He circled her wrists, his eyes like a winter’s twilight. “What about the things I can do, the pain I might cause? I’m stronger than you realize. Aren’t you afraid of that?”
Her hands slid to the waist of his jeans. “I’ll never be afraid of you.” She felt his zipper stretched taut.
“You should be. Everyone else is.” His voice fell. “Even my bastard of a father was in the end.”
“Because he knew you were better and stronger than he’d ever be, so he hated you for it. As for everyone else—they haven’t seen your soul the way I have.”
Wolfe stood very still. “I don’t have a soul. Not anymore.”
She smiled faintly, saddened by his lie. Saddened that he thought she couldn’t see deep enough to know it was a lie. “Then I’ll take whatever you have to give me.” She opened his zipper and took him between her hands, stroking him slowly, ignoring his low curse.
Even then his control didn’t waver, despite the smooth squeeze of her hands.
Or her mouth.
She honored him with that hot touch, telling him what he refused to believe about his own worth. She wondered briefly what he’d had to do to become so distant, so controlled, but the thought faded beneath the rough pleasure of his body’s powerful response against her lips and hands.
His fingers tightened in her hair. “Damn it, Kit, you don’t understand. There are things I can’t tell you—” His breath caught as her tongue feathered across him lovingly. “That won’t change. Not ever.”
“Do you want me?” she asked gravely.
He nodded.
“That’s all that matters. I’ll love you enough for both of us, since you can’t seem to love yourself.”
Something seemed to snap inside him. When she drew him back, stroking him with her mouth, he muttered her name and forced her to stop, his breath harsh and labored.
“You’re turning me inside out, honey.” He lifted her to her feet as if she weighed nothing, guiding her legs around his waist. A muscle flashed at his jaw. “I want us. Even if you regret it tomorrow.”
“Never.”
“Never is a long time.” Then he pinned her against the shadowed wall, against the moonlight slanting down in a pale bar. His body was a line of shadow when he kicked his clothes away and took her there, the first time slow and fierce, every stroke robbing her of breath. He drank her ragged cries with his mouth, driving her up again, giving her no pause, no quarter.
Kit knew she was lost, knew she’d never be able to take another man like this again, with her heart given completely and time standing still. He might be gone in an hour or in a day, but this would be enough, his body driving her against the cool wall in deep, pounding strokes while his hands dug at her hips and his breath came harsh at her forehead. This she would never regret.
His body hardened. With a curse he lifted her.
She felt cool honed granite at her back as he set her against the counter. She watched his face change, watched his jaw clench and his control finally begin to slip.
This is real, she thought. This is sweat and lust and the dark slap of his skin on mine. This is Wolfe naked, deep inside me.
Filling me to breaking.
Loving me. Whether he knows it or not.
He rasped her name as if the sound was torn against his will. Then her body betrayed her, wet and shuddering, gripping him in her climax even as she struggled to wait.
Their bodies locked, straining. Then she fell, boneless and blind, stunned to feel him follow, his thighs rigid as he drove his hot seed inside her.
Moonlight shivered around them.
Light against shadow. Hope against despair.
“WE SHOULD GO UPSTAIRS.” Wolfe’s voice was husky. “A bed would be good.”
“Ummm.” Kit’s mouth nuzzled his chin.
He was still leaning against the counter, one arm supporting her. She wondered vaguely how he managed to do that even now, after the most mind-blowing, heart-stopping sex she had ever known.
His fingers eased behind her back. “You’re pressing against the outlet,” he said gruffly. “That’s got to hurt. What about those bruises on your leg? Damn, I forgot all about—”
“Can’t feel a thing.” It was true. She was sated and insensible, beyond anything but bliss and smug in the aftermath of her last stunning climax. “Since I can’t move a muscle, I guess we’ll have to stay this way for a few centuries.”
She heard his low chuckle. “I know the feeling.” But he didn’t seem to have any problem lifting her.
“No,” she muttered. “I want to stay here, exactly like this, with you inside me.”
“I will be again, believe me.” His voice was ragged, smoky with hunger.
“Again?” Kit’s eyes slitted open. “You can still—”
His kiss cut her off. When he pulled away, his eyes glittered. “You’re damn right I can. Only this time will be in a bed.”
“In that case, I’ll have three more of the same.” As he crossed the floor, moonlight brushed his shoulders, and Kit couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away.
“There’s something I need to tell you first.”
“Let me guess.” Her lips curved. “You’re married?”
“Not a chance. Something else.”
She feigned shock. “You’re using me for irresponsible, impersonal sex, but you’re trying hard not to show it.”
Wolfe bit the soft finger that was trailing across his mouth. “Honey, if this is impersonal, then I never want to see personal.” His mouth flattened to a line. “It’s about protection—or the lack of it. In case you didn’t notice.”
“I noticed.” Kit slid her arms slowly around his neck.
Wolfe took a deep breath. He was trying to be practical, to be honest with her, but her body was robbing him of all thought. “There’s no reason for you to worry, because it won’t be a problem.”
She studied him uncertainly. “What does that mean?”
“It means no babies. No chance of it on my end.”
