She shut the door and suddenly, she wanted as much space between them as humanly possible. She ran up the sidewalk to the porch where Charlie stood waiting for her. She threw her arms around his neck and did everything she could not to fall apart. But a sob escaped. His arms wrapped around her, tightening protectively. She heard the car door open. Then she felt Charlie’s breath hitch.
“He’s getting out, Iz.” The door shut. “If he’s half the stud that car is—Oh, hell no and hello, tall, dark and—hot damn, girlfriend, I don’t blame your cherry for pouncing all over that. Does he have a gay twin brother?”
“Isadora,” Flynn’s deep voice called as he approached. “Is everything all right?”
Charlie pushed her behind his five foot seven, one-hundred-and-forty-pound body. “How can you ask if everything’s all right when you’re the one that made Iz cry?”
When Flynn didn’t respond, but stared at Charlie like he wanted to stuff him a hole somewhere, Charlie kept at him. “I, a person who cares about her, would never do that. Obviously you don’t care about her since you made her cry. You need to leave. Now.” Izzy had never heard Charlie angry before. His voice held no room for argument.
“Isadora?” Flynn asked.
Izzy sucked it up as best as she could, even though she was feeling like a little girl who was just uninvited to the popular kid’s party. Moving around Charlie, she clasped his hand tightly as she faced Flynn. Her heart did a crazy stutter step. He was so handsome. Potent male personified. God, she was going to miss every nuance of him. “Everything’s fine, please leave.”
He stood for a long, drawn-out minute holding her gaze. The hot sting of tears built up. Blinking furiously to keep the damn tears at bay, rigidly, she stood her ground, offering him no concession. He either found a way to deal with her past or he didn’t.
Judging by the tightness of his features and the angry burn in his eyes, she doubted he’d come to terms with her past any time soon. Men like Flynn didn’t. Their egos couldn’t handle it. To him she was damaged goods. A blight to his high-society name. Just like she was a blight to her father’s name. Birds of a feather flocked together, Momma had warned her.
“Good night,” he bit out, then turned on his heel and walked away. The sound of his retreating footsteps crushed her heart. Forlornly, she watched Flynn’s tall body as his angry stride took him farther and farther out of her life. When he moved around his car and came around to the driver door, he stopped and stared at her on the porch for a long minute. Hope swelled in her chest.
“Oh, tall, dark, and craves some, wants to come back to momma real bad,” Charlie crooned. “He’s been a bad boy and he can’t figure out how to make it right and retain his pride at the same time.”“He’s not coming back,” Izzy whispered.
Flynn ducked into his car and roared off. She stood there until she could no longer hear the deep purr of the engine.
Charlie turned and took her against this chest. “Let it out, sweets. Let it all out, then we’ll talk about it.”
Chapter Fifteen
Flynn gunned the Vette, wanting the tightness in his chest to ease. Anger, frustration, guilt, fear, jealousy, and something else he couldn’t put a name to twisted him up inside. Nothing had trained him for what he was experiencing at that moment. He’d never been so furious in his life nor felt so helpless. He was a self-admitted control freak. He didn’t like surprises or people’s actions having a negative emotional impact on him. To make sure that didn’t happen, he controlled the people around him and limited not only their emotional influence on him, but his on them. It was why he loved being a federal agent. The law gave him the room to control the bad guys, not the other way around.
Flynn didn’t know any other way. Growing up with an absentee father who made no effort to hide his women—his strippers—had resulted in Flynn’s developing a protective nature. Not for his father, but for his mother, who’d taken her husband’s infidelity with the stiff upper lip of her Boston upbringing, even when his father had brought them to the table when his mother was in the house, for God’s sake!
Those women were raucous, bawdy women who saw a golden goose in his old man. To hang on to it, they went to great lengths to win the Ryker boys over with exuberant shows of affection. Mal was mesmerized by them, but Flynn refused to speak to them, which earned him an ass-kicking. Flynn’s heart had slammed shut when his mother died too young. Flynn would never forgive his old man for killing her.
His disdain for women like the ones his father brought home went deep. How the hell he’d gotten tangled up with one was beyond his comprehension. He could only blame it on one thing: lust.
He’d been celibate for months, working a task force that didn’t give him time to sleep, much less socialize. He was overdue for a healthy romp. Let’s face it, Pink had caught all their eyes. Flynn saw the way the single guys in the room watched her. He knew damn well the same thoughts and images that had thundered through his mind straight to his groin had thundered through theirs, too.
Flynn slammed his hands against the steering wheel. He winced at the pain that shot through his left hand. “Why the hell does she have to show off her tits?” he yelled at the dashboard.
Part of him knew he was being unfair.
Izzy wasn’t a stripper, she was a cocktail waitress at a bikini strip club. Nothing like the women his father had fucked. Not typical of the breed at all. Not even close. She had a Marilyn Monroe naïveté about her. Hell, she even looked like her. Big doe eyes, little nose, cupid’s bow lips, skin as smooth as silk. Knockout curves. Pink was just a younger, more contemporary, spicy version of the icon. That breathless voice and ethereal innocence drew him to her like a moth to an open flame. That she did that to him drove him nuts. The insanity controlled him, not the other way around.
That loss of control compelled him to keep reminding himself—she was working the floor at a strip club, strutting around in a barely there scrap of a uniform leaving nothing to the imagination. And she had attempted to drug him and make a damn sex video! He got it, it was for her sister, but where was he supposed to draw the line on how far he could go with it?
It was his lust that had him seeing more in her.
So why did he pound the shit out of that guy at the restaurant? He’d never fought over a woman or for one.
His hand throbbed each time he clenched the steering wheel. The pain was worth breaking that bastard’s nose. He’d do it again. The wounded animal sound that came from Pink when she realized what was happening to her cut him in half. Didn’t matter that she should expect that type of thing to happen; the pain in her eyes had been too much for him to ignore. Dude had to pay.
Flynn roared down his street and into his driveway, coming to a screeching stop at the garage door. Rigidly, he sat there in his car, the engine rumbling beneath him, not ready to call it a night. Neither was Flynn. He’d toss and turn until the sun came up, unable to get the smell of bubble gum out of his head.
“Fuck it all to hell.”
He shifted into reverse, backed out of the driveway, then downshifted and headed downtown.
Simon’s text earlier in the day had given him some cursory info on Sorlov, with the promise of more intel to come. Flynn wanted more now.
A pot of coffee and hours later Flynn sat glued to his computer screen in his office at the FBI Field Office in Oakland. Pink was in way over her pink and blond head.
Boris Sorlov aka Vladimir Chermensky, a Ukrainian-born terrorist, was not only on the FBI’s radar, but there was a task force in place, comprised of men Flynn had worked with, some of whom had gone deep and infiltrated the terrorist’s infrastructure. Surf’s Up was just one of Chermensky’s numerous enterprises.