Better with You: Outback Skies, Book 4 (6 page)

She whimpered but didn’t break eye-contact with him.

“I don’t believe you,” he said, smoothing his other hand up her ribcage, over her breast.

A hitching moan tore from her as he pinched her nipple, her eyelids fluttering again.

“It’s…it’s true.” She panted, arching as he dragged his thumb over the puckered point of flesh. “I…I need you…”

Tugging her head back a little, he lowered his mouth to the bowed column of her throat and nipped at her skin.

“Oh God…” She clawed at his shoulder with her free hand.

He responded by pinching her nipple again.

“Yes, do that…” She raked her nails over his back. “Do that again.”

He didn’t. Instead, he replaced his fingers on her breast with his mouth and sucked.

She groaned, the sound raw with surrender.

Tightening his fist in her hair, he moved his mouth to her other breast, trailing a path of biting kisses over her flesh as he did so. He captured the pebbled point of her nipple with his lips and then, as she groaned again, flicked the tip of his tongue over it.

“Ah yeah…” She fisted her hands in his hair. “I like that.”

He drew her nipple deeper into his mouth. Sucked on it with a series of rapid pulses. He couldn’t get enough of the way her flesh felt against his tongue, the warm, wet friction, the taste of her skin…

“I like that,” she repeated, lifting her leg to wrap her thigh around the back of his.

The contact of leg to leg detonated a hungry urgency in him and, before he knew what he was doing, he tore his mouth from her breast and hauled her hips to his.

Ground his erection to the curve of her pussy.

“Fuck, yes.” Her nails on his scalp turned savage. She scraped them down the back of his neck, over his shoulder, to his upper arm. She gripped his deltoid and rolled her sex along the length of his hard on.

“How did you find me?” he growled, reveling in the way she dry-humped him.

Even bound to the pole of the weight machine, she was a master of manipulating her body,
his
body. “Why are you here?”

She loosened her leg around his thigh long enough to reposition it around his hip. The change parted her folds and Charlie had to bite back a groan as her moist flesh pressed to the underside of his cock.

“It took me three years to ascertain where you were,” she answered, the words falling from her in shallow pants. She rubbed her sex up and down his engorged length, seeking the crown of his cock with her clit before rolling her hips back and forth.

He digested her statement, moving a hand to her hip, her arse as he did so. He denied her penetration with his erection even as he teased her with its rigid length.

She opened her eyes and met his gaze, the hunger, the want in their depths flooding him with fresh pleasure.

“Three years of digging,” she went on, raking her hand down his back to scratch at his backside.

Charlie knew she was trying to impale herself on him.

The desire to allow her to do so, to envelope his cock with her tight, wet muscles made his head spin.

“Three years of discovering which skeletons were in which closets and who had put them there.” She panted, digging her nails into his butt cheek, her eyelids half-closed. “Three years of threats…”

“Threats?” he echoed, rolling his hips enough to nudge her clit with the tip of his cock.

She shuddered at the touch, a whimper falling from her. “To reveal where those skeletons were to the right people…”

He chuckled, more than turned on by her ruthlessness, even if it was to discover that which he’d never wanted her to know. “Any follow through?” he asked, sliding a hand between their bodies to finger her clit.

She hummed approval. “Yes. Australia has a new deputy prime minister, doesn’t it?”

Hot lust poured through him at her husky boast.

Dani had been responsible for the country’s corrupt deputy leader’s demise? Perfect. When he was finished interrogating her, he’d thank her for a job well done. If only he could tell Ryan his boyfriend was now deputy prime minister because of Dani.

Pride threaded through his pleasure. Pride at what Dani had achieved. And yet, at the same time, he couldn’t help but wonder who else knew where he was. Not even the director of the agency was meant to know.

So how had Dani found him? And why had she waited until now?

Stroking her clit again, he lowered his head to the side of her throat and nibbled on her skin.

“Christ, you do that so well,” she moaned, rolling her hips forward.

He kissed his way up to her ear, captured her earlobe and bit it with gentle pressure.

She hissed and then gasped as he abruptly sank his finger into her sodden slit. “Fuck, yes!”

The moment he felt her shudder again, he withdrew his hand, dragging his finger from her sex until its pad rested once more on her clit. “Why wait?” he asked against her ear. “If you knew where I was, why wait until now to come here? Who wants me dead?”

She grew still. Her chest heaved.

Lifting his head, he searched her eyes for an answer she obviously didn’t want to give him.

“Tell me,
wife
,” he ordered, stroking his finger over her clit again. Slow, steady strokes. The kind that would propel her towards an orgasm she had no control over.

She watched him, lips parted, breath ragged, her free hand clawing his shoulder.

