Flirting with Fire (Hot in Chicago #1) (12 page)

“That mouth of yours, Kinsey,” the Douche said with a condescending shake of his head. “Always have to be one of the guys. Hanging around with foul-mouthed politicians has made you less of a woman.”

“And spending time with me made you less of a man.”

“That’s okay, honey. I don’t mind admitting you’re a better man than I’ll ever be.”

Ah, hell, no. Something imploded in Luke’s brain, pinwheels of fury propelling him forward in attack. No one talked to his woman like that. No one. He closed the gap, using his height to intimidate and get all up in Dr. D-bag’s business.

But before he could do his usual “fists first, questions never” thing, Kinsey slipped between them, her
hands on Luke’s chest. Protecting her ex—and Luke from his own brutish impulses.

“Luke, don’t.” Her eyes implored him not to undo all her good work making over his reputation. “He’s not worth it.”

Just as she had calmed him at the firehouse post-Lisa and this morning, when she covered his angry fist with her small hand as they sat at his kitchen table, her tender touch absorbed all his negative energy. With one last “fuck you” glare at the doc, Luke rolled his shoulders and backed off.

Which is when Kinsey turned and landed a right hook to the Douche’s jaw.

 CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
hat steaming pile of cheating excrement.

Of course, Kinsey had suspected it all along. When she arrived in Chicago in February and David told her six weeks later that he had met someone else, the odds of him
not
going for a test drive with his pretty nurse had struck her as slim to none. Now her ability to do simple addition taunted her, making it very clear how David had spent those cold, oh-so-lonely early days in the Windy City.

Fucking—and impregnating—the nurse.

A child.
He was having a child, though by the looks of it, Blondie was carrying quadruplet hippos. David had claimed he didn’t want children, some logically reasoned argument about how fatherhood wouldn’t suit him or their lifestyle, and she had let him lead there, too. But it was Kinsey who hadn’t suited him.

He just didn’t want children with
her
.

Stunned senseless, she plowed aimlessly over the hot sand, its burn on her feet a match to the scorch marks over her heart. She flexed the hand she had used to strike her gutless ex. It hurt—all of it. Her head, her chest, her knuckles, which looked as raw as she felt. Her throat was thick with unshed tears,
which she desperately staved off by making each step more deliberately forceful than the last. Walk it off, Taylor.

Walk. It. Off.

“Hey, watch it,” an aggrieved voice called out. She might have trod on the voice’s towel. Or his sand castle. Or his stupid face.

Fury fueled her off-kilter pivot. She refused to let one more man walk all over her today. “Watch what, asshole?”

Any forthcoming answer was lost on the lake breeze as a strong arm circled her waist and gathered her to a solid chest.

Luke.

The comfort she took in his body was more shocking than the events that had led to this moment. For too long, she had been starved of a man’s affectionate touch. For too long, she had relied on her own resources. It felt so good to rely on someone else for a little while.

Stiffness in every part of her gradually gave way to Luke’s strength, a muscularity that was as much mental as it was physical. It must have taken sincere mental strength not to want to comment on the scene he had just witnessed. Make her feel better with murmured platitudes. Fill the gnawing silence. Instead, he was just there for her, his hold tight and sure and a touch rougher than she was used to.

It was perfect.

Peeking up from where her head was burrowed into his left pec, she found those lake-blue eyes holding her prisoner. While the competitor in her was tempted to see how long this stare down could last,
the woman in her needed something else. Something only this man could give.

“I’ve got you,” he whispered.

With strong hands on her butt, he raised her body, her lips to his, and the resulting union streaked through her like fire. Their mouths might be made for sniping, but mostly they were made for this. Better they should be used for this. A perfect melding of lips and tongues, the tangle so sweet, the chemistry so right.

I’ve got you.
For the first time in what seemed like forever, someone had her.

Afraid he’d pull away before she was done taking her fill, she climbed closer, tighter. The kiss turned more assured, the intimate taste of him more intoxicating. Faced with the knowledge that she couldn’t satisfy one man, she needed to know she was desired. That despite all those character traits that men found so off-putting—her bossiness, her selfishness, her drive—she still had something to offer the man who could match her word for word, kiss for kiss.

