Ricochet Read Free Page B

nightmare just gets better and better.” She shoved at his shoulders with both hands. When he didn’t budge, she stopped struggling and just lay there, glowering up at him, her soft mouth a flat, angry line.
    He considered the two men in the corridor. “Did you come in here alone?”
    “Just me and the Chicago Blackhawks.” Tone dry, eyes blazing, she held onto whatever deep emotion she was feeling. A new skill. She used to be an open book. He was the one lousy at communicating. Unless they were in bed, He did just fine communicating there.
    He could almost feel her anger lashing out like a sharp cat o’ nine tails ripping into his flesh, his heart, his brain.
    Her chest rose, then fell as she sucked in a calming breath. Her eyes were shockingly blue, and as cold as the tundra. The look was unfamiliar to him, and her fear and disdain made something hot and tight clench inside him.
    “For God sake, Pumice, I’ve been going to the bathroom by myself since I turned three. I came to take my insulin shot before dinner.” She looked him over, with a scowl. “Why are you dressed like a giant black sperm?”
    Her presence in the middle of this clusterfuck was so out of context he had a hard time wrapping his brain around it. “Were you coerced?” he demanded flatly. “Kidnapped?” Experience told him that there wasn’t anything too improbable, too dangerous, too vile, to be a possibility.
    “I might ask you the same damn question. Why are you here, Pumice? Because as we both know, you never do anything that isn’t completely self-serving. In that, you and your brother are frigging peas in a pod.”
    Because his friends and family didn’t know he worked for T-FLAC, they figured he was some kind of underworld criminal. It killed Gray, but that’s the way it was. He lived with it. And this woman with the soft, sassy mouth whose loving heart had turned to stone between one beat and the next, tied him in knots because he knew, being here, just cemented what she’d thought all along. “Answer the damn question, Hannah.” He kept his voice brusque and all business.
    “News flash Grayson Burke. Talk to me in that tone again, and I’ll cut off your balls and feed them to you as a little snack.” He didn’t miss the way the word little was stressed.
    He gave her a feral smile. “Hard to do all that when said balls are pressed up tight against you.”
    “You have to get up sometime,” she responded sweetly. “I’ll wait.”
    “No, as history proves, you don’t wait.”
    She made an inarticulate sound of anger, and her cheeks flushed. “You decide to follow me halfway around the world to attack me, so you can discuss old news? Worse. Imply that I was in the wrong? Go to hell, Gray, just go to hell.”
    “Answer the damn question. What are you doing here, Hannah?” Grayson repeated grimly. Through his comm he could hear his men gathering outside the salon, ready to burst in. He should be up there with them.
    She returned his frown, not looking any happier than he was. Soft breasts pressed against his chest as she sighed. “Colton’s upstairs.”
    “Christ.”
    Of course his brother was involved in this goatfuck. Hannah was always bailing him out of some damned mess.
    She didn’t move, but the suppressed fury in her voice was like a third party in the room with them. “Get off. You’re hurting me.”
    “If I wanted to hurt you, you wouldn’t be speaking right now.” Gray inhaled her light citrusy perfume, which still affected him the way it always had. That perfume, and his reaction to her, hadn’t changed. At least he was consistent.
    This dainty, five-foot-four, feisty fairy of a woman was his Achilles Heel. Always had, always would. Her pulse throbbed hard beneath the manacle of his fingers around her wrists. He wanted to touch more than her bare wrists.
    One thousand and ninety five days since he’d held her. Dear God, smelling the achingly familiar scent of her skin took his breath. His eyes