Pleasure etched her face. He could see her trying to school it, to hide it.

She failed.

His pulse pounded faster in his throat.

He’d used sexual pleasure as an interrogation technique before, but never like this. This was…raw.

He waited for her answer, not just because he needed to hear it, but because he needed to bury himself inside her.

He couldn’t surrender to that need until he knew the reason for her being here.

No matter how much he wanted to.

“Tell me,” he repeated, the demand a low growl as he inched not one finger but two deep into her sex again and scissored them inside her.

Her face contorted with pleasure as a soft whimper vibrated in her throat.

He stroked his fingers over the inner wall of her sex. “Tell me, Dani.”

“You…you are the only target I’ve failed to kill when ordered to do so,” she rasped, eyes closed, breath choppy. “Do you know that?”

He didn’t answer. His own breath threatened to tear at his lungs. His body thrummed, a dangerous cocktail of pleasure, hunger and rage flowing through him. Fueling him.

“Knowing where you were, the only target I couldn’t kill…” She opened her eyes and met his stare. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t decipher the expression on her face. In her voice. “I’ve felt safe knowing where you were.”

“Safe?” His heart thumped so loud he wondered how the house didn’t shake around them. “From me?”

Dani shook her head. “From…from the agency.”

Charlie frowned. “I don’t understand.”

A wry chuckle fell from her, a sound he’d never heard her make before, and she moved her hand from his shoulder to his face. Cupped his jaw. Brushed his lower lip with her thumb. “You were my safety net. For when I finally said no.”

“No?”

She smiled. Charlie’s stomach twisted at how sad it was. How tormented. “To a job even I wouldn’t do.”

He studied her, their bodies so close, so connected he could feel her heart smashing in her chest against his. “Has that happened? Have you said no?”

“I have,
hatiku
,” she whispered. And then, before he could ask her what that job was, what
hatiku
meant, and why she’d come here to him, she shoved her hand between their bodies, wrapped her fingers around the base of his cock and impaled herself on his length.

Chapter Six

She hadn’t planned this. Not this.

She sure as shit hadn’t meant to call him
her heart
in her native language.

Why had she done that? It was insane.

Taking it this far? Insanity.

But Charlie had pushed her to a level of want bordering on frenzied. She’d tell him everything, she really would. After he was inside her. After his girth stretched her sex and he was pounding into with the power, the strength, the savage force he barely kept contained.

She’d seen him channel that force into dispatching targets. She’d witnessed him funnel it into interrogations far more brutal than this one.

That latent, simmering power had turned her on from the get-go.

She wanted to experience it in a carnal way, the way she’d hungered for since their first job together.

Now, she was going to.

And tell him everything as she did.

And more importantly, make him believe her.

With a roll of her hips, she took his engorged length deeper into her sex.

He groaned, clenching his jaw as he held her stare. His fingers—still inside her—slid free of her flesh. Dragged over her clit.

She didn’t release her grip on the base of his cock.

“Have you ever wondered why I didn’t kill you?” she asked, squeezing her inner muscles around his imbedded cock. “That night the director ordered me to do so?”

Charlie’s expression didn’t change. She couldn’t read it. But the fact he didn’t withdraw filled her with hope as tenuous as the control she had on her body, her emotions when it came to him.

“You couldn’t.”

She nodded, rolling her hips again. “We’d talked about disappearing together. Leaving ASIO. I know it was meant to be a joke, but I also know we both wanted it.”

Charlie groaned. Thrust up hard into her. “Fuck, yeah.”

Her heart slammed into her throat. Confirmation. In those two words, he’d confirmed it. Imagining something was one thing, knowing it…

She constricted her pussy around his length again, wanting him to feel as much pleasure as she did from their connection.

“If we’d disappeared, the director would have come after us,” she murmured. Christ, he felt so good inside her. “Would have killed us both.”

“I wouldn’t have let him.”

His growl, the instant coiling of his body, flooded her with tormented rapture. Loving him was so much easier when she didn’t know,
really
know, what he felt for her. “I couldn’t take that risk,” she murmured, sliding up his hard cock a fraction before sliding down again. “So I followed my orders and stabbed you. Knowing it would make you hate me. Hoping to hell it would make you get out.”

His fingers on her body dug hard into her flesh. “You betrayed me to keep me alive.”

“I did.”

His eyes closed. Haunted torment flashed across his face. “Oh, Dani…”

“And then I finished the job you wouldn’t.”

“I know.”

She wasn’t surprised.

What did surprise her, and thrilled her, was the way he smoothed a steady hand up over her hip, her back, before skimming her ribcage to capture her breast.

