A second after that amazing, womanly smell chock-full of pheromones went straight to his dick, he saw her, and his entire body seized up. He was unable to move, unable to breathe, for a second or two.
Midnight black, glossy shoulder-length hair, enormous, uptilted eyes the exact color of the cobalt glass sculpture he’d turned down as too expensive for his office, eyes with lashes so long and thick they could stir up a breeze, slightly overlarge mouth with that Angelina Jolie dent in the bottom lip, perfect straight little nose, creamy skin.
Fuck-me shoes.
Incredible hourglass figure poured into a demure blue suit that exactly matched the color of her eyes and hugged curves guaranteed to make any male within a one-mile radius salivate.
She sure had the two moving guys salivating, as she directed them carrying in a heavy teak desk and a tiny antique sofa. They were doing her bidding like two puppy dogs hoping for a bone.
She turned to look at him directly, at thepingof the elevator, and Christ, all he could do was stare at the dazzler with the deep blue eyes.
Eyes that watched him warily.
Sam was exhausted, but a man would have to be dead not to have all his hormones wake up at the sight of the most beautiful woman on earth. And, hell, his hormones weren’t the only thing to wake up.
Instant boner, right there in the upscale hallway of the very expensive building he’d chosen as headquarters of his new company.
Shit.
Thank God he had on his tightest jeans because she was already looking alarmed at the sight of him. Who could blame her? He’d put a lot of care into looking like a scumbag, walking like a scumbag, thinking like a scumbag, even smelling like one.
And he was enraged down to the bone at the sex trafficking he’d discovered. That was something that was hard to switch off.
A woman like this would have antenna way out there where men were concerned. She’d be able to read men like other women read fashion magazines. It was a fact of her life. She was stunning, with the kind of natural good looks that would carry her through from childhood to old age as a beauty. So she’d grown up with the background buzz of hot male attention and she’d have learned to filter out the bad ones, the dangerous ones pretty quick.
He wasn’t bad but hewasdangerous and he carried that with him, like a shroud. He’d had a brutal childhood and had learned street fighting before he could read. By adulthood, he was really good with his fists, with a knife, hell—with a rock. Uncle Sam had taken what he was by nature, refined it, armed him up and spent over a million dollars turning him into a killing machine.
He’d made his living as a soldier leading hard men, and now as a civilian he made his living being tougher than most.
He’d come straight into the office after working the night shift on the docks, then sharing a beer with the man who’d recruited him for Bucinski, Kyle Connelly. Sam had nursed one beer to Connelly’s ten, and laughed while the pusbag told him about the perks of the job. Extra money, all the drugs you could snort or shoot up and sex. Sam had had to listen while Connelly bragged about handcuffing a twelve-year-old Vietnamese girl to a steel post and raping her. Sam had even had to commiserate with the fucker, whining because he’d been sore afterward, after popping the girl’s cherry.
Listening to this, laughing, slapping him on the back in sympathy, had been one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do in his hard life. His hands had literally itched to draw out the garrote wire in his belt and rip the fucker’s head right off.
So he’d been fighting mad when the doors had opened and—whoa. The world’s most beautiful woman, right there in front of him.
He’d actually had to rub his eyes, sure that what was right before him had to be some kind of vision, maybe some kind of compensation for the horrible night.
Her eyes had widened when she’d seen him. He knew what she was seeing—a very large, very strong, hugely pissed-off man, dressed like a bum and smelling like one, too.
Well, he couldn’t shave, wash and change his clothes right then and there and there was nothing he could do to kill those deadly pissed-off vibes so he’d merely walked down the corridor and entered his office.
Her huge cobalt blue eyes had followed him warily every step of the way. She’d actually stepped back as he approached, which pissed him off even more. Goddamn it, the last thing he’d ever do was hurt a woman.
Though, in fairness, she couldn’t possibly know that. Probably every cell in her single urban female body was screamingdanger. He knew she was single because though he saw she had some fancy rings on those pretty hands of hers, none of them were on her left-hand ring finger.
She absolutely had to be single because Sam couldn’t even remotely imagine a man married or even engaged to a looker like that who wouldn’t put a rock the size of her head on her finger, to warn other men off her. And what husband or fiancé wouldn’t be around to help his woman move into her new office?
She couldn’t know that his rage wasn’t in any way directed at her, of course, but at the system. He wanted to nail the gangright nowand send them all into the slammer five minutes later, special treatment reserved for one Kyle Connelly, child rapist.
But what you want and what you can have are very different things. No one knew that more than he did. So he’d had to stay under cover, sick at heart, wondering if some other little girls were being raped while he put together enough evidence to put the fuckers away. And to do that he had to stay in Scum-land for another couple of weeks.
So every time Nicole Pearce saw him, he’d been tired and grim and dirty, inside and out. Dealing with the scum of the earth was filthy work.
He knew that while he was on this mission, there was no room for anything else, certainly not something as beautiful as Nicole Pearce, so he’d waited.
But all that was now behind him and life had just handed him a big fat present all wrapped up in a fancy bow, to thank him for his patience.
Nicole Pearce, outside her office, looking as beautiful as ever, even with a ferocious scowl on her face, rifling through her bag and jacket pockets, looking for her keys.
