She hummed a little noise and my balls instantly tightened at the thought of what it would feel like if her mouth was wrapped around my cock and she was doing the same thing.
“They should have someone there to help them when they want out. That’s what’s so awful about this city. Once you’re in, there doesn’t seem to be any way out. A girl can get on a stage and be lured by all that money she can make stripping when she’s eighteen or nineteen, but what’s after that? Suddenly she’s thirty and all she knows is selling sex and the streets and what shot does she have for anything else?”
“Are you speaking from experience?” If she ever took her clothes off for money, entire countries would end up broke.
“No. Just from what I heard when they were in my chair and then from watching how quickly my sister got sucked into it all. There is no escape once the Point has you.”
She leaned her head back on the couch and shifted her eyes up to the ceiling. I thought I saw a sheen of moisture dance across the navy-colored surface but then she blinked and it was gone.
“It sucks,” I said. She tilted her head to look at me. “The way everything went down with your sister, that sucks. But you tried to help her, tried to save her, and that’s what you should focus on.”
She made a noise low in her throat and shoved up off the couch. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked down at me with eyes that went flinty hard. “It wasn’t enough. What time do you want to head out tomorrow?”
The quick change in conversation forced me to switch gears. “I have to work in the morning, so when I get back.”
“Are you actually going to come back after your shift tomorrow?”
So my avoidance tactics hadn’t gone unnoticed. “Yes. I’ll try and be here before five. You really do need some clothes that fit.” Brysen had run a few things up after we had been camped out for a couple days and they fit slightly better, but no girl alive seemed to have those ridiculously long legs or the same kind of curves Reeve was working with up top. Brysen’s stuff covered her up more than my teenaged neighbor’s, but not enough that I didn’t get an eyeful every time I looked at her.
She linked her fingers together and lifted her arms up over her head in a way that pulled the hem of her tank top up over the indent of her belly button and lifted the edge of her tiny shorts so high I didn’t have to use much imagination to envision what all the secret, soft parts of her looked like. Like I needed any more incentive to keep thinking about her and sex when my mind and attention should be anywhere else.
“I can cover it all up, it’s not going to change the fact that you want me and are angry about it.”
She twirled on her foot and flounced back up the stairs. If there had been a single door in the loft I knew she would have slammed it to make her point.
She was right. I did want her. I had wanted her from the second she came into my precinct and admitted to me that she had solicited Novak for murder. I wanted her when she tearfully told me about her part in Dovie’s abduction. I wanted her when the marshals had whisked her away and I never thought I would see her again. And yes, I wanted her now in the middle of this charade that had life and death woven into the fabric of it. I wasn’t angry that I wanted her, lusted after her. She was beautiful, slick, and all kinds of street-smart. She looked at me like she understood what made me tick and didn’t care that I acted like it was me against the entire city most of the time. I was fighting a losing battle every single day and that essentially made me a loser, but she didn’t seem to see that. There were a lot of reasons to want her, to find her attractive and ultimately irresistible.
There was more than one major reason that every time my blood kicked in response to her, guilt and shame roared to life inside of me. Of course I had an issue with the fact that she was an admitted criminal. She was one of the people I was trying to protect the city from. No matter her intentions, no matter if she was trying to use one bad guy to get rid of another bad guy, she hadn’t done it by legal means. But there was also the fact that the monsters of my past, my burden of beasts that I kept buried so deep and dark inside of me that I tended to forget they were there, woke up and started to scream when she was near. There was no more ignoring them and the way they strained against the skin of the man I tried so hard to be.
Being infatuated with a woman that had a history of taking the law into her own hands would be my absolute undoing, and if I couldn’t keep those feelings in a box there was going to be nothing left of me. I would have nothing left to stand against my inner animal, and it would chew me alive from the inside out and I would be just like the rest of the people lost and alone, just waiting for the city to claim them. I couldn’t let that happen.
I wasn’t angry that I wanted her, I was terrified that I did.
I lay back down on the couch and took one of the decorative pillows and smashed it over my face so I could shout every dirty word I could think of into it. It was already a long night and now it was going to seem endless.
“YOU AREN’T GOING TO try any of that on?” I hated shopping. Hated it. Most men I knew just considered it a necessary evil when they had a woman in their life they needed to keep happy. I only went shopping for myself when I ran out of underwear or needed new shoes and stuff for work. Most of the jeans and T-shirts I wore I had had since the police academy back in the day and that worked just fine for me. Reeve was an anomaly. She seemed to dislike the act just as much as I did.
There wasn’t anything close to a mall in the Point, in fact most retailers had pulled up stakes years ago after one too many armed robberies. So we had driven to the outlet shops that were on the outskirts of the city. I braced for hours of torture. Much to my surprise she blazed through the stores like she was on a mission to get in and out as quickly as possible. Her eyes kept darting around like she was expecting someone to jump out of the clothing racks and grab her, and as a result she had an armful of clothing she was marching toward the checkout counter with without having tried a stitch of it on.