by Angel Payne
“Kellan!” She struggled to keep it from turning into a scream, all too aware they weren’t exactly alone.
He answered with another possessive bite, this time on her ear. “My name on your lips turns my cock to stone, sweetheart.”
They weren’t empty words. His erection was a wand of pure heat against the stiff ridge of her need, coaxing it into higher peaks, until there was no way to go but into the hottest fire her body could generate. She gasped and started thrusting back against him.. “Ke ˋale ne ke kai. Kellan, I’m—I’m going to—”
He took the hand at her breast and swiped it to her forehead, keeping her cheek pinned to his jaw, burning his glorious scruff into her skin. “And I’m going to watch, starshine. No closing your eyes. Let me see. All of it.”
As the waves of euphoria slammed her and pulled her under, a breathtaking smile took over his face. A second later, the look turned into a passionate growl. His teeth clenched as he lifted her a little, high enough for him to release thick white streams of his seed into the sink.
For a long second, their stares held in the mirror while their bodies heaved in unison. For an extended moment, Lani still didn’t move. She didn’t want to. Her limbs and gaze were tethered in place, locked to him in that steam-clouded make-believe of the mirror. She was bound by the intensity of him. Riveted by the effortless strength of him. Spellbound by the burnished beauty of his form…and the fathoms of feeling in his eyes…
What the hell are you doing? “Fathoms of feeling?” What kind of poetic garbage is that? You don’t have time for poetry. Or intensity. Or thinking of this as anything beyond what it is: a pleasant distraction for you both. End of story, Hokulani.
If only he wouldn’t keep staring at her like they’d suddenly turned into the last two people on earth.
“I…I need to get into the shower. I still have some work to do tonight.”
It wasn’t a lie. Before she’d patrolled the beach and found him and Bommer playing the sand flea hustle, she’d sequestered herself in the office trying to determine how to get the bust in the north fence fixed, pay for Leo’s next semester at school, and re-file the permits to reopen the B&B. She’d been pondering a hitch over to Honolulu with Jean-Paul on the sea plane. Maybe the authorities there weren’t in Gunter’s back pocket, and she’d be able to bypass the mess that the man had created for her with the hospitality permits office here. Dear God, she hoped so…
But that meant jerking herself away from stupid mirrors and the beautiful satyrs in them, and forcing herself back to real life again.
Luckily—perhaps eerily—Kellan seemed to understood that. “You got coffee around? I’ll be looking after T, so it’ll be a long night for both of us. I can brew a pot.”
“Thanks.” She smiled in lieu of kissing him again. Gods only knew where that would lead. Being around the man was starting to translate into a deep need to touch him—and more.
Dangerous thoughts. Tendencies she couldn’t germinate for another second.
Yep. Time for office sequestration again. A dose of reality would do her good, at least until the next time she could let Kellan carry her off into a perfect pretense of happiness for another treasured hour or two.
Chapter Seven
Tait groaned. It hurt. Well, no shit. When one’s mouth had been turned into the Sahara, vocal action of any kind was doomed to be torture. That didn’t excuse the camel who’d decided to stomp on his head. To make things feel better, he fantasized about pulling out a rifle and blowing the animal’s head off. Which would do nothing, because camels were malicious sons-of-bitches who would survive the nuclear holocaust along with cockroaches and reality TV stars.
A sound seeped into his senses, flipping his daydreams like card tables. A voice…feminine yet a little feral…throaty and sultry threaded into a music he longed to hear better. He’d recognized it, didn’t he? How? From where?
The woman laughed. More sexy-husky. Lots more. Fuck. He had heard that sound before.
You going soft on me, Weasley? Seriously?
His eyes flew open. Sunshine blinded him. His chest imploded on itself.
“Luna.” Why was it just a scrape on the air? He swallowed, struggling for moisture to blurt it louder, but his jaw and mouth really hurt. Everything hurt. Goddamn, that light was bright. Maybe it wasn’t the sun at all. Maybe he’d finally succeeded at drinking himself to death, and was now locked in some weird ether between Heaven and Hell. Maybe his crazy little woman was taunting him, just to get him moving again. And damn it, she was right.
