by Alison Kent
She felt the vibration the length of her spine and curled five of her toes. "Too much on my mind, I guess."
"Your foot?"
She shook her head. "It throbs a bit, but I just took more Advil."
"You've got it propped up on a pillow still, yes?" She smiled to herself. "Yes, boss."
He grunted.
This time she laughed. "It's okay. I'm so out of my element here I need direction. Even of the bossy sort."
He said her name with a growl. "Then listen to me when I say the one thing you need now is sleep."
"I know. I just can't." Her mind was a jumble of so many thoughts, zipping here, there, everywhere. Coming back always to him. "I need more wine. Or a really good orgasm."
He nearly broke the bed frame turning from his back to his side. "No sex. My rules."
"Oh, I don't need you for an orgasm," she said, digging her own grave even deeper. "And I wasn't suggesting sex. Simply thinking of effective sleep aids."
"Jesus," it almost sounded like he hissed, draping an arm over her middle and hauling himself close. His breath was warm where it stirred her hair when he muttered, "Go to sleep, Katrina."
That might happen if she were to be hit on the head with falling debris.
"I can't." Not with the way he'd surrounded her, his arm, so heavy and warm, the bulk of his body, his face so close to hers. He suddenly seemed much more threatening than any assassin's bullet.
A threat she feared would turn her life as she knew it upside down. "I'm sorry. I just can't."
"You're starting to piss me off here, woman."
Such sweet talk from the man she was falling for. "A bedtime story would be nice. Or even twenty questions."
After a short silence, he said, "Ten."
"Ten?"
"Ten questions. Not twenty." He moved so that his chest pressed her shoulder. "And hurry up before I fall asleep."
She felt as if he'd given her the moon. She also felt as if his skin would set hers on fire.
"Okay, number one." Think, think, think. What did she want to know most of all? "Have you ever been, are you now, or will you soon be married?"
"That's three questions," he grumbled.
"Only if it requires three answers."
"Still making up rules as you go along?"
She would've smacked him but wasn't sure he wouldn't smack back. "Answer, please."
"No, no, and no. Three answers to three questions."
She didn't care what he said. She was only counting it as one. Then again, the wealth of information gained was worth letting him keep score.
Now for the nitty-gritty. "Does what you do for a living ever scare you?"
He responded with a snort. "All the time."
"Do you make a lot of money?"
"Scads. Stop being shallow. You just wasted number five of the ten."
She smiled to herself. "I was just trying to figure out why you do it if it frightens you."
"It's more of an adrenaline buzz than true fright." He paused to adjust his pillow. "Besides, being scared is no reason not to do what you know is right."
Finally. That peek into his psyche she was wanting. "Do you always know what you're doing is right?"
"Does this count as one of your questions?"
She considered only for a moment because this one mattered more than the others. "Yes."
"I wouldn't do it if I didn't know it was."
"Is that why you came after me?" she asked softly.
"Yes. And that's seven."
She allowed a private smile, then sobered. "Do you know why Peter's firm would want me killed?"
"Yes," he said, then said nothing more.
"Are you going to tell me?"
"That wasn't what you asked."
True. She'd only asked if he knew. She felt as if she were wasting her questions, though she was quite sure he wouldn't hold her to the original ten. Not when she had so much at stake and when he didn't have it in him to be that unfair or unfeeling.
She twisted her fingers into the top edge of the sheet. "Why, then? It's not like Peter shared anything about who he was. I don't pose a threat of any sort."
"They seem to think you do. That he leaked information. Or stored it in your place."
"He was never in my place." He'd been arm candy of the cosmopolitan sort. Not her lover. "He did a lot of business in Miami and kept a suite at the Mandarin Oriental. I would meet him in the lobby when we went out."
"I don't need to know the details, Katrina."
"But I want you to know." Nice. Now she sounded like a shrew. "I don't want you to think less of me because of lies you've been told about my relationship with him."
"This is a job. It doesn't matter what I think."
"It matters to me." She shoved his arm away, used the heels of her palms to scoot herself up in the bed to a sitting position. "I'm not the bimbo flake you've obviously determined that I am."
"And that bothers you."
"Yes, it bothers me." She was used to being judged by her appearance, by what she wrote, which was often deemed fluff. She wanted Julian to see the truth. "It bothers me a lot."
"Why?" he asked, flopping onto his back.
She was not going to cry. She was not going to cry. "Because I don't want you to feel like you're wasting your time saving my life."
He cursed in that strange foreign language and squirreled around roughly to sit on the edge of the bed. "Don't put that bullshit about one life being worth more than another into my mouth."
His words reverberated in the small room, bouncing from wall to wall like a ping-pong ball. She dodged the impact; the move was too late. The bitterness with which he'd loaded the statement slammed her back.
He hurt. He ached. He lived and breathed a pain unlike any that had hurt her as a child.
She'd lost track of how many questions she'd asked him. It didn't matter; there was only one thing left she needed to know. Had to know.
The only truth that mattered.
"Julian?"
"What?" he snapped, his breathing harsh.
"Who did you kill?"
