Their Ex's Redrock Twilight (Texas Alpha) (Texas Alpha Series Book 4) (3 page)

“But I want you to keep calling me sugar,” he said in his deep voice that sounded kind of like an order, but she didn’t care, because—

He
was flirting with her.

Coco felt the heat in her cheeks, which she willed away with a slight toss of her head.

“You be good, and maybe I will,” she sassed.

She’d flirted right back at him. His dark eyes did amazing things that she felt all the way to her toes, then he looked out the Jeep windshield and she saw a slight smile on his face.

She
loved
that little smile. That meant smoking-hot Officer Finn had accepted her flirt. Wow.

“Babe,” he said, pulling the Jeep to a stop. “Things are crazy, I know, but I need you to take a leap of faith with me here. I’ll get your things. We will figure this all out, but I have important things I need to do right now.”

Coco opened her mouth to argue with him. What woman just let a man she barely knew whisk her away to some unknown spot? But then she realized that for the first time in a long time that a man might be trying to have her back. And that man seemed as if he had really important things to be officially doing, which he’d given up doing just to help get her stay out of a criminal sweep.

So instead being flippant, she got soft.

“Okay, sugar. I’ll leap,” she said.

Finn’s hand reached toward her, but then it stopped and edged back. Coco just knew he’d been about to cup her nape, because the look on his hard-angled face said so.

“Babe,” he said, shaking his head slightly, while his teeth showed whiter between the rich blackness of the goatee framing his mouth. “Fucking sweet.”

Warmth spread through Coco, in a way she’d never felt, and she knew she might do a lot of things to feel it again.

And that was how she found herself standing outside Finn O’Neil’s lake house log home with the key to it in her hand, while she watched his Jeep’s rear end going back down the driveway out of view.

He’d given her the key with the orders, “Make yourself at home, babe.”

Then Coco decided that what should have been the most awful day of her life ... just wasn’t.

––––––––

F
inn O’Neil’s multilevel log and stone lake house was
amazing
. From the outside, that was. The inside wasn’t really done. The outside had stone borders and terraces, and it was landscaped with pockets of bushes, flowers, and trees. There was a three-car garage, which she only saw from the outside, thick redwood columns for a portico entrance with stone facing, and a huge wooden door.

That big door pushed open surprisingly easily. Being so amazed by what she’d seen outside, Coco felt the letdown from amazement to disappointment, because the inside wasn’t as breathtaking as she’d expected. The flooring was undone and looked like dusty cement, there were wires hanging where she supposed lights and more light sockets would go, and she suspected the place didn’t have heating or cooling installed yet.

As she circled around in the unfinished great room with no furniture, she pulled out her cell phone and called her best friend Patty Ann. She really needed some Patty Ann advice, because Patty Ann always had advice. After spilling everything, because she always told Patty Ann everything, Patty Ann latched on to the part where she’d explained how smoking hot Finn was.

“Jump him,” Patty Ann advised.

“I just found out Gordon was cheating,” Coco exclaimed.

“Yeah, so you need to jump this hot Officer Finn.”

“Yes, Patty Ann, very hot, and I’m just me; besides, why would he want to let me do that?”

Patty Ann made a disbelieving sound.

“Babe, you’re so hot you don’t see it, but let’s get past that because I know you’ll argue. Instead, why don’t you tell me why he would ask you for a date, ask you to keep calling him sugar, and”—Patty Ann let that “and” roll around before she finished—“saved your ass by taking you to his house, which I can tell you is not the standard police safe house, babe. Why? Tell me why?”

“Maybe I wasn’t exciting enough in bed,” Coco half moaned, ignoring Patty Ann’s comments, as besties did a lot.

“You put on a French maid outfit, for God’s sakes,” Patty Ann exclaimed.

“I did,” Coco muttered, while she wandered through the house.

“And he went to sleep. Then you tried reading erotica to him, and he dozed off.”

