by Julie Leto
She preferred men who were easy to enjoy and discard. Sean was a challenge. He’d use any snippet of information she inadvertently let slip against her. He had the capacity to play her as expertly as she might him. She was smart enough to fear that she’d tell him more than he ever needed to know simply because he asked.
And even worse, he had the power to get under her skin.
In fact, he might have already.
But despite her misgivings, she stepped into his personal space anyway, straight into the miasma of sweat and heat searing off his body.
She had a job to do—and having sex with Sean would serve double-duty. She could work off her sexual stir-craziness and keep him close for a couple more days.
All in all, it was win-win.
Even for him.
Hell, especially for him.
“What do you want to know about me?” she asked.
He stepped in close and then tilted his head up to the sun, as if to remind her of his superior height. “More than the fact that you eat oatmeal with blueberries for breakfast every morning, skip lunch and have a dinner around five o’clock that consists of one lean protein and three vegetables, two of which are green.”
He’d noticed her food selections? Sneaky. She’d delivered his meals to his room on a tray while she’d eaten alone in the small dining room that had clear views of both the front and back doors. And yet, he’d made it his business to discover this seemingly insignificant detail about her post-holiday diet plan. Why? To show her the power of his observational skills and throw her off-kilter?
Because if that was his motivation, it worked.
“You haven’t exactly been forthcoming with me, either,” she pointed out. “When I ask how you’re feeling, I’m lucky if I get a one-word, usually fine or tired or hungry.”
“Pain doesn’t make me particularly chatty,” he said.
She took a half step back and stroked the length of his body with a bold, assessing gaze.
“You don’t look like you’re suffering too much anymore.”
He stretched his shoulders, hooked the towel around his neck.
“I think I’m ready.”
His declaration—delivered with a twinkle in his soulful, blue-gray eyes—raised the tiny hairs on the nape of her neck.
“Ready for what?”
He grinned, tugged the towel off his shoulders and threw it at her. She yelped in surprise but caught it just as he broke into a run.
Five
Sean tried not to take too much pleasure out of throwing Brynn Blake off-kilter, but he couldn’t help himself. Despite her subtle attempts at flirtation, he’d seen her type enough times to know her type: an ice-princess.
Emphasis on the princess.
Sure, she worked for a living. And yes, she’d orchestrated an impressive rescue from the hellhole where he’d been tortured to the brink of insanity, if not death. But she was efficient and thorough, not kick-ass. She had other people to do her dirty work, from her Latina co-conspirator to the unnamed twelve-year-old in pigtails who delivered their meals three times a day.
Brynn Blake wasn’t used to taking care of problems all on her own, which was going to make his escape from this gilded cage a snap—or so he thought until his ankle caught on some unseen object and sent him hurtling to the rough, stone ground.
He would have tucked, rolled and sprung back to his feet if not for the realization that the thing that had thrown him off-balance was her foot, swung with perfect proficiency in a low, roundhouse kick.
He fell against the hard surface of the patio with a grunt. He braced his hands, prepared to counter her surprise attack, but she merely strolled up to him, still in her high-heeled sandals, dusting off her hands.
“Where, exactly, do you think you’re going?”
Okay, maybe he’d misjudged her speed.
He put his hands up in surrender. “Hey, I was just going to cool off in the pool.”
She narrowed her eyes, which had a stronger effect out in the sunlight when her wicked green irises blazed against her milky skin and the backdrop of a perfect blue sky.
“And you needed a running start?”
“Scared of what Dante will do to you if you lose me?”
She jammed her fists onto her hips. “I’m not afraid of anyone.”
“You’re afraid of Dante Burke or you wouldn’t have taken this job.”
When she spoke this time, her lips barely moved. “I told you. I owed him a favor.”
Though he wasn’t entirely certain she wasn’t going to try and drop him again, he stood. The minute he dragged his feet under him, her stance changed. He’d watched her spar with Marisela and had made the erroneous assumption that he’d seen the best she had to offer.
He wouldn’t be so overconfident next time.
“What’d he do?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Dante. What did he do for you to make you owe him?”
“That’s none of your business.”
He clucked his tongue. “And here I thought you wanted to have a real conversation.”
“Pick another topic.”
“I will, after we go for a swim.”
As he hoped, her reaction time, taken off-guard, wasn’t a match for his. He snagged her by the elbows before she could jab them into his solar plexus and spun them around. With her pressed tightly to his chest, he propelled them backward into the pool.
The sound of her enraged scream just before they splashed underwater injected him with the kind of vigor he couldn’t get from eating right, pumping up on protein or working out until his muscles burned.
This brand of incendiary spark came only from holding a hot woman tight to his body and getting her soaking wet.
Once submerged, she made quick work of kicking herself free by jabbing her heel into his thigh. He grunted, expelling his breath and forcing him to surface. He was gulping in a mouthful of oxygen when she splashed him and sent him into a choking fit.
“What the hell was that?” she demanded.
In between the sheets of water raining down his face and obscuring his vision, he watched her kick across the pool to the stairs. She plopped herself at the top step and tore off her sandals. He ducked back under the water, fully expecting her to bean him in the head. She’d already ripped a gash across his leg.
