Free Kiss Me Gone by Christa Wick Page A

to the rank of sergeant faster than any other man in the city had earned it.
    Whenever I returned home from a fire as big as what I had just faced, I usually rubbed out a quick orgasm if I was alone to ease the tension and celebrate being alive. Seldom was I actually alone. More nights than not, I fucked my partner until she was a wet puddle of nerves.
    But it wasn't the fire that had me on edge. It was the driving need to have Eden be the one melting beneath me, aroused, electric. To violate that sweet body until she was creaming and crying my name, promising to stay within the circle of my arms forever.
    I rubbed at my eyes, reminded myself a dozen times over who -- what -- I was to her. I was Michael Burke's godson. I was the child of a marriage her mother had ruined. I was the hurt twenty-year old who abandoned her and I was the stranger who had rescued her from death in a hotel she never should have been forced to stay in. I had no right to lust after her as I was doing. If I screwed up so soon after finding her, especially after the night's horrors, I would never get another chance.
    Rolling onto my stomach, I buried my head under a pillow and hoped she would be able to find a good night's sleep.
    One of us had to.
     

Chapter Eight
     
    Eden
     
    Alone in Dare's bedroom, I folded the blanket I had wrapped around my waist then removed my t-shirt, leaving me completely naked. Realizing I should lock the door in case he had forgotten something, I tiptoed across the carpeted floor, quietly slid the lock into place then went into the bathroom and secured that door.
    I sat on the toilet and emptied my bladder, looking around the room at the same time. There were shelves opposite the toilet and the lowest one had two small, lidless storage cubes overflowing with cosmetics. Either Dare was a closet drag queen or clothes weren't the only thing his former girlfriends had left behind.
    My lips quirked in a knowing smile. He had tried to give me the impression that there was only one ex who had forgotten half her closet, but I wasn't blind and I wasn't so dumb I couldn't accurately interpret what my eyes took in. While the taste in clothing was almost universally bad, there were too many different sizes and most of the colors were uncoordinated, as if each woman had only left behind an item or two.
    The contents of the storage cubes confirmed my suspicions. It seemed like forever since I had been able to afford any make-up, but I knew that most women were particular about their brands and the shades they wore -- particularly when it came to foundation. Looking at duplicate brushes, foundations for wildly different skin tones, and various eyeshadow that were super expensive and others that were super cheap, I started to feel a little sick in my stomach.
    Dare had turned into a player since I last knew him. Worse than that, he didn't try to hide it from the women he brought home to fuck. The clothes and cosmetics were warning flags to all the hotties who entered his inner sanctum that each was temporary, just one more layer in the collective debris of his sex life.
    If he had been serious about a woman, he would have erased the trace of his past lovers before he brought her by his place for even a casual visit. What I saw before me and in the bag of clothes was more than a few months of accumulation.
    Or so I very much wanted to believe. Only a pathological sex drive could sample so many women in less than a year.
    Shoving the bins onto their shelf, I flushed and stepped into the shower. I turned the water as hot as it would go and started washing the soot from my body and hair. I cleaned myself twice, still feeling dirty but knowing I was spotless -- at least physically.
    Out of the shower, I wrapped a thick towel around me. Big as Dare was, he needed oversized towels and the material covered me from my collarbone down to my knees. Letting my hair dry on its own, I returned to the containers that had made me feel sick earlier. In