Baby, It's Cold Outside

chapter 1

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart . . .”

Eyeing the crush of cheerfully wasted humanity as they sang along to the soppiest Christmas song ever, Beck Rivera let go of a frustrated sigh. It turned into a growl midway through.

“If one more idiot in a red suit breathes his fumes on me, I’m going holiday nuclear.”

His brother Luke laughed at Beck’s out-of-character dramatics. Normally the least excitable one in the family—except for their oldest, Wyatt, who wouldn’t know drama if it upchucked in his face—Beck was clearly teetering on the brink tonight. Three weeks to Christmas and the annual Santa Shuffle Pub Crawl, a staple of the Chicago holiday scene, had stalled in his bar.

Ho-dee-ho-ho.

“So how is holiday nuclear different from regular nuclear?” Luke asked. He pulled gently on the Guinness tap to complete the shamrock imprint in the stout’s foamy head.

“With holiday nuclear, I’ll go ballistic—with an elfish smile.”

Pint safely delivered to a thirsty customer, Luke laid a strong hand on Beck’s shoulder. “Stay cool, psycho. You’ll be back in bunker gear before you know it.”

Before he knew it couldn’t come soon enough. Put on leave after his recent brush with death and the brass at the Chicago Fire Department, Beck was itching to return to firehouse duty. Sitting around all day making an ass-shaped dent in his sofa was killing him slowly and, but for the fact he was pulling extra shifts at his family’s bar, Dempsey’s on Damen, he’d probably lose his mind. Along with the love of his foster siblings—three guys, one gal—who held no truck with his moodiness over the last month.

At least he was alive, for Christ’s sake. And so was the poor kid he’d managed to haul free before the roof of that South Side crack house caved in Old Testament style. So maybe he’d disobeyed his lieutenant’s orders—Beck’s MO had always been of the act-now-beg-forgiveness-later variety. But where usually the head honchos liked how the heroics looked for the papers, this time it had landed him in deep shit.

Now, with at least another month until his disciplinary hearing—because God forbid anyone at HQ make a decision over the holidays—Beck had plenty of time on his hands to brood and shine up a new rash of apologies.

“Hey, amigo,” Beck heard behind him. One of the red-suited troublemakers, a downtown professional type. With Puerto Rican skin darker than most of the pasty-faced Chicago Irish set who propped up the bar at Dempsey’s, Beck supposed he might look like someone’s amigo, but he sure as hell didn’t appreciate this stranger bandying the word about. Red Suit leaned forward and, in his eagerness for a drink, blindly elbowed a cute blonde out of the way.

So, not looking to get laid, then.

“Careful, now,” Beck said.

“What’s that, amigo?”

F’real, dude? “I said you need to be careful.” Beck enunciated each word, then turned to the blonde. “You okay?”

“Fine, thanks.” She shot a hostile look at Red Suit, who chose that moment to bare his teeth in an approximation of a grin that went thoroughly unreturned. Nice.

Beck directed his attention back to the loser. “What’ll it be?”

“Chivas, neat, twice over.” Red Suit glanced over his shoulder to where his rowdy friends stood, making a lot of noise. A spilled beer on a woman’s dress earlier had been the first hint these guys were trouble. Two more rounds until they were cut off, Beck estimated. “A bottle of Bud and a Goose Island. Whatever the holiday ale crap is.”

“Sure,” Beck said. “How about I add it to your tab and bring it along?” Red Suit blinked his acceptance, adjusted his padding, and loped off.

“Hey, Rivera, how’s life sitting around eating bonbons all day?”

Beck slowed while pouring the Chivas, then rearranged his expression and his bones to neutral for Frank Gilligan, a CPD detective with a mouth as big as his ego. He happened to be a friend, but more often a pain in Beck’s ass.

“Detective, the moment I met you I knew we’d get along.”

Gilligan smiled that crugly grin, the one he gifted drug dealers before he gifted them his fists in a pretty red bow. “I’m touched, Rivera. Really.”

“Yeah, because cops and firefighters have so much in common.” Beck worked the pause for a beat. “They both want to be firefighters.”

An oldie but a goodie, it pulled a guffaw from Gilligan, who enjoyed the semiserious rivalry between the city’s first responders. But the detective’s words had pinched a nerve all the same. Beck would be hard-pressed to think of a worse time to be sidelined than the holidays. Burst pipes, electrical fires, Christmas tree combustions, and hot girls in skimpy Santa outfits usually kept the team at Engine 6 busy, a state of affairs he was not alone in enjoying. Since their foster parents and brother, Logan, had died, the rest of the family preferred camping out at the firehouse over the holidays. Anything to feel useful and honor their loved ones’ memories.

Hard to feel useful kickin’ back on the sofa. Christ on a crutch, he wanted to hit something.

Raucous shouts whooped from the corner followed by a distinctly female complaint of “Hey, watch it, dickhead.” Beck sent up a brief acknowledgment to the Big Guy. Ask and you shall receive. In seconds, he was out from behind the bar and halfway toward the corner pocket of Santas.

“Beck,” Luke called after him in a voice edged with warning. Beck raised a hand to say he had this. Damn it, he needed this.

“Want help, Smokeater?” asked Gilligan.

Beck threw a smirk over his shoulder. “Watch and learn, Mr. Policeman.” As the saying went, God created firefighters so cops could have heroes, too.

His fists balled of their own volition, and Beck could almost feel the tape wrapped taut over his knuckles. Three-time winner of the Battle of the Badges, the charity boxing match between fire and police, he was as at home wearing gloves as not. But there was something eminently more satisfying about delivering a pounding bare-knuckled. Definitely more primal.

“Boys, we can do this the hard way or the easy way.”

Red Suit turned, wearing the gaze of a man not quite so wasted that Beck would have reservations about kicking ass.

Cue elfish smile. Hello, holiday nuclear.

“But I’ll warn you, amigo,” Beck said. “The hard way is my favorite.”

“It’s like the Justice League of hot bartenders.”

Mel’s hazel eyes shone as bright as the red-suited Santas on a zombified trail down Milwaukee Avenue. “And I’ve got my eye on Thor.”

Gingerly, Darcy planted her high-heeled boots on the treacherous sidewalk outside the wine bar where they had spent the night dishing. Soft, nonthreatening flakes melted as soon as they made landfall on her cashmere coat, but with five more inches forecast tonight, Darcy was unimpressed with the peaceful snow globe vibe. Native Chicagoans knew better.

“You have your superhero mythology mixed up. Thor’s part of the Avengers, not the Justice League. Maybe you’ve got your lusty eye on Aquaman or Green Lantern, both of whom are generally acknowledged as inferior in the superhero pantheon.”

“You would know that, nerdette.”

“It’s my job to,” Darcy said. “I get so many requests for bulging men in tights, I could write a thesis on it.”

Mel grasped Darcy’s arm so forcefully she almost hit the deck on her Michael Kors–covered butt.

“You’ve got to come with me! The last time I was there, Thor—”

“Or Aquaman.”

She waved the hand not death-gripping the sleeve of Darcy’s coat. “—made his interest very clear. I’m sure tonight’s the night. My womb’s feeling all tingly.”

“Might want to check that out with your doctor,” Darcy retorted.

Mel made a face beneath her dirty blond curls. Piqued looked super cute on her.

“Here I am,” Darcy announced as they drew alongside the ’96 Volvo jalopy her friend Brady had lent her for what was supposed to be a fleeting visit to Chicago. The month she had taken out of her life to shepherd Grams through her recovery from a stroke had stretched to three, but now the old girl was almost back to her crotchety, razor-tongued self. By the time the last New Year’s Eve firework had exploded over Navy Pier, the spectacular Chicago skyline would be perfectly framed in Darcy’s rearview mirror. Next stop, Austin, Texas, and that spanking new job.

“Always be moving” was her motto.

“This town isn’t big enough for me and my father” was a close second.

She would miss Mel, though, who had kept her entertained through the fall with dating horror stories that made Darcy laugh-pee every time. The woman was a magnet for every panty-sniffing mouth breather in Chicagoland.

Darcy hugged her girl. “Thanks for hanging and listening to me whine about my family.” The Cochrane holiday photo shoot that afternoon, first in a number of dreaded family events dotting her schedule over the next couple of weeks, had left Darcy more than a little on edge.

“Ah, those little shits I teach have primed me well. But you know what’s the perfect antidote to whining? Drooling. Panting. Moaning.” Mel squeezed Darcy’s arm tighter as she punctuated each huskily spoken word. “It’s hard to whine when your mouth’s filled with a sexy bartender’s tongue or other interesting body parts.”

Darcy considered her friend’s arguments. She had to admit that chilling with the walker-and-Jell-O set at Grams’s upscale nursing home had put a decided crimp in her love life. “My sex point average is at an all-time low.”

“Which is why you should be coming to this bar with me.” Mel linked Darcy’s arm like it was a done deal. “I can’t believe you’re all dressed up like a North Shore princess—”

“Watch your mouth, bitch. It’s Gold Coast. Higher property values,” Darcy said, referring to the tony Chicago enclave where she’d spent her formative years.

Her friend flashed a toothy grin. “And you don’t want to use those pearls to flirt with a little rough? Come on, help this J.Crew–clad pleb out.”

“You know I only got trussed up like this so I wouldn’t scare Grams with my usual threads.” Actually, Grams would have taken Darcy’s biker chic threads and all they revealed in stride. Not so the rest of the Cochranes. The glare her father daggered her way a few hours ago was evidence enough that she was still a crushing disappointment to him. And as much as she would have loved to grace the shoot in ripped jeans and a tank, it would have smacked of a tad too much teenage rebellion for a twenty-five-year-old woman. Instead, she’d donned the designer twinset of boring to keep the peace.

“Just a half hour playing my wing girl,” Mel pleaded. “I can’t go in alone. What would that look like?”

Sighing, Darcy inched away from the car. In truth, she didn’t want the night to be over quite yet. With the holidays just around the corner, her chances to hang with Mel were diminishing rapidly.

“Lead the way to bartender nirvana.”

Holding on to each other as they walked a couple of blocks, they managed to remain upright on the slippery walk, no mean feat for women sporting weather-inappropriate footwear.

They were laughing so hard at the sight of yet another drunken Santa lurching down the street, this one with a healthy serving of chalky butt cheek on display—“Shrinkage alert!” yelled Mel—that it took Darcy a moment to realize they’d turned a corner. This bite of Damen Avenue was hopping with a steady stream of bar crawlers, suburbanites, and friends meeting for preholiday drinks. It was also achingly familiar. With each crunch of hard-packed snow underfoot, icicles of dread jabbed Darcy’s chest.

“What’s the name of this bar, Mel?”

“I dunno. Something Irish, Dennehy’s or Donnelly’s.”

What was the likelihood there were two Irish bars on the same block?

Oh, balls.

“Dempsey’s,” Mel announced. The muted strains of the Pogues’ holiday classic “Fairytale of New York” pulsed against the bar’s heavy oak door.

Dempsey’s. Darcy had driven by it a few times since her return, and on each pass she had floored it. Ridiculous, she knew. It was just a bar and he was just a boy. A man, now.

He might not work here.

It might be under new management.

But the kick of her heart to her ribs said nothing had changed. The Dempseys still ruled this little corner of green in Chicago just like the boy she once knew still took up valuable mental real estate. A spot that ignited whenever Darcy saw firefighters or boxers or Irishmen or . . . damn . . . Suddenly curiosity overruled her dread. Benevolent gods would ensure he had grown into a potbellied troll with a receding hairline and bad skin from a diet of Portillo’s hot dogs and deep-dish pizza. A girl could hope, anyway.

Didn’t she owe it to herself to find out? If he was behind that door, didn’t she owe it to herself to show him what he had missed by walking away from her all those years ago?

Bring it on.

Letting determination flavored with old-fashioned payback fuel her steps, Darcy reached for the wrought-iron handle. But before she could get a grip, the door crashed open and Bam! a large red blur filled her vision—and dropped her on her ass. Her ankle twisted as she hit the cold, punishing street.

The blur—more of a sack, really—rolled off her leg.

Then it spoke.

“Christ, I’m sorry,” it slurred through a beer-stained slash of white cotton. “I didn’t mean to—”

Whatever it didn’t mean to do, she would never know. Red Sack was violently wrenched aside. Huge hands settled on her shoulders and pulled her to a sitting position.

Oh, God. Time and space contracted with her heart, bringing an onslaught of sensation in its wake. He smelled the same—a clean, male spice that made her light-headed. Seven years, and he still smelled like the boy she had held tight inside her soul all this time.

He spoke, the exact words inaudible above the beat of her silly heart. The timbre of his voice was deeper, huskier, but its power to ripple through her and set her quivering with need had in no way diminished. Or perhaps it was just the frigid temperatures. Yes, that had to be it. Her coat had fallen open except for one precariously fastened button; her wool skirt had ridden up to midthigh. She looked ridiculous, and not just because she was lying on a snowy street thanks to what she realized now was yet another wasted Santa. Seriously, there ought to be a law against that sort of thing.

With a bolstering breath, she lifted her eyelids to meet the gaze of Beck Rivera.

Who was not looking at her.

His unstinting focus was on her limbs, his sure hands tracing over her extremities, seeking out injuries. Weaknesses. Her heart cranked out a few more beats than were safe. Her mind scrambled for Zen. While it was startling to have him touching her so intimately, at least the moment gave her a chance to examine him unnoticed.

Scimitar-curved cheekbones, a nose broken several (more) times, and, mother of God, a scruffy lumberjack beard. That was so damn hot and not in the least bit troll like. He looked as serious as ever, but the gravity seemed more intensified on his twenty-six-year-old face. That dark hair, formerly a wavy handful of sin she loved tunneling her fingers through, was now close-cropped and split, not by a parting, but by a scar. Recent, by the looks of its raw, pink anger. He had cracked open his skull.

Idiot.

“What an asshole!” Mel shot a death glare at the Santa who had fallen—or more likely, was pushed—on Darcy. A trio of men in red were hauling up the troublemaker as he muttered something about a lawsuit that’d “send your Mick bar back to the Stone Age.” Ignoring the threat, Beck kept up his thorough damage assessment, hot hands moving over soft knees and trembling thighs.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, now treating her to a full proton blast of the Beck Rivera gaze. More navy than blue, the shade used to shift often with his variable moods. But now those eyes registered distant, polite. Was she hurt? Not physically. Just incredibly pissed that the boy she had adored for two years in a previous lifetime had blocked her from his mind.

For God’s sake, the shit head didn’t recognize her!

“I don’t think so,” she said in a clipped tone.

“Can you stand?” He was already dragging her up with those arms as thick as her calves.

Agh! Sharp pain lanced through her ankle. He caught her as she crumpled, sweeping her into his arms and moving toward the pub in one sinuous, catlike movement. She had no choice but to loop her hands around his neck, his body heat the perfect counterbalance to her freezing butt cheeks.

“Should we call an ambulance?” Mel asked, concern coloring her voice.

“No,” he said sternly. “Get the door.”

Mel jumped forward and pulled the handle. A gush of warmth, spiced with memories, escaped the bar, and Darcy realized that she really needed to speak up.

“Beck, it’s Darcy.” She mentally cringed at having to reintroduce herself after all they had meant to each other, or as was now becoming painfully obvious, all she had not meant to him. Her face heated despite her best efforts to stay chill. “Darcy Cochrane.”

Staring straight ahead, Beck’s lips twitched.

“I know, princesa.”

chapter 2

With alarming ease, Beck plowed through the candy cane–colored haze to the far end of the bar, where he pointedly glared at the expansive backs of two men sitting on stools.

“McElroy,” Beck said impatiently.

The men turned, took one look at Beck, another at Darcy, and immediately stood.

“Here you go, miss,” one of them said deferentially, while the other made way for Mel.

“Oh, I’m quite all right. You don’t need to do that.”

Beck set her down on one of the vacated seats and popped the last hold-out button on her coat. It parted, almost indecently, and ta da! was whipped from her body like a magician’s tablecloth trick. He hung it on a convenient coat hook.

Whoa, that was hot. Flushing at this potent demonstration of his sharp movements and impressive reflexes, along with all the erotic memories they conjured, she caught Mel’s eye. Or her jaw, really, which was grazing the floor.

“Shut it,” Darcy muttered to her friend, who promptly closed her mouth and eyed the rather gorgeous African American hunk who had surrendered his seat. The logo of the Chicago Fire Department popped above a pec that rivaled The Rock’s.

“So, are you a firefighter?” Mel asked, eyelashes batting vehemently, all blond innocence.

CFD Beefcake opened his mouth, but Beck spoke first. “Lieutenant McElroy’s got fourteen years on the job, twelve of them blissfully married.”

A sheepish McElroy shrugged his broad shoulders. “Guilty.”

Mel sighed good-naturedly and climbed onto the next stool. “No worries, my hormones are invested elsewhere.” Once settled comfortably, she turned to Darcy. “Good seats, girl. How we doing?”

“Not bad. Think I just turned my ankle.”

“Do you mind if I look?” Beck asked in a low voice that made her uncomfortably warm.

“I’m sure it’s fine.” Beck’s version of “looking” would invariably involve touching, and she readily admitted that she had enjoyed the previews a little too much out on the street. Determined to prove her well-being, she placed her right foot on the floor with purpose.

Bad move. There was no hiding the grimace that screwed up her face.

“Stop being so brave and let him take a look,” Mel said, giving Beck an appreciative twice-over. “Qualified EMT along with those firefighter chops, I assume?”

“Uh-huh.”