You’re asking for one hell of a red ass, aren’t you, beautiful? Believe me, it’ll be my pleasure to deliver, once I catch you again…
The woman, beyond the pale blue walls that met his gaze, had the nerve to laugh louder. She was instantly shushed. The silence police had a man’s timbre. “Slash?” He forced his head up. Damn it, someone needed to turn off the room’s spin cycle. Hardwood floors, potted plants, and wicker furniture mashed together in his vision. “Fuuuck…”
“T?” Kellan appeared, though he was sideways. Tait blinked, fighting to keep focus as his friend crouched down. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” He lowered his head, realizing that it sank against a pillow that smelled like verbena and coconut. Some compassionate soul had draped him in a blanket that smelled the same. Kell would do a lot of things for him, but the tuck-tuck action with the great-smelling linens? Not a chance.
“Where am I? This isn’t Franz’s place.”
Kellan chuckled. “Were you that obliterated last night?”
He managed to wobble his head, hoping it passed for a shake. “Just hurts to think.” After a coarse grunt, he muttered, “We were on the beach. You threw my bottle away. And then we wrestled and—”
Fuck.
The memory gutted his voice. Filled his mind. Drowned him in desire. The cascade of black hair kissed by lavender lights. The wildcat-bright eyes. The body a man would commit major crimes for. But more than anything, the flame of inner spirit his soul recognized at once…a fire he hadn’t experienced since one intense week in LA, during one of the most life-changing missions of his career…
A spark that flickered, hesitant but bright, deep inside him once more…
Especially as she walked into the room.
Tait swallowed hard against a mix of anguish and exhilaration. She isn’t Luna, you hung-over dickbrain. His mind rammed it as a command, and his gut finally, reluctantly obeyed. He’d scattered Luna’s ashes over Puget Sound himself, for fuck’s sake. Nothing—nobody—was going to magically nullify that fact.
Hokulani. His mind made it past the haze of last night to recall her name. He’d fiddled around with enough of the South Pacific dialects during language training to realize the last half of it meant “heavenly.” Though that little tidbit had escaped him last night, he still remembered thinking how he’d stared at her with dreamy fixation, considering the word perfect for her.
Bommer, you’re a fucking cheese bag.
Funny, how much fortitude a man could get from booze in one moment—and how much regret a few hours later.
Okay, maybe more than a few hours.
He glanced out the window next to the couch. The palms and banyans swayed in a gentle breeze. Cotton ball clouds lazed in the sky. The squalls of yesterday had given way to golden sunshine, though the shadows indicated it was somewhere between sunrise and noon.
“Shit,” he mumbled. “How long was I out?”
“About thirteen hours,” Kellan supplied.
“What the hell?” He shoved to an upright position. The room played shake, rattle, and roll again, but that didn’t stop him from whacking Kell’s shoulder. “Why the hell didn’t you wake me up, asswipe?”
“Because I wouldn’t let him.”
The assertion came from the woman who now stood at the other end of the couch, arms folded and lips pursed. Her hair was piled into a cute bun with chopstick thingies poking from it, a
nd she wore a flowery sundress with a built-in bra that pushed her breasts into better position than her damn bikini had. T tried not to fixate on how those incredible mounds were positioned in the scoop of the dress, so perfect for someone to just reach in and coax them into erection, before pinching hard and delighting in her squeal…
He dropped his line of vision to her knees, but even those were beautiful. Though the dress covered her to mid-thigh, he saw more than enough to remind him of the cocoa cream curves beneath…especially if a guy could envision those gorgeous legs wrapped high around his waist, encouraging him to go deeper as he sank his dick deep and—
Think of something else.
He’d be fine in a second, as long as she didn’t start tapping one of those adorable feet with the turquoise toe polish adorned with little white flowers. The toe-tapping was always Luna’s thing. If the goddess started it, too, he really wouldn’t be responsible for his headspace anymore.
“I wouldn’t let him because clearly you needed some sleep.” No toe taps. Thank fuck. But hell, the way she shifted from one foot to the other, ending with a confident hip pop, might have been just as unbalancing. “And I’m the boss of the house.”
