Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 36597 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 183(@200wpm)___ 146(@250wpm)___ 122(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 36597 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 183(@200wpm)___ 146(@250wpm)___ 122(@300wpm)
Millie shrugged. “As long as you don’t touch, we’re good.”
That must have been the exact wrong thing to say because Shadow shut down. Admittedly, she hadn’t known him long, but he seemed like the type to try to smooth things over. The mediator. He was always smiling and hadn’t taken offense to any barbs thrown his way by either Millie or Venus. Now, he looked hard. A man who’d been pushed past his limit and was walking away from a situation rather than confront it and possibly lose his temper. Millie found she didn’t like that at all.
“Never touched a woman without her permission,” he snapped. “Ain’t startin’ with you.” Then he turned and marched to the overhead bin and snagged his own laptop. Moving to the far end of the plane, he sat and started working. Millie hadn’t meant to imply she thought he’d assault her. Of all the men she’d ever met, Shadow seemed like the least likely to hurt a woman like that. Or for any reason, though she had no doubt he’d do what he had to in combat.
Fuck. She didn’t have time for this. She needed to know where Katya was being kept and the layout of the place. That was her part. She could do that. And keep Katya calm if needed. She could not pull something out of her ass to find and remove the trackers. So, she really hoped Shadow was working on that instead of licking whatever wounds she’d given him. Because if she’d hurt him that much with a flippant remark, then she was a bigger asshole than even she thought.
Chapter Two
Of all the fucking things for that girl to say to him, implying he might touch her without permission was the one thing that could set him off. He’d been accused of that once. Not in a sexual way as she’d implied, but physically. The woman Shadow’d been with back then had fought verbally. She’d accused him of getting physically abusive with her. The cops had taken one look at the tearful white woman without a mark on her and the huge tattooed, muscled Black man and assumed she’d been right. Shadow had fought it, but the police had made up their minds, and the reports had made it look pretty damning for him. Thankfully, they’d settled the dispute out of court, and the charges against him had been dropped, but it had changed the course of his life.
He put all that out of his mind. Just something to think about before he got caught up in Lyudmila. She was a pistol, he’d give her that. She’d mopped up the ring with everyone they put her against. Mainly because she didn’t fight by the rules. She used every dirty trick in the book, taking down men more than twice her size. Shadow liked that. It made him smile even in his dark mood. Didn’t mean he’d make the mistake of seeing her as anything but the lethal, scrappy fighter he’d already seen. Because if he let himself think about her as the woman he’d glimpsed when she’d bared her body to wash and change clothes, he was fucked.
Her body had been battle-scarred and honed in the fires of war. But there were still luscious, feminine curves to be savored. Her skin was milky white, if bruised in a few places after her fights. He’d had the insane urge to wrap his body around hers protectively when he knew she wouldn’t appreciate it.
Which brought him back to reality. No. A woman that fierce wouldn’t want a man to protect her. She could do that on her own. And if he wrapped his naked body around hers, she’d just kick his ass for sexually assaulting her. Shadow didn’t know if it was a greater crime to beat a woman or try to rape her. But he was under no illusion that Millie couldn’t fight him off if he tried, even if he was hell-bent on hurting her. She might be tiny, but she was even fiercer than Venus, and the Salvation’s Bane enforcer considered Venus the most dangerous member of that MC.
“Hey.” Millie came up behind him. She placed a tentative hand on his shoulder. Shadow looked up from his computer and looked back at her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to imply you’d try to force yourself on me. I didn’t mean it like it sounded.”
He nodded once. “Apology accepted.” He thought that would be the end of it. She didn’t seem to like him.
“Will you tell me what you’re working on?” She pointed to his laptop.
Shadow raised an eyebrow. “Just informing Cain what you told us and requesting an assist from the Shadow Demons.”
“Who are they?”
“An organization Romano belongs to. He and two of his associates are vigilantes of a sort in Rockwell, Illinois.”