Heat Seeker (35 page)

There was nothing he could do but hold her. There was no way to comfort her, no way to promise her that the decision, whatever it had been, was the right one.

“What happened, Bailey?” He smoothed her hair back, whispered the words in her ear, and prayed to God that she was finding at least a small amount of comfort from him.

He couldn’t bear to see her hurt like this. His Bailey was so strong, so proud. The wound it would have taken to produce this kind of pain would have to be devastating.

She shook her head again, another sob ripping from her chest and tearing through his heart.

“It was right there,” she cried, her voice low. “Ford admitting to killing Anna and her mother, ordering my father’s death. It was taped by his assistant and sent to Wagner after the assistant was killed last month. ‘Insurance’ was what the man had called it in a letter that accompanied it. His insurance. And it was in Ford’s office, with Orion. My father showed up, furious, questioning him about military design secrets that had been stolen and sold to the highest bidder. Father was enraged. They fought. He stalked out.” Her voice was broken, rasping with agony. “And Orion walked into the room. He walked in and Ford ordered him to kill my father.” Her nails dug into his shoulders as a low, broken wail tore from her throat and through his soul.

He could imagine what it had taken for her to maintain her control. To hide her pain.

“Oh God, I told Wagner to remember where his loyalty was.” Self-disgust colored her voice and mixed with the tears and the sobs. “I told him to remember it before he ended up as dead as his mother and sister. I broke the disk. And I warned him to remember where his loyalty should lie.”

Her fist clenched against his shoulder as a low scream vibrated against his chest. Her body tightened in her fight to hold back the rage tearing through her, nearly destroying her.

“I want to kill him.” She fought to breathe, and John felt his own eyes fill with tears as he tried to comfort her. Without words, because there were no words that could ever ease the pain he knew she was feeling.

“It was right there in my hands,” she sobbed against his chest again. “Right there, John, and I walked away. I walked away.”

Because she had no other choice. She knew it, and he knew it. Warbucks was too important, the recovery of the
missiles too imperative to jeopardize it at this point. The needs of the many versus the needs of the few, and the agony tearing through one small woman.

“I have you, Bailey,” he whispered against her hair as he tightened his hold around her, kissed her tear-drenched cheek and wished he could find a way to ease that pain. “It’s okay, baby. I promise it’s okay. We’ll get him. We’ll make him pay for all of it.”

Because John knew what Bailey didn’t. The unit had been called in not to bring Warbucks to justice, but to gain the proof against him and execute him.

There was too much power contained here, in one place. If Ford Grace was Warbucks, then he had the connections to have any charges against him tampered with. Evidence would come up missing. Witnesses would die. It was that simple. There was no way in hell to preserve the facts of the case and ensure that justice was served.

No, Warbucks would die. It was that simple. At the hands of a member of the unit, whoever was holding the sniper rifle when the meet was arranged. The order had been signed before the unit had ever taken the job. It had come to them because the law enforcement agencies that had tried to capture him were too hampered by rules, regulations, and laws.

“He’s going to pay for this,” John swore again as he rocked her in his arms and felt a slice to his soul each time a sob tore from her chest.

“I hate him,” she cried out, a strangled low sound that the white-noise generator could cover, a grief-ridden, agonized sound that he knew he would never forget. A sound he would ensure Ford paid for.

“He took everything from me,” she charged. “Anna, my parents. You. He took everything, John. All of it, and never flinched. He didn’t care. God help me, he didn’t care.”

Death was too good for Warbucks, but there was no other way to make him pay. No other way to ensure that he didn’t destroy another life.

Brushing her hair back, he kissed her cheek again and simply let her cry. There was no way to fix this, no way to
make it better, and if she was going to mend her shattered control, then she would need a chance to hurt first. To grieve.

The game could continue tomorrow. For now, Bailey needed this chance to rail at fate and at the job she had signed up for.

An agent who had truly turned would have to remain loyal to Ford, no matter what he had done. Thus, for now she would have to keep the end goal in mind and ensure that Ford Grace—Warbucks—had the chance to to continue his treasonous activities.

That would come to an end. John made the vow to himself. If he had to pull the trigger himself, Warbucks’s treachery would end. And it would end soon.

BAILEY OPENED HER EYES
as John lifted her into his arms and carried her to the bed. He laid her against the cool comfort of the silk sheets and began to draw the blanket over her body, his expression tortured.

She couldn’t sleep. There was no way she could sleep, no way that she could ever drift off fast enough or deep enough to still the agony, the betrayal she had dealt, or her own guilt.

“No.” She pushed the blankets away as he braced one knee on the bed and moved to him instead. “I don’t want to sleep.”

“You need to rest, baby.” His voice was deep, dark. It was as tortured as she felt, but she felt something more as well. The need for a comfort that could only come from his touch. An affirmation that there was indeed something Ford Grace hadn’t been able to kill. He hadn’t killed the man she loved.

No matter the name he took, no matter the shape of his face. This was still Trent. He was still her soul.

Moving to her knees, she gripped the hem of her shirt and pulled it from her body, the cool air of the room striking her nipples, sensitizing them.

So many nights she had lain alone, crying, aching because there had been no justice for those she loved. Because there had been no comfort in the darkness of the night for her own soul.

Her comfort was here now.

She tossed the shirt to the floor, stared into his eyes, and cupped her own breasts, her fingers finding the hard tips of her nipples and pinching them slowly, pulling at them as he suddenly swallowed tightly.

She had never teased him like this. She should have, she realized, because his gray eyes turned almost black as a hard flush mantled his cheekbones.

“Baby,” he breathed out roughly. “This won’t help you rest.”

