Cassie looked delighted, as if she was already getting an idea where she’d use that quote. “Deputy Murphy—”
“Cassie, quit trying to take advantage of people who aren’t up to fighting you off,” Tracy said sharply, glowering at the pixie. “The department spokesman will give you a statement. That’s going to have to be enough.”
“But—”
“That’s enough, Cassie,” Frank rumbled in his big bad Dom voice.
The reporter looked up at him, her eyes going wide. “Oh. All right, then.” Turning her attention on Alex, she gave her a bright smile. “Glad you’re okay, Deputy Rogers. We need all the good cops we can get.” Turning, Cassie tucked her phone into her coat pocket and loped out of the garage, probably hoping to ambush Alex’s parents before they got away.
“That woman thinks she’s Lois Lane.” Tracy sounded disgusted, but there was a note in his voice that made Alex wonder if there was more to his antipathy than the usual cops-hate-reporters dynamic. “Let’s get out of here.” He stomped off toward his car.
Alex and Frank followed. “Good job with the Dom voice,” she murmured.
“Works every time.” Frank grinned.
Alex grinned back. She was looking forward to listening to him use that voice to her in the very near future.
* * *
Ben Tracy brooded as he drove them to Frank’s house in his trooper-bait red Corvette.
“I wish to God I’d realized the son of a bitch was the killer before he had a chance to do this to you. Or Diane. She’d been so sure he’d try for her at Rose’s—and she was right in the end. All week long, I had the SWAT team around that restaurant, ready to take him out. Never showed up. Then we caught a murder that diverted us, and that’s when he went after her.”
“Probably monitoring radio traffic,” Alex said.
“Bastard,” Tracy said bitterly. “She’d started to get kind of embarrassed to call us out here, as if she was afraid we’d believe she was exaggerating her danger. I kept telling her that after what happened to Ted, after everything the bastard painted on Ted’s car, it was obvious he’d try for her eventually. Too goddamned bad I was right.”
“Ben, I hate to say it, but Diane bears some of the responsibility,” Frank pointed out. “She didn’t call for backup when she should have. I know if she’d called me, I certainly would have come out to back her up, on duty or not.”
“Any of us would have,” Tracy agreed. He brooded a moment. “But at least she got the bastard. Not bad considering that she was under fire at the time.”
“That’s why he went after us,” Alex said. “He knew that bullet meant he was caught. The minute they dug it out of him, he’d be done.”
Tracy smiled grimly. “At least you kept him from killing anybody else.”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Ben,” Frank said quietly.
The detective stiffened. “What do you mean?”
“The ultimate responsibility for Diane’s death lies with the bastard who killed her.” He took a breath and let it out. “I’ve blamed myself for a friend’s death for a long time, but the reality is that I’m not God, and nobody but God could have saved him.” He looked at Tracy. “Don’t blame yourself for not being God, Ben.”
He looked back at the road. “Of course not.”
Alex and Frank exchanged a Yeah, right look.
* * *
Arm in arm, they watched Ben drive away. “It’s going to take him a while to get over this case,” Frank murmured.
Alex sighed. “Now, there’s a club with a lot of members.”
“Yeah.” He draped an arm over her shoulders. “But I can think of a thing or two that’d make me feel better.”
She smiled wickedly. “And me, too, I hope.”
“Could be, could be.” He turned her toward the house, and they strolled up the walk together toward the front door. “And since we’re both on paid leave, medical and otherwise, we’ve got plenty of time to experiment.”
Frank unlocked the door and moved to key in the alarm code before the system’s warning beep could get any more obnoxious.
“You do realize,” Alex said, “that between your stitches and my head, we’re going to have to take this thing slow?”
Frank smiled wickedly. “Slow is one of my best things.”
“So’s fast and hard.” She walked into his arms for a kiss that took its time—lips, tongue, and teeth getting into the act with nibbles and swirling strokes and lots of brushing touches. When Alex finally drew back, they were both breathing faster. “In fact, I’ve yet to find anything you don’t do well.”
“Oh, stop,” he deadpanned. “I’ll get a swelled head.”
Alex slid a hand down his flat belly to the bulge in his jeans. “Feels like you already have.”
“You’re a bad, bad girl, Rogers.”
“That I am, Murphy.” She took hold of the bottom of her T-shirt and slid it up, teasing. “Wanna see?”
“That depends.” His grin was as toothy as a tiger’s. “Are you going to handcuff me to a chair this time?”
“We agreed there’d be no bondage today, remember?” She pulled off the shirt and tossed it aside. “We’re going to try something really kinky—van-il-la.” She enunciated each syllable of the word with a certain wicked relish.
He eyed her lace-clad breasts with approval. “And if anyone could find a way to make vanilla kinky, it would be you.”
They undressed each other slowly, careful of one another’s injuries. Frank murmured and kissed each of hers as he found them, gentle brushes of his lips against swollen bumps and bruises, blue with old blood. His hands felt exquisitely gentle as he touched and stroked. For all his dominant’s chivalry, Alex had never realized how sweet he could be, how tender.
Alex stroked him just as carefully, just as sweetly, though most of his stitched-up injuries were hidden under layers of gauze. Exploring the hard ripples of muscle beneath smooth skin and gauze and soft hair, she realized she’d craved this tenderness, too. Particularly after they had almost lost everything that mattered. For all he seemed so big, so powerful, he was as vulnerable and human as she was.
They could have died so many times yesterday. She remembered the sight of Bruce, lying on his back, staring with empty eyes at the ceiling, just as Ted had stared at the sky the week before.
