Rogue Alpha (Alpha 7) (5 page)

Except, unlike every other widow Seth had ever met, Diana didn’t tear up or become emotional whenever her husband’s name was mentioned. Admittedly, it had been eight months since Moore died, but even so…

She called him
an abusive bastard
.

Did that mean the other man had physically hurt her? Maybe taken his fists to her?

Seth’s own hands curled into fists against his thighs at the thought of a man hitting a woman for any reason. There
was
no excuse for a husband hitting his wife. “Does anyone else know about that?”

She gave a shake of her head. “My parents would have been devastated, and after Jeremy was killed, I couldn’t see the point in telling them. Once I was back in England, I didn’t—I was too embarrassed to tell my friends what happened either.”

“That’s the reason you moved to Paris.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes.”

Seth would have liked to go into the subject more deeply, but for the moment, he had to concentrate on what was—or wasn’t?—going on in Diana’s life right now. “Did Moore know you were leaving him?”

“Oh yes.”

The expression on her face was enough to tell him how that conversation had gone down. “Did he have enemies?”

“Other than me, you mean?” she questioned dully.

Seth disliked intensely that look of defeat in her eyes. “Yes.”

“Not that I’m aware of, no. Jeremy was all charm in public.” She gave a shudder. “It was only in private he became violent.”

Seth wasn’t as convinced of that as Diana obviously was. Oh, no doubt the other man had been able to keep up that façade in his working life, but there would be others, most probably women, the bastard would have preyed on in the past. Women like Diana, who were too embarrassed and humiliated to ever want to talk about the abuse to other people.

Diana stood abruptly. “I didn’t shoot him, if that’s where this conversation is going.”

“What the fu…?” Seth stood up too, scowling darkly. “Of course you didn’t shoot him.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I am, okay?” Seth knew what a killer looked like, could see that death in their eyes. He saw that look in his own eyes every time he glanced in a mirror. Diana’s eyes had shadows, yes, but not from the sort of memories he lived with every day. He could see Diana shooting Moore in self-defense because she couldn’t take his abuse any longer. But in cold blood, in the middle of the street? No, she just wasn’t the type. “You aren’t a killer.”

“I could have hired someone to do it.”

Yes, she could. But again, Seth knew she hadn’t. Because, whether she pulled the trigger or not, Diana would still have been responsible for the death of another human being. “You didn’t do that either,” he dismissed confidently. “But someone did.”

She tensed. “You don’t think it was merely a random shooting like the officials at the embassy did?”

“No.”

She drew in a shuddering breath. “Do you think Jeremy’s death could also have something to do with my apartment being broken into and the feeling I have of being followed?”

Seth looked at Diana with appreciation; not only beautiful and intelligent but intuitive too. “I think how he spent his time in Colombia is worth a second look, yes.” Including this woman’s kidnapping. If Diana had told Moore she was leaving him and getting a divorce, something that could have been detrimental to his career, then there was no telling how he might have reacted. What he would have done to stop that from happening.

Including arranging to have his own wife kidnapped for ransom?

A ransom Stephen Baxter had willingly paid, but Diana still hadn’t been released. Which was usually the time Seth, or someone like him, was called in to go and get them out.

Now that he knew more of the facts, Seth found it interesting that Diana was one of the kidnap victims who hadn’t been released even though the ransom had been paid. She had been a woman about to leave and divorce her husband. A husband whose career might have suffered as a consequence. Moore would have been so much more deserving of sympathy as a widower, than as a man who was being divorced by his wife because he had physically abused her.

But maybe Seth was jumping ahead of himself. There was still the possibility that Diana’s work at the museum was at the root of this particular problem.
If
there was a problem.

Nothing Diana had told him so far had convinced Seth she wasn’t imagining things. Her marriage had been traumatic, the kidnapping even more so, the cause of her widowhood shocking. Who could blame her for being a little paranoid after all that? Hell, he might have felt a little paranoid himself in those circumstances.

The fact he wasn’t wholly convinced didn’t mean she wasn’t telling him the truth.

Plus Seth had this niggling itch.

A
feeling.

And he knew better than to ignore his own feelings, that to do so could get someone killed. In this case, that someone might be Diana Moore.

“Are you going to fly back to Paris with me later today or not?”

Seth had never been a sucker for a sob story. He had seen too much, been involved in most of it, to underestimate what human beings were capable of doing to each other.

But Diana hadn’t attempted to tell him a sob story. Her eyes had teared up a couple of times, but she hadn’t actually cried, not once, through any of the things she had confided in him last night or today. Some of them things it seemed even her own parents didn’t know about her.

Seth was reacting to this situation purely on instinct. An instinct that had never let him down in the past, and he was relying on it not to fail him now either.

“I am, yes—” He didn’t get any further as Diana launched herself into his arms.

“Thank you. Thank you. Oh thank you!” She clung to him, her face and eyes alight with her relief.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Seth’s voice was a guttural rasp.

She stilled, her brow creased in puzzlement. “Thanking you—”

“That’s not thanking me.
This
is thanking me.” Seth’s arms tightened about her waist and his hands cupped her bottom as he made her aware of the reaction of his body, both to her kisses and her close proximity. A reaction he’d been fighting since he’d kissed her in the bar yesterday evening. A reaction that hadn’t lessened in the slightest in the hours since, despite his having pumped his cock to release in the shower last night and again this morning.

This woman pressed every one of his arousal buttons without even trying.

