He spun, so fast she didn’t actually see him move, and stomped toward her. Stopping barely an inch from where she now stood, shaking a little. “Don’t ever use that name again, Niki.”
“Why? Who’s Crowley? Why did you pretend to be dead for a year? Why were you in Bali when I was there? How did you know what I was about to do? Why did you have a gun? Who the hell are you, Lincoln? Really? Why do you look at me like you want to kiss me if I annoy you so much? And why did you almost make love to me five years ago and then freaking stop?”
She shoved his chest. Holy shit, she actually shoved his chest. “Why? Why did you do that to me?” She shoved his chest again. He staggered back another step, expression as closed as the door to his warehouse. “Why did you make me feel so incredible, so sexy and…and wanted, and then just throw me out of your freaking house? What the hell is your story, Lincoln?” One more shove for good measure. “What. The ever-loving fuck. Is it?”
“Nik.”
“Don’t freaking ‘Nik’ me!” Oh man, when had she gotten so angry? “I never gave up on you. My heart told me you weren’t dead! And the first thing you do when you see me is brush off the fact you faked your death like all you did was pick your freaking nose? And not even try to explain why? That’s the way you treat someone you’ve known since she was ten?”
“That.” He destroyed the small distance between them in a split second, his stare locked on hers, his body so close, she shivered. Her nipples grew hard again, tight tips of need aching to be touched. Pinched. Sucked.
“What do you mean, that?” She glared at him, even as she forced herself to keep her hands balled at her side instead of burying them in his hair and reminding him just how good it felt when they kissed. She hadn’t forgotten, and she would bet her last dollar he hadn’t, either. “God, why is having a conversation with you so confusing?”
“That,” he repeated, lower this time. His breath played with her lips. His eyes searched hers. “The very fact I have known you since you were ten. You’re my little sister’s best friend, Nikalene. I’ve watched you grow up. And I’m ten years older than you. I shouldn’t even think about you the way I do, let alone act on it.”
“How do you think about me, Lincoln?”
His nostrils flared. Heat radiated from him, as if an internal battle raged in his soul she could almost feel on her skin.
“Tell me,” she whispered, feathering her fingers over his chest. The memory of how sculpted and smooth and hard it was sent a hot lick of lust into her core. Five years ago, she’d traced her tongue all over his chest, had tasted his dark, hard nipples. Had risen up onto tiptoe and kissed him. And he’d kissed her back. A soft touching of lips barely lasting more than a heartbeat, but a kiss all the same.
And then he’d stopped. Sent her from his home.
Four years later, he’d stopped her from bashing the hell out of a depraved, corrupt diplomat…and then died.
And now his lips were inches from hers, their breath mingling, and she knew he wanted her as much as she wanted him, regardless of what he’d said.
She knew it.
“How do you think of me?” she asked again, trailing her fingertips over his nipples. They beaded at her touch, the cotton of his shirt incapable of hiding his response. His nostrils flared again, and his unreadable gaze drilled into hers. “When you’re lying in bed at night…or when you’re in the shower. Do you think about the way I would look in the shower, all wet and naked? Do you wonder how my thighs would feel beneath your palms as you slide your hands up to my—”
He crushed her mouth with his, silencing her.
The last time he’d kissed her, he’d been so reverent, so gentle, like she could break at any moment. It had shaken her to the core, made her wetter and more ready for him than she’d thought possible. Of course, she’d been a naïve nineteen-year-old virgin then. Barely kissed, let alone touched.
She wasn’t that girl anymore. She may still be a virgin—no one else had ever come close to making her feel what Lincoln had—but she was no longer sheltered. What activist fighting for the rights of abused children was? She’d seen things, experienced things.
But this kiss…holy crap, it was savage, brutal. Hungry and possessive and…and…carnal.
His tongue lashed into her mouth, demanding her participation. He fisted a hand in her hair, holding her head exactly where he wanted it. His other hand grabbed her arse cheek, squeezing it with a force that bordered on painful as he slammed his hips to hers. Her sex flooded with need. Her blood turned to liquid lust in her veins.
