Extreme Danger (22 page)

He gave her a wary glance. His grin faded. “What’s that look?”

Her mouth went dry. “I…I was just thinking how beautiful you are when you smile,” she whispered.

Not a muscle moved in the mask of his face, but she felt the light go on inside him. And the answering one flare up inside her chest.

Chapter
13

A voice was yammering on about how he would trash it, yada yada, how much more it was going to hurt her if he kept on down this road, how bitterly she would hate his guts, blah blah, so on and so on.

Didn’t help. This mindless wanting was inexorable and huge. He swung around to face her, sank to his knees in front of her. Kneeling like the desperate supplicant that he was.

He stared at her face. Jesus. Becca was dangerous, she was so fucking pretty. She had to tone it down. Wear a bag over her head. People would remember her face even if they had no particular reason to do so.

She made his eyes ache. That hot pink blush, the delicate line of her cheekbone, her jaw. And that mouth just did it to him, especially that pouty lower lip with the seam down the middle. So sexy, so soft. One look at that mouth would have made him stone hard, if he had not already been so. His dick strained in his jeans, like he hadn’t just had the most amazing volcanic lay of his whole life. And the cock-teasing robe gaping over her cleavage did not help matters.

Her knees poked out of the crumpled robe. He put his hands over them. Her tongue flashed out to moisten her lips. He stared into that dim triangle between the draped panels of silk over her clamped thighs, where the hot stuff hid.

Her pale white knees were covered with scratches and scabs. He leaned down, kissed them. The callused spots on his hands snagged at fragile fabric, until his hands found skin, and greedily sought more, pushing the silk up over her legs. The robe gaped at her navel right under the knotted sash. Showing her dark muff.

Her legs shook too much to keep them clamped against the relentless pressure of his fingers. He pressed them open, and stared down into her shadowy mysteries, the holy of holies. Her beautiful cunt was ready for him.

His fingers tightened. His balls, too.

The unmistakeable purpose on his face made her scramble back. She lurched to her feet, batting his hands, and swathed herself with a swirling flutter of rose-print fabric. “Cool it, right now! My landlady is downstairs and the neighbors can see us from their window!”

“I don’t care,” he said.

“Of course you don’t,” she said crisply. “You’re a caveman. We’ve already established that.”

“So can I throw you over my shoulder? Drag you into my cave?”

“No, you may not!” she snapped. “This is my cave! You can carry in the coffee mugs, and put them in the sink. That’s what you can do.”

“Shouldn’t have asked,” he said. “Asking was a big tactical error.”

She folded her arms under her tits. Her nipples poked through the threadbare fabric. “Too bad you didn’t think of that before.”

Laughter threatened, but he had plans for the next half hour that did not include another sobbing fit, so he breathed it carefully down. He scooped up coffee cups with one hand, Becca with the other, and pushed her, stumbling ahead of him into the kitchen. He deadbolted the door, rinsed the cups, and set them carefully in the drainer.

He turned to her. “So?”

She gave him a narrow look. “So what?”

“I didn’t just put them in the sink,” he said. “I rinsed them out.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, boy, Nick. I’m overwhelmed.”

“Good.” He pried her arms away from her chest and jerked the robe down over her shoulders so that it bared her breasts, and trapped her arms in the folds of silk. He caught her arms, trapped them behind her back. “You like being overwhelmed. It gets you off.”

“You overdo it,” she whispered, and moaned into his mouth as he claimed her lips in a ravenous kiss. The puckered buds of her nipples tickled his chest, and he explored the sweet, silken, coffee flavored depths of her mouth as he pressed her closer.

“Maybe,” he said. “But it works for you.”

“This part, yes. Just not what happens after,” she said.

He stared down into her wide, somber eyes, ringed with long wet black lashes. She wasn’t fooling herself this time.

Her statement hung between them like a lingering chord. She waited for him to deny it. For him to reassure her that it wasn’t true.

