Navy SEALs Complete Series: 3 Books + 3 Novellas (Tempting Navy SEALs) (110 page)

He had to touch her. His arms went around her, his hands flattening against her back as he pulled her against his aroused body and took her lips before she could speak.

Whatever Daniel had reported to her, he didn’t want to know. Not yet. First, he had to taste her once more. Fill his senses with her heat and her passion.

One hand slid between her thighs and found her creamy, slick with her own need. That was what he needed. Kira wet and ready for him.

Hands clenching in her buttocks now, he lifted her, feeling slender legs grip his hips as he pressed the painfully thickened flesh of his cock head into the folds of her sex.

No condom. Not this time. She was protected. He knew for damned certain he was safe. And he needed this. Needed to take her naked, with nothing between them, nothing separating their lust.

His head fell back on his shoulders at the intensity of sensation that whipped up his spine. His balls drew tight, his jaw clenched with the need to hold back. He could have spilled himself inside her in that moment as inch by inch she tightened around the impalement, her moans whispering around him as he braced her shoulders against the shower wall.

She was like pure heat. White-hot. Cutting through bitterness and pain to the core of his soul and wrapping around it tighter than her legs were now wrapped around his hips.

Opening his eyes, he tilted his head to lower his lips to hers once again. To sip from the shower-wet curves as he opened her slowly, his cock flexing, throbbing.

“It’s like possessing life,” he whispered against her lips. “And feeling it envelop me. Do you know that, Kira?”

Shock darkened her eyes.

“Do you know what you do to me?” He groaned roughly as he slid in to the hilt and felt her pussy tightening convulsively, milking his flesh.

“What you do to me?” She gasped, her hands tightening on his shoulders. “Oh God, Ian. You make me come apart.”

She was coming apart? He was melting inside. He could feel the heat burning him alive as her head lowered to his
chest, her sharp little teeth nipping at his flesh as he began to thrust inside her.

Her pussy was so tight. So hot. It seared his flesh with liquid heat and tightened on it with firm, rhythmic milking motions. The sensations stroked over the sensitive nerve endings of his cock head, rippled through the shaft, and struck his balls with fingers of heat. They drew tight beneath the shaft, ached with the need to come. Her lips scraped over his chest, adding to the pleasure tearing through him. Her hungry moans filled his head, the prick of her nails on his shoulders added to the incredible rapture he could only find in taking her, possessing her.

“Don’t leave me.” He tightened his teeth as the words slipped past his lips, as the emotions tearing through him found voice.

“Never. Oh God, Ian. Never.”

He braced her against the wall, held tight, and pounded inside her. He fucked her like the demon he sometimes felt he had become, starving, demented. And she was his softness. His corner of peace.

His hands tightened on her hips as he felt his release boiling in his balls. Holding on wasn’t an option. Not when she was crying in his ear, her orgasm unraveling around him, flexing on his dick and tearing his control from him.

He continued to thrust, feeling his cum spurt from his cock in hard, pulsing streams as he locked his teeth against his own cry.

Shudders of pleasure exploded through nerve endings and muscles, racking his body with an ecstasy that still amazed him. An ecstasy found only with Kira. A pleasure that went beyond the flesh and filled the soul.

If he lost her, it would kill him.

W
HAT HE WAS AND WHO
he had become once he entered Diego Fuentes’s world had begun to merge before Kira’s arrival. Ian had recognized the signs, the lines that had been blurring between what was just and right, and what was expedient. He had been slowly becoming the same sort of monster he was tracking, and he hadn’t realized it until Kira had given him her heart.

What part of him did she hold though?

A week later, he locked himself in his office, pulled up the reports Deke and Trevor had managed to collect, and tried to hide from that question.

Unfortunately, hiding from it changed nothing. She owned him. Heart and soul. The good man, and the man that had become dark, honed by the blood and the evil he had witnessed since accepting the name Fuentes.

He stared at the report and the pictures gained by the interrogation of the two men who had sent the missile exploding into the front of the limo the week before. Tourists, they had at first claimed to be. Nothing more than tourists. They had come in on the yacht
Cantrella
, rumored to be Sorrell’s favorite seagoing vessel. Just tourists.