“I don’t want to rest.” One hand continued to cup a breast as she moved the other down, between her breasts, over her stomach until she pushed her fingers past the elastic band of the loose cotton pants she wore.

She found herself with her fingers. As he watched, his gaze narrowing on the movements beneath the material, she found the dampening folds of her pussy and caressed the sensitive pearl of her clit softly.

“I want you,” she whispered. “All night, John. Take me. Take me until I know nothing but your touch, know nothing but the pleasure you can give me. Don’t leave me alone.”

She slid her fingers from the pants, the tips wet, glistening with her juices, and moved them to touch her lips, to taste herself.

He caught her hand before the tips touched the curves, his breathing suddenly hard as he pulled them to his mouth instead and tasted her, sucked her fingers between his lips and raked the sensitive tips with his tongue.

Bailey moaned. She couldn’t stop the sound, still rough from her tears, rasping with the pain that burned inside her and the hunger rising to scorch her.

“What the hell do you do to me?” he asked as her hands moved to the buttons of his shirt and fought to undo them quickly. When the tiny disks slipped through her fingers, she gripped the edges of his shirt and jerked them apart, sending the buttons flying.

“The same thing you do to me, perhaps?” she panted.

She could forget the world in his arms. She did it every
time he touched her. She needed to do it now. She needed the world and the guilt to recede, to evaporate for just a little while.

She watched his jaw clench as his hands moved to the waist of her pants and with a smooth shift of muscle in his shoulders, jerked the material over her hips and to her knees.

His hands weren’t rough, but they were insistent, dominant. This was what she needed. That blazing hunger that burned inside him. She needed all of it, every desire that had filled his imagination as well as hers.

“I used to dream,” she whispered as she stared into his hungry eyes, her hands going to the belt that cinched the waist of his pants. “When I was alone.” When she had thought he was gone. “When it was dark. I would touch myself, and imagine you. You would forget yourself with me. You would touch me like you were never going to touch me again. You took me as though it were the last time you would ever have the chance.”

The belt came loose and she sucked in a hard breath as his hand suddenly cupped between her thighs, covering the swollen, sensitive flesh of her pussy while his upper palm rasped against the engorged bud of her clit.

“What did I do to you?” His voice was dark, dangerously sexy. It whispered of rain-swept nights and fierce passionate storms.

She pulled the clasp of his pants loose, lowered the zipper.

“Your lips went to my nipples,” she breathed out roughly. “You sucked me, hard. Your teeth and tongue rasped them.”

Her head fell back as a cry tore from her throat. His lips moved to a nipple, covered it. He tugged at it with his teeth, lashed it with his tongue, then sucked her in deep as she pushed his pants over his hips, freeing the thick, fierce length of his cock.

She loved him, loved his touch, his kiss, loved the heavy shaft that she knew brought the edge of pleasure and pain so destructive to her senses.

Her fingers tried to wrap around the heavy flesh, but they wouldn’t reach. She contented herself with stroking it, feeling
the dampness that coated the wide crest and the fierce throb that pounded through the heavy veins.

Her other hand gripped the hair at the nape of his neck, held him to her breast. She gloried in the heated feast he was making of her flesh.

He wasn’t holding back. So many times she had felt him holding back, taking her gently when he needed to take her harder. Suppressing his own needs for what he thought were hers.

His teeth tugged at her nipple again before releasing it and moving to the other. Bailey whimpered at the incredible sensations that tore through her. It was like strokes of lightning tearing from her nipple to her clit, clenching her womb. The burning sensations overwhelmed her and tore another cry from her lips as her head dipped, her teeth moving to his shoulder to clench at the tight flesh there.

A hard male groan echoed from his chest and he pulled back, one hand clenching at the back of her head, as her lips moved lower, her teeth rasping against his flesh, nipping, taking heated, stinging tastes of his skin while he used his fingers to lead her down his body.

“D’you think you’re the only one who dreamed?” His voice was almost a snarl above her, the lightest flavor of an accent coming through as he shed his pants and knelt fully on the bed before her. “Come on, love, give me what I need. Let me watch you take me, Bailey. Suck my cock, baby.”

She moaned as her lips reached the wide, glistening crest. Her tongue licked over it as she teased him, evading the caress she could feel he sought.

He wanted in her mouth. She wanted him there. But she wasn’t about to give in to him so easily. Bent before him, she braced one hand on the mattress and raked down his thigh with the nails of the other.

She felt him shudder and felt the juices flowing from her sex at the knowledge that she could affect him like this. That he needed her as much as she needed him.

She had never felt him like this, never felt that hunger
clawing so close to the surface of his lust before. It was there in the tight tension of his body, the steady pressure of his hand at her hair, holding her in place as his cock nudged insistently at her lips.

She licked over the demanding crest again, blew a rough breath of air over it, and tempted him to take more, to demand more from her.

“Little tease,” he growled.

Holding her head still, he pressed his cock more firmly against her lips, parting them, pressing inside as she felt flames lance over her nerve endings.

She could feel his fingers tight in her hair, tugging at the tender roots just enough to send fresh flares of ecstatic sensation tearing through her.

“Suck me,” he demanded roughly. “Suck my cock, baby. Hot and deep.” The last was a harsh, heavy groan as her lips parted and sucked him inside, hot and deep.

Her mouth closed around the thick flesh as she felt it throb against her lips. The thick shaft clenched beneath the caress of her fingers, and his body tightened until she wondered how he could bear the strain.

Hot, electric lust flared between them, burning Bailey with its intensity as John began to move in short, shallow strokes, fucking her lips with an almost desperate hunger.