Gamboa’s grip loosened around his cock, and he felt a tremble run through her fingers.
He’d lay odds that she didn’t have a plan, either, of what to—
“Put her on the table,” Carrera told Eric, “and fuck her.”
Gamboa’s gaze flew to his.
His belly sagged to the floor. He swayed back, but she caught his face in two hands, easing him forward as she scooted back and hiked her bottom onto the dining room table.
“We can fake this,” she whispered in Spanish. “Thrust your cock against the back of my thigh. It’ll be okay.” She spread her legs for him.
The sight was a mule kick to his gut. His balls twisted tight as he imagined doing what she’d suggested. He would climax. The friction of his boner hitting the back of her thigh and the hip movements that mimicked the sex act would… No way to avoid it; he’d spurt. He supposed he’d have to pretend to pull out and do the whole porno-cum-shot thing. Which meant that everyone in the room would see him make his O face. Another thing he would’ve like to avoid Gamboa witnessing in these circumstances. But they’d come this far, probably too far to walk away without planting that tracking device.
She smoothed her hands around his butt and urged him forward.
The act of stepping between her spread legs, of bringing his cock so close to her entrance, washed out his vision. He took the briefest moment to regain himself, then slid his arms around her and drew her close. He suffered another near-lapse in control as her naked breasts came in contact with his chest. Her nipples hardened into rigid little points against him, and her athletic thighs encircled his waist. He worked hard to steady his breathing. He cupped her firm ass cheeks in his palms and angled her hips up, putting her into a position that would allow him to pump against the back of her thigh. His diaphragm clenched.
“Turn toward me,” Carrera directed. “Both of you, so that I can see you enter her.”
Their eyes slammed together, locked and held.
A long line of Eric’s pulse pounded from his throat, down the left side of his sternum, into his stomach, and finally his aching balls.
She was going to do it. The look she gave him was steady and sure…although not before he caught something else. An unnamable emotion slipping through the depths of her eyes that said if they did this, a piece of her would be irretrievably stolen.
A fist closed around Eric’s heart. He couldn’t do that. He’d rather be gunned down than be the cause of this woman losing anything. “No,” he said in a suffocated voice, and eased back from her.
Panic dashed across her face, her nails digging into his elbows to try and stop him.
He pulled free of her fingers and faced Carrera. The sweet stench of the drug lord’s cigar tunneled into Eric’s nasal passageways. The stupid waterfall sounded like surf booming against rocks. Steel entered Eric’s jaw as he readied himself for the savage fall he was about to take.
Kyle, Jesus Christ, what happened to you?
Chapter Eleven
Kyle Hammond’s imitation of a clown in a barrel rolling down a hill—sans barrel, but still feeling like a huge fucking clown—wasn’t a quiet operation. He scuffled, scraped, snapped twigs, threw up a jet stream of dead leaves, and oomphed all the way down, finally belly-flopping to a halt at the bottom. Biting back a groan, he shook dirt out of his face and looked up. His eyeballs were still swinging in their orbits, but he could see well enough to determine that he’d landed in bad news.
Three Colombian bandidos dressed in forest camouflage were seated on logs around a campfire. Kyle would’ve found their expressions downright comical—faces frozen, eyes flexed wide, mouths formed into the shape of oooooo’s—had his dick not been put in such a serious sling by the situation.
A bandido with a scar near his eye managed to line up the facts first—Caucasian male in a flight suit with military green paint on his face—and he woke up real quick. Bounding to his feet, he grabbed a carbine rifle.
No! In a breath, Kyle was on his feet and lunging forward, using his forearm to knock the nose of the rifle skyward, luckily before it went off or else more bandidos would’ve surely been summoned to this soiree. He sent his other fist smashing into the bandido’s sweaty face. The man flew and fell.
The other two shouted and sprang to their feet.
Dammit, wasn’t there something in the Geneva Convention about excessive noise-making during a life-or-death fistfight?
The taller of the two threw a roundhouse at Kyle, but the man telegraphed the punch, and it was easy to duck. Kyle spun around—the shorter one had darted behind him—and landed a blow that sent that guy reeling to his knees…just as the tall bandido grabbed him from behind. Kyle growled through clenched teeth as the tall bandido cranked one of Kyle’s arms behind his head, locking him into a half-nelson. The position left one arm free, and Kyle gut-rammed his captor with the sharp point of his elbow. Air rushed out of the tall man, but he didn’t loosen his grip, and… Metal flashed.
