Playing for Keeps

by Cherry Adair

  The truck swerved as she whipped her T-shirt over her head, exposing her pretty, bare breasts, kicked off her sneakers, then lifted her butt off the seat to pull down the zipper on her skintight jeans. “Pull over.”

  Nine

  You’re freaking nuts,” Jon murmured, spearing the truck into the overhanging trees like a hot knife through butter. The jungle closed in around the vehicle with a rustle of leaves and the snap of branches, cocooning them in verdant green. He shut off the engine and silence rushed at them. “Do you have any idea how insane this is?” His voice was thick as he turned to look at her.

  Danica smiled, and her heart started pounding as if his hands, rather than his gaze, touched her. “Do you have any idea how messy it could get in here if we don’t?”

  He cupped the back of her head and brought their heads together, touching his forehead to hers. “Ah, Jesus, sweetheart. Don’t—”

  “Shhh. Shhh. Keep me safe, Jon. Make love to me.”

  The inside of the army surplus truck was hotter than sin, despite the thick jade canopy. Danica intended to make it even hotter. Naked, already damp with equal amounts of perspiration and desperation, she reached for the hem of his T-shirt. “Clothes off. Now.” She dragged the damp fabric up his body, over his head, and tossed the garment over her shoulder.

  Just seeing the heated desire flare in his eyes as he looked at her made her adrenaline race. She grabbed his hand, placing his fingers at the base of her throat. “Feel that? You, touching me -anywhere-gives me the biggest rush. You make my heart race and my blood boil.”

  “I’ve never stopped wanting you,” he said in a ragged voice, thick with urgency. His fingers glided down, caressing first her throat where her pulse pounded, and then trailing down her chest in an almost lazy caress.

  Her skin was hot and damp with perspiration, and she loved the familiar feel of his hand on her. Her body remembered every caress, every touch, every brush of his fingers. She looked down, watching as his lean, tanned fingers curved to cup the weight of her breast.

  Her breath caught and her body shuddered with anticipation as he bent his head, the long dark silk of his hair brushing her skin in its own caress. She squeezed her eyes shut, threading her fingers through the skeins, holding his head to her, dizzy at the exquisite pull of his wet mouth on her painfully erect nipple.

  “Nobody—” she tried to say. His tongue stroked the distended bud in slick, rapid movements that sent her heart slamming erratically into her ribs and shuddering through her entire body, scrambling her thoughts. She fumbled with the top button of his jeans, feeling his furnace heat and clenched muscles against her fingers. An electric current zinged through her.

  Come on. Come on. Come on. “Ah—could ever make me ache as you do, Jon Raven.” And nobody else ever would.

  He skimmed out of his jeans, shoving them aside, all hard, sinewy muscle and bronzed satin skin as he slid into the center of the bench seat, taking her with him. He lifted his head, and Danica shuddered as this beautiful man, this primal male, gently cupped her jaw, tilting her face to meet the hard pressure of his mouth and kissed her as though they’d been apart for a hundred years.

  “You are my water in the desert.” He lifted his mouth from hers long enough to murmur it. “My reason for being.” Then he lowered his mouth again gently biting the fullness of her lower lip, tugging at it to access the inner softness, before he crushed her mouth beneath his in a kiss so raw, so desperate, Danica moaned, feeling the power of it all the way to her toes.

  He reached down and activated the seat so it slid back as far as it would go.

  Arms around his neck, fingers gripping his hair, she straddled his lap, opening her body to him. The hard steering wheel dug into her back, but she didn’t care. A deliciously had Jon dug into her front, that was all that mattered.

  He glided his hands around her waist, neither insisting nor holding her back-simply holding her. Still kissing her as though there was no tomorrow. His thumbs moved in lazy circles, dipping into the creases at the juncture of her thighs.

  Taut with anticipation, she stayed poised there, braced on her knees, feeling the jut of him, so hard, so ready, against her eager core. Liquid heat filled her, surging and rushing through her veins. The sensitive tips of her breasts rubbed against the solid plane of his chest, teased by the wiry hair narrowing down to his groin. Every part of her yearned for him, while the kiss went on and on.

