Savage Hearts (2 page)

She thought she heard him rumble.

There was a pause, and she got a glimpse of longish blond hair before
she
 
suddenly
felt big hands around her waist and she was being lifted up and spun around the corner of the building. Cate grappled wildly with the stranger’s arms as he set her down on a windowsill, her eyes wide and her body on high alert, and all of her now totally shielded from view of the office building.

“Safe and sound and out of sight,” the stranger said.

It took Cate a second to get her bearings. The window she was sitting in was open. She could lean back and fall right into Club Volare if she wanted to. There were shutters blocking her peripheral vision. And the strange man who’d put her here was standing,
hands
on either side of her, right in front of her.

She had to look now.

And oh God, his
face
.

Oh God,
the rest of him
.

He was beautiful. Norse-god beautiful. Except Norse gods probably didn’t have much opportunity to get a tan in Asgard or wherever it was they hung out; this guy had the SoCal thing down. Almost shockingly blond, shaggy hair framed a tanned, chiseled face, his features rough and craggy and beautifully masculine.

He had ice-blue eyes.

He was studying her.

He was very nearly touching her. That body of his, that warm, hard body, was so very, very close.

Cate’s mind went blank. Adrenaline always made her kind of dumb, and this was adrenaline with a chaser of impossibly attractive man. She couldn’t tell if it was the fear or the man that kept her heart pounding, but she supposed it didn’t really matter. She was now officially in Club Volare Venice. Or at least her butt was. She looked down to see that she was gripping the windowsill so that she wouldn’t fall backwards through the window.

Holy shit, Club Volare
.

She didn’t want to be impressed. But she was. Maybe she could blame that on the adrenaline, too.

Because this, right here, this place was the realm of fantasy for her, of books and message boards and late nights in front of her computer. Part of her hadn’t really accepted that any of it was real, but now that she was here, she couldn’t escape the knowledge that for these people, the members of this club, it
was
real.
All of it.
What would that feel like? To be so unafraid of what people might think, of how they’d react to your secret fantasies? Or of how you could be hurt? These people, this place, it was
real
. Was it just a world where people like Jason didn’t exist, where…

Cate’s eyes met the Norse god’s, and her wandering mind slaat ing minmmed back to the present. The man standing in front of her was one of those people.

Holy shit, the sequel.

He’d just been watching her carefully, this whole time. Now Cate watched a slow, gentle smile spread across his face, and realized that she was no longer terrified. Apparently there wasn’t room enough in her head for both the Norse god and terror. Norse god won.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Cate.”

Some expression that Cate couldn’t quite place flickered across his face, gone before she could get a read on it. His eyes seemed to dance for a moment, and then his tone changed. Serious. Searching. Gentle.

“So does this help, Cate?” he asked.

Cate wanted to laugh. Was it possible this man knew how loaded that question was? The contrast between the way he’d picked her up and thrown her around and the way he was now very carefully asking if the manhandling “helped” was disorienting enough. Even weirder was that it
had
helped—besides getting her out of Patrick’s line of
sight,
it had also given her something else to think about.

But the weirdest part was that this stranger had known that she’d been genuinely frightened, and he’d known what to do for her, even if what he’d done would look highly questionable to an outside observer.

Cate was too stunned by that to do anything but tell the truth.

“Yes,” she said simply. “It helps.”

“Good,” he said.

He didn’t move.

He didn’t look at all uncomfortable with his proximity to a woman he didn’t know, either. In fact he looked like he was enjoying it, and like he didn’t care who knew. And yet just that question—“Does this help?”—
made
her feel like he’d back off if she even looked at him sideways.

Cate studied him the way he was studying her. Something about the way he carried himself, his head high and his shoulders back, demanded attention. She was jealous of his easy confidence, his apparent calm, as though he personified the traits that Cate only felt she had when she was working. Everyone but Jason thought she was like this Norse god. No one knew about the way she felt inside, about the fear and the self-doubt and the way she put up with Jason’s treatment for so long. About the way she’d believed the things Jason said.

Except, apparently, for this stranger. He knew. He’d just seen it. Or he’d just seen part of it, anyway.

That was
not
fair. Cate straightened her spine. She hated
being afraid, and she hated being exposed even more, and damn it, she was not going to do this. Part of getting away from Jason was actuallkne was acy
getting away
from Jason in her own head, which meant not running like a scared rabbit every time she saw one of his friends.

If Patrick saw her, she would deal with it. And if Jason found out she was at Club Volare, she would deal with it. God damn it.

She looked up to find the stranger looking at her with interest.

“Excuse me,” she said politely.

