Stranded (Boys Behaving Badly Book 4)

by Delilah Devlin

  “A beautiful woman,” Drake said it without hesitation. “Smart, tough, and practical. Also, she's got sense of humor coupled with no sense of shame.”

  Julia laughed. “Shame? Hon, that's a lander concept. We wear what we need to wear and don't wear it when we don't have to. If the water's warm enough, I go out in just a tool harness.” The thought seemed go over well with Drake. He looked away for a moment. Just long enough for Julia to sit up and shimmy out of her suit. The cool air helped ensure her light pink nipples were as erect as Drake's cock. When she sat back down, he caught a glimpse of her fox-red pubic hair.

  “How about a cruel sense of humor?” Drake tried to sit in a lotus position.

  “Cruel? Now that hurts.” Julia shook her head. “First, I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe you and, at this point, trust you.”

  “And second?”

  “Second, I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't plan to help you with your... current condition.” Somewhere in the back of her head, Julia's mother screamed at her about picking up strange foreign super soldiers while stranded on storm-lashed fortresses. But when Drake—killing machine and apostate soldier—blushed like a schoolboy at her teasing, she shut down that part of her mind.

  “As much as I'd love to, I'm still not quite in the best of condition.” The blush faded, and the feral gleam returned to Drake's eyes. “But I do know how I can thank you.”

  “Oh?” Before Julia could ask more, Drake was on all fours, walking to her like a hungry wolf. He rested his warm, wide hands on her knees and lifted himself up to kiss her. He was tentative at first, as if not trusting himself. When Julia kissed him in return, running her fingers through his hair, hesitation faded. He slid his hands around her hips, pulling her to the edge of the chair. His tongue toyed with hers.

  The kisses distracted Julia enough she almost forgot to take off the fabricator gauntlet. No sense in letting that ruin things. Arms free, she ran her hands down his back, enjoying the feel of his broad shoulders. Julia played with the hair at the nape of his neck and felt him shiver in response. He pulled away, just briefly, to lay kisses on her collar bones.

  Drake's kisses trailed downward. He ran his thumb across one nipple, teasing it erect. He flicked his tongue across the other. She let out a low moan as his hot mouth surrounded her tit, kissing and sucking, testing her sensitivity with the barest touch of his teeth. When Julia squirmed, he turned his attention to her other, neglected nipple. Every stroke was attentive, as if he'd been thinking about where she might be the most sensitive.

  Heart thudding in her chest, Julia watched him trail kisses away from her breasts, down across her navel, and onto the tops of her thighs. She grabbed onto the arms of the chair as he spread her legs apart. Drake glanced up, eyes asking for permission.

  “Yes. Dammit, yes!”

  Drake smiled. Julia wrapped her legs around his shoulders and let him slip between her thighs. He didn't start right away. He took her foot and kissed it, licking the webbing between her toes. She moaned as his kisses moved ever inward, up along her thighs, until his tongue found her labia. As before, he was patient, almost worshipful. He traced up along her lips, the tip of his tongue playing with her. He only toyed with her clit, dancing around it, but never lingering too long.

  It wasn't until Julia grabbed his hair and nearly ground him against her that he did more than tease her clit. He wrote a love letter with his tongue, bringing her just to the edge of orgasm before slipping away and letting her relax. Drake learned her rhythms well. When she was slick and aching, he slid two of his fingers inside her, curved upward just enough, while he returned to lapping at her pearl.

  Julia moaned with abandon as she felt her heart rate climbing. Eyes closed, she sang out when Drake's ministrations brought her to orgasm. She broke one of the chair arms while saying his name. After a moment, he sat back and looked up at her. “Believe me now?”

  “Yessss...” She nodded, over and over. “Give me a minute to catch my breath.”

  Drake looked puzzled. She leaned over and kissed him, still tasting herself on his lips. “I have to return the favor. Let's just say the webbed hands are good for more than swimming.”

