Page 77 of Protecting What's Mine

“See, Dr. Mack? Even Sunny wants ice cream,” one of the very smart, manipulative boys pointed out.

She managed a weak smile. But when she looked up, Linc’s eyes were blazing into her as if he could see beneath this veneer of a competent adult. As if he could see the ugliness beneath her skin.

“Please, Dreamy?” he asked sweetly.

She couldn’t do anything about her past or its effect on the now. But she could say yes to ice cream and steal a tiny moment of fun. Even if it didn’t really belong to her.

“I guess we’re going for ice cream,” she said with forced brightness.

“Yes!” The ice cream celebration was as big as the one for the game.

“Hey, can we ride with you, Dr. Mack?” asked a dark-haired boy with dreamy brown eyes and a Gatorade stain on his jersey.

As a baffled Mack loaded up six baseball players—whose parents inexplicably trusted her with their kids’ lives—Linc pulled up next to her with Sunshine hanging out of the passenger window of his truck. The grin he sent her went straight to her gut.

She wished things could be different. Because she would love a side of big, blond, handsome trouble.

25

Linc watched as Mack powered through another set of chest flies on his weight bench, her walking boot propped up on a crate he’d liberated from his garage. She was a week out from her injury, and once the small-town charm of being looked in on and catered to had worn off, she was going as stir-crazy as his crew at the station.

In a week, they’d responded to four fender benders, three false alarms, and a cat stuck in a drainpipe. They’d completed every training scheduled, a new, boring record. Mack had spent the week pushing paper and wheeling herself around non-life-threatening illnesses and injuries at the clinic on a stool while her health care coworkers kept eagle eyes on her to make sure she wasn’t overdoing it.

But he was picking up on something that ran deeper than just impatience. There was something brewing beneath Mackenzie’s very attractive surface. It felt like a dark cloud of thick, black smoke that hung over them, between them. Obscuring his view.

She blew out a breath at the top, then lowered the dumbbells slowly.

“I meditated today. For fifteen freaking minutes,” she complained.

“That’s not a good thing?” he asked, gritting his teeth and working his way through triceps dips on the rack.

She sat up, let the weights drop to the floor. “I had fifteen freaking minutes to spare because I’ve got nothing else to do. I’ve read every medical journal I’d banked for the last six months. Caught up on all the podcasts I follow. I don’t have any yard work to do because your guys mowed for me again yesterday—thank you again, by the way. I can’t run. I can’t take air shifts. All I can do is stare at those daffodil yellow walls and write prescriptions for UTIs and hay fever.”

“Yeah, yeah. Quit whining. My guys are in the home stretch of their hair growing challenge,” Linc complained. “Al lost another bet and had to shave off one of his eyebrows. The women are measuring leg hair. The guys are looking like the cops fromSuper Troopersonly less well-groomed.”

She stood and he dropped from the bars. Facing each other in the tight space, sweating, frustrated.

He was tired of waiting. Tired of not kissing her. Linc moved in. His hands settled on her hips, and he watched the sparks fly in those eyes.His favorite shade of green, he decided.

His body reacted to hers immediately. Cock springing to life. Pulse kicking up. Every sense was heightened because he was touching Mackenzie O’Neil. He felt like he was walking into a fire.

She was nervous. The pulse at the base of that slim neck fluttered away, and he longed to brush his mouth against it. But his focus was on her mouth. She favored red lipstick. He wanted to see it smeared. To have her step out from behind those barriers long enough to ruin those perfect red lines.

Messing up the outward perfection of Dr. Dreamy was his new mission in life.

“I’m gonna kiss you now,” he stated.

Heavy lids lowered over those eyes as her focus locked on to his mouth. He wondered if she knew she was nodding. Taking his time, he slid his hands all the way up her sides, to her shoulders, that delicate neck, and cupped her face.

Romance was not dead. It was a living, breathing thing in the room.

He paused in his approach. A breath away from those red, red lips. Her breathing was ragged, and he noticed his was, too. They stood that way, breathing the same air. Feeling the pulse of desire as it awakened like a dragon between them.

She broke first. And he thanked the gods in the heavens when those lips crashed into his. She kissed him like she needed it, neededhim, to survive. There was no gentle brush, no savoring. This was a devouring. She pivoted and slammed him against the wall. One hand shot into his hair and tugged hard. She shoved her other hand under his shirt and touched his bare, sweaty skin.

His hard-on was in danger of rupturing when she shimmied up against him. Vision going gray, he spun them again so her back was to the wall. For a moment, they each grappled for the upper hand, then decided it didn’t matter since they were both ravaging the other.

He slid a big hand under her shirt and cupped one, perfect breast.