by Tara Janzen
Even under water, he heard her squeal, could see her feet tap-dancing on the pool bottom, while she tried to decide which way to make a dash for it—it was such a primal response, absolutely predictable, but there wasn't going to be any escaping. He was a good shark, and when he zeroed in on her, she didn't have a chance. Like a shot, he went for her legs, grabbed her, caught her as she fell, and dragged her under.
When he brought her up for air, they were on the far side of the waterfall, with steam and mist rising up around them and the water sheeting into the pool behind them, creating a liquid barrier between them and the rest of the room, between them and the rest of the world.
“You're—” she gasped, laughing, water running down all over her. “You're . . .”
“Stupid,” he said, shoving his wet hair back off his face with both hands and grinning. “I know.”
“And . . . and—”
He lifted her out of the water and set her on a stone ledge in front of him, bringing them face-to-face. Foliage and palm fronds curved around them. Ferns arced down from the rocks above, dripping with water. With one, smooth twist of his fingers behind her back, he had her bra undone.
“And . . . and you're taking off my underwear.” She laughed again, incredulous, her arms coming up and crossing over her chest.
“I want to see you.”
“Well . . . yes . . . I—”
He moved in closer and dipped his head slightly to look her in the eyes. “I want to make love with you.”
And he did. As much fun as it could be, he hadn't really wanted to just do the wham-bam thing up against the door. He wanted more than to just get off on her. He needed more.
She stared at him, speechless. “I . . . I—”
“Are you warm?” he asked, so smooth, going for her panties, those Saturday panties. “Lift up.”
To his everlasting satisfaction, she did, first one side and then the other.
“Y-yes,” she said.
She wanted this, all of her actions said so, but he hadn't exactly figured out why. The attraction was there; he could feel it pulsing between them. But there was something else.
“How old were you in that school picture?” He slid the panties off her legs and tossed them behind him into the pool.
“Seventeen,” she said. “How did you get that school picture?”
He saw her gaze follow the short arc of her underwear into the water, before returning nervously to him.
“I lifted it off Bruno Walmann. It's the one he was showing around the library.”
“You stole a photo from Bruno? Right off him, and he didn't, like, grab it back?”
“Pickpocket,” he confessed. “Bruno never even knew. Old school skills, right out of west Denver, when I was a kid. If we got lucky, we ate. If we didn't, we'd go hang around the back door at Mama Guadalupe's restaurant. She never let us go away hungry.”
“You . . . you were homeless?” She sounded truly shocked and a little dismayed. “But . . . but all this.” She gestured at the loft.
“I had a home.” He shrugged, not too worried about the past. “There just wasn't any food there, so lots of the time it was better to just cruise the streets a little, see what I could come up with.”
“What about your parents? Didn't you have brothers and sisters?”
There had been plenty of siblings, which had only made things worse. During those years, everybody had been struggling.
“I was the last of the litter,” he said, “and my dad took one look and decided I wasn't his.” He scooped up a handful of water and ladled it over her shoulder. A slight grin curved his mouth. “I think it was the blond hair and blue eyes that gave me away. It didn't matter that Mom weighed me down with Cesar Raoul Eduardo—the old man wasn't buying it. I was the whitest boy in the 'hood.”
“So your mother is Anglo?”
He nodded.
“Do you know who your real father is?”
He shook his head. “Mom has never said.”
“But you see her.”
“Sometimes. I'm out of town a lot.” And this conversation was quickly coming to an end. He wrapped his fingers around one end of her bra and started to pull.
She tightened her hold on it, still covering her breasts with her arms.
He had to keep himself from grinning. Women were such a mystery, such lovely mysteries. He already had her out of her underwear. She was completely naked except for this one little scrap of satin that technically wasn't even on her body any more.
“It's okay, Cody,” he said, looking up at her and giving her the grin he couldn't resist. “It's just us.” He didn't want her scared, he just wanted her, and after another moment of hesitation, the bra started coming away. He watched it unthread from between her hands.
