The Russian (Federal Hellions Book 2)

by Gray Gardner

  Connor ran his hands up and down her back, holding her close even when he pulled his head back to talk to her.

  “I’m not supposed to leave you alone until tomorrow evening,” Connor said, taking her hand and pulling her behind him as he walked. “So, it looks like you’re staying at my place tonight.”

  She walked behind him and rolled her eyes, replying, “If I had a nickel for every time some dude laid that line on me…”

  “On the couch, private,” he said, smiling to himself as they walked through the buildings. Again, her kiss had been delicious. If he hadn’t broken it off and started leading her to his house, he wasn’t certain he would have behaved himself.

  “No,” she replied, as they approached the officer housing. “You’re on the couch. I’m in the bed.”

  “I’m over six feet tall,” he said, opening his door and pushing her inside. They couldn’t even make out without arguing. “I won’t fit on the couch.”

  His place was modest but nice, with a kitchen, a large living area, and a bedroom. Perfect for the single captain, except when he had a guest.

  “Fine,” she said, heading into the bedroom. “You can sleep in the bed with me.”

  “Hey,” he said, following her in there. “Keep those little hands to yourself, though.”

  She kicked off her shoes and moaned with comfort as she slid under the light gray comforter. At this point it didn’t matter to her where he slept. Though, she had to admit, it would be kind of fun to have him in the bed with her.

  “I don’t know how chaste you are, captain,” she sighed, flipping pillows out from under her and setting them at her side. “So you sleep on the other side of the pillows.”

  He shook his head and peeled off his t-shirt and shoes, jumping in on the other side of the mound of pillows. He quickly shed his bathing suit as he slid under the covers, hoping his cock would cooperate with the naughty little private on the other side of the bed. He clapped his hands twice and the lights went out.

  “Oh, classic,” Burton said in the dark, sounding more like herself. She felt more like herself, too. He didn’t try to berate her, or send her away. He’d even kissed her.

  And now she was in his bed. She hoped he didn’t notice how much she was sweating.

  “You didn’t have to get up and flip off the lights, did you?” he asked, shifting around to get comfortable as he defended The Clapper. He felt like that dark cloud that had been hovering overhead had finally blown away. For once, he felt hopeful, and it was a great feeling.

  She sat up a little and rested her head on her hand. “Let’s be totally honest with each other.”

  He stared up at the ceiling in the darkness and tried to get the image of her chest in his face and slender legs straddling him out of his head; the day she’d busted his nose. She was in his bed. She was fragile and it had been a rough day. He rubbed his face and tried to remain in control.

  “Okay, full honesty for the next minute. Deal?”

  “Deal,” she said, licking her lips. “How many girls have you dated since your girlfriend left you?”

  “Are we already having the talk where we compare sexual histories, because I’m not sleeping with you tonight, Burton. No matter how much you beg,” he smiled.

  She smacked him across the face with a pillow and rolled over on her other side. “I’m not that kind of girl, you perv. Never mind.”

  “Perv? Does anyone even say that? Okay okay,” he mocked, slowly removing the pillows between them and sliding closer to her. He ran his hand along the side of her face. “Honestly, I’ve only just kissed one other girl since Gina left. And that was because Captain Lance set me up with his sister to try and make me feel better…so no, I haven’t been with anyone else since I got dumped.”

  Burton was surprised, but what surprised her even more was her response.

  “Me either,” she quietly said, closing her eyes as his hand rested on her shoulder and his body pressed against her back. It felt good to be touched.

  “You haven’t been with anyone for a while?” he asked, sliding a little closer.

  She wiped a wisp of hair out of her eyes, staring at his bookshelves as her eyes adjusted to the dark, and said, “Since I left my fiancé.”

  “You were engaged?” he asked, intrigued.

  “Don’t sound so surprised,” she smiled, as his hand sat on her waist under the covers. “You were probably ready to ask Gina to marry you, too.”

  “Yes, but I’m old and bitter.”

  “And I’m not?” She smirked at him. “You’ve at least kissed someone since. I haven’t done anything.”

  “So what happened?” he asked, pulling her back into his body, the safety of the comforter not between them anymore. He liked talking to her. He really liked tucking her into his body under his arm. She had clever things to say and she was really funny.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “It’s honesty time,” he said with a note of warning, loving the way her body stiffened as he ran his hand over the top of her clothes and rested it on her ass.

  “Fine,” she sighed, as he wrapped his arm tightly around her. It took everything in her to keep from turning around and jumping him. “I had this amazing and grueling job at Goldman Sachs, in New York City. I lived with my friend Marissa from Oxford, who was really from the States like me, and my boyfriend John stayed with us during his frequent business trips from London. We had hooked up at Oxford, though I didn’t realize what a skanky whore he was at the time. He proposed one snowy Christmas in Rockefeller Center, I accepted, and by New Year’s Day I caught him in the throes of passion with Marissa—in my bed.”

  Connor pulled her in closer and replied, “So, you three are still friends?”

  She snickered and rubbed her hand on top of his.

