Tongues dueled, gained access as they kissed. Each drawing deeper and deeper into emotion that shouldn’t have been poured into one single kiss. His hands crept to the tie on the robe, he loosened it, and she reared up enough to slip it off her shoulders.
There was something so perfect about a woman in the moonlight…about this woman, Brand thought, on the edge of incoherence. The slender slope of her shoulders, the slenderness of her throat, the rounded fullness of her breasts, and the tender skin of her stomach.
He ran a hand through it all and felt her tremble. With one hand around her back, he rolled them over, so that he was on top.
Akira chuckled. Her brown eyes pools of amusement and seduction.
He couldn’t laugh. He shucked off his belt, toeing off his shoes and socks, and groaned when she ran her toes down his calves. It was she who tugged off his pants and boxers.
“God, you’re built,” she breathed, when she could. When she was done staring at him and her pulse started drumming in her blood.
“You talk too much,” he muttered, curving one hand around her neck and kissed her again.
No matter how many times he kissed her, how generously she responded, whatever technique he used it wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. And for this one moment, it didn’t scare him.
~~~~~
“Brandon.”
Akira sighed, looping her arms around his neck and let him do all the work, because she was floating.
Because she really couldn’t move. Her hands, when he kissed down their lengths, were shimmery like water. Her throat, where a pulse hammered as loud as her heart, was ravaged. The soft skin behind her lobe, made her breath come out in gasps.
And when he touched her aching, heavy breasts, the warmth in her pooled into a need so sharp she gasped aloud at the pleasure–pain of the sensation. His hands moved low, lower, to her toes, to her instep, her shapely calves so she trembled and shivered again.
Passion stirring into her, making her active, making her want to touch him, to know him as he was learning her.
She ran her unsteady hands over every inch of his taut, needy body.
The scars over his rippling back, the hair-roughened muscles of his legs, that excellent butt that she’d thought about more than she should have. The sensitive area under the nape of his neck that made Brand curse.
She’d found weak spot number one. When Akira nipped him on his ear lobe, he surged a little into her, and that made her whimper again.
Their dance continued from one end of the bed to the other, punctuated with rough breathing and silent moans, half-whispers and things that they could only feel. Only live through.
When he finally slid into her after sheathing on protection, she came once on a long, fulfilled moan, wanting to hold onto this moment, this man, if only because he made her feel so complete.
Her closed, languorous eyes opened on their own and she stared at him, while he completed the motion. His hands were on either side of her; she dug her nails into his sweaty back.
“Higher,” Brand said, when he could growl.
And he took her. Over and over again. To a place where it was all colors and need, where only he existed. Where only he could save her.
As she saved him, when he murmured her name, whispered it, shouted it and followed her.
~~~~~~
Akira reached for him again, in the middle of the dark night and he allowed her to lead them this time.
Her kisses, her touches had the flavor of desperation, of need so acute it could never be satisfied.
And because Brand understood the fear and the need, he didn’t say a single word, when she rode them both to intense satiation and pleasure. And then collapsed silently beside him, tangling into him, slept off.
When he held her, through the night, like he had the night before, all his doubts and fears and nightmares were held at bay with the force of contentment he felt blanketed around them.
Fear, immense and unnamable, struck him while his hands tightened around her waist and she curled deeper into the curve of his neck. Her arms were around his back, her legs were wedged between his.
She’d become such a part of him that he didn’t know what to do with it. He’d never needed anybody, never wanted anybody, the way he wanted her.
And he’d never used anybody the way he was blatantly using her.
Not for the first time he regretted having her involved in this mess and damning both himself and Sebastian to perdition for their parts in it.
If anything happened to her…
Nothing would. He promised himself and her and whatever Gods he could name, silently, fiercely. Nothing would happen to her, as long as he was there to guard her and protect her. And if it got too much, he could always make her go away.
Somehow he’d do it.
Even if it killed him.
This time, it was he who reached for her and made love to her so slowly, so thoroughly, with such gentleness that Akira cried. And she wondered in that delicious limbo between sleep and waking, if love could come to you in a dream.
Forty-One
“How are we going to get into La Reine De La Mer?” Akira asked him first thing the next morning.
She’d been up before Brand, showered, wearing his shirt which skimmed her mid-thigh, with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows. She was calmly attacking the huge breakfast she’d ordered in broken French.
There was enough to feed five of them.
Brand was still a little disoriented as he regarded her spearing the Eggs Benedict.
Akira knew how he found her right now. She herself had been surprised at the changes in her. The changes that a couple nights of healthy, consuming sex had brought about in her.