Kellan flashed a glance that teetered on an eye roll. “Yep. She’s the boss.”
“Hey.” She made the word a reprimand while jamming her toe into Kell’s thigh, toppling him over. Tait watched in wordless wonder while his friend snickered up at her. He turned his stare back at Hokulani.
Who are you and what have you done with the tight ass I call a partner? He looks a lot like this bozo here…?
“So I crashed on your couch all night?” he asked, instead.
“Wasn’t like it was an inconvenience,” she murmured with a small smile. “Especially after the way you threw yourself at Gunter’s gang for me.”
A confused frown hunkered his brows. In weird chunks, the rest of last night’s events flashed back to him. The Escalades. The pretty pouts. The shitloads of hair product. All Benson and his goons had been missing was their fashion ramp. It had been a funny joke at the time—until he’d goaded them all on.
“Damn,” he muttered. It all returned to him now. The pretty boy’s name had been Casey. He’d goaded the kid into punching him first, and had made sure Casey would go home by way of the ER, before the rest of the pack descended on him. He didn’t remember too much more after that, likely a good thing. “Guess that’ll teach me to pull the Rambo act.”
Hokulani laughed and took his hand. “Rambo’s a guy in a movie with five stunt doubles, Sergeant. What you did was real-life bravery, and I’m grateful.”
Before he could think of how to react, the strange flicker of an expression on Kell’s face distracted him—but it disappeared quickly as it came. His friend stood again. “You hungry, man? Lani made this killer scramble shit with eggs, Spam, bacon, and pineapple. Good stuff. There’s still a lot left.”
Lani?
“Yeah.” He scowled again, feeling like he’d been thrust into the middle of an ongoing op without proper intel. His senses, trained to gather every speck of data that they could, started firing on all cylinders again, but his mind didn’t have any grid to process anything on. “Yeah, uhhh, that sounds good. Thanks.”
“Cool.” Lani beamed like she’d just been asked to serve her Spam eggs to the president. “I’ll be right back.”
Kellan smiled at her. “I can help, sweets.”
Sweets?
Kell barely tolerated foreplay. What the hell was he doing, tossing around a word like sweets?
Despite how the room spun again, making the rocks in his head tumble into new piles of pain, he swung his legs out then stood. He barely suppressed a groan while fighting the urge to sink back to the couch. But he’d learned a thousand new forms of fortitude in the last six months, and those lessons came in handy now. He had to keep an eye on Kell. He loved the man as equally as he loved his biological brother, but he also knew Kell as well as Shay—in a few ways, perhaps better. What was the guy’s game here, and why was he running it on a jewel like Hokulani Kail? She wasn’t his type. Correction: she was out of his league.
He moved across the living and dining rooms as quietly as he could, drawn closer to the kitchen door by the cadence of a warm conversation. Kellan’s distinct timbre was balanced by the velvet of Hokulani’s tone, sprinkled with the soft rasps of her laughter. He stopped for a second, just listening to the sound. Damn. A laugh like that could keep a man going in a shitty gun battle, inspire him to survive torture, to keep his ass moving under horrendous mission conditions. It was a sound made for pillow talk and private jokes—
And for prefacing the kind of kiss that Kellan pressed to her neck now.
Tait pressed open the kitchen door to observe them in profile, with Kell pressing himself against Lani’s back as she scooped eggs from a skillet. He pressed both hands against the fronts of her thighs, using the grip to fit both gorgeous globes of her ass against his crotch. His head dipped against her neck and he’d apparently gone in for teeth action on the nuzzle, since she gave a protesting squeal before giggling again. Kellan mumbled something to her, though Tait didn’t hear it past the sudden, raging thunder in his ears.
He shoved on the door. It slammed against the wall with a whap. The pair at the stove snapped their heads up like a pair of new boot camp nuggets caught sleeping in, eyes wide and mouths open.
“T-Bomb. You okay?”
Was the man expecting an honest answer to that? When all Tait wanted to do was haul his skanky ass from the woman and send him flying across the breakfast bar?
“You fucked her.”
Hokulani set the plate down with a clatter. “Excuse me?”