Diana’s breath caught in her throat as Seth’s mouth came crashing down on hers, bruising her lips as he forced them apart with the probe of his tongue, even as he ground the hardness of his long and aroused erection against her.

Her response was as instantaneous. A hot gush of desire between her thighs, her nipples engorging, aching to be touched, caressed,
pulled
.

It had been so long since she had been physically close to someone. Since she had allowed anyone to be physically close to her. And Seth was like no other man she had ever met. Big. Rough. Dangerous.

She groaned low in her throat as she returned the heat of his kiss, tongues dueling, entwining, Diana asking, wanting everything this man had to give her. Wanting the complete oblivion the roughness of his desire promised. She wasn’t able to think of anything else when Seth kissed her. Didn’t want to think, only wanted to feel.

She felt now, as the warmth of one of his hands moved beneath her sweater to cup her swollen, lace-covered breast, finger and thumb unerringly finding her nipple through that thin material before squeezing just enough to cause her to gasp.

He broke the kiss to trail the heat of his lips and tongue down the column of her arched throat, at the same time as he continued to cup her breast and squeeze her nipple, nudging the lace material aside so that he could grasp her bared flesh.

Diana whimpered softly in her throat when Seth pushed her jumper up before pulling the cup of her bra completely out of the way and his mouth latched on to her bared flesh. He suckled deep and hard, elongating her nipple as his tongue rasped roughly over that sensitized nubbin. Again and again, harder and deeper, until he had the whole of the areola in his mouth as he suckled greedily.

She was so aroused, so lost in the pleasure, she was barely aware of Seth unfastening the button to her jeans, or the soft rasp of the zip as it was lowered. “Oh God, yes,” she gasped achingly when the heat of his hand slid beneath the lace of her panties, palm cupping her mound, his fingers dipping into the profusion of wetness gushing between her thighs, before those fingers moved higher and he began to stroke her swollen, throbbing clit.

The pleasure began to swell and surge inside her in waves that grew higher and then higher still, Diana’s hands moving upward and her fingers becoming entangled in the heavy thickness of Seth’s hair as she held him to her, pleading, demanding more. He gave it to her, the pleasure-pain of those straight white teeth biting down on her nipple sending her over the edge as she was claimed by the explosion of her release.

Seth continued to suckle and bite her nipple, his thumb stroking against her clit and two of his fingers entering her to thrust deeply, quickly taking her to that edge again, and then over. Her second orgasm was even stronger than the first, causing Diana to buck and arch her hips into the rhythm of those thrusting fingers.

Seth stilled as he wondered what the fuck he was doing.

The woman he now held in his arms, caught in the throes of her second orgasm, had suffered through more in the last year than most people did in a lifetime, and now he couldn’t keep his fucking hands off her. Or his mouth, for that matter.

And he wanted more. Wanted to pull her jeans and panties down and put his mouth where his hand was, to taste between her thighs, to lick and drink her down as he brought her to climax after climax, until she begged him to stop. Seth knew he could make it so good for her that she became so lost in pleasure she never wanted it to end.

He
didn’t want it to end. What he did want was those lips tasting and then wrapping about his cock as Diana took him to the back of her throat and sucked him deep. Then he wanted her to straddle his hips and take him inside her—

Jesus, he was on the edge of coming merely thinking about having all that luscious heat wrapped around the throbbing of his cock.

So much for his precious rules. So much for never becoming involved with a client. So much—

Oh fuck it.

Fuck, fuck, fuck it.

Dragging himself back from the edge of release was agony. Sheer fucking agony.

His cock jerked in protest and his balls ached when he pulled his hand out of her panties and released her red, distended nipple from his mouth. He placed his hands on the tops of her arms to put her away from him.

Diana’s eyes were still closed, her lips parted and swollen, her cheeks flushed, her clothes in complete disarray and revealing her bared breast. Her jeans and panties were pushed down far enough to show the top of the damp, silky red curls between her thighs.

She looked gorgeous.

Totally fuckable.

Her lids fluttered open to reveal eyes of deep unfocused blue. She blinked several times, as if trying to get her bearings, to remember where she was. Who she was with. Who she had allowed to finger-fuck her into not one orgasm but two.

She had been married to a man who looked like an angel but inside was a monster, and now she had been kissed by a scarred man who sometimes killed people for a living.

Seth could see all that in her eyes as she gazed at him in horror, her cheeks paling as she quickly turned away and began to straighten her clothing.

He shouldn’t have kissed her. Certainly shouldn’t have touched her. And kept on touching her.

It had to stop. Now. He didn’t have the luxury of allowing his cock to rule his head. That sort of distraction could get them both killed.

It stopped now.

“Maybe we should consider that the first payment for services rendered.”

Diana froze, her heart beating wildly in her chest as she frowned at Seth. “What do you mean…?”

His mouth turned back in a sneer. “You can consider what we just did as being your down payment on my fee. I’d appreciate a little cocksucking next time, though. I like to come as much as you obviously do.”

“You want… You expect…” She gave a shake of her head as she lifted her chin. “That’s not going to happen.”

He folded his arms. “No?”

Her jaw tightened. “I have the money to pay you whatever you think your
services
are worth.”

“Don’t you mean Daddy does?”

“No,” she bit out. “I have money of my own.”

“From Moore’s life insurance policy?”

She appeared startled. “How do you know about that?”

He shrugged. “The two of you took out life insurance policies on each other when you married. A sort of poor man’s prenup agreement,” he added derisively.

Her nostrils flared. “I have the money to pay you. It shouldn’t matter to you where it came from.”