Body Guard

by Suzanne Brockmann

  These clowns weren't Trotta's men. They were assholes who didn't have the brains to know not to bring weapons into a bar, even if they were only for sport.

  As Harry lowered his gun, he watched the bartender and several other men converge on the men with the paint-ball rifles. And the six of them were escorted right out the front door.

  Allie was clinging to him. He'd pushed her back, against the wall, pinning her with his body. "My God," she breathed. "I thought…"

  "I know. I did, too. Jesus, I almost killed them." He pulled away from her, aware that he was crushing her, aware how soft she felt against him. He winced as he re-holstered his weapon. Hitting the floor that way had definitely not been what the doctor had in mind when he'd told Harry to take it easy on his broken rib.

  It was strange. No one had noticed. They'd made a dive onto the floor, he'd pulled a deadly weapon, and no one in this bar had given them a second glance.

  Shit, maybe Allie was invisible.

  Allie touched his chest, lightly at first, then harder, pressing her hand against the beer-drenched front of his shirt. "You're not wearing a bullet-proof vest this time."

  She was shaking even more than he was.

  Harry shook his head. "No, I'm not."

  "From now on you wear one!" There was more than fear in her eyes now. There was anger. She was positively blazing mad, shouting loudly enough for him to hear her over the music.

  Her eyes were brimming with tears, and she was nanoseconds from losing it. Maybe she was invisible and no one would notice, but he wasn't going to take that chance.

  He stood up, pulling her with him toward the back door.

  The night air was cool and fresh. The decibel level of noise dropped instantly as Harry closed the door tightly behind them.

  "I didn't bring a vest," he told her. The back parking lot was dimly lit by a neon sign for the motel that sputtered and flashed.

  "Then you better get one. Tomorrow."

  He laughed at her vehemence. Bad mistake.

  "Don't you laugh at me—I'm serious!"

  " Al, it's not like I can just go out and pick one up at the grocery store."

  "Don't you understand? If those men had been after me, you would have been killed!"

  "But they weren't—"

  "Don't you ever, ever do that again! Don't you dare die for me!"

  She was serious. She was fighting her tears, willing them from escaping. "Promise me," she said fiercely. She all but stamped her foot. "You have to promise me, Harry!"

  "Thing is, Al," he said carefully, "I could think of worse things. See, I'm kind of… kind of fond of you, and…" He shrugged.

  The tears won, streaming silently down her face.

  Her knees looked as if they were about to buckle, and Harry did the only thing he could possibly do. He pulled her into his arms. "Hey," he said. "Hey. Come on, Allie. It's okay. It was a false alarm. We're both okay, everyone's safe and—"

  "I'm kind of fond of you, too," she whispered, and his heart nearly stopped. "I couldn't bear it if something happened to you. Your friendship means so much to me."

  Harry laughed. Friendship. Right. For a moment he'd actually had the audacity to think—

  Allie reached up around his neck and lifted her own face and…

  For about three seconds, he stood there like an idiot, unable to react, unable to comprehend.

  Then his synapses fired, and he realized that yes, she was kissing him.

  Once comprehension dawned, reaction didn't take long to kick in. He pulled her hard against him in an embrace that had absolutely nothing to do with friendship and everything to do with the fact that he'd wanted to be inside her since that very first moment he'd gazed into her eyes.

  He kissed her ravenously, angling his head to inhale her completely, meeting and matching her explosion of passion. The sensation of her tongue thrust boldly into his mouth was completely knee weakening, and he felt them both sway.

  He pressed her more completely against him, his hands cupped around the soft roundness of her rear end, kissing her even harder, even deeper. She made a low sound in the back of her throat, a soft moan that accurately expressed everything he was feeling.

  She tasted like fire, sweet and hot, like his idea of heaven. Her hands slid up beneath the edge of his T-shirt, cool against his bare skin as she gripped his thigh with her legs, pressing herself even closer to him, her message unmistakable.

