by Lexi Blake
This was how sex had always been between them. They couldn’t hold back, couldn’t pretend there was anything but need between them—a need only the other could fill.
She held his gaze and gave him everything as he stroked inside and his tongue laved her clit in the perfect rhythm. She wanted the moment to last, to stay in this place forever, but she finally couldn’t hold out a second longer.
The orgasm rushed over her and her whole body tightened and released, relief flooding through her.
Her head fell back as Beck gave her one last lick and rose to his feet. She watched as he moved between her legs and knew it was his time.
She forced herself to sit up and open her arms.
* * * *
Beck’s whole body was alive for the first time in years. It didn’t matter what he’d told her. Fucking Kim Solomon was making love. It always was. Every single time. Even when they came together in anger, it was making love.
No other woman in the world could make him feel the way she did. He could try to fool himself, but he knew deep down he’d never really let her go.
She came up off the table, moving gracefully and opening her arms to him. He reached for her, drawing her close and lowering his mouth down to hers. Kissing her felt so perfect, and he worried he wouldn’t be able to stop. It was good that they had hours and hours before Tag was scheduled to show up because it was going to take all that time to even begin to feed the hunger he felt for her.
He could still taste her. All these years later and he’d thought he could remember, but she tasted better than memory. Sweet and tangy. She coated his lips and tongue, and he would never get enough of her.
Her legs wrapped around his waist, and he felt the heat of her pussy rubbing against his cock. He was surrounded by her, and it made him feel safer than he had in forever.
Even as he had the thought, he knew how dangerous it was. Kim was his kryptonite. She was the person who could lift him up, and she was the only one in the whole world who could drag him right back down to hell. He’d spent ten years on the wagon, but it looked like he was falling off tonight.
And every night until he had to give her up again.
His tongue plunged deep, dancing with hers. Over and over they stroked together, building his need higher than he’d thought he would ever go again.
Did he have to give her up? What if the problem the first time around was that he’d been too indulgent? He hadn’t insisted that she stay away from Levi. He’d listened to her when she said he was harmless. Maybe she’d learned her lesson now.
He let the thought float away. He was living this minute by minute. He wasn’t going to let himself think of some dreamy future with her.
Except he already had. He was damn good at fooling himself these days.
What wasn’t a trick was how wet she was. She was soaking wet, and it was all for him. He’d been the one to make her cry out his name as she came. He was the one who’d made her shake and shiver. The whole time he’d spanked her, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t stop until she’d cried. But this was what she’d needed. She needed this more than anything.
He thrust his hands in her hair, feeling the soft silk against his fingers. He’d missed all that honey. Her hair was long and thick, and he’d always loved to control her with it. They might be more formal this evening, but he’d always topped her in the bedroom. From that first night when he’d taken control and she’d screamed out his name, he’d been her dominant partner.
He kissed her, tangling their tongues together as he rubbed his dick against all her softness. His cock was so hard he could barely breathe, but he wasn’t about to rush this. He wanted this to last all night. He was going to sleep with her, going to wrap his body around her and wake up with her in his arms.
“God, I missed you,” she breathed against his mouth.
He’d missed her so much, felt her absence like an ache in his soul. It had been so long that he’d gotten used to that hole inside him, but now that it was full again, he realized how empty his life had been without her.
He gripped the globes of her ass and started to force her onto his dick. He’d thought he would turn her over and drive into her from behind, but he wanted this intimacy. He wanted to fuck her while he kissed her, while their mouths mingled and hands clutched.
“I want to try everything with you,” she said, her eyes wide and guileless as she looked up at him.
“Everything,” he promised. They would be like two kids in a candy store. Every night they were here he would bring her down and they would have hours to play. “Sanctum is even better. Sanctum has everything.”
Everything he would need to train her, to train himself. To discover what made her purr and what made her howl. He would learn her all over again.
But first he would revel in how good it felt to fuck her.
He pressed his cock inside, the heat surrounding him and making him grit his teeth. There was nothing like the feel of her pussy tight around him, her nails digging into his back as she accepted him. He felt her breasts pressed against his chest and the way she shuddered the deeper he went.
“You feel so good. Your cock feels so good.”
He loved that she never held back during sex. She might shut down outside of it, but while they were making love she was open and completely honest with him. “You’re the one who feels good. You’re the one who feels right and perfect.”
She’d always felt that way. Until the minute she hadn’t.
He kissed her like she was something precious. Maybe he’d been wrong. He hadn’t known how to process his feelings back then, and now he worried he’d thrown his anger at her. He still wasn’t great at it. This was what they needed. Holding her, loving her, would let him see past his own rage. If he let her in, they might be able to move on. They had to find a way because he wasn’t certain he could survive losing her twice.
She tightened around him and he lost control. He gave over to the magnificent feel of her wound around him, of their bodies combined. He fucked into her, the rhythm of his hips becoming primal. He lost the need to do anything but come inside her. He managed to hold off until her head fell back and he felt her tighten around him.