Instinct whipped into high gear. Kyle snapped his hand up and grabbed the tall man’s wrist. A large, serrated K-bar knife stopped inches away from his cheek.
The tall bandido grunted with effort and his muscles flexed as he poured on the pressure.
Adrenaline pumping, Kyle struggled to hold off the blade, scuffling back and forth with the tall man, their boots churning up a ring of dust around their feet.
Problems multiplied as the short one scrambled back to his feet, a stream of Spanish profanity spewing from his lips. Half the words Kyle didn’t recognize, but the tone sure wasn’t an invitation to a quinceañera for the guy’s niece or sister or—The short bandido wrenched out his own knife and rushed forward, jabbing at Kyle’s gut.
Heart skidding sideways in his chest, Kyle kicked out, barely managing to keep the tall one’s knife off his throat while he was dealing with the short one. His new attacker leapt back, but slashed open the leg of Kyle’s flight suit along the way. Wet warmth flowed down Kyle’s lower thigh. Fucking suckbag cut me! A raw shout funneled up Kyle’s throat. Sweat sheeted down his face.
The short bandido came at him again, teeth bared.
Kyle jacked back one knee and pistoned out his leg. The sole of his flight boot caught the short one full in the face. The man’s nose flattened on impact, blood rainbowing out from the spongy mess, and Short Bandido sank to the ground for a nap.
Tall Bandido shouted and rammed a hard-boned knee up into Kyle’s tailbone. Stars of pain sprinkled across Kyle’s vision. The K-bar knife flashed toward his throat again. Kyle flinched back in time to avoid getting his jugular severed, but a streak of hot pain opened along the line of his jaw, and he felt more wet warmth flood down. Before the tall man could recover, Kyle used the back of his skull to bash his captor in the face—jerk forward, slam backward. Hard. Tall Bandido’s arms fell away, and Kyle lurched forward as the man keeled over unconscious, knife dropping to the ground.
Click!
Kyle whirled around, staggering as his buttery knees objected to the suddenness of his movement. Pain from that head-butt shot up from the base of his skull like iron railroad spikes.
The first bandido with the scar was pointing his carbine rifle at Kyle, two eyes glaring from above a bloody nose. His intention had clearly been to put a bullet in the American, and had the action not just jammed, Eric would be picking out Kyle’s coffin right now.
Exhaling a breath that was also a curse, Kyle scrambled for Tall Bandido’s fallen knife. In the next second, Scarface rammed a hard shoulder into Kyle’s side, driving him to the earth onto his back. Kyle’s pulse pounded into the back of his throat as Scarface jumped onto his chest and clamped a hand around his throat. Kyle grabbed Scarface’s wrist with both hands and counter-pulled against the man’s attempt to cut off his airway, his nostrils flaring. Cocksucker’s breath could peel the bark off every tree on this island.
But then halitosis and hypoxia took a backseat in importance to Scarface’s next intentions. The bandido raised hi
s carbine rifle high overhead, then swung down. Kyle blocked the blow with his forearm, screaming hoarsely when, crack, the metal stock met his radial bone with bruising force. Rotating his arm in a blare of agony, he grabbed the nose of the rifle and yanked it out of Scarface’s grip.
While the maneuver saved Kyle from any more skull-bashing bright ideas, it freed up both of the Colombian’s hands to strangle Kyle double-fisted, which he did, squeezing with the strength of a wire cable, his pupils dilated with maniacal determination. Kyle’s arms shook violently with the effort of holding him off. Already weakened from his fight with tall and short bandidos, Kyle’s lungs soon shrank…from Scarface’s weight on top of him and from lack of incoming air. From fear. I’m in trouble. He’d been up Shit Creek all along, but it finally hit him just how far. He bucked and thrashed.
If he made it out of this, no more lazing around on deployment. Ever.
