Enemy Mine (The Base Branch Series Book 1)

by Megan Mitcham

  He took a mental breath and concentrated on relaxing and enjoying Sloan. Yep, his inner He-Man longed to plunge his sword deep into her slick body, but he could wait. Hell, he’d once waited fourteen hours laid out on the ground, looking through the scope of a sniper rifle, to get his target.

  He could do this.

  Baine thought that until she maimed his control with one zealous mingling of tongues. Her entire body got into the exchange, rocking against his chest, rolling against the tip of his pulsing erection. Sloan pulled his tongue into her mouth and worked it like a dick from base to tip several times before sitting on his lap and smiling.

  “Woman, you’re tempting the beast.”

  With one raised brow and that damn sexy smile, she said, “Good.” Her gaze sharpened. “What was it you said to me? Oh, I remember. ‘I was about to release your hands, but that look says you can’t be trusted.’”

  “Risk for reward,” he answered.

  “So right.” She eased off his arms, but pinned him with those lion eyes. “Control, remember? It’s my turn.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  As Sloan unfastened the sleek buckle at his waist and snapped the leather from its loops, Baine held tight to his tattered restraint. Holding onto a tree trunk in a hurricane might’ve been easier. When she spread the fabric of his slacks the broad head of his cock peeked out through the slit in his boxer briefs and she moaned. At the sound, sweat beaded on Baine’s forehead and his hands fisted at his sides.

  Sweet Lord!

  Her cool hands wrapped around his hot girth as she guided it from the soft cotton to the silk of her mouth. He watched his mushroomed tip disappear between her red lips and his rod stretch her sweet mouth wider to accommodate. All ten of her fingers cloaked his base, working in tandem with her lips and tongue as she bobbed up and down his length. She set a grueling pace for the start.

  The sight of her, the feel of her, the contented moans emanating from her throat and the vibrations they wrought all combined to snap his reserve. His hands gripped the edge of the counter as his hips jerked, shoving him into the back of her throat. She swallowed him down. Once. Twice. The third time he barked a curse at the intense pressure building in his balls. He did not want this to end. Then again, he did not want to waste a good orgasm in her mouth. Shit, as wild as he was for her he’d be in danger of piercing her brain. He wanted to pierce her womb. Come deep inside her, looking into her flushed face and loving eyes.

  “Straddle me, Sloan,” he demanded. “Ride the fuck out of me. But I want to look in your eyes when I come. When you come.”

  She popped off the head of his dick and pouted. “Thought I was calling the shots?”

  “You were. Now I am.”

  He slipped the gathered sundress up over her hips, plunged his finger inside her nude thong, dragged them across her swollen pussy and positioned her over his cock. With a firm grip he wrenched her down his rod, until her ass grazed his balls.

  They both cried out at the exquisite pleasure and slight pain of the joining. Baine wound his hands up her back and gripped her shoulders for leverage as he pulled out then rocked back into her. The weapons and ammunition clipped onto the vest chaffed the cotton covering her breasts. He smiled when she leaned into it, increasing the friction on her beaded nipples.

  Sloan brought her knees up on either side of him, allowing better access. Her gaze seared into his as they rode each other like desperate souls contented only by the other. She wrapped her hands around the nape of his neck and arched into him. He nipped her breasts through the slight material.

  Sloan bit her lower lip and her head lolled back. Fresh moisture coated his already slick cock as Sloan groaned her orgasm. Her body rolled with the gratification of climax. The sensation overcame him and Baine let her wring a fierce ejaculation from his body. He went tight all over, straining against his own skin until he went slack, completely sated.

  His love nestled onto his chest. Amazingly, he found the strength to wrap her in his arms.

  “And you said we couldn’t make love on the bathroom floor.”

  “That was too primal to be called love-making.”

  Sloan nuzzled his neck with her cheek. “Thank you.”

  “Thank me? Love, you never have to thank me for that.”

