Read Too Hot to Hold for Free Online

and he’d wanted to be under that hand. And he knew in that instant what she was going to do, watched and waited as she’d torn wires from the lights on the 4?4 and lit his engine on fire like a pro.
    She’d put the windows down, but hadn’t used the radio.
    She’d put on his racing gloves.
    She’d looked sexy as hell as she stripped them off and handed them to him on the way back to her car, a Mercedes sedan that did not fit her at all.
    Like you know her so damned well .
    No, the problem was that he didn’t know her at all. It was going to stay that way.
    Roaring down the highway, he felt like he had the night of his first mission. Both times were brushes with something that changed his life forever, in ways he didn’t fully comprehend.
    It was so easy to get caught up in the memories, from childhood, from his years before becoming a SEAL, from the missions themselves—easy to get mentally screwed for hours or a day or however long he let them take up residence. Some days they rose up and caught him off guard, until he pushed them back down where they belonged.
    Most nights, he didn’t let himself sleep. He didn’t expect this one to be any different.
    He’d taken his jacket and shirt off on his way up the driveway to the house. The jeans came off the second he hit the door, and this wasn’t anything new or unexpected for him, something done without much thought—or any, no matter if the house was empty or full of company.
    He was convinced that his disdain for clothing came from so much time spent in the hospital as a kid. As a patient, he’d never worn clothes. The doctors and nurses were always stripping you down, knocking you out, and you woke up dazed, balls free and surrounded.
    These days, the only part of that he dealt with well was being balls free.
    Now he deposited the discarded clothing in a heap on a chair in the maze of rooms he called home, part of the first floor of the house where he’d spent his teenage years. A house Dad had left to the three of them when he moved to L.A., left to him and Chris and Jake, so they’d always have a place to come home to, no matter what else happened.
    He opened the windows and the sliding glass doors that overlooked the backyard and stood in the cool night air naked. If he’d been training or on a mission, that would’ve overrode the need to feel something on his skin, pleasurable or painful. His throat ached where the scar was and he rubbed it again and waited for the air to calm him.
    There was a danger in remembering … but sometimes an even bigger one in forgetting.
    ———
    W hy don’t you just forget about taking these crazy bands on was something Kenny Waldron was used to hearing—a question he never answered. Instead he would just smile a secret smile and think of his three sons, who were wilder than any band he’d ever managed. Then he would sign the papers his lawyer put in front of him, committing him to manage what usually turned out to be a band on the verge of self-destruction, one that had been dumped by several managers before him, one that no one but Kenny was crazy enough to take on.
    There was crazy and then there was crazy , and Kenny had been used to all kinds from the time he’d been a young wild boy himself growing up in the bayous of Louisiana. Married to Maggie at seventeen, they’d had their son, Chris, nine months later and had taken him on the road with them as they began a career of managing bands that would make them famous.
    By this time, Kenny was used to trouble, used to having his authority questioned. Used to things coming out all right in the end. Sometimes, it took his sons, and the bands, longer to figure that out.
    “We could’ve had a bigger deal if we hadn’t listened to him,” he heard the lead singer of his latest project whisper now to the other members of the group from behind the half-closed door.
    Kenny would speak to the kid later, privately, after the show was finished and the post-performance