Page 30 of Not So Goode

Toying with her braid, looking half-sober.

Thoughtful.

Damn, damn, damn.

I ripped my gaze away from those deep baby blues before I lost my soul in them.

Shit, this was bad.

The look in her eyes told me she remembered every word that had passed between us. God, why did she have to rally? Why couldn’t she just stay passed out and forget I’d told her she was perfect?

But it hadn’t been a lie, or even an exaggeration. Not at all. The truth was she was purely breathtaking, and that was the honest to god response my soul gave me when her blue eyes locked on mine, just for a split second.

Oh god, I’m so fucked.

I looked away first…

Because I had a job to do, which required my full attention.

Not because I was scared of what I saw in her half-drunk eyes.

Nope. Wasn’t that. Not at all.

5

Charlie

Imore than half wished I’d been able to stay passed out. At least that way, I’d have been able to forget a little longer how I’d acted.

What had happened.

Those nasty men, their nasty hands.

Pinching, grabbing.

The memory of the harassment, however, as gross and nauseating as it was, was eclipsed by the arrival of Crow.

I will never, ever, for as long as I live, forget that moment.

One of my harassers was yanked backward as if by shepherd’s crook in a Merry Melodies cartoon. Yank. A massive, scared fist hammered down, and then hell broke loose. Bloody, wrecking hell disguised as a sinfully sexy man. If he was even a mere man. If he told me he was a shapeshifter from a Sherrilyn Kenyon novel, I would have believed him.

Six feet tall, broad shouldered, narrow hips and a wedge waist. Hard, heavy slabs of muscle sheathed in dark weather-leathered Native American skin—his heritage was written all over him. His short messy hair as black as a wing of his namesake, the hawkish angle of his nose, his cheekbones, his eyes. His bearing, his demeanor. Even his smooth low quiet powerful voice. He wore faded, tattered, tight black jeans over tall, thick black leather boots with silver buckles on the sides. A leather vest was unbuttoned and open over bare skin—and god, his body.

Now, my whole life I’ve read romance books. Since I was a preteen girl awash with hormones and budding body parts, I have devoured romance novels of all kinds. You read about the heroine seeing the hero for the first time and her mouth watering. Maybe even a phrase like “her delicate center coiling with low, insistent heat.”

I always thought that language was melodramatic bullshit to make the story more interesting.

Nope.

It’s real.

My mouth? Watering.

The delicate center at the apex of my thighs? Oh yeah, definitely coiling with low, insistent heat.

One look at him, and my legs pressed together. Heat gathered, throbbing dull and hot, pulsating—NEEDneedNEEDneedNEED.

God, I was still wasted, but at least there was only one of everything—if I focused and moved slowly.