It was just a scratch and he couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d taken her in the water with him, but then, Sean had never been one to examine his actions with too much introspection.
This time when he broke the surface, he tilted his head back so that his hair, already too long before he’d been taken, streamed out of his face.
“Water’s nice,” he said.
He expected her to curse or rage or throw the shoe she gripped like a 9mm, but instead, she only eyed him with a narrow gaze.
“Okay,” she said cryptically. “You proved your point.”
“What point?”
“You can physically overpower me. You didn’t have to ruin my Prada sling-backs to prove it.”
He breaststroked toward her, stopping just out of reach. Though she was in the shallow end, he didn’t stand, enjoying the feel of the cool pool water swirling around his tired, aching muscles. “I wasn’t trying to prove anything.”
She arched a brow skeptically.
“My ability to physically overpower you hasn’t been in question for a couple of days now,” he clarified, “though I admit that little swipe with your foot was an interesting surprise.”
She frowned. “Yes, well, while you were in a painkiller-induced sleep, Marisela and I filled our time with training. I figured I needed the practice if I was going to keep you in line.”
He chuckled. “You’d need more than practice, sweetheart. When I decide to blow this popsicle stand, you won’t be able to stop me.”
Her head bobbed as she listened, as if she was wholly unaware of how she was acknowledging the truth. Why Dante hadn’t set her up with back-
up security was a mystery, though Sean did not discount the possibility that just because he hadn’t yet spotted a team keeping them under surveillance didn’t mean Dante’s people weren’t somewhere close by.
The questions piling up in Sean’s brain nearly dragged him back under the water. For weeks, he hadn’t been able to hold on to a single coherent thought, but now that his recovery had turned a corner, his head overflowed with questions that needed answers. First and foremost, why would anyone want to find Jayda so badly now, five years after her reported death? Second, why would anyone think he had information about her whereabouts when, before she’d disappeared out of his life, she’d made it perfectly clear that she wanted nothing to do with him?
Then there was the separate matter of Dante’s arranging his retrieval. How did he know that Sean had gone missing in the first place? They were friends but hadn’t spoken for months. He’d been following a lead on a run-of-the-mill cheating spouse case in Shreveport when he’d been jumped, drugged and spirited halfway across the world. So why did Dante send in a private contractor instead of an official team? Sean hadn’t left the Arm under the best of circumstances, but he’d never betrayed his colleagues or his country.
Finally, he considered the question of his continued sequestration. He’d been kidnapped and tortured but had not been debriefed. Wasn’t the Arm interested in why someone was looking for a once-valuable asset who’d been dead for half a decade?
Sean drifted onto his back, floating away from Brynn as the circular queries spun in his gray matter but connected to nothing useful. He wasn’t one hundred percent recovered. He likely wouldn’t be for months. But he was strong enough to move and determined to get to the bottom of the whole mess.
Which meant he needed the cooperation of Dante’s handpicked babysitter.
He watched from the waterline as she stood and tugged her leather belt off from around her waist and laid it out straight beside her shoes in the sun. He expected her to sprawl out on the nearby chaise and dry herself out, so he kicked off toward the far end of the expansive infinity pool to start a round of laps.
His sutures tugged at his side while he moved, but swimming back and forth a few dozen times and then soaking in the hot tub would be the perfect ending to a fruitful afternoon. He’d completed his full exercise routine, tested his hand-to-hand combat skills with an interesting opponent and had caught a brief, but memorable glimpse of her breasts in her wet, silky blouse.
All in all, not a bad day.
One that got better the minute he felt the water surge as she dove in beside him.
She slid past him, her body enveloped in bubbles. But even in a swirl of white froth, he’d recognize bare legs. He nearly snorted in a nose full of water but instead tucked his head down and increased the rotation of his arms and the power behind his kicks until he’d caught up with her.
Her stroke was sleek yet efficient. She’d nearly reached the edge when she tucked and rolled and then kicked off from the wall as if she were competing in the Olympics. He noted a flash of blue amid the cloud of auburn hair. She hadn’t removed her blouse, which was fine by him. The incentive of seeing her wet and braless spurned him faster. Just as she was about to touch the edge, he snagged her ankle, pulled her back and then beat her to the finish.
She came up sputtering. “You cheated!”
He wanted to gloat. He wanted to remind her, yet again, that injured or not, he was still physically superior. But he couldn’t form a single intelligible word, not with her nipples popping through her blouse like gumdrops.
She splashed him full in the face. “Hey!”
“Hush,” he begged, wiping the water from his face. “I won. Now, I’m claiming my prize.”
Unsurprisingly, she didn’t wilt under his stare. She didn’t yelp or protest when he snagged her arms and dragged her flush against him. He took a split second to explore her hypnotic green eyes for any sign of alarm, but he saw nothing to throw him off his intentions.
Which was a good thing, since he had no intention of changing course.
He wanted her—and she wanted him to want her. He had no doubt that this had been her plan. Somewhere in the less arrogant part of his mind, he gave her credit for achieving her objective so easily. Not that he was a hard sell. Sean could think of only one thing he wanted more than escaping this deceptively pretty prison—and that was making love to his even prettier jailer.
