by Lexi Blake
He moved closer to her. “It was a car accident?”
She studied him for a moment. “You didn’t ask about why I can’t walk?”
“You can walk.”
She sighed. “Why I can’t walk properly?”
Did she think he was playing around? How often did she have to justify her existence to people who thought the word normal meant anything at all? He’d learned normal was a word humans tossed around to describe something that didn’t exist.
“You walk the way you walk, Noelle. There’s nothing proper or improper about it.” Except the way her ass swayed. That gave him perfectly improper thoughts. “Your walk is a part of you. I didn’t ask why because it doesn’t matter.”
She stared at him for a moment. “I can’t quite believe you’re real. Of course it matters.”
Hutch didn’t see why. “Would my knowing why change my acceptance of you? Would it be different if the reason you walk the way you do came from a congenital defect? If you want to talk about it, I would love to. I would love to know how any incident you want to talk about affects you, but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s nothing wrong or damaged about you.”
“Hutch, I assure you I was damaged,” she said. “I couldn’t walk for a long time. I probably wouldn’t walk today if my stepmom hadn’t come into my life.”
“All right. Then how about I say it’s typical to be damaged. Being human and damaged go hand in hand. I assure you I’m as damaged as a person can be.”
Even in the low light he could see her eyes roll.
“Yes, you look damaged.”
He would love to have the right to put her over his knee for all that sass. “Most of mine is on the inside. My dad was good about not leaving scars. A good punch to the gut can put a kid out of service for a while without a ton of visible damage.”
“I’m sorry,” she sputtered. “It’s just you’re so comfortable talking about it. I still don’t like to.”
“I’ve gone through ten years of weekly therapy. I’ve learned that I can talk about it or I can let it eat me up inside. I ended up on the streets when I was a teen. Oh, there were group homes I could have gone to, but I rather enjoyed finding my own space. I got into a lot of trouble. I ended up meeting a man who I think saved my life. Tennessee Smith. He’s the reason I went into the Army and joined the Agency and eventually landed where I am. Big Tag pretty much chucked my ass into therapy after a particularly long op, and I learned how to talk about my feelings.” He knew there were guys out there who would call him weak, but he knew how strong a base knowledge of his own soul made him.
It should make him strong enough to walk away from her.
“Was it something about your childhood that made you worry about my boss?” Noelle asked.
He sighed and sat back. “There are lots of reasons I’m worried about your boss. I don’t believe in coincidences, not at this level. I could buy that someone tried to get on your laptop and there was an accidental fire in a lab. Tie that together with a DPD detective in your building and someone attacking you and it’s a pattern I haven’t identified yet.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” she pointed out softly.
Yeah, he’d wanted to avoid that. “It was a shitty time of my life. I avoid talking about it with anyone but my therapist, but as it’s the reason I can’t sleep tonight, hell, why not.”
She crumpled the empty Red Vine wrapper in her hand. “You don’t have to.”
He didn’t want this moment to end. He got the feeling the intimacy between them would be over if he let her go back to bed. “If I talk, I want something from you.”
She sat back as though she was happy to have a reason to stay. “What?”
He’d never felt this comfortable with a woman before. Maybe comfortable wasn’t the right word. In synch was better. “Whatever you’re willing to give. A story about your childhood or some of your cinnamon rolls. A list of your favorite songs and why you love them. It’s up to you. I only want it to be something you don’t mind giving me.”
“All right,” she agreed. “I know I should tell you that you don’t have to talk, but I want to know the story.”
Because she felt what he felt. She felt the pull of whatever this thing was between them. “Okay. Then I’ll tell you why Jessica Layne bothers me. It’s not that I have a problem with powerful women. I work around a whole bunch of them. I would let Charlotte or Erin Taggart watch my back any day of the week. I’ve witnessed a wealth of kindness from my friends’ wives, and there’s power in that, too. But I was held captive by a woman who called herself a doctor.”
“Held captive?”
It sounded like the plot of a bad action film, but it had been his life. “Yep. I was held hostage for my computer skills. Hope McDonald was working on a super-soldier program that included being able to wipe her subjects’ memories. She kidnapped soldiers and intelligence employees. She took one look at Theo Taggart and decided he would be her greatest soldier. It didn’t matter that he had a girlfriend. She went right for him.”
Noelle nodded. “Like Jessica flirted with Kyle.”
He’d seen the look on the tech guru’s face and been right back to that time in his life when Hope McDonald ruled everything. She’d made his father look like a great and loving papa. “Yes, though McDonald was even more aggressive. No one thought anything of it at the time. We joked about how Theo had a stalker and generally gave him hell about it. And then she took him and erased his memory, and for a long time we thought he was dead.”
She gasped. “She really erased his memory?”