Darcy chewed on her lower lip while Beck waited. He was good at waiting, always had been.

“If you don’t mind,” she said primly, channeling her grandmother.

He hunkered down and held her booted foot with astonishing reverence, as if trying to determine the best access point for a tricky rescue. Almost leisurely, he unzipped the soft suede and slipped it from her foot. Zing! Another sizzle of sensation snaked through her insides.

Opaque tights covered her legs and the evidence of how she had been spending her time all these years. He moved his hands knowledgeably over her ankle, testing with his thumbs, rolling the joint.

“Anything?” he asked, looking up with those serious blue eyes.

Could she plead the Fifth? The truth would be so damn incriminating. An acutely pleasurable ache settled between her thighs, accompanied by an acutely pleasurable dampness.

“It’s just a twinge.” Darcy’s gaze dropped to the top of Beck’s head, her heart throbbing as much as her ankle. That scar . . . what had he done?

“No swelling, from what I can see,” he murmured.

In the ankle area, no. Other areas, however, swelled like a tidal surge. Her breasts, the sensitive area between her legs as she tried not to squirm against the bar stool.

He stood, leaving her foot bootless and her chest strangely empty.

“Hands.”

“Excuse me?”

“Show me your hands.”

When she failed to react quickly enough to his order, he took her hands and examined the palms. They were raw from her fall but the skin was intact. However, instead of letting them go, he curled his long, sensuous fingers around hers and squeezed. Unexpected tears of surprise stung the backs of her eyelids at his gentle touch.

“Darcy.”

“Beck.”

“How do you want to do this?”

She fought a smile. Barely won. Beck had never been one to waste words. “Seven years in a hundred and forty characters or less? Let’s see. College in Boston, traveled the world, returned to Chicago when Grams had a stroke three months ago. She’s on the mend.”

His eyes softened. “Sorry to hear about your grandmother. She’s a nice lady.”

At Darcy’s eyebrow lift calling bullshit, Beck’s wicked lips shaded a hint of a smile. “Okay, she’s crazy as a loon with a tongue that could slice prune cans, but I always liked her. Do you still draw?”

The lie came easily. “No.”

“And the rest of the family?”

“My parents finally divorced, which was really for the best. Jack’s running my father’s empire in London.” Unlike Darcy, her brother was never subjected to the same pressures to fulfill some grander role in the Cochrane dynasty. No need, when he was fast becoming a clone of her father.

Her turn. “How about you?”

“With CFD for seven years as of last September. That and this place keep me busy.”

So, barely a month after he dumped her, he got his wish and joined his brothers in the service. A small surge of jealousy pinched her. She wasn’t proud of it.

“Your family good?” With difficulty, she dragged her gaze away from his ruggedly compelling face to drink in the sausage fest behind the bar. Luke, with mink brown waves framing his handsome features, was not all that changed except for a slight hardness around his eyes. The tall blond must be Gage; he’d been barely sixteen when she saw him last at Sean and Logan’s funeral. Now he rocked a Hemsworth brother vibe as he impressed a gaggle of girls with a cocktail shaker at the other end of the bar. Mel’s Thor, Darcy assumed.

“They’re great,” he said. “All in. Even Alexandra.”

“Your father would be proud. Logan, too.”

Those shocking blue eyes flashed, and remembrance of that night flooded the space between them. The night they both lost something, and everything changed.

He angled his thumbs to stroke her pulse in tight, erotic circles. Unadulterated lust slammed through her. The power he had over her still . . . it electrified her to the core. Just one look stripped her bare and stunned her with want.

An attention-grabbing cough sliced through the loaded silence.

“Hi, I’m Mel.” Her friend thrust out her hand.

Beck released Darcy’s hands, shook Mel’s, and had already redirected his burning focus back to Darcy before he spoke his name. “Beck Rivera.”

Okay, this has been awesome. “We should go,” Darcy said.

“After you’ve rested that ankle and we’ve had a drink,” Mel chimed in. “A couple of G and Ts, please. Heavy on the G.”

“Sure, coming right up.” Beck wrapped Darcy in an all-encompassing look that left her feeling she’d been touched in an intimate way—and enjoyed it far too much. “Leave your boot off in case the ankle swells. I’ll check back on it later.”

He lifted a wooden flap at the end of the bar and went back to work.

“Okay, spill the juicy deets,” Mel intoned. “Now.”

“Well, my ankle really hurts when I put any weight—”

Mel cut her off with an exaggerated eye roll. “When and where did you do Wolverine?” She gestured violently to Beck just in case there was some confusion about which bearded sex god was under discussion.

“We were kids.”

Mel gave her the don’t-even look, which she had honed to eviscerating sharpness in the years since they had first met at Harvard.

“Popped your cherry?”

Darcy sighed heavily, caught between annoyance it was so obvious and relief her friend knew her well enough to guess. “Popped it, then popped a cap in my heart.”

“Ooh, you so ghetto, girl.”

Funny, that. Maybe if she had been, things might have been different between the Gold Coast princesa and the dangerous, furious boy who had lit her soul on fire. Before he doused it with an ice cold vat of adios.

Mel’s eyes widened in a way Darcy was sure she would not appreciate in three, two, one . . .

“He’s the one you cried your eyes out over all freshman year. The guy your father hated because he was a gangbanger.”

Ex-gangbanger, saved by the Dempsey fostering machine when his biological father died during a drug deal gone bad. Not that she had learned those details from Beck, who shared nothing. Jack had filled her in, trying to scare her away from him.

“How do you remember this stuff?”

Mel tapped her temple. “Mind like a steel trap. Other body parts as well, which I hope to be demonstrating before the night is through.” She waggled her eyebrows and directed a sexy pout in Gage’s direction. “So we have firefighting, bartending brothers—”

“Foster brothers, taken in by Sean and Mary Dempsey. They couldn’t have children of their own so they were big on spreading the love to kids who needed it, five boys and a girl. Sean was a big-time fire chief who died on the job just over seven years ago. The oldest son, Logan, died in the same fire.”

“Holy shit.”

“A couple of them—” She nodded at Luke behind the bar. Intimidating Wyatt was nowhere to be seen. “—did a stint in the Marines first.”

Mel’s twisted expression depicted a battle between sympathy for the city’s fallen and imminent collapse into a puddle of lust. “Hot ex-marine Chirish firefighters. Jesus, my panties are going to melt.”

The lust option. Excellent choice, madam.

“Not Irish, just raised that way. And your panties melted about five minutes ago, you dirty bird.”

Mel grinned. “True to the last drop. What’s the skinny on my man, Thor?”

There was something about him, something different that teased the cold edges of Darcy’s mind and refused to come in to the open. “That’s Gage and from here, he fills out his shirt and jeans reeeeal nice. What else do you need to know?”

“Too fucking right,” Mel said, laughing that girlish tinkle, step one of her slide into flirt mode.

“That shit’s wasted on me, you know.”

She giggled inanely. “Just warming the pipes. And I think from the look the cherry popper is giving you, things will be getting nice and warm in Darcyland very soon.”

Lifting her eyes to Beck took effort, as did meeting the unerringly scorching look he was laying on her. So much for benevolent gods. He had to go and grow hotter over the years. Strong arms corded with sculpted muscles stretched his tee sleeves to the limits, walking temptation in a six-foot-two package. Virile, warrior-like, and a beard to boot! Hot damn, she loved a good smattering of facial hair.

Concern lined Mel’s brow. “What happened, exactly? I know you met in high school, but all I can really recall is the ugly crying before the inevitable graduation to ‘guys suck.’ ”

“If they’re any good, they will,” they said in unison, drumming the bar with a quick one-two. Ba-boom.

Darcy’s laughter gave way to a sigh. “He was a friend of my brother’s. They used to train together at a boxing gym.”

That look came over Mel again, the one where her brain might disintegrate to lust-mush any second.

“Yes, Melanie, he was a boxer. Control yourself.” Admittedly, it had been verra, verra sexy.

“And?”

“For a year”—and two months, one week, three days— “he didn’t breathe a word to me. He’d come over to play video games with Jack and I’d try to get him to open up, but it was like talking to a brick wall. An unbelievably sexy brick wall. I thought he hated me. He’d get this crimp between his eyebrows every time he looked at me like he’d smelled rotten eggs. Or was trying to solve a really difficult math problem.”

“Kind of like how he’s looking at you now?”

No need to lift her gaze to verify that his eyes were still trained on her. Her skin sizzled with his penetrating heat.

A patchwork of sensual images grabbed hold. Their first kiss during a winter festival at Lincoln Park Zoo, her hot chocolate cooling while his lips kept her warm. A yearlong diet of sexy smooches and teenage exploration, stopping short of home base because Beck refused to take full advantage.

“I begged him to do the deed, but he said I was too young. Finally, when I turned eighteen, he—” She stopped as memories of Beck’s blunt prizefighter hands on her body, seeking out erotic flash points and bringing her to blistering release, assaulted her senses.

“Did you good?”

“So good,” she said, lowering her voice though the bar’s noisy hum provided adequate cover. “I was gaga about him and I thought it was mutual until he sent me packing.”

Darcy still remembered his final words to her all those years ago, spoken in that graveled voice, dripping with sex and menace. Only a month after he had made her a full-fledged woman and claimed every part of her.

Forget you ever met me, Darcy.

And she had, after a year—or five. She stowed the boy in her brain’s basement and went on to a new life, one she chose for herself instead of following the gated path her father had insisted she travel. Underneath this designer sweater and perfectly cut skirt was the project she had been working on for years. A well-traveled, well-adjusted, reinvented woman.

“You’re not a kid anymore,” Mel said. Despite only seeing each other a few times a year, her friend could always intuit when Darcy was about to send out invites to the pity party. “You should go for it.”

“Go for what?”

“School the cherry popper. Make him beg. Milk. Him. Dry.”

Though Darcy had been on that very wavelength before actually coming face-to-face with Beck, now that he was in her immediate orbit, looking hot as sin and twice as dangerous, doubts assailed her. “Hooking up with the old flame who took my virginity and cast me aside quicker than the used condom? That seems a bit—”

“—revengey,” Mel finished with a smug grin.

“Sad. It seems sad. I’m not looking for revenge. Revenge is for people who care.” She most definitely did not care about Beck Rivera and his soulful eyes. Nor did she care about that livid scar on his head or how he came by it. And no way in hell did she care about how good his ass looked in denim. Those trim, tight glutes were the natural resting point for a gaze that started at the broad triangle of his shoulders and traveled down his solid back, tapering waist, and slim hips. Even from behind, the man was painfully beautiful.

Did not care.

“You lied to him,” Mel said, her brows veed. “About your art.”

So she had. Explaining how her life had turned out would open a can of worms and invite unwanted scrutiny. While wearing the costume of her alter ego, the Gold Coast princess, she could keep her true identity hidden. She didn’t owe him any explanations. She didn’t owe him a thing.

“Like I said, don’t care.”

“So bang that hot firefightin’ ass and don’t care,” Mel said. “And hope to God he’s better at that than he is at tending bar. I’m parched over here.”

Bang him and don’t care. Not revenge, necessarily, just raising her sex point average. And if, in the process, she happened to remind him of everything he had given up by casting her aside? Well, that was just extra credit.

Forget you ever met me, Darcy.

Maybe it was time to ensure Beck Rivera never forgot he met her.

chapter 3

Of all the bars in all the world, she had to be tackled to the ground outside his. And she had hardly changed. Beck’s man card required he knew subshit about designer duds, but even he could tell those fancy fabrics clinging fondly to her curves and the pearls around her swanlike neck were the real deal. The princesa still oozed money, class, and keep-the-fuck-away.

“She looks familiar,” Luke said as Beck poured shots of gin.

“Darcy Cochrane. Another lifetime.”

Luke’s mouth tightened in recognition. “She was at the funeral. Her father owns the Trib?”

“And Chicago magazine, a slice of the Cubs, part of the United Center.”

“She’s grown up fine,” Luke mused.

True that. The prettiest girl Beck had ever known was now a knockout on an epic scale. Sleek hair pulled tight off her face in a swishy ebony fall. High, haughty cheekbones, ruby pink lips, a chin as stubborn as her father’s. The feel of her curves beneath his searching hands left the impression of a heaven-formed, amazingly built woman.

“She’s been traveling the world,” he said, because Luke seemed to expect something more. She had skipped any mention of her marriage from the catch-up checklist, though he noticed she wore no ring. Admittedly not compelling evidence, and that it spiked his pulse annoyed the bejesus out of him. The day Luke had pointed out the engagement notice in her father’s paper, eighteen months after they had split, Beck had punched a wall so hard he broke his hand. Whatever Darcy’s situation now, apparently she could drop her jet-setting life for three months to help her grandmother.

“Well, now she’s back,” Luke said. “Whatcha gonna do about it?”

Beck’s heart hitched and tripped out a ragged beat. She was the cliché, the one who got away, and now she was here, a glowing second chance. A do-over.

Except she was still so far out of his league that she may as well be crater hopping on the moon. And oh yeah, he had dumped her without explanation in the name of doing her a favor.

Right.

“It’s not quite so simp—”

“Jesus Christ, ladies, could you put a plug in your hourly gossip and help me out here?” Gage threw his hands up dramatically in case the caps-lock delivery didn’t reflect sufficiently The Real Housewives of New Jersey vibe.

“You’re doing fine, Short Stack,” Luke returned, clearly amused. “Think of all the tips you’re making.”

“Tips I’m sharing with you dickheads. When I should be keeping them because I’m so fucking awesome.”

With both hands in perpetual motion, Gage deftly added vodka shots to a couple of metal shakers, then got busy squeezing lime halves into the mix. His T-shirt advised his fans to Feel Safe at Night: Sleep with a Firefighter.

A group of enthusiastic female customers cheered Gage on and slammed a couple of twenties down on the bar. Their youngest brother had read an article on mixology last year and introduced a special cocktail menu that no one could get right the nights he was on shift at Engine 6. His grand pretentions were a menace, but they loved him all the same.

It had taken Beck awhile to get on that page. By the time he was pulled out of the foster care system into Waif and Stray Central at the Dempseys, he was thirteen years old, and the rest of the kids had been part of the family for years. A well-established unit with rituals and connections and nuances he could never hope to understand. He spoke to no one for the first six months, just nodded to Mary when she asked if he’d had enough to eat and grunted at Sean for everything else. Unfortunately, he had to share a room with a ten-year-old Gage, and the kid would not shut up.

Want to read my Spider-Man comics? Gage was obsessed with Spider-Man. The transformation from wimp to superhero really appealed to him.

Beck had ignored him. Not there to make friends, he’d already been kicked out of two families because of his “emotional dissociation,” which apparently meant he wasn’t emotional enough. Like he was a robot. He’d show them robot. Because if he showed them anything else—the rage inside him, the fury spitting for a target—they would return him as defective, anyway. The Dempseys had five foster kids already, and he was the last one in. Even a fucked-up junior banger like him knew what that meant.

Last in, first out.

But Gage would not give up. His sunny disposition bugged the shit out of Beck until one day he threw the little runt’s latest peace offering, a Game Boy, against a wall. And then he called him names. Queer. Fag. Words that filled Beck with shame to this day. While waiting for Gage to rat him out to Sean, just in from his shift at the firehouse and pounding his steel-toed boots up the stairs, Beck refused to look at Gage. Refused to give him the satisfaction. But as his heart galloped in time with Sean’s heavy tread, two piercing realizations smacked him upside the head.

He was so frickin’ tired.

And he wanted to stay.

He wanted to stop fighting, but his mouth couldn’t shape the words in his heart, and now it was too late.

Sean curved his head around the door and, after ten mind-blurring seconds, pulled back with a mere nod. Gage hadn’t snitched. Though he didn’t fully understand why, Beck was overwhelmed with a gratitude that warmed his cold, neglected heart. His little brother, more annoying than all get out and one of the best people Beck knew, had smiled like he’d won a prize and dropped the latest issue of Spider-Man on Beck’s bed.

Gage and Beck had been on the same page ever since, and it opened the floodgates with the rest of them. When Logan took Beck to the gym to try his hands at boxing, Beck knew he was in the right place and with the right people at last.

But growing up Dempsey was a double-edged sword. If not for them, he might have been content with an ordinary girl instead of an upper-crust babe like Darcy. The problem with being a Dempsey is that they made you believe anything was possible.

“You need to talk to her,” Luke said, jolting Beck back to the present.

Beck shrugged his response, all those old insecurities coming back to bite his neck. Talking had never worked for him. And what could he say after all these years? I was crazy about you, but I let you go for your own good. Because that shit would fly. Women just loved being told what was good for them.

Luke took an order from the adorable blonde who’d been manhandled by Red Suit. Clearly interested in more than a rum and Coke, her face fell when his brother didn’t respond to her overt flirting. With his divorce recently finalized, Luke had yet to reach the bang-his-way-out-of-his-misery step. It would come.

Beck remembered it well.

Gin and tonics in hand, he ambled over to the side of the bar, frowning when he found no sign of Darcy. Her coat still hung on the hook but her boot was gone. Darcy’s friend was groping the bicep of Jacob Scott, one of Beck’s coworkers on the truck, but paused to thumb over her shoulder. “Little leprechaunette’s room.”

“Think I’ll take that break now,” he said to Luke, who smirked at that.

Smug bastard.

“Sure, Becky. Take all the time you need.”

Not even Luke’s use of the girly nickname Beck had been plagued with as a kid could quell the anticipation thrumming through him. Sort of like the energy sparking his blood before a run or a fight. He didn’t want to punch anyone, but he wouldn’t say no to stoking a fire. First, though, he wanted to talk more. Find out what she’d been up to all these years.

