The Protectors Christmas Box Set (sexy paranormal romances) (12 page)

You’re wrong,
his conscience chided.
What you’re doing is not much different than tossing her on the ground and raping her.

But she was strong. If she didn’t crave him as much as he was craving her, she’d push him away.

You know it works that way…not while she’s in your world, under your control, and playing by your rules
.

Then he would have to make sure she didn’t get hurt, because stopping now would be too damned difficult…for the both of them.

He wasn’t absolutely sure about how everything worked because he’d never done this before. But he suspected that since she was in his world, she was probably feeling what he was feeling. And frankly, he was horny as hell.

He wrapped his arms around her slim waist and rolled her over onto her back.

* * * * *

Dallas tried for a calm breath. This was a dream, she reminded herself. A wonderfully, uninhibited erotic dream.

He was wearing those battered old jeans that were growing tighter by the moment. With no shirt. His muscles rippled from his arms down to his finely sculpted chest. His golden tan reminded her of honey.

Her stomach was still dancing from the sensation of him flipping her over onto her back. Not only did she suddenly find herself under her dream lover, a happy slave to his advances as he nudged her legs apart, the leather clothes she’d been wearing had disappeared and had been replaced with a shimmering white, sinfully sheer negligee.

Her breathing seemed uncontrollable. And the short, halting panting only heightened the throbbing between her legs. Never, ever had she felt so desperate for a man. Before this moment, she doubted she could have even explained the feeling of desperation.

Don’t you dare pinch yourself
. Nope, no pinching was going to be allowed. Now, as for biting…

She sank her teeth in the soft flesh around his broad flat nipple and thrilled at the low rumble of his groan. His single-minded attraction gave her a rush of power.

Power. Hmmm…She enjoyed the taste…the strong power. She couldn’t seem to get enough. She lapped at his chest while he rocked his body against her. With sharp, quick kisses, he started to work his way down her body.

When he reached her swollen, needy breasts, he returned the favor and scraped his teeth against her nipple. She arched up off the ground with a force that made her eyes roll back in her head. He suckled her, urging her nipples to pucker. An electric tingle followed his hand across her belly and down between her legs.

“Touch me,” she whispered.

She spread her legs wider and helped him pull up the long, gauzy material of the white negligee. With a mischievous grin, he sat up and draped the material over her so it was spread over her face like a wedding veil.

Slowly—achingly so—he ran his hands over her thighs. Teasing her by avoiding the moist, swollen lips begging for his attention. A frustrated scream escaped her lips when he finally touched her with the tip of his finger. He slowly ran that same finger down the length of her opening.

At first his touch was light. But then he pressed deeper. Harder. He dipped one finger into her and then another. She raised her hips off the ground as he fucked her with his hand.

She was at his complete mercy while at the same time in complete control. It was a heady experience.

Replacing his fingers with his hungry tongue, he buried his head between her legs and swirled his tongue over her swollen clit. She was hot and wet and felt like liquid fire. She thrashed against him, not at all concerned what he might be thinking of her wanton behavior. Free from the worries that came with a genuine encounter, she let herself sink into the sensation of his hot tongue raking against her soft flesh.

He devoured her, suckling her nether lips with the same intensity he had used on her nipples until her heart seemed to be beating, pounding through her clit.

More
.

She wanted more. Though the erotic, wonderful sensations pounding through her were all too much, too overwhelming, she wanted—
needed
—him inside her.

Now
.

But how did she ask for something she had never asked for before in her life? How did she demand the satisfaction only his cock could give her? She didn’t even
know
him.

As if reading her thoughts, he lifted his head slightly and smiled. It was a cat that swallowed the canary kind of smile—slow and purposeful. He knew what she wanted, and he knew how to give it to her. It felt as if he was worshiping every inch of her as he crawled up the length of her body, kissing, licking, nipping as he forged a trail from between her wet needy legs up to her tingling lips. She tasted her own sweet nectar in his drugging kisses while his red hot cock rubbed up against her still throbbing clit.