  The hours they spent curled together on the control room floor, musty emergency blankets covering them where they rested, were peaceful. They listened to the monitoring systems chirp away as the swirling track of the storm crossed over the fortress. Throughout, rain smacked against the storm shutters and decking like a wild drumbeat. After a while, the repetitive sound lulled them to sleep.

  The proximity alarm woke them, the sound shrill and repeated. Drake reached for his gun as he startled awake. Julia strapped on her fabricator gauntlet and charged it with raw material. Naked, they padded up to the main screen and keyboard access point.

  “I’m so glad they believed in mechanical keys.” Julia's webbed fingers danced over the keys. “Touch screens die horrible deaths in the ocean.”

  “What is it saying?” Drake squinted. The pre-flood writing resembled random lines and streaks.

  “Two things. First, the eye of the storm will pass over us soon. We'll have about twenty minutes of calm before the winds hit again. The system is alerting us we're hitting the wind wall for the eye.” Julia frowned.

  She tapped a few keys once again. “But there's something in the eye. It's artificial; the system can't pin the profile. Keeps pegging it as a storm chaser drone, but it's too big.” Julia turned to Drake. “It's also heading right for the fortress. It's on an intercept vector.”

  “It will land as soon as we pass the storm wall.” Drake searched the floor for the remnants of his clothes.

  He dressed in what he could salvage. Julia stepped into her wetsuit and zipped it up.

  “It's another mech. It's a Knight come after me.”

  “That's insane. No one would fly a mech like that through a storm just to get you...” Julia tapped a few commands into her fabricator gauntlet. It reshaped, going from its standard boxy outline to something more akin to a weapon.

  “Yes. They would. I'm an Apostate.” He chambered a round in his gun, holstered it, and pointed upwards. “How long before he lands?”

  “Soon. At this rate, minutes.” The howling winds and machine-gun rain stopped. No warning. Silence fell like bulkhead doors. “What do you plan to do?”

  “Fight.”

  Julia argued the point all the way up to the landing deck. The storm had swept the remnants of Drake's mech and the paratrooper bodies into the ocean. It looked untouched and unvisited. As she pointed out all the injuries he'd sustained, the inadequacies of his sidearm, and the fact this would be someone as jacked up with combat systems as he was, they watched the mech descend like a falling angel.

  She expected a missile or machine gun barrage from the mech suit. It's what she would do—eliminate the enemy from a distance. But, instead, it landed and cracked open, revealing Drake's twin.

  “Knight Aldred.” Drake's eyes softened.

  Julia swore. This was a comrade. Someone he knew. It didn't stop Drake from raising his gun. She raised her gauntlet to match. They stood side by side as the new lander regarded them from inside his mech.

  “Knight Guisard.” Aldred shook his head. “No. Drake. I've come to take you home.”

  “There is no home for me anymore. Our City's built on lies. And you know this!” He shook his head. “Go home. Tell them I was lost in the storm.”

  “I can't do that. You've been…” He glared at Julia. “You've been irreversibly contaminated. I cannot let you go.”

  Drake’s jaw tightened. “Then let's end this.” Drake bowed and raised his handgun in a salute.

  Aldred did the same, his mech suit mirroring his movements.

  Julia shook her head, raised her arm, and made a fist. A white-hot streak of light flew from the gauntlet's muzzle into the mech, where it promptly exploded in a fireball of torn metal, black smoke, and cooked Stontejas knight. She kept firing, over and over, until the mech and
its pilot were reduced to slag.

  Drake stared at her, jaw open.

  She shrugged and blew on the gauntlet. “What? Was I supposed to wait?”

  “What in God's name was that?” Drake lowered his gun, still stunned.

  “Gyrojet anti-mech rounds. Only short range, though. I would need more time and a bigger fabricator to make a real anti-aircraft weapon.” Julia lifted an eyebrow. “What? Did you think I came here unarmed? These gauntlets make more than simple tools, you know.”

  Drake laughed grimly and holstered his gun. “Now what?”

