Hidden Agendas (12 page)

"I told Dad, when he accepted that position on the oversight committee, that it wasn't going to be safe for either of us."

"What did he say?"

"That he would protect me." Emily rolled her eyes.

"And he's making sure you're protected," he said softly, his expression too intent, his gaze too probing as he brought the beer to his lips again and drank.

It was sexy, watching his lips pull the liquid from the glass bottle, the way his tongue flicked over his lower lip when he was finished.

He hadn't shaved that morning, so his cheeks were still covered with the overnight growth of beard. It gave him a rakish, piratical look that made him seem darker and more dangerous than ever before.

Sexier. More primal.

"Oh yes." Her lips twisted mockingly. "He's making certain I'm protected." She crossed her arms over her breasts now. "Tell me, Kell, what are you going to do if you end up in my bed and Daddy finds out?

When he pulls you aside and gives you the rules to this little game. You'll marry his daughter, and keep her out of trouble, or your career and all your dreams are shot to hell."

"Won't happen. He just lets you think it will happen."

Her eyes widened in amazement. "I thought you knew my father better than that, Kell? You evidently have no clue how bad he wants me married and knocked up."

"Oh, I can safely say I know your father's plans as well as anyone." He grinned mockingly. "But I know how to be careful, Emily."

"You're just like him." She could see the same arrogance, the same determination stamped on his features that she often saw on her father's. "So certain you're right and that you can have what you want the way you want it. I'm not a prize, Kell, and I'm not a plaything to relieve your boredom."

His smile was blatant male confidence and sexual intent.

"No, you're a habitual virgin who's too frightened to take what you want." He lifted the beer, drank again, and his eyes gleamed with amused certainty.

"Are you insane?"

"I'm horny." He shrugged. "So hard for a taste of that sweetness you were rubbing in my face at that strip club, I can barely walk for it."

"So that makes it okay?"

"That makes it more than okay, sugar. That's going to make it a certainty. Because I might be harder than hell, but right now, I bet you dollars to doughnuts your panties are wet again. Shall we put it to the test?"

He was insane. He was crazy. He was the most impossibly confident man she had ever laid her eyes on.

He was totally unlike the bodyguards. He didn't bother to hide his lust and he didn't give a damn what anyone thought of it.

Her gaze raked over his tall, muscular body. She paused at his thighs, seeing the length of his erection beneath his jeans. The impressive bulge was a temptation in and of itself.

"You think you can handle me." She smiled slowly. "I can see it in your face. You think all you have to do is get me addicted to your touch, to touching you, and everything else will be a piece of cake."

His lips quirked in response.

"You are so deluded." She dropped her arms and moved closer, watching his eyes narrow as she brushed against him, stopping a breath from his hard chest as she let one hand drift across his tight abs.

"Am I?"

"You are." Her fingers brushed over his belt before she began to slowly loosen it. "I could become addicted, Kell. So easily." His eyes narrowed as the belt came undone and her fingers tugged at the metal button holding his jeans. "I could do all the things I've researched, hungered for, dreamed about." The second button came undone. "I could go crazy with you in my bed." The third button, the fourth.

His jeans parted beneath her fingers, revealing the snug white briefs he wore and the heavy ridge of flesh beneath.

"Teasing, sugar?" he dared her. His voice. His eyes. They sent out a challenge she couldn't resist.

Carefully she eased the material of his briefs over the hard flesh, catching her breath on a silent moan as the thick, heavy wedge of flesh was revealed. Dark, pulsing with blood and strength, the head engorged, flushed nearly purple with arousal and heat as a creamy drop of semen beaded at the flushed crest.

"I don't tease," she whispered.

She had known what she wanted as she came to him, and she had been certain he wouldn't allow it. That he would steal control, that he would take her as he wanted, not as she wanted.

But he stood still, his body growing more tense by the second.

Emily could feel the hunger rising inside her now, beating at her brain, searing through her bloodstream.

Her mouth watered with the need to taste him, to put to action all the research she had done on going down on a man.

"Take your shirt off." She meant to whisper the words, she hadn't meant to make it a command.

