Prisoner (Werewolf Marines) (31 page)

When Echo came back to herself, she was
gasping and trembling, with her face buried in DJ’s shoulder. She
was abruptly conscious of being a person and having a body and
being with DJ. For a second there, she’d forgotten absolutely
everything. She’d
been
the light.

“That was fast,” he remarked. “Or maybe I’m
just that good.”

Echo caught her breath, then chuckled. “I had
a couple weeks of foreplay.”

DJ laughed as well. “I know what you mean.
Well, I don’t want to stop and run down to the corner store, so
when you’re ready, you want to show me what you can do with
your
hands?”

Echo was still floating on a dreamy cloud of
contentment, so it took her a moment to interpret that. “I have
condoms in my purse, if you don’t mind me stopping and running to
the bedroom.”

He grinned. “Run!”

She reluctantly extracted herself from his
arms, leaped over the table and sofa that blocked the doorway, and
rummaged in her purse.

“Got them!” Echo called, and returned with
the strip.

He reached up for it. She let it dangle until
it was almost within his grasp, then snatched it away. His fingers
closed on air.

“We’re not even undressed yet.”

“Don’t let me stop you.” DJ glanced curiously
at the condoms. “Did you know this was going to happen?”

“No. They live in my purse. I don’t date like
Charlie does, but sometimes I pick up men for one-night stands.
One-hour stands, really. I don’t spend the night.”

She didn’t expect him to judge her, but she
heard the wary note that crept into her voice. Once she’d overheard
a security guard telling a new hire he should have a go at Charlie,
the “base mattress.” Echo broke his nose, his jaw, three ribs, and
both his arms before the rookie tranquilized her. Echo was
reprimanded, the guard was fired, and that was the last unkind word
she ever heard about Charlie.

DJ must have caught some hint of her
thoughts, because he said, “I hope you don’t disapprove, but I’m
not a virgin either.”

Echo smiled, relaxing. She stripped off her
jeans and underwear, slowly, enjoying watching him watch her. His
throat bobbed as he swallowed.

“After all this time being roommates, I can’t
believe this is really happening,” he said. “I thought you weren’t
into me like that.”

“I thought
you
weren’t into
me
,” she returned. The air-conditioned currents were cool on
her bare skin, making her nipples harden again. “So,
are
you
into bondage?”

She watched, amused, as his expression
shifted from where’d-that-come-from to
no-actually-it-does-make-sense-in-this-context to
okay-sure-if-you-like. “Not especially, but if you want to tie me
up…”

“I notice you didn’t offer to tie
me
up,” Echo remarked.

“I assumed you’d want to do the tying. But I
could do it. If you like. Wait a second.” He pointed at her
accusingly. “This is for the mission report you’re giving to
Charlie later, isn’t it?”

“I won’t tell her the details if you don’t
want me to. But yeah,” Echo confessed. “I can’t not tell her we had
sex, and after that conversation this morning, I had to ask. I’ve
never tried any of that stuff myself. What about you?”

“Once I dated a woman who wanted me to tie
her up. And once I dated a woman who wanted to tie me up. So…” He
shrugged.

“You’re such a pushover,” Echo said,
laughing. “You’d do absolutely anything if I asked you to, wouldn’t
you?”

“Yes,” he said, his expression suddenly
serious. “Yes, I would.”

Echo could see that he meant it. But it made
her feel protective rather than powerful. He was so strong
physically, but he’d put himself completely in her hands. She’d
have to be very careful not to hurt him.

Trying for a lighter tone, she asked, “Which
did you like better? Tying, or being tied?”

“My problem both ways was that there was too
much planning and thinking involved. Especially when I did the
tying. It felt like I was commanding a mission. One of my favorite
things about sex is
not
thinking.” He took off his belt and
started to undo his jeans.

“Want me to rip them off?” Echo asked.

“No, thanks. I like these jeans.” He stripped
them off, then lay back with his hands clasped behind his head.