Holy crap.
She kissed him back, even as a jolt of fear and something darker, something hungrier, snaked through her. How many times had she fantasied about this, about him, this Lincoln, the one she’d only even seen once twelve months ago?
Growling into her mouth, he raked his hand up her rib cage, cupped her breast and then, hands on her boob and in her hair, drove her back into the side of the Hyundai.
Oh yes.
She rocked her hips against his, and he accepted her wordless invitation, nudging her thighs apart and nestling between them with dominating urgency.
His cock—long, thick and hard, and imprisoned by his jeans—pressed to her lower belly, flooding her with wild excitement and impatient frustration. She’d wanted that cock inside her since she was old enough to know what a female wanted a cock for. She wanted it…only his, only Lincoln’s.
Rolling her hips, desperate for the feel of it on her sex, in her sex, she wriggled her hand between their bodies, reaching for his belt buckle.
It didn’t matter that their first time—her first time—was going to be against the side of a cheap rental car. Finally, after all these years, she and Lincoln were going to be together.
Finally.
With another growl—this one far more tortured than his last—he pulled away from her and staggered back a step. Another. Then another. His stare locked on her face as he swiped at his mouth.
She blinked. An empty coldness swarmed into her core.
What?
“Fuck,” he muttered before spinning away, his hands clawing through his hair. “What am I doing?”
He shot her a look over his shoulder, and if she wasn’t so pissed at him, she would have been torn apart by the haunted guilt swimming in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Niki. I shouldn’t…this…Jesus, I shouldn’t…” He rubbed at his face, shaking his head.
“You’re kidding me, right?” The stunned question burst from her before she could stop it.
He turned, hands buried in his hair, jaw knotted. “About which part? That I almost fucked my little sister’s best friend? Or that I was about to do it with all the tenderness of a gorilla in heat? I could have hurt you.”
A dry laugh tore from her. Bitter disbelief coated the back of her throat. “How many times are you going to do this to me, Lincoln? Bring me to the freaking edge and then cut me off?”
Jaw bunching, he frowned. “Clearly I want you, Nikalene. You have no clue how much I want you—but you shouldn’t want me. I’m not who you think I am. What I just did should show you that.”
“I’ve fantasied about this version of you so many times, Linc.” She narrowed her eyes. Anger cut through the cold truth. Screw him. It was time he learned she wasn’t just his little sister’s best friend; the girl in high school voted most likely to one day join a convent.
She’d rejected every date request because of him.
“Ever since that night when you appeared from nowhere in Bali, more dangerous and scary than I’d ever seen you, I’ve fantasied about that version of you.” She let out a ragged breath, pulse pounding in her ears. “I’ve spent so many dark, private moments lost to the thought of what it would be like to have that Lincoln—the one I’d thought dead—barge into my place, pin me against the wall, and take from my body every drop of pleasure he wanted.”
His Adam’s apple slid in his throat. The muscles in his jaw bunched again. He was unsettled.
“Nik.”
“I felt guilty, fantasizing about you like that.” Screw him. “I thought you were dead. After all, that’s what I was told, and what kind of person did that make me if I couldn’t stop thinking about sex with you even after you were gone? But I could never fight those fantasies when they overwhelmed me. I gave up trying. I craved them, I craved you, the scary, dangerous Lincoln, just as much as I craved the insanely smart, darkly sarcastic, brooding Lincoln from my teenage years. The out-of-bounds big brother of my best friend who never even acknowledged my existence until that one night, on my nineteenth birthday, when I caught you looking at me…”
Chapter 3
The breath in his lungs grew tight at her words, at the memories they awoke. Guilt—and raw, primitive lust—consumed him. That night, he’d been unable to resist her, unable to deny his long-held desire for her…until the reality of the situation slammed into him and he’d reeled away.