But the shirt came off. Slowly. Too slowly. Revealing tighter than tight abs, a rippling chest, and powerful arms.

She had to touch him. She didn't have a choice. Bronzed flesh filled her vision as her hands, pale against his skin, pressed against his stomach and eased upward, scraping over the sprinkling of black hair that bisected it. Feeling the rush of heat from his flesh, the pounding of his heart. The prickle of the small hairs against her palms was electric.

"How long since you've touched a man, Emily?" he asked her then. "Since you've let your senses be captured?"

She shook her head slowly, dazed, mesmerized by the pleasure building in her palms and rushing through her body.

"Too long." She could barely breathe, could barely remember. "So long."

Her fingers curled against his chest as her head lowered. She wanted to taste him. Her tongue touched flesh and he jerked beneath the caress. But he didn't touch her. He didn't hold her. He didn't force her to do what he wanted.

The taste of his flesh exploded through her senses. Dark, male, clean. There was nothing artificial. Just stark earthy male. Slightly salty. A hint of musk. Addictive. So addictive she let her teeth grip the flesh over his breastbone as she licked again.

"I just want to touch," she moaned, shaking now with the power that seemed to whip around her. "Just once. Just this time." She was out of control. Her lips smoothed over his chest, her tongue licked, her teeth scraped, and her senses became drugged, dazed, weakened by the incredible freedom she could feel moving through her. "I've dreamed of touching you, Kell. For so long."

"Touch, sugar." His voice was a breath of sound, a dreamy rasp over her senses that urged, encouraged, that gave her license to do as she needed. As she dreamed. "You can touch me all you want to."

Freedom. It surged through her, arcing through her body and mind until nothing mattered, nothing made sense but the taste of him. The feel of him. The wicked, liberating sense of holding the reins on this powerful sexual beast.

When a man set out to tame a vixen, he didn't grab her. He didn't manhandle her. That was a surefire way to lose a finger. And the vixen. She was cunning, she was wily, and she was as free as the wind. But she loved touching. She was affectionate and playful, tempting and teasing, but she wanted to be caressed and held.

The man who was determined to capture a vixen learned patience early. He learned control. And he learned to let the vixen set the rules. At first.

Kell's fingers tightened on the side of the bar as Emily's hot little tongue licked over his chest. The pleasure was exquisite. Heated little electric shocks raced over his flesh and drew his muscles tight.

Staring down at her, he became absorbed in the small glimpses of her expression, the slow, steady immersion of her senses into the freedom of touch he was giving her.

He was out to trap a vixen. To seduce her. To stroke her. To control her. Arid it seemed he had found the perfect bait. Something she had never had before, a treat particular to the heated woman smoothing her hands over his flesh, her tongue licking, tasting. The illusion of control.

It was going to be torture. The torture of feeling a pleasure so extreme, so liquid hot, it was all he could do to keep his hands to himself, to keep from trapping the vixen in his grip.

But some things were far better for the wait.

"Kiss me, Kell." She lifted her head, staring up at him with sparkling blue eyes, hunger flaming in their depths as his head lowered. "I've dreamed of you kissing me."

"You kiss me," he suggested in a dare. "Show me what you have, sugar."

He let his lips touch hers, and expected hesitancy. He didn't expect her teeth to nip at his lower lip before drawing it between hers, her hot little tongue stroking over it like a lick of fire.

She smiled at the involuntary groan that came from his chest. Slender fingers moved up his arm to his nape, then into his hair. They tangled in the long strands and tugged him to her, her lips settling against his, first in a whisper of need, then with fiery demand.

Her tongue was silken and damp, stroking against his as she lifted against him, her beaded nipples pressing through her bra and shirt and burning into his chest.

He was dying to touch her. His hands itched to touch her. But he kept one on the counter, the other at his side. And he thought of the vixen and his need to hold her.

"Emily." He whispered her name gently as her lips moved from his, then to his neck and to his chest once again. He began to move, easing slowly to the couch.

"Stay. Don't go." Her hand gripped his waist as he continued to ease back.