Timothy Vangressi and Adrian Hughes were anything
but tourists. Once Ian’s lieutenant, Antoli Kovalyov, began questioning them, they had broken easily enough.

He pulled up the video of the interrogation. He didn’t wince at the pain Antoli had dealt out to the two men. The fact that they had held out for over an hour was proof of their training. But Antoli had trained under some of the masterminds of torture. He knew tricks Ian hadn’t witnessed, even within the interrogations he had seen as a SEAL.

“Sorrell will kill us,” Vangressi had finally sobbed, his face bloodied and swollen, although it was nowhere near as sad a shape as his testicles were in. The drugs Antoli had pumped into the other man, and the pain, were too much. “We were to kill him and the girl. If the McClane girl backs him, he’ll have too much power. Too much backing. The girl can’t be allowed to influence him until Sorrell has the operation.” He was slurring his words, gasping for breath as Antoli slowly eased the pressure of the clamps on his testicles and turned down the power to the electrical lead attached to them.

“Who is Sorrell?” Antoli asked, his voice calm, cold.

Vangressi shook his head. “I haven’t seen him. He’s here, on the island, but he only calls. The cell phone is just for his calls.”

“The cell phone you carried?” Antoli could have been discussing the weather.

Vangressi was sobbing. “The cells we carry. Just for contact and orders. That’s all. I swear. We met the
Cantrella
in Paris and loaded on. We disembarked after it anchored here and slipped ashore under nightfall with the missile launcher and the paperwork to rent the boats. He knew about the meeting that day. Knew the route Fuentes was taking after we arrived. We waited.”

“Who on the
Cantrella
was your contact?”

“Please,” Vangressi sobbed, pain and fear contorting his handsome features. “Please. He’ll kill me. He’ll kill—” His scream was high-pitched, horrible to hear, as Antoli applied power to the electrical leads, straight to the other man’s balls.

He would have come out of his seat if he hadn’t been strapped to it.

He slumped back a second later, dry heaves racking his body as the power was once again lowered.

“Who was your contact?” Antoli asked again.

“Ascarti,” Vangressi whispered. “Gregor Ascarti. He knows Sorrell. He can identify him.”

A gunshot followed the information. Then another. Both men slumped in their restraints, their gazes dimmed, death instantaneous from the single bullet buried in each brain.

Antoli was highly effective.

As he watched the video, it hadn’t been Vangressi that had filled his mind though, it had been Nathan. The proof of the horrendous torture he had endured during his stay with Fuentes would always scar his mind and his body. There had been no relief, as Vangressi had found. No peace.

Ian pushed his fingers through his hair before rising from his chair and pacing to the bar across the room. Splashing the smooth, expensive whisky he kept on hand into a glass, he turned as a soft knock sounded on the door.

“Yeah?”

The door opened to reveal Diego. As impeccably dressed as ever. White slacks and a white cotton shirt tucked neatly into the waistband. Leather shoes and a gold watch. His black and silver hair was combed back and his patrician features were inquisitive.

“Have you learned much from the interrogation?” he asked as he stepped into the office and closed the door behind him.

“Not enough.” Ian shrugged.

He moved ahead of Diego and casually closed the video before the other man could reach his side.

“If you were not my son, I would have killed you by now.” Diego stared back at him ruthlessly.

“You didn’t let brotherhood stop you, why let fatherhood?” Ian asked as he closed the folders on his desk before looking up once again.

The pain that flashed in Diego’s eyes surprised him. It surprised him even more that he acknowledged it.

“You are amazingly adept at going for the jugular, Ian,” he said quietly, his voice bitter as he sat down in one of the leather chairs placed in front of the desk. “Perhaps in that, you are more like me than I would have wished.”

“Perhaps,” Ian acknowledged, and it didn’t sit well with him, seeing parts of Diego in himself, recognizing that heredity played more of a role in what shaped him than he liked.

His gaze locked with Diego’s as the other man stared back at him intently. Black eyes, bottomless, deep, merciless. Diego Fuentes wasn’t known for his softness or his mercy.