  “Marissa and John got married. She lives on his Cambridge estate and jet sets around the world with him. I live in a room with thirty-nine other girls who keep stealing my stuff and laughing their asses off every morning as I struggle to discover what article of clothes I’ll be lacking on that particular day.”

  “I would never cheat on a girl like you,” Connor said, leaning his head into hers and smelling her hair. It smelled like honeysuckle. He laid a gentle kiss on her.

  “Sure you would,” she huffed. “I worked fourteen to sixteen hours every day and never complained. Why? Because I actually loved what I did. That’s why every guy I would ever meet would leave me.”

  “Why did you quit if you loved it so much?”

  “Like I said,” she sighed. “I’m crazy. There was no recovering from finding the man I trusted and thought I would die with sixty years down the road in my fourteen-hundred-dollar sheets with the one and only friend I had in a city full of eight million people.”

  “You have a very concise way of putting things,” he said.

  “There’s really not much else to it.”

  “Your fiancé cheats on you with your good friend and you wind up in the armed forces and there’s really not much else to it?”

  “I’m in bed with my captain,” she added, smiling in the darkness. “Who keeps trying to touch my tits.”

  “Well I’ve already seen your underwear,” he laughed, now rubbing her thigh. He leaned his head forward a little more and kissed along her ear, down to her neck. His hand ran up her leg, underneath her skirt, and over the ruffled dark bloomers she’d been wearing under the scandalous skirt. He skimmed his finger around her hip and over the front of the bloomers, causing her to suck in a breath and shift her cute little ass right back into his erection.

  “Connor,” she whispered, practically panting as he touched her.

  “See? You haven’t forgotten how to turn a guy on,” he mumbled in his low voice right into her ear, causing her to rub back against him even more. “How’s your bruise?”

  “My what?” she asked, in a blissful daze of having a large, warm man pasted to her back who was tickling her neck with kisses and rubbing his hand ove
r the front of her underwear.

  He slid his hand underneath her and gave a slight squeeze on her thigh, knowing from viewing those legs in her short skirt that the bruise was still present, just hopefully not painful.

  “I don’t need any more cream,” she whined, sounding more like a crybaby and less like the wanton woman she hoped she was being.

  The vision of her standing there with her pants around her knees as he rubbed cream on her and tried not to stare at her panties too much flashed in his mind.

  “Maybe you just need another spanking,” he teased, chuckling as she instinctively rolled to her back to hide her ass from him. He seized the opportunity to roll over on top of her, bracing himself over her on his arms, loving that he could still see her cute expressions in the dark room. “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.”

  She figured he meant emotionally since they both knew was strong enough to snap her like a twig. She looked up at him but couldn’t stifle her yawn.

  “Well, I’m boring you, I see,” he said playfully, letting himself fall to her side and squeezing her body up against his.

  “Connor,” she breathed out, not wanting him to stop as she fought off the exhaustion surging through her body.

  “Shh. Let’s sleep.” He wasn’t even disappointed that nothing went any further. There would be plenty of time for that. He was just grateful to have her in bed with him, comfortable and happy, tucked under his arm where she belonged.

  Baylor the Kid

  Waving to her aunt, she climbed up the steps and out onto the stern of the ferry. The sharp, cold air was wet but fresh. London didn’t exactly have a reputation for its salubrious atmosphere, and getting out onto the Channel was a great refresher. She pulled her crimson scarf off of her neck and held the rail in her matching mittens, watching the water slice apart as the large boat moved away from Dover towards Calais, France.

  Then everything went wrong at once. The cabin in the rear of the vessel suddenly burst into flames, an explosion sending pieces of metal flying in a three hundred sixty-degree pattern. She instinctively ducked, dropping her scarf and gripping the rail as she turned to look behind her. The next cabin exploded, and people began screaming and running towards the front of the boat, towards her.

  Then the last cabin blasted apart, the heat blowing across her body, the noise causing her to go temporarily deaf, and the bodies flying past her bringing her into a state of complete panic.

  The rail slipped underneath her mittens, and as she pulled them off and repositioned her hands she realized that her arm was bleeding. When she looked back to where the boat was supposed to be, all she saw were fuel fires burning on the surface of the water and her small sinking portion of the bow heading towards them. She grabbed around the rail as she continued to sink, and held it tightly until the water crashed against her face and sent her into a cold shock. She only held on for a few seconds more, her entire body now submerged, then frantically realized she needed to let go. She pushed off the boat and kicked for the surface, trying to survive.

  “Baylor!”

  She opened her eyes and gripped the sheets tightly as she tried to catch her breath. She swallowed hard and jerked her head around the sunlit bedroom until she found the calming face of Captain Connor.

  “It’s all right,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed in his dark gray track suit and rubbing her back. “It was just a dream.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned forward, and he surprised her with a hug. She wasn’t sure what to do, but it felt so good that she wrapped her arms tightly around him and buried her face in his shoulder. He smelled like deodorant and detergent.

  “Was it the same dream you said you always have?”

  She leaned back and rubbed her eyes.