Of course he hadn't answered her. He'd done what she'd expected him to do. He'd left the bed, cursing violently—or so she assumed—and left the room.
Following him would've been the wrong thing to do. That much she hadn't needed a crystal ball to see.
So palpable was his anger, in fact, she wouldn't have been surprised had it taken the form of a sentient being. The emotion was that obvious, that very real.
What she didn't know was whether she was the cause. Or if her question had simply tugged on the roots of an event time had long since grown over.
Either way, keeping the width of the cottage between them for the time being had seemed a safe course to stay.
Eventually, she'd slept. Or so she assumed since a pale gray light now limned the shade covering the window above the bed. He'd had long enough to cool off, long enough to brood and to stew.
It was time he got over himself, time he let her in. She wanted her answer, especially considering that after the coast was clear and she got back what remained of her life, she wasn't going to want to let him go.
That much she knew for a fact.
Wearing nothing but the dress shirt she'd had on now for eighteen hours, she slipped from the bed and eased out of the room. The front of the cottage was dark but for a wedge of light casting an eerie glow from the kitchen.
The refrigerator. She'd bet her bottom dollar.
She limped her way around the corner, took in the view awaiting her, and froze. Julian stood in the triangle of the open door, staring at the meager contents, wearing nothing but long-legged boxer briefs.
Oh, for a thousand words.
Seeing the body that had been in bed with her earlier took her breath away. The shoulders and chest, which were broad without bulk. The abdomen, which was flat yet rippled. Long arms, large hands. The leanly muscled legs of a triathlete. The thick package of his sex abo
ve.
She didn't want him to know she was there. Ridiculous when he'd probably sensed her stepping from the bed.
Still, he never said a word. And she never moved. Even when he looked up to see her half naked and staring.
He closed the refrigerator door then, silencing the room's grating light and returning the intimate dark-ness. She heard her own harsh breathing over the quiet, heard his, too, above his footsteps on the linoleum floor.
The rhythm of their heartbeats charged the air in the room, a deep throbbing beat older than man's soul. A powerful, telling beat that spoke of hunger and fear, of life and survival, of love and desperation.
When he reached her, he slipped his hands beneath her shirt, circled her rib cage, lifted her to sit on the countertop, and wedged himself between her legs. He trailed his fingertips over the plump sides of her bare breasts before going to work on the shirt's buttons.
Her hands found their way to his shoulders, her legs around his waist. He kept his gaze trained on his fingers until he reached the last button in the row, the one closing the shirt tails between her legs.
Only then did he look up, the meager light glinting off the blue in his eyes.
The shirt fell open; he spread his palms over her thighs and said in a voice she barely heard for his gruffness, "If you want to stop me, this is the time."
"I don't," she whispered, and shook her head. She didn't want to stop him at all.
Nine
SG-5 Safe House, Saturday, 5:30 a.m.
Her surrender stripped away what remained of his damaged control. He slept with women he met on the job. Never with women who were the job. And this was why.
From this moment on the stakes were higher for both of them. He couldn't afford to split his focus. But neither could he afford the price of walking away.
He slid his hands from her thighs, up over her hips and rib cage, his thumbs teasing the outer curves of her breasts until he reached her shoulders.
Once there, he spread open the two sides of the shirt and bared her skin to his gaze. The light wasn't enough to see more than the glitter of the diamonds in her earlobes and her shadowed form, but that was okay.
He saw all he needed to see with his hands. Her softness, her firmness, the gooseflesh on her upper arms, the cold sweat of her nerves.
He thought about soothing her with the words women loved to hear. How he would never hurt her, how she couldn't be any more beautiful, how he wanted her beyond what he'd known possible.
He didn't say any of that because none of it mattered. The lies overshadowed the truth. He would hurt her in the end. That much he knew to be fact.
And right now was all about loving her body with his.
She sat unmoving, her hands on his shoulders, her heels in the small of his back, her chin lifted, her long neck exposed. He wanted to be everywhere at once, to touch and to lick and to fuck.
He started by taking her shirt all the way off and pinning her wrists to her hips. He liked the idea of immobilizing her; he didn't know why. He also liked how close her breasts were to his mouth, the way she smelled of sunscreen and the sweat of the day.
It was a sexy smell, natural, real. He leaned in, his face between her breasts, and ran his tongue from her sternum to the base of her throat where her pulse beat and her moan of pleasure rumbled.
When he lifted his head, she struggled to free her hands and tightened her thighs where she gripped him. He chuckled against her skin, enjoyed her resulting whimper, then moved to the left and took her nipple into his mouth.
She tasted salty and sweet and he wanted to see her, to know if she was the color of an apricot or a plum. He suckled and tugged, and her low throaty cries tugged at him in return. He felt the pull deep between his legs, felt the blood surge until he thought the head of his cock would explode.
Christ, but this wasn't supposed to happen so fast. This need to bury himself inside of her, to feel the tight walls of her beautiful cunt squeeze him and milk him and drain him until he ran dry.
He moved to her other breast, nipped and licked and sucked and did his best to pretend he was doing so with a nameless, faceless body. One he would enjoy and pleasure but would never see again.
Not one belonging to a woman whose life was in his hands.