CODY watched him watching her, watched his eyes darken in appreciation, watched the subtle deepening of his breath, and felt the heat of his gaze warm her skin.
Just us, he'd said, and suddenly, she believed him. The whole rest of the world had fallen away, simply disappeared. It was magic. There was no one, ever, anywhere, just the two of them in this hot, tropical pool, drenched in steam and surrounded by the rich greenness of the jungle.
It was Eden, and he was so beautiful, such a fascinating mix of tenderness and ferocity, of sweetness and seduction. She knew he was dangerous. He killed without hesitation—but he'd put his life on the line for her the same way.
Pulling the last of her bra free, he dropped it into the water and moved closer, stepping between her legs, smoothing his hand down to her ankle and lifting her calf up around his waist.
She felt him come up against her, felt the head of his shaft press into her curls, and her breath caught in her throat, stolen by the fierce edge of desire that cut down her center to her core.
“Creed.” She could barely speak his name.
“You're so beautiful,” he said, rocking against her, his voice husky, his other hand going around her back, supporting her.
He lowered his mouth to hers and simply consumed her, sucking on her tongue, gently biting her lips, turning her deep into his kiss—and all the while rubbing himself against her, enthralling her with his power, his need, with the size and heat of him. God, he was . . . everything. When his hand came into play, his fingers teasing her, his need suddenly became hers.
“You're so soft,” he whispered, running his nose down the length of hers, his mouth barely grazing her cheek, her lips. “I love touching you like this.”
And she loved being touched by him; the sheer intimacy of it felt like a gift, to be so close to someone after being alone for so long. She opened herself to him, opened her legs, opened her mouth and captured his lips with her own, his name running through her mind—Creed.
The kiss was endless, sensually charged, mind-drugging, and she was dying with wanting him. Her head fell to his shoulder, her hands tightening on his arms. She hadn't expected such aching pleasure, only the deed, to have him inside her, making her whole, but here she was, melting into him, her body limp with the pleasure he was creating. She wanted to swoon with it, and when he started to push up inside her, she almost did. All he had to do was be there, pressing against her, and she was mesmerized.
“Creed . . . I—” She didn't know what to say, but needed to say something. She should tell him the truth, before he went any further, but she couldn't, not when he felt like this and it all seemed so much more than she'd planned.
“Shhh, everything's okay.” He brought one of his hands up to the side of her face, cupping her cheek with his palm, kissing her once, so gently.
On his next push, he slid deeper, and she watched, entranced, as his pale gray eyes slowly drifted closed, his dark lashes coming to rest on his cheeks. His head came forward, bringing with it a long fall of sun-streaked hair, a harsh breath escaping him as he moved inside her, hitting every nerve ending she had and all the tender places in her heart, and oh, God, it was all so much terrible trouble—to really need him, to need hi
m like her next breath.
He felt so incredibly good, one soul-shattering sensation after another, thrust after endless thrust taking her someplace she'd never been, his hands all over her, his mouth burning a trail on her skin, leaving her dazed. His body was so tight and hard beneath her hands, one set of lean muscle layered over another. She loved the way he tasted, the way he smelled . . . the way he moved, pushing into her, holding her close. She tangled her hands through the long, silky strands of his hair, buried her face in the curve of his neck, felt the strength of his arms around her—and died a little just for the wanting of him.
Then, between one breath and the next, desire caught, every place he touched her suddenly taking her higher, until she couldn't take any more. It was the last thing she'd expected.
“Creed . . .” She gasped his name, every cell in her body pulsing with the sudden sweetness of release. Oh, my God.
A soft groan escaped him, and he buried himself deep inside her, his hips coming up flush against hers, his body going rigid in her arms. Oh, God. His breath was so hot on her neck, his arms so tight around her. She could feel the pounding of his heart, feel the pleasure coursing through him—and she was lost.