“I had to,” she answered, unable to bite back the whimper in her voice as he pinched her nipple. “It ended the rift between Australia and Russia that had already impacted our international trade agreements.”

His jaw clenched again. He teased her nipple some more. “It saw the Australian ambassador in Russia die in the most embarrassing way imaginable, Dani. It shamed his family, his children.”

Dani leant closer to him, close enough to brush her lips over the strong column of his throat. The change in position caused his cock to move inside her, and he groaned.

“It saved our two countries embarking on a political war Australia never would have won,” she whispered before biting the side of his neck. “You never liked the ambassador in Russia anyway.” She trailed a line of kisses up to his ear. Caught his earlobe. Bit it.

He groaned again. Inside her, his erection pulsed.

“You knew he was a corrupt prick,” she went on, shifting as much as the cable tie binding her wrist to the exercise machine would allow to rub their upper bodies together. “And an unfaithful one.”

His hand on her breast grew still for a moment before sliding up to cup her chin. He looked into her eyes, the emotion burning in his own ambiguous. “No wife or daughter deserves to learn their husband and father died while fucking a goat, Dani.”

Dani licked her lips, her pulse pounding.

“But that’s how you had him die,” Charlie murmured, his fingers loosening. Somewhat. In her sex, his cock throbbed.

“It’s what the director ordered,” she whispered back. “Sick, but orders are orders. The global humiliation of an Australian dignitary had soothed the Russian president’s wounded ego and the status quo had been restored.”

His nostrils flared. His other hand, the one not circling her throat, skimmed over her hip and along the length of her thigh. When he pulled her harder into his penetration, driving his erection farther into her body, she couldn’t help but moan in delight. And fear.

He was angry. And very much in control.

She’d thought she would have been able to take it from him by now. She’d thought once he was inside her, she would have the upper hand.

She’d been wrong.

Gloriously, wickedly wrong.

That too was scary. And as arousing as hell.

Damn it.

“So, sweet cheeks—” he moved his hand up her throat to traced a line over her lips as he slid in and out, in and out of her sex, “—what orders did you finally decide were too depraved for you to follow? What’s worse than orchestrating a man to die during forced bestiality?”

Dani parted her lips and flicked her tongue over his finger.

His nostrils flared at the soft contact. He dipped his finger a little into her mouth.

Heart racing, pussy contracting around his length with increasing pulses, she moved her head and closed her lips around his finger.

Sucked it. Nipped the pad of its tip and then sucked it again.

Charlie’s cock jerked inside her. His stomach hitched against hers.

“Well?” he groaned, the single-word demand rough and shaky.

Holding his gaze, she slowly released his finger with a sucking pop and then squeezed his length with her inner muscles again. “The director ordered me to kill the prime minister’s gay sister while she was on holiday in Bali,” she whispered.

Charlie’s eyes widened. He grew still. Very still.

Dangerously still.

Buried inside her, motionless.

“And to make it look like she’d been assassinated by the BIN,” she finished.

He didn’t move. “The director wanted you to kill the prime minister’s sister and make it appear as if the Baden Intelijen Negara were responsible?”

Dani nodded.

“He wants to start a covert political war between Australia and Indonesia. He wants to destroy the fragile relationship the two countries have.”

She nodded again.

“By pinning a hate crime against an important Australian citizen on the Indonesian intelligence agency.”

Dani swallowed. Her mouth was dry. “Yes.”

“And you said no.”

“I did.”

“And came to me.”

“Yes.”

That preternatural calmness still held him. His cock, still thick and hard, pulsed in her sex.

“Why?”

“Because the director is more corrupt than the Australian ambassador in Russia could have ever hoped to be, and the second I said no, I was dead.”

Charlie’s fingers slid from her lips back to her throat. Circled it.

His grip on her thigh grew tighter.

Dani swallowed again, the perilous situation not lost on her. She was bound to an immovable object while impaled on the erection of the most dangerous man she’d ever known and had just divulged secrets about his former boss planning an act that could be only described as treason.

“And you thought I would keep you alive?”

The question sent a shard of cold fear through her.

“I…” she began.

He yanked her knee up higher to his side, slamming his cock harder, deeper into her.

She cried out, clawing at him with her free hand.

At her throat, his fingers curled.

“You thought I would protect you from our old boss?” he asked, punctuating the words with slow, deep thrusts.

“I…I…”

She couldn’t say it. She couldn’t fucking say it. How did she confess to—

“Or because,” he whispered, slowly withdrawing from her until the distended rim of his cock head stretched her folds wide, “you wanted to give him another target? One he’s been wanting since I told him to go fuck himself?”

