His strong fingers massaged her scalp. It felt so good, but not as good as the spicy taste of Nic Hale as he stroked his tongue against hers. She could have wept with relief at the beauty of this kiss. She sucked on his tongue, and he moved back and nipped at her bottom lip and gave a small tug. Camilla felt her body start to go liquid at the evocative caress. She needed him to move his hand.
“Please, Nic.”
He looked down at her, his eyes searching. That was when she remembered he was as new to this as she was. She wondered if he was as prepared for tonight as she was.
“Tell me what you need, Cami, and it’s yours.”
“I need my bra off, and your shirt off.” She struggled to sit up so she could get out of her dress, and then unsnap her bra.
He pulled her close and easily smoothed the dress down her arms, lifting her slightly so that it fell to the floor. Camilla shivered, in a good way.
“Is this what you wanted?” he asked. His voice was deeper, smokier.
“My bra,” she whispered.
He was looking down at her body, his eyes intent. Did he like what he saw? She took a deep breath, sucking in her stomach.
“Don’t do that,” he said as he traced his fingers along the skin of her tummy. “Relax.”
How could she relax? She was about to be naked in front of Nic for the very first time. It was scary and wonderful all at the same time.
“You know we can’t go too far; I don’t have—” he started.
“I have condoms in my purse,” Camilla interrupted.
He froze. She’d surprised him. Good. She reached up, cupping his face, and leaned in for a kiss. When he didn’t respond she pulled back.
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve never been more sure about anything. I want us to make love.”
His big body shuddered. He pulled her closer for another one of his soul-shattering kisses. She had no idea how long they stayed like that, lost in each other’s arms, but then he tugged her hand out of his hair and she felt her bra strap ease down her arm. He soon had her out of her bra and he tossed it to the floor.
She looked up at him, her eyes heavy with passion. When had he taken off his shirt? It didn’t matter. She pushed her breasts against his hot chest, moaning at the lush sensation of skin against skin. Levering herself against his abdomen she pushed herself into a kneeling position. His hazel eyes watched her as she went to work on the buttons of his jeans.
“Hold on.”
She looked up at him in confusion.
He sat up and pulled the throw blanket from off the back of the couch and wrapped it around her shoulders. “We’re going to my bedroom.” He pulled her close as they headed down the hall.
“My purse.” she pointed.
He gave her a roguish look, then swept it up in his hand.
“Anything else?” he asked.
She shook her head.
He guided her towards his room. Her heart started beating faster. Would she really be able to talk Nic into making love with her tonight?
Once the door was closed behind them, he pulled her in for a kiss. The blanket was in the way of her wrapping her arms around him, but it didn’t matter, because his lips were on hers and it felt sublime. He took the kiss deeper; her thoughts whirled around her head until they all centered on being cocooned by Nic. His tongue thrust into her mouth and she tasted his want, his need, and most of all, his love.
For a moment she felt like she was flying, then Camilla found herself gently placed in the middle of Nic’s bed. She smiled up at him, his hazel eyes, and that dimple in his chin. The blanket fell away and she could move her arms. She traced the cleft, then touched his lips. She read every concern in his eyes, his every worry. But he wanted, Lord how her man wanted.
“You have to be sure, Cami. Are you?” he whispered.
“You have to be sure too, Nic. I’m the one who wants to divest you of your virginity, are you ready for that?”
His eyes went wide and he threw back his head and laughed. He had the best laugh of anybody she knew.
He stood up by the side of the bed, undid the rest of the buttons on his jeans, and pulled them off along with his underwear. This time her eyes went wide.
“Divest away.” His grin was devilish.
8
Three hours of shut-eye had been three hours too many as far as Nic was concerned. The good news was that Zed figured they were only about four hours behind the students.
“In two hours were going to come to a fork in a road, if you can call this a road.” Kane pointed to the piss-poor drone image on his tablet. “Both ways end in villages, both with about the same size populations and both equally poor. It’s a crapshoot which way they’ll go.”
“Is there anyone we could send out to each village?” Nic asked. It was a long shot, but he had to ask.
Max looked him dead in the eye and shook his head. “Sorry, Nic, I made the call all the way to your dad. Nobody could get here in time. It’s all us or the local federales.”
“Fuck them, we never know whose side they’re on,” Cullen bit out.
Most everybody on the team nodded. Unfortunately with the way the Mexican economy was going, more and more of the government was on the take.
Nic was sick of this shit. All he cared about was getting Cami home, safe and alive.
Once again Zed took point and Nic was in the rear. This time Raiden was his babysitter.
“You doing okay?” Raiden asked.
Nic sent him a sideways glare.
Raiden held up his hands. “Hey, didn’t mean to suffer the wrath, just asking a question.”
Nic settled, just a bit. Raiden was one of the coolest members of the team. He was the only one he had told about Alice and Mimi. Not the part about spending time with them when he said he was out chasing skirts, but he had told Raiden about helping his cousin out. He’d wanted advice. Yeah, Raiden was the best.
“I’ve been better,” Nic answered. “I can’t fucking believe that my Cami is one of the ones who has been kidnapped.”
