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1
Bronson
Are they watching me? I don’t turn around. I know better than to draw attention to myself. I reach for another candy bar at the counter, not because I’m particularly craving a Snickers, but so I can surreptitiously check the rounded mirror overhead, positioned so the clerk can keep an eye on anyone who’s lurking too long in the distant corners of the store.
There. Two men, with matching tattoos creeping up the left sides of their necks. I can’t see the whole design, but from here, it looks enough like a scorpion’s tail to set my nerves on edge. The men wear low-slung hats and cheap T-shirts. One of them is carrying a six-pack of beer. The other catches my eye in the mirror for a split second when I glance his way, then he taps his friend on the shoulder and they both head for the counter.
Fuckers. But I’m not about to start a fight right here. I’m smarter than that.
I drop the candy bar and shove the rest of my change, uncounted, toward the cashier. He calls after me, something about my change, but I’m already on my way out the door by the time those two make it to the register to buy their beer.
You’re being paranoid, a voice in the back of my head whispers. They can’t find you here. Nobody knows you’re here.
And with good reason. I’m pretty sure this sleepy little suburb of Atlanta, Georgia is the last place in the world anyone would think to go hunting for the notorious Bronson Burke. The people searching for me are busy scouring the streets of Vegas, New York, LA, or hell, maybe Reno or Atlantic City if they think I’ve gotten desperate.
Nobody will check here.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway. But my eyes are locked on my rearview mirror as I pull out of the gas station parking lot, and sure enough, just as I’m turning onto the main drag through town—if you can call the four-street intersection that passes for it here a “town”—the two bruisers poke their heads out of the convenient store and squint after me.
I whip around the corner, cutting off another car that honks angrily. I hope I moved fast enough to obscure my license plate from anyone watching.
You really need to calm down, that voice says. The practical voice, the one that tries its best to reassure me that I can relax now; I can finally rest.
But I can’t listen to that voice because it’s not the one that’s kept me alive for the past four months.
I pull into the first parking lot I pass, a grocery store called Wayfield’s. Never heard of it, but there are plenty of cars parked out front and enough of a crowd bustling through the lot for me to blend in. I park in the back, reversing into the spot to hide my plates just in case, and then I turn up the collar of my jacket—a little heavy for the unseasonably warm late fall air, but it does the job—and fall in with the crowd marching into the store.
A glance around reminds me that it’s Sunday. Everyone’s in their churchgoing best and pushing shopping carts filled with oversized purses and screeching children. The people trickling out of the store are hauling enough food to feed small armies, and I realize it’s football Sunday, at that. Everyone’s prepping for their tailgates later, in a rush to shop before the coin toss.
I sidestep into the crowd, my heart still racing from the encounter at the gas station. The back of my neck itches with the urge to turn and check behind me, see whether those guys drove after me and followed me into this lot. But I know better than to give them a full view of my face, just in case they have.
I’m busy cutting across the flow of traffic when I feel my side collide with something soft and pliable. Something soft that lets out a yelp, as we crash into one another.
Blinking, I turn just in time to catch a woman’s arm. She grabs onto me, her fingers digging into my bicep through the thick wool of my coat, and her baby blue eyes are wide with surprise.
“Hey, watch out!” she shouts, an annoyed frown creasing her brow as she jerks her arm from my grasp. At her feet are a couple of shopping bags which she seems to have dropped in the collision.
A few other people around us grumble in agreement as the traffic is forced to part around us to continue its march into the store.
As for me, I can’t tear my eyes from her face. Or, well, I can. But only to have it snag on the rest of her, because damn, I didn’t know they made curves like that anymore.
“I apologize,” I say, which has happened fewer times in my life than I can count on one hand, but for once, it seems warranted. “I was distracted. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
“You can say that again,” she grumbles, and that’s when I notice her broad Southern drawl. I’ve never been one to get hot over accents, but fucking hell, even as pissed off as she clearly is right now, hers sounds spectacular. Or maybe her anger just makes the accent stand out more. She adjusts her purse on her shoulder and narrows those dangerous baby blues at me. But she doesn’t make a move to pick up her groceries. And while I kn
ow I ought to offer, I don’t want to end this conversation—or confrontation—just yet.