Dani shook her head. It was hard. Charlie’s grip on her throat had tightened to the point it was a struggle to breath. To move. “No, J—Charlie. That’s…not…”

He slammed back into her. Sinking into her until his balls slapped against her.

Pain and pleasure detonated inside her. Wrapped in fear and adrenaline and threaded with lust and desire and need.

“If he comes for you here,” he growled against her cheek as he withdrew to the tip of his cock again, “and finds me…”

He drove into her once more.

Dani cried out, the rough invasion flooding her with electric pleasure. The soles of her feet tingled.

“He’ll forget you said no to an order—” he caught her earlobe with his teeth, kneaded her breast, pinched her nipple, “—and go after me instead.”

She groaned, awash in raw, carnal pleasure. “N-no…no, that’s not…not it…”

He teased her nipple, dragging his mouth down to the side of her throat where her neck became her shoulder and sucked on her flesh.

“Charlie…” She scraped her nails over his shoulder, straining against the cable tie even as she reveled in every second of his interrogation. “I’m here…”

He skimmed his hand over her ribs, down to her belly. Pumped into her hard and fast. Explored her throat, her shoulder, her jaw with his lips and teeth and tongue.

“I’m here…” she tried again. Christ, she was finding it hard to function. To focus. She’d never felt so consumed by pleasure, by need.

“I’m here…” she repeated, tangling her hand in his hair as he slipped his fingers down to the curve of her sex. Her clit.

He found the tiny hooded button.

Stroked it.

“Holy fuck, Charlie,” Dani burst out, liquid electricity rupturing through her at the touch. “Holy fuck, I’m here because I love you and I wanted to see you one last time before I die!”

Her orgasm crashed through her as the confession tore the air. Both uncontrolled. Both powerful and undeniable.

Charlie froze, buried to the balls inside her.

And then, with a growl, he fisted a hand in her hair and locked his stare on hers. “About fucking time you told me that, Aanjay.”

Dani gasped, her heart slamming into her throat as his lips curled into a smile she’d never seen him make before.

A real smile.

A happy smile.

“The feeling,” he rasped, holding her gaze as she felt his body tense, coil, “is entirely fucking mutual.”

And without another word, he captured her lips with his and pounded into her, filling her with his seed in an orgasm, a release, more wild and fierce and powerful than any act of violence she’d ever known him to perform.

The sheer force of his release and the truth he’d divulged detonated another orgasm in her. She cried out, her sex contracting around his driving cock, her whole body on fire.

“Charlie…
hatiku
…” She panted, clinging to him, as he filled her. “Oh, Charlie…”

She didn’t know how long they came together. She’d lost focus on time, on life.

All that registered in her brain was the pleasure Charlie had wrought upon her body, the rapture his words had wrought upon her heart, and the grief of what she’d delivered to him.

Because it didn’t matter how amazing this was, how powerful, the director was after her, and she’d led him to Charlie.

Led him here because she was selfish, because she couldn’t deal with the thought of being killed, being erased as if she’d never existed without telling Charlie how she felt about him.

She hadn’t counted on this, and she sure as shit hadn’t counted on Charlie telling her he loved her as well.

That changed everything. That gave her soulless, empty life meaning. Purpose.

And now she’d destroyed that purpose.

She’d feared the director would take out Charlie trying to get to her. Had resigned herself to that fact, just as she’d resigned herself to the fact the director would end her.

But now she knew Charlie loved her?

Christ, was it too late to lead the director away?

Get him as far from Charlie as she could?

“Hey?”

At his low whisper, Dani opened her eyes.

He watched her, holding her with one arm, brushing her lips with a steady thumb.

Their bodies were motionless, but she could feel the trembles and pulses of their orgasms like fading echoes of gunfire. He was still buried deep inside her. Still connected to her.

“Hey,” she answered.

“You think we’re going to die? Be taken out together by the corrupt bastard?”

The question, uttered with dry humour, made her snort. “Well, yeah.”

He grinned. “Oh, sweet cheeks.”

She frowned. “I hate that name.”

He chuckled. “And I hate that you think the director is going to do something you yourself couldn’t do.”

“Kill you?”

He laughed again, the sound—and its affect on his body—causing his spent length to slip from her sex. “Yeah.”

Her stomach knotted. She didn’t want to be talking about their impending death now. She wanted to savour the glow of what had just occurred. What they’d just shared with each other.

“But he can. He will.” She frowned again. “You were partnered with him years ago. Before his promotion. You know how tenacious, how…determined. When he wants something—”

“Question?”

She nodded and then bit back a small moan of dismay as he stepped away from her. A chill rippled her flesh at the loss of contact with his body. Who would have thought she’d get so addicted to the feel of him against her, really against her, with her, so quickly?