The image of a ten-year-old Thea riding a horse broke through his thoughts and he wondered how long before she’d remember how happy they made her. For now, her focus was solely on the guns, specifically an M4. “So, you brought me down here because you have a hunch I know how to use these, right?”
“Yes. At least some of them. Like with the German, you may not realize it, but it’s there. It’s in your muscle memory. You easily took out the camera at Animal Control. A damn good shot and you didn’t even take time to aim. When you pointed your Glock at me, you stood correctly, would’ve been a perfect kill.”
“I didn’t even know it wasn’t loaded.”
The corners of Nik’s mouth dropped. Self-deprecation wasn’t a good fit on her. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
She flashed a knowing grin. “Or what? You’ll spank me?”
* * * *
I caught the muscles bulging in Nik’s jaw—a spank-me flex?—as he ground out in that gravelly, all-man voice of his, “Don’t tempt me.”
I probably would’ve let him. His jaw tic did crazy things to my body, but I was still kind of overwhelmed at the sight of his stockpile of weapons and the reason why he was showing them to me in the first place. Did she really know how to use them? If she did, did it mean anything? Knowing my life was in danger, I reckoned being able to defend myself trumped finding out if I was a morally corrupt criminal or not.
“Do any of them catch your eye?”
“This one, I guess.” I slid my hand over the dark wood handle of an older rifle more interesting to me than the modern weapons.
“30-30.” Nik took it off the rack. “This was my first hunting rifle. If it’s familiar, you most likely learned to shoot it with your dad or grandpa, someone who would’ve taken you out hunting or target shooting.”
The rather unassuming rifle had caught my eye in a room full of bigger and bolder weapons. Knowing it could be a link to my childhood intrigued me. Things like popular culture and understanding foreign words, bits of trivia and general knowledge had been coming easier to me. I still had no desire for her memories to return. But unlike the more recent Thea I feared knowing, this gun may’ve represented the childhood version. The part of her I was interested in learning more about.
“Any others?” Nik took the rifle off the wall and set it on the worktable in the middle of the room.
I stroked my fingertips over a fierce-looking one. But Nik tsk-tsked. “Can’t let you play with that one. We affectionately refer to it as a head eraser and I’ve seen the way you look at Coop’s head.”
“That does sound appealing.”
Bins upon bins of various containers lined the shelves, labeled with various calibers and types of ammunition. He must’ve sensed me taking it all in, calculating the sheer volume of potential damage, because he rushed to explain again about his father’s influence. “I’m prepared for the apocalypse, remember?”
I pulled out a clear-sided drawer and held up one of the many slim darts topped with frilly pink tassels. “Are there going to be clowns to kill during the apocalypse as well?”
He laughed heartily. “Fucking frightening, but no, I don’t hunt clowns. Those go with the one up there.” He pointed to a strange, slender gun.
“And what is it for?”
“Tranquilizing bears.”
My eyes widened as I remembered the bear he’d mentioned seeing earlier and how common they were here. “You can do that?”
“I have lots of training hours on it.”
“Our military is involved in bear warfare now?”
“More like my dad’s training program.”
“Oh, right, bears…” I drawled, adding a conspiratorial wink, “with big feet.”
Nik narrowed his eyes. “We helped the wildlife department tag black bears,” he scoffed. “But now that you mention it, Dad’s motives might not have been purely veterinary. Shit.”
He closed the drawer full of clown darts, as if it would put an end to the conversation.
I smirked. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Careful, your feet are looking pretty big right now. Lemme see ‘em,” he demanded as he leaned down to check my feet. Hooking his arm behind my knees, he swept me up. The ground disappeared so fast I yelped in shock. Lifting my oversized booted feet higher into the air, he tilted me backward. “Oh, no. Those are some big feet, baby. Not good.”
“I don’t have big feet. I swear! These aren’t my boots! My feet are tiny,” I gasped out through laughs. Still cradled in his arms, I ducked my face into the warm crook of his neck and shook my head. “How can you make me laugh right now?”