  She tore her mouth from beneath his as she impaled herself, then stopping because the sensation of having Jon inside her was so sharp, so unbearably sweet, she couldn’t move. Jon, being Jon, and knowing her so well, let the pleasure build and build as the muscles in his neck corded and his body shook with the effort to remain still while buried deep inside her.

  The magnitude of his control stunned and humbled her.

  When her nerves quivered unbearably and her muscles jumped with the strain, when the urgency encompassed her entire world, only then did Jon grip her hips in his strong hands and set a rhythm that had them both panting and gasping. Everything seemed to tighten inside her in concentric circles. Danica’s vision blurred. She went deaf, blind. Nothing would compare to this—this driving compulsion. This overwhelming race to the finish.

  Jon cried her name in a garbled voice, his sweaty face buried against her equally sweaty throat as they came together in an apocalyptic finish that left them both weak, shaken, and on an adrenaline high.

  “We made it even hotter in here,” Raven murmured against her temple. Sweat glued their skin together, and he was still deep inside her. He had to get to a phone. Now. But Dani was a wilted, gloriously satiated, limpet on his chest, and he didn’t want to move any more than she did. As relaxed as her body felt, her heart pounded in a comforting, rapid, erratic beat beneath the hand cupped around her breast. “Hmmm,” she murmured, not moving.

  Unfortunately, move they must. “There’s a spider the size of my Porsche on the hood of the truck.”

  The lashes of one eye brushed his chest as she stirred. “What color?”

  “Silver.”

  With a grin, Danica lifted her head. She gave him a not-so-gentle punch to the ribs. “The spider, you idiot.”

  His throat closed, aching with how incredibly beautiful she looked as she sat up, pushing her hair off her face. Her stick-straight bangs fell into place above her sparkling eyes like black silk. Her cheeks were hot pink with the heat, her mouth slightly swollen and still damp from his kisses.

  She lifted her leg over him, leaving him bereft at the loss of her slick heat, and felt around in the foot well for her clothes. “Guess we’d better go and do whatever it is we’ve got to go do before my head explodes. Right?”

  “Jesus, Dani, don’t even joke about it. Nothing’s going to happen to you.” He needed to make that promise. The amazing sex sent a healthy dose of adrenaline and endorphins through her system. But how long would it last? How long before Villalba-Vera decided he wasn’t getting her back, and therefore, she was expendable? How long before Donovan and his soldiers found them and forced Danica to undergo surgery so they could keep their damned prototype of the smallest assassination tool ever made?

  Raven pulled his T-shirt over his head then bent to retrieve his pants from the floor. “I’m prepared to pull over any time you feel the least bit calm,” he offered magnanimously, arching to do up his jeans while keeping an eye on the rapid pulse at the base of her throat.

  “A prince of a guy.” Dani smiled. Not the wide Danica smile that always made his pulse go from zero to eighty in a second, but a knowing smile that sliced right into his heart. She reached out, cupping his cheek. Raven buried his face in her soft palm as the pressure in his chest built. Her other hand came up and stroked his hair back off his face.

  “I’m not going to let that bastard make me explode. Got that, Jon Raven? The only person allowed to mak
e me explode, and in the future I’ll use that term with all due seriousness, is you.” She stroked his hair, his cheek, her heart in her eyes.

  His throat ached. Jesus, Dani—

  “You still take my breath away,” she admitted, touching the corner of his mouth. “I—I want to tell you something before. . .just in case. . .I mean, if—”

  Raven silenced her by pressing two fingers to her lips. “There’ll be plenty of time for this later. Let’s book so I can call my contact and resolve this once and for all.” He started the truck and backed out onto the road, cracking the window open once they started moving, to dissipate the fog on the inside of the glass. For a moment, he was back in his first car, out on lover’s lane, looking through the steamed rear window.

  Danica finished straightening her clothes, moved the guns, and slid across the seat to tuck herself against his side, despite the stifling heat. Raven looped an arm about her shoulders and drew her hard against him, resting his fingers lightly on the pulse at the base of her throat as he drove.

