Hot Ice (13 page)

There was a lot of rottweiler in this guy.

She let her eyes shift to the door as she leaned slightly in that direction, as if ready to make a break to the right. His grip tightened on her left arm.
Oh, please, as if-
—

With a quick jerky movement she broke free and dashed left. Straight for the slider.

"Bloody hell, woman."

Two seconds, and the door slid open the full nine inches. She slipped through as quickly as a greased eel and onto the foot-deep false balcony. Safety was seconds away. He couldn't possibly fit through the slider to come after her. Triumphant, heart pounding with exhilaration, Taylor threw a leg over the wrought-iron railing—

Only to be unceremoniously jerked backward. Hard fingers gripped her upper arm and yanked her back through the opening. He couldn't squeeze his large body after her, but he had long arms. The whole thing had taken all of five seconds!

Damn.

"Jesus Christ, woman. Do you have a death wish?" He hauled her into the center of the room, not releasing his merciless grip on her arm. Taylor's fingers went numb. He jerked her around to face him. They were close enough for her to see the unadulterated fury in his steel gray eyes. Yeah? Well that made two of them.

"Why? Because I tried to jump?" she demanded, heart still doing the adrenaline gallop. "Or because you think I should be scared of you?" The slider was still open. The drape dancing in the breeze. She'd make it the next time.

The shackle of his fingers slid down her arm to her wrist. "You should be a damn sight more afraid of
me
than of taking a header down nine stories."

"Is that so?" She struggled in his grasp, all pretense at serenity gone in a flash of red-hot temper. "Well, I'm not scared of either you
or
heights. I'm freaking
pissed off
. Who the
hell
do you think you are breaking in here and manhandling me like this?"

Chapter Eleven

Hunt wasn't feeling sanguine himself. Anger, arousal, and admiration all vied for supremacy. Anger was the most appropriate. "I'm the guy who caught your ass. Again."

He tightened his fingers around her wrists until her hands went pale and bloodless. Satisfied that she'd stay put, he wrapped his hands around her slender, white neck, thumbs feeling the unsteady jump of her pulse at the base of her throat. If he so desired, he could snap her neck like a twig.

She gave the ceiling a look, before staring right back at him. "What are you going to do? Kill me?"

"I'm quite aggravated enough to do so, so don't push it." His voice hardened and became deadly. "No more games. I told you we could do this easy or do it hard. Either way suits me—Jesus fucking Christ! Are you
crying
?" He used his thumbs to tilt up her chin.

Accusatory green eyes sparkled with welling tears. One spilled over, trickling down her cheek as she looked up at him pleadingly.

"Y-You're hurting me. Please. Let me go. I'm n-not who you think I am. I'm really n-not."

For a split second Hunt felt a sharp stab of guilt, but that was gone in a heartbeat. All it took was remembering that this woman was the one who'd left him unconscious and handcuffed to a bed. He slid his hands from her throat, over her smooth shoulders, and down her arms in a caress, seeing the subtle triumph in her shimmering eyes before she lowered those long silky lashes to hide from him.
Oh, no you don't, darling
.

He gripped her fragile wrists in the hard vise of his fingers and, using them as a fulcrum, twisted her onto the bed. She gave a startled cry as he followed her down, covering her slender body with the weight of his own.

A few more crystalline tears dribbled down her temples, her lower lip trembled, but she lay passively beneath him. Hunt transferred her left wrist to his other hand, then used his thumb to wipe away a tear. "You're a real piece of work, you know that, lady?"

The tears were still coming, but behind those fake, tear-filled green eyes was a mind going a mile a minute. If he hadn't been looking at her so closely he might have missed the shift from pitiful victim to seductress.

Her tongue came out briefly to wet her bottom lip. Darker lip liner inside her natural lip line made her lush lips look thinner, but they were the same lying lips he'd felt against his skin in South America.

"P-Please." Her voice held a plaintive wobble. "Please don't hurt me. I'll do anything you want. Just don't h—"

Hunt had two choices. Listen to the latest script she was constructing—or create his own diversionary tactic.

No contest.

He dropped his head down to crush his mouth over hers.

Oh, for… An aching warmth spread through Taylor's body as his hardness pressed her into the mattress. It was pretty damn hard to think when she had a ton of rock-solid male on top of her. It was even harder to concentrate when said male kissed her in a blatantly aggressive move that shut off her brain for those critical few seconds she might've used to escape.

She prided herself on thinking on her feet. The fact that she was usually mentally several steps ahead of anyone trying to catch her had saved her butt a time or three. But she wasn't on her feet at the moment.

What was with this guy and beds?

Instead, she lay there being tasted as if she were Huntington St. John's last meal. This was no tentative exploration. No getting to know the shape and feel of lips and tongues. No slow buildup, no leisurely investigation.

This was deep, hard-core French kissing. Raw. Carnal. Possessive. They hadn't kissed in San Cristóbal, yet the taste and texture of his mouth was shockingly… familiar.

