by Alison Kent
He waited through her cries and contractions then pulled free, spun her around, and ground his mouth to hers, kissing her thoroughly until they were both satisfied. And neither one of them could separate his taste from hers.
Ten
SG-5 Safe House, Saturday, 7:00 a.m.
She wanted him again. Already. She ached and burned and knew she was torn and raw. It didn't matter. She had to have him again and now.
First things first, however. Taking hold of his hand, she led him through the front room, now bathed in dawn's sunlight, down the hall, through the bedroom, to the bath.
"Wait a sec," he said, disappearing only to return seconds later with a roll of duct tape and two food storage bags.
"You need to keep the stitches dry." He ordered her to sit on the toilet lid while he sat on the tub's edge and took her foot in his lap, slipping both bags over her injury, taping the tops tight to her ankle.
It was a surreal scene, sitting there naked, neither of them acknowledging what had just happened, the organic intensity, the mind-blowing way they'd so thoroughly taken one other apart.
She wondered if he thought less of her because she wasn't the least bit proper when it came to enjoying sex. She tilted her head to the side, studied his face as he concentrated on the task at hand. "I didn't mean to shock you."
"Shock me?" he asked, never looking up.
Fine. Make her spell it out. "The sex."
"The sex we weren't supposed to have?"
"That would be it." The man was a master of avoidance. "Did I? Shock you?"
"Does it matter?"
She jerked her bagged foot from his thigh. "Yes. It matters a lot what you think of me."
He looked at her then, his expression the same one he'd been wearing since she'd met him. The one that made her nuts because she couldn't read him at all.
So she wasn't the least bit surprised when he asked her, "Why?"
She got to her feet, leaned behind him to start the water running in the tub. "For the same reason that I wanted you to know that I never slept with Peter. Because as much as I love sex"—water temperature adjusted, she straightened, stood, looked him in the eye—"I tend to have most of my sex alone. I don't indulge with any man who asks. Only with a man who I can't imagine not having. One who turns on my mind as well as my body."
She swore a pleased smile flittered across his stoic face as he got to his feet. "The best sex always begins in the mind, Katrina. Trust me. There are still a few of us Neanderthal types who know that."
She didn't know what to say. She'd expected him to clam up again, not give her this glimpse of the man he was beneath his warrior's facade. Speechless, yet certain she was grinning like a fool, she stepped into the tub, thankful for the nonslip strips on the bottom, and pulled the lever for the shower.
Julian followed, closing the curtain, handing her a bottle of shampoo. She met his unwavering gaze as she leaned back and wet her hair.
"You know what I would love?" she asked, working up a head of lather as she backed up beyond the showerhead to give Julian access to the spray.
He wet his head and body and came up sputtering. "What's that?"
"Clean clothes. If I'd known we were going to have to hole up in the middle of the Everglades, I'd've packed appropriately while we were at Maribel's."
"Actually, we have clothes here."
His long dark hair reminded her of Johnny Depp in Chocolat, Daniel Day-Lewis as the last Mohican, and she couldn't help but blow out a long slow breath. "What sort of clothes?"
He poured a puddle of shampoo into his palms. "T-shirts and sweats. And, unfortunately, nothing in your size."
"I don't care." She nudged him into reverse, flat-tening her palm in the center of his impressive chest, moving beneath the water to rinse her hair once he was out of her way.
That done, she planted her hands at his waist and danced around him in the narrow space. "Anything soft and cotton sounds like heaven. Those jeans were beginning to chafe."
"I thought you looked pretty damn hot in those jeans with your ponytail swinging," he said, eyes screwed up as he rinsed shampoo suds from his hair.
She caught a quart of water before she managed to close her dropped jaw. "Julian Samms. Are you actually flirting with me?"
He shrugged, reached for the plastic bottle of body wash he'd left on the back of the commode. "Doesn't seem too out of line considering where I've had my hands and mouth."
She felt a blush rise from her toes to the roots of her hair. "I suppose you have a point."
He glanced down. "Nope. Not right now. I'm still pretty soft."
She was not going to rise to his bait, no matter that her heart tingled with his teasing. "Brain sex, huh?"
"Best sex organ in the body."
Hmm. She cast her gaze toward his groin, the thatch of dark hair there where his thick—but soft—penis nestled. "You're right, of course. Though don't discount the other organs you do have."
"I never do."
"And I'm sure all the other women whose lives you've saved have appreciated it as well."
He opened his eyes then, stared down and demanded her attention with no more than the sharpness of his gaze. "I don't sleep with women I'm assigned to. You're the first. And I plan for you to be the last."
She swallowed hard, knowing what he wasn't saying. He wasn't saying that he'd never sleep with another woman. Only that he'd made a mistake sleeping with her. A mistake he wouldn't make again.
What she wasn't as sure of was how she felt about what was an obvious truth.
She tried to casually toss it off. "So, this thing we're doing here is like those commercials? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?"
He nodded. "It can't be any other way."
She sighed. "I guess I thought..."
"What? That this was something emotional? Or real? More than an affirmation of life and all that?"