  Dense jungle eventually gave way to the poverty-stricken outskirts of San Cristóbal proper as the sun rose higher in the sky, heralding another hotter-than-hell day in paradise. The smoky smell of open fires mingled with the scent of spicy foods as Jon steered the truck into a rutted parking spot in front of a corner service station. A decades-old telephone booth stood guard over the antiquated pumps beneath a tattered awning.

  He placed one of the guns on the seat next to her. “Shoot anyone who isn’t me.”

  “That’s a little drastic, isn’t it? What if it’s someone who has nothing to do with—?”

  “Then we’ll apologize profusely.” He made her pick up the weapon. “Here. Safety’s off. Point and shoot.” He hopped out of the truck, locked and slammed the door, and jogged over to the booth. Danica watched him through the grimy windshield as he made his call.

  The interior of the truck was sweltering, and she prayed there wasn’t a temperature-sensitive component to the thing in her head. Absently, she brushed hair away from her face, lifting it off her neck in an attempt to let the pitiful breeze cool her flushed skin. A bite on her neck itched like crazy, and she reached up to rub at it. Her fingers moved across the small bump that had been driving her nuts for days. A small—minute actually—welt just behind her ear. Could it be. . .? Grabbing the rearview mirror, she folded her ear down and tilted her head in an attempt to examine the spot.

  All she saw was what looked like a pinprick.

  “We’re positive she’s wearing the chip,” Donovan had said. “My man detected it behind her right ear when you were picked up.” Danica felt sick to her stomach as she moved her fingers gently around the slight bump.

  Fear welled inside her, mixing with the annoyance, frustration, and other emotions threatening to erupt at any moment. Jon’s call continued. He vacillated between periods of animated hand gestures and attentive listening. What was taking so long? Maybe there wasn’t a way to get this thing out of her. Oh, God! Maybe Donovan was telling the truth. Maybe—

  A bullet shattered the windshield, sending a rain of safety glass pellets into her lap and eliciting a loud shriek of surprise from her. She ducked down low. Damn it to hell-

  “Jon!”

  Ten

  Before Donovan’s man took his first shot, Raven was sprinting across the weed-infested parking lot toward Dani-running interference between their truck and that of Donovan and his men.

  Everything happened in slow-mo-the windshield shattering, bullets freaking flying, and the sun blazing down on his head as if holding him in place. “Da-aaaa-ni!”

  Squeezing the trigger of his automatic, he laid cover fire as he ran like his life depended on it. He got one man, clambering out of the diesel, in the chest, the next in the right shoulder. As he ran by, he scooped up the fully loaded AK-47 from the fallen guy and sent a barrage of bullets toward the truck holding Donovan and more of his men.

  He kept firing, using both weapons, until the Sig clicked empty. He tossed it aside and reached for the door handle, still letting bullets fly with the assault rifle.

  Danica yanked on the lock, pulling up on the button, then she flung open the driver’s-side door, shouting, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” He got off a kill shot over the door, then climbed in, slammed the door, and peeled out of the parking lot in a spray of gravel, Donovan’s bigger truck right behind them.

  “Are you hit?” he yelled over the sound of gunfire.

  “I’m fine. Turn left.” Dani, his quiet, pacifist, glorious Dani, turned around to kneel on the cracked leather seat and started firing out the back window. The glass shattered and splintered, then fell off in a sheet. No safety glass there. Raven grinned, as he turned left. She’d never fired a weapon in her life, and she never had had an eye for a ball, but she kept firing. The close proximity of their tail, and the firepower of the weapon insured she got in a sufficient number of hits.

  The back tire exploded, tilting the truck ominously. He didn’t pause as the large vehicle shimmied and swerved, just flattened his foot on the accelerator, gripped the wheel and kept going. It wasn’t the smoothest ride, but they were still ahead of Donovan. If only by feet.