“Tell me you want me,” he demanded. His hot breath whispered against the sensitive flesh of her neck. His gaze met hers. “Tell me I’m not forcing you.”

She read a glimmer of worry in his dark eyes. He wanted her to want him…to need him. But that didn’t make sense. Couldn’t he taste how much she was aching? For a dream, the pain was too real and too demanding. If he didn’t fill her with that thick cock of his soon, she feared she would come apart.

“
I want you
.” She blew out a shuddering breath as she dug her fingers into to his hair, afraid that if she let go he might vanish. “
Please, I want you
.”

“
Your name
…” her dream lover whispered. His beautiful blue world dissolved like chalk on a sidewalk. “
I need your name
.”

“Dallas. I’m Dallas.”

A faint beep, beep, beep tugged at her awareness. She could barely breathe. Exhaustion weighed heavy on her chest. It took all her strength to draw a steady breath. Lord, she had sex dreams before but nothing had ever come close to what had invaded her dreams last night.

She drew another breath, this one not quite as even as the first, and tried to stretch. Everything ached, especially her inner thigh muscles—exactly as expected after a night of vigorous fucking. It wasn’t a bad ache. Her muscles felt stretched and relaxed and, well, sated.

He had stretched her and done things to her that were beyond her wildest imagination. First with his tongue and fingers, and then with his tireless cock. Simply thinking about it made her body grow tight, eager for more.

Which was nonsense. It had only been a dream. A pleasant, wet, highly erotic dream sparked by a stranger’s stolen kiss. Perhaps Janice was right. If this sexual explosion was any indication, perhaps her love life had become too regimented.

She shuddered to imagine what would have happened if she hadn’t been in a hurry when she’d bumped into that sinfully sexy man in the alleyway. Would she have lived out those obviously repressed fantasies for real?
With a stranger
?

Lord, she hoped not.

Though amazing, mind-blowing and violently erotic, it had simply been a dream. One, that had made her whole body feel as if the encounter had been more real than anything she’d ever experienced before.

That insistent beep, beep, beep started to annoy her. It was Saturday. She didn’t have any appointments this morning and had planned on sleeping late. What was it with that cursed alarm clock?

Her muscles screamed their protests as she swatted her arm out, trying to find the snooze button. Her fingers hit plenty of tubes and wires, but no buttons.

“Come on, I just want to sleep,” she grumbled.

“You’re awake!” Janice cried.

“You set the alarm clock?” Of all the under-handed, sneaky things to do to a person.

Dallas opened one eye, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Even her eyelids felt heavy and sore.

Janice started sniffling. “They told me you were going to…to…” She was sniffling again.

Dallas opened her other eye and blinked several times to clear her foggy vision. What she saw made her want to shut them and return to her sensual dream world.

Janice never cried.
Not ever
. But there they were, big salty tears running down Janice’s pink cheeks.

“What’s going on?” By that time she had gathered enough wits about her to figure out she was in a hospital bed and hooked up to enough wires to make an electrical panel proud. But why? “What’s wrong with me?”

Janice shook her head and cried some more. “Don’t you remember anything?”

Dallas remembered quite a lot. But it wasn’t something she felt comfortable talking about, not even to Janice. Besides, her dream encounter would never explain the hospital.

“We were heading out?” Janice prompted. She wiped her eyes with one of those ultra thin tissues hospitals provide. “To meet Tony and Cayce?”

Dallas shook her head. Her memories from last night, except for the vivid wet dream, were foggy.

“We made it to the hallway outside your apartment when you got this blank look on your face,” Janice was saying. “I asked you if you were okay, but you wouldn’t answer me. You pushed my hand away when I tried to touch you. And then—” she sniffed “—then, you collapsed.”

“Collapsed,” Dallas repeated as if saying it out loud could make it feel real. But it didn’t.

“No,” she said, shaking her head again. She didn’t collapse. She’d soared. She clearly remembered soaring.