The thought made Alex shudder. Reaching up, she caught Frank’s big head in her hands, her thumbs playing over the cuts he’d collected crashing through that glass door to save them. He could have lost an eye. The shard that cut his thigh could have slashed the femoral artery. It would have all been over.
With a tormented groan, Alex’s lips opened against the velvet of his, her tongue swirling deep to stroke. He groaned into her mouth, the sound ragged with need.
“So close,” she groaned. “We came so close . . .”
“Don’t think about it,” he whispered back, and his fingers found her nipples, tugging and stroking and giving her something else to think about.
She ran a hand down his torso along the ripples of strong abdominal muscles. Traced a circle around his navel. Dropped lower to wrap around the hard column of his cock. For a moment she just held it, feeling his pulse beat beneath the thin skin.
“Nice to see the transfusion did its job,” he joked.
“It certainly did.” She used her grip on his cock to steer him backward to the couch. When he sank down, she nudged between his thighs, bent, and tasted him, savoring the cream at the tip of his cock.
“Are you sure . . .” He broke off to swallow. “Are you sure you should be doing this?”
She lifted her head and pushed him down lightly on the cushions. “I’ll be gentle.” The smile took on a wicked edge. “Just lay back and enjoy it.”
Alex had sucked off men before, of course. For that matter, she’d sucked off Frank before. But this was different. She remembered what he’d said to her father. “If the Archangel Michael had personally taken my order for the perfect woma
n, she wouldn’t be as perfect as Alex.” Even half-drunk from blood loss, he’d sounded dead serious. Had he meant it?
Had he meant it when he’d told her father he intended to marry her?
She shut the thought away. Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t. That wasn’t what was important now. All that mattered was being with him in this moment. As if it might be the last moment of their lives, the last time they were together. Because it could be. If yesterday had taught her one thing, it was that nothing was ever guaranteed.
She didn’t intend to lose this moment.
Alex engulfed his cock and suckled fiercely, then drew her mouth off him. Slowly she ran the tip of her tongue the length of the great vein that ran along his cock, tracing lazy patterns until she heard his breath speed up.
“Wait,” he said, pulling her up. “Across my mouth.” The touch of Dom snap in his voice wound her body tight in delicious reaction.
They rearranged themselves, Alex kneeling astride his face as she bent to lick his cock, alternating tongue strokes up and down the length of his shaft, with pauses to suckle the velvety head.
She had no intention of trying to deep-throat him—that much violent activity was sure to trigger a migraine that would have brought the play to an uncomfortable end. So instead, she sucked hard, wanting to make him feel it even as he worked her with fingers and lips and wicked tongue, working over wet flesh in a slick, sweet dance.
Pleasure rose in bright lace patterns, so pure and intense Alex could almost see the glow behind her closed lids. She licked and suckled him even harder, wanting to share the purity of her pleasure like a gift of frankincense and myrrh. A thing of precious, ancient magic.
Alex had lost track of the number of times they’d made love in the past week. How many times had he driven her to orgasm, made her call him Master, made her beg? No man, Dominant or otherwise, had ever affected her the way he did, right down to the core.
Yet none of those exquisite experiences with him had hit her like this one, even careful and gentle as it was. Was it just how close they’d come to dying? Some combination of neurotransmitters and hormones, flashing through the brain and blood, there and gone?
It didn’t feel like that.
It felt more like a newborn’s cry, like the warm touch of the Coach’s hand, or the brush of her mother’s lips. Something that made the soul reverberate to possibilities beyond sex and lust.
At that thought, Alex felt an orgasm rising in a sweet bell-like peal through her bones, her flesh. Gasping, she suckled him, fighting to hold on.
“I’m about to come,” Frank gasped. “Stop, I want in you!”
“Yes! Yes, all right, wait!” Shivering, Alex drew away, moved to straddle him, and guided his cock to her slick opening. Slowly, slowly, she sank downward, head falling back as he filled her and filled her. Until his balls rested against the lips of her pussy.
Bracing her hands on his muscled torso, Alex began to rise and fall, taking her time as she fucked him, sliding up, sliding down, until his head rolled back against the cushions as he groaned, the sound rich with sensuality and passion. “God, nobody’s ever felt—”
“I know! God, I know!”
She was close, so close. Each thick stroke of that big cock wound the tension of her building orgasm tighter and tighter. He watched her ride him with his gunmetal eyes glazed, darkened almost to iron.
“Oh, God,” she whimpered, “Oh God, I’m about to—”
“I love you,” he chanted, “I love you!”
“Yes! Yes, I love you!” Alex came in an exquisite rain of warm light, softer than the ferocious orgasms she’d known before, yet sweeter, too.
Frank bowed under her with a sudden surge of effort that lifted her clear off the couch, as he reached a deep, groaning completion.
Panting, breathless, she collapsed on top of him. They clung together like survivors of a tsunami.
“Marry me,” he said in a hoarse voice, stroking her hair with a hand that shook. “I know we’ve only known each other a week, but I’m not some kid in the first grip of infatuation. I know what I want, and I know what I need, and it’s you. If you say no now, I’ll ask you again later. If you need time, I’ll give it. But—”
“Yes.”
He stared at her as she cuddled into his warm, sweating strength. “Yes?”
“Yes.” She grinned and sat back, enjoying the depth of his cock. “You’re right, neither of us are kids anymore. I know what I need, and what I need is you.”
Her big, bad Dom grinned up at her like a boy contemplating an endless Christmas morning. And dragged her down into his arms to kiss her until her head swam.
There’d be problems. There’d be drama. There’d be all the little disasters that were a part of life.
But as long as they had each other, they’d get through every bit of it.
Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!
Without Restraint Page 32
