Tempting the Fire (8 page)

and his erection pressed into the softness of her belly. “I have some seriously selfish motives.”

“You going to rape me? Because you’ll have to,” she spat.

“Rape?” He leaned in, so his lips brushed her ear. “I so wouldn’t have to.”

Had she been in any other situation, she’d have kneed the arrogant bastard in the balls and jammed the heel of her palm into his nose. But she really did have to get into bed with him, so she stayed where she was and whispered, “You’re so full of yourself.”

“Soon,” he whispered back, “you’ll be full of me too.”

Fury shot through her, and job or no, she slapped him. He grabbed her other arm and held her immobile with an incredible amount of strength.

“That,” he snarled, “was a huge mistake.”

A thread of terror wove its way into her soul as a scene from her beating slammed into her head. The man who’d nearly killed her had said the same thing, right before he knocked her across the room so hard her shoulder had dislocated on impact with the wall. Worse had followed.

But instead of striking her, Logan fisted her hair and held her for his 45

sudden, punishing kiss. Sela wanted to fight, but at the same time, she wanted to kiss him. His lips were hard but not cruel, and when his tongue stroked at the seam of her mouth, she opened up to him.

Instantly, the air seemed to arc with electricity, thickening around them. He deepened the kiss, turning it into something so hot that she clung to his shirt, preventing him from breaking away.

Desire speared her, went straight to her sex and radiated out. As if he knew, he dropped his hand to her thigh and lifted her leg to his waist, putting her core in contact with the hard ridge of his erection. His warmth put the jungle heat to shame, and yet she shivered as his mouth blazed a trail along her jaw and down her throat. He bent her back on his arm, exposing her neck to him, and one hand came up to jerk her tee out of her pants.

He sucked lightly on her neck as he slid his hand up her shirt, leaving a trail of tingles behind it. Her nipples tightened against the silk fabric of her bra, becoming instantly sensitive, feeling almost abraded as his palm cupped one breast.

Tension made her belly taut and her lungs tight, and when his thumb began to rub slow circles around her nipple her muscles locked up hard, as if her body was trying to fight the pleasure. But it wasn’t her body doing the fighting; it was her brain.

Sela hadn’t had sex since the attack, and before that, it had been about the job. Oh, she’d sometimes taken pleasure from it, if her partner was skilled or considerate, but usually, the sex was all about measuring his response. Getting him worked up for the most intense orgasm of his life so he’d spill more secrets into her brain as he spilled his semen into her body. Usually she was so occupied with making him feel good that she would fake her responses, putting on a show worthy of an Oscar.

Sex on the job had never been about her orgasms. It had been about theirs.

But something about Logan made her curious about his skills and made her want what her feminine instincts said he could give her.

And that scared the crap out of her, because out of all the men she’d screwed for the good of ACRO and the country, this one, with his weapons company and connections to Itor, had the potential to be the baddest of the bad, with a generous topping of evil.

Evil, for sure, because even now, his wicked fingers were sliding beneath the fabric of her bra to her bare breasts, and she couldn’t stifle a moan.

“You like that,” he murmured against her neck.

“No shit.” She spoke softly, mindful of the tent’s thin walls.

His chuckle sent an erotic tremor down her body. Slowly, his hand followed, skimming over her ribs to her stomach, until his fingertips were working the buttons on her BDUs. Panic reared up, and she squirmed, but he tugged her close and wedged his thigh between her legs, trapping her, but creating a delicious pressure against her core that settled her down no matter how badly she wanted to 46

get away.

It’s just a job. It’s just a job. She repeated the mantra in her head and tried to concentrate on giving instead of taking. Boldly, she palmed his neck and pushed his face to her breasts as she dropped her other hand to his ass and squeezed. That fast, it was his turn to groan. He arched into her, grinding that massive erection against her sex.

His mouth did sinful things to her breasts, even through her T-shirt and bra, and she pictured them together with no clothes between them. If he could affect her like this fully dressed and standing up, in a tent, she could only imagine his talents in a real bed, with no clothes and no worries about who might hear them.

His fingers no longer played with her pants’ buttons. He tore the fly open and dipped his hand inside. “We don’t have time for what I want to do to you,” he breathed into her shirt, “but fuck if I’m going to wait another second to touch you.”

She didn’t have time to say anything. His fingers slipped beneath the lace edge of her panties and found her clit. Sela damn near shouted at the sudden pleasure that crashed into her. The unaccustomed sensation sent her into a fresh panic, and she shoved against Logan’s chest, but again, he brought her down with pressure right where she needed it.

“Shh,” he whispered, rolling her swollen nub between two fingers. “Just let yourself go.”

Oh, God, she wanted to. Wanted him to squeeze harder and rub faster, and yes, that was what he was doing now. Once again she remembered that she was supposed to be rubbing and squeezing him, not the other way around. But she ached so badly, and really, what would it hurt to get a little something out of this godforsaken assignment?

She let her head loll back in surrender, and in that instant, Logan growled low in his chest, a male animal taking possession now that the female had given in. Oh, but she hadn’t completely rolled over, and even as he pushed two fingers inside her weeping core, she tore open his pants and took his hard cock in her fist.

She’d seen it when he’d come out of the shower, and only just semi-erect, his penis had been impressive. But fully engorged, she couldn’t even close her hand around it. A silky drop formed at the tip, and as Logan found a rhythm with his thumb against her clit, she matched it, spreading the moisture over the head of his cock.

“Oh, yeah.” His voice was gruff, breathless, and it turned her on like nothing before.

Slow, skilled strokes in and out with his fingers built pressure inside her that threatened to blow out her ears. She cried out when he found her G-spot, and he smiled impishly, went to work with unmerciful flicks of his fingertips over the swollen pillow of nerves.

