Sweetest Taboo (17 page)

The violent power of such a claiming act spins through my body. And, honestly, it's a wonder I don't come right then.

“Close your eyes,” he says, and I comply, then spread my legs when he orders me to do that, too. “Wider,” he says. “Even with the table legs.”

That leaves me wide open and exposed. And when he wraps something around my ankles—“twine,” he tells me—and ties me to the table legs, I feel the pounding of my pulse in my throat—and between my legs.

Because my legs are spread so far, I can bend forward and lay atop the table, my ass pretty much level with the tabletop. I know this, because that's exactly what Dallas has me do, and then he tells me to stretch my arms out in a V so that my fingertips hang over the opposite corners.

Dallas moves around the table to stand in front of me, and I lift my head and chest to look at him, my shoulders back as if I were in a kinky yoga class, tied down and doing the cobra pose.

“Like what you see?” he asks, smirking as he wraps one end of a length of twine around my wrist, then ties the other end to a table leg.

He's still wearing his jeans and T-shirt, and so I lift a brow and say, “Not bad. I can think of at least one way to improve my view.”

“Can you?” He repeats the process with my other wrist so that I am now spread-eagled. Not to mention completely vulnerable.

He moves slowly around the table, trailing his fingertip over my skin as he moves. “Oh, sweetheart,” he says. “I do like this. You're laid out like a feast for me.”

“In that case, I hope you enjoy eating me.”

I hear a muffled sound that may be him holding back a chuckle. “Oh, I'm very sure I will. Right now, though, this is about your enjoyment. Hold on.”

His fingers leave my skin, and I feel bereft while he's not touching me. I try to twist around enough to find him, but it's just not possible, and I'm left to rely on my ears to tell me what he's doing. Honestly, I don't know. He's stepped into the bedroom and I hear him opening drawers, but I don't have a clue what he could be looking for.

Finally, he returns, and this time when his hands stroke my back, they are slick with oil. It heats up as he moves his palms over my shoulders and down my spine, and when I breathe in, I can actually taste the mint. “Massage oil,” I say, and those simple words make me wonder what other sexual toys he might have here in the bungalow. Dallas invested in Cortez long before we got together, and I imagine he's brought a few of the women he fucked before me to the island.

“I have quite a few little treats stashed in the bungalow,” he says, confirming my words and making my gut twist with jealousy. “But this is the first time I've used any of them with someone I love. With the only woman I've ever loved.”

Immediately, my jealousy fades to warmth. I know with unerring certainty that what he says is true.

“I'd forgotten what was in this box, actually,” he says. “Honestly, I have a pretty interesting collection.”

“Oh, really?” I have no idea what interesting things he could be talking about—knowing Dallas, they could be anything. I don't ask, though. I'm quite certain that whatever it is, I'll find out soon enough.

Slowly, sensually, he strokes the oil over my back, my shoulders. Then he gets on the table and straddles me. The table is narrow, so it's a tight fit, and I close my eyes, relishing the way his thighs brush my waist and hips. The way the denim of his jeans rubs against my heated, sensitive skin.

I feel him shift, then shiver from the touch of his lips to my spine. It's so sweet and so sensual and so wonderfully erotic that I feel my core clench and I know that I'm wet.

He trails the kisses upward until he teases the back of my neck, and while his lips do a number on me there, his hands slide over my shoulders, slick and hot. He grasps my neck, and I bite my lower lip, wanting to feel more, to feel his grip tighten, to
submit
.

“You like that,” he says.

“Yes.”

He says nothing else, but he releases my throat, and I whimper in protest. Then he slides off me, and I want to cry with frustration, wondering if this is some sort of perverse punishment. But he is standing by the table, and this time I can see what he's doing—he's undressing. And I have to say, I very much like the view.

He turns to the side, and I hear the thud of something being laid on the table, but it's down near my legs, and I don't know what it is.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“You said you wanted to feel,” he says, but offers no other explanation.

After another moment, he is back on the table, his hands once more slick with oil. He straddles me again, only this time it's skin on skin, and when he slides his hands over my shoulders to my breasts, there's something in them. I glance down, then suck in air. “Dallas…”

“Trust me,” he says. “Arch your chest up and close your eyes.”

I do, but I also bite my lower lip as he attaches a wooden clothespin to each of my nipples.

“Okay?” he asks, and I make some sort of raw noise in my throat, because I'm not sure
okay
is exactly accurate.

Except after a moment, I realize I'm not biting down as hard. And the pain I'd felt has transformed into an intense warmth that I don't just feel in my breasts but throughout my body.

“I want you to feel everything,” Dallas says, and I realize he's slowly moving down my back. Only this time, he's not stroking me with his hands. Instead, he's using something soft on my skin. A feather maybe. Or fringe?