He looked down at me with hooded eyes and warm weight filled my belly. I knew that look. Craved that look. Got drunk off it. His shallow breathing deepened. “How can you turn me on all the damn time?”
Green eyes locked dangerously with mine. His bottom lip disappeared into his mouth, returning dampened as his breathing hitched. The smell of nighttime in these mountains—cedar, campfire smoke, and snow—permeated his hair. But it was the warm scent of his skin, the blend only belonging to him, making me buzz with need. Strong arms banded tighter around me, still cradling me off the ground—not wanting to set me down…to let me go…to stop.
When he hadn’t acted on the heady impulses I easily read in his fiery eyes, I asked, “Let me guess? There are cameras down here too.”
Nik swallowed. Pivoting to turn me to the corner by the door, he lifted his chin to the camera. “Probably sent an alert to Coop’s phone when we came in.”
“He’s watching us, isn’t he?”
The camera pivoted left and then right and then left again, as if it were a head shaking no.
“And listening.” Nik flipped Coop off. “This room is mic’d for sound.”
“It’s the middle of the night. Do you guys ever sleep?”
“Hazard of the job. You either learn to sleep through anything or to live without it. Put me in a hammock on a C-17 cargo plane and I’d be out so cold you could probably do surgery on me.”
I tilted my head to whisper in his ear, “Give me your shirt.”
“What?”
“T-shirt. Now.”
He set me down and reached back, hauling his shirt off in one motion. As he handed it to me, I brought it to my nose, taking a deep whiff of his amazing scent mingling with cotton and laundry soap. Then I tossed it over the security camera.
Nik quirked his lips as my eyes danced across his glorious inked chest. His abs flexed under my appraisal.
He leaned in and whispered into my ear, “I like where you’re going with this.” With a little nip on my lobe, he added, “But there’s still audio.”
Placing my hands on his hips, I backed Nik against the center worktable and went up on my tiptoes to whisper in his ear. “Let’s see how well you play the Quiet Game.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Nik’s Adam’s apple popped up the thick column of his throat and his neck torqued from side to side. My mouth fell open seeing the reddened marks where it met with his shoulder. “What happened?”
“You happened.”
My fingertips questioningly stroked over the bruises. “I did this to you?”
His low voice rasped against my ear, “Taste me again. Mark me.” The piercing growl in his urgent demand coiled heat deep in my belly. Grasping my hips, he pulled me flush against him, the hard outline of his erection pressing into my stomach.
Skimming his fingertips to my cheeks, Nik softly guided my face to look up at his. Sharpened eyes locked on mine. With a nip to my lower lip, his teeth plucked it like he had earlier done to my nipple. Just enough pain to get my attention. “Anywhere you want. Everywhere. Bite me. Be rough. I won’t break.”
Running my mouth from his neck to his shoulder, I let my teeth scrape lightly over his taut flesh. My fingers were enthralled by each masculine thing on his body, every part of him differing from me. His sheer solidity. From the armored ink capping his arm to the hardene
d muscles along his strong shoulders.
“You’ve already explored me there,” he impatiently snarled under his breath. The sight of his flexed arms as he gripped the table behind him, all roping tendons and strong veins, captivated me. “And there, too.”
“And you’re not very good at the Quiet Game,” I shot back with a little grin.
“I’ve already lost. My mind, my sanity. Whatever might be left of my goddamned soul.” Hard fingers twined in my hair. I couldn’t physically feel the grip, only the intensity pulsing from the flex of his forearm as it pressed against the side of my head. If his intentions were to provoke me into submission he’d have to do better. I leaned, nestling my cheek against his fisting hand. Angling my neck, I nuzzled the soft, dark hair coating his forearm with my nose. God, he smelled good. Pressing my lips against the underside of his wrist, I flicked my tongue over his skin. Tasted good, too.