  “Always the same,” she sighed, looking at her sleeve and noticing that she was wearing his other pair of army issued gray sweats. They smelled good, like him. Wait a minute…

  “Yeah,” he said, as she grabbed the extra-large hooded sweatshirt hanging off of her body and glanced over at her folded costume on the chair. “You were thrashing around so much that I thought you’d choke yourself on your necktie.”

  “Thanks,” she sarcastically said, checking to make sure her bra and underwear were still on. They were.

  “Breakfast?” he asked, leaning back on the bed and pulling out a large plate of bacon and fruit. He began eating a piece as he grabbed the remote and flipped on the television.

  She watched him cautiously, as if he had an ulterior motive, but he didn’t. He was just eating and trying to find a good show to watch. She brushed her loose wisps of hair behind her ears and leaned back against the headboard next to him. Pulling the extra-long sleeve back until she found her hand, she reached across and ate some bacon.

  “Good?” he asked, glancing over at her with a grin. It was one of those grins that looked as if he knew something she didn’t.

  She was staring at him as she replied, “Yes.”

  He sighed and dropped the remote. The grin disappeared into a look of deep thought.

  “I kissed you last night.”

  Oh no. Or was it a look of remorse?

  “Yes,” she nodded. How could she forget? It was better than anything John had ever done to her in their extended relationship. Her heart beat against her ribs as she waited.

  “Would you like to add anything?” he asked, frowning as she continued to stare at him.

  “What does it mean?” she asked, crunching on her crispy bacon absentmindedly.

  “What do you want it to mean?” he grinned.

  Good. The grin was back. She tried not to return it even though her instincts told her to do so.

  “Don’t do that. I hate it when you do that,” she huffed, pointing at him as a loose sleeve dangled down.

  “Do what?”

  “When you smile at me with that shit-eating grin like you know something that I don’t!”

  “Well did it ever occur to you that maybe I do?” he asked, eating a slice of pineapple, fighting the grin now.

  “It… no,” she answered, dropping her hand and looking down. What could he possibly know that she didn’t? Why wasn’t he saying anything? Now the grin was completely gone. He looked too serious for her to try and be funny. Her face quickly turned serious, as well.

  “Did you know that I was struggling with the feelings I was having about you?”

  Her mouth dropped open as she peered over at him, her now lopsided pig tails hanging loose on her head, her red strands of hair hanging around her face. But still she had to wonder, what did it mean?

  “I didn’t really understand what I was feeling at the time,” he continued, sighing and scratching his head. “It took you coming clean with me to make me realize…you make me look forward to work every day. I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say and to see what you’re going to do.”

  She felt exactly the same way.

  “Yeah, that’s about right,” she nodded. “So? What does it mean?”

  “What do you want it to mean?”

  “Stop doing that!” she ordered, trying to point at him again.

  He grinned again as he grabbed her pointing hand and pulled her onto his lap, laying a great big morning kiss on her. She held his broad shoulders as she kissed back, wishing that it would never end. It wouldn’t have ended either, until she remembered the real world outside of his door. She finally pulled back and asked what time it was.

  “It’s ten, and this discussion isn’t over,” he said, still very close to her face. She could see the small strip of healing skin on the bridge of his nose still. God, why did he smell so good?

  “Fine. What’s on the itinerary for today? Facing our fears about men?” she asked, giving a partial smile.

  “Do you fear men?”

  “Don’t you fear women?”

  “Undoubtedly,” he nodded, raising his brow at her in that knowing way. “But less and less when it comes to you. Anyway, we aren’t facing any fears to
day. It’s Sunday. Even privates get a day off.”

  “Thank God,” she groaned, falling sideways onto the crumpled comforter. “The only thing I want to do today is relish in the reality that I don’t have to do anything.”

  Connor sighed and leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees as some newscaster reported something on the nearly silent television.

  “That’s not entirely true, kid.”

  He had given her a nickname. She would rather it have been something like “Darling” or “Sugar,” but “Kid” would do just fine.

  “What’s not entirely true, old man?” she smirked, adjusting a pillow under her head.

  He ignored her jesting and continued to not look at her. He didn’t want to upset her, and he was having such a good time with her. He’d crossed a line, though, and it was time to get serious. He was her captain. “We do have something we need to do this afternoon,” he tentatively said.

  “Using ‘we’ already?” she asked, suddenly looking confused at the solemnity of his face. “What?”

  “We have to go back to Major Taylor’s office and meet with Eubanks and Payne.”

  “No!” she protested, immediately jumping off of the bed and taking a step backwards. What was he talking about? He couldn’t have already forgotten how upset she’d been the night before.

  “It’s not my decision.”

  “I’m not going back there! It’s over, okay? The CIA can look for someone else because I will not work for them!” she stated, shaking her head. Her cheeks flushed with anger as she tried to calm herself down. It wasn’t his fault, really. She hadn’t been completely honest with him about her past.

  He stopped before he said anything else, then flipped his feet to the side of the bed and leaned over on his knees.

  “How did you know they were CIA?” he asked, carefully looking her in the eye.

  She didn’t flinch an inch as she responded, “I could spot a spook in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. I’m not even having this discussion right now.”

  She walked towards the door and he grabbed hold of her arm.

  “Talk to me,” he said in a compassionate tone as he stood over her.