by Lara Adrian
She caught her lip on a gasp as he slipped his fingers beneath the thin cotton on either side of her pelvis and drew her panties down. Freed of them, she didn’t resist as he put his palms on her inner thighs and spread her for his gaze.
He stroked her wet slit and the swollen bud at its crown. “Just as pretty as I remember. Damn, you kill me, girl. You know that?”
She couldn’t answer. She could only stare in mesmerized fascination as he lowered his head between her legs and took his first taste of her. She sucked in a shallow breath when his tongue cleaved her folds. Wet. Hot. Mind-numbingly good.
As he suckled her, he slipped a finger into her body. Her walls clenched around him, tremors already starting to build as he teased her with his touch. For each thrust, he sucked her clit deeper into his mouth, tonguing her into a state of pleasured frenzy.
Before long, she was arching and writhing beneath him, panting for more. She reached for him, caught her fingers in the soft, thick waves of his hair. “Please,” she gasped. “I need to have you inside me when I come the first time tonight.”
He glanced up, his mouth glistening with her juices as he cocked a wicked smile. “The first time?”
“Just come up here, dammit,” she commanded him, clutching at his shoulders.
He didn’t argue. Shucking his jeans and boxers, he moved up on the bed. Lisa sat up, her gaze riveted to him. She couldn’t resist taking hold of his erection. She stroked his length and cupped his balls, reveling in the powerful feel of him in her hands.
His breath shuddered as she explored him. When she dipped her head to cover the engorged head of his cock with her lips, he exhaled a ragged curse and set his hand on the back of her head while she sucked him.
She loved the taste of him on her tongue. Salty and hot, silky and strong.
The scent of his sex and his skin was instantly familiar, felt instantly right. As if he’d been branded into her senses.
He was so hard, so big. She could barely wrap her fingers all the way around his girth as she held him.
He dropped his head back on a groan as she sucked him deeper into her mouth and stared up at him, his reaction giving her encouragement, making her burn hotter for even more of him. Tendons strained in the sides of his neck with each pull of her mouth. His big body twitched and tensed with every slow suction and teasing flick of her tongue against the underside of his thick shaft.
On an abrupt curse, he bent toward the nightstand beside the bed and fumbled the top drawer open. He dumped a small box of condoms and took one out.
Now it was his hands that shook.
He nearly dropped the thin packet, but recovered on a harsh chuckle. He grinned down at her and shrugged. “I’ve clocked thousands of hours with my finger on the trigger of a hundred different weapons in the heat of battle, yet look at me. All thumbs around you.”
Lisa drew back with a smile. “Let me help—”
“Oh, hell no.” His sandpaper growl cut her short. “You touch me right now after what your sweet mouth just did to me, and I’m done for.”
His confession warmed her. The idea that she could make the stoic, steady John Duarte tremble a little was a wild turn-on. She watched as he rolled the condom onto his length, then scooted back to make room for him on the bed with her.
He moved between her legs, nudging her thighs open with his knee as he came down on top of her. He resumed kissing her, his warm hands on her face and tangling in her loose hair.
She moaned at the pleasure of his weight and the need to have him inside her. “I can’t take much more, Johnny.”
“That makes two of us,” he uttered thickly, guiding himself to her slick cleft.
The blunt head of his cock slid between her folds, demanding entrance. Seated at her opening, he began to push inside, inch by glorious inch.
Lisa gasped at the fullness invading her. “So good,” she murmured as he stretched her, filled her. Made her yearn for more of him. “You feel so good.”
“Ah, fuck, sugar... so do you.” His molasses-rich voice and sexy Southern drawl made her heart flutter even more behind her ribs. “You feel too damn good. Just like that first night. Too fucking good.”
He took her in a hungered kiss as he rocked deeper into her, leaving her quivering and electrified with pleasure. He rolled his hips forward and back in long, powerful strokes, his eyes blazing as he watched her arch and rock with him.
Then there were no more words. Just skin rasping against skin, breaths mingling. And need burning hotter as their rhythm picked up, turning urgent and fevered.
John’s low curse was a snarl against her ear as he drove deeper, faster, harder.
Nothing about him was gentle now, and that lack of control sent her own sanity reeling. She couldn’t hold on any longer. Her climax built toward a dizzying crest, swelling like a tidal wave.
He was right, it did feel too good.
They felt too good.
While the rest of her life had careened out of control a few hours ago with her brother’s disturbing message and apparent involvement in things she still struggled to understand, this moment with John—in his arms again, in his bed—felt so good and right it terrified the hell out of her.
Yet as her orgasm washed over her, she could only hold on to him for dear life and let the pleasure take her blissfully down.
~ ~ ~
He’d never known anything as sexy as Lisa moaning his name as she orgasmed in his arms. His own climax roared up on him in response, a wild thing he could barely control.
She’d had him so ready when she’d sucked on him. The satiny glove of her mouth on his naked cock had almost made him spill before they’d even gotten started.
Now this, the sanity-robbing feel of her channel walls rippling against his shaft as she came. Her tiny muscles milked him toward a massive release, and he chased it with greedy abandon.