Six
“Are you going to kiss me?” she challenged.
His grip on her upper arms tightened. Brynn had no doubt in her mind that Sean Devlin, even though only partially recovered and exhausted from his punishing workout, could snap her arms like twigs if he wanted to. But judging by the erection pressed against her belly, hurting her wasn’t his intention. And like the pool water lapping around them like a thousand tiny tongues, his devilish blue eyes twinkled with erotic mischief.
“Do you want me to kiss you?”
“Does it matter what I want?”
He pulled her closer and swept his lips across hers with such swiftness, she wasn’t sure if his mouth had touched hers or if she’d only imagined the brush of salty warmth. But dream or not, the close contact sparked a flame that traveled straight to the tips of her breasts and then flashed outward until her entire body erupted with gooseflesh.
“Yeah, babe,” he assured. “It matters.”
“Then don’t call me babe.”
He chuckled, the throaty sound tickling through her as if his fingers were rippling between her legs instead of the water.
“Then what should I call you? Brynn is a beautiful name, but what would I call you to make you hot? Or should I say, hotter? Do you like sweetheart?”
He buried his nose into her neck, swiping his tongue along the ridge of muscle that ran parallel to her accelerating pulse.
“Maybe darlin’,” he said before dipping his head and suckling the hollow of her neck. “What about cher? I’m a ragin’ Cajun from deep in the bayou. Does that get you off, knowing you’ll be slumming with a man whose pedigree was spawned in a swamp?”
He folded her arms behind her so that her back arched when he dropped his head and slid his lips across the upper swell of her breasts. Surrounded by water under the umbrella of warmth from the sun, he’d entangled her in an irresistible wave of sensation she hadn’t expected but wouldn’t resist. She’d dived into the pool to initiate a seduction, but he’d turned the tables until she was spinning.
She pulled out of his tentative hold, snagged her fingers through his hair and then tugged until his face was level with hers. “I don’t give a damn where you came from, but I like the way you say cher. Say it again.”
“Cher,” he complied, tearing her thong from her body as if the water had turned the silk into paper. He repeated the endearment as he dragged her saturated blouse over her head, then again when he smoothed her hair away from her face, his thumbs lingering on the arches of her cheeks before curving down her chin and over her lips.
As he undressed her, she ground her pelvis against his until he grabbed her ass and lifted her. She wrapped her legs around his waist. Dragged down by the weight of the water and the gyrations of her hips, his shorts dipped to expose the tip of his erection. The round head hinted at the firm girth that could be hers, if only she said the word.
And apparently, the word was cher.
He growled, his lips thrumming between her breasts. “Now you say my name, nice and slow, as if you’ve been wanting me ever since you saw me strapped to that chair, bleeding like a sonofabitch all over your designer shoes.”
Her shoes that night—common work boots picked up at a thrift store—hadn’t been designer, but she wasn’t about to argue details with a man who was doing delicious things to her skin with his mouth. She wasn’t sure how he could turn the images of his battered body into something sensual, but he had. Oh, boy, had he ever.
“Sean.”
Her voice pitched high when he snagged her left nipple with his teeth
.
Sensations rocked her with a thousand unexpected quakes. She grabbed his head, her palms hard against his ears as he plucked and suckled her into sensual oblivion. When she thought she might go mad if she lost herself in selfish pleasure, she untangled her fingers from his hair and boldly explored every inch of him that she could reach, from his tight, bulging muscles to his web of scars.
Some were new, puckered and sensitive so that he hissed when she touched them, but others were so old and hard that he seemed not to feel them at all.
But he felt her. When she reached a sensitive spot or applied just the right amount of pressure to an erogenous zone, the little Cajun endearment tumbled from his lips like a moan. “Oh, cher, cher, cher. I’ve been fantasizing about getting you wet since I first laid eyes on you sparring by this very pool. You probably thought I was too drugged to watch you, but even Vicodin can’t keep a man like me from feasting his eyes on two hot women smacking each other around. It was cruel and unusual punishment, having to watch you get all sweaty and I was too weak to join in.”
Her gasp was drowned by a surge of water while he spun her around and swam them to the other side of the infinity pool. Somewhere along the way, the rest of his clothes washed away, leaving them both naked and exposed to the sun and sky. But before she could take advantage of his stripped-down state, he lifted her onto the ledge and parted her knees.
“Look how sweet and juicy you are,” he crooned, licking his lips.
The shock of instantaneous intimacy struck her silent. They’d lived together for over a month. She’d seen every naked inch of him, had cleaned wounds, changed his dressings, wiped his brow during a short bout of fever and fed him when he was unable to lift a spoon. But she’d managed to do all those things with complete efficiency—without ever revealing anything about herself that she did not purposefully want him to know.
Now, she was completely exposed and wildly turned on. She couldn’t turn back, even if she wanted to—which she didn’t. She’d risked her life to save Sean from sadistic kidnappers, but how much more danger would she face if she surrendered her pleasure to his care?