And touch her. Definitely touch her.

He found her in the corridor heading to the restrooms, and covertly he watched as she tentatively tested out her ankle with brief stops to flex her foot. Satisfied she was back in business, she leaned her back against the wall, and he took a blessed moment to admire the curved wave of her body as she texted on her phone with quick, supple fingers. He used to love how fast those fingers moved, creating portraits in charcoal, quick sketches that she would later develop into masterpieces. It was their only communication during that first year of nonversation. She, trying to capture his mood while he sat in her family’s den. He, biding his time, scheming to capture her heart.

“How’s the ankle?”

She lifted her tilty-green gaze, but there was no surprise at seeing him. “I’ll live.”

He stared, the need in him rising more quickly than expected as every cell in his body clamored for action and release. A fiery blush crept up her neck. When the sweep of heat tagged her cheekbones, she made a disgruntled noise in the back of her throat, and knowing he still had that effect on her had his dick at attention in an instant.

“Some things don’t change, I see,” she said as she slipped her phone into a purse slung over her shoulder. “You’ve not become a sparkling conversationalist in the intervening years, Beck.”

“We never needed to talk, princesa.”

Man, how she used to hate that endearment, though in days past, using it had sparked some of their most pleasurable moments together. He would goad her until her cheeks flushed and his cock swelled and relief could only come from sinking his fingers in her hair, her mouth, her slick-for-him sex.

Now, on a razor’s edge, the moment lived, then deflated when she gave him a nervy smile. She looked unsure, vulnerable, not at all like the girl he knew.

“What are you up to these days?” he asked.

Thoughts ran circles over her face as she geared up to . . . huh. Lie her sweet ass off.

“This and that. Mostly helping with Grams’s recovery and organizing the charity fund-raiser for the homeless she hosts each year. Big party in a couple of weeks.”

Maybe this was a boyfriend or that was a husband.

“How’s Preston Collins III?”

Her composure took another hit, but on the beat of three she picked herself right back up and smoothed her expression to a cool slate.

“I’ve no idea.”

“So your marriage didn’t work out?”

“I never got married. That was something my father wanted, not me.”

There was no time to enjoy the sweet balm of relief those words created in his chest. Something else was going on here, a restlessness about her that matched his own edgy mood. The tell in her eyes piqued his interest. Time to double down.

“So how mad at me are you right now?”

She sucked in a breath. “Mad? At you? Why would I be mad at you?”

“Oh, I dunno.” Because he had dropped her like a bad habit. “You seem uncomfortable at seeing me again. Pissy.”

“Beck,” she said in the tone of one about to explain something to a dimwit. “When I was eighteen years old, you broke my heart. Stomped on it. Pulverized it into a mess I thought would be irreparable. I cried for two months, cut my hair and dyed it a really awful blond, let it grow out, made friends in college. I even had a boyfriend, a hot linebacker who was excellent in bed. But every day since, I’ve wished I was here with a guy who voluntarily runs into burning buildings. I wanted to be waiting at home with my heart stuck to the roof of my mouth, hoping he’d text me whenever a warehouse fire was splashed all over the local news. I longed to be getting into arguments about whether it was okay to use my family’s money to get us a better apartment because my man was so proud he insisted on supporting us on his city salary.”

“So, still mad.”

She angled her head, taking him in like he was a bug not worthy of her attention. And then she gave him a huge-ass smile.

Fuckin’ A! Hell, fuckin’ B, C, D, and E. He felt like he’d been pumped with a triple dose of tropical sunshine.

“Sorry, just needed to get it out,” she said. “You dumped me a month after we had sex for the first time and that kind of thing is enough to give a girl a complex. I had it in my head that I must have been god-awful in the sack.”

Mierda. Surely she had not been living with that?

She stayed the tip-of-his-tongue protest with a hand, and that she still had the imperious thing going on put his groin on serious notice.

“But I realized fairly quickly that it was for the best. We were from different worlds, Beck. I don’t harbor any grudges.”

Listening to her mature and measured assessment should have put him at ease. Should have. But his body did not feel loose. His mind did not accept this.

“It’s okay to be a little ticked off,” he said, strangely ticked off himself at her self-possession. “I treated you pretty shabbily.”

She arched a dark eyebrow, its delicate upward curve a message in itself. “After all this time, you’d rather I was angry. You’d rather I kept you in here”—she touched a clenched fist to the soft swell of her breast—“because it would mean I still care and you still have some power over me.”

Yes, a million times, yes. He hooked her pearls to bring her closer and then, very deliberately, placed one palm against the hallway’s wall inches from her heat-stained cheek.

“I’d rather you were mad because then I could make it better. Remember what I used to do to calm you down? Your dad would piss you off and then I would piss you off more and before you knew it, you were coming apart, screaming my name.”

A muscle ticked at the corner of her mouth, begging for his thumb to soothe it.

So he did.

“Kissing you, touching you, every hurried fumble in my car, every time we explored each other’s bodies—it was all amazing. And when after months, years of waiting, I finally drove deep inside you where I belonged, that was also amazing, Darcy. Sex had nothing to do with why we didn’t work out.”

There. He’d said it. As for the reasons for their split—the real reasons—now was neither the time nor the place. Might never be, but she needed to know she was not to blame.

The soft thud of a closing door signaled that someone was exiting the restroom around the corner. A guy weaved by on his way back to the bar, and with each passing second, Beck’s heart thundered in his ears.

He turned back to Darcy in time to catch her blinking away an intrusive thought. “Thank you for setting the record straight and letting me know my sexual inexperience was not a contributing factor.”

Uh-oh. Sarcastic, if his snark-o-meter was calibrated right. “You said you had a complex.”

“I said it was enough to give a girl a complex.” She rubbed a tuft of his coarse beard between her finger and thumb, like she was testing the quality of fabric in a high-end store. “But I figured out quickly that I’m rather awesome, both in and out of the bedroom. Lots of hot college guys helped with my sexual awakening.”

“Your what?”

“My sexual awakening. Those first few months of school, I jumped right in with all the zeal of a frat boy at a kegger. Discovered what I like.” She tugged on his beard and it felt surprisingly good, despite the fact he was half-past pissed at the words spilling from her pert, kissable mouth. “What I don’t like.”

A tight band of steel squeezed around his chest, and the pounding in his ears grew louder. He had been the one to nurture her sex-starved body, not some Dockers-wearing college boy. Beck’s nineteenth year had been one of the most painful of his life. A year of stiff sheets and balled-up tissues, every cock-stroking fantasy filled with sweet, sexy Darcy begging him to touch her, take her.

Own her.

Denying his raging needs for months, he made sure to take care of hers until finally he surrendered to her tight, virginal body the night of the funeral, in the boxing ring at the gym where he had made Sean and Logan proud so many times. Not how he had planned it at all. It was too rough, too raw, too damn visceral. But he had needed her desperately, the only drug that could numb his soul-splitting pain.

He scrubbed a hand across the scruff on his jaw. “You like the beard, princesa.”

“It disgusts me,” she deadpanned, but there was no missing the wisp of a smile on her lips. Teenage Darcy was a fiery creature, spoiled and perpetually indignant, and the ability to laugh at herself was not part of her makeup. Somewhere along the way, she had developed a sense of humor, and damn if that wasn’t sexier than every one of her soft, womanly curves.

“What else about me disgusts you?”

“How long have you got?”

“Ten good inches.”

She snorted. “See? Dirty mouth.”

Covering her body with his, he nuzzled his raggedy jaw against her cheek and absorbed her shiver into his own. “You used to like my dirty mouth and all the magical things I could do with it.”

“Teenage hormones have a lot to answer for.”

“Adult ones, too.” Though it killed him a little, he put a few painful inches between them and trailed a finger along her jaw, noting with satisfaction that she trembled under his touch. “It was good to see you again. Have a nice holiday.”

Her expressive brow told him she liked what he’d done there. “When did you get funny, Beck Rivera?”

“Around about the time you got a sense of humor, querida.”

There it was, that fire-bright smile. He felt like he’d swallowed the sun.

“Your shtick needs work.”

“Then show me how it’s done. Bésame.” Kiss me.

She laughed, right in his face. “Bésame el culo.”

Kiss my ass? Oh, it was on. Leaning in, he caged her with palms on the wall. The air around them shook with sex and need. Her lush body damn near vibrated with it.

“So demanding, princesa. How about I start with your mouth, then work down to your breasts, your belly, your thighs? Plenty of country to rediscover before I get to your sweet culo.”

But before he could kiss her, she kissed him. Unexpectedly, like the Darcy of old, and expertly, like this new Darcy he liked very, very much. Her lips claimed one corner of his mouth, then the other, and he parted to let her in. An invitation she accepted with joy. He’d always loved how she approached kissing, like she approached everything—with a single-mindedness that bordered on pathological. Over the years, she had probably honed her technique with a ton of guys. He hated every fucking one of them.

His arms snaked around her involuntarily; his body had always known what it wanted where she was concerned. By the time his mind caught up, he was a goner. He gathered her closer, perversely pleased that she didn’t soften immediately. He deserved to suffer. As their tongues tangled, realization shocked him stupid: no one else affected him like this, sent his heart soaring into the stratosphere and his cock punching against his zipper. A kiss, that’s all it took with Darcy who had once been his fantasy girl, and was fast becoming his fantasy woman. It was like someone had opened a bottle of good lovin’ wine. Vintage, seven years ago.

She had closed her eyes and the fact that she still did that during a kiss made his heart ache so sweetly. Slowly, she opened them as if waking from a dream.

“Te necesito, Darcy,” he murmured. So strange, only with her did his first language—one he barely spoke anymore—come out. She unlocked that primal part of him.

Their lips met again in a rush of heat and desire, and this time he abandoned his misguided attempt at coolness. It had never been a game with her. She clutched his shoulders, digging into his skin, and he couldn’t get enough of the bite of her. Her soft mouth, her clawing fingers, the fight in her body. She let loose a groan he felt all the way to his balls.

Crowd noise filtered through from the bar, reminding him that they were in far too public a place. Lifting her, he headed a few short feet to the back office and pushed his way through, kicking the door shut behind him. Too small for anything, it was perfect for this. He sat her on the desk, on top of a pile of invoices. Her purse hit the floor. She was breathing heavily, the swells of her breasts lifting her pearls.

“Is there someone else?” he asked, needing to know for a million reasons, none of them good for his sanity.

“Not at the moment.” She reached for his belt and undid the buckle while he pushed her skirt up her thighs. Thick woolen tights covered her legs, and the memory of her peaches-and-cream skin made his mouth water.

“Hurry,” she said, her eyes wild. “Please.”

This was moving at lightning speed, but she’d get no complaints from him. Next time—and yes, there would be a next time—he’d take it slow. Right now, he needed to be inside her, feel the clutch of her silken folds around his cock, find the pleasure he craved after a shitty couple of months. After far too long without her.

Quickly, he produced a condom and rolled it on while she watched approvingly. His hands shot up her skirt, seeking out the top of her tights so he could yank them south, but the snugness of the fabric over her hips made it difficult to get purchase.

“I think we need to—”

“Rip it, Beck,” she whispered.

“What?”

“Rip it.” She dragged his hand between her thighs, and he could feel her pulsing with want right there. A throaty moan escaped her lips as he applied more pressure. “Please. Now.”

Rip it. Get inside her. No waiting, no seduction, no fucking games. Just Darcy with that hot brew of pleading and ordering that destroyed him every time. He pulled the thick wool away from her body and, after a couple of tries, tore it down the seam. Slipping his fingers inside, he pushed aside her panties and found her soaked.

“Jesus, Darcy. You’re—”

“Yes, yes, I am,” she said, grinding her pliant heat on his hand. She hooked a finger in his jeans pocket and drew him toward her. “Do something about it.”

Yes, ma’am.

His mouth crushed hers, and then it was all hot hands and slick tongues. His on her, hers on him. Stroking with velvet licks inside her demanding mouth. Taking timeouts to watch as her pale hands pumped his cock, dark and pulsing even while sheathed. Memories he’d locked down broke through and added an indescribably sweet edge. Darcy giving her body to him the night he buried the two men he loved the most. Darcy making it better before he made it worse.

She felt it, too, he could tell. Remembrance flickered through her green eyes and he entered her just then, like that one action could seal the bond between past and present. He held still for untold heartbeats, ostensibly letting her adjust to his expanding size, but really because he needed to grasp onto this for a few seconds longer before the tethers of his waning control snapped.

One, two, ah . . . He cupped her jaw, enjoying immensely the delicate feel of her bones and how the softness of her skin churned something inside him. He plundered her mouth and mapped it with his tongue, giving her what she wanted, taking what he needed. A wave of clenching pleasure slammed into his midsection. Only then did he withdraw and plunge deep.

So damn good.

With his hands on her wool-covered ass, he urged her closer, tighter, the claustrophobic binding of their clothing adding another layer to the pleasure. It wasn’t enough. He jerked at the hem of her sweater, anxious to see the changes time had wrought on her body, only to be met with resistance. She pushed his hand away.

“No—no—we don’t have time.” A shocking vulnerability shone from her eyes. Was she unsure of being naked? Because he would not allow it. “Just take me there, Beck.”

Take me there. The same words she would beg when they were too young to even know their significance. It might have meant simple pleasure or outright oblivion. He had hoped it meant forever.

He did as he was told. Fucked her harder, got lost in the feel of her, took her to that place. Slick suction where their bodies joined fell into a hot rhythm with their fevered pants. Desperate thrusts and pulls ramped up his desire so fast he had to actively slow it down to make sure he lasted. This woman was so hot. And Christ, he wanted to burn.

Her moans got louder, the clench of her silken muscles tighter.

“Come for me, Darcy. Sé mía.” Be mine.

“Beck,” she whispered. Her tight channel clamped around his cock, and in every cell he felt the shatter of her orgasm as it unraveled through her body. It triggered his own release, and he let go with a roar, pumping every last ounce of tension and need into her.

Un-fucking-real.

“Hmm,” she hummed after a couple of minutes spent panting their way back to even breathing levels.

“Sí,” he managed.

She laughed. “That Spanish gets me every time.”

How lucky was he to have found her, right here, right now, as if he’d wished for it? Kissing her softly, he worked the condom off and disposed of it. She kissed him back, caressing his mouth with sexy kitten licks that melted his insides and hardened him everywhere else.

“I can’t leave the bar now,” he said, “but I can see you later.”

Keeping her gaze low, she adjusted her skirt to cover the ripped tights, like she could hide the glorious sleaziness of what they had just done. “I . . . I don’t think so.”

“It wasn’t a request, princesa.”

Her head snapped back and a flash of the old Darcy sparked in her sea-green eyes. “I don’t follow orders anymore. Not my father’s, not yours, not any man’s.” Standing tall, she gave his dick a gentle tug. “It was great seeing you again, Beck. Feliz Navidad.”

And before he could muster an argument or shove his still aching dick in his pants, she was out the door, moving astonishingly fast for someone who had twisted her ankle not half an hour ago.

Five seconds passed in disbelief, another ten in outright awe. He forced himself to swallow this devastating dose of reality: he had just been wham-bammed by Darcy Cochrane and then she had said good-bye with a dick shake.

A dick shake!

The door flapped open and his heart boosted in hope before plummeting to the floor, along with his flagging cock. It was only Luke with that well-worn smirk on his face.

“For fuck’s sake, Becky, how about you put your dick back in your pants and come help us out here?”

chapter 4

Something was off here.

Beck strummed the steering wheel of his truck and peered up at the gray, nondescript building on this industrial stretch of Clybourn. A construction site a half block down instilled hope that the area might be up-and-coming, though that claim had been made about this neighborhood before. Not that “neighborhood” really applied—it was no neighbors, all hood.

He checked the torn-off slip of paper in his hand, covered in Gage’s loopy writing. The snooty butler at the Cochrane mansion in the Gold Coast said Miss Cochrane was not residing there, which left Beck to tap his usual sources. Marcy at the DMV had turned up mothereffin’ zilch, and he still owed her sister a date. Finally Gage had come through with a call to Darcy’s drinking buddy—Melissa or Paula or something.

He needed to see her again. Her taste still coated his mouth, honey-sweet, exactly as he remembered it from all those years ago. How could she taste the same and how could his body still react like that? Even now, the memory of her eager lips and that surrendering sigh as she came gave him pleasure he had no right to enjoy. Not after how he had let her down, treated her as no better than something stuck to the bottom of his boots.

But lust makes monsters of us all, and this monster was greedy for more.

Sucking a sharp breath of snow-tinged air, he pressed each label-less button on the intercom panel in turn. The metallic buzz echoed in the quiet, broken only by the intermittent whoosh of traffic behind him. He let a minute tick by. Tried again. Nothing. Looked like the friend had sent him on a wild goose chase, maybe under orders from the princesa herself. Which wouldn’t surprise him, given how fast Darcy had bolted from his bar last night.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a ghostly flicker. At the gable of the building, a wall-mounted neon sign read Skin Candy Ink, the S struggling to stay lit, the K in Ink extending to an arrow that pointed to a spot out of sight. Maybe someone there could provide the answers.

Decided, he stepped between the buildings, half expecting the gap to close behind him and explode into a fantasy world like something out of Harry Potter. If someone were to approach from the shadowy bowels at the end of the tight passage, they’d both have to flatten their backs against the walls and slither by to avoid contact. Ten seconds and a hundred heartbeats later, the passage opened out into a small clearing. Like a dirty beacon, the tattoo parlor shone, its glass windows darkly tinted except for another neon sign affirming he’d reached the right place and a large banner proclaiming “We reserve the right to refuse service to any asshole.”