She was his sister’s best friend, and he was an agent for Australia’s most secret and dangerous intelligence organization. No matter how much he’d wanted to be with her, he couldn’t.
He wouldn’t have done that. Not to his sister, not to her.
And to make sure he hadn’t, he’d finally accepted the promotion from cyber security to international fieldwork the agency had been offering since recruiting him. If he wasn’t anywhere near Niki, he couldn’t want her.
How wrong he’d been.
Dropping his hands from his hair, he balled them at his sides. “Stop.”
“Stop what, Lincoln?” Her eyes flashed. Her chin tilted. Jesus, she was angry with him. Seriously pissed. “Wanting you to fuck me?” She shook her head. “You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted to have sex with. And honestly, I don’t care which you it is—the brooding computer geek I grew up lusting after, or the intimidating-as-all-hell stranger who came charging out of the night and stopped me from doing something crazy in Bali. Either will do. As long as it’s you. I freaking flew across the country to find you, Lincoln. That’s got to tell you something.”
It did. It told him he was walking on treacherous ground. And that he needed to get Niki as far away from him as possible. Any way he could.
Gut a swirling mess, he let out a dry snort. “It tells me no matter how worldly and hardcore you think you are, you’re still the deluded girl I knew who believes in princess fairy tales, true love, and happy-ever-afters.” He ran a slow look over her. “The world’s changed, Niki. I’ve changed. But you haven’t.”
Which was bullshit. A woman stood before him now, everything about her more mature and ripe than the last time she’d begged him to make love to her. She’d changed, all right. And he had no defenses against her.
God help him, he was in trouble here.
She studied him, expression enigmatic. And then a small smile curled her lips. “Nothing has changed?”
His heart smashed into his throat at her confident, almost smug tone. Or was it the way she lifted one eyebrow as she pushed herself from the side of her rental?
“Are you sure about that?” She lifted her hands to where her T-shirt disappeared into her jeans. “Are you one-hundred percent certain nothing’s changed?”
She tugged the white cotton free of her waistband, her gaze locked on his face.
“What are you doing, squirt?” Christ, where had all the air in his lungs gone?
“Proving you wrong.”
“Meaning?” His cock throbbed at the slight glimpse of smooth skin between her shirt and her jeans.
“I’ll make you a deal, Lincoln.” She took a step closer to him, her smile turning smug. Knowing. Hell, a smile like that had no right looking that sexy on her. “If you can resist me, I’ll go. Get on the next plane and fly back to Perth.” She took another step closer, tracing her top lip with her tongue. “If you can resist me.”
“Niki.” When the hell had the Simpson Desert been dumped into his mouth? “You need to think about what you’re doing.”
She laughed, and like her smile, it was sexier than he could ever imagine. “Oh Lincoln, I’ve been thinking about this for years.”
And with that, she pulled her T-shirt up over her head and threw it aside.
“Fuck me.” The curse tore from him in a strangled groan. His stare roamed over what she’d revealed. He couldn’t stop himself. He just couldn’t.
A plain white bra cupped her breasts, but it was that simplicity that drove him wild. The bra wasn’t designed to seduce or entice, but to do a job, and it did its job well. But the very fact Niki wore it drove the blood to his cock faster than any skimpy lacy thing could have.
He swallowed, lust and guilt a hot lump in his throat, and devoured the sight of her.
She wasn’t skinny, she loved her food too much, but she was fit. Back when he’d been in her life almost every day, she’d loved playing field hockey almost as much as she’d loved kicking up hell against those she deemed without morals. How many protest rallies had he dragged her and his sister from in their teenage years? Protests against coal mining, live-animal exports, batter-hen farms. Protests to shame politicians who were against asylum seekers coming to Australia. Protests to draw attention to child labour factories in third-world countries.
Hell, he’d even gone and pulled her and Bebe from a protest against fur used in the fashion industry. For that protest, they’d been wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and body paint—their bare skin painted to look like exposed, bleeding muscles. He’d had to remind himself over and over that day she was his little sister’s best friend, barely nineteen, off-limits.
