Love Me Twice (8 page)

He tasted like heaven, salty with a hint of citrus. Celeste relaxed her throat muscles and took him deep. It had been so long since he’d given her this much control. After the disastrous mission, they’d returned to the States and things had changed between them. Sean wouldn’t let her suck him off. As a sub, she hadn’t questioned his choice of positions, but as the woman who loved him, she had to.

She loved this position. On her knees, her upper body supported by the gentle curve of the bench, she was positioned perfectly to take him in her mouth. For the longest, he held her head in his hands, and she felt the war he waged within himself. He wanted to stop her, but he didn’t. At last, his hands dropped to the sides of the bench. A complete surrender. She hadn’t expected it, and her heart soared.

Her hands roamed then. She traced the soft flesh of his stomach, the hard ridges of his abs, up and over the definition of his pectorals. Her fingers found his flat copper nipples and teased them until he arched his back and groaned. With his cock held prisoner by her mouth, she touched every inch of him she could reach.

He was as lean and muscular as ever. She remembered his morning swims and thought he must still do them. He had an athlete’s body, and once, it had been hers.

“Sweet Jesus, Celeste.” His hands returned to bracket her head, but she refused to stop. This was a pleasure she could give him, and she wasn’t going to be denied the opportunity. She redoubled her efforts, and within minutes, Sean’s cock jerked, and his body stiffened. Hot cum shot down her throat. She swallowed it, swirling his cock with her tongue to get every drop. His hands were like a vise on her skull.

When he finally let her go, she scooted over the end of the bench and draped herself over his prone form. It felt so good to be skin to skin with him again. His arms came around her and held her in a boneless embrace. His heart beat steady against hers, and after a few moments, he began to stroke her back in a long, lazy caress.

Drew wished he could say he hated this part of the job, but that would be a lie. Watching the amateur porn, made and shared by the passengers, was one of the few perks as far as he was concerned. The ship had a bevy of people to edit the videos, and it was their job to make sure nothing objectionable made it onto the open channel, but Sean’s brother insisted that someone needed to scan them daily, just to make sure. That job had fallen on Drew.

Tonight, sitting alone in the security office, the job was a good distraction from what he was certain was taking place between Sean and Celeste. Thinking about his best friend fucking the woman he loved, all night long, wasn’t good for his health, mental or otherwise.

Not that he’d been faithful to the one time he’d been with Celeste. He closed his eyes. It took little effort to recall the ethereal scent of the woman he’d been with last night. His hands remembered the feel of silky skin beneath them. Something had happened this morning in the redhead's economy cabin, something he couldn’t name, couldn’t grasp solidly. Whatever it was, he needed to figure it out so it wouldn’t happen again.

When they’d taken this job aboard the
Lothario
, Sean had generously offered him the smaller, second bedroom in his brother’s suite, and Drew had accepted. He wasn’t an idiot. Why pass up luxury when it was offered? However, since he was technically a crew member, he couldn’t very well take his conquests to the owner’s suite, so that meant creeping out of the passenger de jour’s cabin in time to get to work.

He remembered waking this morning, his brain instantly alert to his surroundings. No matter how many times he woke in perfectly harmless places, he couldn’t shake the survival instincts he’d counted on for too many years. In the darkness of the small windowless cabin, he hadn’t been able make out much, but he recalled the redhead who was curled over his chest, deep in sleep. He brought his free arm over her head, and squinted at the glow-in-the-dark dial on his watch.

Past time to go.

He found his clothes, what little there was of them, and slipped them on in the dark. He had to hand it to Sean’s brother. He’d certainly thought of everything when it came to having a good time. When all you had to worry about was a sarong, creeping out in the pre-dawn hours was easier than finding a STD in port.

Only this morning, he’d stopped before opening the door and returned to the bed. He couldn’t remember the woman’s name and that had bothered him. His eyes adapted to the near total darkness, a skill he’d found useful in his former life. He brushed a strand of hair from her face. She slept deeply, her features lax and porcelain fine. Her lips were full, and he recalled how they looked after he’d kissed her—swollen and a deep russet that matched her auburn hair. Her nipples had the same coloring, and had been as responsive to his touch as the rest of her.

He placed a kiss on her parted lips. Nothing much, just a touch, but the contact had singed his system as if he’d touched his tongue to an electric fence. She stirred, and her pink tongue darted out to wet her lower lip.

For the first time he could remember, he left a woman sleeping, rather than wake her and fuck her senseless, as his body had urged him to do. It was a complication he didn’t need, not with Celeste back in his life.

Drew stared unseeing at the blank screen. He needed to focus on his job, but no matter how hard he tried, his thoughts veered off course like a ship without a rudder.

His feelings for Celeste hadn’t changed. Every time he thought of her, he got a warm feeling in the pit of his stomach, and something in the region of his heart ached like a son-of-a-gun. If it wasn’t love, he didn’t know what else it could be. The last thing he needed was to be involved with Celeste’s partner. Absolutely nothing good could come from that.

That thought brought him full circle to wild imaginings about what Sean was doing to Celeste. He’d seen enough of them together when they’d been a team, working behind the scenes gathering intelligence for the DIA, to know something about their sexual relationship. Sean was a dom, and Celeste had been his sub. They thought they hid it, but it crept into their professional life in small ways, and Drew had picked up on the signals easily enough.