Her skin glowed from the inside like she’d spent considerable time at an expensive spa. Her hair was wet and straggly and damaging his shirt even as she let it dry naturally and she couldn’t give a fig, she felt so good. And there were aches in her body from muscles that felt used.
God, what a way to wake up.
Akira grinned at him, while she bounded to his side of the bed, and cupping his unshaven cheeks in her palms, gave him a noisy, resounding kiss.
He immediately curved his hard hands around her butt and pulling her closer, kissed her for real. When she opened her eyes, there was a pleased-as-punch expression in them.
Brand grinned back too. “Good morning, princess,” he murmured drawing her down to his lap. His suddenly active lap.
She linked her arms around his neck. “Good morning, Brand.” Then she frowned. “Why do you call me princess?”
“Because you are. All regal and snooty with your cute nose up in the air when you are angry or crossed. And because you think the world revolves around you,” he answered promptly.
He pinched said nose.
She wrinkled it and was indignant. “I don’t believe the whole world revolves around me. That’s ridiculous. I am a reporter. I know better.”
“Well, if you don’t, you should.” Brand told her while he tried to get the shirt off her.
“Why? So that you can make even more fun of me?” She was grumpy and swatted his hands away.
“I don’t make fun of you. I just… let’s not argue even before I’ve had my coffee, okay?” He persuaded, kissing his way down her jaw to her willing neck.
“Fine. But after, we have to discuss our next plan of action, Brandon.” Akira gave him a mock-order.
He nodded, looking up from where he was nuzzling her nipples through the shirt.
“After.” Brand agreed.
~~~~~
In the suite two floors below, Jared, Lucas, and Murad had a sheaf of papers in front of them as they waited for their boss to put in an appearance for their morning debriefing session.
There was a huge pot of French-pressed coffee in front of them and three mugs with various amounts of the beverage left. A huge platter of croissants and muffins were beside the coffee pot and occasionally one of them wou
ld nibble on a flaky pastry, and sigh in that way that only good food can induce one to.
They were tasked with following up on the lumber company - its financial status, and the backgrounds of its owners and shareholders.
For a relatively obscure company in South America, doing a minimum volume of business, as stated in the quarterly reports, it showed a steady profit. Enough to declare dividends in the first two years.
The largest had come last year, for Geraldo De La Hoya, one of the major shareholders in the company.
And though the volume of business had trebled since it had started operating in San Magellan, it still was nowhere enough to post the kind of profit the company had shown. And a large share of this profit had gone into Geraldo De La Hoya’s pockets.
The other major shareholder in this relatively small company was, interestingly enough, Cobalt Bernhardt’s five year-old son, Nigel. Since Cobalt’s ex-wife had sole custody of the child, the name Bernhardt was mentioned nowhere…making it harder to connect that particular dot.
The plot had officially thickened and they were finally excited to get some kind of breakthrough.
A comm talkie continually crackled on a prefixed frequency. And a tiny monitor was turned towards the window and not the men who sat at the huge leather sectional sofa with its throw pillows and elegant lamp-stands at the end.
The monitor held images, hi-res images of Brand leaning against the headboard, feeding Akira strawberries in cream. Naked to the waist, till the covers saved his modesty.
Akira had his shirt on again, and she was looking even more flushed and rumpled, her eyes sparkling with some secret delight that even she wasn’t aware of.
But Brand was. The on-camera Brand was glad that he was making her happy.
“You think we should remind him that the suite surveillance camera came on automatically at sunrise?” Lucas asked uncomfortably, pouring himself some more of that excellent coffee.
He wondered how much his boss would hurt him because he’d been on patrol duty and had thus watched a naked Akira pad into the bathroom two hours ago.
He’d turned the monitor towards the window, in a second flat, but he was sure it was a second too late. Besides, she was a sexy, naked chick. His boss’s chick. He hoped to God he was covered for damage done by employer.
“I am not calling him for anything.” Murad answered, flipping one more page on the huge dossier he’d painstakingly complied over the last two days.
At last, at long last, everything was starting to fall into place. Everything was starting to make sense.
“He wouldn’t fire us, would he? If he found out he’d forgotten about the camera? I mean, it’s his fault, isn’t it?” Jared asked reasonably.
“Isn’t it?”
Neither Lucas not Murad lifted their heads from the papers.
In the end, Lucas said, “We’ll give them an hour more. Then we’ll knock. I mean, we’ll send room service to knock.”
“Good plan, Luke.” Murad approved.
