The Animal Under The Fur

by E. J. Mellow

  His muscles grow taut under my touch, and his fingers knead my thighs, an attempt to keep himself in control, to let me have my way, if only for a few seconds. But we wouldn’t be us if there wasn’t a constant give and take, a tug of dominance. And while I appreciate his discipline, I want none of it, so bringing one hand to the knot of my towel, I give a decisive tug and let the white material fall free.

  “Good Lord,” Carter groans, taking me in.

  My nipples tighten as a soft breeze whispers through the open balcony, an invisible finger trailing down my spine as I sit there, straddling him, until he’s pulling himself up, wrapping his arms around my waist to kiss my breasts.

  I throw my head back on a gasp, feeling his arousal, his teeth, his fingers on my back, and then lower.

  With the sound of deep pleasure emanating from his throat, he spins me to lie under him, pinning my hands on either side of my head and grinding into me. He’s in control, and I willingly accept this…for now.

  He goes after my mouth again, and I pull my fingers free to dig into his thick hair, yanking a portion back so I can nip and bite his throat. We are animals, tumbling, claiming, and with a tug of his jeans, down and then off, we become pressed together, skin to skin. My senses lap in every hard inch of him, a crooning purr as I feel what’s waiting for me.

  Fumbling for his nightstand with one hand, Carter continues to lick and kiss, holding me in place beneath him. But when he pulls out a package of condoms, I can’t help the bark of laughter that escapes me.

  “Please tell me you didn’t bring those for me.”

  He answers by shooting me a devilish grin. “We’ll never know,” he says before cutting off my next words with a kiss. A kiss that curls my toes, for it’s a slow massage at midnight, a nap under the sun, and I decide I could do this for the rest of my life, before he rises above me again. Resting on his knees, his broad shoulders and rippling body stretches above, green eyes darkening to shaded moss as he peers down. He rolls on the condom, slowly, and I let out a pant.

  The corner of his mouth curls at the side, taking me in, my apparent hunger, and he waits right at the edge, at the beginning until I let out a soft growl.

  With the sound, his eyes dilate, a man becoming possessed, and I hold my breath as he slides in.

  “Jesus,” he groans, grasping my hips.

  “No, Nashville,” I say teasingly, before my eyes flutter back on a gasp as he thrusts in again. Hard.

  “If you can make jokes right now,” he breathes, teeth clenched, “I’m not doing a good enough job.”

  Pulling my legs to rest against his shoulders, his hand dips perfectly between them, and all my ability to speak is lost as he works me like the man he has flaunted for so many weeks to be. And my God, does he have reason. He plays me precisely, teasingly, skillfully, sending me spinning up until the minute I’ll explode, before pulling back, only to do it over and over and over, a torture. Every inch of the room becomes ours to throw the other upon, the walls for him to press me against as he pumps into me, the stone floor for me to ride him into ecstasy, the posts on the bed for me to grasp as his muscles bulge under his movements, his abs to tense as my moans and his grunts fill the air for an endless ticking of time.

  Even in our pleasure we compete, neither of us ready for this to end even in our race to get there quicker. I have no idea what will be on the other side once this is done. My brain won’t think that far. It can only handle so much stimulation at once, can only allow Carter’s intoxicating pheromones to coat my skin, to take in the beauty of his sweat dewing under my fingers and his gloriously concentrated expression as he hovers over me.

  This man whom I had hated, despised the very moment I met him, is claiming every inch of me and I him. A shiver runs the length of me because I like it. I like him, more than I want to or probably should. We both seem to be thinking this, for our tornado only picks up speed, our fight for position above the other a constant twirl. It’s a combat I’ve never played before, but with him I’ll gladly do again and again.

  Let’s give ourselves a second, he’d said, and that’s just want we do. We give ourselves many seconds, seconds that turn into hours. And it isn’t until the sun turns a lazy orange, lowering in the sky, that I find myself on all fours on the bed, Carter behind me, hands and angles right where they need to be as we finally, violently, burst apart only to collapse as one.

