by Eva Chase
Garrett gave a startled laugh. “Not always. I’ve let it ride me more times than I’d like to admit. I’m not any paragon of self-control.”
I waved his objection away. “When is anyone absolutely perfect at anything? You found a middle ground. You leveraged that drive into being spectacular at your career. I—” I paused. “The way I grew up, we were raised to jockey for a spot at the top, no matter who it hurt. No matter what it cost. You weren’t worth anything unless you could prove yourself.” Prove that the highest among the shrouded folk would deem you a delectable meal, it’d turned out.
“When I got out of there, I learned pretty quickly that I couldn’t trust that impulse in myself,” I went on. “I have no sense of when to rein it in. I have to focus on practicalities and numbers and facts, or it’ll lead me away from my goals. You turned the same feeling into fuel to get you where you wanted to go. I think I’m allowed to like that.”
“I’ve never really thought about it like that. As something good.” Garrett hesitated. “No one pushed me to feel that way when I was a kid, but I had three older brothers who were all ‘better’ in pretty much every way, and I don’t think my parents really knew what to do with me. I did some rotten things when I was younger, thinking I was just evening the playing field. It got… bad. I couldn’t stand to keep going like that. I’ve turned it around as well as I can.”
“And look at you now,” I said teasingly with a gesture to myself. “Tracking down master criminals all across the world.”
The smile he gave me in return was a little more relaxed in its wryness. “Bringing said master criminals to justice is another matter.”
“Oh, maybe you’ll catch me yet.”
Silence settled between us for a moment, me by the wall and him on the bed. Something shifted in his expression.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you,” he said quietly. “Even after we realized how you played us. It’s hard to trust you when I know that I want to in spite of all available evidence.”
The admission tugged at some part of my heart I hadn’t known still worked. “Maybe you don’t have to trust me,” I suggested. “Maybe this can just be whatever it is, and if I fuck up enough, you can toss me behind bars and throw away the key, but until then… until then we take what’s in each moment as it comes.”
“I don’t know.”
He didn’t look angry anymore, but the pain hadn’t completely vanished. I didn’t know what to do with that. Maybe I’d gotten as far as I could.
I straightened up, nudging myself off the wall. “Look. I have no agenda right now, in this moment. I still owe you a night. We can make it a morning instead if you want. You call the shots. Get me out of your system. It’s up to you. I’ll walk out of the room while you think about it so you can be sure I’m not working some kind of voodoo on you. Just don’t leave me hanging too long or the housekeeping staff will chase me off.”
I didn’t wait to try to prompt an immediate answer. I grabbed my purse and went right out. In the brighter lights of the hall, with the door clicking shut behind me, my breath came out in a rush.
When was the last time I’d talked that openly with anyone? I wasn’t sure I had ever—not since Olivia. Not even with Bash. I hadn’t told Garrett anything he could use against me, but waiting to see what he’d do, my innards seemed to have twisted together.
It was all right. Even if this interlude didn’t go any farther—it was all right. He wasn’t angry anymore, at least.
I was starting to consider that maybe I should just leave when the door jerked open. Garrett blinked at me as if he hadn’t really expected me to still be there. He wet his lips. Then he eased back to make room. “Come in?”
My heart thumped with anticipation as I stepped back inside. Garrett flipped the security latch over. He turned to face me, close enough that the heat of his body grazed my skin.
“Just this once,” he said with a rasp in his voice. “To get it out of my system.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.
He touched my cheek, his fingertips gliding over it and into my hair. “How should we do this?”
“You were supposed to get Jemma Moriarty the rising star of the Friesing Police Department. I can give you her if you want.”
He shook his head. “I want Jemma Moriarty, criminal mastermind. How does she fuck?”
I grinned. “To tell you the truth, she liked the desk quite a bit. Two thumbs up.”
“Well, then…” He led me into the main part of the room. “No desk this time, but there is this handy dresser.”
He shoved the TV over to the far end so we had plenty of room and rested his hand on my hip as I hopped up. The way he’d talked, I’d expected a quick wham-bang-thank-you-ma’am, not so different from our first encounter. Instead he leaned in slowly to catch my mouth with his.
He kissed me at a measured pace, not touching me otherwise except the circle of his thumb over my hipbone and his fingers steady in my hair. When I ran my hands down his chest, he deepened the kiss with a pleased hum.
Hunger welled up inside me at the heat of his mouth, the crackling electric smell of him filling my nose. Every lingering shift of his lips, as if he were absorbing all the pleasure he could from each simple sensation, left my nerves quivering eagerly.
I teased my tongue across the seam of his mouth. He nudged closer and tugged me to him at the same time, his groin settling flush between my legs. The bulge of his erection sent a fresh wave of exhilaration through me. I couldn’t help rocking into him as he opened his mouth so our tongues could dance.
“You feel so fucking good already, Firecracker,” he murmured, ducking his head to kiss my neck next, careful of the forming bruise.
I sighed in agreement, grinding against him harder until he groaned. He slid my dress up my thighs and tugged it over my head, making quick work of my bra while he reclaimed my mouth. Our tongues slicked together as I ran my fingers through his tawny hair. I couldn’t hold back the motion of my hips. That felt fucking good. The friction of his jeans through my panties already had me soaking.