“I did,” Coco muttered again, looking at Finn’s unfinished kitchen, which had no counters, but did have a very nice polished slab wood table with matching wooden chairs. It also had a stove and refrigerator, plus sink, so basically the essentials if you overlooked no cabinets or counters.

“You did that striptease and his cell rang and he took it. You bought special oils and tried to massage them on him and he wouldn’t let you, and you showed him a book on different positions in bed and told him you would try any of them he liked.”

“I did,” Coco mumbled, with a flash of heat in her cheeks. Laid out like that, it looked very different from having it happen piece by piece.

“You even bought lube and the cutest pink butt plug, for God’s sakes!”

“I did,” Coco said, more strongly.

That time Gordon’s excuse had been he didn’t want to hurt her. Well, she’d wanted him to hurt her, damn it ... besides, it wasn’t supposed to hurt.

“I especially liked the whipped-cream bikini you made on your body, and you
so
have to promise me you will do that with your hot-bodied officer when he jumps you.”

“He won’t.”

“He will, babe. He
so
will.”

“What will I do?”

“Let loose, Coco. Please, just let loose.”

They talked for another thirty minutes, going over what the hell Gordon was doing, and what she should do about it. By the time Patty and she hung up, Coco had been all through the downstairs, where she’d found one room with a TV and large leather couch, and then she’d made it through several rooms upstairs. She’d finally found the bedroom that had a bed, thank God, and that was where she sat finishing up her call.

“Okay, I will call your lawyer friend right away,” Coco said, then she lay back on the end of the unmade king bed, looking up at the log ceiling with more wires hanging out of it. “First thing in the morning,” she promised Patty Ann, then they cut the call.

Coco sighed as she curled sideways at the end of the bed next to her purse. She so hated to lie, but she had to lie to Patty Ann that way because Patty Ann would never understand why Coco just had to find out what Gordon was doing and confront him.

To do that, she would not be seeing a lawyer anytime soon.

Later that night, just after midnight, Finn sat in the chair facing his bed. He’d been home about twenty minutes and sitting with one motorcycle boot across his knee, while watching the woman asleep on his bed for most of that time. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a woman on his bed. Especially such a tempting one.

She had dark hair so rich he knew it would feel like silk through his fingers, and she had the kind of creamy white skin that was translucent on brunettes. Her lips were curved in a sultry pout and her lashes were long over her soft cheeks. She wasn’t young, but mature in age like he was, in a sexy way that he’d felt deeply when she talked to him with her accent and those “sugars” she said, which made him instantly hard.

But her clothes were all wrong for her. They should be tailored in a way to cup and show off her lush, full breasts. He thought short, airy skirts would look good on her with those crazy high heels she wore, which were curled up on the end of his bed. His eyes traced her painted toenails and the high arch of her feet in the four-inch silver heels she wore that had sexy little straps. Then his gaze moved to that gold piece of dangling jewelry she wore, which was nestled in her very nice cleavage.

Fucking attractive as hell pussy.

On his bed.

At midnight.

The thing about it was, after today, he was finally damn well free to maybe do something about that. The hell of it was, though—it was still “maybe,” because while he was free from being undercover, he was not free from the results.

One of which was curled on the end of his bed, which he liked a lot. But that in itself was an issue, because they were both still married, had just met, and while he’d gotten a little flirt from Coco and it had excited him, it still didn’t mean she was offering him an open invitation to crawl into bed with him right then. Though she was completely tempting him to do.

It certainly didn’t mean he could fuck her and then bounce her out, which was all he was ready for. There would be no more relationships in his life, before he figured out the character of the woman he was getting involved with. That meant all he was left with, for the moment, was just appreciating her being there, on his bed, and in his house.

Finn wiped a tired hand across his face; maybe he was thinking more about it than was really there. He’d been without a woman for so long, playing the undercover game, so maybe he was inventing something between them that wasn’t real.

Then, before he did something stupid like haul her up into his bed, strip her, and find out how real she was with his dick inside her, he got up and walked slowly out of the room.