  His fingers trail a slow path down my arm as I lie tucked into him, his chest warm at my back, and I stare out at the darkened courtyard beyond our balcony. I just finished telling him everything, all of it, and my throat burns from the unnatural act of confiding in someone. But he didn’t say a word as I went on, only listened, waited, until I squeezed out the last drop, a towel wrung through.

  “We should probably check out of this hotel,” Carter says after a moment. “If they know who you are, they know who we all are and where we’ve been staying.”

  “I thought about that, but if we leave, I think it would draw suspicion. They haven’t indicated that they’d attack, nor have I felt anyone watching our hotel. I’ve been doing sweeps of our room for bugs, but it’s been empty. Mendoza seems sincere in his hope that I’ll join him and is giving me time to gather myself before making any moves. If we disappear now, it will only make him do the same.”

  “So we have to play the sitting duck?”

  “Unfortunately. But I think that could be to our benefit.”

  “Mmm.” Carter seems to agree, and I turn to find him looking up at our bed’s canopy, his full lips and sharp jaw making up his gorgeous profile. Yes, I’m admitting that Carter is gorgeous.

  “He’s put a lot of faith in you,” he says. “To keep his secret.”

  “He knows what I’m risking if I tell.”

  Green eyes slide to me. “Yes, I suppose he does.”

  The way he says it, with his gaze steady, makes me realize we aren’t just talking about Mendoza.

  For some reason this moment, with his fingers playing across my skin, his attention never wavering from mine, becomes more intimate than everything we just did, with lips and limbs locked together, and I shift under the sheets.

  “No you don’t.” Carter brings me in closer just as my muscles tense. “Stop it, Nashville.”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “Yes you are. You’re thinking about what we just did, what this means for us. Internally talking yourself onto a ledge of a freak-out, and I have no patience for that. Now or ever,” he adds.

  “Well, how are you not freaking out?”

  “Because I’m obviously more mature than you.”

  I elbow him in the side, and he laughs through his oof.

  “I’m being serious,” I say.

  “When are you ever not?”

  “Carter.”

  “I love it when you say my name.”

  A frustrated growl leaves me as I push away, but he merely chuckles and pulls me back.

  “Fine,” he says. “You really want to know why I’m not sitting in a corner sucking my thumb right now?”

  I nod.

  “Because nothing in me is saying this is wrong.”

  I wait for him to elaborate.

  “Listen. Everything we do, you and I, is with our gut, our instincts. I’ve let it guide me through the army, my brother’s death, then my parents, and every assignment I’ve had. It’s served me well with this job and even how to handle you.”

  “Handle me?”

  “Like right now it’s telling me that it’s in my best interest not to answer that, but do something ridiculous instead like…” He lifts my arm and blows a raspberry against it, eliciting a farting sound.

  “That’s disgusting.” I pull away with a scowl.

  “Extremely,” he agrees. “But back to my perfect instincts,” he says, and I realize his odd distraction worked, my earlier flare of annoyance gone.

  Shit.

  “It’s so far never led me astray. My interpretations of what it�
��s trying to tell me might have been off at times, but that’s my own fault. I’ve learned to trust it, listen to it, and while a part of me is definitely wondering how the hell I can be lying in bed with possibly the most dangerous person I’ve ever met and not have seven knives hidden under my pillow, I don’t have any more stashed weapons because it’s telling me I no longer need them.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask, twisting a serpent’s grin onto my lips. “It does seem rather precarious of you.”

  “Aw, you’re cute,” he says and bops me on the nose with his finger.

  My eyes go wide. I’ve never been called cute, especially not when it comes to my threats. Oh, this won’t do. But before I can make an example out of such behavior, Carter cuts me off.

  “I’ve been running for a very long time from a lot of things,” he says. “And I can’t tell you that I no longer have issues about my past, because I do. I’m still terrified of…losing like that again. It’s not an emotion that’s going to go away overnight. Especially not in our line of work, but…” His gaze slides back to mine. “I’ve finally found something that has me wanting to risk it despite that. And my instincts”—he brings the back of my hand to his lips—“are telling me that’s okay.”