Garrett caressed my breasts with both hands and then held me more firmly in place to lower his mouth to one. I tipped my head back against the wall as his lips closed around the nipple and sucked hard.
A gasp shuddered out of me. Pleasure raced through my chest with each lap of his tongue. He devoured me with the intentness of a man enjoying his last meal.
Bliss was building between my thighs too. I grasped Garrett’s shoulder, lost between his mouth on my breast and his cock still three layers of fabric away from where I wanted it to be. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d come from nothing but contact through clothes, but oh—fuck—
The orgasm caught me like a wave from my core. I arched against Garrett, and he yanked my mouth to his again. We kissed and kissed again, until I was losing myself in that sensation too.
My hunger wasn’t sated yet, and I couldn’t believe he was anywhere close to satisfied either. I fumbled with his shirt, and he yanked it off. We collided again, his bare chest searing hot against mine, the urgency I’d remembered coming back into his kiss.
I flicked open the button of his fly, and he shed his jeans, groaning when I gripped his cock through his boxers. I rubbed it against me as our kisses grew sloppier, our breath ragged.
He wrenched off my panties. I snatched a condom from my purse and shoved it into his hand. With a rough chuckle, he dropped his boxers and prepared himself. Then he kissed me again, stroking my breast, massaging my hip, until I growled insistently.
“You want this?” he said, running the head of his cock over my opening.
“Yes. Please. Fuck me.”
The last word had barely left my lips when he thrust inside me. I couldn’t hold back a moan.
Maybe that was what he needed to know more than anything else—that I wanted him, that this meant at least a little more to me than mashing genitals with any decently good-looking man who h
appened to be in the vicinity.
“Garrett,” I mumbled around a hitch of breath. He plunged into me even deeper, and I dug my fingernails into his shoulder at the burst of pleasure. “Just like that. Please, Garrett.”
At the plea and his repeated name, his thrusts turned wilder. His lips pressed against my jaw and then the side of my neck with a nick of teeth. His cock hit the most sensitive spot inside me. I cried out, arching up to meet him. He hammered into me, and I hung on through the surge of ecstasy that swept over me and crashed with a shimmer of stars behind my eyes.
“Jemma,” Garrett muttered. He came with a choked sound, holding me tight. Before the impact had even quite rippled from his body, he drew me into one last kiss.
The kiss went on and on, oddly gentle after the last frantic pounding of our coming together, but perfectly sweet. Just this once, I found myself thinking. To get it out of his system.
I didn’t know what to do with the pang of mourning that came with that thought.
Chapter Sixteen
Jemma
Even though I’d encouraged Bash to pick a hotel as nice as mine, he’d gone with an older, more modest building a couple blocks outside of the downtown core. It had only eight rooms per floor, which meant it wasn’t hard to tell that the woman just emerging into the hall was coming out of his.
I paused for a second on the worn carpet outside the elevator and then pushed myself to start walking again. The woman brushed past me without a hint of concern. Her bleached hair hung slightly damp from a recent shower, but the clothes on her skinny frame suggested a walk of shame—a little too rumpled to be fresh. I caught a whiff of orchid-and-amber perfume she must have recently reapplied, no doubt from that massive rhinestone studded purse.
A sharp-edged sensation wound through my gut. I waited until the woman had vanished onto the elevator before I knocked on Bash’s door.
“Just a second,” he called, and opened it shirtless with jeans slung low on his hips like he’d barely managed to tug them on. His blasé expression stuttered at the sight of me.
He’d thought the knock was his recent playmate coming back for something she’d forgotten.
“I see you had a good night,” I said with a smile that formed a little stiffly. “Now put on a shirt, and we’ll get down to work.”
It wasn’t that I objected to his bare chest per say. Bash’s military training and the physical regimen he’d kept up since that time had bulked him out with an impressive array of muscle. The smooth light brown of his skin was broken here and there by darker scars that only added to the visual appeal.
Right now, though, the visual reminded me a little too starkly of running my hands over those muscles while he’d thrust inside me weeks ago. The memory mingling with the sight of the woman in the hall provoked a trickle of nausea.
I shouldn’t be bothered by it. We were better as colleagues—safer as colleagues, with the rules cut and dried, knowing exactly what we could expect from each other. I’d never had an honest romantic relationship, open and giving without any ulterior motives, with anyone. It wasn’t in me. I had no playbook for that.
Still, my gut stayed clenched as I sat down at the table by the window. The warm mid-morning sun streamed across two glasses and an empty bottle of whisky from the mini-bar. Crimson lipstick marked the rim of one of the glasses. I clamped down on the urge to toss it out the window and enjoy the smash of it shattering on the driveway below.
Bash yanked on a T-shirt that only partly disguised his impressive physique and sat down across from me, studying my face with what looked like wariness. “I didn’t realize you’d come by this early.”
Somehow both the fact that he was apologizing at all and the fact that he was apologizing in such a half-assed way irritated me beyond measure. I shoved the glasses to the side, maybe with a little more force than was necessary, and set my tablet in front of me.
