At this, he shakes his head without hesitation. Slowly. “Everyone else should be fucking nervous, baby. Not you.”
“I thought my manic giggling freaked you out.”
He huffs an incredulous laugh. “You have no idea how wrong you are.” He leans in, forearms flexing on the counter. “Give me the chance to prove it. Come to my truck.”
A tremor runs through my inner thighs, turning my juncture hot and confusingly damp, making it necessary to squeeze my legs together. “But I’m working.”
“The way you make me ache, Tatum…” He shifts in his seat, something hot and desperate blanketing his features. “It doesn’t give a shit about the rules.”
“I make you ache,” I repeat in a whisper.
All other sounds around me fade out, except for his voice. “You make me do a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Come over here and I’ll tell you.”
My feet are trapped in quicksand. I can’t move. Do I want to circle the counter and experience this man’s incredible hands on me once more? Yes. More than I want this comic book in my hands. More than I want anything. But there is a voice in the back of my mind warning me that I’m about to get a rude awakening. Warning me that there is more to this man than meets the eye. “I should probably stay over here,” I murmur, wetting my lips.
A dangerous light comes on in his eyes.
He crooks a finger at me. “Come here, Tatum.”
“Uh…”
“I can come back there, if you like.”
“Customers aren’t allowed back here.”
“Like I said, there are no rules when I’m aching like this.”
“Oh.”
My head is growing more muddled by the moment in the presence of his gruff intensity, but I’m thinking clearly enough to remember that if my boss comes in and there is a customer behind the counter, I will get fired. “No, I’ll come to you,” I eek out, setting down the comic carefully and brushing the wrinkles from my skirt.
Slowly, I start to make my to the opening in the counter—but I only make it three steps when Hoss lunges to his feet with a growl and strides there faster. “Can’t wait that long.”
I stop dead in my tracks and watch the human equivalent of a bull bearing down on me. I tilt my head back at his approach, stumbling back until my butt hits the metal refrigerated cabinets—and then he’s pressing me against it. Hard, with his hips. He’s gripping the sides of my skirt and yanking me up on my toes, his hips pinning me to the metal barrier. “Quit my job and made a lot of dangerous enemies to get back to this pussy, Tatum,” he rasps into my hair. “To get back to your giggle. Your beautiful face. Your soft skin. Don’t tease me.”
I can barely speak around the heart in my throat. “I’m not teasing,” I whimper.
“You tease me just by standing there. Crossing your legs and squeezing, like maybe you think I don’t notice, baby? I can see every one of those little goosebumps around your nipples. I can feel you wiggling around beneath me, laughing and squealing.” He fists my hair and draws my head back, baring his teeth against my lips. “God, you’re so deep in my head already and digging deeper, deeper, by the fucking second. So don’t tease me. Don’t do it. When I ask you to come here, please understand I’m on the verge of dying if I don’t touch you.”
My skin is made of molten lava, knees weakening. “I-I didn’t realize…”
“You didn’t realize I’m a lunatic? Neither did I. Not until I saw your picture. Now you’re day and night. You’re my day. You’re my night.”
“Picture?” In my mind, pages are flipping. We’ve gotten to the twist. I had an intuition in my stomach that I wasn’t seeing the full picture and now…now I’ve stumbled upon a clue, haven’t I? Comeback Girl would be slowly removing the hidden dagger from her bot. “What picture, Hoss?”
Clearly, he didn’t mean to let that slip. His nostrils flare and he slams his fist down on the counter behind me, rattling my nerves. “Goddammit, Tatum.”
I try to push away, but he hauls me even closer, bringing our mouths an inch apart. My toes are barely scraping the tile ground. “You are going to come out to my truck and listen to me. Calmly.”
“Like hell I am.”
“You are in no danger from me.” He tilts his hips, groans, then rams my hips up against the waist-level refrigerators. A hard protrusion is pressed up against the seam of my panties, and despite my well-founded fears, I can’t help wanting to rub my femininity all over it. “I don’t want to harm you,” he growls. “I want to worship you.”
“Maybe you say that to all your victims.”