That night, he’d gotten wasted in a bar to avoid the temptation of remembering how she’d looked.
Right now, however, there was no paint to distract him from how exquisite her body still was, no yelling protestors and angry cops to stop him taking in the smooth expanse of creamy skin, the high, round swells of her breasts held by pristine white cotton, the flatness of her belly, the tiny raven tat on her hipbone…
Who’d given that to her? One of his old rivals in Perth? For some messed-up reason, he’d always thought he’d be the first one to mark her skin with ink, and the thought of someone else popping her cherry stirred a caveman-like possessive lust in him.
“When did you get the ink?” Resist. He had to resist her.
No you don’t. Take her. Now. On the bonnet of the rental. Strip her naked, spread her thighs wide and bury yourself deep inside her.
“The day I was told you were dead.”
He dragged his stare back up to her face.
“Everything changed for me that day, Lincoln.” She took a step toward him, feathering her fingers over the beautiful tattoo of the black bird. “The fact I never got to be with you, that I never would get to be with you, have you inside me, filling me…”
He ground his teeth, incapable of stopping the raw groan low in his chest.
“I would have sold my soul for a way to go back in time and prove to you then what I’m about to prove now.”
He should be turning from her, walking away. He should be shutting this down. Instead, every molecule in his body craved her. Her skin, her curves, her heat, her wetness.
“And what’s that?” he asked, the words little more than a scratching breath.
She flashed that seductive smile again. It flooded his cock with steel. Christ, he should be ashamed of himself.
“That regardless of our age difference,” she said, unzipping her jeans, “regardless of who I am to your sister, regardless of whatever it is you do for work—you and I are meant for this.”
“This?”
She shimmied out of her jeans, kicked them away and closed the distance between them with one final step.
He caught a tormenting glimpse of a pristine white G-string, and then she skimmed her fingers up his chest, over his nipples, to the hair at the back of his head. “This,” she repeated on a whisper. “Fucking
. Each other. Anytime and every time we want.”
“Niki,” he groaned, even as his hands found their way to her hips, her rib cage. “You don’t want to do this. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
Tightening her grip in his hair, she smiled. “Yes, Lincoln. I do.”
She raised up onto tiptoe and kissed him.
And his resistance shattered.
With a growl, he grabbed her arse and hauled her up off her feet. The warm flesh of her bare backside branded his palms and detonated a feverish urgency in him. She wrapped her legs around his hips, locking her ankles at the small of his back as he carried her back to the car.
He perched her on its bonnet, groaning as she lashed her tongue against his. He met her hunger with his own, years of denying himself what he wanted—her—smashing through him, overwhelming.
She ground her pussy to his groin, clawing at his scalp even as she deepened the kiss.
Stop. Stop her. This can’t happen. You can’t do this.
Yes, he could. Snagging her wrists, her yanked her hands from his hair and moved them to his belt buckle.
Tearing her lips from his, her breasts heaving, she stared up into his face and slowly tugged his belt open.
He watched her, the sight of her lips glistening with his saliva sending fresh blood to his groin. A hot spasm claimed his dick, just as she popped the top button of his fly.
Stop. Stop now. Before it’s—
“Too late,” he growled, as he fisted a hand in the hair at her nape and crushed her lips with his, closing his other hand over her breast and kneading its heavy weight.
She moaned, drawing his groin closer to her spread sex with her legs and heels. A rush of liquid electricity surged through him and he squeezed her breast, nipping her bottom lip with his teeth for a heartbeat before moving his lips to her throat, the curve of her shoulder, her collarbone.
“Oh yeah,” she rasped, grinding her pussy harder against his trapped erection. “That’s good.”
He pulled away—long enough to see immediate dismay and anger flare in her eyes—before he yanked the pliable cup of her bra aside and captured her nipple with his mouth.
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