No, goddamn it. I’m a DeMarco. I’m not going to be terrified.
But what if something had happened to Mal? What if he’d been injured because of her?
Taking a steadying breath, she looked at Mal to see him pull his ripped and bloody jeans away from his knees.
Fear tried to sink in again but she wouldn’t allow it.
“Damn it, Mal, you’re bleeding.”
“Just surface abrasions. It’s fine.”
She took another look and knew he was right. Still… “When we get to my place—” her voice sounded weak and shaky so she forced some strength back into it, “—I’ll clean that for you.” He didn’t fight her about it, but he wouldn’t look her in the eyes either. It must hurt worse than he was letting on. Her own hands were scraped up and her right leg probably had the beginning of a spectacular bruise, but his knee must be killing him.
“Maybe we should take you to a hospital.”
His hands curled into fists. “I really slammed you into the pavement.”
Now, why did he sound angry about that?
“I’m fine. I’d rather you slammed me into the pavement than that car.”
Mal acted like he didn’t hear her. “I should have been more careful. Should have seen that car sitting there waiting. Goddamn Bennett. I told him to leave. Told him to go back to the hotel.”
Mal shook his head and didn’t say another word after that.
By the time the cab deposited them at her doorstep, the silence sat on her shoulders like an anchor.
Mal limped to her couch and dropped onto it, letting his head fall back against the cushions. All other thoughts left her head at the pain etched into his face. “I’ll be right back with the first-aid kit.”
When she returned from the bathroom, she knelt in front of him.
“The jeans are ruined anyway. Just go ahead and rip them.” Mal didn’t even open his eyes.
Taking hold of the damaged fabric, she tore them away. Then she reached for the bottle of painkillers and held it out. “Take a few of these.”
He opened his eyes and stared steadily into hers. He held out his hand. His trembling hand. She spilled out three, then handed him the bottle.
“I’ll get you some water.”
After he’d taken the pills and downed the water, he leaned his head back onto the cushions with a sigh and she turned her attention to the wound, pausing before actually touching him.
“This is going to sting.” She looked up to find him staring at her. “I’m sorry.”
His answer was a slight nod. Then he closed his eyes again.
She dabbed at the dirt with a soft white washcloth, trying not to cause him any more pain, but noticing every slight flinch he made.
She also couldn’t help noticing the man’s great legs.
Dragging her gaze away from the bit of muscled thigh she could see easily, she turned to find the bandages and give herself a moment to regain her equilibrium.
“Janey, are you really okay? Your hands are shaking.”
Damn, so they were.
Come on. Pull yourself together.
“Do you want me to stay with you tonight?” he asked, causing her hands to tremble for a whole different reason. Then he totally ruined the mood. “Or if you want, I’ll call Nic, have him come over.”
She stood and began to gather her first-aid kit together. “I’m fine, Mal. You took the worst of the fall. Hell, my hands aren’t even scraped. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”
“Janey—”
She held up one now-steady hand and stopped him. “You can stay.” So she could keep an eye on him, make sure he didn’t have a concussion from hitting his head on the ground.
Yeah, right.
She stalked off to the bathroom, fuming because he was just like her brothers, thinking she needed a man to take care of her, protect her from all the bad things in life.
So, okay, it was kind of sweet, in a chauvinist-pig way, but she’d discovered some things about Mal this morning that left her with a whole lot more questions.
Like her inability to find his exit date from the NSA.
If he stayed here, with her, she might be able to extract more information from him. And of course, after last night, the thought of close proximity made her knees weak. And that definitely was not due to her near brush with danger. It was all due to Mal.
She’d been thinking of ways to get him back in her bed all day. She wanted him there and, from the heat in his eyes whenever he glanced her way, he wouldn’t be averse to that either.
When she left the bathroom, she found he’d moved into the kitchen, where he stood at the sink getting another glass of water.
She hadn’t made a sound. Her house didn’t creak. Not the hardwood floor or the new windows or the steel door.
But he heard her coming anyway and turned to watch her walk across the room.
She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Are you sure you want me?” Her eyebrows lifted and he actually flushed, just a low rise of color on his cheeks. “To stay? Are you sure you want me to stay?”
She had to laugh at that one. Yeah, she was sure. She couldn’t help her furtive glance toward her bed. Her home’s open floor plan meant her bedroom was only partially concealed from the rest of the room by a large folding screen made up of old wooden garage doors. They hid her bed from view but they were not walls.
She wouldn’t get any sleep if Mal was only a few feet away.
Then again, maybe she didn’t want to.
“You can sleep on the couch.”
***
“So tell me again how you found out DeMarcos was looking to hire someone.”
Sitting on the couch in a pair of Nic’s sweats that weren’t too big and a faded T-shirt of Jimmy’s, Mal stared straight into Janey’s eyes. They’d been sitting here for the past half hour, her on the chair across from him. Her questions had gotten increasingly more difficult to answer. It was only going on 10:00 p.m. Maybe he should just plead exhaustion and go to bed.
But he couldn’t even think the word “bed” without wanting to end up in hers.
