Inescapable (Men of Mercy Novel, A) by Joss Wood Read Free Book Online Page B

against the pulse point in his neck, his eyes flicking between them and his wristwatch. And, dear Lord, he wasn’t wearing a shirt—it was tucked into the back of his shorts—and that broad, slightly hairy chest glistened with perspiration. Muscles rippled and gleamed, and his tattoos, stark and beautiful, had her mouth watering.
    She’d seen the geometric one that covered his forearm the other day but the one that made her breath catch and hold was the tattoo high up on his chest, of dog tags hanging from a nail. She squinted to make out the writing.
Jo, June 1990. Mike, September 2009
. She knew that Mike was an army buddy of his and Sawyer’s who’d been killed on a mission in . . . Flick frowned, trying to remember the country. But who was Jo? She wanted to know who was so important to him that he’d keep her memory so close to his heart.
    “Don’t let her do it, bud. Run like hell.”
    It took Flick a couple of seconds to work about what he was talking about but when she did, she quickly responded. “Maybe if I do remove his balls—”
    “Aaaarrroooooooooooo.” Rufus howled and they both winced.
    “—he’ll stop running.”
    “Doubt it,” Kai replied, placing his fists on his hips. “He’s got a lot of border collie in him and they like to exercise. I heard you coming up the hill. You were puffing like a steam train before you ran half a mile.”
    “He pulls my arm off!” Flick protested.
    Kai stepped closer to her and she caught a whiff of his deodorant and musky sweat and felt her knees go to jelly. If she could bottle that scent, she’d make a fortune selling it as an aphrodisiac. Flick sucked in her breath when Kai picked up her hand and started to unwind Rufus’s leash from it, which had lost all feeling about fifteen minutes ago.
    His fingers were warm on her hand and wrist and she sighed when they drifted over her pulse point. When she thought that she had a good chance of stringing a sentence together, she looked up at him. “What are you doing?”
    “Up here or right now?”
    “Both.”
    “I had a difficult morning so I thought that I would take a break and get a run in.”
    “Taking a break is having coffee and eating a cookie, not running a couple of miles,” Flick told him.
    Kai ignored her mutter and pulled the leash away from her hand. “You need to get blood back into your hand.” Kai slipped his hand through the opening of the leash and wrapped it around his wrist. Rufus, seeing a bird in a tree, lunged upward but with a jerk, Kai had the massive dog sitting again. “You! Behave!”
    Rufus just sat and looked up at Kai angelically, his tail going at two hundred beats per second. He had found someone new to charm and he was in doggy heaven. Rufus gave Kai his doggy grin and Kai responded by rubbing both of Rufus’s ears and her dog’s eyes rolled in delight. Flick couldn’t blame him. She suspected that she would have exactly the same reaction if he rubbed anything of hers.
    Behave, girl.
    “Shake your fingers out,” Kai ordered and Flick groaned when the blood started rushing back to her battered palm and fingers.
    “Ah, that hurts like hell.”
    “He’s too strong for you,” Kai said, shaking his head. His biceps bulged as he easily kept Rufus from lunging away in pursuit of a phantom rabbit.
    Now that she had some feeling back in her hands, Flick held out her hand for the leash. “I’m good now, thanks.”
    “You can’t run him properly because you can’t control him,” Kai said and flicked a quick look at his watch. “I still have about five miles to do on this trail. I’ll take him with me and tire him out.”
    “I’m not sure if he’ll cope.” Flick tasted panic in the back of her throat. “I only rescued him three months back and he was a wreck. Five miles might be a bit much for him.”
    “Bullshit,” Kai stated, his tone firm. “He’ll be fine.”
    “I’m really not sure . . .” Flick bit the inside of her lip, feeling like a