“Yours?” Raiden asked quietly.
“She was mine through junior and senior year of high school, then the summer we graduated. Years might have passed, but I guess in my heart she’s always been mine. How fucked-up is that?”
“The heart wants what the heart wants.”
“Is that some kind of quote?” Nic asked.
“I think it’s Emily Dickinson, but I might have gotten it wrong. I figured I should quote her since we were talking about high school love.”
“Raiden Sato, you’re a pain in my ass,” Nic said with a half-laugh.
“Got you laughing though.” There was a glint in Raiden’s black eyes. “So why aren’t there little Camis and Nics running around right now?”
“There were supposed to be. Silly woman wanted to get married after we graduated, but I sure as hell wasn’t on board with that. I knew how rough my first couple of years in were going to be. I didn’t want to end up divorced. What’s more, she’s a bona fide genius, she had scholarships up the ass. Her parents both had or I should say, have Ph.Ds.. They wanted their princess to go to Ivy League, but then when she got the full ride to MIT, all bets were off. That’s where they wanted her to go for her math degree.”
Raiden whistled.
“Yeah, right? That’s the woman who was so in love with me, that she wanted to drop everything and be a sailor’s wife. Can you imagine?”
Raiden didn’t respond for half a klick. “Yeah, I could imagine. How did you break it off with her?”
Nic snorted. “How do you manage to crawl into my head?”
“Practice. So how did you break it off? Were you sneaky or up front?”
“God, it was tough, but I was up front. I loved her. There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to be anything but truthful with her, she deserved my utmost respect. Of course, she totally blew me off. She was tighter than a tick,” Nic laughed as he thought about how she was. She’d been mag
nificent.
“What?”
“Huh?”
“What are you laughing about?”
“Her. Always her. God, Raiden, Cami was a force to be reckoned with. First, there was her logic. That woman could out-argue a supreme court justice. She had it figured out that I was going to the SEALs, so I would be based in either Coronado, California or Little Creek, Virginia. So she started her campaign. California was easy because it was San Diego State. That school was killer, and she had a full-ride offer. Virginia was trickier.”
“How so?” Raiden asked.
“Camilla explained how close William and Mary College was, and how she could study there and get just as good an education as she would at Harvard, MIT, or anywhere else. Hell, she sent the curriculums and the professor bios to me through certified mail. Then when I still balked, she had one of the alumni of W&M show up at my apartment when she was there, forcing me to listen to him.”
“She didn’t.”
“Oh yes, she did.” Nic grinned, remembering how pissed-off he’d been. How impressed he’d been.
“What was she planning on majoring in?”
“Mathematics. There was this famous mathematician who was a professor at W&M that she intended to study under. She’d been offered a full ride at that school. Her parents were furious that she was even considering it. They were bound and determined that she go to MIT.”
“How did you find that out?”
“Little girl might have been fighting her fight, but don’t think that her parents weren’t on my ass.”
“How’d they get to you?”
“They didn’t really, they went to my parents.”
Raiden laughed and laughed some more. “Oh shit, I would have loved to have seen that. I haven’t met your mother, but I’ve heard stories. And your father? Captain Hale doesn’t take shit from anybody. I can’t imagine him putting up with some interfering Ph.Ds.. What did they do?”
“I don’t know. They told me about their visit, and how adamant the two Doctor Ross’s were that I not marry their daughter. Apparently, a sailor wasn’t good enough at any point. Mom was pissed.”
“I imagine. Did you tell Cami?”
“Fuck no. Her campaign only would have intensified, then she would have been angry with her parents, and I would have hated that. But her parents solidified my stance. She needed to go to school and totally focus on that, not try to juggle a new marriage.”
“So, I repeat my original question,” Raiden said as they made their way through a particularly dense part of the jungle. “What did you do to convince her to wait?”
“I told her there wasn’t a chance in hell we were getting married before I joined the Navy. I told her. She didn’t believe me. Eventually, I told her to register for William and Mary College, because she had convinced me that was the right university for her undergraduate degree. She figured because of that, she had me. The day her first class began, I was off to Lake Michigan for my first day of training.”
“So no wedding,” Raiden sighed.
“Nope. Jesus, did my phone blow up. She even flew up to Chicago to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center.”
Raiden laughed again.
“Hey, it wasn’t funny,” Nic glared at him.
Raiden raised his hands in surrender. “I’m just liking her more and more. She’s going to need that kind of resilience right now. So tell me how all of this ended. Why didn’t you just marry her after she graduated?”
Nic closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them to watch where he was going. He remembered following her college career at William and Mary, even though he was going through intensive training to become a SEAL, he kept tabs on her. In all that time he’d never once lifted the communication embargo, not wanting to derail her career, wanting her to stay focused. But when he got his trident, it had been time. It was the summer after her junior year. He’d sent her a letter. He knew that she’d be back with her parents. He didn’t want to call her, instead he’d poured out his heart. He told her that he was stationed in Little Creek as a SEAL. He knew they could make this work. He loved her, and wanted to see her. He waited three weeks and there was no reply. He figured he deserved that. He’d been too much of a wuss to call her, what he needed to say needed to be said in person or in writing, so he kept sending letters, ten in all. It wasn’t until September that he had gotten a response.
