Page 59 of Nightfire

That made Chloe smile. Jesus, he liked seeing her smile. Her face just glowed, even when it was a small smile, like now.

She rummaged in one of the side pockets of the suitcase and came up with a number of small packets. “Well, I must have sensed that, because I took along a selection of teas from my flat.”

She might be looking lost, but man she also looked so fucking beautiful. Worn and weary, with a bandage on her arm, all her makeup worn off, she outshone any woman Mike had ever set eyes on, including Nicole, which was saying a lot.

There was just something so…so golden about her. The soft gold hair, the gold eyes, that beautiful pale skin now sun-tanned the lightest of golds. All together, she glowed, as if lit from within.

She simply stood there, looking at him, taking her cue from him. And he was just standing there, staring at her.

Willing his hard-on down.

Okay. Well, hard as it was to understand and hard as it was to do, Mike was going to go against every single instinct he had and be a perfect gentleman. Harry might have tacitly lifted the Curse on touching Chloe, but the fact was she’d been through violence and had been sexually assaulted.

Jesus, every time he thought of that he wanted to go to the morgue and revive the guy he’d killed and whack him all over again. Then go to SDPD where the other fucker was, and whack him, too.

He was used to violence. He’d been a soldier and a police officer and now was a security expert. He thrived on violence. You could say he was a violence expert, always had been, as of five minutes after his family was killed. He’d made it his life’s work to understand it and to master it.

Violence was a language, the only language bad guys understood, and Mike was really fluent in it.

But the kind of violence Mike believed in had a purpose. To protect people like Chloe, who weren’t supposed to be touched by it.

And yet, Chloe had been touched by it all her life.

He’d trained since boyhood for violence and he still couldn’t wrap his head around it. How Chloe’s mom’s boyfriend could take a little girl, break her arm and slam her violently against the wall. How her adoptive father could break that same arm and want to rape her. And how those two Russians fuckers could try to rape her and then throw her across a room.

How could men do that? How could any man do that to Chloe? Just look at her, he thought, standing quietly in the room, sad-eyed and nervous, unspeakably beautiful, a spirit so gentle you instantly felt better the minute you saw her.

Everyone felt better when she was around. Gracie and Merry, with the sure animal instinct of the very young, gravitated to Chloe like a plant to sunshine. Everyone loved her.

Including him.

Jesus.

He rubbed his chest.

Get this back on ground you understand. Get her into your bed.

But instead of one of his usual smooth lines, what came out was…“So…you want some of that tea you brought?”

She was looking more and more lost. “Yes. Please.”

He didn’t move. Neither did she.

Something had happened to Mike’s brain. It had ground itself into a new gear he didn’t recognize.

Over the years, he’d perfected his seduction patter. He had whole bits of dialogue memorized, little logic trees he followed like a bot. If she said this, he said that. But if she said that then he’d say this.

He also had it timed perfectly, and within half an hour, tops, he could get any woman he wanted naked and into his bed. Or hers. Actually he preferred hers, so he could leave as soon as it was over.

Often it only took a few minutes to close the sale. It was all so familiar it had worn a huge groove in his brain, so he didn’t have to actually think about anything.

Put the mechanism into gear and it rolled along all by itself, while he was thinking of where to leave his clothes and where was the exit, for after.

None of this was any help with Chloe. There was no script here, none at all, because, well…because this was Chloe.

Mike knew he should be heading for the kitchen because she wanted…what did she want? He couldn’t remember. Didn’t make any difference, because he didn’t want to leave a room she was in.

Say something.