Surrendering To Her Sergeant (18 page)

His lips pressed into each other. “Not
particularly. Not yet.”

She squirmed again. And once more,
didn’t get very far. “Let me up and go call your damn cab,
Sergeant.”

His lips slanted in challenge. “Not
until you answer my question.”

“Not
happening.” She nodded toward the door. “If you’re really not
leaving, then have fun sleeping on the couch.”

Without a word, he slipped his hands
back to her knees—then pushed them apart. He kept them spread by
shoving his own against them, then locked her down by twisting his
ankles around hers. She grunted in astonishment. He’d kicked his
flip-flops off at the door just as she had, freeing his toes to dig
into her insteps with irrefutable force. Did Special Forces
training now include toe calisthenics, too?

“Fun?” The word was a growl, his
punctuation a dark chuckle. “I like playing, sunshine, but not like
this.” He stretched his hands to brace her again, though this time
he caught her by the wrists to lock her against the pillows. “And
right now, playtime is officially over.”

The tears evaporated. In their place,
she seethed at him with hard huffs. Several yanks of her arms and
legs brought the realization that he was serious about keeping her
here. Flat in her own bed. Trapped against her own pillows. By a
soldier with muscles like boulders, a grip like steel, and even
toes that were recruited for his cause.

Terror should have been declaring
siege on her bloodstream, but she was too furious for that. Her
rage grew to include even her own body, which acknowledged the
intimate weight of his with a horrible betrayal. Her inner thighs
ached and clenched. Her vagina started to pulse and drip. Even her
nipples started to throb, awakening for him, stretching for
him.

“Ethan, what the hell are
you—”

“Don’t you mean ‘Sir’?” He
charged it from lips that barely moved, again hovering inches above
hers. “Two minutes ago, you were all about that, Ava. Eight hours
ago, you freely tossed out the same words. And seven months ago,
you begged me to trap you against a tree and control every move you
made.” He dipped closer, so near that she could see the flecks of
black smoke that fought with the cobalt fire in his eyes. His voice
glided around her with the same sinuous intent. “Your need for
submission is beautiful, breath-stealing. And
god
damn
it do I
want to be the Dom that delivers for you, but…”

She wanted to scream when he cut
himself off with a harsh growl. Her lungs sawed on air, caught in
her body’s civil war: her soul and her sex against her head and her
pride. He’d just given her the perfect opportunity to save the
latter, too. She just had to stay silent, continuing the charade
that what he’d just done hadn’t been the emotional equivalent of
dangling solid gold Gucci heels in her face. No, worse. She’d
longed for a Dom longer than the shoes. A man who took the word
seriously, who would accept her submission with that same
reverence, who would use their exchange to unlock a connection like
no other…

That connection doesn’t
exist, Ava. Not with a man like Ethan Archer. Not even with a Dom
like him. He wears camouflage to work, remember? Delete him from
the list. Delete him from your life.

“But what?”

The civil war had its winner. Her lips
had fallen in with her lust. She heard a disgusted sigh echoing in
her psyche as she urged Ethan on with the only method she had
available: a pleading gaze. She watched him absorb it into the
depths of his own before dipping his face toward her, wrapping her
deeper in his power with every inch he closed in.

“You want to open the door, baby, but
you’re missing the key.” His murmur was still molten, mesmerizing.
“You want to call me ‘Sir’ and mean it and know the power that
comes from it? Then you have to earn it…with your honesty. By
talking to me. By letting me in.” He brushed his lips against her
forehead. “I know you somehow think I can open this up and read it,
but I can’t. Not what you lock away from me. Not what you won’t let
me see.”

His feather-soft kisses loosened
chunks of conflict through her mind. She shuddered as every piece
fell. “I know,” she told him in a whisper. She’d never meant two
words more. “I know. You can’t give me anything more than what I
give you.”

His brows hunched. “So why do you say
that like it’s a deployment to Siberia?”

She gave a dark laugh.
“Good comparison. Damn accurate, actually.” As she finished, their
gazes tangled again. Her heart slammed against her ribs. Looking at
the man was like getting hit by a blue laser. “Ethan, I can’t lie
and tell you that submission isn’t my dream…but I can’t go back
there. I
cannot
dig all of it up again. I worked too damn hard to bury it, to
leave it and make this life in its place. So unless you want to
step up for a mission…to…Siberia…”

Her syllables slowed then stopped as
the man pushed up, releasing his hold on her arms so he could yank
off his T-shirt with a pair of hard tugs. He stripped off his dog
tags, too, then wrapped the shirt around them and hurled the whole
wad out into the dining room.

Ay dios mio.
Every rippled inch of his torso was no less
resplendent than this afternoon, when she’d had just the dim light
of the wine room to help her gaze. The slice of light from her
kitchen helped now, making it more impossible to reclaim her pulse
from her bloodstream as he braced his hands to the tops of the dual
ridges that dipped beneath his shorts.

“Let me make something clear.” His
posture alone told her to interrupt him at her own peril. “Missions
are what I do for a living—and that doesn’t define this.” He
emphasized that by pinging a finger between his chest and hers. “It
isn’t even in here anymore.” He swung the finger toward the door.
“It’s out there, okay?”

