Vengeance (The Protectors 5)

“Wait,” Brennan called and then he was catching up to me.

I didn’t wait, but as I reached for the door handle, Brennan placed himself between me and my car. I stepped back only because I didn’t trust myself to be standing so close to him and pierced him with a sharp look. “What?” I asked, not bothering to hide my irritation. Only problem was, my irritation had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the way my body was reacting to his.

I’d seen plenty of my fair share of gorgeous men, had probably fucked more than my fair share, but Brennan…he had no equal to any of the stable of men I’d been with in the last few years. He wasn’t quite as tall as my own 6’2 frame, but he was damn close. He wasn’t a mass of hard muscle, but he was definitely fit. The jeans he was wearing were loose fitting but still accentuated his tight ass and trim waist. His white polo shirt fit perfectly across his lightly muscled chest. I couldn’t help but think that with his styled black hair that was a little longer on top than the sides and his bright green eyes, he looked like he’d just stepped off the cover of a magazine.

Brennan’s smile had faded at my brusque inquiry, but he didn’t move and I felt another bout of lust surge through me. Not meek. Definitely not meek. God, that shouldn’t turn me on even more, but it did.

It absolutely did.

“You never came back,” he murmured.

“What?” I asked stupidly as I tried to get control of my raging libido. We were standing in the driveway of a house belonging to one of the men on my team, Maverick “Mav” James. Mav and his young lover, Eli Galvez, had recently rented the small house near the University of Washington campus and he’d asked me to stop by to review some cases. Mav would be taking a secondary role for a little while so that he wouldn’t have to travel and leave Eli, who was still struggling with the trauma of being repeatedly sexually assaulted by his stepfather several years earlier. As the second on cases, Mav would help with the logistics while the primary on the case actually took out the mark. It was a role I was glad to hand over to him because I was eager to get out of Seattle and return to the field. I’d joined the underground vigilante organization two years earlier out of a desperate need to maintain my hold on my sanity, after the events of one cool summer day much like today, and I often found that if I didn’t have a case to focus on, things went bad for me very quickly.

“Your visit that night,” Brennan said. “I thought you’d come back…I wanted…”

Brennan fell silent, but when his eyes fell to my mouth, I knew it wasn’t because he couldn’t find the words he was looking for.

Fuck, this was bad.

Because even as Brennan lifted his eyes to meet mine, I saw it. He wasn’t freaked out by the invisible current that was running between us…he was intrigued by it.

“I’ve got things to do,” I bit out.

I wasn’t exactly known for my sunny disposition, but my harsh tone seemed to have little effect on Brennan because he didn’t move.

“I never got a chance to thank you,” Brennan murmured. “I didn’t think I’d get the chance,” he added quietly.

I knew the polite thing to do would have been to accept his thanks, ask him how he was feeling – all that chit chat shit people did. But I’d never been that guy and I wasn’t going to start now. Better that the kid see that so he’d stop looking at me like I hung the moon. Or like he’d have no problem with me pinning him against my car so I could finally satisfy my need to taste him.

“It was nothing,” I muttered and then I ignored my need to keep some space between us and reached past him to open the door. But he didn’t move and all I’d managed to do was line our bodies up so that there were mere inches separating us. I heard Brennan suck in a breath. It would take so little for me to lean in and brush my mouth over his. Fuck, he’d already parted his lips as if anticipating me doing just that.

“I need to go,” I said, though my voice sounded more desperate than commanding like I’d intended.

“I’m not letting you go,” Brennan whispered. His mouth was so close to mine that I could feel his breath fanning over me.

“What?” I asked as my heart lurched painfully in my chest.

“That’s what you said to me that day. You said you weren’t going to let me go. Do you remember?”