At the end, all she could do was cling to him and try to breathe. He had her in such a death grip, his arms like a vise around her, his body a rock solid wall of heat and power up against hers—and she never wanted him to let her go. Never.
After a long, intense moment, in which he didn't move, he sank to his knees in the pool, taking her with him. Water lapped at her chin as he rolled onto his back and drifted up against the base of the waterfall. He leaned back into a bed of ferns, still inside her, still holding her.
“Shhh,” he said, when she would have changed position. “Don't move. Not yet.”
Then he kissed her, over and over, his mouth opening on her forehead, her eyebrow, the side of her face, soft kisses, gentle kisses, each one of them making her feel more loved than she knew she had a right to feel.
C HAPTER
23
S KEETER LOOKED MUTINOUS. Her arms were crossed. Her legs were crossed. Hell, for all Dylan knew, her eyes were crossed. But he couldn't see her eyes. Her ball cap was pulled down so low and tight on her head, he could barely see her sunglasses.
“You don't want me to have to take this place apart,” Tony Royce said, putting a new twist on the same threat he'd been making for the last half an hour, ever since he and his guys had made it back to Steele Street.
“No,” Dylan admitted, not too concerned about the possibility. Skeeter had sat her mutinous butt right in front of the main motherboard, and with a couple of keystrokes, she could shut the operation up tighter than lockdown at the state penitentiary. Tony Royce would be lucky to get out, let alone get farther in.
But he didn't think that was what was bothering Skeeter. She'd come out of the office and signaled him that they needed to talk, but before he'd been able to extricate himself from Royce's tirade, she'd gone all spooky on him, glancing toward the ceiling and sitting herself down in the chair and getting silently, seriously wound up. Something was going on, and something was going to snap if she didn't lighten up.
He glanced back over at her, and watched, fascinated, as she mouthed the word “sex” at him and jerked her head toward the ceiling. It was unmistakable, she'd said sex, and it had an equally fascinating, if inappropriate effect on him. He knew what she was talking about, and despite his reaction, it didn't have a damn thing to do with the two of them getting hot and naked.
“No way,” he said. Impossible. Creed and Dominika Starkova hadn't been upstairs that long. He knew women found Creed damn near irresistible, but Ms. Starkova had looked like a drowned rat, and Creed had been way too strung out to put together any sort of “this is my place, can I get in your pants” scene.
“No condom,” she said with a tight little shrug, so angry it looked like she could spit.
Again, absolutely impossible. There was no way in hell for her to know something like that. He didn't care how “spooky” she was.
“No way.”
A strangled cough, coming from his right, drew his attention to Agent Mathers, whose gaze was riveted on Skeeter, everything in his expression saying “Yes, way. Anyway you want it way. With or without a condom, I'll go upstairs and have sex with you.”
Dylan had already been thinking he might have to kick Mathers's ass, because of the kid's fascination with Skeeter's breasts, and now he was convinced. It was just a matter of time.
“Do . . . uh . . . you two need to clear something up, so we can focus on what's happening here tonight?” Royce asked, sounding about as disgusted as Dylan suddenly felt.
He never got off track, and Skeeter had just sidelined him into the bleachers.
“Yes. As a matter of fact, we do,” he said, heading for his office and gesturing for her to follow.
She was off her leather-clad butt in a heartbeat and right on his ass all the way into his office.
SOMETHING damn fishy was going on, Royce thought. Something about as fishy as what he'd found at South Morrison. He and his guys had hardly gotten out of the car before they'd been called off by the director himself.
Called off when there'd been goddamned gunfire coming right out of the goddamn building. All under control, Alden had said. Another set of agents was on the job.
Bullshit. There was only one reason for another set of agents to have been “on the job” at South Morrison: The “prongs” in Alden's multipronged approach to the Dominika Starkova operation were starting to trip over each other. Royce could see the writing on the wall. He'd been sent as a frickin' decoy to rattle SDF's cage and draw them off, while some other guys grabbed all the glory and Dominika Starkova.
