Protecting Dallas

by Krista Wolf

  I glanced up and saw his knowing grin. I could only smirk right back at him.

  “Yeah,” I said with a little laugh. “I guess you and I have some catching up to do.”

  “Some welcoming home actually,” Kane nodded. “Unless you forgot?”

  I chuckled again. “Forget? Please.” I stood on my tiptoes and pressed into him. “It’s why I left my room tonight to begin with.”

  Kane’s eyes caught mine, then he lifted me into the air like I was nothing. My arms went over his shoulders, my legs sliding around his warm, naked torso.

  Then we were kissing, with hunger and intensity. Over and over again, in the silent sanctity of our shadowed little hall.

  “Take me back to your room,” I whispered, when I finally broke free of his lips.

  My lover shook his head and smiled.

  “Your room this time,” he said, walking us in that direction. “It smells like you, and it’s a lot softer and nicer in there.”

  Fifty

  KANE

  It was so fucking warm inside her. Warm and wet and spectacularly good. She felt absolutely incredible with her body spooned into mine, my arm firmly around her waist, pinning her tightly against me as I chewed on her shoulder.

  There was a lot comfort in screwing her on her side. For one I could kiss her as much as I wanted to. Kiss her while thrusting myself deep inside her, tilting her chin back in my direction as I kept sawing and plowing away.

  “Baby…”

  Her moans were soft. Mere whispers of words. Each time a hot breath left her lungs, I could feel it on my own lips.

  “Oh honey…”

  We’d been screwing for a long time. Doing it slowly, lazily, my arms wrapped around her as I penetrated her from behind. My hands were free to roam her perfect breasts. They made their way up to her neck, where I applied just enough pressure to leave her gasping with pleasure, even as she sucked, one by one, the fingers of my free hand into her wet, desperate mouth.

  “Oh fuck, Kane,” she gasped greedily. “Fuck me…”

  God, I’d missed her. So much more than I wanted to. So much more than I thought I would, even though she’d only been gone for a couple of days.

  Part of me kept telling myself that was a problem. That I was getting in too deep, too fast. Becoming too attached to someone who could, at any moment, literally be torn from my life.

  Just like Connor.

  I growled and thrust harder, taking out all my frustrations and worries and fear. Dallas responded by groaning even more loudly, and calling for me to fuck her even more deeply than I was.

  After what happened to her brother, nothing would keep me from protecting her. I’d trusted Maddox and Austin enough to take care of her while I stayed behind. And yet from the stories they told me, she’d almost been… almost been…

  “Unnhhhnnnhhhnnnhhh…”

  I flexed my arm as she came, pulling her into me so hard I drove the air from her lungs. I could feel her soft, supple ass, grinding back against me. The rhythmic contractions of her pussy milking me, over and over, through an unforgettable series of orgasmic throbs and pulses.

  Don’t. Come. Yet.

  Damn, that was easier said than done! Every nerve ending in my body was standing on end, telling me to erupt. Giving me full permission to blast off inside her, filling her with three agonizing days’ worth of my hot, juicy come.

  Somehow, through some miracle, I didn’t. And that was solely because I was enjoying myself too much. Savoring the feel of being inside her while I was holding her, of letting my throbbing cock just marinate itself happily, deep in her womb.

  “Baby…” Dallas breathed. She craned her head around to face me again, all jasmine-scented skin and soft blonde hair. “You can let go…”

  Her lips were plump and full, and just slightly wet from where she’d bitten the lower one into her mouth. I leaned in and kissed her, and my whole body exploded with warmth and love.

  Go on. Do it.

  I wanted so badly to come inside her. I’d done it once already and it wasn’t nearly enough. Last time had been a sort of free-for-all, a breakout orgy of want and lust and raw sexual need. But this… right now…

  Right now I wanted to consummate our union. I wanted to fill her with myself, yes, but I wanted to kiss her while I did.

  I wanted her to know how I truly felt. I needed her to realize the full extent of my feelings.

  Tell her.

  My mind was screaming at me to stop being ridiculous. That it couldn’t possibly be like that. But my heart was telling my mind to shut the fuck up.

  Just tell her.

  I couldn’t hold back any longer. The come was boiling up from my balls. In seconds it would surge forward, rushing out of me. It would splash into her in a glorious moment of pure ecstasy, filling her to overflowing.

  SAY it!

  Our mouths were locked, our tongues still dancing hotly. But at the last moment I pulled my head back. In those very last seconds, as my cock jumped in that first euphoric pulse, the words I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud still formed themselves with my lips and tongue.

  I lov—

  I froze… and there was Dallas, her eyes locked against mine. Her face was bright. Her expression soulful, grinning.

  “I love you too,” she smiled, then kissed me. “Now come in me…”

  I didn’t just explode, I detonated.

  She grabbed my head as I shoved myself forward, drilling her to the core. Every twitch was an all new exhilaration, every throb bringing me agonizingly closer to heaven. Our tongues danced again and we kissed hard, my swollen cock flooding her pussy, devouring each other in a storm of heat and passion. I kept shooting and convulsing, firing myself so deep, so fully inside her, that if the universe ended at that exact moment neither one of us would’ve had a care in the whole fucking world.

