
Why me?
And why, most importantly, is my body responding to him this way?
"Wait…" one of them says, frowning, sweeping the light on the bottom of his machine gun up so it's blinding me. "That's him!"
"Fuck," The man snarls. "Get ready to run."
Run? I'm in four-inch Louboutins and a six-thousand-dollar Little Black Dress, which is so tight even walking requires concentration and effort.
I have no chance to express any of this. The man pivots to face his four pursuers, putting himself between them and me. He grabs a handgun from the back of his suit slacks, whips it around, and fires off three quick shots.
I'm no expert, but it doesn't look like he knows what he's doing, judging by the way he holds the gun, and the fact that his shots go wide, cracking off the walls nowhere near his enemies.
It does serve the intended purpose, however: they duck and crab walk out of sight around the corner as he fires several more shots in their general direction, all of which go high and wide.
The gun clicks empty, the slide snapping back, and he curses again, hesitating—one of them peeks around the corner, and he hurls the empty gun at the other man. His throwing aim is better than his shooting, as the empty gun hits the man in the forehead, eliciting a howl of enraged pain and a string of curses in some European language I don't recognize, other than perhaps belonging to a Slavic family of languages
"Run, goddammit!" He shoves me, hard, and I trip into a run, wobbling on my heels.