Better keep his asshole tendencies in check, then.

He pushed the door open and his body thanked him for the warm blast. The gratitude did not extend to his ears, however. Classical music assaulted them where something hard edged with a booming bass would have been more welcome. The feeling of having stepped into a strange new world washed over him.

“Be with you in a second,” a muffled voice came from the back.

Moving farther in, Beck scanned the surroundings, first looking for exits. Nothing marked, which was against code. He tripped his gaze over the walls. Every inch advertised the shop’s craft: cartoon figures, superheroes, skulls, half skulls/half devils, half skulls/half Marilyns, winged hearts, arrowed hearts, hearts inset with Mom. The whole gamut.

Another few steps brought a whole other level of artistry into view. A raven-haired woman bent over a client, a tattoo machine poised in her gloved hand. On her exposed shoulder blade, a flock of birds gathered low before taking flight at the base of her slender neck. Inked cuffs laced her toned biceps, a shocking contrast to her porcelain skin and the white tank top barely covering purple bra straps. One of them fell in dishevelment off her rounded shoulder, the kind of messiness that always stirred him up. Pretty damn sexy.

As was the rest of her. Slim, with full hips that flared and kept her short black skirt snugly in place. The ink picked up along her left thigh, a vine of blue roses that disappeared into her biker boot. Sexy and badass.

Beck felt a ping in his chest—perhaps more of the strange new world effect, but something was off. All firemen learned to recognize that whisper, that gut check, and shit if he wasn’t feeling it now. Seeking his bearings, he scoured the walls and let his eyes rest on signs that broke up the images:

“Love lasts forever but a tattoo lasts six months longer.”

“Tattoos hurt. No bitching, whining, or passing out.”

“A man without tattoos is invisible to the gods.”

Were the gods looking down on him now, laughing at his torment? Giving him a taste of Darcy and what might have been, only to snatch her away from him again? He’d spent his whole life defying those fuckers’ plans for him. The gods could go screw themselves.

Something glanced by his legs, and he dropped his gaze to an obese tabby cat that reminded him of another place and a time long gone. It rubbed against his jeans affectionately.

Then it hissed.

Beck’s eyes widened in recognition. That cat had always hated him.

No way. No. Fucking. Way.

“I’m looking for someone who lives around here,” he said, but he already knew he’d found her.

She straightened, every muscle in her curvaceous body locking up tight. Carefully, she raised the machine from her client’s arm and placed it down on a tray like it was loaded. As she turned, hints of color peeked out above the edge of her left bra cup.

The blinding realization that had crashed over him about ten seconds ago was just now catching up to make his skin buzz. Still, it was nowhere near enough time to adjust to this new information. He had known she loved to draw, but he never imagined this. Could never have connected the neurons to even dream it. Darcy Cochrane, tatted and dressed like she belonged here. Like this was her world.

The Earth had flipped on its axis, dragging his brain along for the crazy ride.

“How did you find me?” she asked, cool as the other side of the pillow.

“I have my ways, princesa.”

Long denim-clad legs swung off the chair behind her, and combat boots thumped the ground. A beast of a man towered over Darcy’s shoulder, boasting raw scar tissue on the right side of his face that gave the impression he’d road tripped to hell and made a few friends there. His protective stance sent a surge of fury through Beck.

Darcy and . . . nah-ah.

“It’s okay,” she said, looking up into her protector’s smoke-dark eyes. “Beck’s an old friend.”

Old friend? Hell yeah, he was.

With care and a slightly unsteady hand, she placed a wrap over her recent work, which looked like—was that a habanero pepper? Both of the guy’s arms were blanketed in ink, barely room to spare for a postage stamp.

“I’ll stay while you lock up,” the brute said, one eye on Darcy, the other on Beck.

“I’ve got this, Brady.”

Brady crossed his arms resolutely and planted his feet.

Seeming to arrive at a decision, Darcy pushed out a noisy breath. “Brady, Beck. Beck, Brady.”

This dude was clearly important to her, not in a romantic sense, because if he was her man there would be zero debate about leaving her solo with another guy. But he was important on some other level, a realization that did not put Beck at ease. Darcy seemed A-okay with the situation, though. Her worlds had collided and she was figuring it out—with a lot more mental agility than Beck.

Beck stepped forward and held out his hand, half amused because the situation had the ring of a hostage handoff in Berlin circa 1985. She’s safe with me, new scary friend. Brady acknowledged Beck’s outstretched hand with a look but refused to take it. Alrighty, then.

Without further pleasantries, not even a “later” for Darcy, Brady headed out into the Chiberian night in short sleeves, ink as armor. Watch out, darkness.

Beck turned back to Darcy, his surprise momentarily giving way to blatant curiosity. “Where’d you find him?”

“Paris. Don’t take the handshake thing personally. He doesn’t like to be touched.” She clicked off the music with a remote control, and then with nimble fingers unhooked the needles from the tattoo machine and placed the apparatus in a box like a cube-shaped microwave. Entranced, he watched her, waiting for the wavy lines in front of his eyes to clear. On the off chance he was stuck in a crazy fever dream, he shut his lids, counted to three, and opened them again.

Nope, still there.

Darcy Cochrane, heiress, charity doyenne, and one of Chicago’s elite, had turned into a tattooed biker chick. So, no motorcycle as far as he knew, but she had the boots and the ’tude and the fucking ink. This was a million times removed from old Darcy with her pink, fuzzy sweater that used to have him in fits. And not even on the same planet as Darcy 2.0 from last night with the designer clothes and the pearls.

“Think I’m gonna need the non-Twitter version, Darcy.”

“Oh, but we never needed words, querido.”

Throwing his own smooth line back in his face? Nicely done, princesa.

He leaned on the counter, making it abundantly clear he was settling in for the long haul. In the bruising silence, he raked his gaze over her from head to toe, trying to craft his own story of what her body art meant. Last night she hinted at bad blood between her and Daddy, but hell if this wasn’t one head-kicking case of rebellion. Those images were etched into her skin for a reason.

“So paint me a picture.”

Oh, he looked good. Grumpy and annoyed that he didn’t have all the information, sure, but surly had always looked like sex on him. All that heart-wrenching intensity, and when it had been focused on her as he moved inside her, it was so easy to believe they were the last two people on Earth.

Mr. Miggins, her crusty old kitty, snaked a figure eight through Darcy’s legs and scratched out a plaintive mewl. Evidently, already feeling the tension.

May as well start with the easy stuff. “I’m filling in for the owner who heads to Florida this time every year. Snowbird. I do this during the downtime when Grams can’t bear the sight of me fussing around her. I’m staying in the apartment upstairs.”

“That covers the last three months.”

Needing to do something, anything, to escape his visual dissection, she turned the knob to the high setting on the autoclave so the tattoo iron would be sterilized in fifteen minutes, then set about tidying up her work area. Always be moving.

“I’ve been in Paris for the last couple of years, working with François Bernet. He’s a well-known tattoo artist and he’s taught me a lot.” Both in and out of the sack, when he wasn’t being a controlling French jerk, but Beck didn’t need to hear that.

Too late. The crimp creasing his forehead said he’d read between the lines and come away with “Darcy did Paris” in more ways than one.

After some first-rate glowering, he found his voice again. “I knew you loved art, but . . .”

“You had no idea how much?”

“I’m pretty sure Skin Ink 101 is not an elective at Harvard.”

She sighed. “I dropped out my sophomore year. The expectations . . . well, they got to be too much.”

“Was your engagement part of those expectations?”

She had wanted to study art, but there was no room in her father’s plans for a foolish girl’s dreams. A Chicago media and real estate tycoon, Sam Cochrane had a rather feudal attitude when it came to the family’s fortunes. For years he had treated his children as cogs in a plan to consolidate power without dirtying his hands with outright politicking. The front lines were of no interest to him, not when playing puppet master suited him better. The Collinses were a wealthy Connecticut family where everyone over the age of thirty was a U.S. congressman and had numbers after their names. Preston was the dynasty’s most eligible bachelor.

“I met Preston at a political fund-raiser my father encouraged me to attend. We dated for a few months and he asked me to marry him. I was only nineteen. I thought it was what I wanted, but every day closer to the wedding I became more panicked. I bailed two weeks before the big day.”

Darcy had stared down a lifetime of bruncheons and getting her hair ombréd, and realized this was not how she was supposed to go out. Finding out that Preston and her father held regular powwows with agenda items covering everything from how many children she should push out in the next five years to whether a political wife actually needed a college degree had woken her up from the Matrix-like life she’d been sleepwalking through. When she asked for her father’s help canceling the wedding, he told her to play ball or be cut off.

“Let’s just say I didn’t want my life to be mapped out for me.”

On a grunt, Beck flipped open one of the flash books, the shop’s equivalent of clip art for people who wanted a tattoo but had no imagination beyond the initial impulse.

“Last night you ran out on me,” he murmured.

“You ran first.”

Electric eyes snapped to hers. Jaw muscles bunched. She longed to bite back the hastily spoken words. Not supposed to care, Darcy.

“Ancient history, princesa.”

“And you can cut that princesa shit out, for a start.” For a start? No, no, no. Nothing was starting here because he was right. They were ancient history and dredging up the whys and whats was about as useful as Matthew McConaughey’s shirt collection.

“Why are you here, Beck?”

“You ran out on me,” he repeated, the edge in his voice hitting the hollow between her lungs. He shut the flash book, the sound a brutal echo in the tense silence, and skirted the counter, devouring the ground with long, measured strides. She backed up into the remaining inches available until her butt met the chair.

“And now I’ve found you.”

She took those words as more than mere acknowledgment that he had located her at this point in time, in this particular place. The underlying meaning, that she had been rediscovered and would be at his mercy, thrilled through her despite her best intentions not to be aroused.

“And now you can be on your way.”

He placed a big palm on either side of her, hemming her in against the chair’s armrest with his feral, male heat. So sexy, so dangerous. That damn pirate’s jaw!

“Do you think I’m stupid?” he rasped.

“Well—”

“Let me rephrase, because right now you might have something there. Standing this close to you makes me feel incredibly stupid.” He sucked in a hissed breath. “Do you think I’m going to let you go now that we’ve reconnected?”

Her heart thudded insanely fast. “I’m thinking you don’t have a say in the matter, Beck Rivera.”

Shit. She needed to stop using his last name like that. Or his first name. It smacked of a lover’s familiarity and a level of comfort she did not want to indulge in. Last night, the ease between them as they teased and flirted had filled aching gaps in the cold corners of her mind. Not to mention what had come after. All day, she had savored X-rated visuals of his hard body fusing to hers, that in-out rhythm as he entered her so deeply she felt him clear to her heart. Tasting him had been such a boneheaded move she wondered how she was still standing. Shouldn’t her brain matter have squeezed out of her ears? Shouldn’t she be collapsed somewhere in a fetal heap of regret?

He inched closer, invading, conquering her body and soul with his quiet intensity.

Goddamn him.

One thick finger traced along her collarbone and down, down, down over the inky flora blooming above her tank top’s neckline. He tracked the motion with his somber gaze. It was unbearably erotic.

“Last night, you were covered up. Looked like you’d come from one of your grandmother’s fancy parties.”

Her breathing came in short tugs. “The Cochrane holiday photo. Just playing the part for my father.”

“Rip it, Beck,” he whispered hotly against her ear, mimicking her desperate plea from the night before. “You didn’t want me to see your body. You chose to hide this shiny new version of yourself from me. Why?”

The edge in his tone boosted her pulse precipitously, and not just the one that supplied oxygen to the troublesome muscle in her chest. Between her legs, another heart beat a chant to the one man she had loved like no other. Her labored breathing smashed her breasts against his chest, the friction turning her nipples to aching points of need.

Those Beck blues flashed. “Why did you insist on hiding this beautiful body from me, Darcy?”

“It seemed easier to . . .” Her mind flailed like a dying fish. “. . . to pretend.”

“That you’re something you’re not?”

Perhaps she had been playing the part for more than just her father. She’d taken enough Cosmo quizzes to know that walling up her essence and falling back on the old was a classic defense mechanism. This way, she controlled the situation. She stayed in charge. No need to complicate sex with something as inconvenient as the truth.

“People have certain expectations of me. Even you. You wanted to relive the good old times with the Gold Coast princess, and that’s what you got.”

He swiped her lower lip with the thick pad of his thumb. “Think I got a whole lot more, querida. Think I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of this fascinating, new woman you’ve become.”

The shock of that almost undid her. She was so much more than Darcy Cochrane, the painted rebel or her father’s pawn. The way Beck held her gaze captive completely unnerved her. She wanted to be seen so badly. She wanted to be seen by this man.

Why him? Why the man who had cast her aside like day-old bread? His arrogance made her muscles seethe. Men like that were welcome in her bed, but not in her heart.

Stark evidence of his arousal pressed against her hip, hard and thick, sending a message to her clenching sex. Soaking wet, it shot back like a Morse code throb. If she shifted a couple of inches, it would be an invitation for him to lift her skirt and thrust into her. She suppressed a groan. If she stayed still, what did that say? He could wait her out forever with the patience of a feline predator.

So color her surprised when he withdrew his granite body from her personal space, the loss of it so shocking she almost whimpered.

“Do you have a portfolio?”

“What?”

“An album of work, demonstrating what you can do.”

Irritation frayed her patience. Might have had something to do with the chill his body’s removal left on her sensitive skin. “I know what a portfolio is, Beck. And it just walked out the door.”

“That guy?”

“Yeah, I’ve inked most of his body. Even parts you can’t see.” She plastered on a saccharine smile, enjoying his disquiet and especially getting a kick out of how she had hauled the power back to her side of the room. Because now he was thinking about what other ink lay beneath her clothes—and whose hands she had permitted on her body. “Why do you want to see my work?”

“Because if I’m going to let you brand me, I’d like to know it’s worthy of forever.”

Her breath caught. Power shift, activate.

“Brand you?” Forever?

Their gazes locked. Held. Warmth unfurled in her blood.

“Yes, Darcy. I want you to design a tattoo for me and brand it on my skin.”

The way he said that, the way he owned it, made her wetter. Word that she was in town had filtered out, guaranteeing her dance card was full through the end of the year. She didn’t need new business. She didn’t need this business. But hell, she needed something.

“What did you have in mind?”

“Something for Sean and Logan. To commemorate them.”

“That’s beautiful, Beck.”

He coughed out a mirthless laugh at her compliment. “It’s a typical reason to get a tattoo, isn’t it? Remembering people.”

The air was charged with memory and want. Dangerously so. The past held risk, the present just as much. She needed to claw her way back to the safety of the future.

“I’m only in town for another couple of weeks. I’m moving to Texas for a job after the holidays.” It was best to get it out there, establish the parameters of the transaction. An old friend had offered her a job in his parlor, and Austin was on her never-ending bucket list of places to live.

Nothing on his face indicated whether he cared about that. The pang of disappointment in her chest pissed her off to no end.

“Will you have time?” For the tattoo, he meant.

“Yes, I will.” But Darcy meant something else. Time enough to flush Beck Rivera out of her system once and for all before she headed to warmer climes—and a fresh start.

chapter 5

The pots of money invested in Sunnyvale couldn’t quite mask the astringent smell of disinfectant, marking it a place where old people went to pass on to the other side. Sort of morbid, Darcy admitted as she quickly navigated the slick floors of the lavish care facility, where her grandmother was camping out while she recovered from her stroke. The old girl was richer than God and could have afforded around-the-clock care at the mansion, but the docs had recommended she spend her rehab here. Something about socializing her way back into regular life.

Lord help the other residents, was Darcy’s answer to that.

Darcy entered her grandmother’s room without knocking. “Hey, Grams, how’s it hangin’?”

Eleanor Cochrane’s regal gaze landed with a thud on Darcy’s bustier-molded cleavage.

“You trying to catch a cold or a man in that outfit?”

“Oh, a man. Most definitely a man.”

She’d gone leather today from the waist down, and maybe it was too sexy for her grandmother, but it sure as hell wasn’t for Beck Rivera. For that man on fire, it was the perfect temperature. She had plans for him later.

Bending over Grams, Darcy kissed the wax-papery skin of her cheek. The woman had aged so much in the last three months it scared the shit out of Darcy, which is why she loved when her grandmother showed flashes of spirit—even if that spirit was laced with acid.

Darcy plopped down into a comfy armchair near the bed. “Looks like you might be on the hunt yourself, Grams. In that nightie, you’re flashing enough bosom to send the boys here to their graves with big smiles and bigger hard-ons.”

“It’s a peignoir, Darcy. Your expensive education was clearly wasted on you.” She inhaled a breath with difficulty, causing Darcy some difficult breathing of her own. “But at least you’re here. Not a single visit from the rest of them. All waiting for the call that I’ve croaked and my money is ready for distribution.” Them, meaning her cousins. The rest of the Cochranes found it hard to fit tongue lashings from the family matriarch into their busy schedules.

“I’m only here in the hopes you’ll change the will and drop it all on me,” Darcy said with a grin, knowing that despite Grams’s diatribes against the younger generation, she would never do such an outrageous thing. Blood is king was her mantra when she wasn’t damning the lot of them to hell.

“He’ll cut you out for good if you’re not careful.”