“I know you’re in a hurry, but we all are,” she adds.
I can’t help it. I laugh.
Those eyes narrow further. Is it weird that she seems hotter when she’s pissed off? Especially when she cocks one hip to rest her hand on it, and tilts her head, just far enough for her long blonde curls to swish to the side and afford me a glimpse of the sexy arch of her neck. God, I’d love to kiss and suck my way down that neck, all the way down to her chest, which is straining under her tight blouse. It’s not too revealing, but it’s tight enough to let me imagine the fantastic pair of tits hiding under there.
“You don’t look like you’re in too much of a hurry to me,” she adds, tone still withering, and my gaze jumps back to meet hers. “You seem to have plenty of time to check out my assets.” Her eyebrow arches.
My smile widens. “Miss, if I’m ever in so much of a hurry that I fail to notice a woman like you passing by, then you can assume I’m either in immediate mortal danger or I’ve gone blind.”
Her cheeks redden at that, but she doesn’t take her eyes off mine. Most women would duck their heads as they blushed, but not her. She stares me down instead. Fucking hell, it’s hot.
Any more of this and I’m going to have to excuse myself before I have to awkwardly walk away from the blood rushing directly south.
“Maybe blatant flattery works for you up north when you’re hitting on women, but down here, we Southern girls prefer our men gallant. You know, the kind who don’t run us over in the grocery store parking lot.”
“So if I hadn’t run you over, you’d be flirting back at me right now, is that what you’re saying?” I smirk.
She scowls in response, but I can tell I’m getting to her by the way her cheeks turn an even brighter shade of red. “You consider this flirting?”
I step closer to her. “That wasn’t a no.”
She tilts her head back to keep her eyes on mine, even though I stand at least a good half a foot taller than her, maybe more. “I’m not the kind of girl who dwells on what ifs,” she replies archly. “I don’t know what I’d do if you hadn’t started off on the wrong foot, because you did.”
“I see.” Someone else jostles past us, and on instinct, I reach out to catch her shoulder, my fingers gripping just tight enough to make sure she doesn’t stumble. And, okay, maybe I pull her a little closer to me, and use the bumping crowd on either side as an excuse to step closer to her again, too. She smells amazing. Something bright and light and floral, but so Southern. Geraniums, maybe. Or jasmine? I can’t place the scent. All I know is that I don’t want to stop smelling it. Forever, if possible. “So,” I continue, leaving my hand resting on her shoulder, and barely an inch of air between us anymore. “If you don’t deal in what ifs, then how can I figure out what you’d do if I tried to make up for that whole impolite collision thing?”
She tilts her head to the side, and for a second, just a second, her gaze drops from mine to my lips. Her eyes jump straight back up, but I grin now, because I know I didn’t misread this. She’s every bit as turned on as I am right now. “Well,” she says slowly, laying into that fucking irresistible drawl of hers. “I guess you’d just have to try whatever it is you had planned to make up for your brutish behavior, and see how I react.”
“I see,” I say again, nodding. At the same time, I gently, slowly, move my hand from her shoulder. Trace closer to her neck, until I cup my hand around the nape of her neck and draw her that last inch closer to me. She inhales sharply as our bodies touch, hers soft and curving against mine, as she arches forward into me. I lower my voice, and she rises up on her tiptoes to hear me. “And what if my apology involved me being a lot more brutish?” I whisper.
Since we’re touching now, I can feel the shiver that passes through her body at my words, starting at her toes and rising all the way up to her neck, which quivers against my fingertips. At the same time, her hands come to rest on my chest, and slide, tentatively, up toward my shoulders. “They say two wrongs don’t make a right,” she replies, her voice pitched almost as low as mine now. Her gaze drifts again, back to my mouth, and my smirk widens. “But I suppose sometimes it’s nice to be a little wrong.”
She grins, and fucking hell, it makes me want to devour that mouth of hers.