He pulled away, let loose a flurry of curses he knew she wouldn't understand. Yet it wasn't until she said, "Julian?" in a voice so soft he melted with it that he admitted to the gravity of this mistake.
And then he did what he had to do.
He kissed her.
He let her arms go, and she wrapped them around his neck, kissing him back like staying alive depended on how well she used her teeth and her tongue.
She used them like a courtesan, a high-paid call girl, yet he knew the intensity of the kiss was real. Whether fueled by lust or driven by fear, her response was genuine and the hottest thing he'd ever known.
He slid his tongue deep into her mouth, seeking to deepen her fire along with his own response. He held her face in his hands, sweeping through her mouth, tasting her, moving closer so that her breasts flattened against the muscles of his chest.
The sounds she made were of heat and hunger, and he growled in return, filling her mouth with all the words he couldn't say, with passion unfamiliar and raw and consuming.
She cupped the back of his head, pressed her thumbs into the tired muscles at the base of his skull, massaged him there as she pulled her mouth free to kiss his face, his eyelids, the skin beneath his neck.
Enough, he barked to himself, undeserving of her tenderness when this was only sex, not emotion, not feeling, not involvement. It had to be so little. He couldn't trust it to be more.
He pulled free, took his frustration lower, nipping and licking his way from the hollow of her throat down her body, tonguing her navel, spreading her thighs wide with his hands and breathing in the scent of her sex.
She shuddered. From no more than the heat of his breath, she shuddered. Her reaction had him pins-and-needles impatient to witness her come. To feel her pussy contract around his cock, his fingers, his tongue.
He started with the latter, kissing his way up her thighs, left to right, holding her ankles as she leaned back on her elbows, until he reached the soft crease where her leg met her sex.
He tongued her then, licking his way between her swollen lips and finding her clit. She cried out when he drew on the knot with his lips and sucked, a sound of pain mixed with pleasure that had his balls drawing close to his body, his cock surging up to the sky.
He lifted her legs, draped them over his shoulders, and skinned out of his briefs before ringing his fingers around the base of his shaft. He squeezed his cock with one hand, used the thumb of the other to pull back the hood of her clit.
He exposed her to the air and to his mouth, circling the nerve endings with the tip of his tongue until her hips left the countertop and she raised up towards him.
She offered herself fully, and he took the gift, slipping one finger then two inside of her, sucking on the lips of her pussy, her clit, and stroking himself as he did.
He was dangerously close to unloading all over the cabinets and floor. She did that to him, spun him off the axis that had kept him stable since Hank salvaged his sorry wind- and sunburned ass from Kenya all those years ago.
He'd spent the time since embroiled in his work, banging who he could when he could. But nothing had prepared him for this.
He released his cock, slid his free hand up her body to cup a breast, to slowly pinch his fingertips around one nipple. She lay all the way back then, covered his hand where he tweaked her, sent her other hand down between her legs.
She tangled her fingers with his, masturbated, slipping her thumb into her cunt to pleasure herself. He couldn't believe it. Could not believe this woman.
He swirled his tongue in and out and around, wedged her thighs wider apart, pulled her other hand away from her breast and urged her to play.
She s
nugged two knuckles around her clit, rubbed and tugged and thrust up against him. He slid the flat of his free index finger beneath her pussy, pressing against the entrance to her ass.
She was sobbing now, her head thrashing, begging him to take her, to fill her. He wet his finger with her juices and did, sliding into her slowly as she clenched around him.
She came then, and he'd never seen anything like it. Never known a woman so uninhibited, so open, so explosive. So much a part of her own experience. Convulsions tore through her; she contracted around both their fingers. Pre-cum beaded on the tip of his cock.
He tried to ease her down slowly, but his own ass was aching from the tightness, the swelling. Sweat ran down the middle of his back as he held his body in check.
But she didn't want to be eased and gentled. She wanted more, telling him so with a gruff, "Move," as she shoved him back with the sole of her good foot planted in the center of his chest.
He stumbled, she jumped down, turned, and bent over. He thought he was going to die. Thought he had when she gruffly whispered, "Julian, please, fuck me."
He cursed, jerked open the kitchen drawer of twine and scissors and electrical tape, searching out the condoms he knew were there.
Once he was sheathed, he took hold of her hips and stepped into her body, sliding himself between her thighs, knowing if he used either of the entrances to her body she offered, he'd be done like a Sunday pot roast.
He breathed deeply, smelled her musk, and hardened further, taking time to wrap a mental fist around his flyaway control.
"Do it. Please. Do it now."
"Let's go to bed. Get you off your foot."
"My foot's fine. Other parts of me are in desperate need of attention. So attend, already."
Though nothing about this was funny, he chuckled. And then he surged forward into her sex, which was wet and hot and amazingly still tight. He pumped as hard as he could, slamming into her.
All the while she cried, "Yes," and "More," and "Harder. Fuck me harder."
It was over almost before it began. He felt the heat of his load burst and turn him inside out. He squeezed the muscles around his ass, dipping his knees to drive into her, realizing that her fingers were buried in the folds of her sex as she brought herself off once again.