  It wasn't a question, but he answered it anyway. "Oh, yeah," he breathed. Oh, impossibly fabulous, incredible, wonderful yeah. It was all the invitation he needed to run his own hands up under the edge of her shirt, to touch the amazing smoothness of her skin, to gently cup the fullness of her breasts.

  She made that same soft, sexy noise, pressing herself more completely into his hand.

  He pulled her back with him into the deeper shadows alongside the building, catching her already taut nipple between his forefinger and thumb with one hand and lifting her up against him with the other. She spread her legs, and he pressed himself between them, fitting the hardness of his arousal against her softness, pressing her back against the concrete blocks.

  "Oh, Harry," she gasped. "Oh, please…"

  She reached between them, unfastening the top button of his jeans, unzipping him before he could stop her.

  Dear Christ, they were in the parking lot!

  But then she touched him. Polite, refined, cool-as-ice Alessandra Lamont had her hand down his pants, fingers wrapped around him in the parking lot of a cheap bar. Someone wake him—he had to be dreaming.

  But then as she stroked him, caressed him, he knew this was no dream.

  It was, perhaps, the best reality he'd ever experienced.

  She was unabashedly direct about just what she wanted, completely oblivious to the rest of the world.

  When she released him, it was only to unfasten her own pants, and Harry pulled back slightly, catching her wrists in his hands. He was breathing hard, and he rested his forehead against hers. Jesus. Jesus.

  "Harry," Alessandra whispered. "Can we go to our room? Because I'm dying to…" She pressed herself more tightly to him. "You know…"

  Harry laughed. And swung her up into his arms.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Alessandra closed the door by leaning on it, already tugging at Harry's shirt, well aware he was working hard to rid her of her own, which was nearly impossible to do while they kissed.

  But she couldn't stop kissing him. She didn't want to stop kissing him.

  He wanted her. Now.

  She felt like laughing and crying, but she settled for kissing him.

  Beer had never tasted so good as it did on Harry's lips.

  He found the front clasp of her bra, unfastening it and groaning softly as he covered her with his hands. He touched her with just the right combination of gentle roughness, breaking free from their kiss to lean down and draw her hungrily into his mouth.

  Her jeans were so loose they fell right off, but Harry's stuck to his thighs. It didn't matter. She pushed down the silk of his shorts even as she slipped off her own panties. And then she was touching him again.

  The sensation of his lips and tongue drawing hard on her breast was exquisite, but it wasn't enough.

  His hands skimmed her body, slightly rough against her skin, touching her everywhere except where she wanted to be touched, driving her completely insane.

  She moved his hand directly between her thighs, and he lifted his head to look up at her.

  She'd spent quite a bit of time looking into Harry's eyes over the past few days. Despite their rocky start, she knew him well, perhaps better than anyone else on earth. But she'd never seen anything remotely like the heat she now saw in his eyes. The intensity made him look a little scary, made him seem a little like a stranger. And for the first time since she'd started kissing him in the parking lot, Alessandra felt a flash of trepidation.

  But then he smiled, and he was Harry again. He touched her, softly at firs
t, then harder, deeper, stroking her with the very tip of his finger, his smile fading as he watched her eyes, as he looked down at her, naked, in his arms.

  Again, his touch felt deliriously good, but it still wasn't what she wanted. She shifted her hips, driving him more completely inside of her as she tugged again at his pants.

  "Please, Harry. Can we… ?"

  "Oh, yeah. I have condoms in my backpack." He released her, struggling for a moment with his jeans around his ankles, hopping toward the bed and falling back onto it in an attempt to kick his legs free.

  But Alessandra was done waiting. As Harry sat up to push his boxers and jeans off his feet, she straddled him, kissing him hard on the mouth. She couldn't get enough of his kisses. But she didn't want to think what that might mean.

  He put his arms around her—it didn't seem possible that arms that big, with muscles that were so clearly defined, could hold her without hurting her. But hurting her was so not what he was doing.

  She could feel him hard between them as she kissed him. His mouth was so soft as he kissed her lips, her neck, her breasts.