It's not until he reaches my ass that I realize what it is he's teasing my skin with—a flail. And when he flicks it against my rear, I feel the connection all the way into my breasts.

He's doing what I asked—and damned if it doesn't feel glorious.

After a moment, he tosses the flail aside, and I wonder if he's done with me. Then I hear a telltale buzzing, and if I wasn't so aroused I would have laughed. As it is, I'm craving whatever he has planned.

Except he doesn't intend anything out of the ordinary with the vibrator. It's a small one, and he lifts my body just enough that he can put it under me so that it's not directly on my clit, but so that I feel the rumblings—along with the slow build of a growing pleasure.

As the vibrator teases me, he kisses his way up my inner thighs, the butterfly-soft touches so arousing that I feel swollen and needy. His tongue dips inside me, then his fingers, and then he finger-fucks me as I beg him to go deeper. To stand beside me and fuck me hard.

“Naughty girl,” he says, then smacks my ass. I cry out, then moan with pleasure as he thrusts his fingers in deep. He rubs my ass to soothe it, then immediately spanks me again. I expect the same delight when he finger-fucks me, only this time, his fingers ease into my ass, and I just about lose it between that and the vibrator and these damned clothespins.

Over and over he repeats this sequence until I am a mindless blob of lust with only one thing in my mind—to be fucked. Hard and thoroughly. And I want it so badly, I'm willing to beg. Which I do.

“You want to be fucked?” he asks.

“Yes. Yes, please.”

“Then tell me you're mine, Jane. Tell me that I'm the one you go to whenever it gets to be too much.”

“I am. You are. God, oh god, Dallas, I can't—” It was too much. I couldn't take all of it. The onslaught of sensations. The wildness of the feelings crashing over me.

“Can't what?”

“Can't take it.”

“You can, baby. You said you wanted to feel us. This is us. Raw connection. Primal need. You wanted to feel vulnerable, but it's not you who's vulnerable, it's me. Because you can destroy me with a glance. You can cut me down with a look. You can walk away from me, baby, and shatter my whole goddamn world.”

His words are at least as powerful as his touch, and I tremble as another wave of desire crashes over me. And then almost weep with relief when he thrusts his cock deep inside me and starts to slowly pump me, his fingers twined in my hair, forcing me to arch up.

“Do you think I have the power because you're naked and tied down? Because I can spank your ass and use your body for my pleasure? Because right now I could do anything to you—anything—and you're helpless to stop me? Is that what you think?”

“Yes,” I say, because I know that's the line I'm supposed to say.

“Well, you're wrong. Because you're everything to me, baby. You're the woman who fills me up. Who makes me whole. You're my reason to face the day, to go forward. You've shaped the man I am, Jane, and you'll shape the man I've yet to become. Everything good I owe to you, and right now I want you to do more than feel it. I want you to believe it. I need you, baby. Hell, we need each other. Tell me you know that, too.”

“I do,” I say as his body slams into mine.

“Tell me you won't leave me again.”

“Never,” I promise as he fucks me so deep I feel impaled upon him.

“I want you to come now. I want to feel your body claim me. Tightening around my cock and…Now, baby. Come for me now.”

He smacks my ass one final time, then bends forward over me while still deep inside. Before I realize what he's doing, he takes the pins off my nipples, and a rush of blood returns. A rush that I feel not only in my nipples, but in my clit.

And that's where the world ends. I spin out of control, lost in the overwhelming wildness of the sensations that crash over me in wave after wave after wave, as powerful as the sensation of his palm against my ass. As wild as the words with which he brought me to my knees.

And in that moment, all my fears and worries fade away. I feel whole again. I feel loved.

He's right,
I think as a deep exhaustion starts to settle over me.
He truly is mine,
I think.
And I am his. And together we can survive whatever comes.

Dallas was dreaming.

He knew it. He was asleep and he was dreaming and he was aware of that, but somehow, he couldn't wake up.

In fact, some instinct deep inside him was telling him not to wake up. That this was important. That this was a defining moment and if he woke, he'd lose everything.

And so he stayed in the dream. A dim room. An empty dining table. A single rose in a bud vase. And Jane in a sequined formal gown, her lips red and sultry, her eyes on him.

“Aren't you going to sit? I haven't finished telling you about what Brody said.”

“Brody?”

“When we walked the beach.”

You told me already,
Dallas thought, some part of his mind remembering a conversation from before they'd fallen asleep.
You told me when I was awake.

But he sat, and she sipped her wine. “The Woman isn't just someone who's been watching us for years. She's someone we see all the time, too. Can you pass the bread?”