“I’d like to move quickly now that Sherlock and the others know the score. The less time we’re reliant on their goodwill, the better. Your contacts here who can get us military-grade equipment are still good, right?”
“Absolutely. I can reach out as soon as I know what we need.”
“Good. I’ve got a list. Feel free to add anything else you think would help with a covert operation. The budget is no object. I’ll need to get as close as possible to the village without them knowing I’m there—probably making use of some natural caves—and then I’ll need to keep them diverted so I can get what I need.”
“Which isn’t any special plant,” Bash said. “That whole story about you being poisoned—you made that up to get Sherlock off your back.”
“Yes,” I said. There wasn’t any point in mentioning that my life was still on the line here. Bash couldn’t do anything about that. “They have a dagger with supposed magical powers… If I’m lucky, it works as advertised. With that, I should be able to sever the pact I made, and none of those monsters will have any claim on me.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Bash leaned back in his chair. A hint of orchid-and-amber perfume reached my nose, and my gaze slid past him to the bed with its strewn covers. An image popped up in the back of my head of him bending over that woman there, fucking her the way he’d fucked me.
Sleeping next to her the way he’d slept next to me. The way I hadn’t slept next to any other man I’d ever fucked.
Why should I expect that part to have meant anything to him? Pleasure and proximity and convenience—nothing more.
I jerked my attention back to my tablet. “We’re moving to Split as soon as you have the equipment. It’ll be easier to plan our approach from closer by. We’ll need a truck or a van to transport everything, since we can’t take the equipment by plane without raising some eyebrows. I was going to set us up in the same hotel this time for ease of communication, since we’ll need to work together closely for most of this.” I paused and glanced up at him. “Unless that would cramp your style.”
He looked back at me evenly. “I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”
“Good. And I trust you won’t allow any of your extracurricular activities to interfere with our plans.”
His jaw tightened at that remark. “Of course not. What we’re doing is my first priority.”
“Glad to hear it.” I stood up abruptly. The jagged feeling inside me had twisted around too much. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t totally trust my own reactions.
More of that orchid-and-amber scent flooded my lungs as I inhaled. It was all too here, too in my face. A little distance, and I’d have my tangled emotions under control.
“I don’t think there’s anything else we need to talk about right now,” I said. “I’ll leave you to it—and whatever else you’re occupying yourself with.”
As I headed for the door, Bash pushed back his chair, its legs scraping against the tiled floor. “Mori.”
“You know,” I said without looking back, “you should probably stop calling me that. It’s hardly professional.”
I grasped the handle. Bash caught up with me at the same moment. He leaned his hand against the doorframe, not exactly blocking my exit—I might have taken a shot at breaking his fingers if he’d gone that far—but with the clear implication that he didn’t want me leaving. “Jemma.”
I looked up at him, willing myself not to glare. The only other time he’d used my first name was right before we’d fallen into bed together. “Moriarty works just fine. I’ll even still accept ‘Majesty’ if you insist. I was on my way out.”
“I’d rather you didn’t leave angry.”
“Who says I’m angry?” I said, with an edge creeping into my voice that I couldn’t quite rein in.
His gaze bored into me. “We don’t normally talk like this. I know you well enough to tell.”
I sidestepped, folding my arms over my chest. “Well, you don’t normally act like this.” All the tiny details that had been irritating me collided in a surge of—all right, anger. The words b
urst out.
“I’m not stupid. I know you have your own needs, and I’ve assumed you fulfill them as it suits you. But in seven years, you’ve managed to keep that side of your life totally separate from anything we’re doing. I’ve never seen even a hint of a fling. Somehow today, when you knew I’d be coming by, you just happened to have someone here, you let her spend the night, leave her scent all over the place, when we just—when I—” I cut myself off, swallowing thickly.
A shadow had crossed Bash’s eyes. “You can’t act as if I’ve done something wrong when just yesterday you told me to take a hike so you could put moves on the prince of Scotland Yard,” he said. “You didn’t hide that. Why the hell should you be jealous now?”
“It’s not the same,” I said, my throat constricting. “And this isn’t about jealousy. Every man I’ve ever been with, it’s been a means to an end, part of the business—except for you. You know that. I told you that. And then you… Tell me it’s a total coincidence. Tell me you didn’t want me to react. Can you? Because as far as I can tell, this wasn’t a mistake. It was a low blow from the one person I trusted to have my back.”
Bash winced. His hand fell from the doorframe, but I stayed where I was. I needed to hear his answer.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said after a minute, hoarsely. “I promise you it wasn’t something I consciously planned, but I wasn’t thinking—if I’d let myself think about it, this wouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry. I’ve been trying not to let what happened between us change anything, but it’s changed already, hasn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you told me you wanted things to stay the way they’d been, you said that you didn’t trust yourself to have that kind of relationship honestly. Because I meant something to you, and you didn’t know how to handle that. But the Londoners, now… It’s not just business with them. You have to admit that they mean something too—they mean enough that you risked your whole plan just to keep them alive!”