On a growl, his lips tucked his constricted words close to my ear, private. “I didn’t tease you in the dressing room with nuzzles and breathy kisses, did I? I gave you exactly what you needed, right where you craved it most. And you and I both know you didn’t toss my T-shirt over the camera just so you could run your fingertips across my arms and chest again.”
My diaphragm sucked in tight as the vibration of his words combined with the memory of his fingers. At the piercing nip to my earlobe, a breathy little squeak shot through my lips. Oh, he was definitely doing better, and the look in his eyes indicated he wasn’t even close to being finished.
“Tell me, Thea, what on my body are you the most curious about? The most anxious to touch?”
I pointedly lowered my eyes to the exact location.
He leaned in to whisper, “God, Thea, no woman’s ever made me so desperate to show her how I’ll feel inside her and you do it with just a fucking look.” The raw-sounding words swirled between the shield of my hair and the shell of my ear. Spoken so quietly and yet impacting me with such percussion. “But there is only one way for you to know exactly how good my cock will feel wrapped in your fingers…between your lips…inside your mouth…deep in your body.”
He pulled back to look me in the eye. His brow cocked as he mouthed the words, Don’t be shy. Uncoiling his grip, he gave my hair a teasing flip meant to egg me on.
With a playful jab of my index finger to his chest, I pushed his body off mine, giving myself some room to work with. He leaned back against the metal table watching as I shucked off the heavy winter coat. Folding it into a cushion, I dropped it to his feet. Gleaming down, his eyes filled with a mix of excitement, heat, and a little bit of questioning.
I slid my hand down the front of jeans to his hardened girth. His cock bounced as an appreciative rumble emitted from his throat. Unbuttoning his pants, I eased the zipper down to the sounds of his stuttering exhale. His abs flexed, rippling as if simply standing there was taking every single muscle.
My fingers skimmed across his skin, down through the soft trail of hair past his belly button as it disappeared into his waistband. My other hand fisted around the band of his jeans and with a sharp tug I had both his pants and his black boxer briefs down low on his hips and him right where I wanted—the palm of my hand.
“Shit.” He gulped as he gripped the table’s edge. The rasp of his breath scraped the quiet air as he intently watched my fingers curl around the smooth, veined skin on his freed shaft. Stroking the hardened flesh, I learned the shape and feel of him. I, too, watched as my palm cupped around the firm head, marveling at the way it thumped into my grip as I slid my fingers back down.
I strengthened my hold to keep him from popping out of my grasp, but feared I might hurt him. Reaching out for one of his hands, I guided it over mine as I lifted my eyes questioningly to his. His Adam’s apple bounced on a swallow as his hand closed over mine, teaching me with each jerking pull exactly how tight I should grasp, how fast, how rough he wanted it. And he liked it a lot rougher than I’d assumed from the more delicate and precise way he’d pleasured me.
His hand soon lifted away from mine, returning to grip the table behind him as his breathing turned into panting. A dewy bead of wetness glistened on the capped head of his cock. My lips parted as I lowered, dropping to my knees on the folded jacket. I spiraled the tip of my tongue along his thick shaft, then took a few turns around the underside of the head, before opening wider so my upper lip could scrape the cream from his crown. Just like I had taken the tip off the soft serve cone he’d gotten me after dinner. The taste of him not as sweet, but much more addicting.
“Fuck, Thea,” he moaned. Hips twitching, his hands gripped my shoulders, pushing me back. “Stop, stop, stop,” he ordered below his breath as he wheeled to face the table.
I sucked what was left of his taste from my tongue, swallowing as I stood back up. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No. Fuck, no.” He braced himself against the table. The muscular planes of his back heaved, like a pair of wounded wings.
“Why did you stop me?”
“If I let you keep going, I wouldn’t be able to stop,” he panted.
“Then don’t stop.” I reached my fingers up, tracing the frog bones in the tattoo on the back of his shoulder.
“I have to.” His low voice dripped with regret and a little anger. He pushed out a deep breath. “I don’t have any condoms down here.”
“Is a condom necessary for what I was doing?”