Blood saturated with him, she reluctantly drew back and blew out a shaky breath against his lips. “Thanks,” she said simply.

“Anytime, sweetheart. Put these on.” He fell to one knee and slid her foot into her flip-flop, then the other, with a reverence that stung the backs of her eyelids.

He stood again. “You might recall my theory about how violence satisfies men’s sense of justice, makes us feel good, and always improves our odds with women.”

Baffled, she stared at him. “I do.”

“Goes both ways,” he said, his grin twinkly and dangerous. “That little outburst considerably improved your odds of getting lucky with me. How’s the hand?”

Laughing, though she still hurt everywhere, she stretched her hand and relished the oncoming stiffness. “Worth the bruise I’ll have later.”

“Good girl.”

Dwarfing her uninjured hand in his, he led her to a path at the back of the beach, the one that headed to the beach house shaped like an ocean liner. He never let go, just threaded his way through college kids with lithe bodies and older hipsters who surveyed the youth with a mix of wry amusement and jealousy. Finally, they reached the rooftop bar and found a table near the balcony overlooking the volleyball courts.

Luke raised an eyebrow in query. “Watered-down beer or watered-down cocktails?”

“Beer would be fine.”

Scanning the crowd, he connected with a server who had clearly already spotted him. Six four of rock-solid brawn with the face-body combination of a god was hard to miss.

“Hey, you’re the hot firefighter!” the waitress squealed.

“Yeah, just trying to enjoy a quiet moment with my girl here. Any chance we can keep that on the down low? There’s a good tip in it for you.”

“Undercover firefighter-slash-model? Your secret’s safe with me as long as you give me your autograph later.” She shimmied, displaying her autograph book.

Luke kept his face carefully blank.

“Lucky girl,” she murmured to Kinsey, before bouncing off with Luke’s order for a pitcher of cold stuff and a bowl of ice.

He met Kinsey’s testy gaze. “Hey. You started this. Don’t get all crabby because you don’t like the monster you created.”

She
hmphed
, irked that her disapproval of Miss Sign-My-Jugs was so obvious.

“So Dave the Douche likes ’em sweet and adorable,” Luke said, shooting right to the heart of the matter.

Kinsey snorted. “Something I could never be accused of.”

“No, you’re not sweet. But you’re pretty damn adorable when you’re drunk off your ass.”

“Is that what I need? Copious ingestions of alcohol to make me palatable to the opposite sex?”

He stared, all badass and sexy. “I wouldn’t change a thing about you, Kinsey.”

Her heart jerked to a stop. She willed it to beat again. “That’s easy to say in the early phase of a relationship.” Brilliant. Just bandy the R word around, why don’t you? “What I mean is—”

“That your particular brand of ‘in your face, I am woman, hear me roar’ does the trick for attracting men, but gets old in a hurry and doesn’t work in the long term.”

How embarrassingly astute of him. “Yep. Men claim strong women are sexy, but by the time the wooing is over and you’re no longer shaving above the knee, by the time the sex has wound down from every night to once a month—if you’re lucky—and especially when the man you admired because he saw
you as an equal starts to see you as a rival, then we can safely say most men prefer the soft, ultrafeminine replacement. The Stepford Wife.”

“Don’t tar us all with the sins of your ex, sweetheart. It could be you two were just incompatible.”

That’s what David had said when he dumped her. She’d assumed it was one of those breakup buzzwords men throw out to justify their boredom with a long-term relationship and their embrace of the new and shiny. Ten years with someone who she may never have been compatible with. How did it come to this?

Luke strummed the table. “What was all that shit about winning?”

“David thought I was too competitive. I always had to run faster than him, beat him in the bedroom, win at poker—”

“Back up there a sec. The bedroom?”

With marvelous timing, their perky server returned with a pitcher of beer, a bowl of ice, and a flirty smile for Luke. He poured a glass and passed it over, then tipped water into the ice bowl and dipped Kinsey’s stiffening hand in the frigid solution. His no-nonsense attitude in caring for her reached inside to some private, untouched place.

“You were saying?”

“No,
you
were saying.”