Helplessly, she clutched his shoulders as lightninglike bolts of pure, white heat zipped from her lips directly down to the juncture of her thighs. The sensation vibrated there like the hum of a tuning fork. She wanted to curl her legs around his hips, but she couldn't move. Her world narrowed until she became pure sensation.

His lips. His teeth—God—his
tongue
. His agile, clever,
devilishly
clever tongue. When he slid it over hers, Taylor swirled her own in response. The flavor of him made her breath come faster, and echoed in her ears with the rapid pounding of her heart. She wanted to touch him, but he controlled both her wrists over her head with one hand.

Every thought, every
bit
of sense in her brain, dissipated like mist on a bright, sunny day.
Well, hell
… Her last intelligent thought before she sank beneath the deep sensual waters of the kiss was
escape
… later.

He cupped her cheek, his hand cool on her hot skin as he turned her face a little, slanting that clever mouth down her throat. Taylor sucked in a shaky draft of air as he found the spot behind her ear guaranteed to have her arch beneath him.

He murmured against the delicate skin there as her hips moved restlessly, and the echoes of his sexy murmurs sent more shock waves through her. He pressed his hips hard against her, and she thought,
God, yes. More. Harder
.

He took small bites along the tendons in her neck, then laved her sizzling skin with a slick, damp tongue. Taylor about shot off the bed as every nerve, every tendon, every muscle, every cell in her body did the happy dance.

She tried again to free her hands. He wasn't holding her that tightly, but she couldn't break free. She was double-jointed. She could squeeze free of anything. Usually. But no matter what she tried, she couldn't get free of him. Damn him. She attempted to rub her aching nipples against the hard plane of his chest. But he was too heavy to allow even that small movement.

His lips brushed her ear. Taylor's fingers curled and her nails dug into her palms. She
had
to touch him—

"Where are the disks, Taylor?" he asked through a trail of sweet-hot kisses. Faint stubble from his beard scraped against her throat as he lazily nuzzled and nibbled his way up to her ear.

If he'd only release her hands… She frowned, then opened her eyes. He'd called her by name. Her
real
name. Oh. My. Lord. He knew her name!
How
? "Wh-What?"

"Disks?" he repeated shortly, not sounding in the least bit loverlike despite the weight of his body pressing intimately in the cradle of her thighs, and his breath whispered across her ear making her shudder. "What. Did. You. Do. With. The. Disks?"

Taylor struggled to bring the room and the man back into focus. His question made her feel like hot tea being poured over ice. The chill was sudden and effective. She scrambled to regroup mentally, while her body parts wept in disappointment.

She blinked up at him while her heart thudded and galloped in her chest and their breath mingled intimately. She could read absolutely nothing in his enigmatic face. He might have been made of stone as he looked down at her, apparently unmoved. He was intently, wholly, focused on her. And not in a good way. She felt uncomfortably as though he could read her mind.

"You seem awfully damn determined to butt into my business," she said, breath unsteady. She struggled to sound as emotionless as he, while battling equally hard to ignore her body's still clamoring response to his close proximity. Damn and double damn.

Unlike herself, more fool her, he clearly hadn't been engaged in this activity one iota. She had to hand it to him. It was pretty damn effective. He'd actually conned her into believing he'd been caught up in the passion as intensely as she'd been. She could take lessons from this guy.

She'd been outconned.

He lifted his head to look down at her. His body, his long, lean,
heavy
body, stayed put. His eyes frosted from storm gray to sleet. "I want everything. Papers—documents of any kind. And those disks. Keep the jewelry."

"Keep… ? Good of you to allow that."

"Damn good of me. Considering."

"Considering what?"

"Considering that you lied to me about the location of the disks, knocked me unconscious, and left me handcuffed to a bed."

Oh, yeah. She could see that indignity stung. Poor baby. "Okay, I give you those. I can see how they must've looked to your friends. I felt really, really bad about that," Taylor assured him sincerely.

How much did he weigh, for God's sake? A ton? She couldn't
move. Don't freak
, she told herself, trying for a few deep cleansing breaths. Unfortunately all
that
did was press her nipples against his chest and revive her awareness.

Uneasy under such close scrutiny, Taylor shifted. The slight friction between her dress and his shirt against her breasts was enough to cause her nipples to tingle. The hard ridge of his impressive erection, exactly where she wanted it, proved he wasn't as immune as he appeared.

Good Lord. The man was, to her, like Kryptonite to Superman! He made her itch from the inside out.

Her confused emotions—fear, sexual awareness, and intrigue—were dangerous. All three emotions gave her a rush. And God only knew, in her line of work she thrived on that adrenaline rush like a junkie. But it had never manifested itself like this. And the sexual awareness.
That
was a new sensation. She'd never desired any man quite so intensely. And the fact that he intrigued and fascinated her clanged all of her self-preservation alarms.