Exasperation surged. She’d
heard enough. She
had
enough. “Damn it, Ethan.” She tried getting away from him
again but only got in a hard jab to his chest. “It’s
not
‘out there’.” Was he
seriously living that high in the clouds? Or maybe he’d eaten some
amoeba in the Mexican seafood that gave him crazy delusions. “It’s
never ‘out there’ with you guys. Your survival depends on it being
right
here
and
here
,”
—she pointed at his sternum and forehead before sweeping her finger
toward the room— “which turns
this
into a pretty convenient op target, right?” As the
words spilled, so did her bitterness, stemming from the truth of
every word she blurted. “I mean, why not?” Her breath wobbled.
“Easy insertion point, yeah? Simple exfil, too. After you’re done,
you can just compartmentalize it all to a back drawer in the brain,
and soon, it’s easy to forget it ever happ—”

The torrent of his lips, wild and
consuming, didn’t just drown her words. He drenched every thought
in her head and sensation in her body. Surely the flood had been
forged by a volcano, for his mouth was as scalding as a surge of
magma from a burning core. He was everywhere, fusing his tongue and
lips to hers with rolling waves of sensual invasion.

Ava mewled in protest. It didn’t stop
him by a beat. She raised a hand to pummel his shoulder. He seized
her fist and slammed it into the mattress. Her mind ignited in
fury. Her blood detonated in white-hot arousal. Maybe that was why
she tried the same move with the other hand. Maybe it was why her
stomach flipped when he handled it in the same way, adding a harsh
growl this time.

No more than a minute passed before he
lifted his mouth from hers.

Sixty seconds in which everything had
changed.

The man who’d joked with
her during the drive from Bella’s? Gone. The Dom who’d silently
brooded at her during the party? Disappeared. Even the half-panther
lover from the wine room, who’d just popped in for a cameo in her
own kitchen, had fled the building. This creature was someone new.
Some
thing
new. Her
breath snagged, caught on thorns of confusion and even fear as she
struggled for a definition that fit him now. Impossible. Anger
didn’t begin to describe the ferocity of his gaze. His focus had
gotten reset to the power of a thousand, every degree zeroed in on
her.

On a ruthless grunt, he shifted his
body so her feet were freed from his—because he pinned her lower
body with his crotch, instead.

“Ay,
Dios
!” She gasped in punctuation. Even
through his shorts and her jeans, his cock pulsed with enough force
to tease the swollen ridge of her clit. It was bliss and torture in
a single second.

“My thoughts exactly.” Ferocity clawed
every note of his voice. “But I’m not sure God can save either one
of us right now.”

“Wh-what the hell are you—”

“I tried to do this the
decent way, sunshine.” His jaw tightened in proportion to his grip.
“I asked nice. One word, one name, was all I wanted. We were going
to sit here and just talk about it. I stripped the tags off, threw
them out the door. I wanted you to have nothing but me, committed
to knowing more about you. But you wouldn’t let it go. Apparently,
I wear those sergeant’s stripes on my fucking forehead, because
that’s all you see. It’s all you
want
to see.”

She slammed her head to the side and
gritted back more tears, accepting every word of the accusation.
And why not? They were true. “Some things can’t be changed.” She
prayed he heard the apology in her voice. “Some windows can’t be
opened, damn it. They’re sealed shut, and that’s how people are
doomed to see things.”

His angry breath seemed to fill the
room. “Yeah? Well, that’s what hammers are for.”

Ethan watched Ava wrestle
with that threat, licking her lips in hesitant curiosity but still
not looking back to him. That was for the best right now. He
couldn’t remember a time when he’d been in a woman’s bedroom, just
a sun dress and a bikini away from having her naked and screaming
nonstop
Yes, Sirs
but too enraged to make a single move, let alone a dominant
action beyond his hold on her wrists.

Damn it, he hated mental smoke
screens. In prisoners, the maneuver was maddening, but at least
those poor shits had an excuse. From Ava, it was an insult. A bomb
launched for maximum damage, intended to drive him back, generated
from panic that rivaled any he’d felt from the poor morons they
captured on missions. Fear that pushed at the realm of
dread.

Of what?

Of
him
?

How? Why? Damn it, she’d been in that
wine room this afternoon, too. She’d had the same hours as him to
remember every one of those incredible minutes, every second of the
connection they’d forged…to realize the enormity of the trust she’d
given him, and the explosion they’d created together because of it.
And now she was talking about super glue on her windows?

Well, there was more than one way to
open a goddamn window.

He didn’t let her have any time to
deliberate on his meaning. Or more importantly, to develop a
defense against him. While she still blinked in analysis of the
hammer reference, he reared up and planted on his haunches—and took
the bodice panels of her sundress with him. The little buttons made
like buckshot all over the room, backed by her high
gasp.

“Caramba
! Ethan! What the hell are
you—”

She stopped herself with another choke
as he continued ripping down the middle of her skirt. He was glad
she kept sputtering for a couple of seconds, because the sight of
her light bronze curves, tucked to perfection inside a halter
bikini top and a string-tie bottom, had his tongue struggling for
coordination, too. Thank fuck his brain wasn’t stopped at the same
red light. It hit the gas pedal right toward Domination Highway,
and he enjoyed every second of the ride.

“Ethan?” He looped a sarcastic edge on
it. “Who’s that?” After pushing away the torn sides of the dress,
he leaned and caught her dropped chin with a thumb, redirecting her
eyes back at him. “You’re going to call me ‘Sir’ for a while.” He
slid his other hand back to stroke the valley between her ear and
her nape, a place he’d rapidly learned as one of her sensual hot
buttons. “If you have a problem with that, tell me now.”