by Lora Leigh
“His concern with Ms. Serborne’s safety eludes me.” Raymond moved to the bar and fixed himself and Myron a drink. “It’s not as though shares in her companies could make or break him, is it?”
Myron shook his head. “Fucking pocket change.”
“Then why go to such lengths? Orion was on a monthly retainer to keep her alive. Why would he care? Let the bastard kill her if she’s causing him that much trouble.”
Myron gave a hard, mocking laugh. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” He accepted the drink Raymond handed him. “It’s not the money.”
“Really? What else could motivate him?”
Myron looked thoughtful a moment before giving a heavy sigh. “I asked him that once.” He shook his head. “Right after he placed Orion on retainer to keep her alive.” Myron looked confused for a moment. “He said she was all he had left to remind him of something. He never said what?”
His child perhaps, Raymond thought. If Ford Grace was indeed Warbucks, then the murder of his child could be playing on his conscience. But then, if he was Warbucks, he likely didn’t have a conscience.
“Ah well, it likely won’t matter for long,” Raymond stated as he took his chair in front of the fire.
“Why is that?” Raymond sat down slowly in the chair across from him.
Raymond shook his head. “Vincent is a bit irritated. He believes Warbucks may have hired Rodriquez.”
“No way.” Myron shook his head quickly. “He’s enraged. He’s ordered me to bring whoever it was straight to him the moment I found out. He wants to kill him himself.”
Raymond shrugged. “So I suspected and informed Mr. Vincent. He wasn’t convinced. I would suggest making some gesture of goodwill or encouraging our employer to hurry this process, perhaps in Vincent’s favor. I fear when Ms. Serborne is ready to travel, he may be disappearing for a while. He seems rather fond of her.”
Myron sighed. “Vincent is known to have had few relationships, but in those he did have, he was rather protective of the ladies. He’s known for his valiant attitude toward them. Almost chivalrous, despite his sexual relationships with them.”
“Strange,” Raymond murmured as though he didn’t quite understand it.
“Just so,” Myron stated as he sipped at his drink. “I’ll meet with Warbucks and see what I can do. I agree with you, a gesture of goodwill is definitely called for. And I believe he’s merely been stringing Vincent along in some asinine little game of his. He would accept no one but Bailey’s, choice, I believe.”
Warbucks’s affection for Bailey confused Myron, as it did Raymond. Warbucks didn’t seem to be the type to feel affection for anyone, let alone a woman.
“I would suggest accomplishing this before Bailey’s ready to travel,” Raymond said with a sigh. “Vincent’s not in a pleasant mood and time will only enrage him further, I believe.”
Myron rose to his feet. “I’ll call him again tonight.” He set his empty drink glass on the table between them before moving to the door. “Wish me luck. He’s not easy to deal with these days.”
“Good luck, my friend,” Raymond stated softly.
After Myron left, he stared into the flames of the fire, but it was the past he was seeing. He saw bright green eyes, long red hair, and a smile that had lifted his heart.
He saw the sister he had loved with all his heart. Bright, shining, innocent. He saw her laughing one minute, he saw her in a casket days later, that beauty and laughter wiped away because of one man. Lucy had been a courier for the CIA. Posing as a college student in Milan, she had been transporting classified information between two sources when she had been waylaid.
Rather than taking the information and leaving Lucy laughing, they had killed her instead. The information he had uncovered was that the men had taken her to Warbucks. The bastard had raped her before giving her to his men. He had fired the bullet into her brain himself, stealing her life.
That had been fifteen years ago. Lucy had died and he’d been unable to attend her funeral, unable to grieve for the connection he had shared with the young woman, because no one had known of their family relationship.
Raymond had been the bastard. His father had never acknowledged him, and Raymond had never asked for the acknowledgment. But Lucy had found him. And she had loved him. She had taught him what innocence was, what loyalty was.
This is for you, Lucy. He lifted his drink to the fire in a toast to the flames that so resembled her hair. This is for you.
CHAPTER 20
IT WAS THE NEXT AFTERNOON before Bailey felt more like herself. She was stiff and bruised, but bouncing back despite the stitches in her arm and the bandage wrapped around it.
She felt good enough that her hormones did a major back-flip when John moved from the bathroom with nothing but a towel wrapped around his hips and approached the bed.
She’d showered earlier. Insisting on it despite the wound. She felt refreshed, her aches easing, and definitely ready for something that would affirm she had lived rather than died.
Something that would give her one more memory to hold in reserve against the loneliness she knew was coming. The shot the doctor had given her the night before for pain had knocked her out. Painkillers tended to do that for her. It had given her a full night’s rest, and a morning’s appreciation of waking up.
“Feeling better?” he asked as he sat on the bed beside her.
“Better,” she agreed, staring up at him before she reached out and slowly pulled the edges of the towel apart to reveal the arousal he hadn’t even been trying to hide.
The darkened crest was thick and throbbing, a pearly drop of liquid glistening at the tip.
Bailey felt her nipples harden painfully as her clit became unbearably swollen. Heated liquid warmth spilled from her sex, dampening the folds of her pussy and leaving her feeling tender, weak with hunger.
