Free One Good Man by Alison Kent Page B

Because of the easy access to the interstate? Because he’d wanted her to focus on her studies? Kell hadn’t met her father, had only read about Steven Monroe’s abandonment years after the fact. He had no way of knowing what the issue was between Jamie and her father.
    He did know that it was time for sleep. For Jamie, and for him, too, so he capped the bottle, set his glass beside it next to the steps and went to bring her inside.

7
    J AMIE KNEW BETTER than to drink. She had no tolerance for alcohol. She was an easy drunk, the cheapest of cheap.
    And a barefoot Kell Harding, wearing nothing but his jeans, was going to make her cheaper and easier than she’d been in years. She could feel it in her blood, in her bones, a fire of lust and stupidity and Jim Beam.
    She knew he was standing in front of her, but she kept her eyes closed. It had been hard enough not to touch him when he’d been sitting on the stoop beside her. She could smell him then, and now.
    He’d showered before bed, and the heat of the night had carried the scent of his clean skin until she wanted to crawl beneath it, and wrap it around her like a cloak, and remember what it had been like to live without looking over her shoulder. She wanted that back, all of it.
    “Let’s go in. You need sleep. I need sleep. The glass will wait till morning.”
    Still hunkered down, she shook her head. “If I sleep, I’ll dream, and it won’t be one I can stomach alone. Not tonight. Not with…all of this happening. And with tomorrow.” Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, she told herself. Please, please, don’t cry.
    “I’ll be in the next room. And I’ll be with you tomorrow.” He touched her hair then, brushed his knuckles against her temples. “I’m here now.”
    But he wasn’t here in the way she needed him. He was here as a cop, a watchdog, here to keep her smart and sober and on time, though he was running late on the first two counts. She grabbed his wrist to stop him from moving his fingers along the shell of her ear, using her hold as leverage to gain her feet, rising along his body.
    And then she couldn’t help it. He was in front of her, looming, his chest big, bare and magnificent and calling her. She placed her hands there, the heels of her palms just beneath his pectoral muscles, her fingertips skating the edges of his nipples.
    The wedge of hair in the center of his chest was soft, thinning as it descended his abdomen. She followed it with her thumbs, her eyes wet, her cheeks wet, her belly tight with wanting him, with wanting.
    He stopped her when she reached his waistband. She felt him there, just beneath, swelling, full and firm, but he kept her from enclosing him in her hand, and held her arms at her sides. “Not a good idea.”
    His body said otherwise. “Are you sure? I’m getting some mixed signals here.”
    “I’m sure,” he told her, his grip tightening when she tried to pull away and prove him wrong. “Another time, another place, maybe.”
    “You’re saying no because of tomorrow?” Not because she was an old maid, damaged and broken and lost, with nothing to offer a man? Not because she was ugly and drunk and pathetic? Not because he didn’t want her?
    “I’m saying no because we both need sleep,” he reiterated, his voice rough, rougher than the hands holding her, than the concrete driveway she was standing on. “And because the reasons right now are all wrong.”
    What did that mean? That he could only tumble her into forgetfulness if it fit his white-hat sense of right and wrong? How fair was that, when she was the one who wanted no strings attached?
    She pulled against his efforts to keep her at a distance, lifting her hands to his chest again, to his shoulders, lacing them around his neck.
    She shimmied close, pressed her nipples to his chest and rubbed against the cotton of her camisole until sensation swept her to the edge of oblivion. “What do the reasons matter?”
    He groaned. The rumble rose