pride in the fact that he didn’t rile easily. He was a pro at avoiding conflict. But if she kept this up, he didn’t see how he’d keep a lock on his cool.
“Yes.” She made an expansive gesture with her hands that was automatic when she got excited. Or mad. “Men’s eyes turn all hot and bothered when they’re mentally undressing someone.”
The van behind them was still bearing down on the sports coupe, so Romero didn’t address the fact that there was no such thing as hot and bothered eyes.
“What the hell is this guy doing?” he muttered instead.
Shannon turned in her seat to peer out the back window, her long blond hair brushing his shoulder and pooling on the console where his hand rested on the stick shift.
“Can’t you outrun him?” She straightened to look at him, her body close to his the way it had been during that one electric dance they’d shared at the wedding reception.
If anyone made him have sexy eyes, it was this woman. Mentally undressing her was pretty much second nature whenever he couldn’t indulge in the real thing.
“What are we, sixteen years old?” He didn’t plan to drag race with some crappy vehicle a car owner would be only too glad to total for the sake of an insurance settlement.
The van swerved out into the other lane on the narrow road, and for a moment, Romero thought he would simply pass them.
“He’s going around us anyway.” Shannon’s eyes followed the vehicle as it pulled up beside them.
Romero slowed down to let the guy pass, glad to be getting rid of him. But the jackass in the van veered closer.
“Hey!” Shannon yelled, a moment before the van swerved hard into the driver’s side of the Beemer.
The scrape of metal on metal seared through him. Romero yanked the steering wheel hard to the right. His tires squealed and one popped as the rubber raked through rocks alongside the road. Scraggly Joshua trees appeared in front of the windshield and the car went airborne as they sliced nose-first down a steep embankment.
Shannon screamed. His predominant thought as the rocky desert rose up to meet them was that he’d give anything to make sure nothing happened to her. When the nose collided with the gritty ground at the bottom of the slope, bits of plastic and metal mangled and crunched until the impact reached the main frame. The steel encasing them fought back and the car bounced down onto its roof.
Romero reached blindly for Shannon, his brain scrambled and blood somehow in his eye as he turned to look for her. He saw a curtain of long blond hair brushing the ceiling and his heart lodged a little deeper in his throat.
“Shan?” His hand found her shoulder and came back sticky.
She was bleeding. The thin trail of blood seemed to originate at the back of her head.
“Shannon?”
He blinked to try to clear away the red haze in his vision. The scent of smoke and burned rubber stung his nose.
Smoke?
Like a bat out of hell he grabbed for his seat belt to free Shannon before the car caught on fire. He might not have lived up to her expectations as a boyfriend, but he damn well would never let anything happen to her.
2
SHANNON BECAME AWARE of the burning odor slowly.
Her neighbor’s cooking was iffy, but she could never remember anything this acrid wafting from next door in the year since she’d bought a house with Romero. A house Romero didn’t share anymore. Besides, she couldn’t be at home, because her bed was way more comfortable than this. Hard objects speared into her back. Water dripped down onto her face. Her lips.
She ran her tongue along her mouth to catch the droplet, since her throat was dry. Only it wasn’t water. It was sweat.
“Shannon.”
“Romero.” Her whole mood shifted as she got her bearings.
She felt him stretched out over her, his hot male body drenched and hard. She couldn’t wait to open her eyes and see it for herself. See him. The man was sex personified.
She reached for him as she wrenched her eyelids open. And, oh, man, Romero Jinks rated high on a woman’s list of faces she’d like to see when she woke up.
He leaned over her, his dark eyes narrowed with concern. His angular face was drawn into stark lines, while a cut oozed blood just below his right eyebrow. He was part Irish and part Mexican, a heritage that had blessed him with inky dark lashes and silky black hair. Women around the globe lusted after him, but for this moment at least, Shannon had him all to herself.
Too bad her head was throbbing with pain at the time she’d managed to snag the honor.
“Are you okay?” His hand skimmed up the back of her neck and the grit against his fingertips made her realize she was lying on the dirt.
There’d been an accident.
Her fingers reached for her Celtic necklace, the only item she wore that meant something to her. She could replace the Louboutin shoes—although perhaps not too soon considering her new budget—but the necklace had been her mother’s. One of the few pieces of jewelry that hadn’t been all about the bling, since cinema sex icon Bridget Leigh had received it long before her life goals involved bringing the men of Hollywood to their knees.
Hollywood had turned out to be a bigger, badder enemy than even her mother could have predicted, driving her to her death before she’d had a chance to overcome her addiction to prescription painkillers. After dealing with a death that had turned into a media frenzy, Shannon had tried to step out of her mother’s shadow and be taken seriously as an actress, a dream that never really took off. And a dream that never would if she accepted film roles like the one Ceily had been waving in front of her nose. Another flesh movie about her mother’s life.
Shannon hadn’t even bothered to read the script.
“I’m fine. How about you? You’re bleeding.” She inched upward before realizing she was practically clinging to Romero for support. Shannon released him in a hurry—she wouldn’t let an adrenaline rush send her back to his arms. Not after he’d addressed her relationship frustrations by suggesting a trial separation. She’d been too devastated by the idea to argue. Besides, the man didn’t argue. He expected people to either be happy with him or, she’d discovered, to be out of his life completely.
“It’s nothing. But you’ve been unconscious for a few minutes. Are you sure you’re all right?” He cradled the back of her head and her nerve endings danced at his nearness.
How many times had he stroked those long, guitar player fingers over her body to elicit soft sighs until he hit just the right note? The temptation to arch up and kiss him, to drag him down to the hard ground with her, was strong.
But hadn’t that been the trouble with them all along? They’d always been so willing to lose themselves in sex, ignoring their problems until they were so monumental that the lack of a pair of hiking boots in a woman’s size six could detonate an entire relationship.
“I’m fine.” She struggled to sit up the rest of the way, needing to escape the touch that had the power to render her brainless in zero to sixty. “But what was with that guy in the van?”
Romero frowned at her, as if he didn’t believe for a minute she was fine, but at last his disarming fingers fell away from her scalp, and he dropped back to sit on his butt in the sand.
They were in the middle of nowhere. No houses or buildings, no signs or highways. Far above them Shannon could see the edge of the road they’d been on, but the embankment was so steep it would be hell to try to climb back up there. Besides, now that she thought about it, she hadn’t seen any houses or buildings on the route they’d been driving. Apart from the van that had run them off the bumpy back road they’d traveled in the hope of taking a shortcut,