He knew it was selfish, acting on his need for her tonight. But right now, with Lisa writhing and arching with the onslaught of another orgasm, he couldn’t regret it.
His senses filled with her. The feel of her warm, soft skin against his body. The wet, erotic sounds of their sex combined with her little moans and gasps as he filled her, stretched her, gave her every inch of him. The pleasured look on her face was heaven, making him want nothing more than to cage her beneath him all night and watch her break on him over and over again.
Christ, this woman could become a swift and merciless addiction. He’d recognized that five years ago. He’d walked away to save himself—to save them both—for all the good it had done now.
Desire consumed him. His own climax coiled tight and pulsing as he lost himself to a more urgent tempo. He thrust harder, knowing he was taking something he didn’t deserve, at the worst possible time in both their lives. Yet he was unable to deny himself the want of it. Of her.
All that mattered was Lisa beneath him and the pleasure exploding between them.
He drove deep as a violent shudder racked him, and his orgasm ripped out of him on a raw shout. The release seemed endless, mind-blowing.
So fucking good he could hardly bear it.
“Jesus,” he muttered hoarsely, his face buried in the curve of her neck as the aftershocks finally began to subside. He smiled against her sweat-dampened, vanilla-scented skin. “Can’t move. Crushing you?”
“M-mm.” Her voice vibrated through him, as warm as her skin. “I don’t want you to move.”
“Have to,” he groaned, hating the need to pull out and dispose of the condom.
All he wanted to do was rock into her some more, stay inside her all night if she let him.
Bad idea, but his dick was already rising in agreement.
Before he could lose the argument with himself, he withdrew and moved to toss the used protection in the trash bin next to the bed.
Lisa’s hands were soothing on him as soon as he returned to her side. She smiled, sultry and spent. “That was...”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “
Incredible.”
She nodded, looking satisfied and too damn sexy lying naked on the rumpled sheets. He couldn’t resist another kiss, then another. Stretching out alongside her, he stroked her hair, traced an idle pattern on the gentle curve of her shoulder. She curled up next to him, one bare thigh slung across his.
For a long while, they simply lay there together in a quiet peace.
And although his thoughts were churning over a hundred troubling issues—not the least of which being the reason for her arrival at his cabin tonight—he stepped away from all of that and let himself relax into the rare feeling of contentment that enveloped him as he held Lisa in his arms.
7
To his complete astonishment, Duarte slept five-plus solid hours, clear through to daybreak. So much for his chronic insomnia. Apparently, all he needed was a good fuck and the warmth of a good woman in bed beside him—the latter more than he cared to admit.
Lisa was still sound asleep, curled up like a kitten in the tangled sheets, her loose honey hair fanned across his pillow.
The warrior in him wasn’t accustomed to soft nights and slow mornings, but he was in no rush to leave her side. For a brief moment, he imagined waking up every morning to that vision. Unbelievable that she’d been married to a man who’d been stupid enough to let her go. Then again, Duarte himself had once been that stupid, too.
Ancient history. Except last night had brought their past back to life in living, breathing color. And this morning, reality slapped him awake with the reminder that it was time to start thinking with his head again.
He twitched with the need for movement, for exertion, for action. Before his body decided to work out those impulses indoors with Lisa again, Duarte eased out of bed and got dressed.
The rain had passed overnight. He thought about her disabled car she’d told him she’d left down on the mountain road. He didn’t like the idea of leaving a vehicle out to be discovered in the daylight. Three years living off-grid had worked for him because he’d been cautious, inconspicuous, unfailingly private. Deliberately closed off from the rest of the world as much as he could be.
Now he had a Phoenix operative’s sister lying naked in his bed and her car abandoned practically in his front yard. He should have made a point of going down to retrieve it or hide it last night.
Yeah, he should have done a lot of things differently last night.
Scowling at himself as he left the cabin with the key fob to Lisa’s Toyota in his pocket, Duarte tucked his pistol into the back waistband of his jeans as was his habit any time he stepped outside. A shortcut took him through the acres of woods he knew like the back of his hand, and down to the dirt road near the base of the mountain.
Her silver Camry had made it a few hundred yards up the muddied tract before getting stuck. Duarte ran a hand over his beard-grizzled jaw as he eyed the deeply entrenched rear tires. They were spun down to the rims of their hubcaps in the thick mud. And with the rain stopped hours ago, the drying mud had turned to concrete.
Shit. No way the puny little two-wheel-drive, four-cylinder was going to have the horsepower to plow out of the deep rut. Gonna have to dig it out.
Using a sturdy stick from the surrounding forest, he went to work freeing the vehicle. It took a lot of elbow grease, and he had to hunker down to chip away at mud encasing the tires. As he dug out the last rut, his gaze strayed to something odd clinging to the underside of the rear bumper.
A small black magnetic GPS tracker.
Holy hell.
He wrenched it off on a harsh curse, his blood running cold.
Someone had been watching Lisa. Thanks to her brother’s careless text, Duarte didn’t have to guess at who might have put the damn thing on her vehicle. Phoenix’s enemies, tracking her.
For how long?
Long enough to know her activities and movements.