Then he let go and pounded into her, holding her up because he wouldn’t let go of that connection. He kissed her as his orgasm hit, breathing in and out with her.
“Move up and lie down on your side.” The order came out a bit harsher than he’d meant, but then he was way more emotional than he’d thought he would be. Blood pounded through him, but there was more. He felt for her.
She moved back and laid down. He followed her. The table was wide enough, but he still had to cuddle. He spooned her, dragging her back against his body.
“Lie here with me for a minute.”
She cuddled back against him and for a moment he felt like the world was right again.
Chapter Six
“Levi Green is now the head of his own department.” Chelsea Weston sat down at the tiny table made even smaller with the addition of Big Tag’s enormous body. They’d shown up at their door only moments before, the sound of the knock a shock to Ezra’s system.
The morning had been peaceful, and hearing that fucker’s name reminded him of everything that was wrong with the world. “How did he go from being interrogated for treasonous acts to head of his own freaking team in the course of a couple of weeks?”
“I should have known something had gone wrong when they didn’t want me to come back to Langley.” Kim had a mug of coffee in front of her. She’d puttered around the tiny kitchen after they’d gotten up, and he’d had a sweet sense of domesticity that he’d been missing for years.
“He’s a cockroach,” Tag said with a humorless chuckle.
Chelsea nodded her agreement. “I don’t know the whole story, but I can confirm that he has the authority to arrest Solo and take her to a place of his choosing for interrogation.”
He sat next to Kim, their legs brushing against each o
ther. He wanted to reach out and hold her hand.
So he did. He drew her palm against his. He had the right and the duty to comfort her. She’d given herself to him last night and they were starting something this morning, something softer than they’d had before. “He wants to use the drug on her.”
Big Tag had shown up bright and early along with his twin daughters and sister-in-law. The girls were currently at Rene’s apartment, the club owner and his wife watching over them. Ezra had been told they only had a brief time to go over everything they needed to before Tag intended to be back at the airport. He still didn’t fully understand what Tag was here to do, but the most important thing was ensuring they all knew what Levi was capable of.
“I’ve talked to a couple of people at the Agency who owe me some favors.” Chelsea yawned behind her hand. If he was correct, she’d recently had a baby, too. The McKay-Taggart team bred like rabbits. “I believe the formulary he has is one of the older ones. It’s not as devastating as the final drug, the one she used on Tucker and Jax. Though from what I understand even they’re getting some of their memories back. In Tucker’s case, I think being in his hometown and with his family has helped enormously.”
“So he’ll only take part of my brain. Good to know. And I don’t have any close family. I guess I could walk around my childhood home and maybe remember my parents didn’t care about much except money.” The words sounded bitter coming out of Kim’s mouth, but her hand squeezed his.
“He won’t take anything at all.” Tag glanced down at his phone. The man was utterly preoccupied. “Chelsea and I have been talking and we need to do a timeline of where you were and what you were doing during the six-month period when Levi is accusing you of working with McDonald.”
It was good to have a finite period of time to work with. They could focus in and find the crack in Levi’s plan. There had to be one.
“I can tell you that I was definitely in Europe during most of that time,” Kim replied. “I was working on tying a couple of organizations to arms dealers. Surprisingly enough, some of my best leads came from Levi. So I would suspect he can place me in some suspicious places.”
No one said the fucker wasn’t smart. “Still, there has to be proof.”
“We’ll find it,” Tag promised. “But we need to figure out how fucked she is, and that means asking some uncomfortable questions.”
Kim’s shoulders straightened as she obviously braced herself for the worst. “It’s fine.”
“Were you aware that one of the companies your family owns had connections to Kronberg Pharmaceutical?” Chelsea asked.
Kim pulled her hand away, seeming to draw into herself. Her family was a sore point for her. She rarely talked about them and when she did, she tended to get emotional. “No. I don’t pay much attention to what the corporation does. I didn’t have any interest in it when my parents were alive. I have even less now. My cousins handle all the business. I don’t even make decisions for the charities anymore.”
He didn’t like the fact that it was one more thing connecting her to McDonald. “When did the company get in bed with Kronberg?”
Tag sighed and sat back. “A few months before Solo’s so-called work began. I’ve got someone looking into whether or not Levi had been in contact with anyone from the company. It’s a neat way to set Solo up to take a bad fall. We’ve got the additional problem of the plane crash that killed your parents.”
Kim’s eyes went wide. “I thought it was mechanical failure.”
“It’s awfully coincidental that all these dominoes fell at the precise right time to put Levi in a position of extreme power. The plane crash happened a few weeks before all of this was set to go down,” Chelsea said.
“Okay, let me make sure I understand this.” Ezra was putting it all together in his head, the plot of Levi’s forming like a spider’s web. “He set Tucker in motion. Tucker works for McDonald, and anything he gets his hands on will be considered above suspicion. Somehow Levi gets your name in the records that are smuggled out on the data drive.”