However, the insistent beep, beep, beep of the heart monitor was telling a vastly different story.

“What’s wrong with me?” Dallas asked again.

Tears flooded Janice’s eyes. “I don’t know. The doctors don’t know.”

It had been a fantasy. A sex dream. Not something that would threaten her life or land her in the hospital.

“You’ve not had any measurable brain activity all night, Dallas. You were in a coma and they said you were going to die.”

“
Die?
No.” The room spun and Dallas fell back against her pillow. No, she couldn’t believe it. This couldn’t be happening.

She had sensed her brooding stranger with those singeing kisses was dangerous. But the danger would be to her heart. Not to her life.

And dammit, it
had
simply been a dream. Sparked by a near-death experience? She found that difficult to believe. All she knew was that, despite the danger, her body was aching to be with him again. And soon.

* * * * *

“Hey!” someone shouted in Brendan’s ear.

What the hell?

Before he could push whoever was shouting at him away, he found himself trapped within a pair of powerful arms. He sucked in a breath and ended up with a lungful of water.

What the hell? Coughing and spitting up water while struggling against his attacker, he tried to piece together what the hell was happening to him.

He caught the scent of lavender. His candles. He only used them to help send himself out into the universe—a form of astral projection where his spirit actually left his body.

Returning was always a bitch. His head felt packed with cotton. And he couldn’t seem to think fast enough to figure out why someone would be trying to drown him like an unwanted puppy.

“What the hell are you trying to do, Brendan? Kill yourself?”

Dammit, what was Horace doing here? There was no mistaking the demanding voice as belonging to the owner of one of Chicago’s hottest nightclubs. Horace was the only man Brendan had ever trusted enough to call a friend. Although, he couldn’t say he was feeling too friendly toward him right now. Horace pounded on Brendan’s back until Brendan coughed up all the water he’d inadvertently sucked into his lungs.

“I was searching for her.” His voice felt like razors against the back of his throat. At least his face was now above the water. His lungs burned from inhaling too much of it. He coughed again.

“Did you think she was hiding at the bottom of your tub?” Horace with his great strength helped Brendan push up onto his knees and then one foot at a time, get his legs under him.

“You know what I was doing.”

Horace grimaced. “Stone’s not going to like this.”

Brendan drew a deep breath that burned all the way to the bottom of his lungs and willed himself to calm down. “Then we don’t tell him.”

“What won’t you tell me?” Stone asked from the bathroom’s doorway. He sounded furious.

Ignoring his aching body, Brendan climbed out of the tub and grabbed a towel to wrap around his waist. “It’s nothing.”

“I found him sunk to the bottom of that damned tub,” Horace said.
Traitor
. “By the look of these lumps of wax that used to be candles, it appears he’s been there all night. Damn near drowning himself.”

“I wasn’t drowning myself.”

Brendan grabbed a second towel and used it to dry off his hair. There was a chill in his apartment that seemed to be seeping into his bones. He padded into the other room with his focus on the coffee maker in the kitchen.

Stone followed. “What were you doing?”

“Tracking our target.”

“And?”

The lid to his coffee tin wouldn’t budge. Brendan shook the damned thing and then banged it against the kitchen’s onyx countertop until Stone took it from him.

“And?” he asked again as he held Brendan’s coffee beans hostage.

“Her name is Dallas.”

Stone nodded. “Sit down.” He opened the tin and started to make a pot of coffee. “You look like hell, by the way.”

“He was on the bottom of the tub. Under the water.” Horace said as he came into the room. He’d been in the bedroom. He tossed a robe in Brendan’s direction.

“
The darkness
has already found her,” Brendan told both men. “And she has some strong barriers of her own.”

“So you went deeper?” Stone asked.

Brendan nodded.

“That’s all well and good,” Horace said. “I may not be able to pop in and out of people’s heads like Brendan, but I understand enough about it to know that finding a woman’s name shouldn’t take all night.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “What else were you doing, Brendan?”