“But I do want to,” he said softly, every damn inch of her.
Her lashes fluttered and lifted. “You do?”
Damn the woman was charming. “Very much,” he assured her. “Tell me about your night. What brought you in here?” She leaned forward, sipping her drink, the shift in her chair tugging her shirt tight over the curves of her breasts, a brush of a nipple puckering beneath thin material, drawing his gaze and thickening his blood.
"Okay then,” she said. “Just remember though. I gave you a chance to run for the hills.”
“I’d be willing to bet you’d run away much faster than I would,” he said.
Her cheeks flushed a pretty pink. “I guess we’ll see about that after you listen to me chatter a bit. So here goes. You wanted to know what brought me here tonight. Like I mentioned, I‘ve been working at the hospital a month. Before that, I was a secretary. No blood, no pain beyond boredom. Just the plain ole, same ole, everyday. I was miserable. Then two years ago, I turned twenty-five and had this whole soul-searching, what-am-I-doing-with-my-life-besides-typing-memos-for-my-boss thing going on. My mom is gone now and I have no one else, so nothing was holding me back, but me. The result was me deciding I had to blow out my birthday candles and then make the next year count. I had to do something that mattered. So I went back to school and ended up as a nurse at Scott and White.” She crossed her arms in front of her and shivered. “And that was when the hell started. The blood. The horror. The tragedy. Do you know what happened my first night on the job?” She didn’t wait for an answer, her hands flattening on the bar, as if she suddenly needed extra support. “I had to tell two sisters that their parents were killed in a car accident. Now, tonight, I told one of those sisters that the other was mauled by a wild animal and killed. I had to drive that poor woman home on my break. She had no one to pick her up.”
Evan’s reaction was immediate, instinctive. He covered her hand with his, created a physical connection that strengthened his command of her mind. “I need the address of the sister, Marissa,” he ordered.
She blinked. “I know it. I wrote it down. Three thirty-one Maple Avenue.”
“Good,” he said softly, before erasing her memory. “Excuse me, Sweetheart. I have to go make a quick phone call. I’ll be right back so you can finish telling me your story, which I very much want to hear.”
Her eyes softened and she touched his hand with her free one. “Hurry back.” There was a soft readiness to her voice.
“I will,” he promised, wishing like hell it wasn’t for all the wrong reasons.
Tonight, Marissa had done more than gain the attention of a vampire. She’d put herself in the path of a killer werewolf.
CHAPTER TWO
The instant Evan let go of her hand, Marissa drew a long, cool sip of her drink. She was on fire. Which was both unexpected and, she supposed, just what the doctor ordered. She’d come to Shooters for a distraction, a way to escape the bloody hell of this night, and Evan was that and more.
With a sigh, she watched him depart, long hair draped down the center of broad, defined shoulders. Oh how easily she could picture him, savage with passion, naked … on top of her, all that long, black hair draped around his shoulders. She bit her bottom lip. The man was hotter than the Texas sun, and that was pretty darn scorching. The kind of man a woman fantasized about, but didn’t think really existed.
Especially since she hadn’t had a man in her life, let alone in her bed, in a good six months, not since the Austin police officer who’d had a bondage hang-up that he’d taken into the creepy, rather than sexy, territory.
She hadn’t trusted that man to tie her up. Heck, she hadn’t trusted him to touch her favorite Snoopy mug for that matter. Of course, it was a special mug, given to her by her former best friend from high school. Ex-friend because Marissa had called her friend’s husband a cheating SOB when he’d cheated. Somehow, Marissa had ended up the SOB with her friend. But the mug still held memories of a friendship long past, it still mattered to her, still held a special place in her heart. And if a guy couldn’t even manage to be mug worthy, he darn sure wasn’t going to be allowed to cuff her to a bed and have his wild way with her.
But Evan—he was another story. She had this instant want-to-get-wicked-and-wild urge with the man that threw caution to the wind. And she liked caution. She liked planning and structure. She liked to get to know a guy before she got naked usually, normally. Apparently, not so with Evan.
The fantasy of getting naked with Evan, as in tonight, slid away abruptly as her gaze latched onto the television hanging above the bar, showing a flash of the hospital and then the house where she’d dropped off the sister tonight. Subtitles talked about a gruesome animal attack. A flash of Ellen’s face, the surviving sister looking pale and wrenched with pain, had Marissa drawing another long sip from her straw. And then another.
Her head started to buzz, and somehow that only made the reality of her life, and this day, clamor louder in her head. She had no family, nothing to lose—her mother had died in childbirth, and her father was a drunk who’d kicked her out when she was sixteen. But Ellen, poor thing… she’d had a wonderful family — a family that Marissa envied — who had been ripped from her life in a matter of weeks. Marissa wanted to help Ellen. She wanted to help people, to make her life count. But the things she’d seen this past month — the pain and hurt, the loss — were eating her alive. She didn’t know if she was cut out for this, and guilt twisted inside her for her own weakness.
“How about another,” Evan asked, suddenly in front of her, and she hadn’t even seen him coming. Which said a lot about how much of a zone she’d been in—Evan was hard to miss.
She drew a sip from her straw and emptied the glass, pushing it toward him. “Considering I’m already buzzing,” she said, thinking his lips looked even sexier with a little alcohol to heat her blood, “that’s probably not a good idea. I’d planned to take a taxi home, but I want to be sure I can actually find the taxi.”
“You weren’t joking about not being a drinker, I guess.” Dark eyes assessed her with a probing, intimate inspection and, she had a feeling, he saw far more than she would have liked right about now. She shook her head. “It’s a control thing,” she said, “which is probably why the ER is exactly where I don’t belong. I can’t control anything there. Nothing. Horrible things happen—death happens—and I can’t do anything to stop it.”
“You’re focusing on the lives lost,” he said. “Not the lives saved.”
“I know,” she said. “I do. In the logical part of my mind, that makes sense. But I go home and think of the lives lost or the people that will never walk, talk, or see again. Those are the people who haunt my dreams. I left Austin to come here, and I think…it was a mistake.”
“You’ll find a place to put the bad stuff,” he assured her. “It just takes time.”
“And if I don’t?”