Page 99 of Chad's Chase
“You’re saying, if someone tries to attack me right now, you’ll put a bullet in ‘em for me?”
Swig. “Yep.”
Another grin, his eyes burning with something licentiously fierce. This Sambo person viewed me a lot more than just a job.
His hand disappeared into his jacket pocket, then came back out with a mint. “You got any idea whatsoever how grippingly stunning you are, Jhay?” He unwrapped the mint and popped it in his mouth.
Mowing down the uncouth urge to roll my eyes, I raised my eyes back to the basketball game.
Sambo cleared his throat to steal my attention back. “You’re probably saying I sound cliché, but sweetie, clichés are clichés for a reason. Really, you should be walking beauty pageants or runways, not…this.”
“Do you hit on all your assignments?”
“Not all my assignments look like you.”
Downing the last of my beer, I swiveled my bar stool around to face him, then leaned forward and rubbed my palm up his thick hunk of a thigh, deciding to fuck with him. “So, you think I’m pretty, huh?”
Sambo’s Adam’s apple bobbed as his hot, blue gaze dipped to my cleavage. “You fucking with me?”
Leaning closer so my breasts were pressing against his bicep, I smoothed my hand further up to his crotch where I found him predictably hard and straining against his jeans. “Well, don’t you want to befuckedwith?”
I rubbed my palm over his erection in a teasing circle, and his eyes hooded as he made a subtle thrust of his hips upward. “You stillhis? Like you proclaimed today? ‘Cause I want you, Jhay Byrd. I’ve wanted you since I saw your pictures and I—”
His sentence went unfinished, as his big, heavy body was yanked backwards off the bar stool. Before I could register what was going down, Chad had Sambo on the floor, flat on his back, his right foot fixed under Sambo’s chin, pressing down on the man’s thick neck.
“Was I speaking fucking Lebanese today when I told you not to touch what’s mine?”
Sambo struggled, choking. “I didn’t.Shetouchedme.”
“Do your damn job from a distance,” Chad warned, “or next time I won’t be asking permission to kill you.”
Kicking the man under his chin, Chad left his prone body on the floor, and in two stomps he was grabbing my arm and dragging me off the bar stool.
“I thought you said you’d defend me if I got attacked,” Sambo grunted from the ground with a slight lift of his lips in a teasing smile, his teeth coated in blood.
I hadn’t the chance to respond, because Chad was hauling me through the front door.
“Let go of me, Chad.” The words were spoken half-heartedly, though. Plus I wasn’t even struggling. Because, should I be honest with myself, I not only knew he would find me, Iwantedhim to. Not like I was hiding. This shit I was trained at. So if I’d wanted to run from Chad, I would’ve ditched his car, hot-wire and steal another, and would’ve been miles at yonder by now. Not drive round and round the same vicinity he was in for hours.
I knew this. He knew this. Which explained his manhandling me right now like a possessive, over-jealous, apoplectic boyfriend. He knew I loved him, knew I’d been waiting for him to find me, and he knew, no matter what, I didn’t really want him to let me go.
He didn’t let me go.
The stab wound I’d inflicted seemed to have been treated and covered with a gauze, because there was a noticeable square raise on his shoulder under that tight black T-shirt, at the same spot I’d stabbed him.
No doubt his precious little Clementine nursed it.
Chad all but drove me like a car down the unlit dirt lot, stopping at the Lexus. “Keys.”
“What?” I asked, stalling, just so I could stare at him some more while he was too busy being mad at me to realize how madlyin love with him I was. “How did you get here?”
“Your brother.”
“Oh.”
“Keys, Jhay,” he gritted out.
I tipped my head back to look more squarely up at his angry face, his eyes and the blackness of the night being one and the same. “They’re…in my front pocket.”