At the mention of her father, Darcy stiffened in the plush chair, but recovered with a wave. “Guess I should continue to be careless, then. I don’t want it. Any of it.” Her father’s cash-rich approval came with strings so tight they made the bustier she was wearing feel roomy. Since she had dropped out of college and became her own person, she had felt free. Rootless, a little lonely, but liberated. She loved Chicago, but there wasn’t an umbrella big enough to weather her father’s toxic rain.

“He misses you,” Grams said, and Darcy’s heart melted. Not because she believed Sam Cochrane truly missed his daughter, but because Grams sounded so forlorn.

“I miss you, too.” That earned Darcy a geriatric scowl. Gaudy shows of emotion were unacceptable from a Cochrane.

They spent ten minutes chatting about the upcoming fund-raising gala for homeless women that Grams organized each holiday season. Darcy was playing proxy for her grandmother, and had discovered that ordering people about in the name of Madam Cochrane was the ultimate power trip.

Her grandmother turned on the dowager countess stink eye once more. “So who are you flashing all that skin for?”

Heat scalded Darcy’s cheeks. “Do you remember Jack’s friend? The boxer from about seven or eight years ago?”

Grams screwed up her pinched face, calling deep on her memory reserves, and Darcy held her breath. Just how much damage had that stroke done to her?

“Serious boy. Broken nose.”

Phew. “That’s him. Beck.”

“Ah, my favorite ladies.”

Darcy’s muscles locked up as the deep, resonant tone of her father both warmed and chilled the room. Sam Cochrane had a marvelous speaking voice, which he used to great effect encouraging his employees Trump-style—and crushing their dreams, when any of them dared step out of line. It was the same tactic he used to control his family.

Self-pity, thy name is Darcy Cochrane.

She turned in her seat, “displaying her wares” as he had once described her body art and revealing clothing. Petty satisfaction warmed her gut at watching his lips form a grim seal.

Tall and urbane, with graying hair winging his temples, her father had aged exceedingly well. Tori, his third wife, was a health nut and she made sure to keep him active, both in the gym and in the bedroom. A between-the-sheets exercise regimen with women who weren’t his wife had always been his go-to before the latest Mrs. Cochrane.

He had married Darcy’s mother, a former beauty queen and daughter of a wealthy man, for seed money. And then he left her to a boozy rot in their Gold Coast mansion while he screwed his secretaries and figured out ways to contort everyone around him into knots. Darcy had seen the effects of her father’s manipulations on her mother. It dragged her down, made her small. But she had eventually wised up and was now happily remarried, living in South Beach.

“Well, Grams, I’ve got to go seduce that man. I’ll check back in later.” Darcy sprang up and gave her grandmother a kiss good-bye along with a gentle squeeze, netting for her trouble a disapproving hmph at her mawkish display.

Bypassing her father, she headed to the corridor with a parting nod of acknowledgment. “Dad.”

“Darcy,” he said, following her out. “Stop behaving like a child.”

She halted and let the fury work through her body for a gratifying moment before she spun on her boot heels and drew herself taller. He made it so easy to hate him. “In another two weeks, I’ll be out of your hair. I’m only here for Grams.”

“What about the fund-raiser?”

“Like I said, I’ll be there for her. Not for you.”

“Dressing appropriately, I hope,” he said, his dark gaze skimming her outfit. “Your stepmother would appreciate it.”

Instinctively, she drew the lapels of her jacket together, hiding what made her individual, different. Not Cochrane. Her ink felt like a huge X over her heart, an invitation to her father to take his best shot. Every battle in this war between them left her diminished and bruised, and now she dug deep for ammo.

“Dad, do you still have it in mind to trot me out as meat for one of your screw-someone-over schemes? Who is it this time? The scion of a Swiss banking dynasty? The geek founder of some start-up you want to buy out? Or is Preston Collins back on the market looking for Wife Number Two?”

Her father scoffed. “Well, now that you’ve made yourself look like a barrio mural, no one of use to me would want you.”

Shock sliced through her, not at his words, but that they could still sting so much. Her usefulness to him had vanished with every screw you she embedded in her skin. She could feel her body curling up, her heart shrinking in his outsize presence.

“I’m more than what you choose to see, Dad. I always have been.”

Subtlety was not part of her father’s skill set, but in that moment, he seemed to realize his faux pas in cutting her so deeply. His mouth softened.

“Darcy, you’re still my daughter and I love you. Come home.”

“It doesn’t feel like home anymore, Dad.”

“Even with one of the city’s finest at your beck and call?”

Rage boiled up. “For God’s sake, Dad, have you been following me?” His keeping tabs should not have surprised her. Given some of his past stunts and his preference for gold jewelry, he had more in common with an old-school Mafioso than with the upper echelons of power he so wanted to control.

“He’s not worthy of you, Darcy. He never was.” He stared her down for a moment, then turned and walked into Grams’s room.

“Keep your fists up,” Wyatt said.

Shoulders back, Beck adjusted his stance, putting more weight on his back foot, and delivered a one-two to the bag with his chin down and fists proud. Only three weeks since he’d started his leave, and his muscles bitched at every unfamiliar motion. Sweat rolled off his neck, soaking his tee, the impurities of his body sloughing away with every punch. Not the impurities of his mind, though. He held on to those like a drowning man whose life flashed before his eyes in bursts with each desperate second above water.

Darcy writhing under him, encouraging him to take her harder, do her right. Darcy’s hands exploring his chest and rasping his nipples. Hell, sexy shit she hadn’t even done!

The bag hit his head so hard that his ears popped and rang.

“The fuck?”

“You’re distracted,” Wyatt said as he steadied the bag he had just used as a weapon to usher Beck back to reality. If reality meant the cramped gym at Engine 6 on Chicago’s North Side, he’d take his fantasy life, thanks. The old quarters could do with a face-lift, which given the city’s budget woes and the fact CFD came last on their good mayor’s list of priorities, would not be happening in any Dempsey’s lifetime.

Wyatt cleared his throat. “Keep that shit up and you’ll get your head bashed in by the Five-Oh.”

“It’s not until April,” Beck said, referring to the annual Battle of the Badges. “Plenty of time to get undistracted.” Two more weeks should do it. She’d be gone, off to Texas and some cowboy hick who would learn every inch of her tattooed body, and what each image meant.

“So you are.”

“Are what?”

Wyatt’s flinty expression said Beck shouldn’t even bother playing it cool.

“Yeah, I’m distracted.” He had Darcy on his mind. Then. Now. The future with a heaping side of regret if he didn’t act and lock her down. She’d lied to him about this amazing woman she had become while he lodged his body deep within hers. But as mad as that made him, he understood that deficit of trust on her side. Maybe she was right to keep the real Darcy from him; maybe he didn’t deserve to see the woman behind the ink, not while past mistakes were milling around in his brain.

Beck knew he was going to rue the next words out of his mouth because Wyatt was the worst sounding board ever, but sometimes talking to a human wall was better than a lady-feelings exchange with Gage or Luke.

“There’s this girl.”

Wyatt hoisted an eyebrow. Already overseas with the Marines when Beck and Darcy had started dating, his oldest brother had missed out on all the drama from back in the day.

“I cut her loose years ago and now she’s on my radar again. She was this big bright light that made me feel like I could do anything, y’know?”

“I know,” Wyatt said with uncharacteristic feeling. Guy was completely cryptic when it came to his sex life, so that was about as effusive as Beck had ever heard him.

“Keeping her close would have been the best thing for me, but it would’ve dragged her down, dimmed all that radiance. She had college and this golden life ahead of her, and she would have given it up to stay with me.” She knew he couldn’t leave Chicago, not when his future involved suiting up in CFD bunker gear. Which left the option of a long-distance relationship, or Darcy staying put and possibly giving up her dreams—for him.

He threw a punch at the heavy bag, keeping his top knuckles centered in the glove to absorb the shock. “I needed to be a firefighter, to honor Sean and Logan and everything they had done for this family, this city. My life was here, but hers . . .” Another solid blow to the bag kept him focused on getting out words that had never before found air. “Not sure I could have lived with what a life with me would have turned her into.”

For a start, her father would have cut her off for hooking up with a punk-ass street kid. Staying in Chicago with her wings clipped, living on the fumes of teenage love that might not pass the test after a year or two of real life—no way did Beck want to shoulder the blame for that cluster.

“Love someone, set them free. That your angle?”

“I s’pose.” Beck landed a hard, yet unsatisfying one-two-punch on the bag. “She’s turned into this amazing woman, Wy. Strong, beautiful, independent.” As for what Beck brought to the table, the jury was still out. He knew one thing, though, with a clarity that cut him to the core.

He wanted her.

“Becky, you’ve got a visitor,” Luke called out from the gym’s entrance.

“Are you decent?” a sultry voice crooned. Speak of the green-eyed temptress herself . . .

Darcy peeked around Luke’s shoulder, her palm caging her eyes inadequately as she scoped out the gym. She dropped her hand dramatically. “Oh, that’s disappointing. I was hoping for more sweaty men.”

Beck’s heart punched his ribs with all the force of an attack hose pumping out water at 400 psi. Just when he thought he’d have to chase her down, here she was, and holy shit, she had dressed up for her Engine 6 debut.

Leather molded to her curves like it had been painted on with a brush—or tattooed with her gun. High-heeled boots brought her up to Luke’s chin, and he was taller than all of them. The jacket she wore was unbuttoned, revealing that revolt of colorful florals on the rise of her breast. All she was missing was a frickin’ crossbow.

“Hey,” he said. Wow, positively Shakespearean.

“Hey, yourself,” she said back, a smile in her voice. “Can I have a word?”

That should have been enough of a hint for Beck’s nosy brothers to clear off, but from their assorted smirks and raised brows, no one was budging. Fuckers. Hurriedly, he made introductions and was about to quickstep her out of there when Gage strutted in.

“Hey, it’s Darcy, isn’t it?” Gage asked. “Hot damn, I love your ink!” Never one for boundaries, baby bro nudged the lapel of her jacket aside and scrutinized her cleavage. “Heard you’re a big-time tattoo artist now.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” she said, a becoming watercolor bloom of pink suffusing her cheeks.

Gage threaded his muscled arms over his chest. Today’s T-shirt slogan announced: I’m a Firefighter—What’s Your Superpower?

“Beck’s been stalking you on the Web, trying to piece it all together Sherlock-style. Those pics . . . Darcy Cochrane, you are a stone-cold fox!”

“Sometimes I wonder if this gay thing is just a phase,” Beck muttered, drawing Wyatt’s low huff of laughter.

“Oh!” Surprise perked up Darcy’s face, and she considered Gage with renewed interest. “That’s right, you’re gay. Mel is going to be stricken with grief.”

Gage winked. “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

As he stripped off his gloves, Beck recalled the details of his investigations on Darcy, which had turned up far-flung locations like London, Paris, and LA. She lived a nomadic lifestyle, always leaving her clients—and no doubt her many admirers—wanting more. In the tattoo world, Darcy Cochrane was a big fucking deal. She had won contests, displayed her art at something called the Body Expo, was a respected force in the business of drilling pigment into the skin. She’d even inked a well-known rock star, and there were rumors of a brief, combustible relationship, if TMZ was to be believed.

Gage was still gabbing. Jesus. “I couldn’t believe that in all this time, he’s never once looked you up. I mean, that’s what the Internet is for.”

“I thought it was for cat videos and porn,” Darcy deadpanned, catching Beck’s eye with a glint in her own.

“But it’s also for snooping,” Gage said with authority. “I’m always checking up on my exes, usually with my fingers crossed that one of them has made it onto some revenge porn site or that they take a really bad mug shot.”

Amusement curved Luke’s lips. “Does anyone take a good mug shot, idiot?”

Gage double thumbed in the direction of his head. “This face is incapable of having a bad day.”

Darcy laughed warmly, just like Beck remembered, not that he had ever given her much reason. As a kid, he was too nervous around her, his skin so tight he felt like it would snap right off his bones. He liked to think he had lightened up in his old age, but he would never have Luke’s innate charm or Gage’s easy good humor.

Jealousy of his gay brother gnawed his innards. These two would be fast friends before the day was out; tequila and pillow fights would cement the deal. Still, another part of him enjoyed that she dug his family. He wanted her to be part of this thing that was so important to him.

“What did you need to talk about?” Beck asked, cutting in on the Gage and Darcy Show.

“Oh, right.” She opened the big-ass purse on her shoulder and extracted a piece of paper. “I wanted to show you the design for the tattoo.”

Her moss-green eyes were alight with a brew of fire and apprehension as she handed it to him. The names of Sean and Logan in Celtic lettering hit him like a right hook out of yesterday. Even after all this time, he felt it. The void they had left.

“The black script is a bit hard on the eyes,” Darcy said, “so I thought I’d soften it with a shamrock on one side for Sean and the CFD logo on the other for Logan.”

Beck struggled to get the words out. “Two separate tattoos, then?”

She placed her hand on his bicep. “One for each gun,” she said softly, her fingers cool to the touch from being outdoors. He felt the sizzle as the heat between them expanded, and for a moment everything fell away and it was just him and Darcy, eyes fusing like their bodies had two nights ago.

Several heartbeats later, she lowered her eyes, then her hand. “I can do something else. Just tell me what you need.”

Everyone stared at the design, trapped in their own vortex of memories and pain.

“It’s awesome. We’re in,” Luke pronounced, breaking the heavy silence. “Unless you want this just for yourself.” He held Beck’s gaze, worry that he had spoken out of turn clouding his eyes.

The unabashed rightness of this struck Beck squarely. It was for them all.

“If you guys want to be a part of it and Darcy can manage the work, then that’s fine by me. She’s in high demand and . . .” He trailed off as the memory of how long she’d be around sucker punched him in the solar plexus. She was planning to skip town by year’s end, and shit on a hot dog, that sucked.

“I can do you all.” She bit down on her lip and took in the ring of Dempseys staring at her avidly. “Well, you know what I mean.”

“If I was gonna turn, Darcy, you’d be first on my hetero bucket list,” Gage said, ever the outrageous flirt. He added to Beck with a wink, “CPF, man.”

Beck’s scowl at that was cut off as the alarm sounded, the mechanical voice of dispatch echoing its siren call through the firehouse. “Engine 6, Truck 43, Ambulance 70 . . .”

“Time to get smoked,” said Luke. “Later, bro.” He nodded, doing an admirable job of reining in the pity that they all got to speed off while Beck was forced to stay behind, but Beck saw it all the same and his heart bled a little. In a clatter of thudding boots and organized chaos, they headed out, leaving Beck alone with Darcy.

Bewilderment creased a line between her pretty dark eyebrows. “You don’t have to go with them?”

“No.”

“Day off?”

Lots of days off. “I’m on admin leave.” He huffed out a breath. “I almost killed my brother.”

chapter 6

A cold gush flared and froze to a block of ice in Darcy’s chest. “What happened?”

Beck’s face crusted over like a rusty lock, the tumbler click, click, clicking into place. Damn, she had a nanosecond to grasp at it before he shut down completely.

So she grabbed his sweaty T-shirt and fisted it.

“Jesus, Darcy. That’s skin you’ve got.”

“Oh, sorry. I just wanted your attention.” She loosened her grip, but still held on.

He gave her a bemused look. “You always have my attention. When you’re in the room, you’re my sun.”

Those words battered her breathless, and it was a moment before she could draw enough air to fuel what she said next. “Tell me what happened. It was on a call?”

“A month ago. Fire at a crack house on the South Side that started on the second level. The place was in dire straits when we got there, but it hadn’t reached the first floor yet.”

He paused, so she rubbed his chest over the skin she’d grabbed. Encouraged, or perhaps just resigned to honesty now that he’d opened the floodgate, he went on.

“Another company had arrived before us. Typically the first on site makes the calls and they said the second floor was clear, so Luke and I swept the first. It was empty, but on the way out I heard something on the landing. Someone was trying to get out. I raced up the stairs but the heat was too intense. I could feel it through my hood, fighting to take control of my mask. Luke was calling behind me to get back. My lieutenant was on the radio screaming at me to pull out, but this kid . . .” He laid his head against her forehead. “Darcy, he was just gang fodder, caught in a bad place, pulled in by all the shit. I managed to haul him free for the handoff to Gage, but before I could get clear, the ceiling crashed in on top of me. Luke dragged me out.”

“You saved that kid’s life.”

He nodded. “And almost got my brother killed trying to save me. The boys at HQ don’t look kindly on behavior that endangers your fellow firefighters. It’s just—” He took a breath. “This kid has probably gone his whole life with no one on his side. But I could do that for him. Come storming out of my corner, gloves on, fists raised. ’Cause if not me, then who?”

“There but for the grace of God,” she whispered.

In his eyes, she saw his relief that she understood. In another lifetime, that kid could have—no, would have—been him, and Beck needed this save to honor the people who had saved him. Coming from gang-infested streets, Beck had always known how blessed he was to be taken in by the Dempseys. Paying it forward was a given.

She recalled the scar on his head, that raw rift of pain. “How long were you in the hospital?”

“A week. They induced a coma and then brought me out of it after a couple of days. But they won’t sign off on me from a disciplinary standpoint. I’m on suspension until they schedule a hearing, probably not until after the holidays. Waiting around for the sword to drop is killing me.”

“Following orders keeps people alive,” she said, not wanting to pile on the scoldings but so, so angry with him for putting his beautiful self in danger like that.

“Thanks, Luke,” he muttered.

She pressed her palm to the vee of sweat branding his gray tee. The musky scent of man wafted into her nostrils, giving her a contact high, making her knees and heart go soft. Beneath her fingertips, she felt his thrumming vitality and the emotion that he had always done such a good job of reining in until he buried his body inside hers and took them both to a place she hadn’t known existed before she met him. A place she wanted to get back to—with the only man who had the power to affect her on a soul-deep level.

