by Gennita Low
Seconds passed as the men left. Michael was nearly on top of her, and the instant the door latch clicked, he wrapped a hand around the back of her neck and brought her to him again.
Talk about crossing lines, sucking face with the Deputy Director of the CIA could only bring her more grief, but as his demanding lips parted hers, she didn’t care.
For this moment, grief was far away. Guilt and responsibility too. He made her feel sexy and alive like she’d never experienced, and damn if she didn’t want even more.
Enjoying his sensual lips on hers, she used her tongue to taste him. Coffee and a hint of spearmint. Power and control.
He returned the favor, meeting her tongue with his as he shifted her body around to press her against the wall. She sucked in a breath, amazed at his gracefulness, but he mistook it for pain and broke the kiss. “Is it your ribs? Did I hurt you?”
Brain muddled from an overdose of his lips, she shook her head in confusion. “My ribs?”
Michael’s fingers grazed her rib cage, sending an electrical charge through her chest. “Your bruised ribs, remember?”
She giggled, the sound almost a whisper. Had she really just been sticking her tongue in his mouth? “Oh, that, no. You didn’t hurt me.” Touching him in the same spot, she watched his eyes darken with desire. “I’m in tiptop shape.”
“You were almost blown to pieces two days ago.”
Two days ago was another lifetime she didn’t want to talk about. She didn’t want to talk at all. She wanted his tongue back in her mouth and his body pressed up against hers, trapping her to the wall. “I’m not done thanking you for today.”
With slow smugness, he smiled and slid his face so his cheek was next to hers and his mouth was by her ear. “What were you doing hunting Peter by yourself? I told you we would come to Belfast together.”
His low tone, the sound of pure sex in his voice, made her shiver. How did he do that? Talking about a terrorist and undressing her with his voice at the same time?
She struggled to form coherent words. “Killing Peter would ruin your career.”
He kissed a spot under her earlobe. “What about your career?”
“Gone already.” Leaning her cheek against his, she breathed in his clean-smelling aftershave and hoped it would rub off on her. “No career. No family. No life.”
“I told you”—he nibbled her lobe—“I’m going to get your dad back.”
Sinking her fingers in his short hair, she sighed. “How?”
“Peter’s the key.”
“Peter will be dead soon, or at least very, very sick.”
Michael’s lips stopped nibbling. “How do you know?”
Shut up, she told herself. You’re ruining everything. But she couldn’t ignore his question, nor could she lie. “I poisoned him.”
“What?” Michael put his face in front of hers so they were nose to nose. “How?”
She let her hands fall to his chest. His sculpted-like-a-Roman-god chest. Now she’d blown everything. “The umbrella.”
Michael stepped back and held up his hands, looking at them as if they were diseased. “You put poison on the umbrella?”
“No.” She shook her head in earnest. “In the umbrella. It’s a Cold War technique. You use it like a gun to inject a poison pellet into your target.”
His brows drew down and then he strode out of the room, clearly irritated, taking all his magnificence with him.
Brigit slumped against the wall, deflated. Her luck hadn’t really changed after all. She didn’t belong with Michael any more than she belonged with her father or her sister or anyone else. She was alone. Totally alone.
“Show me.”
Her head snapped up at Michael’s command. The umbrella was in his hands and he was holding it out to her.
Taking it apart, she laid each piece on the bureau and answered his questions about how it worked. Keeping her focus on the umbrella, she tried to let his annoyance roll off her back, but his obvious disappointment in her couldn’t be ignored.
When his silence stretched into the painful zone, she peeked at him from the corner of her eye. He was staring at her with an unreadable expression, arms crossed over his chest. “You built this?”
Returning her attention to the umbrella, she swallowed the lump in her throat. “Yes, and I followed Peter to the bar and injected him with rat poison. Got him right in the calf.”
Silence again. Unable to stand it any longer, she turned to face him. “Say something.”
A light had entered his eyes. He rubbed his chin with his fingers and thumb. “I think I’m turned on.”
