Lightning Strikes (The Almeida Brothers Trilogy #3) (5 page)

Jack held up the clothes in his hand.

“Just, throw them there…” She spoke with a strangled voice, motioning to her leather pants and cami top, which she’d piled up on the bed.

Jack leaned out of the doorway, just enough to send the abs on his stomach contracting as he tossed his clothes on top of hers.

“I need the pants and the shirt, but I’ll never wear the jacket again,” he said, standing tall and meeting her eyes across the room.  “It’ll cover you up.”

She gave him a tight smile.

He didn’t smile back, disappearing behind the door and slamming it shut once more.

Twenty minutes later, he emerged, just as gorgeous as she remembered, but this time, gorgeous with smatterings of shower water glistening on his golden skin.

She almost cursed from where she was digging her nails into her knees from the desk chair.  The fucking nerve of this guy, to be so beautiful.

He lingered in the doorway, holding her eyes.

With every second that passed he was less and less adamant about avoiding her gaze, and it was throwing her into a whirlwind she could hardly take.

She tightened his tuxedo jacket around her naked body, crossing her legs.  “Clothes are in the wash.  Should be done in about ten minutes or so.  The heater is right next to the closet, so if I hang them right away, they should be dry by morning.”

He shifted, his hand going to the knot in his towel.  “Does the washroom not have a dryer?”

Her eyes fell to that knot.  “It was painful enough putting that beautiful suit in a washing machine.  Drying it would simply be too much to bear.”

“No need to be so diplomatic with a piece of cloth I’ll never wear again.”

She held her arm up.  The cuffs of his jacket hid her fingers.  “Thanks for letting me cover up with your jacket.”

“Like I said, I’ll never wear it again once I get home, so…”

She sat taller.  “Home?”

He sighed.  “Greenwich Village.”

She was stunned.  He’d given it to her.  She’d been expecting him to tell her to mind her own damn business, to look away from her, to do everything he could to disconnect.

“Sounds about right,” she said.  “A Greenwich boy.  Clean as a whistle on the outside, nothing but grit underneath.  Maybe even a few feline-sized rats hiding quietly in the shadows.  The kind that only show their faces on the darkest nights.”

“And where are you from?” Jack threw up a hand when she went to answer.  “Don’t even tell me.”  He chuckled.  “Bronx.”

She clicked her tongue.

His smile grew smug.  “How did I know?” He laughed.  “Bedford?”

“Fordham, you fucking jerk off.”

“Fordham,” he roared.  “So
your
rats don’t even hide in the shadows.  They come at you in broad daylight, nose to nose, demanding your cut of the rent.”

She looked away from him with a roll of her eyes.  “Yeah, it’s easy to laugh from your billowy cloud in The Village.  It’s not so funny when you’re living it.”

Jack pushed off the doorsill and made his way into the room.

Watching him, she lifted the iPhone she’d placed on the desk.

He froze at the sight of it.

“This was in the pocket of your slacks.  Thank god I found it or the machine would’ve destroyed it,” she said.  “No money, no ID, and literally, bleeding from the head.  You have two hundred missed calls.  Surely there is, at least, one person in this bunch who can help you.”  She held his phone out to him.

He didn’t budge.  “No, thank you.”

“Two hundred missed calls. 
Two hundred. 
I’ve never seen anything like it.”

He came to a stop in the middle of the room, sighing.

“You told me you didn’t even
have your phone.”

“I lied.”

“I believed.  You must be a good lawyer.”

“I’m a
great
lawyer.”

“We just almost died.  There’s not a single person in the world you want to call right now?”

“Is there anyone
you
want to call right now?  If there is, I’m happy to unlock it for you.”  He held out his hand to take the phone.

She straightened, letting her phone clad hand drop into her lap.

He held his hands out at his side.  “Look at that.  We do have something in common.”

Her eyes fell, and she stood from the chair, moving to the edge of the bed.  She held the phone in both hands, staring down at the lock screen.