  Danica kept firing, until her weapon, too, ran out of ammo. “Damn it—”

  “Here,” Raven shouted against the din of racing engines and the thump-clop-scrape sound of driving on a rubber-less rim. He handed her another AK-47. “Take mine. It’s nice and big, and full of extremely accurate bullets.”

  With a wide grin, Danica picked it up, braced it on the back of the seat, and started firing. “From your lips—” Even with her inexperienced aim, eventually she’d hit someone, or something. Right now, the covering fire was preventing Donovan’s people from driving right up their tailpipe. “You’re heading to the palace, right?”

  “Hell, yeah!” Raven shouted, rocking and rolling down the streets of San Cristóbal, bullets flying all around them. Morning commuters jumped or drove onto the sidewalks to get the hell out of their way. “We’re about to become Vera’s best friends.”

  “My thoughts exactly—Hey! Did you see that? I hit the front tire! Yahoo! They’re running off the roa— no, wait. They’re back on again,” Dani shouted, clearly disappointed she hadn’t run them into the ditch alongside the narrow street. “Oh, my God! Incoming!” Yeah. He saw them. Two more vehicles barreled down on them from side streets, closing fast. Vera’s people from the look of the heavy, shiny black vehicles.

  People jumped clear of the trucks hurtling down Avenida del Sol, with its flowering, brilliant yellow mimosa trees, and picturesque sidewalk cafés. Kids, chickens, goats, and bicyclists scrambled out of the way. “Are we close?” Danica yeled, getting the hang of the rifle and feeling like G.I. Jane without the bad hair and terrible shoes. They screamed past City Hall, flanked by a pretty little park, and turned with a screech of three tires onto Presidente Avenida leading a parade of mismatched vehicle.

  “Gate’s closed.”

  She vaguely remembered the high, black, wrought-iron monstrosity, about a mile wide and half a mile high. “How—”

  “Brace yourself. Now!”

  She let go of the rifle, allowing it to drop behind the seat, then braced herself as Jon aimed the truck through the heavy iron gates like a guided missile. Danica, teeth almost jarred from her head, turned to face front as the truck hurtled past the openmouthed, uniformed guards, around the large stone fountain and wobbled crazily up the grand stairway leading from the sweeping gravel driveway directly into the public rooms of the palace. People poured out of various wings, like ants at a picnic, as the vehicle came to a shuddering, smoking stop, wedged partially inside the giant double doors.

  “Very dramatic,” she said admiringly as the truck gave an exaggerated death rattle and spewed a plume of steam from the gaping mouth of the hood.

  “Wasn’t it
, though?” Jon said, turning to run his gaze over her. “Any damaged body parts?”

  She held up a finger. “Broken nail. You?”

  “My nails are just fine.” He jerked his head toward the front of the hissing, smoking, pinging truck and the horde of men striding toward them. “Check out who’s coming this way to greet us in all his pompous, sleazy glory.”

  Danica tucked her hair behind her ears with shaking fingers. Just seeing the monster, knowing what he’d done to her, what he planned to do to the president, made her breath hitch and her palms sweat. “He looks a trifle cranky, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jon said with satisfaction. “That bemused guy next to him must be the president. Why don’t you hop out and go give old Ed a big hug?”

  “Why don’t I?” Unfortunately, it was a little hard to “hop out” since the truck was wedged firmly between the heavy wooden doors of the palace. Vera broke away from the president and his entourage and started drifting backward. “Oh, damn. Lookit, he’s slithering away!”

  “Come on.” Jon stood on the seat and held out his hand. “This way.” He helped her through the broken windshield, onto the hood of the truck, and then, assisted by some very confused gentlemen, onto the marble floor. Jon jerked his head toward Vera, who had his back to them as he tried to squeeze through the various palace personnel and make a break for it.

  “Let’s go.” He grabbed her hand and ran after the chief of security. People parted for them like the Red Sea.

  As he ran, Jon started shouting in rapid-fire Spanish. With much screaming and drama, everyone scattered. “Hey! Ed!” Jon yelled, closing in on the man, Danica trying to keep pace with his long strides.