“I don’t know why I hooked up with a guy who thinks with his dick,” Jared complained.
“If you think that Brandon Rice is thinking with his dick, then you really don’t know him at all.” Murad told him matter-of-factly, while he crunched loudly on a croissant.
He hoped that they weren’t all going to go to hell just because Brandon Rice had finally found someone worth caring for.
“Amen, brother,” said Luke.
Forty-Two
“So let me get this straight. You are almost sure that Geraldo, Cobalt and his friends-cum-business partners in the lumber company are behind most of the problems we are facing right now. They want the land and the rigging rights so their profits are double-guaranteed?” Akira asked thoughtfully, while she shoveled in lobster bisque, seated in one of the tiny seafood bistros that dotted the promenade.
Brand nodded. Glad that she had such a quick and agile mind and he didn’t have to lay out the whole picture for her. It was one of the things that had hooked him… her quicksilver mind.
“And the guy who took us, of course, was working for these people. Some of whom are aboard the Sea Queen, an ironic name if you think about it.” She took a quick look at him from under her lashes, wanting to see his reaction to that provocative statement.
He simply nodded agreement again. Sopping the last of his seafood platter with a piece of pita bread.
“And the other rebel faction, Miguel Cortez and his cohorts who helped us out the other night, now have sole control of guerrilla movements on the mountain and the land under question. Which is why they helped us, in the first place, so they could gain sole control.”
“Yup.” Damn, she was smart. He hadn’t expected her to connect that dot this soon.
“Which still leaves us with two big questions.”
“Which are?”
“Who all are aboard La Reine De La Mer, and what do we get out of them? And how am I tied to this mess, since you are so keen to have me around now? Am I the target, the victim, or the bait, Brand?” Akira asked these questions without any judgment.
It was his problem that he still felt guilty.
“Akira, it’s a little more complex than that,” he said after a second’s internal debate.
“Then simplify it.”
“It started out like that, with you as bait. You were my entry into San Magellan, because Sebastian is no more. So his former security head has even less reason to be there. And I knew, you’d figure it all out, sooner or later. All the loose ends, all the threads that seem to be going nowhere. I just…wanted to help you get there.”
“So you used me. You used me to get what you wanted and then things went ballistic that night at the Hall of Records,” she said quietly, wondering why she should even feel wounded.
“You can’t make me feel bad about that, Akira,” he reminded her wryly. “You were the one who wanted to commit international crime.”
“Well.” Akira was thoughtful, cool. “I asked for the truth…I should have known it would be ugly.”
“I had to protect you. I had to,” he insisted, taking her cold hand in his. “You would have been dead the minute you went back to San Magellan. Regardless of whatever diplomatic sanctions you had, the rebel faction would have had you dead. You’re aware of that.” He was so quietly logical that she knew her anger had no place in this conversation.
“Thank you for that. Thank you for saving my life all the time, but Brand, maybe I should ask you this. You could have let me die in San Magellan,” she was quietly logical.
“We’d found the evidence, and you tell me now, you’re almost sure you know who the players are. You don’t need me anymore. So then why didn’t you?”
His lips thinned but he didn’t answer.
“You know what? I don’t want to know.” Akira shook her head quickly. “I am sure whatever answer you give will either disappoint me or anger me. And I don’t think we have time enough to do that.”
“Can you please look at me?” He tugged on her fingers till she was forced to look at him.
The meaningless smile fading from her lips, while she saw him looking at him with that same focused intensity that unnerved her.
“I wouldn’t have left you anywhere,” he said quietly. “I can't,” he added almost helplessly.
It was an inadequate answer to all that she was asking of him. But, for a man who valued his freedom and independence more than life itself, it was a pretty telling statement.
And she knew it. How big a sucker was she; that she let him use her for bait even after he admitted to her that’s all she was to him?
“What I said yesterday is true, Akira. I can't stop wanting you and I can't let you go.” He spoke gruffly, his eyes devil-black in the afternoon sun. His mouth a grim, sensuous slash and his thumb insistently rubbing warmth into her cold self.
For now, she added silently. You want me for now, Brandon. What happens when you stop?
~~~~~~
That nig
ht, they all had dinner together in the restaurant of the Hilton. An American Steakhouse, where Luke, the vegetarian had to munch on Caesar Salad after picking off all the bacon onto a side dish. It was a riotous affair and to look at Akira, no one could suspect that she was struggling to come to terms with the newest realities in her life.
Their merriment was interrupted when Murad’s phone buzzed with a text and he looked at the group expectantly.
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