He was right, but it still hurt like hell to hear him say it. After all, he wasn't the one who'd made the mistake of falling in love. "Why me, then? If you don't sleep with the women you're paid to protect, why me?"
"I'm not paid to protect women, Katrina. Not anymore."
She started to write off his comment as semantics but was stopped by the look in his eyes. A look that had her wanting to ask when he'd stopped, why he'd stopped.
A look that reminded her he'd last walked out when she'd questioned him about who he had killed.
She'd bet her last nickel it had been a woman whose well-being had been in his hands. And she wasn't quite sure how that made her feel.
"Okay then. Forget the paid protection. Why me?"
He arched one of those dark warrior's brows. "Because you make it hard to say no."
She sputtered. "That's about the lamest thing I've heard come out of your mouth. And it doesn't tell me a thing."
The brow lowered. Lowered more, deepened into a deadly-looking crease. "You want the truth?"
Why did his tone of voice make her want to tremble, to run, to hide? "The truth is always a good place to start."
"Because you're not who I expected you to be," he said simply.
"Back to that, are we?" she asked, her ire rising along with the shower's steam. "Pretty girl who writes fluff can't possibly have any redeeming qualities?"
A stream of unfamiliar words rolled from his tongue. "Katrina. For christ's sake. You wear diamond earrings to sunbathe."
She closed her eyes, opened them again, set her jaw, and reached for the stud in her left earlobe. Then she grabbed Julian's hand and dropped the earring into his palm. "There. Feel better now?"
"I don't want your fucking diamonds," he said, handing it back.
She slapped at his hand. The earring fell, skittered across the tub and down the drain. It was like watching her connection to Peter and the disaster of the last few months wash away.
She couldn't believe the uplifting sense of relief. She reached for the other. "I don't want them either."
Julian snagged both of her wrists, pinned them to the wall on either side of her head. "Stop it."
"Stop what? Stop doing what I have to do to save my own life? Isn't that why we're here?" She shivered from his heat and his fury, and finally saw herself in his eyes. God, she'd been so stupid not to see it before. "Or is your perception of me as high maintenance giving you a problem with that?"
"You don't know shit about what you're saying, Katrina," he growled down.
She lifted her chin, feeling as if her heart would rumble straight out of her chest. "No? Then why don't you explain it."
"Why don't I just fuck you instead," he said, a nanosecond before his mouth came down.
He tasted like raw anger and unleashed rage, and none of it frightened her at all. This was who he was, a bottle of emotion needing to explode.
And so she let him, matching every stroke of his tongue, every nip of his teeth, every harshly inhaled breath, yet being the cognizant one, the one to finally ease the kiss back from a disastrous precipice.
She struggled against the hold he had on her wrists, demanding he relent. When he refused, her demands became insistent.
She pulled harder, slipping her hands from the vise of his; he flattened his palms against the wall on either side of her head while she wrapped her arms around his waist and pulled his body close.
She angled her head, pushing up into the kiss, feeling the tremors that gripped his body, surprise that he'd revealed himself so, thrilled that he trusted her that much.
She soothed him with her mouth and with her hands, sliding her palms over the hard straps of muscle on either side of his spine, massaging him with her fingertips, the heels of her palms, drawing on his lips with tiny sucking kisses.
He was huge and threatening as he loomed above her, his stance, his bulk, his fierce internal fight that she knew he didn't want her to see. She didn't have to see a thing. She felt and tasted it all, and when he shuddered and gave up one sharp sound that was almost a sob, she swore she fell completely in love with every inch of this damaged warrior.
Her warrior. Her man.
Moving his hands to cup her face, he softened the kiss. She was so glad they were where they were so the tears welling and falling from her lower lids vanished into the water drops beaded on her face.
Whatever he'd seen, whatever he'd done, it was killing him, yet nothing she could say right now would mean a thing because he was a man and he understood the language of sexual intimacy more than he did words.
And so she used her body, her hands, and her mouth, pulling away from his kiss to trail tiny love nips over his throat and collarbone, down the center of his chest to his belly.
He didn't even move. He remained statue still, rock hard and aloof, his hands coming to rest on her shoulders as she pushed back the shower curtain, turned to sit on the edge of the tub, and took his growing erection into her mouth.
He was soft and hard and thick when she took him to the back of her throat, cupping one hand to hold his sac, wrapping her other fingers around the base of his shaft.
She stroked him as she sucked him, the moisture of her mouth and that from the shower creating a slick lubrication, one she used to explore the extension of his arousal where the hard ridge rose behind his balls.
He muttered beneath his breath, sharp foreign words that had her smiling, had him asking, "What's so funny?"
"That language. What is it?" she asked, and went back to circling her tongue around the plum-ripe head of his cock. Oh, but she loved his taste.
"Mandarin."
She grinned again. "As in oranges?"
"As in Chinese. Christ, Katrina. Don't make me talk."
The idea that she could make him do anything thrilled her. And suddenly she didn't want to do this anymore. She was selfish and she wanted more. Wanted the fulfillment of having him inside of her.