The return address was her parents, inside was nothing more than a newspaper clipping of an engagement announcement, Camilla Ann Ross and Harris Prescott.
“Nic, you still with me?”
“Not really,” Nic admitted. “Don’t we have a mission?”
“Seriously, what happened next?”
“It ended. End of story. We went our separate ways, and I followed the age-old sailor tradition of wine, women, and song.”
He could feel Raiden looking at him, but he ignored him. All that mattered was the here and now. They had people to rescue. They had Cami to rescue.
And her last name was still Ross, not Redmond.
“Up!”
Camilla didn’t know what was going on.
“I said get up. If you don’t start listening, I’m going to just drag your sorry ass out of the Jeep.”
Who is the woman yelling at me? Where’s Nic?
“Ahhhhh,” Camilla cried out when her hair was yanked as she was pulled sideways against her seatbelt.
“Finally, I have your attention. Get out of the Jeep. Even after we give you a ride, you find a way to slow us down.”
Camilla heard sobbing. “Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me.”
She tried to turn her head and see what was happening in the seat next to her, but Maria was holding her hair too tightly.
“Let me unbuckle my seatbelt,” Camilla said in her schoolteacher's voice. Anything to make Maria let her loose so she could help Jan.
Maria shoved her head away. “Be quick. We don’t have all night.” That was when Camilla realized it was dark. She also noticed a loud rumble that she hadn’t heard before, but she didn’t have time to look around. Instead, she unbuckled her belt and focused on Jan. There was some thug groping her. Quickly, she pushed the man’s hands away, unbuckled Jan’s seatbelt, and pulled her toward her side of the Jeep.
“Hey, what are you doing?” the man demanded in Spanish. Camilla ignored him. She stumbled out of the Jeep before finally getting upright. When she was firmly on her feet, she tugged Jan into her arms.
“Shhh, it’s going to be all right,” she comforted the girl.
“Why lie to her?” Maria laughed.
Jan shuddered against Camilla’s throbbing shoulder. Were they ever going to get out of this?
“Time to get into the truck!” a man yelled. Headlights blinded Camilla for a moment.
“What’s going on?” she asked Maria.
“You’re always bitching about people needing to ride. Well, Princess, you’ll be happy; now everybody gets to ride. You and that sniveling bitch need to move your ass, we don’t have all night. We need to get to the village by morning.”
“What’s going to h-h-happen to us?” Jan stuttered.
“If your parents pay, then you won’t spend too long in your cage. Maybe just a month or so. It won’t be so bad. Maybe your cage will be next to that pretty boy’s who’s always so protective of you, won’t you like that?” Maria taunted.
The woman was trying to mind-fuck them, there was no other term for it. Camilla hated her more than she did El Jefe.
“Now move your asses onto the truck.” She sauntered away, leaving them to fend for themselves.
Now that Camilla’s eyes had adjusted she saw that there was a canvas-covered truck that looked like it had been built in the nineteen-fifties on the road in front of them. Most of the college students were climbing inside. Lisa wasn’t; she was standing at the back bumper looking around, making sure everybody was getting onboard.
“Camilla!” she shouted out.
“I’m h
ere,” Camilla shouted back. “I have Jan with me. We’re coming.”
Camilla let out a sigh of relief when she saw Lisa head there way. Trying to keep Jan upright was using what little strength she had left. She realized that Lisa’s arm had to be killing her, but hopefully, between the two of them, they could manage to get Jan onto the truck.
“Some of the guards hustled the guys onto the truck, that’s why they’re not here to help,” Lisa said as soon as she was close.
Camilla nodded, she had wondered.
Between the two of them, they made quick work of getting Jan to the truck. Travis and Paul were at the edge to help all three of them up when they got there.
“Where are we going?” Camilla asked Travis as she glanced over at the two stone-faced men with their rifles pointed at Paul and Brian.
“They said something about a village. All they keep talking about is the food. Sounds good to me.”
Camilla nodded. Food would be good. She looked over at Lisa. She was looking as wan as she and Jan. Camilla needed to think of a way to get them some help.
“Once our parents pay up, everything will be all right, right?” Travis asked her quietly. She sat as straight as she could with her shoulder hurting as badly as it was. He needed her to be strong, she was in charge after all.
“Yes,” she lied outright. She refused to think of what Maria had said. “They know the only way they will get their money is if they return all of you unharmed.”
The eagerness in his eyes about broke her heart. “Really?”
“Absolutely,” she confirmed.
“That’s good. That’s real good.”
The truck hit a bump and she almost toppled onto her side. Her eyes smarted with tears. She bit her lip. She couldn’t let herself cry, otherwise, she might not stop.
You can be strong, Camilla, she reminded herself.
I’m Camilla!
Remember who Dad named you after.
Camilla let out a snotty snort-laugh and wiped her nose with her sleeve. Yeah, here she was, Camilla Ross, named after the great Roman virgin warrior and she wasn’t doing crap.
Her Faithful Protector: A Navy SEAL Romance (Night Storm Book 6) Page 7