  She giggled. “Not that. But yes, I, along with entire cultures, should thank you for that demonstration.” Baine cupped her hand in his. “Thank you,” she continued, “for making me see the ugliness in my hatred, for stopping me from doing something I would regret, something that would destroy the person I am, who I want to be.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  The words should have made him smile. But the way she said them twisted his gut. Because they sounded a lot like goodbye.

  The best laid schemes

  Of mice and men go often awry.

  And leave us nothing but grief and pain.

  For promised joy!

  30

  The food, though gourmet as money could buy and a personal chef could prepare, rolled around Baine’s mouth like pub peanuts scraped from the floor weeks ago. Where Sloan was concerned, each task associated with the magnificent woman ratcheted up a notch in difficulty.

  First, he’d been unwilling to contact her because of his father’s psychotic tendencies. Locked into a life of emotional solitude, guessing and wondering how Sia fared in this world for years, had been difficult. He’d nearly broken his promise to keep her safe and out of his life after a night of pub-crawling the first semester of his freshman year at Cambridge.

  Baine had been practically on his own since the age of five, when his father fired Nanny Pat. Independent. Self-sufficient. Yet, that day, restlessness wriggled through his body from the early morning hours and didn’t let up through his first or second classes. By the third he shifted so often in his seat the professor actually asked him to leave. He hadn’t known what he’d been looking for when he fled campus, but he didn’t find it in the bottom of his many pints or in the blue eyes of a barmaid.

  So, he gave up, deciding Sia’s voice was the only thing to give him peace. As luck would have it, he bumped into Law on the way to the bar phone to track her down. The big guy’d been a little miffed about wearing his beer, and Baine had been more than happy to oblige him with a fight. He’d woken the next morning in his London house propped in a wingback with a bloody headache, busted lip, and the chap snoozing on his couch.

  He hadn’t found Sloan that day which was best for her own safety. Surprisingly, he’d found a friend to carry him through the next miserable years of his life.

  The second task, and slightly more difficult than the first, was cracking her on the head in D.C. to save her life. Third, trying to control his impulse to fuck her like a crazed animal. Fail. And now, watching while his father devoured her from across the table with his eyes, and not being able to do a damn thing to stop it.

  More and more difficult. No doubt.

  To her credit, she played Devereaux like Jimmy Page played the guitar. The man hung on her every glance, the rise and fall of her chest, the curve of her smile. And it was hard to blame him. Sloan, like Pages’ textured notes plucked from the string, mesmerized.

  Too damn bad he couldn’t kill the man.

  If matters weren’t bad enough, Kobi fed the combustibility of the room by sending fuck you’s with his darting glances. Sloan was the object of Kobi’s sharp gaze through the first round of drinks and appetizers. Now, finished with the main course and with a few more drinks down his gullet, he spread the hateful glare between Sloan and Devereaux, though never making his disdain for either too obvious.

  Baine knew the guy had plenty of hostility for him. The run-in earlier must have ignited his disdain for his master, as well as added to his raging obsession with Sloan, making Baine yesterday’s headache.

  Time to draw that attention elsewhere.

  One more minute of Kobi’s snarled gaze on the mocha skin that rocketed him to the moon with one tou
ch, and Baine would blow the whole half-cocked plan to shit by ramming his thumbs into the man’s eye sockets.

  Try ogling her now, asshole.

  With a finger, Baine signaled Law. His friend, the last guy in the world to be wrestled into a suit, straight-backed his way across the room like a professional butler. One hand tucked behind his back while the other he held in a stiff L before his middle, complete with a crisp, dangling, stark-white towel.

  “Yes, sir?” Law asked with a slight incline of his neatly quaffed dirty-blond mop.

  Law had to buy a brush and hair products for this gig and clean shave his perpetual stubble. A smile threatened Baine’s lips. Hell, he was all over the place today. Gooey happy. Pissed. Smiley. Scared, for the first time in a long time. Since he now had something to lose.

  Head in the game, McCord.

  “Scotch straight, for me.” He motioned toward Kobi. “And a vodka martini for him. Apple. Yep, an appletini for my friend.”

  “Right away, sir,” Law replied.

  As Law turned away to fulfill the request, Baine met Kobi’s glower with a smile. “Something to brighten your mood a bit. You seem glum. We can’t have that, now, can we?”

