MIDNIGHT QUEST: A Short 'Men of Midnight' Novel (20 page)

It never got stale. In fact, it got hotter each time because beyond the kiss right now, she remembered those other thousand kisses. Her sex clenched as she remembered his lips there. He could make her come with his mouth alone.

Lauren opened her arms and embraced him. Her hand was full of gel so she spread it over that wide, strong back. How she loved touching him here. Each muscle distinct, so hard she could never make indents with her fingers.

He left her lips and she was about ready to complain when he kissed her behind the ear. Right…there. Which to her astonishment, had turned out to be an erogenous zone. Big time. She’d never known that. And it turned out that the tendons of her neck were erogenous zones, too, and made her shiver when he ran his lips up and down them. And when he bit her, right on the spot where her neck met her shoulder…well, that turned out to be a huge turn-on.

If you’d told her two years ago that she would have liked being bitten, she’d have laughed and called you crazy.

But this wasn’t a pain-bite. It was Jacko’s mouth knowing precisely how much pressure to bring to bear, the lightest possible bite, just enough to entice, not hurt. Once she’d climaxed through only a slight nip.

Jacko really knew his stuff.

But he once told her that it wasn’t because he’d “fucked around” so much, as he put it. It was that he made a study of her. That he had touched or kissed every inch of skin on her and had memorized her reactions. He knew her body the way a concert pianist knows the keyboard, and he played it well.

She kissed him on the neck too. Because he knew her body but she also knew his. He made a low, rough sound, barely audible above the cascade of water. “I’m glad you’re back,” she whispered against his skin.

Jacko curled his big hand around her neck, lifting her chin with his thumb. Then his mouth was on hers again, the kiss deep and long. His hands traveled down her sides, reached her thighs and lifted.

His strength never ceased to amaze her. He lifted her as if she weighed nothing, hands under her thighs, spreading them apart, stepping forward between them. It was all just a feast for the senses. The waterfall of hot water, the heated scent of freesias, Jacko’s hard body pinning her against the shower stall wall, his huge, hard penis probing to enter her.

“Damn,” Jacko muttered against her mouth.

Lauren smiled and reached between them. “I thought you were this big-shot sniper. Infallible aim.” She took his penis in hand and placed the head against her entrance. He was huge and burning hot.

“Little…distracted here,” he mumbled against her mouth.

“Yeah?” Lauren licked his lips, opened her mouth against his and he groaned and leaned forward, pressing her more tightly to the wall. Jacko didn’t plunge into her. She was always a little tight when he was gone for a few days and he was always careful. “Thought snipers never got distracted. Total focus. Ahh.”

He slid into her, just the tip.

She wanted more. More, more, more.

Jacko had somehow changed her. She never used to be like this—sex-crazed. It was all his fault, turning her on so much. Giving her all these explosive orgasms. Then holding back now. Wasn’t fair. The beast.

Lauren wriggled but there wasn’t any purchase. With the wall at her back, and Jacko pressing so hard against her, she had no room to maneuver, nothing to force him to move.

Well…maybe something.

She clenched around him, hard, and felt him buck. “God, Lauren,” he muttered. “Trying to be a gentleman.”

“Mm. I don’t want a gentleman, I want you.” She closed her eyes, concentrated on her body. Everything in her felt full except her sex. It felt like her blood was going to escape her body, her skin was so tight; even her fingertips, pressed against Jacko’s hard back, felt tight and tingling.

There was a remedy for that. Jacko had taught her. There was a remedy for that feeling of needing to explode.

“More,” she whispered against his mouth and he pressed forward. Maybe halfway in. There was a lot of Jacko, and even half of him was more than most men. She had enough to work with now. Under the beating stream of hot water, she linked her ankles behind his back and writhed on him, almost dancing on him. There was just enough room for her to move up and down and circle him and oh God, it felt like she was burning up, that iron-hard rod unyielding and hot.

Jacko was saying something to her, something about the bed, but she wasn’t listening. She couldn’t. Every ounce of attention was centered on her body, between her legs, where Jacko barely penetrated her but was still the point of all pleasure in the world, gripping, blinding pleasure.

She circled him tightly, the moves echoing her mind, which was spiraling tightly around that pleasure spot, tighter and tighter…

With a wild cry, Lauren tipped over the edge, plunging into a deep abyss that would have scared her if she hadn’t been held so tightly in Jacko’s strong arms. The world fell away, disappeared and all that was left was her, Lauren, head tipped back against the wall, laughing. Happy her man was back.

Something penetrated her sleep. A sound, not enough to wake her. What woke her up was Jacko jackknifing up in bed and throwing back the covers. Cloth rustled as he pulled on jeans and a tee shirt.

It was dark in the room. She could barely see in the gloom, the only light coming from the full moon outside. Jacko had already finished dressing when she heard another sound, two notes this time. And she recognized the first sound she’d heard in her sleep.

The alarm.

The system Jacko had set up had two sound alarms. A single tone for when the outer perimeter of the property was breached and two tones for when someone was on the property. By some magical alchemy, Jacko had adjusted the setting so that no member of ASI or any of their women would set off the alarm. They joked about it—Metal could simply walk onto the property and throw a rock at their window and no alarm would be set off, not that Metal would ever do it.

Which was the point of the setting. Friends yes, foes no.

