by Leslie North
Her brother.
The brother who thought nothing of putting his future on hold to raise her. The brother who always told her that life began beyond the edge of one’s comfort zone. The brother who was abducted because of something she created.
And here she was, scurrying away.
The Angela who had been orphaned when her parents were killed and holed herself up in countless laboratories while the pursuit of intellect became her security blanket would have been relieved to have an escort back to her safe, predictable life. Hell, the Angela from the King’s Head Tavern days earlier would have been satisfied.
But as hard as it was to fathom, she was no longer that Angela. She had seen too much, experienced too much, felt too much, to ever return to the naïve woman she had been. She was a woman whose rediscovered weaponry skills empowered her, a woman who had found the strength within to break ties and forge new, unexpected ones, and who had uncovered a part of herself she hadn’t known existed: latent erogenous desires in the presence of an outrageously sexy SEAL. And though she could never be in a relationship with someone who subsisted on a steady diet of danger and women, Samson had as much genius of the non-book variety left to teach her as she had a craving to learn.
If Julian realized the formula was a fake, Samson was a dead man walking.
In that scenario, only she could sacrifice for him the way he had for her.
A plan gathered in her mind. This time, she didn’t create lists or make choices based on all that could go awry. She focused on all that felt right and acted.
Angela knocked on the driver’s partition. The tinted glass slid down a few inches.
“Take me to Julian’s plane. I have to be on that flight.”
Chapter Nine
Julian Simkins was one loaded motherfucker.
There had been Marianne’s family money—old French money that went back a century and included aristocrats and enough land to form a new nation. And Julian, himself, had built his empire in commercial real estate abroad. His contemporaries were the top one percent—dignitaries, celebrities, tycoons, CEOs of multi-national corporations—and it showed in every gilded fixture, every crystal sconce, every lavishly-appointed living space inside his Gulfstream G-550 jet.
The guy had enough money to conceive and fund a private but untouchable vendetta.
As the plane ascended to cruising altitude, Samson leaned his head back against the plump Italian-leather headrest in the empty executive cabin and tried to remember why the hell he thought this plan was a good idea. The absolute last thing he wanted was to let Angela go, but it was the only way he knew how to protect everyone—Angela, Mike, Manny, the innocents of his homeland. Even if it came down to the very real possibility that he was sealing his fate. Permanently.
Six years ago, it wouldn’t have mattered. He’d have given anything to follow Riley into death. Almost had. But time had a way of rounding the jagged edges. Rockwell gave him renewed purpose, his combat brothers gave him new memories to replace the old, and he learned the best remedy for pain came when he sank himself into the willing flesh of a beautiful woman.
Progressively, that had no longer been enough.
He wanted a family—something real that grounded him and curbed his impulsiveness. And when he tired of the fight, someone waiting for him with a passionate heart and an unyielding devotion. He had that, once, but it was an illusion. Never again. The pain of loss next time would be insurmountable.
Samson shuffled his feet. His heels hugged the hard-sided case containing four vials of serum, as if the liquid had the capacity to devastate. In his private world, it did.
The cabin bulbs dimmed. Soft orbs of light from executive lamps pooled around clusters of furniture and tables. He had yet to see anyone from the four-person crew since takeoff; he supposed discretion and sight-unseen was how Julian preferred doing business. Samson lolled his head toward the closest portal windows. The dusky clouds below looked like confections, dipped in sugar and glazed orange from the setting sun. His eyelids grew leaden.
He couldn’t say how long he dozed. By the rays still visible on the horizon, it couldn’t have been long. He shifted in his seat. His gaze snagged an argyle-patterned sticky note, affixed to the table beside him: What ifs…
His stomach did a perfectly-executed parachute drop in the span of one breath. The paper was familiar, the handwriting more so. No. He glanced around.
On a lamp shade behind him and diagonal, another note.
Samson picked up the case at his feet, charged the second note and read: aren’t an option…
No.
A third, attached to a bottle of French wine chilling on ice: for me, either…
Fuck, no.
A fourth note on the frame of an abstract painting took him nearly to the rear of the jet: Please don’t be mad.
Beside him, a wood-grained pocket door slid open. Angela stood at an arm’s reach beyond, same clothes as the marketplace, same uncomfortable-in-her-skin demeanor that had her fidgeting six directions, same pink and brown glasses dipped low on her adorable nose because her ears were low, with one notable exception: her eyes were round, vulnerable.
His chest felt like a flash burn. From anger or relief, he couldn’t say.
“Say something,” she urged.
He didn’t trust himself to speak.
“I’m not sorry I came. I won’t apologize. My whole life has been one long pre-meditated thought. I can’t eat without obsessing over food labels or get in the car and drive somewhere without three ways to track where I am and where I’m going. I haven’t done a single spontaneous thing in my life, not since that spontaneity cost my parents theirs, so before you send me back to my solitary, listless existence, give me this one moment without judgment.”
His throat burned. The case handle slid in his grasp. He was mad as fucking hell, but she looked so fragile, he didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
“Say something,” she pressed again.
“That’s the last time I ask you not to think so much.”