Taking a calculated risk, Kyle shot one hand out to the side and swept his arm back and forth, searching again for Tall Bandido’s knife. As suspected, Scarface was able to strangle him more effectively without both of Kyle’s hands to offer resistance. Kyle’s tongue ballooned in his mouth and his pulse pounded frantically behind his optic nerves. Panic escalated as his eyes crossed, his vision fading. Then…his fingers brushed over a hilt.
He snatched up the K-bar and slashed it at Scarface’s throat. Turned out killing a man with a knife wasn’t easy. The movies made it look like it was; it wasn’t. Kyle only succeeded in skidding the blade over the bandido’s flesh. Blood bloomed on Scarface’s neck, and, here, at least, was a bonus—the pain of the strike startled the man into loosening his grip. Kyle was able to draw a small breath. Attacking again, this time Kyle aimed the sharp tip straight in. The blade drove inward with a meaty thunch, jerking raggedly over vertebra bone. Drops of blood the size of Christmas tree ornament balls splotched down on Kyle’s face and chest. He spluttered. He’d never seen so much blood. The front of his flight suit was soaked in a matter of seconds.
Scarface’s eyes glazed. Kyle heaved him off, then rolled onto his hands and knees and pulled in a huge breath. He rasped out a cough, and tried to get to his feet, but his legs were having none of that. Glancing drunkenly around the campsite, he confirmed that no one else was presently trying to kill him. He sat back on his heels and turned his face to the sky, inhaling more gulps of oxygen into his parched lungs. After all the loud scuffles, thuds, grunts, and low shouts of fighting, the sudden silence sounded creepy. His breathing and the soft crackle of the campfire were the only sounds. LZ and Nicole… Gotta go, gotta get moving.
He planted one foot, pushed himself up, then planted the other, taking a moment to secure his balance. He shuffle-stepped over to the short bandido with the smashed face. The man’s nose had been driven into his brain by Kyle’s boot. So the dude wasn’t just taking any old nap, but the dirt nap. All right… He wobbled over to the tall one and checked for a pulse. Still alive. Kyle blinked slowly. To kill or not to kill…? He was too tired to kill anymore, which he supposed saved him from the moral dilemma of really deciding. Ripping some fabric off the tall bandido’s clothes, he used it to tie and gag the bad guy. He couldn’t chance the beeyatch coming awake and alerting his other bandido amigos that an American soldier was running amok on their little fucking Isla Bonita. Such tattle tailing could get LZ and Nicole killed. Or Tall Man could decide to sneak up on Kyle while he was trying to shoot out the generator.
The generator…gotta get to the generator. Shit, he needed to find his sniper rifle.
Kyle limped to the foot of the hill where he’d landed after his fall. Best place to start his search for his CAR-15 was here. He’d fan out in an ever-widening—
He smacked his palms onto his knees as a groundswell of dizziness made the vertigo he’d endured that zero-zero night with LZ feel like a head rush, like the kind a guy got from sucking helium out of a balloon then seeing how many verses of Call Me Maybe he could get out before his voice re-normalized. Or possibly that was just what he did after too many shots of Jägermeister. His bent-over position put his injured leg into his direct line of sight. He watched shiny blood push to the surface of his pant leg, seep away, then more appear instantly. He was bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig.
Straightening in slow increments, he stumbled over to the nearest bandido—Scarface—and tore a length of fabric off the guy’s clothes. Hands shaking, Kyle tied the strip around his upper thigh as tight as he could. Here’s hoping his femoral hadn’t been hit. Because then it’d be back to the coffin shop in about five minutes.
Please don’t be dead, Eric. I AM coming.
It felt like he was walking in moon boots as he moved back over to the foot of the hill. Fuck, but he needed a drink…water, he meant, lots and lots of water, so his mouth could stop feeling like Al Qaeda’s living room floor. He set to methodically searching the area for his rifle. I killed two men was the thought most interested in keeping him company. Scarface and the short bandido were his first. As a military man, Kyle knew he might someday have to take a life, but he’d figured it would come down to him dropping a torpedo on a submarine full of faceless people. He’d never imagined killing men with his bare hands. Jamming a knife into someone’s throat had been…something else. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to feel about it, what the protocol was. Pumped to be alive? Sickened? Filled with regret? Honestly, he felt exhausted. It was the best he could muster.
