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Her exhales come in short, quick puffs, and I suck each one in like a drug.
The scent is better than the panties in my pocket. She smells like fear and lilies and lust, and I’m so fucking hard for her that my cock aches.
“Dante,” she whispers. “I can’t—”
Whatever she was going to say gets cut off by the sudden sound of my phone buzzing in my pocket. The sound isn’t even that loud, but it might as well be a fucking sonic boom, the way it cuts through the haze of chemical attraction that surrounds us. The room around me seems to snap back into focus as I come to my senses.
Goddamn. She really is like a drug.
Clearing my throat, I let go of her and take a step back.
“Get dressed,” I tell her with a jerk of my chin as I fish my phone out of my pocket. “Or… not.”
Before she can respond to that, I turn away and answer the call, glancing at the caller ID as I swipe across the screen.
It’s fucking Mario Ricci.
“What’s up, Mario?” I ask, vaguely registering that Riley hasn’t made any move toward the clothes I brought her. She’s leaning against the wall I had her pinned against as if she’s not quite ready to trust her legs yet, and it makes me want to see what else I could do to make her weak in the knees. But Mario is already groveling on the other end of the line, and my mind reluctantly shifts back to business.
Mario runs a casino and occasionally cleans money for us… and it takes about two seconds of listening to his sorry list of excuses for me to figure out that he’s trying to back out of a deal we recently made.
His casino isn’t the only money laundering setup we’ve got in place for the Reapers. Not even the biggest. But even without the way his excuses reek of West Point interference, there’s no fucking way we’d survive if we let him set a precedent of screwing us over.
I set the fucker straight about that as I take the call out of Riley’s room and head down the stairs.
Maddoc’s gonna need an update on this.
11
LOGAN
The dull burnin my lats is becoming hard to ignore, even for me. I do it anyway, blocking out the weak part of my awareness that notices it as I continue the steady rhythm I’ve set at the pull-up bar in the gym that takes up part of the first floor of our home.
I work out every morning from 4:10 a.m until 5:59 a.m., and the fact that I’m in here for a second time today would make me furious if I let it.
I don’t like breaks in my routine. But Idetestthe fact that Maddoc brought that girl into our home.
I appreciate that he heard me out, and drawing blood on Dante helped too. But I still needed this. Something more to calm my rage at the idea of the girl waltzing in and becoming a distraction. A weakness. A chink in the armor that holds me and my brothers—and the entire Reapers organization—together.
I hit two hundred and keep going, but the steady count that I tick off in my brain isn’t working the way it usually does to crowd out other thoughts.
Not thoughts.Feelings.
“Fuck,” I grunt when I should have said “two hundred and one.”
I get back on count.Two hundred and two. Two hundred and three. Two hundred and f—
“Fuck.”
My back seizes up, my muscles locking as I hiss through the sudden spike of pain and then forcefully push it into the background again. I’m in control. Not my body. Not the chaos the world always wants to throw in front of me.Me.
Always.
“Two oh four.” I make it happen. “Two oh five.” I do another. “Two oh six.” And another.
And then my grip spasms, and my left hand slips off the bar.
I drop to the floor with a curse. I’ve been down here for close to half an hour, pushing myself to the limit, but it hasn’t worked. I still feel too wound up to center myself. Too filled with the cold fire that’s been my lifelong companion: rage. And there will be nowhere for it to go if my body is going to fail me like this.