  “We get back inside. When the winds in the storm wall hit, they'll sweep the deck clean. The ocean will eat the evidence. Then, I'll signal the fleet and ask it to come here and dock. This will become home for a while.” She took his hand, the one with the smart gun implant, and held it in her own. “I'll get you asylum. You'll be a part of the Atlantia fleet. If Stontejas tries anything… Well, we'll do what we have to do.” Julia wrapped an arm around his waist, guiding him back to the lower decks.

  “But that's, what, maybe a day or more away? What do we do until then?” Drake blinked when Julia started laughing.

  She let go of him and, very deliberately, unzipped the front of her suit. Taking his hand, she slipped it under the neoprene, letting him feel her heartbeat.

  Julia kissed him. Drake relaxed into her embrace and returned the kiss before resting his forehead on hers. Was that affection in his sapphire blue eyes? Yes. Affection—and trust. A trust she shared. Their time stranded together was a gift. Now, neither storms nor soldiers could break their bonds. They had each other—and hope.

  “What do we do?” Julia grinned. “Anything we want to do, hon. Anything at all.”

  Undercover Lover

  By N.J. Walters

  The memory stick was burning a hole in the pocket of her faded jeans. Sherry Norman picked up her tray of drinks, pasted a smile on her face, and tried to act normal. Not easy to do when all the evidence needed to put the leaders of a notorious biker gang in prison was tucked away in her front pocket.

  “Move your ass, Sherry,” Jack—her boss and the manager of the Mad Dog, a motorcycle clubhouse and bar in the middle of Nowhere, Kentucky—yelled over the country music blasting from the sound system. “I don’t pay you to stand around daydreaming.”

  Balancing her tray, she hurried to the table in the corner. The one she most wanted to avoid. The one where the president of the club and his officers sat. They stopped talking when she got closer.

  “Here you go.” She placed the whiskey in front of Deke. As president and undisputed leader of the Mad Dogs, he always had to be served first. She’d made that mistake only once and had worn the bruise on her face for a couple of weeks before it faded.

  She quickly distributed the remaining beers and drinks to the others. Bull, Deke’s second in command, gave her a nod. Killer, the group’s main enforcer, simply leered. And Slim simply stared. Of all of them, he scared her the most. He was quiet and watchful and dangerous as a rattler.

  In the two months she’d worked here, she’d come to know them all.

  Deke slapped his hand against her ass, and then let it linger. “Join us.”

  A bead of sweat rolled down her back, soaking through the tight cotton tank she wore. This wasn’t the first advance he’d made.

  Objectively speaking, he was a good-looking man with short cropped brown hair and a trimmed goatee that was just slightly darker. He was strong and still in decent shape, but that wouldn’t last if he kept drinking as hard as he did.

  “You know I have an old man,” she told him for the hundredth time. It was the one and only reason another biker would leave her be, but Deke’s patience was running out. He didn’t like being told no, and she’d been doing just that for weeks.

  Deke’s brown eyes narrowed, and the grip on her ass tightened. She gave momentary thanks that she’d stored the memory stick in her front pocket and not the back. When his fingers dug in, she winced but didn’t try to get away. That would only make things worse. No one had ever said going undercover as a DEA agent would be easy, but she’d never thought it would be quite this hard.

  She’d never felt so alone or vulnerable in her entire life, and she’d lost her parents young and grown up being shuffled around the foster care system, transferring from home to home until she’d “aged out” at eighteen.

  It was that lack of ties and her exemplary work which had led her bosses to ask her to take this assignment.

  She was so close to completing this assignment. All she had to do was hang tough and make it through the evening. The raid on the bar was slated to happen in a couple of hours. She’d be arrested alongside the rest to deflect any suspicion. Then she would hand off the evidence she’d managed to collect and be relocated to another office on the other side of the country. Until then, she was stranded here, completely on her own and cut off from any help.

  She couldn’t contact her associates and move up the timetable for the raid because Jack didn’t allow employees to keep their cellphones during working hours. She didn’t know if it was because he didn’t want them slacking off or because he didn’t want to risk them recording anything. Either way, her phone was currently tucked away behind the bar and would stay there until she got off work. To ask to use it would only raise suspicion.