  I swallow against the tightness that’s formed in my throat, not knowing how to respond. I can feel myself understanding his words, even agreeing with them, but I have yet to find such a voice to utter similar sentiments. This does feel right, but in its rightness, it feels extremely wrong. I’ve never known such intimacy, don’t know what comes next, and can’t draw on my friendship with Ceci to break apart what’s happening to me right now. This is so different. It’s creating things in me that have never existed before. I can sense my cells testing Carter’s and bending, remolding to allow him to fit beside me, a worthy ally. It’s exciting just as it’s terrifying. For so long I’ve been alone with this side of my life and have been okay with that. It was less messy, but now…picturing myself returning to my old ways feels colder somehow, more alone. How do I explain this to him when I’ve never been good with words, especially the emotional kind?

  Meeting his gaze, I decide to answer him the only way I know best—physically.

  Leaning forward I press my mouth to his, drawing him in for a deep kiss, and he allows it, understands its purpose as he moves his lips with mine.

  With fingers combing through his hair, I pull him more securely against me, and a deep rumble of pleasure sounds in his chest. Take your time, he seems to say. All the time you need. And I do. I keep us pressed together until he’s above me and then between me, spreading my legs.

  We’re not as havocked this time, not as greedy, but we still demand the most from each other, always, as we ride another crest of pleasure, of him showing his dominance before I show mine. Two independent partners finally acting as one, and after we finish, just as out of breath and wrung dry as the first time, I rest my head back on my pillow.

  Carter is right there with me, the soft yellow light of our bedside lamps cutting the planes of his angular features with a warm shadow. Though I’ve studied him many times, he looks different now, more…him, and I wonder if he feels the same about me.

  Cuddling closer, yes, actually friggin’ cuddling, I allow myself to breathe in the rare quiet of this moment, where the world seems to have paused just for him and me.

  But like all things in my life, the darkness that waits like a predator beyond our door knocks, and everything about the Oculto, Mendoza’s true plan, and our mission comes back in a dark wave.

  “They can’t know,” I eventually find myself saying. “That he’s my father.”

  “No,” Carter agrees. “They can’t.”

  “And the weapons, what Mendoza made for himself and the armies. We can’t hand over either.” My voice is firm. “That science…I don’t care what Ploom and Axel think. It’s not safe with anyone, not even our own government.”

  He doesn’t answer right away, his gaze pinned to some nondescript spot on the bed’s canopy, and I’ve never cared more about what someone will say than I do in this moment. I’m asking him to go against our orders, something that, if anyone finds out, would put a mark on both our heads. His answer could end us, right here, now, after so much, and yet before anything has really begun.

  “No,” he eventually says, his arms tightening. “It’s not safe with anyone.”

  I let out a soft breath, a swell of a strange hope. “You’ll keep this a secret, after it’s all done?”

  His face turns to mine, green eyes boring into my blue. “Beyond my death,” he says, and I don’t know how, but I can tell he means it. I’m not sure why either of us has found such shelter in the person each believed to have hated, but we have, and it has set a strange chain in motion.

  So much to plan, take care of, and then there’s my father…

  “What am I going to do?” I play with a bit of sheet in my hands.

  “I’m not sure,” Carter answers, moving my fingers to lie still in his. “But we will figure it out.”

  Hooking an arm under my head, he brings me closer, and as I lie on his chest, his heart a steady rhythm in my ears, I replay the only word he spoke that truly matters.

  That’s all the difference.

  We.

  53

  Carter

  UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  PUEBLA CITY, MEXICO: 1245 HOURS

  Lying shouldn’t be this easy, especially not when it’s at the expense of your team that’s worked so tirelessly beside you to get to this point. But it turns out it is.

  Everything we do is built on lies anyway, right? What’s a few more. Plus, what they don’t know can’t get us killed, or however that phrase goes.