  Bingo.

  The sorry excuse for a barroom bouncer ground his teeth like an angry animation, flexing the muscles in his neck.

  Baine knew the guy came from screwed up beginnings, but shit, these days who didn’t. Baine certainly had. He looked across the table at the guy who’d profited from death and destruction, oftentimes orchestrating it to turn a nickel into a quarter. In spite of his father—or maybe to spite him—Baine had chosen a different path. Kobi, on the other hand, had chosen the path to hell, and boy was Baine going to enjoy helping him complete that journey.

  A server entered from the butler’s pantry carrying a tray of fluffy confections. Baine breathed through the spike of adrenaline in his veins, knowing the time grew nearer. No sugar for him. His nerves already vibrated.

  Across the table Devereaux declined his finisher with a wave of his hand. The man’s eyes, the ones Baine thanked his mother everyday he didn't see when he looked into the mirror, zeroed in on Sloan. “I have something much more delicious in mind for dessert tonight.”

  Yeah, me too. Your balls roasted on a spit.

  Beside him Sloan bowed her head as if shy, but offset the move by smoldering the man with a come-hither gaze beneath her thick fan of lashes. What no one else in the room saw, except Baine, was her fisted hand in her lap, the way the veins in her small hand bulged and her knuckles whitened.

  Devereaux stood, dropping his burgundy napkin into the seat. “Jesus Christ, Abram! Elbows off the table.”

  The room stilled and the thick man at the other end of the table straightened. “Sorry, sir,” Abram said, returning a fork-full of soufflé to his plate. Nena’s mouth hung open expectantly while her wide gaze jumped between Devereaux and the dessert. Thoroughly chastised, the chap’s hands disappeared under the table. As though pulled by an unseen magnet, all eyes in the dinning room shifted back to Baine’s father.

  Conqueror of all, Devereaux smiled and met Baine’s gaze while holding his hand out to Sloan. Baine didn’t swallow the rock in his throat when his father said, “Come dear. I’m ravenous.”

  Now, why the fuck did he look at me when he said that?

  Based on the report he’d falsified and placed on Devereaux’s computer, and by Sloan’s description of the confrontation between her, Kobi, and Devereaux earlier in the day, the old man should have needled that comment at Kobi. The hair on Baine’s arms and neck all stood at attention.

  Son-of-a-bitch.

  He hadn’t expected warm fuzzies when he watched Sloan leave the room hand in hand with the rat bastard. But every battle-honed instinct screamed inside his head as the last of her mocha skin vanished behind the double doors—because something was wrong.

  As Baine replayed the meal in his head his heart did a S.O.S. against his sternum. His father had been unusually quiet. Not berating or saying a thing to Kobi, when even on the best of days the chav became the target of at least two back handed comments.

  Baine shifted in his seat, ready to make a break for the double doors, when Law’s penguin chest blocked his view.

  “Sorry for the delay, sir. It took me a moment longer to place the apple.” Law set his scotch in front of him and proceeded around the table to Kobi where he deposited one thin-stemmed glass of green appletini.

  Kobi’s face reddened, but Baine ignored him, instead snagging Law’s gaze. “Go ahead and bring me another. It took long enough to get this one. I may die of thirst by the time you get back with the next.”

  Law gave an exaggerated nod, showing he got the intended message. Get the fuck ready because shit’s about to happen.

  “Another for you, sir?” Law asked Kobi.

  “Fuck you.” The chappie growled.

  “Yes, sir,” Law said. Then left the room.

  A moan from the opposite end of the table snagged Baine’s attention.

  Yeah, if Devereaux didn't like elbows on his table, he might not be too wild about the half-naked ass on it either. Since he wasn’t the one to put it there.

  Abram, Nena, Josh, and the blond escort—Baine couldn’t remember her name—tangled tongues and limbs in the beginnings of what looked to be a lively orgy. Abram, the bigger of the two lug heads, steadily eased Nena’s skirt up her body, revealing quite a bit of pale porcelain skin. Too bad for them the party was about to get shut down.