  Not wishing to bring attention to herself was the same reason she didn’t simply duck out the back, get in her car, and drive away. There could be nothing to connect her to the raid, or she’d be looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life.

  “I’m beginning to think this old man of yours is nothing more than a lie.” Deke released her ass but grabbed her wrist. Giving her a hard jerk, he pulled her onto his lap. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, sweet Sherry?” He grabbed one of her tits and squeezed.

  She barely suppressed a shudder. The urge to break his wrist then shoot his ass was nearly overwhelming. She could take him down, but without backup, she had no chance in hell of winning any fight with Deke plus the rest of his Mad Dogs. And the bar was packed with other members as well as a bunch of locals, many of whom were related to members of the club.

  “No, I wouldn’t lie.” Somehow, she managed to keep her limbs from shaking. A huge achievement. Her stomach churned. “As appealing as you are,” she lied through her teeth, “my old man would kill me if he thought I was cheating. Then he’d come after you.”

  “I ain’t afraid of nobody.” Deke put a hand behind her head and forced her closer.

  Shit, he was going to kiss her. There was nothing she could do to stop him. He wasn’t about to be put off any longer. He viewed all the women who worked here as club property and, therefore, fair game, and he’d fucked them all and often. He wasn’t exactly shy about letting everyone know.

  “I don’t have to fuck you,” he continued, his voice almost soft. The smell of the whiskey he’d drunk was almost overpowering when his breath feathered over her face. “You could simply open that smart mouth of yours and give me a blowjob. Nothing wrong with that. Your old man wouldn’t care.”

  Heart racing, she knew she was screwed. Most of the men in the club wouldn’t care if their women gave another guy a blowjob. Hell, she’d seen some of them order their women to do just that, as a way of getting in better with more powerful members. Some of the women even saw being used as an honor.

  Why the hell they’d think something that stupid, she didn’t know and didn’t care. All that mattered was getting out of here alive and with the evidence needed to put them all away.

  “As tempting as that suggestion is…” She poured as much regret into her voice as she could muster, which wasn’t easy. She’d be more likely to bite his damn cock off if it got anywhere near her face. “I don’t cheat.”

  “Well, he ain’t here,” Deke informed her. “And I am.”

  Mind racing to try to figure a way out, she glanced toward the door when it opened. Her heart stopped. The entire bar dropped away. She
no longer felt Deke’s hands on her. All she could see was the man who’d just walked in.

  He stood about six-eight, his shoulders nearly as wide as the doorway. He was all muscle, which was on display as he wore nothing more than an open leather vest, a pair of faded jeans, and leather biker boots.

  “Ellis,” she whispered.

  “What was that?” Deke demanded, giving her a shake.

  That drew the attention of the man. He looked their way, and his gaze narrowed.

  “That’s my old man,” she told him.

  Deke was so surprised, he released her.

  Praying she wasn’t making a mistake that might cost her dearly, she hurried over to the man she hadn’t laid eyes on in five years. He watched her, his eyes still as blue as a lake in summer. His shaggy blond hair fell to his shoulders.

  She put her hands on his shoulders and went up on her toes. “Kiss me,” she whispered. Not giving him time to object, she laid her lips against his.

  That kiss caught Ellis Smith off balance. Not something easily accomplished, given his size. When her lips touched his, it was like all the years they’d been apart had never been.

  She tasted just as good as he remembered. Better, if such a thing were possible.

  He had no idea what the hell Sherry was doing here, but the desperation in her voice had all his protective instincts surging to life. She eased back before he was done, so he looped one arm around her waist and reeled her back in.

  This time, he kissed her.

  He sensed her surprise, but then she was eagerly kissing him back. Tongues tangling, breath mingling, he took her mouth like he owned it. She wasn’t a short woman, but he was still a lot taller, so he lifted her off her feet.

  As she always had, she wrapped her legs around his waist and held on as he devoured her. He’d had more than his share of women over the past few years, but none had ever held a candle to her. She was the only one who’d ever touched his heart.

  That brought him back to reality with a thud. It was the reason he’d walked away. He was the son of a biker and a prostitute. She’d always been destined for more.