She had faced death. She had faced the fear of never touching him again, never knowing his kiss, or his laughter. Never knowing his warmth. She had faced oblivion, escaped it, and now she just wanted to revel in his touch.
“Fuck, you look like a goddess lying there,” he growled as he stepped nearer, staring down at her with naked demand. “Wearing nothing but panties and a T-shirt. Do you know how hard it’s been not touch you the last day? Not to kiss you or taste that luscious little body?”
Her lips parted as she drew in a hard, sharp breath. Dark and erotic, the words sent visions of lust dancing through her brain. She needed that touch, that warmth. She needed him.
“Look at you, love,” he whispered, that dark, earthy hint of Australia sliding into his tone. “So flushed and heated. Does it turn you on to know that you make me half insane with lust for you? That no other woman has ever done to me what you do?”
Bailey smiled back at him as he reached out to her, his hand lifting, the backs of his fingers caressing over the slope of her breast, causing her nipple to tighten almost painfully.
Moving farther onto the bed, he pulled her into his arms, letting her feel the hard length of his cock against the bared flesh of her tummy where the T-shirt rode up. The heated crest flexed and throbbed against her flesh as it sent a pulse of blistering sensation to attack her womb at the memory of him pushing inside her.
“You make me crazy for you.” He nipped at her lips before taking a deep, drugging kiss from them. His tongue licked and stroked against hers. Her senses were rioting, spinning out of control with the need racing through her.
“Damn you, I can’t think of anything but this some days. You’re my weakness, Bailey. And my strength.”
There was a dominance that brewed inside him again, despite his tenderness. A dark, brewing lust that had her breath catching.
It was pure lust. Power. It was a desperate hunger she had never felt before, never known before.
“I could have lost you,” he whispered as he brushed his lips over hers and pushed her panties down her legs to her knees, where she lifted her legs and managed to kick free
of them.
Her hands moved over his naked body, feeling that warmth, that need as he pressed her thighs apart and moved over her.
“Wrap your legs around me.” The wicked flavor of his voice was deeper now, darker, as though he couldn’t hold back who and what he was when he was with her like this.
His hands gripped the outside of her thighs as her arms went around his neck. The heavy width of his cock nudged against her sex, slid against the slick folds, then found the clenched, tight entrance it sought.
The lack of foreplay was only more erotic. The desperate hunger that suddenly raged between them had her heart racing, her body trembling as pleasure raced through her.
Bailey’s head fell back as a whimper of hunger, of pleasure fell from her lips. She felt him working the hardened flesh inside her. Her legs tightened around his hips, her breathing was gasps of pleasure, her cries were of desperate need.
His fingers kneaded her rear, gripped it, moved her as his hips bucked against her. She was flying in the face of a torrent of sensations and fought just to catch a breath that eluded her.
Ecstasy slammed through her, over her. Heat surrounded her. The feel of his arms flexing beneath hers, his hands holding her, his hips shifting, moving, thrusting harder against her as her hips arched, her head grinding into the pillow.
Bailey needed, ached, and hungered. She had never felt this desperate, this hot. She had never before felt as though the world were focused on this one point in time, this one moment when nothing mattered but the pleasure tearing through her.
“Hell yeah,” John groaned at her ear as she pressed closer to him, her hips moving, shifting, dragging ragged groans from both of them.
Tender, ultrasensitive tissue rippled and clenched around his shuttling cock as she fought to hold him inside her.
“You’ll kill me like this.” His lips were at her jaw, her neck, stroking and caressing. “Sweet baby.” Pressing her closer against him, he moved one hand from her rear to her breast. His thumb and finger gripped her nipple, plumped it, stroked fire through it.
“You’ll survive,” she gasped as sensations began to burn and tighten inside her, merging into a conflagration of intensity.
Bracing his elbows into the bed, John thrust inside her again, hard and deep, and she felt her breath gasp from her lips.
This was how he wanted her. Wicked and wanting to be in his arms, John thought. Her nails bit into his shoulders, sending pinpoints of fire racing through his system. The sweet grip of her pussy tightened like a fist around him, slick and hot.
He would never forget this, never forget her like this. Her head thrown back against the pillow, eyes closed, her lips parted as she fought, and sometimes failed, to breathe.
She held on to him as though he were the center of her world, as she was the center of his.
“My Bailey,” he groaned, unable to hold back the claim, the demand.
God, he wanted to possess her, heart and soul. Holding her, loving her completed his life.
He had nearly lost her. He had turned along that maze, slid into the corridor where Alberto had trapped her, and seen him holding her down, his knife coming around to stroke her neck. Terror had jackknifed inside him.
He could not imagine life without this. Without the sweet heat of her pussy gripping his cock. Without her nails digging into his shoulders, her voice, husky and demanding, calling out his name, begging for more.
He might not be able to claim her before the world, but he could claim her in the dark, away from prying eyes. He could have her. As he was having her now. He could love her, hold her. He could belong to her.
“John.” Her hands moved from his shoulders to his hair. They tangled in the long, sweat-dampened strands, tightened and pulled, and he felt her unraveling.