Kellan stroked her back gently. The action spoke volumes. Significant ones. The fury thickened at the corners of Tait’s vision. In so many ways, he realized this didn’t make sense. In so many more, it made all the sense in the world.
“I’m going to echo that,” Kell stated. “Tait, what’re you so—”
“You fucked her.” He bellowed it this time. “On the first goddamn night you met her, you fucked her. Yes or no, Slash the magical man slut?”
Kell’s jaw turned to steel. His eyes darkened to the same color. “That was uncalled for, man. I’m being nothing short of brutally honest here, with Lani and myself. Even so, I don’t see what happened last night, while you were in an alcoholic stupor, has to do with—”
“It has to do with everything, you moron. With a woman like her,” —he forced his gaze to lock on Kellan, certain he’d be searching for Hokulani’s Bowie knife again if he even glimpsed her right now— “you don’t get to be ‘brutally honest’. You don’t get to compartmentalize!” Shit. He was pissed enough to get physical, anyway. The hard teak of the nearest cabinet door sent a nice slice of pain through the fist he pounded into it. “You don’t put her in a box like the rest of your crotch bunnies!”
“Crotch bunnies?” Hokulani huffed hard. “Okay, hold on—”
“Can’t you fucking see that?” He wheeled back toward Kell with locked teeth. “Can’t you see that she—”
“Is standing right here?” The shout came with her brutal shove into the middle of his chest. “And she can think and speak for herself?” She kept on going. flattening him against the cabinet he’d just punched.
Kellan didn’t miss the chance to level a gratified grunt from across the kitchen, making Tait pitch forward again. “You disgusting pussy player! You’ll run any game to make sure your sausage gets extra juice, huh?”
Hokulani dug her palm harder into his sternum. “Back off, Sergeant. Now!”
That order apparently didn’t apply to Kellan. The guy John Wayne’d it across the room, shoulders back and hands splayed. “You know, T, I want to laugh at that. I have nothing to hide from anyone here about the sincerity of my motives, but are you going to even listen?” He tossed a head-to-toe stare over Tait. “Consider who the fuck is talking here—just who the fuck is throwing down about t
he cock leading the walk.”
“Shut your hole. You have no clue what you’re talking about!”
“Except that I was the guy who almost shot a soldier on our side, because you freaked about saving a woman who only looked like Luna.” Finally halted by Hokulani’s other hand, Kell released something that was half gloating chuckle, half derisive grunt. “You lost your grip in Indonesia, Bommer. It’s the whole goddamn reason we’re here.”
“Hmm.” Hokulani’s interjection came with a purposeful stare swung toward Kellan, her brows arched in sensual intent. “Then maybe I need to be thanking him for the breakdown.”
“I’m not broken,” Tait snarled. He tore from beneath her hold. “And he’s not someone you want to be gushing over like that.”
Kellan bristled. “In case you weren’t listening, the woman can think for herself.”
“Fuck you, Slash-aroni.”
“Damn it.” Kell restarted the cowboy swagger. “That’s it!”
“Stop!” The woman between them—literally and figuratively—rammed the guy back against the refrigerator. Tait backpedaled in the dining room, and Hokulani’s stance straddled the doorway between the two rooms “Okay, look. Your concern is appreciated, Sergeant Bommer. But the last time I checked, I was a grown woman with a mind of my own. And you weren’t my father or my brother.”
Kell snorted. “Want that ass served in a cup or cone, man?”
“Shut up,” she countered. “You’re not off the hook, mister.”
“But—”
“Shut. Up.”
It was too damn easy for Tait to cut loose a snide snort, too. “What was that, dude? About ‘ass’? You are, after all, the king of nailing it in every city we hit.”
The woman in front of him pulled up on her posture. Just like that, she was every inch the imposing goddess who’d first had him gaping in awe last night on the beach. “Your welcome in my home has expired, Sergeant Bommer.” She raised her gaze, sucking him straight in with the amazing blue silver of her irises—the same eyes that openly condemned him now. “While I’m grateful for what you did for me last night, I won’t be labeled a piece of ass beneath my own roof.”