"Let me sit down, sugar," he crooned, seeing the effect of his voice on her senses. Her expression lost its look of worry, sensuality taking over again as they reached the couch. "Just let me ease back here, and you can have whatever you want."

If he didn't sit down, lie down, find some way to get off his feet, then once her mouth completed its southward path he'd collapse on the floor. Damn her, she was making his knees weak. She was making his cock harder than ever.

She followed as he sat down gingerly then slowly eased back to the pillow at the arm. Her knee was on the cushion beside him, the other between his thighs. Her mouth was blazing a conflagration to his abs as her slender fingers moved past the material of his jeans and briefs and touched the sensitive shaft of his cock.

His hips jerked, arched. Fingers fisted over his head as he gritted his teeth against the need to grab her, to roll her beneath him and tear the clothes from her body.

"Emily." Her name ground from between his teeth.

"Just a minute," she whispered breathlessly. "I know how to do this. I do. I read about it. I know how."

Ah shit. Her voice was lost, so filled with excitement it shook from her lips as her fingers attempted to wrap around his erection.

"Sugar, there's more to this," he ground out.

"I have movies," she assured him. "And books. I know how to do this."

Her research was going to kill him.

Her mouth surrounded the engorged head, her tongue tucked against the ultrasensitive flesh beneath the head, and she began to suck.

"Sweet God, have mercy!" His body jerked as though a whip had been laid to his balls.

Pleasure tore through him. It wasn't insipid, it wasn't a slow burn. It was hard, searing, it tore across his nerve endings as he bared his teeth in painful pleasure and growled in ravening hunger.

And he watched her. Watched the initial hesitation, felt it in the movement of her lips until she found the exact position she was looking for to tear his soul from his body.

Auburn curls fell like flames to caress his thighs as she began to move her mouth over his cock. Taking as much as she could hold, sucking deeply, her tongue flaying too sensitive flesh as her mouth tightened and worked over the thick cock head and sucking it against the roof of her mouth.

Oh God. Her fucking research was going to drive him insane. What the hell was he thinking? His fingers uncurled, his arms lifted; the only thought in his mind was to grab her hair and to force her mouth to move as he wanted.

Then she moaned. A sound of sheer pleasure, of wild temptation. Kell forced his hands back, tried to breathe through the pleasure and felt the sweat running down his brow.

He was crazy. He hadn't tried to tame a vixen since he was a teenager and he hadn't managed it successfully then. What the hell made him think he could do it now? Especially this particular vixen.

But he would never forget her face, her expression, at this moment, for as long as he lived. Her lashes drifted over her eyes, showing only a glimmer of her dark blue gaze. A flush darkened her cheeks and her cupid's-bow lips were stretched wide over his engorged cock as her slender fingers wrapped around the stalk.

It wasn't his first blow job, but he'd be damned if it wasn't the sexiest one he'd ever had. Her lips moved up and down the throbbing head, her fingers stroked the shaft, her tongue licked and tasted, and he swore she was stealing his soul with the delicate greed of her sucking mouth.

"Ah sugar." He winced at the thickening of the Cajun accent he thought he'd defeated years ago. "Your mouth is perfect. So sweet and hot."

Her passionate little whimper vibrated on his flesh, causing him to stretch, to thrust against her lips. Hell, holding back was killing him. He could feel the need for release tightening his balls and tingling up his spine.

"So greedy," he growled as her tongue licked over the small slit, probed and drew a pulse of semen that slipped past his control. "There you go. Suck me like you mean it, sugar."

His fingers were digging into the couch cushion, his teeth bared in a grimace as he fought the pleasure.

Just another minute, he swore. One more minute.

The soft suckling sounds pierced his head as she drew him deeper into her mouth. Slowly, oh hell, so slowly, drew him to her throat. Paused and released him. Drew him back again, released. Drew and swallowed, the reflex motion tightening and caressing the head of his cock in a move that had him snarling, pulling his hips down, trying to force her to release him.

The pressure eased, but for a second only. It returned as he watched moisture seep from the corner of her eyes at the effort it took to hold him there, to swallow and retreat.