“If you’re looking for wrong, you bumped into the right guy,” I tell her, a note of seriousness creeping into my tone, as I remember how I got here, what I’m running from.
She doesn’t seem to notice the sincerity, though. She’s too busy catching her breath as I slide my hand up to bury my fingers in her hair, tightening my grip just a little to tilt her head back, and grant me better access. “You bumped into me,” she reminds me, but her protest is faint, breathy, altogether unconvincing.
“Lucky me, then,” I reply, and then I kiss her, hard.
Her lips part against mine, soft and supple and tasting just as good as she smells. I snake my other arm around her waist, pull her against me, and at the same time, I feel her raise one leg, hook it around the back of my thighs as she arches her hips into mine.
Damn. She’s almost as hungry as I am.
I tilt her head, part her lips with mine, and press my tongue into her mouth. She takes me in, eager, her hands sliding up over my chest to wrap around my neck for balance as I continue to kiss her, taste her, claim every inch of her delicate, gorgeous little mouth.
At the same time, I can feel my cock growing rock hard between us, and the next time she rolls her hips against mine, she inhales again, another little gasp, no doubt because she can feel it too. It digs into her belly, and I can feel the way her lips curve into a grin as she shifts against me, rolling those hips just enough to make her stomach graze along my length. Now I’m the one breathing in sharply, almost a gasp, at the sensation of those soft, perfect curves of hers pressed against me.
“Two grown adults,” a woman suddenly says, also in a Southern drawl, even more pronounced. “You’d think they could at least afford a bedroom.”
“I’ll say,” sniffs another, and we break apart, breaths coming hard and fast, just in time to watch two older women scowling over their shoulders at us before they disappear into the store.
We both start to laugh, almost at the exact same instant, and one glance at each other just makes the laughter come harder. She steps back from me, but when I trail my hand down from her shoulder, along the length of her arm, to twine my fingers through hers, she lets me. It feels easy, natural, which sounds insane to say about someone I just met. But her soft fingertips fit between mine exactly, and her tiny, delicate hand feels like it was made to nestle in my larger one.
“I don’t have a bedroom handy,” she says, flashing me a sly, sideways grin that makes the ache in my pants even more pronounced. “But I do have a car parked around back. Shady spot under the trees, which I always pick because it’s out of the way…”
“You have a dirty mind, Miss…?”
She laughs and blushes at the same time in a way that makes me want to tug her right back against me and start kissing her again. But that’s liable to get us into trouble all over again. “Rider,” she says. “Daisy Rider.”
“Daisy.” Her name tastes like pecan pie in my mouth—sticky, sweet and impossible to resist. “I’m Bronson.” I don’t give her my last name. Too recognizable. All of this is a terrible idea, in fact.
I release her hand, and her eyes widen in surprise.
But I just reach past her to pick up the grocery bags that have been lying forgotten at her feet ever since we literally ran into each another. “And I think the least I can do after our collision is help you to your car.”
Her throat tightens with a swallow, and her gaze darts to my mouth one more time, before she turns to lead me away from the store with a shrug of one shoulder. “It is the least you could do, I agree,” she shoots over her shoulder, in a sly tone that makes me grin.
I trail aft
er her, enjoying the view of her swaying backside, her ass looking fucking irresistible in the skirt she’s wearing, a loose, flowing one that nevertheless clings to the backs of her thighs with every step to afford me a view of everything she has to offer.
Those creeps from the gas station couldn’t be farther from my mind right now. In fact, all the constant anxiety and thoughts that have plagued me for the last four months seems to vanish, dialed back, drowned out by the swell of desire.
Daisy here is one hell of a great distraction.
We reach her car, which as promised, is in a shaded location, out in the back of the store beneath a wide dogwood tree whose branches drape low enough that they almost graze the top of the vehicle. Which, by the way, I would not call a car. I know everything’s bigger in the south, but does anyone in suburban Georgia really need a vehicle like this, one of those larger-than-life SUVs built for off-roading, which people seem to enjoy spending crazy amounts of money on to fuel just to run errands around town?
Still, I’m not about to complain about how much room there is in the backseat. Tinted windows, too…