Her finger traced his cheek. “Are you going to tell me why not?”
“It’s a long and not very interesting story, believe me. Bottom line—I can’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “What a terrible shame to waste such good genes.”
She was painfully serious, he realized. She didn’t have a clue about the black humor in what she’d just said. “The world will survive.”
“Maybe there’s something that can be done. Have you seen a doctor?”
“It’s final, Kit.” He shoved open the bedroom door with his foot. “I just wanted to tell you so that you wouldn’t worry.”
He put her down in the middle of soft white sheets, but when he tried to stand up, her hands tightened, pulling him closer. There was more than need in her eyes, more than desire.
There was something that felt like belonging.
He closed his eyes, rocked by the image of Kit pregnant, round and radiant with a child they’d made together in love.
Never going to happen, you fool. You’re Foxfire property, stamped and processed. Children are neither in the technology nor the job description.
He dropped the jeans he’d carried upstairs. Her hand slid down his stomach, making him curse. Foxfire protocol proscribed ongoing personal relationships. Sex was fine as long as it was arranged through well-screened government sources. But it was never the same woman twice and the contact was never cluttered by emotions or discussion afterward.
Ryker’s rules, and they were never broken.
Wolfe frowned. He’d just broken that rule in spades.
He’d have to end his contact with Kit soon. God knows, he shouldn’t have started this. But his resolve wavered as her smile warmed him in the moonlight, and her eyes darkened with welcome and acceptance.
He had never known either. The combination was a sucker punch.
He could withstand torture and gunfire, but not Kit’s smile.
So he forgot Ryker’s rules, knowi
ng it was stupid and maybe even dangerous, but unable to turn away from all she offered. For once he needed to feel exactly what it meant to belong.
One last time, he vowed, pulling her atop him.
“You’re scowling at me.”
He ran his hands across her stomach. Smiling, he cupped the silken weight of her breasts. “Because I’m trying to go easy with you.” He bent closer, kissing the dark, aroused nipples that left his body hard again. “You’re not helping too damned much either.”
“When I want easy, I’ll tell you. Right now I’m thinking along the lines of hot and fast and bone-jarring. Got a problem with that?”
Hot and fast was right up his alley.
Something buzzed noisily on the floor by the bed, and he cursed. “My beeper. I have to get it.”
Kit sighed. She started to roll onto her side, but he caught her hips and held her against him. “Wrap your legs around me,” he ordered. With one hand at her waist, he slid to the edge of the bed and leaned over, searching the pocket of the jeans he’d dropped. He found his pager, checked the ID and frowned.
“Look, I’ll go,” she said quietly. “I mean, if this is important…”
He dug his cell phone out of another pocket. “Don’t even think about moving. I’m not close to being done with you, honey.”
Her face filled with color. She laughed shakily. “You’re going to talk on the phone while we—while I’m—” She stared at him, her legs riding against his growing erection.
“Multitasking is the motto of the new Navy.”
“No way.” She bit her top lip. “Not even you can do…well, that.”
Good thing she didn’t know about some of Ryker’s kinkier training exercises, Wolfe thought darkly.
His eyes narrowed. “I can’t?” He nudged her legs apart and slid inside her, grimacing at the wet silk feel of her. His long, probing strokes made her gasp, her nails raking his back.
He realized that watching her come all over again was going to be high on the list of his best life memories. “Don’t let me stop you from letting go.”
He held his slow, powerful rhythm, watching her rise to meet each stroke. With the slightest wince, he flipped open his cell phone. “Yeah.”
Kit’s eyes flashed open, her face filled with color. She tensed as he drove harder, deep inside her. She whispered his name, staring at him blindly.
And then to his fierce delight, her back arched and she came again.
When she would have cried out, he muffled her mouth with his palm. Her eyes were dazed, her body flushed, and he had never seen anything more beautiful than her passion.
“Houston, it’s Teague. Everything quiet in there?”
Wolfe felt his pulse kick as she moved beneath him. “As quiet as it needs to be,” he said hoarsely.
“Nothing moving out here.” Silence. “I saw the living room light go out.”
“Nothing to worry about.”
“How’s Kit?”
Wolfe’s eyes narrowed. The subject of the question was currently panting hard, ready to crest in another wave of pleasure. “Asleep.” His jaw clenched as her velvet muscles squeezed him.
His control was unraveling fast. All he could think about was her body, stroking him in hot, shivering tremors, scrambling his focus.
“Grab some shut-eye. Even you Foxfire hard bodies need quality time in theta.”
“I’m trying.” His voice hardened as Kit went boneless against him. “If there’s nothing important…”
“Not out here. The coast is clear.”
“Later.”
Wolfe cut the connection and dropped the phone. Something glinting and wicked filled Kit’s eyes, and she gripped him hard, drawing him deeper inside her. “Hurry up,” she whispered, biting his hand.
Squeezing him intimately, she pulled him deeper until he felt his control snap.
He pinned her beneath him. “You live dangerously, honey.”
“Because a certain man leaves me no choice.” Her voice was husky. “I want you wrapped around me. I want the imprint of your body so I’ll never forget tonight. Fill me up. Turn me inside out. Let me feel you lose control.”
