Page 237 of Screwged for Christmas

Zahara wound her hands around Holden and Riley. “You boys let him go. He has some work to do.”

Both looked at him but didn’t say anything else. Didn’t have to. Both his brother and the new brother that came into the family with their union with Zahara understood instantly.

He turned and palmed the handle to the door. When he was on the job he would become focused like a laser beam. He could feel tunnel vision coming on now and one black-haired green-eyed angel was his sole focus.

“Hey, Damon.”

He turned back to Zahara where she stood in the kitchen with her men. Her new family. Something he wanted to give Ivy if she would only let him show her what that kind of happiness meant.

“Yeah?”

Zahara crossed the apartment and grabbed a scarf he’d seen her work on here and there when she would visit the bar. She wound it around his neck and waited to speak until he raised his gaze to hers. “Be gentle with her. She’s trying her best and when she is ready, she’ll let you in. Just show her the love I know you have in your heart and she’ll be unable to deny the gravitational pull you Savage men have over a woman.”

He nodded. Before Ivy his heart didn’t want love and he was perfectly fine with hooking up with one-night stands and tourists that liked an adventure with a mountain man. Now he only wanted her.

“There’s one more thing you should know. Be ready for her to run. I did it and if Loren and Riley hadn’t stopped me I wouldn’t be here.”

“Yes, you would. We would have crawled our way to Texas to find you and beg you to take us as your husbands.”

He wouldn’t let her get that far without a fight. He was foolish to try to fight the connection he felt and looking back, it was ridiculous to even try. He wanted her plain and simple. Now he had to peel back the layers for her to see them without the jaded past blocking the full view.

“That’s an entirely different conversation, boys,” she chastised with a gentle slap to Riley’s shoulder.

He excused himself and stepped out into the cold. Fat flurries whipped through the biting cold air and kicked into an angry whirlwind that mirrored the chaos going on in his head.

He slammed the truck door closed and sat there in the dark as the snowstorm raged just beyond the windshield.

He tightened his fingers around the wheel. Fire and determination dripped into his bloodstream and wouldn’t stop the more he thought about the smell of Ivy that clung to him. The fear of losing her. The heat of her body against this and the way she moaned as he took her.

She was his. No matter what he had to do, she would believe him if it took his last breath to convince her.

How the hell did he get through to a woman that didn’t want his help? Didn’t understand the love of a family, and sure the hell didn’t want anything to do with Alaska?

He scrubbed a hand down his face and brushed off the snowflakes that landed in his hair and used the back of the scarf to dry off the little drops of water that clung to his hands. He paused. He smiled. Why, of course.

Looking out over the hood, he pointed the truck back to town and gunned it as a new plan took hold.

CHAPTER 9

Dodging Damon would be hard, but she would slip out the back door and let the darkness swallow her. Drake said fifteen minutes and to meet him at the tiny airstrip a mile outside of town. She worried about the snowstorm but he reassured her it wasn’t anything to ground them.

Yet.

In another hour or so she would be screwed and snowbound for another day, maybe longer. Much longer.

Checking to see that no one was in the hallway—no one being Damon—she slipped from her door, leaving behind the key above the frame where he’d pulled it down her first night.

“I had a pussycat named Ivy. She was as black as your hair and just as skittish.”

She turned on her heel and stilled. Yellow eyes cut through the dark hallway, and she suddenly felt like a trapped animal. “I’m not an animal and I’m not skittish. I just don’t like being cornered.”

“Same thing.”

“Is not. What are you doing here?”

“I live here, remember?”

She took a step back as Damon advanced down the hall closer toward her. If he touched her, she didn’t know if she would be strong enough to leave. He called her his soul mate before leaving earlier and she’d spent the whole damn time packing thinking on those two words.

---