He’d fantasized about showing Celeste another way to find enjoyment in the bedroom, his way, but he wouldn’t have ever acted on his fantasies, not as long as she was with Sean. Then, they’d been captured, and in a moment of insanity, he’d spilled his guts to Sean. He couldn’t regret it. They’d all believed they were going to die that day, and Sean had offered him a moment’s peace, buried in Celeste’s sweet ass. He was certain Sean had made the offer more for Celeste’s sake, as a way to distract her from the inevitable, but he’d seized the opportunity to have any part of her before he departed this world. She’d accepted his loving for what it was, a declaration of unspoken love and a farewell.

Drew swallowed the lump in his throat. Everything would have been fine if the Marines hadn’t rescued them. Living had screwed up all their lives. He didn’t know what had actually happened between Celeste and Sean when they all returned stateside, but it was pretty easy to figure out why Sean had demanded she choose between them, and why she had run.

Celeste was here now, and for some crazy, inexplicable reason, he thought she might make that decision now. What it would mean to the three of them, he couldn’t imagine.

He shut down the part of his brain that could imagine what was going on right now. Down that path lay nothing but insanity.

He’d brought the first of that night’s offerings up on the big screen when the office door opened. The woman from last night, the one he now knew to be Agent Bree Stanton, stood framed in the doorway, her features obscured by the flickering light from the big screen. She wore the short passenger-issue sarong that left her shapely legs silhouetted against the harsh hall lighting behind her. A buzz started along his spine, at the base of his skull, and shot like lightning to the small of his back, and from there it was a short trip to his groin.

She took in the poorly done porn, and Drew alone in the office, watching it. She shook her head, and then, as if she wasn’t entirely certain she should stay, stepped inside and shut the door. Drew noted the way she leaned against the door, clutching the handle. It hadn’t been all that long ago her pretty little hands had been wrapped around his cock.

“Disgusting.”

He slammed a mental door on his previous thought. This wasn’t a social call.

“True. The porn industry has nothing to fear from this group.”

She let go of the door and moved further into the room. He took it as a good sign.

“You misunderstood. I wasn’t talking about them, I was talking about you.”

Drew flicked to the next video in the queue and tried to ignore the unveiled insult. If that was the worst she had to say about him, then he’d consider himself fortunate. “What brings you down here?”

“Agent Hamilton told me you would be here.” She sat in the other desk chair and rolled around to sit next to him, facing the screen.

That explained her lack of surprise at finding him here. He wondered what Celeste had told her about him, about them. A cold chill replaced the flash of heat he’d experienced at seeing her. “You didn’t tell her about. . . . ”

“No, but I think she may have an idea. Why didn’t you tell me you were the security officer?”

“I didn’t think it mattered. Why didn’t you tell me you were FBI?”

“Same reason.” She changed the subject. “She said you were supposed to be looking for the eco-terrorist.”

 He made the mental shift from personal to professional without stammering. “I am.”

“Really?” He didn’t mistake the scorn in her voice. Her tone warned that what had passed between them the previous evening wasn’t going to be repeated, or discussed any further. He certainly wouldn’t have fucked her if he’d known who she was. He’d never been one to dip his cock in the government alphabet soup, especially when it spelled FBI.

“I have been, but this is part of my job too. You can help, if you want.”

“I’ll pass. What have you done about identifying the suspect?”

 “We have photos of all the staff members, as well as all the passengers. I understand you’re familiar with most of the members of this group, so I thought you might look through the photos and see if anyone rings a bell.”

“It’s a place to start. We don’t know who they sent. It’s more likely to be a new recruit, someone expendable if they get caught, but I can take a look.”

Drew set her in front of monitor and programmed a slideshow of the passengers for her. He turned his attention to the amateur porn again and tried his best to ignore her. It proved impossible. Every breath he took brought with it her scent, something light and airy, overlaid with a floral perfume that in no way reminded him of sweet innocence or alphabet soup. She smelled like sin. Exotic, hot, wild, fuck me carnality. Impossible to ignore.

He flipped through the videos, uninterested in any of them. A private video played through his mind. Bree, naked, open to him, begging. Ah yes, she’d begged, more than once in the course of the evening they’d spent together. Drew closed his hand over the roller-ball mouse and instead of cold plastic, his hand remembered the warmth and weight of her breasts, and the way they fit perfectly into his palms. His cock stirred at the sweet memory.

Drew shifted in his seat and tried to focus on his job. It was useless. He returned the screen to the usual random pattern of live security cameras, and swiveled his chair around to the woman whose presence was driving him out of his mind.

“Anything?”

“No. I’ve been through about a quarter of the passengers. So far, no one looks familiar.”

“Like you said, it’s a long shot. If they have any sense, they sent someone they can disavow knowledge of if they get caught.”

She turned to face him. The bluish glare from the monitor made her facial features appear fragile. Her lips looked like a ripe plum, one he wanted to take inside his mouth and suck. He shook his head. What the hell was the matter with him? She’d brought an iceberg with her tonight, and that was a stop sign he’d always obeyed. Until now.

“Drew?”

A hint of uncertainty, or was it warning, tinged the single syllable. Whatever it was, it went unheeded. Drew moved. One hand curved around the back of her neck, the other closed over the arm of her chair. He swung her around, chair and all, and his lips covered hers.

She made a sound. It originated from deep within and vibrated up and along her lips. All Drew knew was that it wasn’t a protest. A second later she was in his lap, her legs draped over his, his hands on her waist, hers splayed like iron bands around his skull. She opened her mouth over his and his tongue plunged inside. Hot. Sweet. Not an ice cube in sight.