“Yes, she did. She was brilliant. She was known as a wunderkind, much like your boss. She was also a sociopath. She took a lifetime of memories and replaced them with perfect obedience to her. She beat her subjects, gave them days of pain if they stepped out of line. She forged them into perfect soldiers. I was on the team that found Theo, but it went wrong and instead of me capturing Theo, my dumb ass was captured by Theo. Thus began my year in Hope McDonald’s tender care.”
She was on the edge of her seat, her hand coming out to cover his. “How did you get your memories back?”
He wanted to flip his hand over and thread their fingers together, but she didn’t know the whole story yet. “Oh, she didn’t take mine. You see, muscle memory is a thing. She could erase a soldier’s memories and the ability to fight, the training they’d had before, was still accessible. But kicking ass wasn’t what I was brought in to do.”
“They wanted your skills as a hacker,” she surmised.
“And my connections to the hacker world, and after a couple of what felt like years of torture, I gave them to her. You should understand that, Noelle. I’ve been broken. I’ve had my soul stripped down and seen who I am at my core, and I was broken. I did what she told me to do.” He sat back, drawing away from her and picking up a fresh licorice. It was a weird emotional crutch that went back to those days with his grandmother. “One of the things she did was put me on a diet. I went in at a pleasingly plump one eighty, and when I came out I was one hundred fifty pounds of pure muscle. Two percent body fat because if I got above that I was beaten and didn’t eat for three days. It took me a year to be able to eat anything sweet after I got home. I hated the fact that this thing that gave me comfort and reminded me of the one good thing about my childhood was suddenly another means of torture.”
“Anyone would break under those circumstances.”
That’s what he’d been told over and over again. “When Big Tag came to rescue us, I stayed in the plane. I actually walked back on the plane because I’d been taught whenever something was going wrong to go back to base. It took me a good ten minutes to make the decision to break free.”
“But you did. You did break free.”
“And then I went back in.”
“What?” Noelle asked on a gasp. “What do you mean you went back in?”
It had been the hardest decision of his life. And oddly, the easiest. “I mean
the night we were rescued Big Tag came to me and asked me to go undercover. He asked me to make my way back to McDonald. I knew there were more men under her control. I’d seen evidence of it, though at that time she kept me away from her other bases. I was the only one who could do it.”
“He asked you to go back in?” The question came out on an outraged huff.
“He did, and then he had to pretend I’d defected because we couldn’t be sure that Theo was solid. The training…”
“You mean brainwashing,” she corrected.
He supposed that was a good term for it. “Yes, the brainwashing was effective. In some ways I was almost relieved because I didn’t have to try to be the me I’d been before, if that makes sense.”
“It does. You didn’t want to have to face the fact that you’d changed. You didn’t want to look at the people who’d known you before and disappoint them because you couldn’t be that person anymore.”
She did understand. Their traumas had been different, but they were both survivors. “I feared standing in front of my brothers and feeling like I didn’t belong there more than I feared the pain that would come from going back to McDonald. Obviously they weren’t my blood, but the men I served with, I worked with, they were my brothers. When I joined that CIA team, it was the first time I felt like I had a family.”
It had taken him a while, but they’d gotten to him. Those men had accepted him and joked with him and invited him to their family gatherings when they’d realized he didn’t have anyone. He’d spent Thanksgivings with the Malones and Christmases with his buddy Deke and all those sisters of his. Lately they all went to the big Taggart family holidays.
But at the time all he could see was how he’d failed. “I had to go back to find myself again, and it was a close thing.”
“You thought about staying with her?”
He shook his head. “No. I thought about disappearing. I thought about walking away from all of it and never showing my face again. But I knew those men were in hell. I’d been in hell and I couldn’t leave them there. It was like penance.”
“You had nothing to do penance for. It wasn’t your fault.”
“But I needed it,” he explained. “I needed to walk in there willingly, to sacrifice. In some ways, it was the turning point of my life. I’m stronger now. I broke, but I put myself back together. Well, with lots of therapy.”
“I’ve been thinking about seeing one myself,” she said. “So you’re worried Jessica is going to be another Hope McDonald, and that’s why you’re trying to protect Kyle.”
“And you.” He stared right at her, giving her all the honesty he had. “And not strictly because you’re the client. So that’s my sad story. I’ve got completely unsupported emotional concerns about a woman I don’t know. And I’ve got real concerns, too. I’ve spent a lot of my evening researching her, and she’s dangerous. I think her corporate structure is sketchy, too. I think there’s a good chance she’s under some kind of investigation, and you’re going to get dragged into it. Is there any way you could take a couple of weeks off?”
It was the conclusion he’d come to. He would feel safer if she didn’t go back into that building again.
She shook her head. “I can’t. If I leave, I leave my research behind, and I’m close. If I prove my processes can work I’ll be able to hire on anywhere, and that would be remarkable at my age.”