The stranger took a step back and offered his hand. Cate took it, and hopped down from the windowsill. She took a deep breath, did her best to smooth her suit, and walked out from behind her
makeshift hiding
place.

Two things happened: one, she realized she still didn’t know where to go, since Ford had only specified “meet me at the club,” which in a compound this extensive left far too many options, and two, she saw that Patrick Cross was no longer hanging around outside the office building.

She looked back at the strange Norse god, who was still watching her.
 
He’d had a perfect view of the office from where he’d been standing.

“The man who was standing out there,” she said. “He’s gone.”

“Yup.”

Cate raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t about to let any bullshit fly. The Norse god had absolutely known
who
she was hiding from.

She said, “You could have told me.”

“You came out of hiding anyway,” the Norse god said. Then he grinned. “Besides, I didn’t exactly mind.”

Incredibly, she blushed.

“And he’s not gone,” the Norse god corrected. “His car is still there. He went back into the office.”

Cate felt a chill run down her back and ignored it. She refused to let this affect her—at least in theory. She could see the man was watching, still, and he’d already seen her more vulnerable than she was entirely comfortable with.

“So you want to wait inside?” the Norse god said. He leaned against the wall of the building, his arms crossed in front of his powerful chest, appraising her. “Or do you want me to go get rid of him?”

That
shouldn’t thrill her. But it did.

“I have a meeting with Ford Colson,” she said. “If you could show me where to wait, I’d be grateful.”

“No problem,” he said, pushing off the wall. “Give me a second.”

She watched in a kind of daze as he picked up the box of now-broken bottles and led her into the building through the side door. What was p> r. Whatit about this guy that made her feel so…raw? Was it just that he’d seen her in a very private moment of craziness? It made her want to keep her distance from him, to keep a definitely safe distance, and, at the same time, as they walked together to the darkened bar, she found herself compelled to explain herself to him.

She didn’t want him to think she was a coward.
Some kind of ineffectual waif, constantly in need of rescue.
That wasn’t what she wanted to be.

“I’m not normally like this, you know,” she said.

He didn’t say anything. Cate found that she almost kept talking—almost actually told him that this morning she’d gotten her divorce papers back in the mail, unsigned, but with a helpful note scrawled across the top page: “You’ll come back,” in Jason’s slanted, ominous script, and that it was messing with her head, as Jason meant it to—and she had to actually force herself to keep quiet. This tall, tan, blond knight in low-slung jeans knew too much about her already. She couldn’t let him become part of her actual, real life. She wouldn’t even ask him his name.

Not that he’d offered it.

She watched him set the box on the bar and turn to look her up and down, unhurried and unashamed and unbelievably hot.

“What are you normally like?” he asked after a moment, taking her by surprise.

Cate realized she couldn’t answer that, and laughed out loud.

“So you’re normally unpredictable,” he answered for her, letting himself in behind the bar.

This Norse god was the bartender? Seriously? Even the bartenders at Club Volare were more impressive than literally all the other men she’d ever met. If Cate had worked with a man like this back in her waitressing days, she would have enjoyed her shifts a whole lot more.

“I prefer the term ‘interesting,’” she said.

He grinned at her. That grin…damn, it was sexy.

“And what else?” the man asked.

Not for the first time today, Cate found she didn’t know to respond. This was getting to be a terrible habit. But what was she supposed to say?
Well, sometimes I’m a total badass who will kick your ass up and down a courtroom, and sometimes I apparently cower in fear, and I don’t want anyone to ever know what I’m really like.

How was she even thinking about this? She was here in a professional capacity. Ridiculous.

“Can I have a glass of water?” she said. Her mouth felt dry.

The bartending Norse god looked at her carefully before he went about getting a glass, and it felt like he’d seen right through her. Cate shivered. Maybe that was just where her head was at because of Jason. She could actually hear him satey hear ay, “You’ll come back,” with that particularly arrogant yet disdainful tone that was designed to make her feel like crap. And it made her think about what horrible things Jason would do if he knew she was sitting at the Club Volare bar, checking out the bartender’s ass.

On the other hand, it was a great ass. And she had already decided not to be the kind of person who would take Jason’s abuse anymore.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about what happened out there?” she blurted out.

“No,” he said. “You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

Cate cocked an eyebrow, which went ignored. Well, maybe Norse gods had reason to be full of
themselves
.

“So this is your first time here,” the Norse god said, putting a slim glass of water down in front of her. Cate picked it up and downed it in two gulps. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was.

“Yes,” she said. She wiped her mouth and saw that her hand was shaking again. “That obvious?”

The man didn’t say anything. Which was just as well, because Cate was avoiding that ice blue stare; she didn’t need him to uncover any more of her secrets. Of course, that meant her eyes roamed over the bar.