He looked down, and where there had been only a white linen tablecloth, there was now a silver breadbasket.

He passed it, and she took a roll. “It's a subtle distinction, but it's important. She's in our lives.” She shrugged. “Or maybe she isn't. How can we know?”

“Clues,” Liam said from the third chair. “I'm looking for clues just like you asked me to. Only sometimes clues are easy to miss.” He was wearing a blindfold, and took it off. “Much easier this way.”

“What am I not seeing?” Dallas asked, but no one answered.

A waitress came and refilled his wineglass, then bent close and whispered, “It could be me.”

“What?” He whipped around to look at her, but she was gone. When he looked back, so was Liam. But he saw something in the wine. A face? But it was gone before he could identify it.

Then the wine was gone along with the table, and suddenly he was at the Meadow Lane house he grew up in, standing by the pool with a woman on each arm.

“I've been to every party you've thrown,” said the redhead.

“So have I,” said the brunette.

“Could it be us?” they asked in unison, then pushed him into the pool.

He sank to the bottom, then floated there, looking up, the ripples on the surface seeming to take the shape of a woman.

He kicked toward the surface, toward the woman, toward the truth.

But it kept getting farther and farther away. His lungs burned. His muscles ached. He wasn't going to make it. He was going to go down. Drown. Gone.

And then a hand burst through the water and grabbed his wrist and hauled him up, up, up until he was gasping on the pool deck.

Adele
.

“Let me help you,” she said. “I'll always be there to help you.”

When Jane found him, Dallas had been sitting on the glider on the porch for two hours. It was still dark. And he was wide awake.

He was, he knew, still in shock.

“Dallas?” She came and sat beside him, dressed only in a thin cotton robe. “What's going on? Are you okay?”

“Adele,” he said simply. “The Woman is Adele.”

He saw her eyes go wide. Saw her tense and swallow. “Are you certain?”

He stood up, needing to move. He'd been on autopilot for the last two hours, pulling his thoughts together. Hell, pulling his proof together.

And now, goddammit, it was all catching up to him. The horror of this insidious truth. The reality that he had lived. The nature of a woman he had once touched intimately.

Bile rose in his throat.

Oh, god. How the hell did he miss it? How could he not see it?

“Dallas, dammit, talk to me.”

“The pieces just started falling together. Her obsession with getting close to me. The way she knew about our relationship.”

“She's a therapist. She's trained to see below the surface.”

“The way she predicted that someone would leak that we had sex when we were in that cell. Who else knows that? Who else has been consistently in our lives?” His voice took on a hard edge. He saw it so damn clearly now, why didn't she?

Now she stood, too, then started pacing. “But it hasn't been consistent. Adele didn't marry Colin until after we were in college. That was years after the kidnapping.”

“Plenty of time to set up a new identity. To change her appearance, even. Heal from surgical scars.”

Jane licked her lips. “But—” She cut herself off with a frown, not sure how to contradict him.

“You see it, too, don't you?”

“I don't want to. Oh, god, Dallas, I don't want to. But it makes sense.”

“It more than makes sense. It's blindingly obvious now that I've backed away. I was too close before. I mean, hell, at one time I even suspected her of writing those damn letters. But I ruled it out.”

She nodded. “You told me. But you ruled her out because the timing was off. Not because you didn't think she had it in her to go psycho-stalker on you.” She exhaled loudly. “Shit, Dallas. This is—”

“Huge,” he said. “A complete mind fuck. Yeah. I know.”

She sat on the glider. “The letters started while you were still—”

“Together. Yeah.” He felt ill. “The letters were essentially about me not being with whoever was writing them. It didn't make sense for it to be Adele.”

“But you were still playing the King of Fuck. A girl can get jealous. Especially a psychotic one. Oh, god, Dallas.”

He didn't want it to be true. Hell, it
couldn't
be true. He'd slept with her. He'd done dark, fucked up, wicked things with her.

His knees went weak and he reached for the porch railing.

“Dallas!”

“I'm okay, I'm okay.”

“Adele killed that poor dog,” Jane said, then looked at him. “Are you sure? Can we prove it?”

“That's what I've been working on for the last two hours.”

“And?”

“And so far we know that she flew into Vegas the day before you found the dog in your driveway. She checked into the Bellagio and had appointments at the spa. She returned to the East Coast yesterday morning.”

“It's not a hard drive from Vegas to LA,” Jane said. “Did she actually go to the spa?”

“Someone using her name did, but I'm betting she paid a show girl to pretend to be her, go have a massage and a facial, and not say a word. Liam's checking that out right now. But what's even more interesting, Noah had to really dig for any information on Adele that's more than five years earlier than the date she married Colin. What he did find has earmarks of being fabricated. He's verifying.”

