I take a deep breath and walk back around to the front of her.
“You need to calm the fuck down.”
She growls at me, and I take an involuntary step back, as if I’m not six foot three and two hundred pounds of muscle. Callie’s gotta be a foot shorter than me and scrawny, except for those tits, the ones that keep bouncing as she shakes and squirms in the chair.
She’s terrifying. And beautiful.
Embarrassingly, I feel my dick getting hard.
“Alright, listen. I don’t want to have you zip-tied. I definitely don’t want to have you gagged.”
Callie growls at me again. I hold up a finger.
“But if you recall, I foundyouonmyproperty.” I point to her, then myself. I don’t think she appreciates my charades. “You hired me to find someone, but you showed up here, which honestly wasn’t at all what I expected.”
She narrows her eyes at me.
“You were stalking me?” I nod, looking for her acknowledgment. “Well, I guess following me home once isn’t really stalking, it’s more like staking out. Like a complete amateur, I might add.”
She has the audacity to roll her eyes. I sink down onto my couch and lean my elbows on my knees.
“And you followed me here from Portland. I don’t know, you could be dangerous.” I throw my hands in the air. “You could’ve had a gun. I hate guns.”
It’s true. As inconvenient as it can be for our line of work, both Noah and I avoid using guns as much as possible. They give us PTSD. The world would have far fewer problems if there weren’t any guns.
She shakes her head, then shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath, her shoulders rising and falling.
“Mmmffffp.” She opens and then narrows her eyes at me. “Rrrfff ifff offff.”
“Sorry, I didn’t understand that.” I touch my ear and lean forward. “It’s almost like you are asking me to take something off. What would you like me to take off?”
She just stares at me.
“My shirt? I get asked to do that sometimes. I don’t go to the gym, but I do a lot of manual labor around the cabin.” I flex my biceps for her. She sighs deeply instead of looking impressed, her eyes only fleetingly glancing at my bulging muscles. “Oh,yourshirt?” I ask hopefully.
I wonder if I’ve gone too far in my attempt to make her smile. She said in her messages she’s looking to serve her husband divorce papers, but who knows if they really are splitting up. Maybe she wants to find him and try to reconcile first. Maybe she’s highly offended by me in general. I should back off.
“Fffff eww.”
Or maybe she’s just mad at her current situation.
“Fuck you? I think I’m starting to understand your language.” I chuckle and stand, walking around to the backof her. “But if I take this off, no screaming. Just talking. Okay?”
She nods aggressively.
I untie the knot and tug the towel off her face, then step back around to the front of her. Not too close, though, because now her mouth—and teeth—are free.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she shrieks and lets out a frustrated scream.
“Ahhh, you promised.” I step away from her. Her screaming really hurts my damn ears.
She huffs and grinds her teeth, as if holding herself back from continuing to scream.
“But isn’t this better now?” I ask, hope filling me. I pull a chair from my kitchen table and spin it around, sitting on it backwards a safe distance away from her. “Let’s start over. I’m Wes.”
Her eyes flit over my face, and I wish I knew what she was thinking. Now she looks anxious, like once I’m right here in front of her she loses her nerve.
“Wes? I thought it was Hawk?”