Her lips stretched into a smile. A nervous laugh lifted from somewhere deep inside her, deep enough to sprout a glistening film of moisture in her eyes. He mirrored her smile, and the pressure in his body cavity eased.
“You’ve been hiding back here all this time?”
His gaze trickled to the space behind her—a private executive suite with a desk, a mounted flat screen, circular windows packed with stars, and a bed. The front stitching of his jeans grew tight at the thought of taking Angela, here, again and again on an excruciatingly long flight, but he talked himself back from that precipice. She was probably a virgin—one who had Jeopardy-level knowledge of the Kama Sutra as it related to women’s rights during some ancient dynasty, but had never actually put anything into practice past the fantasies her ringtone incited. Still, a tempting contradiction.
Christ, Caine, rein it in. She deserves more than you will ever give away. Don’t take advantage.
“I was afraid you’d ask the pilot to turn around if we were still over the west coast.”
“You shouldn’t be here, Angela. This isn’t some theory you can work through. These men are willing to kill or be killed for their agenda.”
“I couldn’t stand the thought of you killed. For Mike. For me. I can’t continue to place the people I care about in danger because I’m afraid to live. Really live.”
“Really living is overrated.” He meant it as a joke, but her response was anything but.
“Is that how you view making love to those seventeen women? Overrated?”
“Angela…” He infused every note of warning he could muster.
She retreated to the bed and sat on her hands. That simple, innocent gesture nearly pushed him over the cliff of want. Her first time should be fumbling in the dark and sensitive and significant—all the things he was not.
“I’m not a virgin.”
The flight hit a pocket of turbulence. Samson jostled a bit on his feet, no
thing compared to what her revelation did to his sense of Angela. It was the shooting exercise all over again. The woman was a vast ocean of untapped surprises.
“He was a teaching assistant my sophomore year in college. Chemistry.” A caustic laugh erupted from her lips. Her gaze drifted out to the visible moon at the edge of the world. “We were doing a lab about potentiometric titration and my data was all over the place. I couldn’t calibrate the pH and my titration curve looked like a deflated helix. He offered to stay after class with me. I thought he was just being nice.”
Oh, fuck. Samson gut turned inside-out. Dark imaginings came on like a toxin in his blood stream. As sure as he knew Marianne’s details before Julian shared them, he knew what was coming. He slid the pocket door closed and set the case at his feet. Feet that refused to move for fear they would make a misstep.
“He touched my breasts. Told me if we had sex that he would make sure I passed the class. I had struggled that semester with anxiety, and I needed that final lab grade to keep my merit scholarship.”
“Angela, you don’t have to—”
“It wasn’t like that. Not what you’re thinking. He was gentle. And I wanted to. I was curious. He kept his word, and here I am, a chemist who created a monster. I just wish my first time hadn’t been in a filthy storage closet.”
“Why are you telling me this, Angela?” He knew. Fuck in all heaven, he knew. But he had to hear it from her lips.
“If there’s a chance Julian might not let us go, that this might be it, I want to know everything. How it should be. I trust you, and that’s crazy because I don’t trust anyone. Ever.” A solitary tear sprinted down her soft cheeks.
Samson turned into a ghost, already long gone.
“And because you know nothing about potentiometric titration.”
He waited for her coy smile then allowed a tight, restrained chuckle. It wasn’t funny. None of this was funny, but he had never been so goddamned nervous around a woman. Angela was the most bewildering, grade-A risk of an intimate encounter as he had ever known. That she trusted him above all others made him feel worthy of her. That she was looking for someone to replace darker memories made him the last person who should oblige. He couldn’t wrestle his own demons into submission.
“If you don’t want to, I understand.” She swiped at her cheek. In the wake of her hand, her eyeglasses slipped low.
He crossed the distance between them and lowered himself to the bed, close enough to let her down gently, at a good enough distance to keep himself in check. He straightened her glasses. “It’s not that. I want to. Very much.”
Her gaze—electric, surprised—flashed to his.
“It should be with someone special. Someone who isn’t just part of your life for a season.”
“You couldn’t have had seventeen seasons.”
Samson smiled, despite his resolve not to. There was no sense worming his way out with logic. She would best him in that department every time.
“What if a season is all we ever get?” She reached for the button at her throat. Her plain, nimble fingers unfastened the collar.
He froze, his senses attuned. The sweet, innocent taste of their remembered kiss whetted his tongue. She smelled clean, cottony, untouched. His memory flashed to the moment in the truck—his words he longed to bite back—why do you keep so buttoned up? She did it to protect herself, no different than his arsenal and his remote house and seventeen faceless women whose names he couldn’t recall, just so he could keep the real thing at a distance.
Her fingers slipped lower. Another button, unfastened.
At the thought of being the one to teach Angela about her sexuality, a fierce surge of desire, coupled with a drive to protect her spirit, her emotions, to know exactly what she needed in this exposed moment, brought heat to his extremities, turned him rock-hard, and threatened his control.
What if he was the perfect person to show her that ethereal connection between body and mind? What if she turned out to be unforgettable? What if he let her in and lost her the way he had Riley?
