“I’m…I think I should go.”
Fuck. I don’t have a vehicle.
I’m already heading for the door, grabbing my coat off the hook, when Mitch catches up with me. Firm arms wrap around me from behind as his breath brushes my ear.
“What are you doing?”
“I have to go.”
“How?”
I twist around in his hold and glare at him.
“I know how to call a taxi,” I snap ungraciously, before moderating my tone and adding, “It makes sense for me to be with my team anyway. I have a perfectly good room waiting for me at the Airbnb.”
He drops his arms, and for a moment it looks like he’ll let me go. But before I can shove my arm in a sleeve of my coat, his hands are cradling my face and his mouth is hot on mine.
The kiss is brief and hard, almost punishing, but when he lets me up for air, his eyes are warm and his voice soft.
And my resolve melts at his words.
“What if I don’t want you to go?”
Then he kisses me again.
This round is sweet and seductive, but quickly heats up. In no time at all I’m pressed up against him, my hands curved around his neck, and I’ve completely forgotten why I was heading for the door to begin with.
My coat is on the floor at my feet and when Mitch turns me up against the wall, and if we hadn’t been clinging on to each other—almost desperately—I would’ve tripped.
Unfortunately, as Mitch deftly works his way up on the buttons of my shirt, the door flies open, followed immediately by a loud crash and a loud curse in a young woman’s voice.
Shit.
“Dammit, Sawyer,” Mitch grumbles as he disentangles from me and bends over to haul the dark-haired girl, sprawled on the foyer floor, to her feet. “When are you going to stop barreling in here like a herd of buffalo? Look where you put your feet.”
I’m still fumbling to rebutton my shirt when I hear the girl respond.
“Well, sue me for not expecting someone stripping right inside my front door.”
My hands freeze and I peek up, catching a flash of angry hazel eyes. The same color as her father’s.
In fact, the girl is a clone of her father, except more delicate and less hairy. She’s also a lot less welcoming.
“Behave, Sawyer,” Mitch growls at his daughter. “This is Opal. She’s a friend. We also work together,” he adds.
The girl’s expression turns from pissed to incredulous as she takes me in, head to toe, before turning back to her father.
“Sure doesn’t look like any FBI agent I’ve ever met.”
“That’s enough!” Mitch barks.
Okay, this is getting really uncomfortable.
I bend down to grab my coat so I can slip out the door while these two have it out, but once again I’m stopped before I can get an arm in when it’s ripped right from my hold.
With my coat in one hand and his other hand curved firmly around his daughter’s neck, he marches both of us into the living room.
“If you can’t behave like the grown-up you tell me you want me to treat you as, why don’t you tell me what was so fucking important it couldn’t wait?”
Then he releases his daughter, tosses my coat on the couch, and stalks into the kitchen where he snatches his beer from the counter, pops off the cap on the edge, and takes a deep draw from the bottle. The girl is watching him with her fists planted on her hips.
I use the moment to ease into the living room, aiming for my discarded coat.
“Don’t even think about it!”
My head snaps up and I find him glaring at me over his daughter’s shoulder.
He doesn’t just sound angry, he looks it as well.
Too bad he’s directing it at the wrong person.
“Excuse me?”
My own anger has the pitch of my voice go right up the scale.
Our eyes throw daggers across the room and a different kind of heat builds between us as his daughter stands between us, almost forgotten.
A sniffle fills the loaded silence as suddenly the girl’s shoulders slump, changing her posture from defiant to defeated.
Her voice sounds brittle when she speaks.
“I wanted to see you. You haven’t been around for three weeks. I missed you.”
The last is said on a sob as she turns on her heel. With her eyes down, she heads for the front door, mumbling “Sorry,” to me in passing.
Such a contrast to the angry teen only moments ago, my heart breaks a little.
“Fuck! Pumpkin, wait up!” Mitch yells after her, but she’s already out the door as he chases after her.
Curious, I peek out the front window to see him catch up to her at the sidewalk where a little red car is parked along the curb. There’s no one behind the wheel.
I watch him swing her around, wrapping her in a bear hug.
By the time he comes back inside, I’m back at the computer finishing the report for my team. He’s alone.
“Where’s your daughter?”
He stops beside me.
“On her way home.”
“Didn’t you tell me she’s sixteen?”
You may be able to drive at sixteen in Kentucky, but only with a fully licensed person, twenty-one or older, in the passenger seat beside you. It didn’t look like there was anyone waiting in the car for her.
He rubs the back of his neck and looks a little guilty.
“She is. Her mom and stepdad let her drive alone, and I didn’t feel like getting into yet another argument. There’s been too many of those as it is.”
It’s clearly a sensitive subject so I decide to drop it. Not really my business anyway.
“Is she okay?” I ask instead.
“She is after I gave her the hug she needed and explained I would’ve like to have been the one to decide when and how she meets the woman I’m seeing.”
Oh. Wow.
I’m not sure what to take away from that but my stomach is in knots.
Especially since his expression is stern and his eyes intense on me, but this time I’m not so sure it’s from anger.
“You almost done?” he bites off.
“I just need to email this.”
“Do it.”
My hands are shaking a little as I type in Jacob’s email address, which only gets worse when Mitch closes in on me. I have to correct a typo first, then I attach the file, and the moment I hit send, he reaches out, snags my hand, and pulls me up from the chair.
The next thing I know, I’m dragged down the hallway to his bedroom where he kicks shut the door.
As his mouth descends on mine and his hand shoves down the back of my jeans, grabbing on to my ass, he mutters.
“God, woman. How you stir my blood.”
NINETEEN
Mitch
“Will you tell me about your sister?”
This time it hadn’t been the phone waking me before the sun had a chance to rise, but a hot, wet pair of lips, wrapped around my cock.
I can’t remember the last time I had a wake-up call like that, probably sometime at the onset of my marriage to Becky, since I made it a rule after my marriage disintegrated to make sure I’d wake up alone in my bed. Mostly because my job is unpredictable—I could get called to a new case any time of day or night—and it was simply easier not to have to explain.