Twist My Heart by Brooke Taylor (ebook audio reader .txt) 📕

the tip off the soft serve cone he’d gotten me after dinner. The taste of him not as sweet, but much more addicting.

“Fuck, Thea,” he moaned. Hips twitching, his hands gripped my shoulders, pushing me back. “Stop, stop, stop,” he ordered below his breath as he wheeled to face the table.

I sucked what was left of his taste from my tongue, swallowing as I stood back up. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No. Fuck, no.” He braced himself against the table. The muscular planes of his back heaved, like a pair of wounded wings.

“Why did you stop me?”

“If I let you keep going, I wouldn’t be able to stop,” he panted.

“Then don’t stop.” I reached my fingers up, tracing the frog bones in the tattoo on the back of his shoulder.

“I have to.” His low voice dripped with regret and a little anger. He pushed out a deep breath. “I don’t have any condoms down here.”

“Is a condom necessary for what I was doing?”

His restrained laugh told me he was tempted to give me exactly what I was asking for. His constricted words, brought back down to a private whisper, told me I wasn’t asking for nearly enough. “I want to be inside of you, Thea. And once I am, I won’t be able to stop at your mouth.”

I brought my lips down to kiss a wicked scar along his side and then down over the ones on his arm. His back muscles shifted in an intricate flexing dance, the skeletal frog moving with them. The sound of his zipper closing gave me pause before I went up on my toes, finding a peppering of scars at the base of his neck to kiss.

“Wait.” I dropped my heels back to the ground. “So you have this place so well stocked you’re prepared for a clown apocalypse, but you didn’t plan on getting laid during it?”

“I’m not the brightest bulb sometimes,” he said with a disparaging chuckle.

His body rumbled with the laugh, his skin shaking against my lips as I continued to find old wounds to kiss. They were everywhere, physically supporting the stories he’d relayed about the life he led, the sacrifices he’d made, the depths of hell he’d gone to. I realized his bringing me here meant he’d go through it all for me, use every single weapon in this room to protect me. This is what I’d witnessed in his eyes while he drove me wild with pleasure in the dressing room.

“I wish you’d let me make you feel as good as you made me.”

He turned, facing me as his hands wrapped my waist and pulled me flush against him. My lips landed on perhaps the worst of all his old wounds—his steel heart tattoo.

He closed his eyes, relaxing into the embrace. Under his breath, and too quiet for any eavesdropping jerks to hear, he told me, “You already make me feel better than any orgasm ever has, baby.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Night-vision goggles turned the pitch-black world into shades of neon emerald, allowing me to make out the landscape as we headed away from the houses on Nik’s ATV. I hugged tight to his body as he navigated a narrow, uneven trail through the trees. Even with several layers of clothing between us, I struggled to keep my thoughts from drifting back to how he’d felt beneath my fingers, my lips, my tongue.

If he had the same problem, he hid it well. In the gun room, his focus had quickly turned to the weapons, going over the basics of safe handling until I passed all his quizzes and tests. Now his attention was squarely on driving the quad. Upon arriving at a clearing in the valley, he handed me ear protection. It enabled us to communicate by amplifying lower-level sounds, like our voices, while reducing the harmful noise of the guns.

“Think of a clock face, like the grandfather clock in my living room. Imagine you’re the middle. Look from nine o’clock to three o’clock. Tell me what you see.”

Through the green tint of the NVGs I realized the valley was set up as his personal firing range. “Targets.” In addition to a few more obvious ones, some were miniscule and tricky.

“Good.” We moved into position for one of the more apparent targets and after a few dry-firing practice rounds, he was ready for me to shoot for real. “I don’t want you to overthink any of this. Trust in yourself.”

Trust in her, you mean.

“Start with your Glock.”

“Her Glock.”

“It’s yours now.” He handed me the gun, this time with a full magazine in place and a suppressor added. “Thea, I know you’re struggling with who you are in all of this. No matter what you find out about yourself, you are whoever you want to be now.”

“I want to stay alive, is all.”

“Then load and make ready your weapon.”

I racked the slide back, chambering a round.

“Shooter ready?”

I gripped the gun with both hands, leveled it on target. “Ready.”

“Send it.”

I exhaled as I squeezed the trigger. Behind me, Nik saw as I did, the bullet pinging the corner of the metal target. “Low left,” I muttered. “I can do better.” How do I know this?

My next shot was overcorrected. “High right.”

“Very good.”

No, it’s not. I repeated the action getting closer to the middle. After adjusting my stance, I squeezed the trigger again. Perfect. “On center.”

I scanned the terrain finding other targets and hitting them squarely. “Damn,” he whispered behind me.

After going through a similar routine with the Marlin and the M4, I asked to try the 901.

Nik exchanged weapons with me, as always, verifying all safety measures were in place.

“Which target are you going to go for this time?”

“You’ll see.” Instinctively, I lowered myself onto my belly, my hip bones pressing into the cold earth. My body flattened as my feet flared out and I dropped my heels down to stabilize me. I nestled the Colt’s stock into my shoulder, leaning my cheek tight against it. I used the magazine to stabilize