“Don’t be mad at me,” she teased. “Unless it makes the sex better. Then continue with your emo posturing.”

That won her a rare laugh, a glorious sound. He snaked an arm around her waist and pulled her so close they shared their next breaths. Life-giving, yet making her weak.

“Can’t get mad at you, Darcy. You’re the only one who can take me out of myself.” He tightened his hand over hers and entwined their fingers in a target over his heart. “I did not deserve you.”

That was not what she wanted to hear, talk of the past invading the pleasure of the present. Much too serious.

“I’m glad you’re not dead, Beck,” she clarified, aiming to cut the tension thick as the lump in her throat. “Better, baby?”

He flashed a so-help-her-God smile. “I’m glad you’re glad, querida.”

The intense heat of him along with his masculine scent intoxicated her, and she drew back to get a much-needed influx of Beck-free oxygen.

“How about you give me the tour?” she asked. And give her a chance to catch her breath.

“Step this way, m’lady.”

He squired her around the quarters, mostly empty except for a too-cute-and-blond secretary in the back office and a couple of firefighters playing cards at a table out in the truck bay. After stifling her giggles at the hose tower (where they dried their hoses), followed by the equipment room housing couplings (for hand jacking hydrants—um, dying here), profound disappointment set in when she learned she could not take a slide down the fireman’s pole. (We don’t have one. No, really, Darcy, we don’t.)

Watching him walk ahead of her in his damp shorts and tee, his powerful legs making her light-headed with desire, she was reminded of the first time she had seen him in that dingy boxing gym nine years ago. The place had scared her breathless with its floor ossified with decades of loogies, its walls propping up granite-faced men who stared right through her. And the smell! Like someone had dipped sweaty sneakers in a fondue of sewage and offered them up for their dining pleasure.

She was only there because her best friend, Shaz, had it bad for Darcy’s brother and wanted to see him in shorts. At seventeen, Jack was almost as tall as Darcy’s dad, and had at least six inches on the other guy standing in the boxing ring, who hopped back and forth like a bunny playing with an invisible jump rope. Darcy found her gaze magnetized to those feet before it slid north over the rest of him. Strong, gleaming, cocoa-skinned legs maintained her interest on the upward journey until—

It was the first time she had noticed a guy’s butt.

Tight and trim, it filled out his shiny black shorts in a way that brought heat to her cheeks. Turn around, her blitzed brain urged. Turn. Ah. Round.

He obliged, fighting the air with jabbing punches as he went. Posturing, she would have assumed if it were anyone else, but this was different. He was different. This was a boy who played sports, not games. CFD was stamped in large letters on his broad chest. The Chicago Fire Department. The boy, his shock of black hair already damp with exertion, stared at Jack, his opponent for the upcoming bout. Barely leashed rage radiated from every dark pore.

Then he turned, his burning blue focus rewired on her.

The floor dropped beneath her feet, her heart plummeted into the void. Every moment in her sixteen years on Earth had been building to this. A malodorous gym and a serious boy’s blue gaze. He saw into her, through her, out the other side, and she felt like one world ended and another began. Teenage dramatics, she knew now, but at the time it had felt so important. So cell-shockingly real. On the germ-ridden chair where she had planted her butt, she squirmed, the chill of the metal a bite on the underside of her soft thigh, and all she could think was: I want him to win.

That’s when Jack coldcocked him with such force he dropped like a stone to the mat.

Oh crap!

It took every inch of her willpower to hold on to the rim of the chair with her clawed fists. Shaz jumped to her feet, cheering her crushing heart out for Jack, who had taken a couple of proud steps back to assess the damage. A cocky smile spread over his reddening face. In that moment, Darcy hated her brother because he was so like their father. Sneakily striking at the good, reveling in the havoc he wreaked.

The boy stood while the referee checked his face, shaking his head somberly. Blood blanketed his mouth; the word broken filtered through to her consciousness. Disappointment rose up to freeze her chest. It was over. One strike and it was over.

An older man about her father’s age said something and threw a soaking rag into the ring. The boy picked it up, wiped his broken nose, and lobbed the rag over his shoulder, past the ropes. Pretty hard-core. Darcy’s heart pounded wildly as the referee stepped back, looking shocked, but his retreat an unspoken agreement that the fight would go on. For twenty-three seconds, the boy let loose on Jack, a whirl of flying fists and unmoored fury until the referee was forced to stop it. Her brother lay on the floor, stunned, grudging admiration for his conqueror in his eyes. Darcy had wished like hell she’d had her sketch pad.

“That guy’s an animal!” Shaz said, railing with indignation. Darcy wanted to sigh at that, but her skin felt too tight for something so casual.

The animal wiped his bloodied, smashed nose with the back of his glove and speared her with another unstinting stare. There was no pride on his face, no joy in his brutal achievement. She wondered why he bothered and hated that she cared. Then he hooked one corner of his bloodstained mouth up, sending her stomach into a wriggle. Lower, too.

Nine years on, and nothing had changed. Beck Rivera was still the boy who heated her from the inside out and forced her to hold on to a germ-ridden folding chair for the ride of her life. He excited her like no one else.

Raise that sex point average, Darcy. Show him what he’s been missing, Darcy.

You’re a grade A idiot, Darcy.

“Last stop,” he said, yanking her back to the present and Engine 6’s shower room. Over the door a sign proclaimed “Old firemen never die, their nozzles just rust away.” Cute.

She arced her gaze over the trio of single-use shower stalls. Not quite the stuff of her filthy fantasies, which were more on the level of communal showers with hordes of hot men soaping up and getting sexy-slick.

“Is this where a fireman keeps his etchings?” Darcy joked, nodding at the tattoo sketch he still held clenched in his fist.

Beck set the drawing on a side ledge. “Nah, it’s where this fireman learns about his girl’s.”

His girl’s. Stepping in, he moved his palm over her collarbone, down over the crest of her breast to trace the cherry blossoms budding above her bustier. She quivered under his touch.

“I want in you, Darcy. I want to feel you tight and hot and wet around me. But first I want to know every one of these tattoos, all the stories. Where you’ve been. Where you’re going.”

And she wanted to tell him. Everything. She dropped her purse and shrugged off her jacket, the soft sounds of leather hitting the floor loudly resonant in the tiled shower room. Her bustier showcased her breasts to how ya doin’ levels, but the true beauty lay below the fold. His hands wandered to her back, seeking access.

“Here, let me,” she said, unzipping at the side with trembling fingers. Her breasts spilled free, revealing the vibrant blossoms painted down the left side of her body, each stem ending in flames.

With his lust-stoked gaze, Beck tracked the motions of his hands down her breasts to her hips. When his eyes fell on the stems, the licks of heat on her skin came alive under his laser-like scrutiny.

“Fire,” he said, one finger tracing the orange curls of flame on her hip. “Beautiful. Dangerous.”

He coasted his hands up her sides and rested a finger above her breastbone, the gentle motion enough to make the blossoms on her skin bloom brighter. Beck’s touch, the sun and the rain.

“Tell me about them.”

“This one I got in San Francisco about four years ago. In Chinese culture, cherry blossoms are a symbol of life and love, as well as sexual power.”

“Hmm.” Gently, he turned her and glanced his knuckles along her shoulder blades. “And the birds?”

“I know a guy in Madrid.”

“Sounds like you know guys everywhere.”

There was no snark in his tone. That wasn’t Beck’s style, but nonetheless Darcy imagined an undercurrent of jealousy. Reveled in it a little, if she was being honest.

“The birds represent freedom.”

He hooked a finger in the waistband of her leather pants and pulled her forward so her breasts grazed his chest. Her nipples tightened to pleasurably painful buds. Slowly—so damn slowly—he unsnapped the button and inched the zipper down, the scrape sending her pulse rate into overdrive and her core into a flood. Only when her bare skin met the tiled wall outside the shower stall did she realize he had walked her back.

“Did you ever think of me, Darcy? When you were traveling the world? When someone drew this on you?”

Her first tattoo at the age of nineteen was of a heart in flames, its trite symbolism cringe-worthy years later. Poor-grade artwork, it served as an introduction to a weird new world and sparked her interest in body art. Later she covered it up with the spectacular elaboration of blooms and fire along her torso—not for Beck, but for her. Still, he had always been there, a part of her she could never deny.

“No, I didn’t think of you.” Liar, liar, thong on fire.

He slipped a thick finger under her lacy underwear, through her damp curls, until he found what he needed. Right at the spot where she needed.

“Good,” he whispered. “I told you to forget and you did. That’s all I could have wished for, querida.”

Oh, Beck. Unbearably touched by the words that had once broken her heart, she gripped his shoulders and dug her nails into his skin, needing an anchor. The staccato of her beating heart thudded in her ears and telegraphed an unnamed need for more.

She moaned deep as his finger rubbed through her seam, every return hitting her clit with the perfect amount of pressure. Two fingers breached her body and found a hot, steamy haven. Heat coiled tight in her belly. He was watching her, waiting for her to go over, so she held on desperately because the longer he trapped her in his intense gaze, the better the release would be. His other hand curled around her neck in a possessive, wildly sensual spread.

“More, Beck. Please.”

A finger soaked in her slick heat circled the nerve-packed nub of her clit, just like before, just how she liked it, and she shattered. His hand cupping her sex and the wall at her back were the only things keeping her upright.

And then his hand was gone.

Which left the cool tile. Slumped against it, she watched in a daze as he did that one-hand-over-the-head thing with his tee and reached in to turn on the shower. The tightly loomed muscles of his back moved like cogs under chocolate silk. Everything about him screamed pleasure.

Her spine had dissolved, leaving her useless, so thank God he took over. Holding her steady, he pulled off her boots and socks, divested her of her pants, sinking to his knees as he pulled them down. On the journey back up, he kissed the blue roses along her calf, languidly running his tongue over her damp, heated flesh.

“Where did you get this one?”

“Wh-what?”

“The roses. Where?” He christened the cerulean flowers with scorching hot kisses.

“London,” she panted. “It was the first big piece I got. The first one I was brave enough to get.”

He rewarded her bravery with more brain-destroying flicks of his tongue.

“Beck,” she whispered into the vapor, feeling like she had entered a fevered dream. Feeling a reckless abandon she had never before experienced.

No, wait, she had. With him. Only with him.

Nudging her thighs apart, he splayed those blunt hands over her soft skin. Oh, God, oh, God. The throb built inexorably the closer he moved to the well of her sex.

“Just a little taste, Darcy. You always tasted so sweet.”

As if she could deny him a single thing.

Mouth set to torture, he tongued her blooming folds, scooping up the intimate moisture, creating more with every luxurious sweep. She was flagging, her legs weak as the steam, her body a quivering mess. Any moment now, she would be knocked out of time—

Damn. He stood, giving her a chance to catch her breath (not necessarily a good thing) and appreciate his glistening mahogany chest (most assuredly a good thing). Dark hair arrowed down to his groin, blazing a trail she yearned to follow with her fingers, her lips, her tongue. He was perfectly formed, all steel flesh, so beautiful that it simply hurt to look at him. But she suspected it would hurt more when she no longer could.

“I need a condom. I need to be inside you when you come again.” He stepped back with the intent to grab protection, leaving her boneless against the wall.

“My purse,” she pushed out. Now wasn’t the time for coy.

“Atta girl.” He handed over her purse and she rummaged for the three-pack among the rest of her crap. After what seemed like an eternity, not helped by Beck sucking the delicate juncture where her neck met her shoulder, she found the Trojans.

Within two seconds, he had shucked his shorts, smoothed the condom on, and lifted her off the floor with little effort apparent in his raw, fireman strength.

Then he dawdled.

Teased and rubbed.

Drove her mad with anticipation.

Only when she begged did he enter her slowly in one consuming thrust. Their united groan reverberated against the tile, such a satisfying sound.

Such a loud, satisfying sound.

Panic about how public this was warred with bone-melting desire. “Beck, someone might come.”

“I guarantee it.” He stroked her long and deep, massaging her swollen clit with every return of his thick, sleek length.

“I mean—”

His mouth fitted over hers, choking off her words. A brutal, uncivilized kiss. The steam from the shower—the one they were not taking—added a skin of moisture that made her hands slip off his shoulders. But she never doubted his ability to hold her safe as he took her higher and made good on that guarantee for both of them.

After her world had been rocked—two more times—Beck still held her close, protectively and possessively, wedged deep inside her.

“We just had hot shower sex outside the shower,” she said with a giggle.

“Find ’em hot, leave ’em wet,” he murmured. “Well-known firefighter maxim.”

A stray thought cut through her mind fog. “What’s CPF? Gage said it before he left.”

His grin was wry and about the sexiest thing she had ever seen. “City Property Fuckable. It’s against the rules, so if you’re going to do it, you need to make sure it’s worth losing your job over.”

“And I’m CPF?”

“You know it, querida. You’re my first.”

His first, just like he had been hers all those years ago.

There was that rare smile on his lips but, also, in his lake-blue eyes she saw his determination: the inner strength that helped him survive those early, dangerous years in a life he hadn’t chosen. The same strength that powered him in the ring and on every call in this life he had made his own.

Maybe it was delayed shock, or the power of the O, or the fact she was standing in a firehouse shower room with her hot Latin lover impaling her to the tile, but it suddenly hit her like a two-by-four.

He could have died.

And she would never have known.

She would have popped into Dempsey’s bar with Mel and assumed it was his night off. Might even have silently cheered the bullet she had dodged by not running into him. Only two days later, the idea of a world without him—her world without him—turned her blood to ice.

Tears sprang into her eyes. Goddamn him.

“Darcy, what’s wrong? Am I hurting you?” He made to withdraw, and she clasped his perfect, tight ass to preserve the physical connection as if it could minimize the emotional.

“You’re a good man, Beck Rivera.”

He looked unconvinced. “I’m not. I’m selfish and greedy.”

“No, no.” She kissed the knotted bridge of his nose. “Look at what you do, at what you’ve become. I’m so proud of you.”

He drew back with the expression of a stern angel, and when he spoke it was like he gouged each word from a deep, dark place.

“This won’t be enough for me.”

Thoughts toppled like dominoes, and her heart seized in her chest, not unpleasantly. But her walls had walls, so she said the first thing that popped into her scrambled brain.

“Let’s not complicate it.”

“No, Darcy. Let’s.”

His kiss cut off all argument, making her blood pound, her heart soar, and consuming her utterly and completely whole.

chapter 7

Have I told you lately how sexy you are?” Darcy tiptoed up to kiss him, then moved her lips along the edge of his ear, eliciting a shiver.

“You’re just sayin’ that ’cause it’s true, querida.”

Damn, she looked fine in a long coat and cream scarf, like a pristine present he wanted to unwrap slowly. And the backdrop could not be more perfect. All around them, the twinkling trees and festive atmosphere at Zoo Lights in Lincoln Park painted the scene in the brushstrokes of a fairy tale. Each year, the zoo—and ComEd—draped the trees in colored lights, blasted tunes from the sound system, and scared the shit out of the animals. A most excellent Chicago holiday tradition.

Darcy had said she didn’t want to complicate what was happening between them, but Beck had quickly kiboshed that idea. Knowing that shock-and-awe tactics were needed to break down her barriers, he had planned a romantic date with holiday lights and hot chocolate and frickin’ polar bears, followed by a horse-drawn carriage ride down Michigan Avenue where he’d hoped to cop a feel under a warm tartan blanket. The fact that this magical space was home to their first kiss years ago made it just that much sweeter.

It had all gone terribly wrong.

“I want to see the gorillas next,” an imperious voice rang out from below. The third wheel, on wheels. Darcy’s grandmother had invited herself along when Darcy let slip their plans during a visit to the nursing home.

“Probably looking for a new husband,” Darcy muttered, not unkindly. She pushed her grandmother’s wheelchair along the tarmac path toward the monkey house with ease. The old lady couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds soaking wet.

“I heard that,” Mrs. Cochrane snapped back. “Two of my three husbands had more hair than any of the brutes in the cages here. I like them well covered.”

Darcy shot Beck a sidelong glance, barely suppressing her laughter. The cold brought color to her pale cheeks, making her appear fresh-faced and younger than her twenty-five years. She looked happy, and that brought out his happy.

“How about some hot chocolate, Mrs. C?” Beck asked. “Warm those crabby old bones of yours.”

“Let’s hope you’re hung, young man, because you’re certainly not charming.”

Darcy broke into shocked laughter. “Grams, be nice. Beck didn’t have to bring you,” she said, adding a sly smile for Beck that sent his lungs on hiatus.

“Extra whipped cream,” the old bag muttered.

Beck winked at his girl and hustled off to get the hot drinks, but as he stood in line at the kiosk, his smile melted away. In less than two weeks, she’d be outta here, winging her way to the Lone Star State and this new job she seemed excited about. He could make sacrifices to the gods of Chicago—the Bulls, the Bears, whoever people prayed to on the I-90—but it would be useless. It was like wishing he could hold back the sunrise.

Feeling glum, he delivered the hot chocolates and took over pushing duties so Darcy could have her hands free to drink. After a spin around the monkey house and a pop in to see the giraffes, they watched the light displays choreographed to holiday tunes, followed by the ice sculpting. Or Darcy and her grandmother watched.

Beck watched Darcy.