Relief slammed through her as he grinned wide, perfect teeth showing. In an instant, she was in his arms again. She wrapped one leg around his muscled thigh as their mouths found each other, and the next second he lifted her and swung her around to sit on the top of the bureau—umbrella parts scattering—all without breaking their kiss.
Her legs instinctively parted to allow him access, and he slid her to the edge of the bureau where their hips snapped together. The bulge in his pants teased her as mercilessly as his lips.
“I didn’t think you had it in you,” he murmured against her mouth.
“I don’t normally,” she said, feeding him short, hot kisses. “But every time I think of Ella and Tory and what Peter’s taken from me, I hate him. I hate him so much I want to kill him a hundred times over.” She pulled back and checked his response. “Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? That I hate my brother enough to kill him? Holy Virgin, I’m fucked up.”
“You have every right to feel mad, Brigit. Blood doesn’t mean shit in this case.”
God, she loved him for saying that. Leaning into him again, she teased his lips. “Thank you.”
He responded, speaking through her kisses. “Dangerous to go after him alone, though.”
“I laugh in the face of danger.”
One of his hands went under her sweater, raked her stomach. “Jesus, you’re my kind of woman.”
When past and present meet, secrets lie beneath the surface.
Beneath the Surface
© 2009 M.J. Fredrick
In retrospect, perhaps archaeologist Mallory Reeves shouldn’t have delivered the divorce papers to her estranged husband mere weeks before her marriage to another man. She knew seeing Adrian again would stir up memories, but she didn’t expect so many of them to be good, not after the mess they both made three years ago.
She also didn’t expect to want to stay at the dig site on the Yucatan Peninsula. But the lure of the ancient ship and, yes, her sexy ex provide more of a draw than the white picket fence she thought she wanted.
Marine archaeologist Adrian Reeves has good reason to trust no one. His former partner—and former best friend—made off with his last archaeological find. And his wife left him, frustrated by his obsession for professional revenge.
Now both Mallory and his nemesis have returned, and it can’t be an accident that they’ve turned up in the middle of the most important excavation of his career. Seeing her again unearths old pain—and rekindles never-forgotten desire. Now he has to decide if he can trust Mallory again. More importantly, if he can trust himself with her.
Warning: Smokin’ hot archaeologists, painful memories, breathtaking underwater scenes and a passion that won’t die.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Beneath the Surface:
Something was off, something was wrong. Adrian realized it the minute the ship came into view the following day. It wasn’t covered, for one thing. Had the currents shifted in the past twenty-four hours, had they pushed the rubber sheet off the ship? He scanned the site and saw the tarp flipped back, not rolled as if it had been pushed by water.
As a result of being uncovered, much of the ancient wood had dissolved into the water. His stomach clenched. The more wood he lost, the more the integrity of the site was compromised. He couldn’t afford that.
He finned over to a curved shape rising out of the ocean floor. Tha
t hadn’t been there yesterday, had it? Or in their excitement over finding the figurehead, had they missed it? His heart rate picked up when he realized it was an amphora, and he reached for it.
A slender shape shot out of the mouth of the amphora. Shock blended with the sharp pain in his arm and he dropped the amphora as he jolted backwards.
Shit. Shit. Fucking moray eel had made its home in the ceramic vase. Adrian had been too distracted to notice. Hell and damn.
Before he could turn to inspect the damage, Mallory was beside him, squeezing the wound closed. His blood drifted into the water in a dark cloud. Mallory’s brow furrowed in concern as she realized they were in danger.
Sharks.
With his free arm, he motioned to Toney and Jacob, then to Mallory, and pointed up. They needed to get out of the water in case a nosy shark came to investigate. Mallory looked at him a moment before she took his other hand and clamped it over the wound on his triceps. He didn’t dare look to see how bad the damage was; he couldn’t risk letting more blood into the water.
Mallory swam to the others, signaled what had happened and motioned them to go up. The two men exchanged a glance, then nodded before ascending to the first decompression stop.
And Mallory swam to him. What the hell was she doing? He gave her his worst scowl, but she merely pushed his hand away and covered the wound with her own. So she squeezed a little harder than she should have—her way of getting revenge?