Long enough to know where she was now, and whoever it was could easily follow her to the mountain. If they hadn’t already.
And Duarte had just left her all alone, unprotected, at the cabin.
As the dread seized him, a sudden chilling image flashed into his mind’s eye: Lisa in the hands of a killer, a gun jammed against her temple.
It was there and gone in an instant, like glimpsing a single frame from a rolling film. Nothing to tell him where or when it would happen, only the stark vision of Lisa’s pretty face contorted in terror as the nose of a SIG nine-millimeter pressed tight at her head.
Fuck. For all he knew, it could be happening right now.
Icy panic froze his veins at the mere possibility.
Duarte drew his pistol and bolted back to the shortcut, adrenaline pouring through him like acid. His boots chewed up the uneven terrain. Branches slapped at him as he cut a frantic path through the bramble and over the rocky, root-tangled forest floor.
All the while he ran, he tried to reassure himself that she was okay. He’d only been gone a few minutes, and the chances that any of Phoenix’s enemies had trailed her to this remote stretch of North Carolina wilderness were slim at best.
But even slim odds were too much for his liking. Especially when his warrior’s instincts were clanging in high alarm.
Something felt off about the mountainside as he tore up the incline, racing to reach Lisa. Someone was in these woods with him now. He’d bet his life on it.
He knew it the same way his instincts had served him well on combat patrols.
A bogey was somewhere on his land right now with his sights set on Lisa. Closing in on the cabin... armed and ready to kill.
Son of a bitch.
Duarte’s chest squeezed as if caught in a vise. If anything happened to Lisa because he’d let his fucking guard down, he didn’t know how he would live with himself.
And then he heard it.
A single gunshot. Up ahead of him through the woods. Where the cabin was.
No. It wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.
He couldn’t already be too late to save her.
He ran faster, his heart about to explode in his chest.
Goddamn it, no!
~ ~ ~
Yanked from a pleasant drowse, Lisa bolted upright.
Was that a gunshot?
Holding the sheet to her naked chest, she shook off her sleep and blinked to clear her eyes. She was in the middle of John’s bed. His empty bed.
And that sharp, echoing crack outside had definitely been a gunshot.
“John?” No answer. No sound at all from anywhere in the cabin. “Oh God, where are you? John!”
She flew off the mattress. Got dressed as fast as she could, forgoing her bra, which had evidently gotten lost somewhere on the bedroom floor a few hours earlier. No time for shoes, she tore out of the cabin and into the dewy, early morning forest outside.
She spotted him a couple of yards ahead of her, near the ditch she’d stumbled into the night before.
“John!”
He wasn’t alone. Another man stood in front of him, his back to Lisa. A mane of shaggy, sun-streaked dark blond hair fell to his shoulders in beach bum waves, but there was nothing else soft about him. He was dressed in a camo shirt and olive cargo pants that made him blend in with the foliage around him. A big man, he was tall and muscular and intimidating, nearly the size and bulk of John.
And, like John, he also held a pistol down at his side.
They both looked her way as Lisa hurried toward them. John’s dark eyes were grave, but he didn’t warn her away as she ran toward him with her heart in her throat.
The other man’s face was equally sober, and... vaguely familiar.
Confused, Lisa tried to process the tanned, angular cheeks and sharp blue eyes that stared back at her from this stranger with a gun in his hand. Then realization settled in.
She knew him. The third member of her brother’s trifecta.
“Alec?”
Instead of greeting her as she reached them, he did a quick visual scan of her, from bed-mussed head to barefoot toe
s. Then he turned a questioning look on John. “I’m not gonna ask.”
John grunted. “Good. Because I’m not about to explain.”
“I heard a gunshot,” Lisa said. “Someone want to tell me what’s going—” Her breath caught in her throat. She pointed to the large, unmoving lump in the bottom of the ditch. “That’s a dead body.”
“It is,” John said, his low voice guarded.
“Did you shoot him?”
“I did,” Alec answered, his baritone drawl equally cagey.
Lisa glanced between the two men caught in their unspoken standoff. Then she glanced down at the body and the nasty looking pistol beside him. The man wore plain clothes, but his trimmed hair and athletic physique screamed military to her. “One of you two please tell me what just happened. What’s going on here? Who the hell is that guy?”
“An enemy of the Phoenix program,” John replied. “Or someone working for the program’s enemies.”
Alec cursed low under his breath. “You told her about Phoenix? Jesus fucking Christ, Ranger.”
Lisa frowned. “Who’s Ranger?”
“I am.” John didn’t take his eyes off Alec. “It was my codename in the program.”
Alec blew out a sharp exhalation. “She shouldn’t be out here, man. She’s in danger.”
“No shit,” John ground out. “The question is, what are you doing here?”
“You mean, besides saving both your asses just now?” Alec gave a slow shake of his head. “Maybe I need to be more concerned about you now. What are you doing up here with Talon’s little sister? Other than the obvious, that is.”
“That’s between me and her. How did you know where to find me?” John drew a small black object out of his jeans pocket and held it in his palm. “This belong to you or the dead guy, Stingray?”
Ranger. Talon. Stingray. Codenames and dead guys, and...