Coco woke up with a bad headache and sunlight hurting her closed eyes, which was not a good sign, because she didn’t know how sunlight could hurt eyes that were closed. And while she was listing the bad things that she was waking up to, she added being sore from sleeping in a very weird position.

That was when she realized ... ohmylord, she’d slept with her makeup on!

That more than anything had her moving, and moving faster than her throbbing head wanted her to move, which meant she was wobbling on her heels toward an en suite bathroom.

Thank God for attached bathrooms, but—

“Oh
my
Lord,” she cried, looking at her smeared makeup in the mirror.

What was she—a drunken whore?

“Oh Lord,” she whispered.

Coco turned away from the disaster she saw in the mirror, and then she saw a shower.

She
had
to get the crap off her face. Fast.

So she stumbled to the shower as she stripped her clothes off. She had the shower door pulled open when she realized all she had left on was her high heels. So she held on to the open glass shower door while she bent over to unstrap them and then kick them off. Then she went inside the doublewide shower, which was tiled in amazing travertine.

She turned the water on to full blast, because she was freaking going to wash away her life, in the most amazing shower she’d ever been in.

But it was halfway through her shower when she realized that she wasn’t in a hotel room, because suddenly she remembered electric green eyes and a devastatingly masculine smile. That got her to “ohmylording” under the shower spray.

She was naked in some unknown man’s house!

“What are you, an idiot?” she exclaimed, spitting water out of her mouth.

But she knew that some ingrained mode of feminine survival had come to her rescue and moved her to clean up, before she might again see the most attractive man she’d ever seen.

So instead of freaking out, she lifted her chin, and then she washed her hair.

After she’d finished, found a towel, and tiptoed back into Officer Finn’s bedroom, she realized it was not yet seven o’clock.

“Maybe he’s not back yet,” she whispered, wondering what she should wear, because she hated to put on her outfit from the day before.

That was when her eyes landed on the motorcycle boots, a shoulder holster with the gun still inserted hanging over the back of a bedroom chair, and a leather jacket across that same chair.

“That was not there last night,” she whispered.

He
was
home.

Coco actually ran into his closet; there was no way she wanted Officer Finn to catch her in just a towel and see her bare thighs in the light of day.

Finn smelled bacon ... then his neck popped.

“Hell,” he muttered, gripping his neck as he tried to straighten from his position, slumped on his old leather couch, which was too lumpy to be sleeping on.

Damn, his neck was going to kill him the rest of the day ... he just knew it. Then when he rolled, he found the kink in his back to add to his neck. He nearly landed on the floor in his only room with furniture, besides his bedroom, which he liked to call a den, because he’d always wanted a damn den.

He managed to not nosedive, but push up, which made him groan. Yeah, kinked back.

“Getting too old,” he muttered.

Then he sat on the edge of his couch, rubbing his face, and not able to stop smelling the damn bacon, which was making his stomach growl, while he realized why he’d slept on his fucking lumpy-ass couch in the first place. His elbows hit his knees and his head turned to the doorway.

“Coco,” he whispered.

Fucking hell ... it had to be her cooking bacon. The two combined might be some kind of wet dream. The three combined definitely were. Coco in his house, her cooking bacon, and her
cooking
at all were definitely worthy of being aroused over. He finally stood in his stocking feet and realized a moment of tension. It was too fucking close ... too intimate.

He started for the door.

“Don’t fucking like this,” he lied to himself.

He forced himself to go take a shower so as not to look as if he was running to see the beautiful woman cooking food in his kitchen. Yeah, he’d shower ... and take a long time doing it.

Ten minutes later, he strode into his kitchen with his tee shirt still damp and glued to his chest where he’d not taken the time to properly dry off.

Abruptly, he halted with a growl forming in his throat.

“
Take
that fucking dress off,” he commanded sharply, while feeling the punch in his gut.

Coco whirled from his stove with a spatula held high and a squeak of surprise on her full, kissable lips. Her chest heaved and his gaze drew down, because the dress she should not be fucking wearing was way too small for her big tits, and it made the whole top of the long dress very sexual.