“You do not find pride in being my son, do you, Ian?” he finally asked soberly. “It is a source of disgrace rather than pride. All I have built.” He lifted his hands to encompass the study. “It is as nothing to you, is this not true?”

Ian leaned back in the chair slowly and regarded the cartel lord.

“I’m here,” he finally answered, his voice firm, cool. “As I promised, doing the job I promised.”

“For the lives of your friends who have turned their backs on you and revile you. For women who would spit on you should they have the chance. For this, you are a part of all you have fought against, all your life. With the man whose responsibility it was to protect you and your mother as a child and failed. For this, you reward me by being my son?”

There was sadness in his voice and for a moment, just for a moment, regret flashed through Ian as well. As a child he had dreamed of his father rescuing him and his mother from the hell their lives had become. Always running, always fighting to live, to survive.

Once he had realized who and what his father was, the betrayal he had felt had nearly crushed him.

Diego frowned as he watched him.

“As a young man, I thought I knew all I needed to know of human nature.” He broke the stare they had maintained, blinking at a suspicious moisture in his eyes before glancing down at his still hands as they lay on his lap. “I thought I knew the shades of betrayal and a man’s honor, and how to categorize each.” His gaze lifted then. “I learned I was not nearly so intelligent as I believed. And by the time I learned this lesson, it was too late. Those who could have comforted me, who could have been the family I so long for now, are no more.”

Ian crossed his arms over his chest and flattened his lips at the hidden message there. Had Diego figured out the reason he was there? There wasn’t a chance. He would have been dead had he figured that out.

“There’s a point to all this?” Ian asked him.

Diego shook his head, his eyes drifting closed for a second. “There is a message in all things, Ian. Just remember, the mistakes you make at this moment in time will follow you always. Not just into your nightmares, but into your future, and into your soul. There is no greater pain than the realization that you have destroyed the ties that would maintain you as you age. Those ties are important.”

“Diego, you’re making about as much sense now as Sorrell’s terrorist rhetoric does.” It also struck at the heart of this mission. Diego’s and Sorrell’s heads. He would deliver them personally to Nathan. Payback. Atonement. Monsters didn’t deserve to live, did they?

Diego sighed wearily before a bitter smile pulled at his lips. “You handle the business as though I have retired and have no say in it. You ask for no advice, you prefer I know nothing of the plans you implement. You are aware, are you not, that this is not working?”

They had no choice but to make it work. When the mission was over, the cartel would come down. Ian had made that vow to himself and, silently, to the friends who had always backed him. It would come down, no matter the price.

“I know your fingers are still in there.” Ian glowered back at him. He didn’t need Diego’s fingers there.

“You cannot reform an old lion from striking out at those who threaten his territory,” Diego pointed out. “Those who have died by my hand, those who have suffered, were there to destroy me. I protect only that which is mine.”

An old lion. As though the drugs he sold had no effects, no liabilities. Hell no, he was the candy man selling sweets, that was all, and the big bad SEALs and terrorists just wanted to smack him down.

Son of a bitch, was this how monsters justified their evil? Was this how he had justified the blood he had spilled while he had been here? Defending territory? He could feel the blood staining his hands, hear the wails of the dead in his ears, and fought to remember that they hadn’t been innocents. They had been drug dealers, murderers, rapists, and animals. No more than Diego himself was. No more than his father was. His chest clenched at the involuntary thought.

Ian leaned forward, laying his forearms on the desk, and replied coldly, “Good men die to protect the innocent. You deal in death, Diego. Just as I deal in it now. Don’t try to spray perfume on shit here to make it more presentable. You’re a drug lord. We sell death to children. We prostitute them, we dope them up, and we make a profit from it. Period. We aren’t lions protecting our home. We’re snakes devouring the eggs of humanity.”

Diego blinked back at him as though in surprise. “You have given this much thought, I see. Why then are you here?”

Because he had no choice. Because it was his life or the lives of those who had become his friends, his family. He was one man, alone. They were men with families, with lovers, with something to lose.