“How did you beat him in the bedroom?”

She sighed and took a draft of beer. The cool swallow refreshed, but couldn’t quite temper the hot burn of failure knotted behind her breastbone.

“I didn’t see it as beating him, but he did. He wanted to be in total control, and while I like that every now and then . . .” Heat scalded her cheeks,
but she was already in too deep to turn back. “I also enjoy a more proactive role.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “In what way?”

“Telling him what I liked. What I needed.”
Shut up, Kinsey.
“How hard I wanted it.”

The muscle went ripe bananas.

“Most guys would be happy to have a woman so vocal about her desires,” he said in a voice several degrees huskier than before. “Half the time, we have no clue if a woman is enjoying herself.”

“Really?”

“Not me. Just trying to represent for my maligned gender. So what made this guy so bad at keeping a woman like you satisfied?”

“Sometimes I needed more, and if I took care of it myself, he saw it as an indictment of his skills, a threat to his manhood.” God, she couldn’t believe the words spewing from her mouth. Never had she been this open about her sex life, not even with her girlfriends. Luke assessed her with no judgment, just a whole lot of heat.

How had she devoted so many years of her life to a man like David?

Tears threatened, and Kinsey took a long swig of her beer to steady her fading calm. She saw now how ridiculous it looked, how she had been holding on to this relationship that had been half past dead for so long. The fear of being alone had trumped her better judgment. Or maybe she had no clue what was best for her.

She knew now, or thought she did. Putting herself first—career, ice cream, orgasms, in that order—that’s what she needed.

“Maybe I’m too hard to please,” she said, immediately backtracking on her attitude of,
You go, girl
.

Luke gusted out a sigh. “Don’t go all pity party on me, Kinsey. This dickhead screwed up, plain and simple. He should have done everything in his power to satisfy you. To make sure you knew how special you were.” Leaning in, he cupped her jaw and swiped at her bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. “If you were mine, baby, I’d never let you forget that.”

If you were mine
 . . . It wasn’t fair of him to speak to her like that, not while she was feeling ditch low. Desperately, she dug for her indignation at being called “baby,” but it was nowhere to be found. On his lips, that word made the broken woman in her feel treasured. Cherished.

What would it be like to be caught in the emotional crosshairs of a man like Luke Almeida? To belong to him, body and soul? The prospect warmed her some. Scared her more. With Luke, she suspected there would be no half measures.

Not like David, who took eight and a half years to pop the question. More fool her, she had let him set the pace of their relationship because she wasn’t sure she deserved the attention of a man in such an exalted position. In her current hot mess, she wasn’t sure she deserved the attention of any man, including the one sitting across from her.

The sickening flash of recrimination at David had her drawing back from Luke’s touch. “You shouldn’t say those things . . . it’s too much.”

He stared with unerring intensity, his gaze a million times steadier than her heartbeat. “Is it?”

“I—
we
have a job to do and we should be keep
ing it professional.”
Preach it, sistah.
What had happened down on that beach with David only served to confirm what she’d known for some time: she was a loser in love and her career was all she had left. Jeopardizing it by having a fling with an assignment was suicidal.

His voice was a low rumble of sex. “You’re a smart woman. I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that professional ain’t my middle name.” Abruptly, he stood and towered hugely over her, looking three times her size, and pissed to all hell at her. From his pocket, he extracted two twenties and threw them onto the table.

“C’mon.”

“But I haven’t finished my beer!” And he hadn’t even touched his.

“Get that sweet ass of yours in gear, Kinsey, or I’m going to carry you out of here.” He inclined his body, close enough for them to share a breath. “You don’t want me to make a scene, not after all the good,
oh-so-professional
work you’ve done turning me into a heartthrob.”

Growling because she knew he was right, and because she felt like growling, she stood and pounded toward the exit to the stairway. The man was a complete ass, with his
baby this
and
sweetheart that
and surliness that gave her whiplash. Well, she’d show
him
surly.

When she reached the bottom step, his fingers curled around her arm, and before she could jerk away, he had muscled her through the restroom door. She spun around to face him, grasping for outrage that immediately fizzled on seeing his face. His eyes blazed hard and true.