But Samson didn’t do what-ifs. He was a man of action. He glanced down at the sticky notes still attached to his fingers: What ifs…aren’t an option…for me, either…Please…
He crumbled the paper to the floor and brought a hand up to stop her unbuttoning progress. A slight, pale rise of breast peeked at him through the slit of her shirt.
His dick lurched from the preview.
Christ, how was he going to restrain himself if one tantalizing morsel of flesh made him want to skip straight to the moment when he sank balls-deep into her and her lust-filled cries of pleasure alerted the cockpit?
Her eyes widened. No doubt, she thought she had done something wrong.
“Rules?” she whispered.
The game was afoot, much like the one on the shooting range, only he had all the advantage. Angela McAllister operated best within the safety of parameters. He squeezed her hand, still inside in his grasp, kissed her soft knuckles then smiled to reassure her.
“You first.” He unbuttoned her sleeve cuff and kissed the soft skin of her inner forearm.
One reedy intake of breath sounded close to his ear. Her pulse staged an uprising against his lips.
“Clean shot.” Her voice was strained, thick. “Nothing left.”
Damn, if she thought this was good, what sugary treasures must await. He pushed her sleeve higher and kissed the hollow at her elbow. “Opponent chooses everything.”
“Rubber duck.”
Samson smiled against her skin. His protection would extend far past the reaches of her bliss-soaked climax. Given a choice, his protection of Angela McAllister would extend indefinitely.
“Agreed.”
“And your choice?”
That Angela McAllister should discover her own body before she ever thought to please another. “Spread. Thighs.”
Chapter Ten
Samson pulled the desk chair to the bedside and sat, watching, waiting, his own legs spread impossibly wide in solidarity. The fly of his jeans was full, prominent. His dark hair was tussled from slumber, but his eyes had never been more penetrating.
Angela might as well have had magnets on the inside of her knees for all she took to his request. She had barely stomached the position for her gynecologist, and now Samson wanted to start with a peep show? Not what she expected.
“Thighs?”
“Wide.”
“Samson—”
“Less thinking, Angel.”
If she had any final reservations, his endearment obliterated them. The name landed against her skin like a thousand suns. She catalogued her imperfections: zero muscle tone, pale skin, practical underwear that no one was meant to see.
“Before my tongue does it for you.”
A hot rush of wetness swamped the area in question. The man could elicit a response with mere words. The word genius returned to mind. She scooted to the bed’s periphery and opened her knees.
“Wider.”
Her thighs stretched the cotton fibers of her button-down-the-front dress to their limits.
Samson shook his head, a devilish uptick teasing the corner of his mouth.
Angela hiked up her skirt and pressed her knees against the mattress, butterfly-style. The robust action was born out of frustration—how much wider did he want them?—but the end result was a slow, satisfied crawl of his gaze from one set of lips to the other. The man could fuck with his eyes. The muscles of her cervix tightened, a purely Pavlovian response she was unaware she possessed.
“My turn,” she said.
His hand raised from his knee in casual invitation.
“You. Naked.”
Samson’s brows pitched. His lips pressed into a barely-restrained grin. “Don’t waste much time, do you?”
“Not when the only man I’ve seen is a plastic anatomy dummy.”
Again, with the smile. He took his time, because South Africa might as well have been Mars for all the distance that
stretched out before them or because he wanted it to last, for her. Her first time had been more like a fire drill and three taps of a hydrant. Angela intended to enjoy every sweet twitch of muscle as he maneuvered out of his clothes.
With every stitch of fiber that fell to the floor, Angela knew a greater appreciation for the male body. Her eyes feasted on the impeccable proportions of his chest, his etched barbed-wire tattoo that had once been the subject of a quip, the sinuous movements of his shoulder blades and arms as he stripped the final scrap of clothing above his waist. He was magnificent, and they hadn’t even gotten to the good part.
“I could use a little help with the rest.”
His invitation was clearly in violation of the rules, but Angela wanted nothing more than to be violated. She climbed off the bed, stood before him, and placed her hands at the top button of his jeans. Eagerness stalled in uncertainty.
He teased her temple with his lips and whispered against her skin. “Like opening a gift.”
Her throat constricted. He didn’t make her feel silly or inexperienced; he was the ideal tutor—slow, patient, completely without judgment. She wanted so much to please him, for it to be as good for him as she knew beyond all doubt it would be for her.
Life begins at the edge of one’s comfort zone.
She unfastened his pants. His cotton-draped shaft throbbed and scorched the back of her fingertips on every subsequent button.
Samson hissed his appreciation.
Thumbs hooked in his belt loops, she tugged the tight denim down his muscled legs dusted with hair and freed his ankles from his jeans and socks simultaneously. When she had completed her task, she straightened, unable to suppress the grin of accomplishment that broke out on her face.
“You forgot something,” he teased.
She glanced down at his boxer-briefs, smoke gray and sheathing what looked like a very impressive laboratory rod.
“Right.” She pushed her glasses back to the bridge of her nose.
Samson chuckled.
As any good scientist would, she worked out the precise angle for maximum efficiency, stretched the fabric to free his sizeable length, and proceeded to study his appendage, eye to dick, as she removed the underwear past his ankles.