“How?”

“Computer checks, follow-ups. But I'm doing my own verification.” He drew in a breath and met her eyes. “I told Quince to ask Colin one very specific question. Was the woman we know as Adele working with him on our kidnapping?”

“You've already asked?”

He nodded, then held up his phone. “I'm expecting an answer any minute. Quince has already said that the Woman may have faked her death. That's why Colin could pass a polygraph saying that she was dead. To him—hell, to her—the woman in the cell with us is dead. A brand-new woman took her place.”

“That's bullshit,” Jane said.

“Agreed. But it's the kind of trick intelligence officers use to fool polygraphs. We should hear from Quince soon.”

They both stared at the phone as if it were a live bomb. And when it rang, Jane actually jumped.

Dallas answered before the first ring finished. “Tell me.”

“She's the one. Sorry, mate. I know she was a friend.”

Except of course she wasn't. Dallas had only thought she was. Adele had played him in a cell seventeen years ago, and she was playing him still.

Fuck.

Dallas closed his eyes, forcing himself to stay calm. Professional. “No, this is good,” he said to Quince. “This is information. Get out to Connecticut and bring her in. Whatever you need to do, I want her in the cell next to Colin.”

“You got it,” Quince said. “The team's already en route. They wanted to be positioned if we got the answer from Colin we expected.”

“Call me back when you have her.”

“Will do,” Quince said and ended the call. The minute the line went dead, Dallas deflated, every ounce of professional bravado leaving him. He leaned against the porch rail, Jane right beside him, then dragged his fingers through his hair as he tried to process all the shit that just seemed to keep swirling in his mind.

“I slept with that woman. Hell, I did more than just sleep with her. I did things—let her do things—and I had no idea. No idea at all that she'd touched me before. That she'd fucking used me.
Tortured me
.”

How could he not have known?

How could he have missed it?

He kept his hands fisted, not so much in anger, but in an effort to hold in every bit of himself. He was on the verge of unraveling, goddammit, and he wouldn't let her have that, too. He had to keep his shit together or else she won. She fucking won.

“It was dark,” Jane said. Her voice was deceptively calm. “She wore a mask. It was years between the kidnapping and her showing up as Colin's wife. And god knows Adele has had plastic surgery. You couldn't have known, Dallas. No one would have even suspected.”

“I should have. I've been looking for the bitch for seventeen years.
I
should have suspected.”

“No
.
”
Her voice was fierce, and when she came over and grabbed his arms, her grip was so tight he thought she might actually bruise him. “Don't you dare pull back on me because of this. Don't you dare let her win.”

She sucked in air. “You're going to work through this. We both will. She played games with you, Dallas. With both of us. Psychotic, fucked up games.”

Tears streamed down her face, but he didn't think she even knew she was crying. “We're stronger together than apart. We always have been. We know it, and god knows she knew it, too. It's why she tried to destroy us. But it didn't work. It won't ever work.”

Her words sang to him, and he wanted to tell her that she was right. That she—that
they
—were what mattered. But the words seemed to get lost in his throat, and he couldn't speak. Hell, his chest was so full of pain and love and grief he could barely breathe.

But she had to know, and so he pulled her close and kissed her, pouring all of his love, all of his fear, all of his need into that touch, that connection. She was right—they
were
better together—and as she melted against him, opening herself to him, he drew her in. Her strength, her ferocity, her love.

“You're everything to me,” he said when they broke apart. They were both breathing hard, and he couldn't take his eyes off her. He needed to lay her down and claim her. He craved the sensation of her body pressed against his, giving herself completely to him. Completing him.

“Yes,” she said. It was all she said, but it was enough. He pushed her back until her ass was against the railing, and she was holding on to the newel post with her right hand. He threaded the fingers of his left hand in her hair, holding her head in place as he attacked her mouth while he used his left to untie her robe, letting both halves fall open, exposing her breasts, her belly, her sweet pussy.

He slid his hands down, and his cock hardened even more when he found her slick, wet heat. She spread her legs, her free hand on the back of his neck as he pulled her closer, deepening the kiss even as his fingers thrust hard inside her.

Roughly, he pulled her head back then looked into her eyes, so dark with passion. Her lips were swollen from his assault, and she was breathing hard. “Now,” she begged. “Fast. Hard. Please.”

He didn't hesitate. He was wearing nothing but the loose athletic shorts he'd pulled on before coming outside, and now he pushed them down, stepping out of them and kicking them off to the side. She still wore the robe, and it fluttered in the breeze as he moved closer, then curled one hand around her waist, under the robe so that he felt the heat of her skin against his palm.