Heartbreaker: A Filthy Dirty Love Novel

He dropped a hand to the brick wall behind her, pressing his forehead against hers, giving himself the minute he needed to recover.

“Maddox,” she whispered.

When he lifted his head, her worried eyes met his, her hand coming to cup his face again. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, leaning away, out of her reach. “You should head back inside.”

“Okay, hold up,” she retorted, grabbing her pants and wiggling back into them. “You go from that to asking me to leave with your dick still out? What in the hell is going on with you?”

“Nothing. I’m fine,” he told her, and himself. “We could get caught out here. That’s something neither of us wants. I’ll be there in a few minutes. Promise.” All lies. Nothing was fine.

“Okay, I’m going to believe what you’re telling me,” she said gently before rising on her tiptoes to kiss his mouth, softly, intimately.

It wasn’t a kiss he was used to, and that was what made Joss so different. She held confidence with him. She didn’t shy away from his strong personality. She met it head-on and never let him push her away. She melted into him as if her soul undeniably trusted him, and that’s what kept him coming back for more.

He couldn’t ever forget her.

When she’d broken the kiss, he reached for his pants, pulling them up over his hips. Then she said, “Don’t be long, okay? Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, surely we can handle one night of keeping our hands off each other.”

He faked a smile because she smiled at him. She thought this was passion. She thought he couldn’t control his lust around her, but she was wrong. You are mine, sugar. And that was the fucking problem. Not only because of their jobs and the complication that came with that. But because he didn’t love women. He didn’t need them. Because the second he did, it might make his mother leaving a little more real, a little more raw, a little more of something he had to face and deal with.

When she slid out from under his arm, he kept his hands pressed against the brick wall, knowing if he didn’t, he’d grab her again and fuck her until she drained him dry. He dropped his head, catching his breath, hearing the clicking of her heels moving off in the distance.

Below his feet lay his wallet on the damp pavement, wide open and showing his bank and credit cards. He’d known many men who kept a photo of their women in their wallets. He’d never understood that desire before. The need to make sure someone was always with you.

Until now.

Chapter 11

When Joss had left for work this morning, the sky was bright and sunny, the wind barely there. Her mind was on Maddox and the way he’d changed last night at the pub. Something seemed different about him—conflicted for sure. She kept telling herself to stop thinking about what was on his mind and just keep enjoying the sex he gave her, leaving it at that. But her mind kept circling back to him, every damn time. She figured her day would be spent in a vicious cycle, wondering over Maddox and telling herself not to, over and over again. That was until a couple of hours into her shift when everything changed.

Hours upon hours Joss had spent learning about tragic deaths at the academy. She’d even learned how to handle tragedies with the greatest of care. Though when she arrived first on the scene of the three-car accident, her training couldn’t have properly prepared her for the real thing.

The call had come in mere moments before, and Joss had only been a couple of minutes away from the accident. She put her police car into park and flicked her siren off, but left the lights still flashing. She’d parked her car sideways across the road, blocking any other cars from getting close, remembering all the training she’d been given.

While she exited her police car and moved to the scene at the T-intersection, a sense of calm descended. “Stay back,” she ordered to the crowd, who had gathered on the corner of the road. “It’s not safe. Stay back.”

The crowd stepped back onto the sidewalk, and some even began returning to the burger joint they’d obviously come from. That’s when Joss noticed all the phones pointed at the scene, filming the destruction that had happened on this beautiful sunny Saturday morning. She stayed focused on her job, ignoring the phones now pointed at her, and scanned the area.

Across the road was an abandoned gas station, with a body shop kitty-corner to the burger joint. There was no sense of danger now, but as she took in the mangled cars in front of her, she suspected that death had come calling.

Pieces of ripped apart metal were scattered from one side of the road to the other. The smell of burnt-chemical from the deployed airbags lingered heavily in the air when she approached the first car, and the scent of engine coolant from an obviously cracked radiator wrinkled her nose.