And for Jacko, if you weren’t a friend, you were a foe.

A foe was at the door.

Lauren opened her mouth to say something to Jacko, who was checking his gun, the gun he kept within arm’s reach. She’d learned enough about guns to see that he was freeing the magazine to check that it was loaded and sliding the chamber back to check that a bullet was already there.

Something was going to have to be done about that when their child started walking.

“Jacko, what—”

“Down,” he said, voice low but not a whisper. “Keep down and don’t go in the living room. Someone’s on the property. Here…” He turned the monitor around so she could see it. The screen was split into four parts—front, back and both sides of the house. “So you can follow what’s going on. But don’t leave the room.”

She nodded and he flowed out the door. There was no other word to describe it. He was there and suddenly he was not there. He was fast and quiet and smooth. She didn’t hear his footsteps and she didn’t hear the front door opening and closing.

There he was, on the panel that showed the front of the house, emerging then on the panel showing the side, meaning he’d stepped outside the front door.

Jacko’s hands came up, fisted around his gun, and Lauren’s heart started jackhammering. He edged forward sideways, making himself a smaller target, though Jacko was a huge target, even sideways. The view switched to the videocamera hidden in the bushes flanking the driveway. She could see his face in profile, expressionless, focused. He moved forward in small steps, which she knew kept his gun steady. Military steps, which meant he felt there was real danger.

He said something, though of course she couldn’t hear what.

Then—then a look of utter astonishment crossed his face. She’d never seen that expression on him before, completely taken by surprise. She was trying to think what on earth could put that expression on Jacko’s face—on the face of a man who’d seen just about everything—when she focused on a man next to Jacko’s vehicle.

Jacko’s eyes were wide and his gun hand dropped. Not in a controlled way, not because he’d received the order to put the gun down, but like someone who simply couldn’t keep his hand up any longer.

Whatever it was out there was scaring Jacko. Or…not scaring him so much as astonishing him.

Should she go out there? If he lowered his gun, that meant—what did it mean? The man wasn’t an enemy? What was going on? What did he see?

Jacko was simply standing there, doing nothing. Stock still. Eyes wide, jaw dropped.

And then
her
jaw dropped, because the man stood up slowly, hands open and to his sides, palms out. The universal sign of nonaggression, though his thumb held something against the palm of his right hand. Something small and square. He turned slightly so that he was fully captured by the security camera.

He looked—but no. That was impossible.

Lauren came closer to the camera, her breathing loud in the room. She put a hand to her mouth and stared at the monitor.

The man was large—as large as Jacko. He had close-cropped gray hair and was wearing a dark leather jacket. Except for his size, just a normal man. But he was anything but normal. What she saw had the hairs on her arms standing straight up.

His face. Dear God, his face.

He was the exact replica of Jacko. Except for the fact that he looked older, he could have been Jacko’s twin. Identical twin.

Jacko felt like he’d been sucker punched. He could barely breathe. His lungs were trying to pull in air but the air had been sucked out of the night sky.

He’d caught the fucker red-handed. This big guy, hunkered down by the front right tire of Jacko’s SUV. God knows what he was trying to do, because you don’t boost a car from its chassis. But Jacko drew down on him. No matter what the fucker was trying to do, Jacko was calling the cops and the man would spend at least one night in jail. ASI knew everybody in the Portland PD, and he’d make sure the man got a good scare and wouldn’t ever trespass again.

Then the man looked up and Jacko’s gun hand went down.

He was nailed to the spot. Frozen. Couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk.

It was like looking in a mirror.

The man standing not five feet from him was an exact copy of him. Face, height, size. Even the guy’s hands looked like his. Shock reverberated through Jacko’s system—the first time in his life he was shocked senseless.

The man stood at ease, hands out, holding something in the palm of his hand.

He searched Jacko’s face with piercing eyes. The one thing that was different between them was that he had light gray eyes.

Who had talked about eyes lately?

Jacko couldn’t reason through it, not with this mirror image standing right in front of him. Impossible, but very real. It wasn’t a figment of his imagination and it wasn’t a hologram. It was a flesh-and-blood man who looked exactly like him.

They stared at each other. Jacko could see a vein throbbing in the other man’s neck. He felt a vein throbbing in his own neck.

Those light gray eyes shifted, watching his own. Jacko was mesmerized, was falling straight down into an abyss, his stomach swooping. He heard a whooshing sound inside his head.

The man spoke but the words didn’t penetrate. Jacko could hardly hear him above the thunderous beating of his own heart.

“I didn’t know about you until ten hours ago.” Finally the words found a place in his head.

Jacko broke out of his frozen stance and shook his head. “What?”

“Can I move?”

Could he move?
What the fuck kind of trick question was that? But then he realized he’d been rendered stupid by shock. What the guy was asking was would Jacko let him move without shooting him.

Because he still had a gun in his hand, finger inside the trigger guard. Anyone familiar with guns would recognize that as a signal that he was prepared to shoot.

Jacko removed his finger from the trigger guard. Which was crazy. He didn’t know who the fuck this guy was who had invaded his property and was checking the undercarriage of his truck. But…he looked like Jacko. Surely his twin wouldn’t attack him. Unless Jacko was batshit crazy and the only thing attacking him was his own head. “Yeah. You can move.”