But he couldn’t. The rules weren’t going to change just because he wanted them to. Being locked into this cage made him furious. Sick of the fucked-up situation, sick of eating poison, constrained at every step, by danger, duty, guilt and fear, sick regret.

He wanted this. The universe could chuckle at the cosmic joke at his expense all it wanted, but he would have this one thing. For him. Not for always, but for now, for right now, he would have it. Have her.

He spun Becca around till she faced the wall and buried his face in her neck as he wrenched open his jeans, dragging up handfuls of her dressing gown. He filled his hands with the warm silky curves of her ass, the hot cleft, the slick folds between. He fit himself to her, pulling her hips back to get the angle right, and they cried out together as he shoved his cock into the tight, wet clutch of her.

The sweet friction, the fluttering resistance of her pussy around his cock head almost did it. He forced himself deeper, thrusting inside until the whole length of his cock was kissed with her dew, clasped in that tight, throbbing sheath.

She cried out, her slender arms trembling where she was braced against the wall, her cunt muscles fluttering and clenching around the intrusion. “No,” she said. “Don’t. It’s not…I don’t like it.”

He stopped cold. His instincts rarely led him wrong in sex. At least not in this phase of it. He touched her ass cheeks, with slow, soothing strokes, trembling with his own desperate eagerness to let go and have at her. “This way I won’t rub your sore clit.” His voice was raw with effort. “I can make you come this way. I promise. You’ll love it.”

“It’s not that.” Her voice shook. “I just…it makes me feel the way I felt with…with them.” Her voice cracked.

He knew instantly who she was talking about. His arm tightened around her waist. His body shook with the strain of staying still. He gritted his teeth, cursed silently. Women and their goddamn complicated notions. It was like blundering through a fucking maze.

“It’s not your fault. The way they looked at me, but they didn’t see me. At all. When I can’t see your face, it makes me feel…” Her voice trailed off, and he heard her swallow. “Alone. Worse than alone. I’m sorry. I’m not blaming you.”

“Don’t apologize. You’re the last one who should be apologizing right now.” He ground out the words as he eased his cock out of her.

They stared at each other for a moment, and he picked her up and carried her into her bedroom. She stiffened, grabbed his shoulders like she was afraid he was going to drop her.

He deposited her on the bed. There was a cheval mirror by the dresser. The answer to his prayers. He dragged it over, situated it in front of her so she was staring at herself. She tried to smooth her hair. Curled into a knot, wrapped her arms around herself.

“I’ll look right at you. Eyes locked. The whole time,” he told her.

She looked uncertain, that rosy, blurred lower lip caught between her teeth. Her eyes big and haunted.

“I can’t see anything but you,” he urged her. “I swear it.”

She wiped away tears, shook her head. “I just feel so messed up,” she whispered. “I told you, I’m not the adventurous type, and this whole thing was awful. It wiped me out.”

“What’s adventurous?” He circled the bed and stared into her eyes from behind, stroking his hands over her hips, cupping her ass. “You say this Kaia was the adventurous type? Trekking in Nepal, crewing on a yacht, rave parties in Thailand? Sucking some engaged guy’s dick while he drove his fiancée’s car? Bet that made her feel like a real wild thing. I know the type. Spoiled kids, living out their fantasies in controlled conditions. Daddy’s credit card in the fanny pack, right along with the passport and the satellite phone and the hash pipe.”

“I do not see how that is relevant. Oh, God…” Her eyes closed, and she sucked in a sharp breath as he parted her hair on the back of her neck with his lips, and pressed hot kisses against her nape.

“Bet the silly bitch never cooked a kick-ass gourmet meal for the kingpin of a global criminal syndicate,” he murmured. “Bet she never served it to him practically naked without missing a beat. And then escaped to tell the tale. With the likes of me, hot on her tail. Check you out.”

She started to shake. “Don’t make me laugh. It’s not funny.”