The lights danced over her delicate features and picked up flecks of gold in her big, expressive eyes. She had traveled all over the world, lived a cosmopolitan life most people could only dream of, and here she was with him, impressed by a crappy light show and a kid with a chain saw. In that instant, all her passion and beauty overwhelmed him.

It was time to lace up the gloves and step into the ring.

“Stop staring,” she murmured out of the side of her gorgeously mobile mouth.

“Never.”

Blushing, she snagged her plump lower lip with her teeth. So damn pretty. He noticed with approval her breathing had picked up, so he leaned in and buried his cold nose in the warm, fragrant skin of neck.

“Problem catching a breath, miss? I can help. Qualified EMT.”

“You’re evil, Beck Rivera. And freezing.”

“I want you to stay in Chicago.”

She lowered her eyelids, and the twinkling lights on her dark lashes made them sparkle like decorative fans. “What are you doing to me?” she breathed, and when she opened her eyes again, they shone glossy with emotion.

“I refuse to believe you entered my life again only to walk right out a few weeks later. The gods couldn’t be that cruel.” His lips brushed hers, gentle, teasing, then a stronger press that made his intent clear. She was his.

Then. Now. Forever.

She sniffed and pulled a tissue from her pocket, then scowled at his inevitable smile. “Shut it, Rivera. I always get sniffly in winter.”

Her father had done a number on her, made it so she had a hard time letting anyone in. Now Beck was insinuating his way into the emotional nooks and crannies, finding those hard-to-reach places, shining a light. And just like he practiced out on the battleground of fire, no one would get left behind.

Over the sound system, a holiday classic filled the air with its smooth, velvet croon.

“I really can’t stay . . . But baby, it’s cold outside.”

“Gotta stop running sometime, Darcy.”

Darcy held Beck’s stark blue gaze and let the words sink in. Soured by her near-miss marriage and her father’s formerly tyrannical grip on her life, funereal bells tolled in her brain as soon as any guy started dictating the terms. “Always be moving” had served her well so far. Free agency suited her.

Beck might be different, but was it enough? He had dumped her once with no explanation, no apology, nothing. Of course, she refused to delve deeper. Asking implied caring.

So she did what terrified, fragile, in-denial girls everywhere did—she fronted with her stock answer. “Chicago’s not big enough for me and Dad.”

“Oh, I dunno. Third largest city in the United States. And you have other reasons for sticking around.”

“Such as?”

“Meddling friends. Terrifying, tatted guys who care about you. Evil grandmothers.” That one he mimed, unnecessarily as it happened, because Grams had nodded off. “A business you can do anywhere because you rock at it.” Pause. “Burn-the-sheets sex.”

Considering they’d never made it to a bed, that particular claim was not entirely legit. She turned into his chest to keep her voice from carrying in the clear night air—and oh hell, because she fit perfectly under his strong jaw—and sucked in a heady lungful of him. “Hmm, you might have something there. The pickings for burn-the-sheets sex are bound to be better in the third largest city in the United States.”

He gentled the back of her neck and kissed her, sweet and slow. His sexy jaw scruff conjured up a wash of sensation and sensual memories of how it had rasped her thighs during their steamy not-shower.

Gettin’ so warm inside . . .

“Let’s keep it PG, handsome,” she said, when he let her up for air.

“Pretty good? Think I can manage that.”

Another press of his lips, and the addition of his wickedly effective tongue, lifted her to a higher plane. This man of hers could kiss away every doubt, make her believe anything was possible. Even that she could live in the same metropolitan area as her father.

She was a much-sought-after body artist who loved her job and the freedom it gave her. She had built a good life, yet the idea of letting someone in—someone who might seem perfect on the surface, but could end up as manipulating and controlling as Sam Cochrane—seized her heart in a fist.

“Tell me why bustin’ out of Dodge is so important,” he whispered. “Because the way I see it, you have more reasons to stay than go.”

“I didn’t turn out how he wanted. The pliable daughter, the budding trophy wife. If I stick around in Chicago, he’ll find a way back into my life, and before I know it I’ll feel small again, just another cog in his machine. Look at how he tried to marry me off.”

“You should be thanking him.”

She gulped, unsure she’d heard that right. “Excuse me?”

He cupped his ear. “Do you hear what I hear?”

“You mean Mariah Carey warbling her way through one of my favorite holiday songs?”

“No, I mean the sound of your brass balls clanging, Darcy Cochrane. You’ve grown from a dependent girl into a self-reliant woman. And you have your father to thank because his dick moves set this great life of yours in motion.” He curled his hand around her neck and tunneled those rough-cast fingers through her hair, his tactile strength unbelievably sensual against her scalp. “Look at what he unleashed on the world. Look at you takin’ names, querida.”

God, this man’s support just slayed her. But as encouraging as that sounded, Beck was taking the product-of-her-environment argument a little too far. She owed nothing to her father. He had no say in how she turned out, yet . . . they were alike in so many ways. Stubborn, unyielding, hardheaded. She wanted to heal the rift between them, not go through life with this ball of negativity like a dead weight in her chest.

They were silent for a few moments, the air heavy with their thoughts and the chain saw’s whine as it cut through the ice.

“You’re pretty good at this,” she finally murmured.

“Uh-huh. PG.”

Her scarf was moved aside to reveal skin for a sensual nip of her neck. So not PG.

“I meant that you’re good at seeing the silver lining, making the best of any situation.”

“It’s the foster kid code. We live in the now, take the scraps, and hope to God some miracle can turn it into a five-course meal. Shifting your perception, choosing to take a situation that makes you afraid or hurt or angry, and see it differently—that’s the best way to move forward.”

Her Beck had become quite chatty over the years. Insightful, too. “Look at you being all wise and shit,” she said.

He grinned. “I know, right?”

“You own a suit, Mexican Dempsey?” Grams piped up, having just woken from her power nap.

“Does a birthday suit count?”

“Get one. Darcy needs a date to the fund-raiser.”

Darcy mimicked strangling her grandmother. “Grams, I can get my own dates, thanks very much! Also, his name is Beck Javier Rivera and he’s Puerto Rican, not Mexican, which you well know.” With an embarrassed head shake, she turned to find him beaming a sexy grin. Yum. “Friday at the Drake. You in?”

Surprise lit up his eyes like stones in a stream. “As my hearing has yet to be scheduled and I’ve already finished Grand Theft Auto—twice—I’m all yours.”

Waiting around for the call on his hearing was driving the poor guy screwy, but Darcy was reaping the benefit while he spent his free time with her. As for the fund-raiser, it would be a fitting punctuation to what had been an unexpectedly wonderful couple of weeks.

Something lurched in her chest at that.

He nuzzled her cold nose. “I’m all yours, not just on Friday night, but every night you want me.”

“Beck . . .”

Another kiss swallowed her protest, an invasive sweep of his tongue as he breathed his promise into her lungs.

And she let him, because it was just easier to give him his way in this. For now.

chapter 8

The next afternoon, Darcy shifted her weight back on the tattoo parlor’s stool and snapped a few mental candids for her memories. No one filled out the chair quite like Beck. Those beefy arms, strapping thighs, and well-built shoulders—he was every inch the powerful fighting machine.

“Can’t believe that fur ball of piss ’n’ vinegar is still around,” he said, jerking a chin in the direction of her cat, Mr. Miggins, who was curled up in a sated ball near the hissing radiator. The two had never been fans of each other.

“He’s like Grams. He continues out of spite.”

Smiling, Beck returned his gaze to his arm and scrutinized Darcy’s work. The green shamrock, like a pulsing Irish heart, bloomed on his bicep above the name of his foster father, Sean. Relatively simple in design, it might not impress her usual clientele, but pride swelled her chest at the thought of helping this amazing man commemorate his fallen heroes.

“You like?”

“I love.” He raised his eyes to snag hers as he said that. Intense, blue, romantic—and a hundred times steadier than her heartbeat.

I love.

And she did. Completely, utterly, and . . . she was not happy about it. Not at all. Every day with Beck dragged her deeper and tore her under a powerful current until she could barely breathe for wanting him.

Happy Frickin’ Holidays, Darcy!

Occupying her hands would be her best play here, and though they itched to meander south and stroke the perma-boner Beck always seemed to sport around her, she reined in her inner minx and reached for a bandage.

Beck was staring again. “How are you fixed for Christmas Day?”

One more week to the holiday, and then a few days later, bye-bye, Chicago.

Bye-bye, Beck.

“I’ll drive Grams over to Dad’s, we’ll scarf turkey while Tori tries to chitchat through the awkward silences, and then I’ll drop Grams back off at prison—I mean rehab.”

He cocked his head. “You want to come hang at the firehouse after? Gage is gonna Martha Stewart the hell out of the dinner. He’s already making paper plate angels for all the place settings. An inordinate amount of glitter is involved.”

She stood and tidied up her station, extracting ink needles and lobbing soiled tissues into the trash.

“I’ll be so busy with getting Grams settled and tying up loose ends.” Such as loading up her piece-of-shit car. Steeling herself for the journey ahead to the job she wasn’t sure she cared about anymore. Holding her ribs while her heart broke into icy shards.

Her body stilled as his masculine heat blanketed her from behind. “Querida, it doesn’t have to end.”

“We’ll have the fund-raiser on Christmas Eve, Beck. It’ll be a nice way to say good-bye.”

With a strong hand on her shoulder he turned her to face him. Those eyes blazed hard and furious, shining like bullets.

“Is that why you invited me? So you could say adios in a room full of blinged-out strangers. We’d eat some rubbery chicken and dance a sad old waltz, though God knows I’ll be crap at that. Maybe you’d get a final fuck-you in at your dad because you brought that guy he hated, then you’d wave to me as you wheeled Eleanor out the door.”

Burning emotion snarled beneath her breastbone. Damn him for making it so hard. “I was never going to stay, Beck. You knew that. I just can’t make a life for myself in the same place as my father.”

Storm clouds brewed in his eyes, myriad emotions battling beneath his usually calm surface. Kinetic energy seemed to bounce off the walls, in her chest, between their bodies.

“That’s just an excuse. So he screwed you over and you’re still pissed. Time to grow up, princesa, and figure out where you’re going instead of dwelling on where you’ve been.” He scrubbed a hand over his close-cropped skull. “You can’t deny what’s happening here with us.”

“Of course not. But it’s just chemistry, lust, nostalgia, whatever you want to call it—” She carved the air with her hand, seeking the right words to minimize the outrageous potency of what existed between them. “I’ve come too far in my career and my life to throw it all up for the special feelings caused by a return to the good old days. Besides, you had no problem letting me go before.”

“That was different.”

“How? How was it different?” She had never pried about his reasons—he hadn’t given her any insight at the time, and she had always ascribed it to the bad space he was in after Sean and Logan made the greatest sacrifice. Preferring not to know, if she was being honest.

“We were kids,” he murmured. “Now we’re all grown up.”

“You got over me, Beck.” A lot more easily than she recovered from the onslaught of him, she might add. “You threw me away seven years ago. It hurt. It really fucking hurt.”

Empathy laced with pain shone back in those terrible blue eyes.

“It was for the best. You know that.”

“I don’t know anything. Why was it for the best?”

He looked like he was weighing his options for evasion, when something clicked in his expression. Resignation. “I wasn’t good enough for you, Darcy. I was a street punk who wanted nothing more than to follow in my foster dad’s footsteps. Honest, hard, backbreaking work. Seeing you was like being blinded by a goddess. Touching your skin with my callused hands felt like sacrilege. Look at where you came from, at your people. How would I take care of you right?”

“So you did care about me—”

“I fucking loved you!”

All strength fled her legs and she gripped the edge of the counter behind her. Hearing those words spoken with such passion, even in the past tense, made her woozy.

Then, angry.

“Yet you dumped me.”

“For your own good.”

Outrage rushed through her. “You—you decided that I would be better off without you. You made that decision. Not us.”

He snorted. He may as well have said duh. “Look at how it all worked out.”

Goddamn him. “You think this is all because of you? That because you threw me away, it allowed me to flower into the woman I am today?”

Silence. Oh, the arrogant prick.

“How does your big fat head not fall off?”

A hint of a smile on his lips greeted that. “I think getting out from under your father’s thumb was good for you. We were kids, half formed, clueless about who we were. You needed to experience the world. Earn your ink.” He waved a hand around the shop, the supposed fulfillment of all her dreams. “If we’d stayed together, what would have happened? You were talking about switching to a college in Chicago or taking a year off. Already compromising yourself, maybe your future, for nothing.”

Nothing? She would have had him, her serious boy with the shocking blue eyes. Beck was all she had needed back then.

“It wasn’t your choice to make,” she gritted out.

“Get real, Darcy. With me, you’d have been making happy noises while shriveling up inside because you didn’t get out there. Travel, learn, be. I was never going to leave Chicago. You would have hated me eventually.”

“And I hated you anyway.”

“Yep,” he said, and then he smiled again, a little sadly.

Confusion swirled in her chest, stopping to grasp at her heart with icy fingers. Since reconnecting with Beck, she had shied away from thinking about how they parted. Really thinking about it. Because if she truly gave that awful time the mental space it deserved, she’d remember the heartache and how it felt to be pushed aside.

Now to hear that he played the ultimate decider on this—his trust in her so negligible that her opinion never entered the equation—sliced through her like a blade. She had loved him so much, but his version held no respect.

Only a need for control.

“So what’s changed? Don’t say you’re suddenly good enough for me now that I’m not the Gold Coast princess anymore.” She held up her palms, stained from the tools of her trade. “Have my manual labor hands knocked me off that lofty pedestal, Beck?”

He glowered. “Stop twisting what I’m saying. It’s not how you start, it’s where you end up. This is where we are now and it’s worth fighting for.”

She drew herself taller, which was surprisingly difficult when your heart had stopped working properly. Thanks to her father, she had been there, done that, bought the I ♥ Assholes mug. She had almost collapsed under the weight of Sam Cochrane’s controlling hand—and damned if she’d let any man do that to her again.

“Make sure you put Bacitracin on that tattoo. Every day for a week.”

He stared at her, the notch between his brows deeply pronounced. “Darcy, don’t shut down on me now. Not when we’re so close.”

“Tell me this,” she whispered. “If you had to do it all over again, would you make the same choice?”

“In a heartbeat.” No hesitation, not a moment to consider. Of course, swift, brutal decisions were his bread and butter on the job. Why would his life be any different?

She could barely push the words through her rapidly constricting throat. “Just forget you ever met me, Beck.”

“That’s not likely now, is it? And not just because of this.” He touched the bandage over his tat, then grasped her hand and targeted his heart with their tangled fingers. “You’re in here, princesa. It broke me to give you up but I stand by it. You left scorch marks that never healed. And I don’t want them to.”

She extracted her hand from the heated cocoon of his. Stepped back. Inhaled . . . a shallow breath, because deep at this moment was impossible.

“Just go,” she choked out, turning her back on him like she had on her father, on her whole charmed life, all those years ago. Only back then, taking a stand had been the first step in Darcy becoming strong. Now, when ten seconds later the door to the parlor clicked shut, she couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so weak.

chapter 9

Coffee shops. The last resort of the desperately single.” Mel cast her critical gaze around the busy Starbucks in Lincoln Square. “They used to be so promising. Now they’re filled with aspiring writers and wannabe day traders, frankly, the worst collection of talent I’ve come across in years.” Sighing, she sipped her skinny latte and eyed Darcy from beneath her golden lashes. “But that’s not why we’re here, is it.”

Darcy poked at the chocolate croissant she had bought in a fit of pessimism five minutes ago. Her third since walking into the aromatic, supposedly calming interior of the popular coffee place with Mel. Between the holiday excess and this Beck business, it looked like she’d be making her grand exit from the city ten pounds chunkier than when she arrived three months ago.

Or maybe all that extra weight could be attributed to her heavy heart.

“Well, I’d love to see you settled before I leave Chicago¸” Darcy said with fake cheer. Her disinterested gaze drifted to a salt-and-pepper-haired professorial type reading an actual newspaper. “Elbow Patches seems nice.”

“Lives with his mother.”

Undeterred, Darcy tried again. “That guy with the hipster hat and the sideburns is cute.”

“There are only so many microbrewery tours and ironic T-shirt shopping trips I can fit into my schedule.” Mel’s pixie features turned kindhearted. “Quit stalling. Time to discuss the man of the hour—or should I say the decade?”

Darcy gave her most Continental shoulder shrug, perfected during her time in Paris. “There’s nothing to discuss.”

“Right.” Mel stared Darcy down. “So how’s this going to end, D?”

The end was a done deal. Seven years ago. Again, two days before when she discovered Beck had cut her out of the decision to take the road to Splitsville. More men taking care of business for their women. Her father, Preston Collins, François, every guy she’d ever dated, really, and now Beck. She almost rolled her eyes at the canyon of self-pity his actions had opened up. Her heart was set to deluded, and now she wanted to wallow in her own stupidity for a while.

“It’s not going to end with me forgiving him.”

“Hmm. Men are just manipulating douche canoes,” Mel said in sympathy.

“Testify.”

“They leave the toilet seat up, can barely walk and chew gum at the same time—”

“Act like they know best,” Darcy cut in, getting warmed up.

“That’s their problem. They think they know best, but in this case . . . I have to agree.”

Darcy was stunned. “I can’t believe you’re taking his side.”

Mel blew out an oh-girlfriend sigh. “It was a long time ago and he was crazy about you. That’s gotta count for something.”

Darcy didn’t doubt Beck’s feelings for her all those years ago, but it was tainted, corrupted, ruined, by his high-handed behavior. What gave him the right to ride solo on such an important decision?