  It seemed like it would never end. Like I would keep pouring myself into her through the intimacy of our connection, and Dallas would hold me fast, kissing me while the world spun around us.

  When it was finally over we didn’t move an inch. I kept her pinned tightly against me, curling my body around hers without breaking our connection.

  I could feel the warmth of her womanhood, throbbing around me. Holding me inside her as our heartbeats slowed and our breathing became regular and we fell fast asleep, together, with her wrapped in my arms.

  Fifty-One

  DALLAS

  The light streaming in through the kitchen windows was bright as hell, sending my arm up over my eyes like a vampire. Maddox laughed as he slid me a cup of coffee. Kane slid me something else: a plain white paper bag.

  “What’s this?” I grunted.

  “Lunch.”

  I noticed he was reading a newspaper, while chowing down on a thick, juicy cheeseburger. It was a good one too, from one of the better fast-food restaurants. I wrinkled my nose.

  “What the hell time is it?”

  “Afternoon time,” said Maddox. He pointed upward as he sank back into his chair.

  The plastic wall clock read one-thirty.

  Holy shit!

  “You gonna eat those?” Kane asked, indicating the rest of Maddox’s fries.

  “Nah.”

  “More for me then.”

  It was incredible, that I’d slept this late. That I’d slept this well, because I already felt alive and awake and refreshed. Even with only a few sips of coffee.

  You’ve got Kane to thank for that.

  That part was undoubtedly true. After what we’d shared together, both at the window and in my bed, I’d slept like a baby wrapped in his arms.

  “So… you kids have fun last night?” Maddox chuckled, kicking his feet up.

  I poked my tongue out at him and worked on my coffee. I had no interest in whatever was in the white bag. Yet.

  A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Austin check in?”

  “Not yet,” said Maddox. “He was out by O-five hundred. Should be there by now.
Then again, LA traffic.” He shook his head disgustedly. “The freeway’s gotta be one of the seven levels of hell. I can’t fucking imagine how anyone could ever live there.”

  “Nine levels,” said Kane.

  “Nine?” Maddox squinted. “You sure about that?”

  Kane kept chewing without looking up from his newspaper. “Yup.”

  “Circles,” I said eventually, adding to the meaningless conversation.

  “What?”

  “They’re circles of hell, not levels. According to Dante at least.”

  Maddox looked at me strangely. “Who the hell is Dant—”

  “You guys wanna go out to the desert tonight?”

  It was the strangest question, especially coming from Kane. Maddox and I glanced at each other quizzically, then back at him.

  “The desert? Why?”

  “Because I did some digging around while the three of you were gone,” he said. “And I found out some stuff.”

  “You did?” asked Maddox incredulously.

  Kane nodded, stuffing fries into his mouth.

  “Well why didn’t you say anything?”

  He shrugged. “No one asked.”

  Maddox stared back at me, his mouth open. He looked so funny I actually giggled.

  “So… are you going to enlighten us?” I asked.

  Kane dabbed at his mouth with the napkin and pushed the remains of his meal away. “Sure.”

  For the next few minutes he talked more about his weekend. About how he’d spent time at Nellis, getting all the information he could. Kane’s contacts were impressive; even on the Air Force base, he had plenty of people who owed him favors. He explained there were people even higher than that who owed them favors, and in turn, everything got cashed at once.

  It reminded me of something Connor once said, about how saving someone’s life could change protocol. When you realize your very existence on the planet earth is owed to someone else, you tended to take care of that person’s needs no matter what they might be. Even it meant breaking the rules.

  Especially if it meant breaking the rules.

  “I wormed my way into the motor pool,” he said. “The SUV Connor’s been tracking — the one we chased off? The device is gone now. They found it.”

  “Figures,” said Maddox.

  “I was going to plant another,” said Kane. “In fact, I was going to put one on every goddamn vehicle in that garage. But then a buddy of mine came up with something better. Something much more useful.”

  He reached down and pulled out a tablet in a flat black case. After tapping a few buttons, he turned it around so that it faced us.

  “I had this loaded with the past three years of GVT data,” said Kane “And then I made a fuck-ton of coffee, and I went over it.”

  I tilted my head. “GVT?”

  “Government Vehicle Tracking,” Kane replied. “Keeps a running log of every government vehicle equipped with a GPS system, which by now, is pretty much all of them.”

  Maddox let out a low whistle. “Well, shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  The screen he was holding out to us looked like something straight out of The Matrix — a whole bunch of letters and numbers arranged in seemingly endless vertical columns.

  “Well that’s all very nice,” I laughed, “but what are we looking at?”

  “Here,” Kane said, tapping the screen.

  I saw more numbers, more letters. I was still confused.

  “This vehicle,” he said, “has gone out to the same spot in the desert as the SUV we chased.” He shifted his finger a bit. “The coordinates match exactly.”

  “How many tim—”

  “Once every two weeks,” said Kane. “Going back over two years. Always on the same day of the week — this day — and always at the same time of night.”