His restrained laugh told me he was tempted to give me exactly what I was asking for. His constricted words, brought back down to a private whisper, told me I wasn’t asking for nearly enough. “I want to be inside of you, Thea. And once I am, I won’t be able to stop at your mouth.”
I brought my lips down to kiss a wicked scar along his side and then down over the ones on his arm. His back muscles shifted in an intricate flexing dance, the skeletal frog moving with them. The sound of his zipper closing gave me pause before I went up on my toes, finding a peppering of scars at the base of his neck to kiss.
“Wait.” I dropped my heels back to the ground. “So you have this place so well stocked you’re prepared for a clown apocalypse, but you didn’t plan on getting laid during it?”
“I’m not the brightest bulb sometimes,” he said with a disparaging chuckle.
His body rumbled with the laugh, his skin shaking against my lips as I continued to find old wounds to kiss. They were everywhere, physically supporting the stories he’d relayed about the life he led, the sacrifices he’d made, the depths of hell he’d gone to. I realized his bringing me here meant he’d go through it all for me, use every single weapon in this room to protect me. This is what I’d witnessed in his eyes while he drove me wild with pleasure in the dressing room.
“I wish you’d let me make you feel as good as you made me.”
He turned, facing me as his hands wrapped my waist and pulled me flush against him. My lips landed on perhaps the worst of all his old wounds—his steel heart tattoo.
He closed his eyes, relaxing into the embrace. Under his breath, and too quiet for any eavesdropping jerks to hear, he told me, “You already make me feel better than any orgasm ever has, baby.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Night-vision goggles turned the pitch-black world into shades of neon emerald, allowing me to make out the landscape as we headed away from the houses on Nik’s ATV. I hugged tight to his body as he navigated a narrow, uneven trail through the trees. Even with several layers of clothing between us, I struggled to keep my thoughts from drifting back to how he’d felt beneath my fingers, my lips, my tongue.
If he had the same problem, he hid it well. In the gun room, his focus had quickly turned to the weapons, going over the basics of safe handling until I passed all his quizzes and tests. Now his attention was squarely on driving the quad. Upon arriving at a clearing in the valley, he handed me ear protection. It enabled us to communicate by amplifying lower-level sounds, like our voices, while reducing the harmful noise of the guns.
“
Think of a clock face, like the grandfather clock in my living room. Imagine you’re the middle. Look from nine o’clock to three o’clock. Tell me what you see.”
Through the green tint of the NVGs I realized the valley was set up as his personal firing range. “Targets.” In addition to a few more obvious ones, some were miniscule and tricky.
“Good.” We moved into position for one of the more apparent targets and after a few dry-firing practice rounds, he was ready for me to shoot for real. “I don’t want you to overthink any of this. Trust in yourself.”
Trust in her, you mean.
“Start with your Glock.”
“Her Glock.”
“It’s yours now.” He handed me the gun, this time with a full magazine in place and a suppressor added. “Thea, I know you’re struggling with who you are in all of this. No matter what you find out about yourself, you are whoever you want to be now.”
“I want to stay alive, is all.”
“Then load and make ready your weapon.”
I racked the slide back, chambering a round.
“Shooter ready?”
I gripped the gun with both hands, leveled it on target. “Ready.”
“Send it.”
I exhaled as I squeezed the trigger. Behind me, Nik saw as I did, the bullet pinging the corner of the metal target. “Low left,” I muttered. “I can do better.” How do I know this?
My next shot was overcorrected. “High right.”
“Very good.”
No, it’s not. I repeated the action getting closer to the middle. After adjusting my stance, I squeezed the trigger again. Perfect. “On center.”
I scanned the terrain finding other targets and hitting them squarely. “Damn,” he whispered behind me.
After going through a similar routine with the Marlin and the M4, I asked to try the 901.
Nik exchanged weapons with me, as always, verifying all safety measures were in place.
“Which target are you going to go for this time?”
Twist My Heart Page 21