Her pussy gripped, tightened, and rippled around his dick until his balls became tortured with the need for release.
Not yet. Bailey first. He wanted to feel her coming, he wanted to feel that wet heat racing over his flesh, convulsing around his cock.
“John, please,” she gasped in naked need. “Give me now.” Her head shook, her body trembled. “Oh God. John …”
He watched her eyes flare open, watched as they widened and her body tightened while her orgasm rushed through her, over her.
She was like a flame in his arms, burning him, tearing through his soul and leaving the very essence of his need for her laid bare.
“There, sweetheart.” He nipped at her neck as she began to shudder in his arms. “Come for me, Bailey. Come for me, sweetheart. All over me …” He thrust harder, deeper, prolonging her pleasure, wanting to live inside her forever.
But that last cry that escaped her lips did him in. He buried himself inside her and lost control, lost that edge that he had always prided himself in. Against his will, against the desperation that burned inside him to wait, to hold on, to relish her just awhile longer, his release tore through him.
And it was like dying inside her. He felt his release tearing from him, shuddering through his body, tightening in his balls, and laying his soul bare.
Over and over it ripped through him until he gasped her name, buried his head at her neck, and gave himself to it.
“Baby. Baby.” He couldn’t bear letting her go. Shudders, tremors raced through him. His knees were weak. It seemed the strength he had always depended on was failing him, and it was going fast.
He’d buried one hand in her hair, holding her head to his shoulder as he poured himself inside the tight grip of her pussy.
“I want to hold on to you forever,” she sobbed against his shoulder. “Don’t let go of me, John. Not yet.”
“I have you, baby,” he whispered, holding her closer, trying to bring her body fully into his. “I have you. Right here.”
She stared up at him, her beautiful green eyes dark with satisfaction and the edges of pain.
“It’s going to be over soon,” she said softly against his shoulder. “Warbucks will be neutralized, the missiles will be safe, and it will all be over.”
And he could hear the hollow pain in her voice that they would be over as well. He wouldn’t let it happen. He couldn’t let it happen, and Jordan would have to understand that. There came a time when a man had to accept where his priorities lay. His were with Bailey. They should have been with Bailey all along. Vengeance was nothing compared with the hell he had faced without her.
Everything wasn’t going to be over, though. He would make sure of it. They weren’t going to be over. He wasn’t letting her go. But first, he had to face Jordan. There was always the chance that Jordan could just have him canceled. It was in his contract, after all. The warning that ignoring or disobeying orders could result in a silent order to terminate.
Not that he thought Jordan would do it. But he owed it to Bailey to know exactly what they were going to be facing before he broached the subject with her.
It would mean a lot of trust from her; it would require a lot of trust from the other team members to bring her in.
She would love it, though. Bailey was a damned good agent. Too good to just quit.
“I think I’m hungry,” she said softly into the silence as she sat up and pushed her hair back from her face before looking down at him. “What about you?”
“We missed dinner.” He turned and glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “And your friends are getting worried about you. The story is that you fell in the gardens and cut your arm. You’ve been recuperating.”
“I’m surprised you’ve kept them out of our bedroom.” She laughed, a low sweet sound that wrapped around his heart.
He grinned back at her, then grimaced as his cell phone rang. Picking up the device, he flipped it open. “Vincent.”
“I’m coming back in,” Travis told him quietly. “I’m about five minutes from the cabin.”
“We’ll be ready.” He jumped from the bed as he disconnected and turned back to Bailey. “Get dressed, Travis is on his way in.”
<
br /> She breathed in roughly. “Does he know who hired Alberto?”
He shook his head. “He won’t report until he can do it securely.”
He moved to help her from the bed, then stepped back at her playful glare. “I can still walk, John.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m not exactly an invalid from that little scratch.”
“Give me a few years to get over the sight of that bastard ready to slice your head from your shoulders,” he bit out, his voice rough as the image of it rose in front of his mind again. “That wasn’t one of my better days, Bailey.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t rate it very high either, John. But see, I’m just fine.” She spread her arms away from her luscious body as he felt his balls tighten in an impending erection.
“You look fine as rain, baby.” He sighed with the knowledge that he couldn’t have her again, not yet. “But if you don’t get dressed, Travis is going to end up seeing just how fine you really are, because I’m going to have you flat on your back again.”
That brought a smile to her face, but the quiet, somber intensity in her eyes was still present.
BAILEY PULLED ON JEANS, a sweater, and thick socks. She was leaving the bathroom when Travis’s quiet knock heralded his return to the mansion.
Opening the door, John let him in as Bailey turned on the white-noise generator and poured them all a cup of coffee.
“Thank you.” Travis accepted the cup as he sat at the small table on the other side of the room, farthest from the door.
Taking the other two cups, John moved to the table to join him as Bailey trailed behind him.
“We interrogated Rodriquez,” Travis said softly. “He didn’t have a lot of information, though. He was contacted anonymously. The money was deposited electronically into his account and he was given your identity. All he knows is that whoever hired him informed him that they would be at the party and they would know if he actually succeeded in earning the money.”
