Read Hit Me (The Bailey Boys #2) for Free Online Page A

battle-hardened face into that of a small boy.
    “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said. “I’m just out of practice, that’s all. I had to hit someone tonight. Hard.”
    “Give.”
    She waited until he’d placed that big hand in both of hers. Delicately, she ran her fingertips along each finger, pressed at the knuckles, smoothed the flesh.
    “It is okay,” she said, finally. “No breaks.”
    “Don’t stop.”
    She met those blue-gray eyes again, ran a fingertip down his forefinger one more time.
    “I...”
    This was crazy. Every look so freighted with desire. Every touch a hair-trigger.
    Was it the danger that heightened everything? Or was it simply that their connection was one of those rare things: immediate and extreme?
    “Tell me,” she said, trying to deflect. “Tell me about London. I have never been.”
    “London... My London’s not what the tourists see. It’s not Buckingham Palace and Harrods and Trafalgar Square. It’s narrow East End streets. It’s Yiamas, a Greek taverna in Poplar run by my old mate Kostas. It’s watching the football in the Old Duchess on a Saturday lunchtime with my brothers. It’s cage-fighting in an abandoned warehouse in front of an audience of gangsters and coppers. It’s walking through the wasteland by the Thames where your old man used to bury the bodies, back in the good old days before the Russians moved in and started taking over.”
    He was being half serious, half self-mocking, she decided. “Everywhere is complex and rich beneath the surface,” she said, and he shrugged, then nodded. “You like it here?”
    He thought before answering. “I love the lifestyle,” he said, finally. “I love the weather. I love the possibilities.”
    “But...?”
    “I don’t know where I fit. You know what I mean? I don’t know who I am here.”
    If you’d asked Imelda if she liked it here, and if she’d been able to even come close to finding the words, those are the ones she would have used.
    And maybe that explained what she had been struggling to understand earlier: the attraction, the power of their connection. The two of them were, when you scratched at the surface, cast from the same mold.
    §
    Another whiskey, another Negroni.
    For a time she allowed herself to forget how dangerous this was. They talked about everything and nothing. About London and the Costa; about Tenerife, which she had never discussed with anyone since she had left at nineteen; about Lee’s brothers, and his father in jail, and about Imelda’s street family in the Playa de las Américas, for that ragged assortment of hucksters and thieves had been more family to her than anyone else had been.
    “It’s late,” he said, and they both laughed. It had been late even before they had come through here to the bar’s back room.
    Just two words, but loaded with far more meaning. It’s late, so what now? More drinks, or head out into the night? To my apartment, or do you have somewhere we can go?
    For that they would go somewhere was inevitable now, an undeniable rule of nature.
    They would go and even before they got there they would kiss again, because it was all she could do not to lean across that small table and kiss him right now.
    She wanted the hardness of his lips, the pressing of his tongue. She wanted to taste that whiskey in his mouth. Wanted to give herself up to that strength.
    She wanted to explore that ripped physique. The way the muscles moved against each other. The way he would respond to her touch.
    She wanted to undo the buttons of those gray pants one by one, her eyes fixed on his. She understood the power of locked gazes, of eye contact. That look was one of the most powerful things.
    She wanted to pull those pants open, find the waistband of whatever he wore underneath and ease it down.
    There would be a tight fuzz of hair, the broad base of his shaft, his manhood straining to be free.
    She wanted to see those eyes widen as she took him in her hand.
    Wanted to see him gasp at