He tripped over a tree branch, and ground out a curse. This was taking too long. And what if he couldn’t find his sniper rifle? Should he try to take out the generator with the carbine? No, the shot was too tough for such a crap-o-mundo weapon, which appeared to be broken anyway. But what would Eric and Nicole do without a distraction? No Plan B had been developed. Because Eric trusted Kyle to get the job done. Fuck, he couldn’t believe—
Finally! He found his rifle and snatched it off the ground.
Now the next mountain he had to hurdle was, in fact, an actual mountain. Or a hill, but climbing back up the way he’d tumbled down, hands clawing, boots skidding, an avalanche of debris cascading down in his wake, made it feel like this hill was the damned Matterhorn.
By the time he reached the top, his vision was glassed over with sweat and pain, and his heart was nearly pounding out of all sorts of places on his body—ears, chest, veins on his neck. Gasping, he slipped over the lip of the ridge, skulked over to the spot across from the generator, and hunkered down on his belly beside a shrub, his feet draped over the opposite edge. He adjusted the rifle scope—which was pointing up at the big blue sky from its own fall down the hill—then lifted it to his eye. The crosshairs swung crazily across the visible edge of the generator.
Kyle lowered the scope and bowed his head. Come on, man, come on, man… Okay, so yeah. He was fucked up. His brutal fall down the hill, the knot of bruise on his forearm which was already the size of a boar’s testicle, the knife wounds to both his leg and jaw, the balls-out fight for his life, and the aftershocks of an ass-truck of adrenaline abandoning his bloodstream were all taking their toll. His entire body was shaking like he was suffering from late-stage hypothermia. But he needed to Pull. Himself. Together. He couldn’t make a tough shot while he was in this kind of shape…not even an easy shot.
Smashing his eyelids shut, he drew in several deep breaths, and tried to mind-over-matter himself. He lifted the scope again. His shakes were a little better, but, crap, not by much, and he saw another problem. A guard was loitering near the generator. Did Kyle have time to wait for the man to leave? Not that he cared overly much about collateral damage from the explosion—he was on a killing spree today, right?—but if he missed, he’d give away the distraction before it even became one. On a normal day, he wouldn’t worry about missing. Today? Big time.
Kyle squinted harder at the man, who was dragging on a cig and looking as relaxed as if a coke whore was on her knees in front of him, chroming his dome. Dude wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
> Tick-tock, tick-tock—Screw it.
Kyle sighted, held his breath, and squeezed off a shot.
A hole appeared in the wall of the hacienda just above the generator, a single plume of dust curling up from it, a few chunks of plaster spilling out.
So luck be a lady, not, but rather an old hag giving him the one-fingered salute. He’d fucking missed.
The nearby guard frowned and turned his head toward the ping Kyle couldn’t hear this far away.
Kyle’s chest socked in. He wasn’t going to be able to do this. He was too messed up. Dammit, how far had Eric and Nicole been forced to play out their sex show?
Chapter Twelve
Nicole was pretty sure her knees had gone nerveless. The rest of her, most definitely, had not. In fact, she could count every one of her senses alive with Navy lieutenant Eric O’Dwyer. The warm feel of his flesh was imprinted on hers, the scent of his masculine sweat—how did he manage to make it smell so good?—was still in her nose and on her skin, the sound of his heartbeat in her ears, the sight of him…well, no memory was required for that. He was standing right in front of her, naked as the day he was born, tall and sleekly muscled, beautifully erect. How much bigger and what level of better? Oh, no words could describe his degree of magnificence down there.
When it came to taste, his kiss lingered on her tongue. That first one had sideswiped her, the tender reverence of it making an inexplicable yearning surface inside her, a hunger for him, both tender and fierce. She’d acted before she’d realized what she was doing, chasing down more of him by thrusting her tongue inside his mouth on the second kiss.
The pleasure of the contact had tumbled her deeper into an unrecognizable delirium. Tongue to tongue, he tasted like the masculinity he exuded with every breath he took, bold and strong and invincible. It’d called to a femininity in her so long repressed she’d nearly forgotten it existed. And when the proof of his desire had risen up hard against her, a womanly sense of victory had warmed her all over. In that instant, she’d never wanted a man inside her more. A groan of pure longing had poured out of her.
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