Back in the Bedroom

“How many more questions do you figure you have, because I’d like to sleep off this headache.”

She’d been manhandled, terrified and trapped, and she could deal with that. But it would have been nice if it’d happened with a warmer, more compassionate man, a man who put others’ needs and fears ahead of his own need for a nap.

Certainly someone more in touch with his own emotions.

In other words, this man’s polar opposite. “You shouldn’t go to sleep,” she said, unable to just ignore him. She had a feeling he could be fully dressed and she still wouldn’t be able to ignore him. “You could be concussed.”

He didn’t answer. His body took up the entire cot and more, a good portion of his long legs were hanging off the cot. His wide shoulders barely fit onto the thin mattress.

But what if she’d wanted to lie down? What then? She’d have to be snuggled right up against all that bare sinewy flesh.

Not that he’d even care, as he appeared to not have given her a second thought. Wasn’t that ever so flattering? “Are you really going to sleep?”

“Shhh.”

Unbelievable. She watched him breathe slowly and evenly for another moment before letting out a frustrated sigh. “Fine. Sleep.” Without a care to her own possible fears and pain. Wasn’t that just like an alpha?

She eyed the room again. The window was still too small, with no fire escape or way to climb down. Interestingly enough though, there appeared to be an attic access in the ceiling, a decent-sized one, too. Not that she could reach it alone, but they had to get out. Maybe if he helped— “Reilly?”

He let out a long-suffering sigh. “What?”

“I have another option than sleep.”

He opened his eyes, the look in them blatantly sexual. “Oh, yeah?”

Oh boy, definitely alpha. Extremely alpha. So why his low, husky tone and those suggestive words made her body tingle, she hadn’t a clue.

“What did you have in mind?” His voice dripped an earthy sensuality.

“Uh…” Oddly enough, the only thing she had in mind right now was X-rated. “I forgot.”

His gaze ran over her from head to toe, flared with heat, shocking her, before he closed his eyes. “Okay, then.”

Okay, then.

2

REILLY DRIFTED off pleasantly, to a place where his head didn’t hurt and he was wearing clothes—

“Reilly.” This extremely loud whisper was accompanied by a shove at his shoulder.

She was ba-a-ack. His father’s latest fling, the petite pixie with the shoulder-length brown hair and mossy-green eyes that flashed her every thought for the world to see.

Was she even of legal age?

“Reilly?”

He had no idea why she bothered to whisper, when she was doing it so loudly she could have woken the dead.

“I think you should wake up now,” she said, and added another teeth-rattling shake. “Come on. Get up and count to ten or something.”

Honest to God, the woman talked more than any woman he’d ever met.

“Just to make sure you don’t go into a coma.” Another shake. “It’s only been five minutes but I can’t remember how long you’re supposed to let someone with a bleeding head injury sleep.”

“I’m not in a coma,” he said with his eyes still closed. It wasn’t really sleep he was interested in, but a way to pass the time other than looking at the oddly sweet and sexy Tessa. “And my head is no longer bleeding.”

“I still don’t think you should sleep.”

All those years in the army and then the CIA, one thing had stuck with him—how to catch quality Zs in five short little minutes. He’d rather have had longer than five minutes. Say the whole night, so the time would have passed painlessly, but slowly he opened his eyes, staring into her wide green ones. “I’m fine.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?” She wriggled three in front of his nose.

He grabbed them. “I’m fine,” he repeated.

“Fine enough to go up the attic access in the ceiling? I think it has good escape potential.”

In the meager but adequate light he took in her slight little form bending over him, her hand on his chest. Not that he minded a woman’s fingers on him, but his head felt like it was going to roll right off his shoulders. And if she shoved him one more time, yet again jarring his head, he was going to roll her pretty little body beneath his to hold her still. “Escape potential,” he repeated, and she smiled at him and nodded.

“All you have to do is climb up. Then shimmy your way through whatever is up there, and drop down through another access in another room. Voilà, escape. I know you said you didn’t grow up here, but you could probably find a phone, right?”

He’d had his cell on him, before he’d made the mistake of actually coming here to see Eddie. Before he’d knocked out three of the four idiots, then realized too late there was one more idiot behind him. Suddenly, he’d seen stars from the hit with a vase probably worth enough to feed a small country.

Which made him the idiot.

And to think, all he’d wanted was to tell his father to knock it off, to stop sending sexy little temps to his office and to stop sending him messages to come visit.

Instead, he’d ended up on the wrong end of a strip search, being held hostage by his own gun no less. He, a guy who knew how to kill a man in more ways than he could count, had been taken down by a few punks with a vendetta against his father.

If that didn’t bite, watching them mess with his gun while he sat in his shorts sure did. And if that didn’t also say how much he’d lost his edge, how dead-on-target his decision had been to get out of the CIA, he didn’t know what did.

He supposed it could have been worse.

They could have killed him.

“Can you? Find a phone?”

The cute young thing was still talking. He let out a long breath and opened his eyes. “Probably.”

“So…will you?”

“No.”

She blinked. “What?”

“No,” he repeated clearly.

“But…why not?”