His voice came over her shoulder.  “See; this is a two-way street, doll.  You don’t get to ask me presumptuous questions, and then turn your nose up when I throw the same questions right back at you.”

She looked at him just as he came up next to her.  “Don’t call me doll.”

He fought a smile.  “You just have such a baby face…” His eyes fell.

She watched it happen.  Watched his walls fall and then reconstruct themselves, over and over.  He must be so exhausted, she thought. Imploding the same towering walls, over and over, just to turn around and rebuild them all over again.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, insinuating I need to be humbled,” she said. “You’re the most arrogant person I’ve ever met.”

“I am not arrogant.”

She howled, meeting his eyes over her shoulder.  They held each other’s gazes for a moment before she looked down at the supplies on the bed.  “Sit down already so I can get a look at your head.”

Holding the towel at his waist, he plopped down on the bed and swept up the remote that sat on a tray in the middle of it.

Nina went to work on his gash as he clicked on the TV.  Over her shoulder, she heard a news channel talking about the hurricane.

“Upgraded.  Again.”  Jack breathed.  “Category 4.”

“Jesus.”  Nina froze in the middle of cleaning his wound, turning to watch the television as well.

Images of bridges collapsed, bodegas submerged, and trains flooded sent her heart into a state of panic.  “That’s my train.” She nodded to the television, where the 6 train station looked like an underwater graveyard.  The news station rolled footage from one train to the next, Uptown to Brooklyn, all underwater.  “Do you see your train?”

“I don’t take the train.”

She almost whopped him across the head.  “Of course you don’t.”

“Looks like the rats in Greenwich Village are going to start charging me rent too.”

“They sure as hell aren’t living in the Subway anymore.  The ones that haven’t drowned anyway.”

The female newscaster’s voice carried over a photo of the departure screen at JFK airport.  ‘CANCELLED’ dominated the screen in bold red letters, zooming down, line for line, until the word was reduced to nothing more than a glaring red blur.

“Looks familiar,” Jack grumbled, recalling the departure screen at Chicago International.

“
If you had a fancy Manhattan vacation planned this week, you don’t anymore.  JFK, LaGuardia and Newark airport have all closed, indefinitely, with extended ground stops that could easily stretch into next week.”

“Shit,” Jack spat.

“Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and even the MTA have terminated service as well, and as of this broadcast, have no immediate news on when service may resume.  New York City hasn’t seen this kind of devastation since the early 1900s.  Experts say it could take years of rebuilding before The Big Apple is back to the city we know and love.”

“It took five hours to bring NYC to its knees?  This is insane.”

Soon, they were sitting side by side on the bed, Jack’s wound still unattended, leaning forward on their knees. They took in one image after the other of their decimated city.

“This is going to take months…
years
to reverse,” Jack said.

“We’re never going to get home.”  She looked at him.  “I suppose that’s good news for you.  Doesn’t seem like you’re itching to get there anyway.”

“Likewise.”  He blinked lazily and met her eyes.

Her gaze fell to his lips.  His did the same to hers.  Something zapped through her, and she leaped to her feet, making the bed bounce under her quick departure.

“I don’t want to be there, I
have
to be there,” she said, moving away from the bed, away from that
feeling
.

She waited for him to ask her why. 
Why
did she have to be in New York so badly?

He didn’t.

After pulling herself together, she returned to the bed and went back to his wound.

Minutes later she was pressing a disinfectant wipe into the cut.  Now that he’d showered, she could see that it wasn’t deep—definitely not hospital worthy—but the kind of tiny cut that could bleed for days.

“All of us here at Channel 5 News send our prayers to the victims of the historic Hurricane Nina as she continues wreaking havoc, her devastation claiming nearly the entire northeastern region.  Back to you, John…”

“Hurricane Nina.”  Jack winced at the persistent sting of the wipes.  “How ironic.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“A destructive cyclone swoops in, unforeseen, and wipes out every poor cad with the misfortune of being in its way.  There is no other name to call it but Nina…”  He lifted his eyes to hers.  “
Nina
.”