  It only took the smallest adjustment of her body, and she pushed herself down to surround him completely, to fill herself with him. This was what she'd wanted.

  "Whoa," Harry said. "Whoa, Allie, condom!"

  Now that she was here, she wasn't going to stop. "We don't need a condom. I can't get pregnant, remember?" She began to move on top of him, pushing him deeply inside of her.

  "Oh, God," he said, running his hands down her back, moving with her. "Safe sex. This is about safe sex. I need to get a condom."

  "I was married for seven years." If he was trying at all to stop her, it wasn't going to be by moving that way. It felt so good, so right. "And you haven't had sex since 1996."

  "Yeah, but between 1995 and 1996,1 have absolutely no idea who my wife was sleeping with." He filled his hands with her breasts. "I mean, aside from me. And there was something of a list."

  Oh, Lord. "She must have been a complete fool."

  "I could say that about Griffin. I think I probably have said that about Griffin. Except I think I used the word asshole." He smiled crookedly. "Sonya and Griffin. What a pair of losers. What are we doing talking about them, anyway? You know, I think we owe it to them both to have truly incomparable sex tonight, just to prove what losers they were."

  Alessandra pressed his shoulders down so he was lying back on the bed, pushing him impossibly, amazingly deeper inside her. She heard herself moan.

  "Oh, yeah," he murmured. "Oh, God, do that again."

  She did. "That?"

  "Oh, yeah. That definitely falls under the heading of incomparable. Although you better do it another twenty or say, fifty times, just to make sure."

  Alessandra laughed. "Do you always talk the entire time you make love?"

  "I promise you, if you let me get that condom, I'll use my mouth for far better things."

  She lifted herself completely off him. "Go, but hurry."

  Harry nearly vaulted across the room, fumbling and spilling everything out of his backpack in his haste.

  As he tore open the foil packet and covered himself, Alessandra froze, catching sight of herself in the mirror.

  Her hair. She'd forgotten about her awful hair. It hung limply around her unadorned face, making her look about as appealing as a wet cocker spaniel. And, Lord, she should have at least gone into the bathroom and put on a little makeup. She looked terrible.

  She stood up, uncertain what to do. There was nothing wrong with her making herself look nice in the privacy of their room, was there? But the idea of spending fifteen minutes or more—she looked again at her hair, definitely more—in the bathroom right now was not a particularly good one. Still, she wasn't the one who had to look at her. Harry was.

  But he was already coming back to her, grinning in that way that only Harry could grin. He grabbed her around the waist, throwing them both down on the bed. "My turn to be on top."

  "Get the light," Alessandra said.

  He was kissing her breasts, touching her with his tongue in a way that took her breath away. "What?"

  She wiggled free. "I'll get it." The switch was by the door. She flipped it, and the room became pitch-black. The curtains completely blocked out any light from the parking lot.

  "Isn't it a little late to suddenly be shy?" Harry's voice surrounded her in the darkness.

  She stood by the door. "I'm just… I just…"

  He let out a very loud, very disparaging breath of air. "Yeah, I know what 'you just.' " He turned on the light by the bed. "What is it with you? You look at yourself in the mirror, and I don't have a clue who you see looking back at you. It sure as hell isn't the woman I see."

  "I look in the mirror, and the person I see is so…" She shook her head. "The way I look, I can't believe anyone would want me. Not the way you seem to want me."

  "Seem to?" Harry looked down at himself. "This is only a seem to?. You better come over here and check this out, because when it comes to wanting you, this rates a definitely."

  Alessandra laughed softly in disbelief. "See, I just… I know you're nice, so—"

  "Yeah, I'm always getting erections just to be nice. Come over here, and I'll be even nicer." Harry held out his hand. "Come on."

  She went to him. "May we turn off the light?"

  "No! Are you nuts?" It wasn't the answer she'd been expecting. Harry held tightly to her hand so she wouldn't pull away. "I want to look at you," he explained. "I love looking at you anyway, and I've just discovered that looking at you while you're naked is a special treat."