She’d come out of her bedroom in a pair of men’s flannel pajamas, her feet bare and sexy as hell. All he could think about was if she was naked under all that soft cotton.
He’d seen her naked. He knew how beautiful her body was. How she responded to him, moved with him, came apart in his arms.
And apparently all she could think about was work.
He shrugged nonchalantly, his gaze never wavering from hers. “You know how it is in the intelligence community. It wasn’t that hard to find out. I called your office, and your mother asked me to come in for an interview.”
That was exactly what had happened. Minus a few key plot points.
Maybe you want to rethink this little sleepover, son.
Too late now.
Janey’s electric blue gaze was homed on his and he couldn’t look away.
“Tell me something about yourself that I can’t find in your classified files,” she asked.
Was she actually admitting she’d read his file? She had to know that was breaking the law. Still, she was a DeMarco.
“My favorite TV show is Community.”
She burst into laughter, tipping back her head and exposing the line of her neck. The sight ripped right into his libido.
“Oh, that’s just too typical.” Her laughter broke into uncontrollable giggles. “You couldn’t come up with something more esoteric, like, I don’t know, some show on the History Channel?”
He couldn’t help himself. He had to laugh along and then she got the hiccups when she stopped suddenly.
And that just made him laugh harder.
“I think—” hiccup “—I need a—” hiccup “—glass of water.”
“Sit still. I’ll get it.”
He limped to her kitchen, opened the glass cabinet on the first try and extracted a bottle of water from the fridge.
&n
bsp; When he returned, she allowed their fingers to brush as he handed her the water. A shiver ran through his body, making every hair on his body stand up.
Before she took a sip of the water, she said, “Tell me about your partner, Mal.”
Damn, she’d caught him off guard.
Deep grief and pain welled up in his chest and he had to turn away on the pretense of sinking back into the couch. Seemed she’d been doing more digging than they’d thought.
“If you know about my partner, then you know how he died.”
She shook her head, eyes wide. “No. I don’t. I know you were a field agent. I also know your last partner was killed in the line of duty. That’s all.”
He really hoped she was telling the truth. He hoped to hell she didn’t find out his true mission until he had a chance to tell her.
Yes, talking about Dev would take her mind off other things but that didn’t make it any easier to do.
“We’d infiltrated a French national’s group attempting to steal and sell US intelligence secrets. We were ready to shut him down when my dad was in the accident. Dev was young. He was trained, but he was green. It was my job to keep him safe. When I got the news about Dad, I lost it.” He shook his head, still unable to comprehend how badly he’d failed.
“He was comatose and wasn’t expected to live. Dev thought I should be with him. But we were two days away from extraction. My dad wouldn’t have known I was there anyway. Dev decided to take matters into his own hands to get me out. God, he was young. And idealistic. Came from a close family. Couldn’t understand how I could bear to be anywhere but at that hospital.”
Mal had to pause and draw a deep breath. “The target found Dev making a call, the call I’d refused to make. He shot him. The guy shot him…and Dev died.”
Janey leaned forward and grasped his hand. “I’m so sorry. That must have been awful.”
“It was the worst week of my life.”
He looked into the warmth of her eyes and wanted to kiss her. Wanted to press his lips against hers and feed on that heat. To forget why he was here and who she was—
“I don’t know what I’d do if I lost my dad.”
And that forced a whole other load of guilt back onto his chest. What would happen when Frank found out about Mal? Would his heart be able to handle that stress?
And what would it do to this woman?
She dropped her gaze before rising. “I think I’m going to turn in. I’ll get you a blanket and some pillows. There’s an extra toothbrush in the cabinet under the sink. You can watch TV if you want. It won’t bother me.”
She disappeared behind the wall into her bedroom and he hobbled into the bathroom, telling himself it was better she hadn’t invited him into her bedroom.
The bathroom walls were tiled in soothing shades of cream, and there was a huge soaking tub that took up the end of the room. Definitely big enough for two people.
Images of the two of them in that tub made his cock throb, giving him the start of a hard-on he knew would just get worse.
He thought about taking care of himself in the bathroom because he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be sleeping in her bed tonight.
She was shaken, tired and worn out. He should leave her the hell alone.
When he emerged, she was nowhere in sight. He considered knocking on that large screen separating her bedroom from the rest of the space, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Looking around, he noticed she’d taken her laptop with her. And that she’d shut down the unit on the huge old steel desk on the opposite side of the room.
Guilt, anger, grief, desire. They all churned into one blazing ball of fire in his chest. He patted down the remains of his jeans for his antacids and took them to the couch. Janey had opened it up into a bed dressed in plain white sheets. Guess she really wasn’t inviting him to share as she had last night.
She’d thrown a blue comforter and a quilt at the bottom and a couple of pillows at the top. Cozy. And not at all where he wanted to be.
Instead of lying down, he paced the room, checking both front doors, the side door that led to an alley and all of the windows before grabbing the remote off the top of the television and settling onto the couch.