It was the easiest thing he’d ever done to let her smoky voice pull him deep until he did what she wanted, locking their fingers and rising to his elbows, driving her across the bed with hard straining stokes until she came beneath him again.
As he drank in her broken cries with his lips, Wolfe let his control shatter and found his way home inside her, dimly aware of her mouth sliding into a smile before pleasure swallowed them both completely.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“YOU TOOK FOREVER. Get back under the covers now.”
Wolfe frowned into the darkness. He’d talked to Izzy and then checked the downstairs perimeter. Nothing seemed irregular or felt out of place when he did an energy scan.
But he was restless, just the way Kit’s dogs were restless. “I took seven minutes, honey.”
“Forever,” she said sleepily, curling up against him.
He couldn’t stay here. Touching her was becoming an addiction.
He took slow breaths, focusing on the dark house. The branches of a big cottonwood tree scraped the nearby window, and he shifted his concentration, running it through the house as he checked for noises that were out of place or subtle energy trails that felt wrong.
But nothing hinted at Cruz’s presence. And that awareness only left Wolfe more edgy.
He heard Kit’s steady breathing beside him. She was asleep again, her leg across his thigh, her fingers curled around his shoulder. Desire was a pleasant torture as she twisted in her sleep, her warm body open to his.
Wolfe knew he shouldn’t be cluttering his mission with emotions.
But something bothered him more than that. Ryker could have ordered that Kit and the dogs be taken to a safe house unrecorded in any government database, guarded 24/7 until Cruz was back in custody.
But he hadn’t put her into isolation, and Wolfe knew why. She and her dogs were the best bait Ryker had, and he meant to use them any way possible. He would do whatever it took to avoid having Cruz’s face splashed across the six o’clock news while reporters shouted messy, unpleasant questions about a military program that didn’t officially exist.
Ryker knew that Cruz would come after them, and Wolfe would be her only real defense when the bullets started flying.
Until then, he had to stay close—and stay ready.
Curled up beside him, she murmured softly, her hand opening on his chest. She said something about chew toys in her sleep and sat up quickly. “Why did you let me fall asleep?”
“No reason not to.”
“You’re still awake and you don’t even look tired.” She shoved the hair out of her face and glared at him. “How come you aren’t exhausted?”
“Training,” he said smoothly. “I’ll catch a nap later.” He changed the subject, staring at her neck. “You’re going to have a mark there in the morning. Maybe more than one.”
Kit stretched beneath the quilt, smiling smugly. “Excellent. I’ve always wanted to be debauched and seductive, like Ingrid Bergman in Notorious.”
“That’s an old movie, right?”
“One of the best. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it.”
Wolfe shrugged. The only kind of movies he saw regularly involved demolition techniques and round trajectories.
“Where have you been living, the eighteenth century?”
“Not quite that far away.” He toyed with the hair at the back of her neck, letting it spill over his fingers.
He didn’t want to ask personal questions, but he had to. “If any of the men in your life have hurt you, I’ll find them.” Actually, he’d kill them.
“That sounds very plural.” Kit traced his stomach. “You must think I’ve been busy.”
He pulled her up and kissed her with grim possessiveness. “I think you’re unforgettable. How could you not have men lined up wanting you?”
“Try me.”
“He was an archaeologist working up on the mesa for a summer. That tent of his looked so damned hot that I felt sorry for him. He used to come down for showers and air conditioning on the weekend. One thing led to another….”
Wolfe’s muscles tightened. He hated the man already. “Things usually do.”
“We agreed on everything at first.” She laughed bitterly. “Except on marriage. I wanted to and he didn’t. And about kids. I wanted six and he wanted zero. He also wanted me to give up my canine work, leave the ranch and follow him to North Dakota.” She closed her eyes and Wolfe watched moonlight play over her face. “How could I leave? How could I ever give up my dogs?”
“He was a fool to ask,” Wolfe said harshly. “Worse than a fool.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he was used to getting exactly what he wanted.” She rolled over, drawing her fingers down his chest. “It doesn’t matter.”
Branches scraped against the window. “Did you love him?”
“I loved thinking that I did. As for the rest—no, I didn’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Kit smiled crookedly. “Because I know how the real thing feels. I’ve probably always known.” Leaning down, she kissed him with slow abandon.
Wolfe’s chest tightened. Honor made him slant her face up to his. “I can’t stay, Kit. It’s—what I am and what I do. I won’t lie to you or make promises I can’t keep.”
Something shimmered in her eyes and then vanished. “I’ve always been a sucker for a man who tells the truth. Even when it’s not what I want to hear.”
He didn’t try to answer her.
“Stop looking so angry. I don’t want promises from you.” She slid her leg across him, bringing their warm bodies together in a slow, erotic friction.
“Kit, you can’t—”
She traced his cheek, then bit his ear.
He closed his eyes at her touch. “When I’m gone—”
“Shut up.” She pressed against his erection. “Where’s that multitasking you’re so proud of?”
Code Name: Bundle! Page 21