  He drew her hand to his mouth and kissed it, turned it over and kissed her palm, her wrist, her arm. "A couple things to get straight here," he continued, between kissing the inside of her elbow, her arm, her shoulder. "I love your haircut because it's helping to hide you from Trotta. And whether you think so or not, I think you're even more beautiful without your makeup on. So, no, we may not turn off the light. I want to be able to watch your face while I make you come."

  He'd reached her neck, and as she lifted her chin to give him better access, he knew he'd won. But sweet

  Jesus, if this woman thought she shouldn't make love in the light because she didn't look good, she was nuts.

  He kissed her lips as sweetly and gently as he possibly could, slowly pulling her back with him onto the bed.

  He ached to be inside of her again, but he did no more than kiss her and run his hands lightly across her beautiful body. The fact that she'd wanted him so badly before, and had been so bold about it, had been the most incredible turn-on. He wanted to get back to that place.

  It didn't take long for her to completely reignite. She deepened their kiss. She pulled him close, cradling him between her legs. She drew his head to her breast, arching her body up to him in a silent plea for more when he touched her lightly with his tongue.

  She reached between them then, taking him in her hand, guiding him to her.

  "Allie, look at me," he whispered, and she opened her eyes.

  He slowly buried himself in her, slowly pushed himself home as he looked down into her eyes.

  The soft noise she made was sexy as hell, her voice thick with pleasure as she sighed his name.

  Harry couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so alive.

  Her smile was tremulous, but it was a smile. As she reached up to touch his face, her eyes shone with tears. Of course, she fought them, blinking them back. By now, he would've expected no less than a good fight from Allie.

  She was so amazing. Such a fascinating blend of hard and soft, of strength and sweetness. And insecurity. She wasn't perfect—it was ironic, really. Her relentless belief that she was imperfect was her biggest imperfection.

  As he gazed down at her, his chest felt uncomfortably tight, but it was from more than the dull ache of his broken rib.

  He would do anything for her, anything to keep her safe.

  Even die.

  Still wa
tching her eyes, he began to move, slowly at first, then faster, taking his cues from what she wanted.

  She liked sex hard and fast.

  That was good, because he liked it like that, too.

  It was bad, because it didn't take him long before he was clinging rather desperately by his fingernails to the edge of the orgasm cliff.

  She kissed him hard, pulling his mouth down to hers, attempting to enter him as completely as he entered her. It was a kiss of complete abandon, of complete surrender, of total passion. As she kissed him, he tried to fight his need for release, tried to cling tenaciously to that edge, to give her everything she wanted and more. He wanted to give Allie the most incredible sexual experience of her life, to watch her shatter beneath him, but when she kissed him like that, with her heart in her eyes, with complete passion in her soul, he was toast.

  His release crashed on top of him like a tidal wave, lifting him up and knocking the breath clear out of his lungs with its force.

  He felt her follow almost immediately, felt her grip him more tightly, heard her cry out his name.

  He was too blown away to feel any kind of relief over the fact that he hadn't completely left her in the dust. He couldn't speak or even think coherently.

  But slowly the roar around him subsided, and slowly he became aware that he was completely crushing Alessandra.

  She didn't seem to mind.

  As he lifted his head, she smiled at him.

  The muscles in his face were among the few Harry still had control over, and he smiled, too. He would have rolled off her, but she held on to him, lifting her head to kiss him lightly on the lips.

  And he knew. Right at that moment. Right when her lips brushed his, he realized he was in serious, serious trouble. Whatever had just happened here had been way, way more meaningful than the casual, everyday scenario in which the vacationing FBI agent did the nasty thing with the former chief eyewitness, simply to relieve boredom.

  "Congratulations," Allie said, kissing him again.

  "What? Why?"

  She smiled up at him again, touching the side of his face. "I don't know—it just seemed like the right thing to say after three years of celibacy. Too bad we don't have a bottle of champagne to open." Her smile turned warmer. "I would make a toast. Something like 'Here's to it not taking another three years before you get some again.' "