Well, fuck that. This sort of snafu should have been all sorted out between the Pentagon and Langley before it ever got down to agents being deployed in the field. It was always a potential difficulty with clandestine operations, that one hand wouldn't know what the other was doing, and the kind of rogues the CIA had been recruiting as agents since 9/11 only compounded the problem. Nobody knew what in the hell some of them were doing. For a few years, Agency work had been a fairly clean operation of signal interception, electronic surveillance, and technical information gathering. They'd cut back on the less savory aspects of human intelligence gathering and lost most of their special forces capabilities, but gained respectability.
Of course, it had all been so damned ineffective, even Royce had balked at some of the changes. It was a well-known fact that if your enemy was in the sewer, you had to have a few rats on your side, the kind of rats who knew how to infiltrate enemy organizations.
Well, Royce smelled a rat, probably more than one, and while they were snatching Dominika Starkova and taking down terrorists, he was stuck in this friggin' impregnable building, watching his guys drool over a street punk and praying to hell he wasn't getting outplayed by a man who should have been sitting in Leavenworth for the last nine years.
He needed something to break—and if it couldn't be Dylan Hart's special status at the Department of Defense, he sure as hell would like it to be Creed Rivera's ass.
SEX?” Dylan said, shutting his office door firmly behind him. “And what's this about a condom? You can't possibly know that.”
“Oh, yes, I can,” she said, facing him with her hands on her hips. “There hasn't been a condom in Creed's loft since I took over requisitions. Every week, I send out the list, the same list you get, and right there under Grooming and Hygiene is a little box for condoms—and it is never checked. Never. There isn't a condom on the ninth floor.”
Dylan stared at her, stupefied. Yes, he'd seen her unbelievably detailed requisition list. He got it via e-mail every Sunday, and every now and then he ticked off a couple of items: espresso, steaks, cordon bleu, croissants, maybe some of that special shaving cream he liked.
But he never checked the box for condoms.
“A guy can buy his own condoms,” he s
aid. As a matter of fact, a guy preferred to buy his own condoms. He could A-1 guarantee it.
“Could,” she agreed. “But why? I've got all the options. There isn't anything you could want that I don't have on the list: cherry-flavored, ribbed, magnum, whatever. It's all there.”
Yes, he'd noticed all those options the first time she'd sent out the list, and he'd tried damn hard not to notice them ever again—and the very last conversation he wanted to have with her was the one that included cherry-flavored ribbed condoms.
Jesus. It was giving him hot flashes.
He turned away from her and walked over to his desk.
“It looks like Royce and his guys are here for the long haul,” he said, sitting down and opening a new document on his computer, and doing his best to just forget about condoms. “Unless we can draw them off.”
He wanted the bastards gone. It wasn't just professional. He couldn't really fault Royce for trying to do his job—but Mathers was skating on thin ice, and he didn't want the guy hanging around Steele Street all night staring at Skeeter's ass.
“I'm going to go—no, I'm going to send you to police headquarters, over on Thirteenth and Cherokee. Take the Humvee.” There wasn't anything that could get to her or stop her in the Humvee. “Drop off all the intel Creed collected tonight. Give it directly to Lieutenant Bradley. I'll send instructions for her to make sure it gets to the CIA guy she's been arm-wrestling with all night. It won't take him long to call Agent Royce, and then they can all go hole up somewhere else and go through their goodie bag. And make sure Loretta gave them the address to Dominika Starkova's apartment. They can have that, too. All we need is the girl.”
“Won't Lieutenant Bradley think that's all kind of roundabout?”
“Loretta owes me, big time. It won't matter what she thinks; she'll do it.”
Royce had been chasing his tail all night long. Dylan could guarantee that he'd jump at the chance to get ahold of something besides his dick tonight.
“Once Royce is gone, I promise you, I'll save Creed from Dominika Starkova's evil clutches.”