She gave him a questioning look and mimed swimming. He nodded. With her hand firmly on his arm, they swam up to where Toney and Jacob dangled near the decompression line. Mallory scanned the water, before looking at him again. He made a half-assed okay sign and her frown deepened.
He hated to admit he was getting weaker. His arms felt like lead and he could barely keep his eyes open. But whether it was from loss of blood or the poison moray eels were said to have, he didn’t know. He did know that Mallory’s grip kept him focused.
She tugged and they swam up the line to the next stop. He shook his head, as if that would erase the effects of the bite. Mallory hung on, scanning the water. The good thing about the Caribbean at this depth—clear as a bell. They could see sharks coming from a long way off.
He lost his grip on the line. She caught him with her legs, wrapping them around his, holding him to her. He tried to give her a leering grin as his hips nestled intimately against hers, but couldn’t manage an effective one with his regulator in his mouth and the muscles in his face refusing to obey his command.
Finally they reached the barge. The three of them worked together to haul Adrian up on the platform. Mallory shed her gear with amazing efficiency before she tugged at his torn sleeve to see the damage.
Her face paled above her bloodied nose, and he turned to look. The skin over his triceps was shredded. Blood oozed down his arm, coating his skin.
“He took quite the chunk out of me, yeah?” he asked and blacked out.
He came to with a start when Mallory spilled some liquid fire on the wound, and he sat up with a scream.
“I’m sorry.”
Her tone was unapologetic. She’d stripped her wetsuit down to her waist and leaned over him in a bright bikini top. That could do for some distraction from his present pain. Someone had peeled his suit off as well. “The bacteria in those eels’ mouths are bad. We have to kill the germs.”
“I am not a germ.” The slur in his voice surprised him.
Mallory ignored him and took a syringe from Robert. Adrian barely opened his mouth to protest when she jammed it into his arm.
He swore. “Is this payback? Geez, Mal, I didn’t know you had a vindictive streak.”
She gave a small smile, her attention still on the wound. “I can’t say I’m not enjoying this a little. But you’ll be glad for the shot. I’m going to stitch you up.”
“Why don’t you give that job to someone I wasn’t married to?” He glanced around the barge and saw Jacob and Robert back away. He cast Toney a pleading glance before turning his attention to Mallory.
Her eyes sparkled as she threaded the blunt-looking needle with coarse black thread. “Why, don’t you want it to be pretty?”
“I’m afraid you’ll make me look like Frankenstein’s monster.”
She smoothed her hand over his skin. “I’m very proud of my work. Don’t worry.” She prodded his skin near the injection. “Numb yet?”
“No. Look, I don’t know how good of an idea this is,” he added as she edged closer, parting her legs around his hips as she inspected the wound. Okay, maybe not such a bad idea.
“It’s a four-hour drive to get to a hospital. And I let you stitch me up when I fell and split my chin in Mexico.” Tilting her head back, she showed off the thin white scar.
He brushed his thumb over the scar and sighed. “All right. I’m ready.”
Sucking her lower lip between her teeth, she placed a damp palm on his arm, pulling the skin taut. “Hold still.”
She scooted closer, surrounding him with the smell of ocean and sunshine beneath the coconut scent of her sunscreen. He would focus on that and not on the effect of her body wrapped around his as she tried to get a good angle to stitch his wound.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, and stuck the needle in his arm. Yeow.
The thread tugged at his skin and he winced, but the pain wasn’t enough to kill his growing desire. Soon the whole crew would know it.
“Mal.” A lump rose in his throat and he swallowed. “Maybe there’s a better way?” When she looked up at him, he flicked his eyes to his lap.
She followed his gaze and scowled. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I can’t help it my body doesn’t know we’re divorced.” Hell, part of the reason he was aroused was because he hadn’t been with anyone since he left their house in Pensacola.
She wasn’t looking at him anymore, but he could see her blush along the part in her hair. “Your body should know you just got bitten by a moray eel.”
“My body prefers pleasanter sensations.”
She jabbed the needle in a little sharper than he cared for. “Tell your body to get control. We have a long way to go here,” she said through her teeth.
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