More patches hung around, along with some locals and a face or two I didn’t recognize. As I made my way through the crowd toward the bar, I accepted chin lifts, shoulder bumps, and a couple of dry comments from brothers who were as sentimental as one of us got over a win.
I was halfway to the bar when I saw her.
At first, all I caught was the profile and the fall of dark hair. My good mood disappeared so fast it left a clean burn behind. The drunk, pushy pain in my ass from the night before had apparently decided getting escorted out once wasn’t enough embarrassment. She had some nerve coming back into The Burnout after the stunt she’d pulled. She sat alone at the far end, angled slightly away from the room, one hand resting near a glass of something clear. Probably vodka that she hoped would masquerade as water.
My jaw locked as I changed direction.
The crowd thinned in front of me, or people had enough sense to move when they saw my face. Fury wasn’t behind the counter tonight, which explained how she’d made it inside without getting turned away at the door. He had business elsewhere, and Rea was handling the bar with two prospects floating near the back, which meant nobody had recognized the problem before it sat down and got comfortable.
I stalked up beside her, already deciding this time I’d handle the problem myself.
“You again?” I demanded, my voice hard enough that Rea’s head snapped up. “Did getting thrown out last night not make the message clear?”
She turned her head, and attraction punched through my chest, dropping straight into my cock before I had time to stop it.My body reacted like it had been waiting for her, going hard in a violent rush that made my hands fist at my sides.
What the fuck?
Her face looked the same, but somehow sweeter. Her hazel-green eyes were clear and sober. Soft as they caught the bar light with a depth that hadn’t been there last night. Her posture wasn’t sloppy or desperate. She looked up at me like she had every right to take up space, and every cell in my body decided that space should be against me.
Fuck.
My gaze dragged over her before I could stop it. She wore clothes over sexy curves that weren’t trying as hard and somehow hit ten times harder.
I’d been fucking repelled by this face less than twenty-four hours ago, and now my body was reacting like I’d found the one woman in the room worth burning the place down for. The contradiction pissed me the fuck off.
My cock pressed hard against my jeans, and I hated that too.
I didn’t understand how she could suddenly look like temptation wrapped in sweetness.
My pulse beat heavier at the base of my throat as my gaze snagged on the curve of her plump lips and the faint flicker of surprise in her pretty, hazel-green eyes. For one dangerous second, my mind supplied an image of wrapping my hand around the back of her neck, dragging that mouth under mine, and finding out if she tasted as sweet as she looked.
The thought came hot and unwanted, and I shoved it down with the same discipline I used when a machine tried to buck under me at a dangerous speed.
Something was different.
A thread of instinct refusing to be ignored kept cutting through the heat and anger. The face might have been the same, but the energy wasn’t. Last night had been all noise and sloppyaggression. Now she looked startled, then annoyed, her body going still in a way that suggested I’d just insulted her rather than caught her doing something she already knew she deserved to answer for.
My anger should’ve held steady. Instead, it tangled with the attraction so fast I couldn’t separate one from the other. I stood there, glowering down at her, trying to reconcile the woman from last night with the one in front of me while my blood kept heading in one inconvenient direction.
I’d handled speed records, dangerous builds, bad wrecks, armed enemies, and men who thought threatening the Redline Kings was a survivable hobby. None of that had ever left me feeling like my own body had betrayed me quite as thoroughly as this woman turning her head and looking up.
I searched her face for some sign of the drunken disaster from the night before, but she just sat there, sober and stiff-backed, staring at me like I was the one who’d lost my damn mind. And maybe I had, since I was hard over a woman I’d been ready to throw out thirty seconds ago.
Her brows pulled together, and that little crease between them did something ridiculous to my blood pressure because my body was still choosing to be a fucking traitor.
“Excuse me?” she finally snapped. “I don’t know you.”
The tone should’ve irritated me more. Instead, it tightened the heat already running low in my gut because not one trace of the glossy desperation she’d had the night before existed.
She looked offended, confused, and fully prepared to put me in my place despite the cut on my back and the fact that half the men in this room would think twice before using that tone with me. The little flash of temper in her eyes made me wonder what she’d look like if that fire was aimed at me for better reasons.
I scoffed, partly because I didn’t trust my reaction, but also because annoyance was easier to handle than the sudden urge toput my hands on her. “Seriously? How fucking drunk were you last night?”
Her spine went straight, and her chin lifted. “I don’t drink.”
The words rang with truth, which made no damn sense. She obviously saw the disbelief on my face because her mouth tightened, and I thought she was about to rip me a new asshole. Then something shifted.
Suspicion clouded her eyes, her head tilting slightly as she studied me with a sharper kind of focus.