He tried not to think about Dev. Tried not to let that young man’s death cloud his judgment. If Janey had in any way contributed to Dev’s death, she’d have to pay. He couldn’t allow his emotions to get in the way. Emotion had already gotten Dev killed.
But Janey could be next if he wasn’t careful.
He released a sigh and flipped on CNN. It was going to be a long night.
***
Janey didn’t think she’d ever fall asleep.
Not with Mal so close.
She’d taken the laptop to bed with her to try to do some work. Luke needed results. Someone had leaked case information and he didn’t know who or how. He was depending on her to find out.
Which wasn’t going to happen if she couldn’t keep her mind on task and off the man in the other room.
She’d heard him pacing a while ago then he’d flipped on the TV, lowering the volume until she couldn’t hear it. Flickering light shown over the room divider but it didn’t bother her.
No, what bothered her was him. The way he kissed, the intelligence in his eyes. The possibility that he could be working for her family for reasons other than what he said. She was really afraid—
Mal leaned on the edge of the screen and stared at her. She froze for a second, before closing her laptop and setting it aside.
“Can’t sleep.” His voice made her chest tighten.
She shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant when her pulse rate had just increased by a hundred. “Me either.”
Then she held out her hand and waited with bated breath for him to take it.
He crossed the floor in seconds, grabbing her hand and pulling her to her knees so their lips met in a rush.
Next she knew, his hands had delved under her T-shirt and he was pulling away to draw it over her head. Then he cupped her breasts, pinching the nipples into hard peaks, coaxing a groan out of her. She grabbed his borrowed shirt and tugged.
Instead of taking off the shirt like she wanted, he bent and sucked first her right, then her left nipple into his mouth, drawing hard and making moisture pool between her thighs.
“Mal.”
“Yeah?”
She could barely hear him as he trailed kisses across her chest to her other nipple.
“Take off your clothes.”
He nipped her, not enough to cause pain but just enough to make her cry out.
“I’m kinda liking this position at the moment. As a matter of fact…” He moved his hands and shoved the flannel pants to her knees, lifted her off the bed and dragged them down and off her legs. “I’d rather not stop.”
There was that alpha streak again, the one that made her toes curl and her heart pound against her ribs. The one that was so at odds with the rest of him.
“Mal,” she started again but couldn’t continue because she moaned when he placed one of those hands flat against her stomach, then slid it down to thread his fingers through her curls and tweak her clit.
Somehow, he managed to get her on her back with him beside her, one hand between her legs, caressing her with his fingers.
She came in seconds—a sharp, swift orgasm that left her wanting more.
“First but not last,” he muttered against her throat, where he nipped the sensitive skin.
But she wasn’t about to give up complete control. Rolling on her side, she lay full length against him. Forcing her hands between their bodies, she slid them under the sweatpants, smoothing over his butt, then using her nails to rake along the skin. He shuddered against her, grinding his erection into her thigh.
And when she moved her hands to the front and grabbed his still-thickening cock in her hand, he groaned against her skin.
“Come on, Mal. Take them off.”
He released a s
hort laugh and lifted his head to look into her eyes. “You’re a demanding woman, aren’t you?”
“So everyone tells me. Just take them off. Right now.”
The expression on his face hardened into pure lust and he lay on his back, pulling the shirt over his head and shoving the pants down until he could kick them off with his feet.
He was so beautiful, he took her breath away. Muscle sculpted his lean body into a gorgeous display of masculine beauty. She could have stared all night but Mal had other ideas.
He must have taken notes last night because he pulled open the nightstand drawer and withdrew a condom. When he was sheathed, he reached for her, lifting her until her knees straddled his hips and her sex hovered just above the tip of his cock.
She sank lower, taking him in. Her inner muscles still quivering from the earlier orgasm, she clamped around him, forcing him to ease into her tight sheath.
When Mal had himself fully seated, he simply stared into her eyes, watching as hers darkened and her lips parted so she could draw in air.
Then she started to move. She eased up on her knees, the tight clasp of her sex drawing exquisite sensation with every centimeter she moved.
When she’d almost lifted herself completely off of him, she sank back down with a moan, her hands splaying across his chest to provide leverage.
Her head fell back as she rode him, and he nearly came at her expression. Sheer bliss.
He wanted her to go faster, tried to make her hurry with his hands on her hips, but she refused.
So he moved one hand to her stomach so he could brush his thumb against her clit.
Her moan made his muscles tighten, his cock harden even further. Now she moved faster, her ass hitting his thighs with each downward thrust. He couldn’t hold back his orgasm much longer but—
She contracted around him, gasping as he thrust up to meet her. Heat shot through him and spilled into her body as she came again.
With a sigh, she sank down onto him. His arms wrapped around her as her warm breath brushed against his chest.
“Stay.”
Her soft voice barely made it to his ears but he heard her loud and clear.
“Yes, ma’am.”
***
When she woke, the sun shone through the thin window above her bed. She stretched and immediately groaned and curled into a ball. She hurt from head to toe.
Sex, Lies and Surveillance Page 18