“I’ve spent the last few years building myself up. I can’t be with someone who doesn’t respect me. Who pays lip service to the notion of my strength but wants to pull the lever behind the curtain.”

“Like your dad.”

“What?”

“You know.”

She did. Every man who crossed her path was assessed with the checklist: was he bossy, manipulative, demanding, in any way like Sam Cochrane? One tick was enough to scuttle any potential relationship. But at the same time, she was drawn to decisive, confident men. Men like Beck who knew what they wanted and fought with gloves on, fists raised, to make it a reality.

So sue her for being a girly mass of contradictions.

“You had to give him my address,” she said faintly, not quite ready to capitulate to common sense.

“Gage extracted it from me under false pretenses,” Mel said, as if Thor-lust could excuse her guilt. “Still can’t believe that hot piece of ass is gay. I weep for my fellow Vagina Americans.”

“I really loved him, Mel.”

“When?”

That pulled her up short. She had fallen in love with a serious boy that day in the boxing ring, and two weeks ago, fell right back into the Beck Rivera groove. The when wasn’t a fixed point in time. Her feelings for this man existed on a continuum.

She had never stopped loving him. Not for one second.

Mel gave a short nod as if Darcy had spoken that aloud. “You said you were over him. That you’d moved on and this was just a fling, revenge, whatever, to see you through the holidays. But you never got over him. Not really. And now you want to punish him for breaking your heart all those years ago instead of just accepting that shit happens, people make decisions for good or bad—” Darcy opened her mouth to object but Mel countered with the hand. “And that now he’s a different person. You’re a different person. He wanted the best for you, to make you happy in the long term because he was nuts about you. Best intentions, so-so methods.”

“You think I overreacted?”

Mel broke off a piece of Darcy’s croissant and popped it into her mouth. “Is that what you call it when you pick a fight?” she asked around her chewing. “ ’Cause that’s what you did, babe. All this time you didn’t want to know why he dumped you, but the minute it comes down to the wire, as soon as he pushes you to be brave, now you start channeling Countess Curiosity? You knew you wouldn’t like the answer, and it gave you the perfect out.”

Darcy hated that Mel was right. Damn her.

“I guess I panicked.”

“Yeah, you did. Loving this man is going to turn your life upside down and make you question everything. That’s a lot to take in if you’re not ready for it. I tell my students all the time that fear is often a good pointer to what we really want and need. If it’s outside your comfort zone, it’s going to be so much more rewarding when you pull it off. You have to feel it to heal it.”

Darcy knew that what Mel said made sense, but making sense never made it easier. Bringing her fears front and center was supposed to make the hurt of facing the truth worth the pain, all shit that sounded great on paper. She thought back to Beck’s words, how she needed to figure out where she was going instead of dwelling on where she had been.

Gotta stop running sometime, Darcy.

Was she ready to let down her guard, expose her soft underbelly, and give this man free reign over her heart?

Beck tore off his mask and gulped the cold, pine-scented nighttime air. Even mixed with the acrid smell of smoke and burned wood, it was the second best scent ever because it told him he was back in the thick of it. The best scent . . . damn, thinking of that, thinking of her, would only drive him mad.

“Good job, Rivera,” Lieutenant McElroy said with a clap on Beck’s back as they gathered for the debrief by the pumper outside the four-story walk-up on Sheridan. “You didn’t screw up once.”

Two kids with minor smoke inhalation, mom with first-degree burns on her hands, and Fluffy the family dog would survive this holiday season. The same could not be said for the Douglas fir that had once stood proud in their living room—or the oodles of presents beneath it.

“Any idea how you pulled this one out of your ass?”

Beck turned to find Luke squinting at him through black-rimmed eyes. He shook his head, still bewildered by the turn of events over the last twelve hours, starting with this morning’s 6 a.m. wake-up call from the deputy fire commissioner.

Your hearing’s been scheduled. Get your ass in gear, now.

Four hours later, witnesses had been called, testimony had been given, and Beck was in the clear with a warning to “not be so eff’n impetuous” and an order to report for immediate duty. His captain said it was a done deal and, while Beck appreciated being back in the fray, he appreciated less the helpless feeling that the strings were being yanked from above.

Decisions made by big men in small rooms.

A little like how Darcy must have felt, when she realized Beck had made a unilateral ruling that affected the course of their entire lives. How her father always made her feel. Growing up as he did, Beck knew the helplessness of having no control over your life. One day you’re on the streets, the next you’re inhaling Irish stew with a bunch of wild foster kids.

Regret at how things had ended with Darcy constricted his chest like he had choked down black smoke. Sure, he could see her point, how cutting her out of the loop minimized her agency—but to use it now to bail on this great thing they had going?

Unacceptable.

He knocked back a half bottle of water to cool his parched throat and raised his gaze to take in Luke. “I never said thank you.”

His brother frowned. “For what?”

“For saving my life.”

Luke gave a desultory sniff. “I won a packet on you at the last Battle of the Badges. You think I’m going to let my meal ticket get incinerated?”

“Screw you, then.”

“You know, Becky,” Luke said in that parental tone that signaled a major speech was about to go down. “Maybe it’s middle-child syndrome, but sometimes I think you forget that we are your family and there is nothing—and I mean nothing—we would not do for you. Walking into a burning building to drag your dumb boricua ass out? It’s just part of the deal. Of course, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to upstage me with the heroics on every frickin’ run. I am older, after all.” With a smile in his eyes, he laid his gloved hand on Beck’s shoulder. “Semper fraternus.”

Forever brothers. Made a man feel good to know he had these people in his corner. But there was someone else who had always been rooting for him, right from the moment their eyes clashed over a boxing ring’s ropes.

“Lock and load, boys,” McElroy called out, his heavy boot on the sideboard of the pumper’s cab. “Back to the house we go.”

“We need to make a stop, Big Mac,” Beck shot back.

The lieutenant’s face lifted, flashing white teeth bright against ebony skin. “Burritos as big as your head? You’re speaking my language, Rivera.”

Luke threw his helmet into the cab and climbed up. “You can stuff your face later. Our boy needs to take care of important business.”

Beck stared past the truck, down the snowy street, and all the way to the merry band of red and green lighting up the hundredth floor of the Hancock on Michigan Avenue. With no time to shower or change, she’d just have to take him as he was. As Sean used to say, you can’t fall off the floor, boy, the only way is up.

The count was not over. He could still haul himself off the mat.

And this time, Beck would fight to win.

chapter 10

With its gold-leafed pillars and crystal chandeliers, the grand ballroom at the Drake Hotel might seem like an odd choice for a charity gala aimed at helping the homeless, but such was the way of big-time philanthropy, Cochrane-style. Opulence always made people feel important, and the decadent surroundings were intended to inspire subconscious counting of blessings and deeper digging into Benjamin-lined pockets.

“They’re more fake than a three-dollar bill.”

“What are?” Darcy asked her grandmother, and immediately regretted it.

“Her tits,” Grams pronounced in a loud whisper, lifting a bony finger in the direction of Darcy’s stepmother, Tori, who admittedly did have a very fake and very fine pair of girls, bought and paid for by Darcy’s father.

Tori and her gravity-defying breasts were currently in deep conversation with Mayor Eli Cooper, who looked like he was hitting those puppies up for a campaign donation. He caught Darcy’s eye and winked. Chicago’s youngest-ever mayor, and undoubtedly its most handsome, Eli was an old friend of the family. Since his election three years ago, he had kept the female voters in a perpetual state of hormonal frenzy.

“You covered up,” Grams remarked in a voice flavored with disapproval.

She had. Darcy could have walked in, tats—and tits—blazing, but frankly she was over it. So she had worn an LBD, though the L stood for long, the B stood for boring, and she looked like she was auditioning for Morticia in the Addams Family musical. Masking every inch of her offensive skin, the dress and matching jacket made her invisible, which was just how her father liked her.

Two tables over, Sam Cochrane sat glad-handing the governor, but raised his head when the low murmur of moneyed voices went from a burble to a babble toward the back of the room.

Darcy turned in the direction of the commotion, and her heart stuttered, stalled, and stopped. Striding toward her in full firefighter regalia, and looking so hot she half expected the sprinklers to go off any second, was Beck. His expression blazed a path of fire to her table, sizzling all the way up her spine. The clucking of the well-heeled crowd increased with every sure step.

He halted, huge and potent above her, and the smell of smoke and man hit her hard.

“Darcy.”

“Beck.” Using the edge of the table, she hauled her wilting body upright. “You shaved.”

“Had to. Back to work.”

She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Clean and smooth-jawed, he stared at her for interminable moments. This infuriating man!

“What are you doing here?”

“You said you needed a date. Sorry I’m late. Had to save Christmas first.”

“Nice suit, Pancho Dempsey,” Grams chimed in, her voice echoing in the now eerily quiet room. The clucking had stopped, only to be replaced with silence ten times as deafening.

“Thanks, Mrs. C.” He turned back to Darcy. “I had a big speech planned. Something about fighting for you and claiming what’s mine.” He frowned. “But this is all wrong.”

Panic flared in Darcy’s chest. “It is?”

“What the hell are you wearing?”

“Um, a dress.”

“You look like someone died.” He curved his blunt hands around her hips. “This isn’t you, Darcy. This isn’t the woman I love.”

“I . . .” She slid a sidelong glance to her grandmother, who was not paying attention to her, but had her beady eyes trained on Beck. Unsurprisingly, no demographic was unaffected by his particular brand of sexy.

And he had just said he loved her. Not only in the past, but in the present. Right here, right now.

“I don’t want to make a fuss,” she said, trying to make that sound like it was a good thing.

“Why not?”

He had a point. Why was she lying low until she could slink away unseen into the cold, starless night? This was not the girl who had waited tables in a Boston diner and pulled pints in a Covent Garden pub when her father cut her off. This was not the woman she had worked so hard to become.

She was Darcy Fucking Cochrane, kick-ass body artist, and lover of the brave man who was currently eating her alive with his eyes.

With shaky fingers, she reached for the button on her high-necked jacket and unfastened it. The fabric’s silky slide against her skin as she slipped it off her shoulders felt sensual. Liberating. It floated to the table behind her, likely smack dab in the middle of her five-thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner.

Not a problem. The only sustenance she needed stood before her. In Beck’s eyes, she saw appreciation for her body, respect for her choices. She saw . . . everything.

He laid a soft kiss on the sleeve of ink she had revealed, blessing it and her. “Darcy, I’ve loved you from the first day you distracted me in that boxing ring.” He switched his talented mouth to her other shoulder, cutting a path of sweet devastation along her newly bared collarbone on the way. “The result? A broken nose and the crap beaten out of your brother. Which I know you wanted me to do, by the way.”

“I did not—”

“Yes, you did.” Unwavering, unflinching, those blue-on-blue eyes held her captive. “From that first minute you were in my corner, Darcy, and I’m sorry I wasn’t always in yours. I was careless with your heart and I didn’t trust you to make the important decisions for yourself. No más.” No more.

No more hiding.

No more running.

No more denying.

“I’m yours, mi reina. Always have been, always will be.”

Her apparent promotion from princess to queen sent a surge of power through Darcy, making her so heady she white-knuckled the table’s edge.

“Then I guess you’d better kneel, Beck Rivera.”

A brief flash of fuck, really? tweaked his mouth before it curved up into that do-me grin. He jackknifed to his knees before her, his hands coasting down her thighs over the acre of fabric as he felt a path to her ankles. Checking for injuries just like the first night he rescued her outside Dempsey’s. Only this time, he would find her strong and whole.

Girl walked into a bar, hooked up with her destiny.

Gently, he raised her foot and kissed the visible skin with hot, purposeful lips, transferring his intimate heat to her body. The sight of him in supplication unraveled her like a loose thread on a sweater.

Lifting his head, he held her gaze boldly. “You’re strong and sexy and I love you. I need you to breathe, but I need to make sure my woman can breathe first. What do you say, querida?”

He delivered the Rivera smile, the same crooked one he wooed her with that day in the ring after he had taken down one Cochrane and set his sights on conquering another. He captured her heart then, and had held it in his iron fist ever since. Beck saw her. He truly did. She could spend the rest of her life looking at him looking at her.

There was only one thing she could say.

“Rip it, Beck.”

A quicker-than-the-human-eye move, and he tore her dress from the hem all the way to midthigh. Gasps hissed though the stultifying air at the sight of her skin shining in glorious Technicolor under the harsh ballroom lights.

Unfolding to his full, staggering height, he stood back, an expression of plain relish on his face at what he had created.

“Now give me your mouth, Darcy.”

She launched like a heat-seeking missile and kissed him with everything she had.

“About time,” Grams muttered, though she sounded a little choked up, the old softie.

“Right on, Mrs. C,” Beck said, once he broke their kiss. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to take my girl away from all this. Think you can hold down the fort here?”

“Go, go!” Grams flapped her birdlike hands. “I need to do the rounds and squeeze more money out of these clam-fisted tightwads.”

On ramshackle legs, Darcy leaned down and kissed Grams on the cheek. “You sure you can manage?” She motioned to her ripped dress and bared shoulders. “I might look like a walking middle finger to your donors, but I can stay if you need me.”

“Be gone, girl. Someone else can put in the work for a change.” Grams curved her regal gaze behind Darcy. “Tori! Get your plastic butt over here and push.”

Beck was already half carrying, half dragging Darcy to the exit. Past Chicago’s glitterati. Past a parade of shocked, pursed mouths. Past her stone-faced father.

She stopped and pivoted. “Just a second.”

“You sure?” Beck asked, concern bracketing his mouth.

Her father stood, age and disappointment sketched in craggy lines on his face. “Darcy.”

Looping her arms around his neck, she hugged him for the first time in so long it brought tears to her eyes.

“Thank you, Dad. Thank you for pissing me off so much that it made me strong and beautiful.” She smiled up at his flinty gaze. “Call me when you’re ready to talk.”

Sometimes you forgive people simply because you still want them in your life, but if her father wanted more, he would need to meet her halfway. She refused to allow another bead of toxicity to burn her skin. Taking Beck’s hand, she led him from the ballroom and didn’t look back.

In the Drake’s foyer, Beck placed his fireman’s jacket over her exposed shoulders, and the protective gesture loosened that painful knot beneath her breastbone and activated the waterworks. He crushed her to his strong chest and gave her a few precious moments to lose it. The tension sloughed away with every jerky sob until she rested, boneless and spent in his arms.

“Happy?” he murmured.

“Ecstatic,” she said thickly into his neck. Peeking up, she met the serious blue gaze of her first and last love. “I love you, Beck.”

“I know.” He pressed a soft kiss to her lips that turned ferocious in seconds. A soul kiss that went on forever, but was still over too soon.

Behind her, she heard an interrupting cough. The mayor stood with a smirk on his face, a redhead on his arm, and a security team bringing up the rear.

“Nice exit, monkey,” Eli said, kissing her damp cheek. “Very colorful.”

She sniffed, not quite ready or willing to pull it together. “Watch out, Mr. Mayor. Standing too close to me, you might lose some voters.”

“Or attract the youth base. If they actually voted.” He shifted his sharp gaze to Beck and back to Darcy. “Surely you have better manners than your grandmother, Darcy Cochrane.”

She rolled her eyes. For years, Eli Cooper had teased her like an older brother and his ascent up the political ladder had made him only more insufferable. “This is Beck Rivera, one of your bravest at Engine 6.”

“Rivera?” The mayor’s lips firmed. As the official boss of the CFD, part of Eli’s job was keeping tabs on the firemen, and with his antics, Beck had clearly not eluded the mayor’s notice. “Incident back in November. Tough situation all around, but I hear you acquitted yourself well. On the mend?”

Beck nodded.

“You’re one of Sean Dempsey’s foster sons. You lost me a shitload of money at the Battle of the Badges.”

“I’m one of his sons. And I recommend that next time you don’t bet against a Dempsey.”

Eli’s mouth hooked up in appreciation of Beck’s snappish correction. He parted his lips to say more, but checked it when one of his lackeys whispered in his ear.

“Have to go kiss some rich donor asses. Good to see you, monkey.” Man-to-man nod at Beck.

As the mayor and his entourage left, Beck drew a callused finger over her jaw. “Since when are you on such good terms with our fearless leader?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you he was an old friend? I had the nicest chat with him last night about bureaucracy and red tape and how absolutely nothing gets done at city hall over the holidays. He’s trying to put a stop to all that lollygagging. Part of his platform, you know.” She shot him a wicked grin.

Beck grasped the lapels of the jacket he had caped her with and drew her flush, his eyes dark with molten hunger. “You didn’t have to do that. But thank you.”

“What use is the Cochrane name if I can’t pull in a favor every now and then?” She dropped a kiss on his sensuous lips. “Besides,” she whispered, a teasing glint in her eye, “I was only doing what’s best for you.”

Beck drew back and studied her playful smile. “Querida,” he chided, “too soon.”

She laughed. “I’m just getting started, Beck Rivera. The next step? Branding you as mine.”

That earned her a sexy Beck growl. “I like the sound of that, mi amor. Think of me as a new canvas for your portfolio. This heart, this soul, this body . . .” He held her hand over his chest and the wild th-thunk of his heart. “Use me, Darcy.”

She planned to. Just imagining the artistry she could create with this man filled her heart to bursting with love, life, and magic.

“I already know how I want to ink you next, Beck. Something old school, maybe a heart with my name.” She lowered her palm to his tight, trim ass, that part of him she had noticed first in a dingy CFD gym all those years ago, and gave it a healthy squeeze.

“Right. About. Here.”