Echo took the opportunity to admire the view.
Her attention was first drawn to his impressive hard-on, then to
the arching bones of his pelvis and the graceful hollows above his
hips. She hadn’t realized how far his burn scar extended. The
shiny, rippled scar tissue spilled over his ribcage and belly and
down his hip, as if someone had splashed him with boiling
water.

“Will it hurt if I touch it?” Echo asked.

“No, of course not—” DJ began, then laughed.
“Oh. You meant my scar. No— well— Maybe this part.” He indicated
the red furrow over his ribs.

“Did that happen later?”

“No, it’s the same injury.” DJ was eyeing her
warily, as if he saw something in her that she wasn’t aware of.
“The burn cracked wide open, down to the bone. The doctors couldn’t
close it. It has to heal from the bottom up. It’ll fill in
eventually.”

“You almost died, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” DJ reached down, caught her hand, and
pressed two of her fingers beneath his jaw, so she could feel his
pulse. “But I didn’t. It’s all right now. I’m all right. Come
on…”

He tugged her up to lie beside him, caressing
and kissing her until she forgot about the fragility of the human
body, and only felt the life coursing through her veins and his.
She tasted the salt of his sweat and ran her tongue over the
smoothness of his collarbones and the roughness of the stubble
along his jaw. He nibbled at her ear, making her laugh, and slid
lower to taste her, making her gasp.

“Tell me if I go too hard,” he said, raising
his face. “Or too soft. Too fast. Wrong place. Whatever.”

“I’ll give you coordinates,” Echo suggested.
“Clitoris, latitude forty-eight degrees north, longitude twenty
degrees east.”

“Thanks, that’s very helpful,” remarked DJ,
and bent his head to her again.

Echo rarely let men go down on her, and never
for very long. There was something about the position, not to
mention the proximity of teeth, that made it feel too risky. Or too
intimate. But it was like when DJ had put his thumbs at the base of
her skull: it didn’t feel dangerous when it was him. He stretched
up one hand to clasp hers. Echo gripped his hand and closed her
eyes.

“Too soft,” she said once, but otherwise she
let her body’s responses guide him. His tongue was as deft as his
fingers had been. She floated on waves of sensation. It was
intimate but not invasive, hot and shivery and satisfying.

“Can you come just from me being in you?” he
asked at last. “Or should I use my hands?”

“Use your hands,” Echo said dreamily. She was
already halfway there. “You’ve got good hands.”

When he pushed inside her, they were lying
side by side, like they had at the start. Her eyes were closed, her
lips locked on his. They rocked together, her arms clasped around
him, one of his hands caressing her back and one wedged between
their bodies, stroking her clitoris. The heat of passion flowed
through her, pushing her up and up until she was trembling on the
brink, and then she was falling, falling, throwing her head back to
cry out her ecstasy.

When she opened her eyes, DJ was still moving
inside her, watching her with love and trust and tenderness.

“I love you,” DJ whispered, the words
tumbling into each other as he thrust faster and faster. “I love
you so much. I’m so glad I met you. I’ve never known anyone like
you. I never knew there
could
be anyone like you. I can’t
believe how lucky I am. I—”

The flow of words broke off as he came, his
hands clenching tight and his face alight with joy.

While they’d been making love, all outside
sounds had faded out. But as they lay together on the floor, Echo
slowly became aware of the hum of the air conditioning and the
faint roar of traffic outside. DJ traced lazy patterns on her skin,
intricate spirals like the inside of a seashell. It reminded her of
how he’d played with her hair while he’d still been
half-asleep.

“What really happened this morning, when you
woke up?” Echo asked. “I thought you were traumatized over having
killed Match. But that wasn’t it, was it?”

“I am traumatized,” DJ replied, his
expressing briefly clouding over. Then he shook himself and went
on, “But you’re right, that wasn’t it. I woke up holding you, and I
remembered how fucking awesome you were, on the mission and
afterward. And you looked so beautiful and it felt so good to have
you in my arms. I thought I was falling in love with you, and I
told myself to stop it. And then I realized that it was too late. I
was already in love.”

“And then you burst into tears?”