  But before he gave voice to his thoughts, a streak of movement brought his focus front and center just in time to meet the cold smack across his face. Fruity vodka dripped down his cheeks and around his lips.

  Kobi stood across the table, chest puffed and chin high. His fists rested on either hip, but Baine noticed he listed ever so lightly to the right. Most likely the work of dear old Dad. The wanker snarled, wrinkling the wide nose under his beady eyes, and showed off a set of teeth that would make a proper Brit cringe.

  Next to Kobi, Lana gasped and the room stilled. Even the orgy.

  Without a word, Baine slid his drink across the table. The dark liquid seesawed in the glass before coming to rest several inches from Kobi.

  The man’s head jerked back in confusion while he stared at the glass as though it were a puzzle to solve. A really difficult puzzle…like why mass existed. When his gaze poked Baine again, he nodded toward the liquor.

  “Mind tossing that one? I like to taste pussy, just not pussy drinks.”

  Kobi’s yell split the air and ricocheted off the walls. Still no one moved until he pulled a gun from his shoulder holster.

  Fuck you very much.

  As if Baine’s concerns about Sloan weren’t high enough already, Kobi had to add to the cluster. Because no matter what happened to Baine, if that gun fired it could compromise Sloan’s mission, or worse, get her killed.

  The room came to life as the two female orgy participants shrieked. Bare ass flew off the table and ducked behind Josh. She pulled the blond with her as they scrambled for the door. Lana didn’t scream, but hot heeled it out through the butler’s pantry while the chaps stared big eyed and goofy jawed at the drama unfolding.

  Kobi’s hand gripped the gun like a little kid did a balloon that might be carried off in a swift breeze. His wrist quavered from the effort. Through gritted teeth he spoke. “One bullet’ll wipe that smug look off your face, boy.”

  Boy? What the hell? Kobi had ten years on him, maybe.

  “Stand up. Keep your goddamned hands where I can see them. Push your chair back and move that way.” He motioned toward the head of the table with the barrel of his gun, away from the other men.

  Having little option at the moment, Baine complied.

  Kobi met him at the end of the room, leaving the table’s width between them. “Kneel.”

  Again, what the fuck option did he have? None. So, he eased himself down until the hard wood greeted his knees. The weight of the weaponry under hi
s vest embraced him, but did not a damn bit of good. He flicked a glance at the ornate wall clock. It had only been five minutes since Devereaux and Sloan left.

  Too early to move. Calm. Control.

  The silent mantra worked, centering his thoughts and relaxing his body. He could do this. He had to do this. For Sloan.

  31

  Devereaux’s hand pressed against the small of Sloan’s back as he ushered her into his suite. The man had been quiet during the meal, but grossly intent on her. On her breasts, throat, face. She’d been thankful for the table between them, blocking his view of her lower half. Too bad only air stood between them now.

  Air and opportunity.

  Ryan’s words echoed in her head and she smiled.

  “You find the accommodations to your liking I see. Good.” His hand coasted up her spine. “I want you comfortable. Totally relaxed. It won’t hurt as much.”

  A chill ran the course from his touch and spread throughout her body.

  “Hurt?”

  Sloan heard the fear in her voice and was both repulsed and relieved. She despised the effect his words had on her, but knew her unease would satisfy the sadistic man, tranquilize the rage she’d seen bubbling in his gaze, first in the foyer this afternoon, then again during dinner.

  He turned her to face him, the firm grip on her shoulders agreeing with his words. If she struggled in his grasp like a normal woman would, the pressure of his fingers would bite into her skin.

  Crevasses lined the old man’s forehead as he filed his gaze at her to a sharp point. His brown eyes hosted splotched scleras, like someone had taken an ink pen and doodled on the white surface. He smiled. The truly sinister expression carved quotations on his clean-shaven skin.

  “You see, I like it rough. No chains or handcuffs necessary. I’ll hold you right where and how I want you.”

  “I like it rough too,” she breathed.

  “Good. Then relax and it won’t hurt a bit.”

  No, it’s going to hurt quite a lot. Going to hurt you.