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Hot as fucking hell.
And it hadn’t been any different than any other night. They burned each other alive.
And no matter how often he had her, it was never enough. He was always left just as hard for her as he was the first time he fucked her. And he always cursed the sunrise whenever he saw it edging through his curtains.
Because sunrise meant Sheila was going to awaken, and she was going to leave. It meant that unfamiliar warmth and the confusing yet comforting emotions he felt would disappear with her.
This time, she’d left well before sunrise, though. And there he stood, naked, hard, and rather than feeling anger he just felt … alone.
He heard her car start outside his window. The second floor afforded him privacy, but it also allowed him to keep his eyes and ears open.
Not that he had a lot of enemies in this new life or in this new, fairly low-key job.
He’d never seemed to make enemies as easily as he did friends, so there weren’t a lot of people who wanted to hurt him, yet.
Yet, because he was involved in something that could possibly turn ugly if anyone ever figured it out. Or if they figured out exactly who Nick Casey really was.
If they did.
They hadn’t yet, and it had been quite a few years since he had come to Simsburg, Texas. He’d been there for five years, ever since his days as a super-secret special operations soldier had gone to hell when an extraction had turned ugly.
He’d taken a bullet to his hip and one to his damned ankle. His reaction time was screwed then and his ability to endure the long hikes and hard runs required was forever behind him.
But he’d made enemies during those days. And once he had taken Ethan Cooper up on his job offer to handle the security at his bar, he’d learned that some men could never retire from the life of an adrenaline junkie.
Not him, not the men who worked with him at the bar, and sure as hell not his boss, Cooper.
As he threw himself back in the bed and stared up at the ceiling silently, Casey admitted that being a special operations soldier had nothing on being a covert information gatherer and tattletale. The Broken Bar, Cooper’s bar, was a watering hole for the dregs of society, as well as the locals and tourists. And Cooper’s men were there to scoop up the scattered whispers, rumors, and gossip left behind. Posing as bouncers and bartenders, they heard it all.
Ethan’s place was the only bar or nightclub coming from Corpus Christi. It was big, always busy, and drew a damned diverse crowd. A crowd that often held customers who mixed socializing with information and dropped tidbits of those secrets as they became more intoxicated through the night. More intoxicated and more self-important than they actually were.
Iron, Turk, Casey, and Jake put that information together along with Ethan for the retired army captain who headed the southern section of the Covert Information Network.
That same army captain was the father of the woman who had just left his bed. As though he had committed some horrible sin. A sin Casey had yet to realize was actually a sin.
He grimaced again and shifted on the bed to relieve the ache in his hip. The result of several nights working overtime, piecing together the information that had come in after a strike overseas on a terrorist cell. That strike had been the result of information the team had gathered the month before, making these past few nights even more important.
Sometimes, Casey wondered if they were even making headway despite the strikes the team was responsible for. Take one out, ten more slide in.
He was beginning to wonder what he had left behind as he chased the adrenaline dream. What had he given up all these years? What had he missed that he couldn’t figure out the feeling Sheila made him feel? And what was he letting slip through his fingers now?
From that first night he and Sheila had come together, he’d felt he had finally found a cure to the restlessness that plagued him. He’d finally felt as though he belonged somewhere. Or to someone.
There was more to her than he’d had a chance to get to know, and more that swirled in that heart of hers than she allowed him to glimpse. Those secrets drew him. They made him hungrier by the day to know her better, to touch her more, to hold her tighter.
And he wanted to see it all.
Shockingly.
Casey had never wanted to delve into a woman’s heart and soul at any other time. Not since the day his fiancée had cleaned out his apartment and his bank account when she’d heard he’d been wounded in action.
She hadn’t stuck around to see how badly he had been hurt or cared if he had needed her. She sure as hell hadn’t cared that he might need his furniture, his cash, hell, his bed, when he returned home.
Nope, she’d just cashed in everything she could and found greener pastures. His best friend’s pasture.
That had been over seven years ago, nearly eight.
Sheila was different, though. From the moment he’d stared into those mysterious violet eyes, he’d known she was more different than any woman he’d ever touched. So unique he was determined to keep her as his own.