“Nope.” DJ grinned. “I thought,
DJ Torres,
this is just your luck. Find the absolute perfect woman for you,
and
of course
she’s an enslaved one-body assassin trapped in
a place where she can’t leave and you can’t stay.
I wasn’t
crying. I was laughing.”

Echo suspected that it had been the sort of
hysterical laughter that was halfway to tears. “I know how you
feel.”

He abruptly sat up. Echo recognized the look
on his face. She’d seen it when he’d won a fight by discoursing on
the platypus, when he’d made his repeated attempts to escape from
the Humvee, and when he’d told her he loved her. It was the
expression of a man about to close his eyes and throw himself off a
cliff, trusting that someone would be waiting at the bottom to
break his fall.

“Let’s not break our hearts.” DJ took her
hands in both of his, pressing them together as if he was swearing
a solemn vow. “I’ll never ask you to leave Charlie behind. But I
don’t want to leave you behind, either. Let’s plan on you and me
and Charlie and Roy all getting out. I don’t know how yet. But I do
know that if you decide in advance that something’s impossible,
then it definitely won’t happen.”

“It
is
impossible,” Echo said.

“I know,” DJ replied. “Let’s do it
anyway.”

He settled back down and kissed her before
she could contradict him. As she kissed him back, his ridiculous
suggestion seemed to float in the air above them, gathering
strength with every second that it went unanswered.

It occurred to Echo that DJ was wrong.
Thinking that something was impossible didn’t mean it couldn’t
happen. Not long ago, she wouldn’t have thought falling in love was
possible.

She wouldn’t have thought
DJ
was
possible. But here he was, with his soft lips, his warm skin, his
scratchy voice, his clever hands, his banter, his music, his
restless energy, his sweetness and his ruthlessness, his happiness
and his pain, his impossible love for her, his outrageous trust in
her, and his absolutely lunatic determination.

His contagiously lunatic determination.

As Echo pulled him close to her, she was
filled with the most terrifying emotion of all, the only feeling
more dangerous than love.

Hope.

Author’s Note

Thank you for reading
Prisoner
. I hope you enjoyed
it.
Partner
will
be released on January 31, 2015. Echo and DJ will have more
adventures, but
Partner
concludes the “trapped in an evil lab” arc and
can be read as a happily ever after.

Echo’s Wolf
is part of the “Werewolf Marines” series.
The other book is
Laura’s Wolf
,
which is about Roy Farrell. It doesn’t matter which you read
first.

If you’d like to be alerted when I release my
next book, please
click here
to be added to my
mailing list. You will only be emailed when I have a new book
out.

Please consider reviewing this book, even if
you only write a few lines. I appreciate all reviews, whether
positive or negative.

To read the first chapter
of
Laura’s Wolf
,
please
click here
. To learn
more about DJ’s music, please
click here
. To
read notes on dyslexia, PTSD, and combat stress, please
click
here
. To see all of those, keep
turning the pages.

The Rifleman’s Creed was written by Major
General William H. Rupertus.
Watership Down
(the rabbit
book) was written by Richard Adams.

Thank you to the readers of
Laura’s
Wolf
who wanted to see more of DJ. Thank you to Victoria
Janssen, the inspiration for DJ’s musical taste, for introducing me
to Sniper, Dessa, and Gloc-9. Thank you to Sherwood Smith, for
helping me brainstorm the mission in this book and several of the
missions in
Partner
. Thank you to Chilla Varkulya, for
cheerleading, cheer, and inspiration to keep writing.

I work as a therapist, specializing in the
treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “Lia Silver” is
a pen name used to separate my writing career from my therapy
career. When I’m not working, reading, or writing, I enjoy cooking,
hiking, horseback riding, martial arts, and cuddling my cats. My
email is
[email protected]
,
and my website
is here.
I also write as
Rachel
Manija Brown
and
Rebecca
Tregaron
.

DJ’s Music

I didn’t want to link to YouTube videos
without the permission of the uploaders, but all the music is also
available on YouTube.