He slid his hands up the silky insides of her thighs, and stroked her pussy. “I just want to make you understand,” he said. “That Kaia cow doesn’t know shit about adventure, babe. I’m talking the real kind, where you risk your skin, where you wish to God you’d stayed home. That you’d never even gotten out of bed.”

“Oh,” she breathed.

“But you do,” he coaxed her. “You got through it. And you’re OK, because you’re tough. And strong. And so gorgeous, it’s killing me. I won’t look away from you for a second. I can’t. Give me this. Please.”

It took a long time for her to overcome her inner resistance. The waiting almost killed him. He stared at her, hypnotized by the contrast of his darker hands against her luminous skin. Her tits overflowed his hands, so full and soft. He nibbled her neck, smooching at that sweet spot on her nape that never failed to send a melting shudder down her back. His fingers traced patterns on the luscious underswell of her tits. He sucked in hungry gasps of her scent. His cock bobbed between her thighs, purple and bursting with readiness.

A vague realization was coming to him as he waited, teeth gritted. He had to grasp for it, since most of his brain was occupied with the desperate desire to fuck her. No space left for complex reasoning.

He’d always hidden the dark stuff from the women he’d been with. Deadly violence and its inevitable aftermath. Things he’d been forced to see, things he’d been forced to do. No woman had ever been stuck in that place with him. No woman he’d ever been with could have understood what it meant. What that level of stress did to a person. How it could wear you down, cave you in. Make you empty inside.

He’d have done anything to keep her from knowing it, but she did know it. And that changed things. It erased a barrier between them.

He couldn’t tell if that was good or bad. He was guessing bad.

But God, she felt so good. His hands moved over that smooth skin, and slowly, she leaned forward, caught herself with her hands. Arched her slender, graceful back, parting her thighs.

Presenting her perfect ass, her gorgeous pussy to him, with perfect trust. Her eyes blinked into his, wet and dazzled. Her lips were parted with excitement.

It shocked a sting of tears into his eyes, which horrified him. He had to break eye contact and press his face against her slender back. Amazed that she would give him so much.

She deserved so much more than he ever could give her in return.

It made him angry. Frustrated as hell. Control. He nudged his cock into her. It was never an easy glide, even as wet and slick as she was. She was as tight and snug as a leather glove. He had to work it in slow and steady, nudging and coaxing, but she shoved back, accepting him.

He raised his head, forced his eyes open. He’d promised to look at her. His face in the mirror was a grimace of self-control, but his eyes held raw emotion.

So did hers. Once they’d locked, a mechanism engaged that he had no control over. He couldn’t have looked away if his life depended on it. He tried to listen with his body as he stirred her around with his cock, feeling for the angles, the strokes that made her shiver and moan, but he lost control, he was sucked into the vortex. He had to give in to his body’s demands and hope to God that it worked for her, too, because he couldn’t stop, couldn’t…stop. Not at all.

She gasped with each hard lunge, jerked her hips back eagerly for more, and then he felt the energy inside her, gathering for a leap—

And she went off, with that wonderful pulsing clutch at his cock, and he thundered down to join her, when some dim part of his brain remembered—

He jerked his cock out of her just in time and spurted hot jets of pearly white come all over her ass, her back.

Her arms sagged. She collapsed onto her belly. He followed her down, braced on his elbows so she could still breathe. Glued to her with come. Pressing his face against the delicate bumps of her spine. Let his own tangled hair absorb his tears. Struggling to breathe into lungs that hitched and caught.

She wound her fingers around his wrists, and hung on, a fine tremor in her fingers. She knew what was coming. She was no fool.

He was the foolish one. For giving in to it. Not once, but twice.

He felt desolate, hollowed out. Washed up on the barren beach of reality again, like he hadn’t gotten a clue the first time. He never learned. He had to get out of here, once and for all. Before he tried to comfort himself again, with her body, and made the same goddamn mistake. Over and over. Worse each time.

He was as much of an addict as his daddy, with the juice. He just hadn’t found his drug of choice till now.