  Sitting in a windowless gray conference room in one of COA’s outposts in Puebla City, a metropolis between Cuetzalan and Mexico City where our larger unit has been standing by, Nashville and I finish sharing our well-crafted story to Akoni, Jules, and two large TV screens that frame David Axel’s and Anthony Ploom’s heads. In the span of an hour, the two of us recount finding Manuel Mendoza’s hideout on a side drive we took searching the land south of Viento del Este. Learning soon after, through various torture methods placed on one of his scientists that we snagged on their shift change, that the biochemical weapon is a serum that temporarily creates superhuman soldiers. We made sure, of course, to leave out such tediously boring things like how Mendoza turned out to be Nashville’s long-lost father and his bigger threat of creating an effective DNA mutation method that allows regular humans to become A+. These remain locked between us, two children sharing a pinky swear in the middle of the night.

  “This place is huge,” Akoni says, the hovering 3-D map of Mendoza’s bunker reflecting in his glasses as he studies it, twirling in the center of the room. He’s paused in peeling apart an orange, wearing one of my favorite T-shirts of his. It’s black with white lettering that reads You Have to Be Odd to Be Number One.

  Nashville just clicked on schematics that, thanks to her quick thinking when in Mendoza’s compound, she was able to obtain by sticking an Echo Mapper to the underside of one of the lab’s tables. She explained to me earlier that if Ramie was in the premises, there was a slight risk in activating it since it gives off a pulsed energy. But because it’s set to dissolve once used, even if he searched for the source, there would hopefully be nothing but tiny bits of dust on the ground under where it was placed. Our story to our team was different of course, explaining we got the Echo Mapper there under different circumstances involving fancy assassin things like air vents and Nashville’s ability to squeeze through tight corners to drop the bug.

  So far no one has questioned anything, and the adrenaline pumping through my veins is similar to the feeling I get when a target steps into Minnie’s line of sight.

  “There are five levels,” Nashville says while tapping a button on her tablet, causing the blueprints to separate into five sections. “The bottom level seems to be the main lab and offices. T
hree and four, dormitory and living space for staff and soldiers. Level two is electrical and mechanical, the engine of the place, while one looks like it’s for vehicle and weapon storage.”

  I watch Nashville go through our report, while studying her hair that’s pulled back into a tight ponytail, her black leather jacket resting over a white tee and black jeans tucked into boots. It’s all similar to what I’m wearing, and when we regarded each other this morning, caused me to smile and her to frown. She’s 3 today, poised, hard around the edges, and a scowl a second away from appearing. But while she looks every bit the spy I ran into in China, she’ll never be anything but Nashville to me now. Nashville, who earlier this AM let me wash her hair in the shower before spreading my hands over the rest of her supple yet firm body. I shift in my chair, readjusting. If sitting across from her before was difficult, now it’s plain torture.

  “This is great work,” Axel says, his army physique barely fitting into his screen, while Ploom looks like a deflated balloon beside him. “The boards are going to be very pleased, especially since this stamps an approval on the success of our cross-pollination test.”

  “Yeah.” Jules regards Nashville and I with slight skepticism. “You really turned this around quickly while managing not to kill each other.”

  “There’s still time.” I shoot my tech assistant a crooked grin.

  “Plus…” Nashville leans back in her chair. “We always work well when Carter simply does everything I say.”

  “Yes.” I nod. “Especially when it’s to order me to tie her up and slip a dirty sock in her mouth before shoving her into a closet. I can complete our assignment way easier that way.”

  “All right.” Jules raises her hands, her blond hair twisting around her shoulders with her headshake. “I didn’t mean to ruin this rare second of peace. I’m just impressed is all.”

  I scoff. “You should be used to that after working with me for so long.”

  “Ugh.” She and Nashville both groan at once, and I glance over to my little redheaded vixen. Her full lips purse in annoyance, and my hand grips my thigh under the table. Oh, the things I could do to make that mouth of yours relax, I say to her with my steady gaze.