“I’d advise you not to fuck with a woman who is handling your pretty face, Aries.”

A smirk tugged the corner of his mouth.

“Go ahead and smile,” she said.  “It takes a lot of hard work to be so consistently miserable, you know.  It’s so much easier to just smile.”

“Taking the easy way out is what’s wrong with the world today.  The easy way is rarely the right way.”

“You sound like an old ass man.  Like you’re about two seconds from pulling a camo-print Vietnam Veteran cap out of your back pocket and plopping it on your head while blaming all your bullshit problems on Michelle and Barack Obama.”

“Like I said, the easy way is rarely the right way.”

“Because the right way is
obviously
to walk around spitting poison in everyone’s eyes.”

“Obviously.”

“Who broke you, Aries?”

Jack’s eyes fell back to the TV, and the slow smile that had been spreading across his face fell with it.

“Ah.” Nina watched it happen, tossing wipe after wipe, all of which were soaked in his blood.  “Is it the same woman you’re running from?  Is she the one who broke you?”

His lips tightened.

“If you had any idea how much your face talks, you wouldn’t work so hard shutting the whole world out.  Your face just welcomes it right back in.  Your face snitches on you.”

He sighed.

“What’s your face telling me?  Well, I’m glad you asked, Aries.”  She ripped open the largest bandage in the tin.  “Your face is telling me that you found yourself a woman just like me.  A cyclone who swept in unforeseen, and wiped you out.  A natural disaster who managed to blast open your hard shell just enough to get a peek at the pearl gleaming underneath. And, for whatever reason, she threw it back.”

Slowly, he lifted his eyes back to hers.

“And you don’t have the damnedest clue why.”  She began easing the bandage over as much of the cut as she could, careful not to catch his hair.  “Do you?”

Jack lifted his eyebrows.

“Don’t move your face,” she warned.

“Please finish.”

“Have I struck a nerve?”

“Only every single nerve that has
ever
existed inside of me since the day I was born.  Twice.”

She laughed.

***

After tending to that petulant Adonis and his oozing wound, Nina couldn’t help moaning as the hot shower water smashed against her skin.  It felt like heaven on earth as it soaked her hair, flattening it to her face and seizing every inch of her body.  She closed her eyes and stepped directly under the spray, trying to push the vision of that Aries lawyer—and the white towel clinging to his strong waist by a hair—out of her mind.

She couldn’t.  After soaping her hair and body from head to toe, washing the residue of the day’s events away, she went to work trying to get rid of the residue that man had left on her from the moment she’d laid eyes on him.  There wasn’t enough soap in the world to get that job done, let alone in the half-f shower dispenser that was one good swipe from coming off the grimy tiles of that shower wall completely.

Bracing her hand on the wall, she allowed her eyes to flutter shut as the shower water splattered her face, and she pushed her fingers past her belly button and over the lips of her pounding pussy.

She bit her bottom lip as she pushed her fingers inside, letting them slide over her slippery walls.  The pleasure claimed her as she pictured the unsmiling face that had left her so wet and ready.  As her orgasm built with each stroke, she couldn’t help but wonder if the moisture on her forehead was a result of the hot shower water or the natural condensation that accompanied her orgasm, so powerful it hit her like a bulldozer and nearly brought her to her knees.

***

After brushing her teeth with the plastic wrapped, mini toothbrushes in the bathroom, Nina carefully put the brush back in the plastic and emerged.  She caught eyes with Jack across the room.  He’d switched out the towel for his black boxers, and hadn’t thought it necessary to put on his undershirt.  In the midst of hanging their wet clothes in the closet, he looked over his shoulder and caught her eyes, but Nina couldn’t hold his gaze.  Not when his bare back was beckoning her, so wide and rigid, covered in strong lines that he didn’t even have to flex to bring to fruition.  He looked like someone had carved him into existence, and she had to look away.