“The same one that was lost in Paris when McDonald caught him,” Tag continued. “But Green couldn’t have known that would happen. He assumed his plan would work and that he would have the data, including the shit he falsified. When he’s sure he’s got everything in place, he sets it all in motion.”
Kim stared down at the table. “He likely had my parents killed.”
Chelsea’s expression had gone distinctly sympathetic. “Tell me what would have happened if you’d been arrested shortly after your parents died. Before you had a chance to settle things.”
“Everything would have come to me. Because he didn’t, I divested myself of a lot of the responsibilities that came with inheriting,” Kim explained. “If he’d arrested me back then and he’d managed to dose me and convince me to marry him, legally he could have done a lot with those shares. Honestly, he still could. There’s no permanent legal document giving my cousins my shares. All I would have to do is show up and the vote would be mine.”
“So this might be a play to take over the company your family runs.” Tag nodded to Chelsea. “Can you have Phoebe put together an overview? I’d like to know all the financial dealings of the company.”
“It’ll take a while.” That company had multiple arms and they went into a whole lot of pies. “So Levi wants power, and he set himself up to be the head of Kim’s family.”
“It probably would have worked, too, if Tucker hadn’t lost the data,” Tag pointed out. “He could have had you swept away quietly. Ezra was working in Africa at the time.”
“I wouldn’t have even known she’d been arrested.” Levi had planned carefully, and he’d been incredibly patient. He wouldn’t have heard a thing until he’d gotten back to the States, and then likely he would have been told that Levi and Solo had gotten married. He wouldn’t have looked in on her. He wouldn’t have made sure she was okay. He would have quit and walked away and been a bitter fucking drunk the rest of his life. “But once the data was lost, he couldn’t fake it again. He’d placed his bet and if he’d come up with proof in another way, it wouldn’t have worked. I bet he really talked up this project, and its failure in the beginning is why he got moved to less than stellar ops.”
“It must have killed him knowing that shot was gone.” Kim sounded a bit hollow and he wished she hadn’t needed to hear these hard truths.
He wished they were still in bed and she was clinging to him the way she had this morning. They’d been in complete darkness, but he’d woken with the knowledge that she was right beside him. He’d rolled her over and kissed her awake. When her arms had come around him, the world had felt right for the first time in forever.
“And it must have thrilled him when he realized Tucker wasn’t dead. So that’s where we are right now. I’m moving cautiously on this one. Solo, I know you want your name cleared,” Tag began.
She shook her head. “Of course I do, but I understand it could take a while.”
Tag paused for a moment as though he wasn’t quite sure how to handle her. “If it’s at all meaningful, Connor Sparks reached out to me and asked to be kept up to date. I’ve put him in our loop.”
“The president could shut all this down.” It bugged him that he hadn’t already.
“No, he can’t.” Chelsea closed her laptop. “Not unless he wants to start congressional hearings on his overreach and put the guy he recently endorsed in the crosshairs, too.”
“Does the president know Levi’s planning on forcing the competition out? I put it in my report,” Kim said.
“Yes, I talked to him this morning and he’s looking into it. The situation is delicate,” Tag explained. “Apparently that was something Levi didn’t have to fake. I don’t want you to worry about it. The president can handle the political stuff. Our job is to prove Levi’s data wrong, and that begins with you documenting every job you did during that time. I need all the information you can give me. Damon will hunt down peopl
e who can support your alibi in Europe.”
Kim groaned. “I don’t suppose you can get into my place in DC and get my calendars? I don’t put my schedule on my phone because it can be hacked, but I do keep detailed journals. The old ones would be in DC.”
“I assure you, he’s already got them,” Chelsea replied. “From what I’ve been able to gather in the short time I’ve had, he’s already been inside your DC apartment, your Manhattan brownstone, and the London flat. He’ll take everything he can and either burn it or use it to his own gain. I’m sorry. I know how much it sucks. Charlotte and I spent years on the run, and every time we had to leave a place, I felt like I’d lost some piece of me.”
How much had Kim lost in the last two days? “I want to see the warrants.”
“You know he doesn’t really need them.” Kim sounded weary. “He’ll have legal documents to show my property managers, but he can also easily make something up. How long do we need to be here in Paris?”
“A few more days. I’m working on moving you to Italy,” Tag explained. “Chelsea and Si have a place in Venice. From there we’ll get you back to the States. Sanctum is the perfect place. You can work and live there, and you won’t have to hide out on club nights, so you’ll have some company.”
“Is there any way I could go to Colorado?” There was a wistful quality to Kim’s question.
He felt his heart threaten to seize at the hope in her voice. And actually it wasn’t a terrible idea. “They don’t have CCTV there. We could find a quiet cabin and have a little freedom.”
Kim liked to hike and take long walks. Being stuck in one place would be difficult for her.
“I would have to talk to John…I mean Henry.” Tag fiddled with his phone again, typing something in. “But I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”
Kim sat back. “Of course. Dallas it is. And thank you so much, Chelsea. Please thank your husband for me, too. I appreciate you letting me stay at your place. I know it’s risky.”