With her lips pursed around his tip, she looked up and met his fiery gaze. "Julian?"
He growled.
"Would you make love to me now?"
The words were barely out of her mouth before he reached for her, hooking his hands into her armpits and pulling her to her feet.
His face was set in an expression of hopeful determination, and she smiled at the thought that she'd put it there. But that was all the time she had to think because his mouth was on hers again, his hands on the backs of her thighs lifting her up.
He pinned her to the wall with his weight and drove into her. She tore her mouth from his and cried out, wrapping her arms around his neck and holding on for the ride.
It was fast and furious, his erection stretching her open, his fingers gouging into her skin. She loved it all, the need, the power, the shattered control.
Her sex burned and ached with the friction and the arousal spreading through her like swamp fire, insidiously taking hold until putting it out seemed an impossible task. She would never get enough of this man.
She felt the flex of his legs on the backs of her thighs as he primed himself to come. His pleasure kindled hers unbearably, and she buried her face in his neck and let go.
He followed, and the sounds of their shared pleasure closed around them in the cloud of steam, wrapping their joined bodies in an embrace that felt like forever.
Eleven
SG-5 Safe House, Saturday, 9:30 a.m.
Julian held Katrina close in bed, listening for her deep even breathing before gathering up the courage to say what needed to be said.
Earlier they'd finished showering in cold water, then tumbled between the sheets afterward, using one another's bodies for warmth.
At least that's how it had started, a teasing and tickling case of Katrina's shivers, and his selfish intentions to get his hands on her under the guise of rubbing the circulation back into her skin.
But the need for warmth had quickly turned into the need for much, much more. For one another and solidarity and so many things that weren't about the situation they were in at all but were about the two of them as a man and a woman.
He'd made love to her again, the way he'd wanted to from the very start. Slowly. Looking down into her eyes, her breasts pressed flat beneath his chest, her ankles crossed in the small of his back.
He ground himself against her, rotated his hips in slow motion, watched tears leak silently from the corners of her eyes as she'd come.
He was exhausted. And she was finally asleep. But he wanted to tell her the truth.
He wanted her to know who and what he was because the small hold he still had on hope was growing tighter and stronger the more time he spent in her company.
And if there was even the remotest possibility this was more than sex, she had to know everything. Details he'd told no one. Details none of his SG-5 partners nor even Hank Smithson knew.
Spooning up into Katrina's body, Julian wrapped his arm around her middle, tucked her head beneath his chin and breathed deeply. "I was in Kenya when it happened. Assigned to a task force that no one digging through military records would ever find. We didn't exist, but we knew that going in."
He stopped, waited to see if his whispered words had disturbed her sleep, or if he was safe to go on. Her hair, which tickled his nose, smelled like the sea, like fresh air and freedom, and he lay there for long moments and did nothing but breathe her in.
"We were guarding a family of tribal royals from Burundi who were in negotiations to use the port at Mombasa. They wanted access to the facilities they would need to export their coffee beans. We were only there to make sure the meetings happened. No one wanted to see more civil unrest hit the news. Not after Rwanda."
What happened had been more like the chaotic urgency of Somalia and Black Hawk Down in the end. But the beginning was the killer. The decision he'd made causing all hell to break loose. The one he would have to live with every day for the rest of his life.
"It happened at zero three hundred," he said, then realized he should back up to make the whole thing clear for her. And for h
is own piece of mind.
"The wife of the tribal leader never appeared in public without wearing every piece of gold she owned. She knew exactly how dangerous it was but was too arrogant to care. I hated that bitch. She was bad news from day one."
Which was why he'd taken her on as his personal project. He'd been determined she wouldn't fuck up an assignment that should've been as simple as a baby-sitting job.
"It was the last night before they crossed the border and our services would no longer be needed. They refused to stay in any of the villages where shelter had been offered, so we pitched tents every night. And we traveled at a snail's pace because the elders couldn't handle anything more."
He stopped because he needed to breathe. He swore he hadn't talked so much at one time in years. He liked privacy. He liked silence. He liked sticking to the business at hand. Getting in, getting it done, and getting the fuck out.
He sure as hell did not like spilling his guts. But then, that's what had started this all, wasn't it?
"It was the middle of the night. I heard a struggle and a muffled scream inside her tent. One thing she had made sure I understood was that she never entertained overnight guests." He huffed his disgust. "She had also made sure I knew I was the exception.
"At first I thought the noises were a ploy to get me inside. She was like that. Manipulative. Entitled. But when I went in to check it out, I saw it was nothing like that at all."
He was suddenly cold, and pressed his thighs closer to the backside of Katrina's, wrapped his chest around her body, seeking comfort, a sensation so unfamiliar he almost couldn't breathe because of the way it raced through him.
"She was holding a kid, threatening him with a knife that would've scared the shit out of a butcher. He was probably ten or twelve but looked like six. And he had his hands wrapped around a dozen of her bracelets."
Even now he heard the woman's words, heard her cold orders. Kill him. Kill this thief now or I will gut him and leave him as carrion for the scavengers. And then I will do the same thing to you.
