Renegade Alpha (ALPHA 5) by Carole Mortimer Read Free Book Online Page A

I eat it.”
    Of course he did. Callie was just nervous, possibly because she had gone from a reluctance to even talk to this rude and uncommunicative man to inwardly admiring him. She also found him disturbingly attractive.
    And she was now alone in his home with him.
    A home that was far from what she might have expected.
    Despite the wide-open plan of the ground floor, the space had a warm and welcoming feel to it, probably created by the golds and browns of the floors and furnishings. Even the coldness of those bare brick walls seemed homely when there was so much colorful artwork to look at.
    Surprisingly good artwork. Better than good—the paintings were all original, some of them exquisite, as were those Finn Devlin photographs.
    Lijah Smith was a puzzle within an enigma.
    She understood now the reason his clothes were so creased. He could easily have passed for a down-and-out. And maybe he had? Whatever Lijah had been doing before flying back to England early this morning, she doubted he had been sitting on a yacht drinking champagne and eating caviar.
    The inside of this warehouse, the furniture, and the artwork he owned told her that not only was he extremely wealthy but also a connoisseur of art.
    Something she would never have associated with the man she’d met earlier today if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.
    Besides that sharp intelligence, she wondered what else Lijah was hiding beneath the battered brim of his Stetson.

    Lijah wasn’t sure what he felt when he came down the stairs fifteen minutes later and found Callie Morgan had made herself completely at home in his kitchen area. The radio was tuned to a classical station, and she was humming happily to herself as she moved economically from the stove to place food on the kitchen table.
    Seeing anyone in his home at all was a novelty.
    His friends all worked at Grayson Security, so he saw most of them on a day-to-day basis anyway. And he never brought the women he fucked here. This was his home, his private space, and he didn’t want an array of women trooping through it on their way out the door the morning after.
    Callie Morgan was here.
    A woman who was an enticing combination of vulnerability and strength.
    She had been beaten down six months ago, her free will taken away from her, and her boyfriend shot and killed in front of her.
    But whether Callie recognized it or not, she was refusing to stay down.
    Lijah was well aware of the courage it had taken for her to travel up to London at all today, let alone approach the men working for Grayson Security. Ex-Special Forces to a man, she would have known they would all be hard, ruthless, and totally uncompromising.
    Out of love for her father, she had come anyway.
    Not only that, but she had refused to be deterred by Lijah’s initial rudeness.
    As for that perfume he’d labeled as inexpensive earlier? Whatever it was, he wanted to buy her a gallon of it and have her bathe in it. That perfume and the warm woman smell that was definitely all Callie had been wrapping themselves about his senses all afternoon. Even more so in the confines of his car on the drive over here.
    By the time they reached the warehouse, his dick was so hard, he could have pounded nails into wood with it.
    How inappropriate was that?
    Callie had come to Grayson Security to ask for help in finding her father, not to have the man giving her that help also wanting to fuck her brains out.
    Which was why he had taken care of that little problem while he was in the shower.
    Much good it had done him, because he was so fucking hard again from just looking at her, his dick probably had an imprint of the zip of his jeans etched up the throbbing length of it.
    “Smells good,” he said gruffly.
    Callie had been so concentrated on what she was doing that she hadn’t realized Lijah had come back down the stairs. That catlike tread of his, she acknowledged ruefully.
    She drew in a sharp breath, her mouth going dry, her palms damp, and