Well, it was the answer he’d expected. “I want you to keep your eyes open and call me the minute you feel like anything’s weird. Trust your instincts.” He let out a breath and admitted the answer he’d come to. “I’m going to let Kyle go in with you tomorrow.”
“Good, because I have it on the highest authority he was going to take that job anyway.”
It was good to know he was in charge. He closed the screen of his laptop. He should go to bed and let her have some peace. She had to be at work early in the morning. He would lay on her couch and stare at the ceiling.
He was about to stand when Noelle beat him to it. “Hey, you didn’t get your prize.”
“Prize?”
“That’s kind of what you wanted, right? I’m supposed to give you something for opening up to me.”
“I wasn’t thinking about it as a prize, though I can see where you would.” He wanted to explore this thing between them, and having her talk to him or tell him something important about herself would do that. But he wasn’t going to push her. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
He was going to go slow. He was going to get to know her and ease into a friendship that could become something more. He had to be patient.
“I want to.” She crossed the space between them. “I want to give you this.”
She had another Red Vine in her hand. He’d wanted something personal from her. Something that would let him know this woman better. He got his own candy back. Story of his life. Still, he gave her what he hoped was a game smile and reached out. “Thanks.”
She pulled her hand back before he could take the candy. It wasn’t even a full one. It was the last little piece of what he’d given her.
“I want you to take it from me.” She licked her lips and put it in her mouth.
He was fully awake now, and about three thousand reasons this was a bad, bad idea went through his head.
It was too soon. She was sheltered and inexperienced. He was not. He had needs that would shock her. She’d literally said she didn’t do weird sex stuff. He did. A lot of weird sex stuff.
He should wait because she wasn’t doing this because she was in love with him. She was doing it because they had wild chemistry and she couldn’t help herself. He should be the senior partner and end this experiment of hers.
She settled on his lap, right over his dick, which had come to full and complete life the minute she’d gotten close. He was suddenly hard as a rock, and every muscle in his body was tense and waiting to see if she was doing what he thought she was doing.
“Noelle?”
She lifted her face to his, offering that last bit of sugar, and he gave up the idea of waiting.
Chapter Six
Noelle could taste the candy on her lips and prayed Hutch wanted her as much as she wanted him. She would look like a moron if her seductive act went wrong and he was one of those totally normal people who didn’t eat candy that had been in someone else’s mouth.
What had she been thinking? Was she insane? She’d just met this man and…
One strong hand pressed against her back, moving her close, and his mouth met hers, tongue dragging across her lips before he bit down on that candy, taking half.
It was the single sexiest thing that ever happened to her, and that included full-on sex.
This was why she’d taken the chance. She was tired of not taking chances, and she had to know what making love with this man could do for her.
No one had ever affected her the way Hutch did, and she wanted to see where this road led.
“What else are you offering me, Noelle? Or was that sugar all I get from you?” His voice had gone deep and something had changed. The laid-back guy was gone, and in his place was someone darker, more commanding.
The Dom. She’d known he went to Sanctum, known he was a top, but now she was facing the Dom and he made her heart beat faster. The fact that there was such a difference did something for her.
“It depends on how much you want from me.”
His other hand moved to her thigh, pulling her legs closer and caging her in. “I want it all, Noelle. I want to eat you up. Let me. Let me carry you to your bed and stay there all night. You won’t regret it.”
She might. She might regret it when this was all over with because she already felt too much for him. It was important for her to acknowledge what this was. “I want you. You need to understand that I’m not asking you for anything but tonight.”
The hand on her back moved up to cup the nape of her neck, tightening slightly in a way that sent heat through her. “Then I’ll have t
o make you want me again tomorrow.”
Even his voice was deeper when he was in this place. He hadn’t acknowledged it—hadn’t told her he wanted to top her—so she didn’t say anything. But the difference was right there. She would know where she stood with this man.
After the story he’d told her, she believed Kyle. Hutch wouldn’t manipulate her with sex. He would be open and honest about what he wanted.
His lips teased at hers, gentle at first. They coaxed her to play, to let him suck her bottom lip between his teeth and teasingly bite down. His tongue then ran over it before he started the game all over again. He took his time.
He’d told her he wanted to eat her up. She was ready to let him do it.
His tongue surged in and she couldn’t think about anything but how good he felt, how incredible it was to have her body respond the way it should. So often it felt like her body failed, like it didn’t work the way other’s did, but now every inch of her seemed to come to life and it didn’t matter that her legs didn’t always work normally.
Her legs would spread fine, and she had a feeling her clitoris was about to get a workout like it had never had before.
This could be just sex. It didn’t have to tear her heart up. They would be together for a while. They could explore this and enjoy it and be okay at the end.
This time she could protect herself.
He kissed her for the longest time, making her feel like she was the sweetest treat he’d ever been offered. His tongue coaxed hers in to play, sliding and teasing and finally dominating in a way that had her primed and ready.
