Crystal Green - Roped In

It felt as if she’d always been here, waiting.

“What the hell is this?” she finally said in her own edged whisper as she held that note.

Either Nicki was playing the innocent or she was truly flummoxed. He was going to go with the latter.

“Candace,” he said, thinking that he should’ve known better. “She must’ve been setting us up. She wrote that note and put it in my pocket.”

Nicki was already out of the bed, the covers wrapped around her, even though she still had most of her clothing on. She picked up a TV remote from her nightstand.

“Nic—” he started to say.

She threw it at him and he dodged. At the same time, he scooped his hat off the floor.

“Can we be civilized about this?” he asked.

“Civilized?” Even their harsh whispers seemed to rock the house. “This is beyond civil.”

She searched her nightstand for something else to throw, and he darted over to her before she could destroy her entire room.

He’d clasped one of her wrists in his hand, and he could swear that his skin against hers set them both to sizzling.

His cock gave an agonizing thud, so he let go of her and she backed away, as if rocked hard, too.

“I understand why you’re upset.”

“Just what do you think I am, for you to come over here and…?”

He offered a grin—one that usually got him out of scrapes—and shrugged.

Cheeks flushing even more, she tightened the covers around her, but that only served to push up her breasts. Every move she made echoed in his groin, which was still pounding, killing him.

Nicki made a “come on” gesture with her fingers, so he prepared to explain it all.

“When a woman invites a man in,” he said, “it’s hard for him to say no. I took the note at face value.”

“But I didn’t invite you here.”

“By God, Nicki, I’m sorry.”

Her chest kept heaving, her skin going redder.

Then it hit him. Nicki hadn’t exactly kicked him out of bed right away, even though she hadn’t been expecting a man to sneak up on her in costume. In fact, it’d been quite a spell before she’d come out of the whole scenario.

“Nicki,” he said softly, “even if you didn’t write that note, did you want me to come here?”

She made as if she were going to grab the pillow from the bed and throw it at him, but then she stopped and plopped down on the mattress.

He’d hit a target, and it was as if the bull’s-eye was ringing in him, too.

“Listen,” he said, “if you’d told me at any time to get out, I would’ve.”

“I was half-asleep when it all started.”

That made him feel even worse, and she must’ve seen it in the way he wiped a hand over his face.

“Nicki…”

“No.” She sighed. “Jeez, I actually believe you when you say that being here was a mistake.”

The way she said “mistake”…

Tentatively, he came nearer to the bed. “When I found you sleeping, I thought it was a part of the act suggested in that note.”

When she looked up at him with those big green eyes, his heart almost broke. There was something he couldn’t figure out, almost as if he was hurting her by explaining everything.

Nicki gestured toward the door again, as if trying to avoid the same questions he was struggling with. “The door’s waiting for you.”

Dismissed, just as so many others had done to him, the rascal of the county.

Her gesture got him straight through the heart. He almost held his hand up to it, because it was as if she hadn’t needed to put that hole in him before seeing through him.

Silence wedged between them as he kept right on aching. And it wasn’t just in his nethers, either. He was dying to touch her hair. Dying to see what she would do if he just reached out to her, stroking a finger over her cheek, her collarbone.

Damned hormones. Damned blood still pounding through him, driving him to distraction and agony.

“Will you tell me one thing?” he asked, unable to help himself.

“Depends on the question.”

“How much of a dream was it?”

She pulled those covers around her even tighter.

“Nicki?” he asked softly.

During her hesitation, he found his answer: at some point, even if she’d been sleeping when he’d come in, she’d known what was going on—that it’d been real.

And she’d let it continue.

She stood from the bed. “You really should go.”

An inexplicable urge captured him—a draw that he’d never encountered before. Was it because she was the one woman who didn’t seem to want him?

All his life, he’d chased and chased, even while running from Pine Junction. Chasing had been the one thing that had occupied him, entertained him.

But this wasn’t a mere game. Nicki had been a good girl, and he always drew the line at those, because good girls were trouble.

So why was he still here?

“That outlaw thing did something for you,” he said.

From the way she whipped her gaze over to him, he knew that his aim had been true.

“You don’t need to worry about it,” she said, “because it’s never going to happen again.”

“You sure about that?” Shane asked. “Because I’d venture to say that you were pretty enthusiastic this time.”

Nicki stared at him, her gaze wide.

“What other fantasies do you have, Nicki?” he asked, just daring her to tell him.

NICKI HELD HER BREATH.

Other fantasies.

She thought of her favorites—vampires in moody foreign castles, storm-tossed shipwreck islands and faraway desert tents. All fake, all so appealing, anyway.

She wouldn’t dare confess any of it, though.

But looking at Shane now, with his chiseled features, deep blue eyes and imposing frame garbed in black, she longed for…more. She yearned to be taken to another world, to have his hands and mouth all over her, as if she were the only person who drove him to the intensity she’d experienced in him tonight.

“That’s none of your business,” she said.

Nicki didn’t have the heart to utter the rest: Were you here for just the sex or because you thought you’d be having sex with me…?

As he stood there, he looked just as needful as she felt, his gaze a little hazy as he kept watching her.

Her pulse jerked, and she loosened her grip on the covers.

It was as if she was in that outlaw dream/fantasy again—a place where she’d had no responsibility, where she wasn’t the Nicki who had so much going on in reality.

But she’d been nothing more than a mistake tonight, and even if he wanted to talk about fantasies now, she wouldn’t give in.

Nicki pointed toward her door.

He paused, and she wondered what was going through his mind, especially since he seemed…

Was “rejected” the right word?

He—Shane Carter—the one all the women had gathered round tonight at the party?

Before she could absorb that, he fixed his hat back on his head, nodding to her. When he grinned, it was as if he was trying to show that it didn’t matter, but it struck her as wrong.

“Again,” he said, “sorry about the trouble.” He paused. “And, if it makes any difference, I’m glad it happened. Real glad.”

Glad?

With that piece of news, she watched him go through her door, then shut it behind him. Her pulse fluttered like a dying thing as she sat on her bed, her brain finally catching up to everything that’d just happened.

Shane Carter, asking her about her fantasies, seeming as if he would make more than a few of them come true for her.

Shane Carter, glad that he’d been fooled into being here, in this bed…

Downstairs, she thought she heard the door close.

As her skin kept tingling, Nicki lay down on the mattress. And, even though she knew he’d gone, she kept listening for any footfalls outside her door, wishing she would hear the outlaw coming to his hideaway just one more time before the sun rose.