  Maddox shifted closer to the table. He reached out and pointed with his own finger.

  “These are service identification numbers.”

  “Yup.”

  Maddox’s eyes went wide with excitement. “So we can look up who this guy is!”

  Kane swung his head slowly up and down. Somehow however, he didn’t seem as excited as his comrade.

  “Already have.”

  Slowly Maddox sank back into his chair. “Holy shit.”

  “I’m thinking something along those lines, yeah.”

  My heart was beating fast again, my blood pumping. I could actually feel the progress now, like we were finally getting closer to the truth about Connor.

  “So… who is this guy?” I asked hesitantly.

  I saw Kane’s eyes shift downward, in the direction of the floor. I knew something was wrong right away. Kane never looked down.

  But I wasn’t the only person in the room who sensed it.

  “It’s someone we know,” Maddox said solemnly. “Isn’t it?”

  Kane cleared his throat uncomfortably. His arms were crossed over his chest now.

  “Someone we served with…” Maddox went on.

  Very slowly, almost painfully, Kane nodded.

  “Tell me,” demanded Maddox. His expression was twisted with fury and anger now. “Tell me which rat fuck son of a—”

  “It’s Dietz.”

  Fifty-Two

  DALLAS

  The ride out to the desert was sullen and strange. I sat alone in the back seat, silent for the most part, listening to the conversation between Maddox and Kane.

  They talked at length about a man named Dietz.

  Dietz… Dietz…

  For some reason, the name rang a bell. Either Connor had mentioned him directly, or I’d heard my brother talk about him in passing. Whatever the case, the man was a soldier they all knew, and apparently loved.

  Worse, it was a person they all trusted.

  “How in the fucking world could Dietz have gone bad?” Maddox was saying. He sat in the passenger seat, sounding as hurt as he was confused. “And how could he have ever gone against Connor?”

  Kane didn’t say much of anything, but he did a lot of jaw-clenching, and flexing of his fists. Before the end of the trip I was sure he’d squeeze the 10 and 2 points of the steering wheel into dust.

  We left early, hours before the times usually indicated on the GPS logs. There was no real-time tracking of our target, and no way to be certain they were coming at all. But if they followed the already-established pattern, and the previously-visited coordinates? We’d get there well before they would.

  Kane had already entered the spot into his phone’s own tracker. It was a blip on a digital map — a place that grew infinitesimally closer with each rock and pebble that whizzed by. We’d left the road half an hour ago. The hills and ridges beneath our tires were hard-packed sand, almost like concrete as we wound our way downward into what looked like a tiny, stone-faced valley.

  “There,” said Maddox, as we approached the end of our journey. “That ridge looks good.”

  “Not good,” muttered Kane. “It’s perfect.”

  We rolled upward, as they talked more about the apparent betrayal of their former brother-in-arms. I could tell they were holding back a little. Sometimes the conversation would dip low for a phrase or two, as if they were saying something they didn’t want me to hear.

  Normally it would’ve made me angry. Right now though, I was pretty numb.

  Connor came here.

  It was all I could think about as I glanced around. All I could really see. Whatever had gotten my brother killed, it all started right here, in this little stretch of desert. This stupid fucking strip of nothing, where he’d stuck his nose where it didn’t belong.

  Don’t be like that, an inner voice admonished me sternly. Your brother was a goddamn hero.

  Up in the front seat, the guys’ conversation went low again. Though I knew they were mostly just trying to protect my feelings, it might be time to remind them again about how we’d all agreed to keep everything transparent.

  Eventually we crested the final rise, and Kane
rolled us to a dusty stop. He parked back a ways from the lip of our cliff face, a good thirty or so paces from the edge.

  “Let’s check it out,” said Maddox.

  I walked with them wordlessly, listening to the dull silence of the desert. The dying sun felt good on my face. The wind had a faint vanilla scent to it as it swept through my hair. Both men pulled out very expensive-looking military binoculars, making minor adjustments as they pointed them down into the valley below.

  “There,” said Kane. “Right near the overhang.”

  I squinted hard, straining to see.

  “You could’ve brought three sets of binoculars, you know.”

  Kane ignored me completely. Maddox spun one of the dials with his index finger. “Yeah,” he said distantly. “Sorry.”

  I started thinking about Connor. Wondering if my brother had stood at this exact vantage point, looking down over the same section of valley. I decided he probably had. They’d all had the same training, shared the same basic tactics and knowledge.

  He might’ve been my brother by blood… but he was also their brother in every other sense of the word.

  I felt a tap, and Kane was handing me his binoculars. They were three times heavier than they actually looked. I peered through them, trying to see the same things they did.

  “See that spot,” he murmured into my ear. “Where the sand is a little bit darker?”

  I saw. I nodded.

  “What else do you see?”

  I focused. Scanned. Concentrated.

  “Tire tracks.”

  “Yup.”

  I sighed and handed the equipment back to Kane. “What now?”

  Maddox lowered his own optics and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Now… we wait.”

  Fifty-Three

  DALLAS

  The first set of headlights showed up well after dark. In the clear desert night we could see them coming for miles away, bouncing their way along into the valley below.