“Bastard,” she moaned. “You’re such a … ah, yes … bastard.”

“And don’t you forget it.” His words came out slurred; he was panting as 47

hard as she was now, his hips thrusting into her grip.

His strokes turned into luscious twists of his thick fingers. Each rotation raked her inner walls, the friction charging her up until her release hovered just out of reach … and he knew it. He fucked her with his talented fingers, letting his thumb just barely brush her hypersensitive knot.

Panting and grinding, she arched into him, riding his hand until her orgasm came at her as if it had been fired out of a cannon, hit her hard and knocked her breathless and was so fierce it almost hurt. Her pussy clenched around his fingers, pulling them deep, and damn, she wished his cock was filling her instead. Her chest heaved and her breath snagged in her throat, and she had to sink her teeth into his shoulder to keep from screaming.

His snarled “Yes!” told her he didn’t mind the bite.

Though she scarcely had the energy, she locked her knees to keep from sliding into a boneless puddle and increased the speed of her strokes on his shaft.

His hand, wet with her juices, joined hers, creating a silky lubricant. Together, they caressed him, up and down his erection, faster, faster … until the only sounds in the tent were of his harsh breaths and the soft slide of their hands rubbing his hard flesh.

Logan’s head fell back, his teeth bared in ecstasy, the tendons in his neck standing out in stark agony, and wow, he was handsome like that, a perfect male specimen on the verge of pleasure-pain. The sight sent flames licking through her again, but she concentrated on him, needing to get him there …

He grabbed her hand and forced her to concentrate her motion on the head of his cock, rubbing gentle circles as he used his fist to take himself the rest of the way—another sight that had her squeezing her thighs together as though she hadn’t just had one of the most explosive orgasms of her life.

Another crystal drop formed at the dusky purple tip, and she smoothed her thumb through it, loving how his massive body jerked and how his breath caught.

His hand pumped faster, the rim of his fingers meeting hers on every upstroke.

Three heartbeats later, he came with a muffled shout, and instantly, his thoughts and memories shot into Sela’s brain. Thoughts about … how sexy she was, how hot, how he wished his cock was inside her. At the same time, memories washed over the surface of her mind, memories from childhood.

She didn’t have time to waste on things that weren’t relevant to the present, so before the psychic airwaves shut off as his orgasm waned, she poked around in his brain, looking for recent memories … but she ran into what amounted to a virtual wall.

Odd. She’d been trained to detect a mental shield, but this wasn’t one of them. Her probes kept pinging back at her, like sonar hitting the metal hull of a ship.

And then the connection was gone, and she was alone inside her head, sifting through images of a young Logan on a playground by himself, and then in a backyard throwing a ball for a mixed-breed mutt.

48

“That,” he rasped, “was really …”

“Intense?”

He took in a ragged breath. “I was going to say embarrassing.” He looked down at his cock, still in his hand. “We’re like fucking teenagers.”

“Without the fucking.” God, she couldn’t believe how fast the flames had built between them … they hadn’t even made it to the cot, were still propping each other up. She pushed away from him and jerked up her pants, which had ridden down to her thighs. “I, uh, need a bathroom.”

Logan didn’t meet her gaze as he began to clean himself up with a napkin from his table. “Outside to the right.”

“Not worried I’ll run away?”

“There’s someone outside my tent to keep an eye on you.”

Great. That someone had probably heard everything that had gone on in here. She ducked out of the tent, and sure enough, Dax was standing there, a knowing smile on his roundish face. She flipped him off and headed for the portable toilet, but spun around when she was halfway there. She wanted her backpack and the micro-satellite phone inside. Her minute alone in the toilet would give her a chance to send Dev an update.

Quickly, she tore back the tent’s flap, but drew up short as she entered.

Logan was sitting on the cot. He jerked in surprise, his head whipping up to stare at her. In his hand he held a syringe, the needle poised to enter his shoulder.

“What?” he snapped. “Never seen a diabetic before?”

“I just … ah, I wanted my backpack.” She snagged it and ducked out of the tent, heart pounding.

Because whatever Logan was doing in there had nothing to do with insulin.

The substance in the horse-sized syringe was black.

LOGAN DIDN’T GO AFTER SELA. T HERE WAS NOWHERE FOR

HER to run to anyway, and she was smart enough not to take off into the jungle at night on her own. Besides that, Dax had been waiting outside the tent the whole time, told to not let Sela out of his sight.

He stood and massaged the injection site—he didn’t feel pain there but the liquid tended to bubble the skin. He felt the thick, viscous substance seep into the biomechanics in his legs, his right arm, half his brain.

And then the sting began; it always stung the parts of his body that were still human. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore it—and forget the look on Sela’s face at the same time.

She knew damned well this wasn’t insulin and now he had a third problem, one as big as the two chupacabras.

Sela might be a cryptozoologist, but for all he knew, she could be a spy for the government or a rival research or weapons company. She could even work for Itor, sent here to find out if he’d had success capturing the Unclass 8, which was 49

apparently a chupacabra.

GWC hadn’t known what it was—they knew they had something special, but they hadn’t known it had a name. And now it was running around the fucking jungle infecting innocent people.

At times like this, he was very glad his father wasn’t close enough for Logan to fucking strangle him. Because this was bad. Really fucking horrible.

Three years ago, under his father’s orders, GWC captured the chupacabra while on an Amazonian search for undiscovered species. A few weeks ago, when it got loose, Logan’s father informed him just how much money GWC would lose if they didn’t recapture the beast. Apparently, his father had a contract with Itor Corp, a freelance paramilitary agency.

Logan had his own suspicions about what Itor wanted to do with the Unclass 8—after meeting it face-to-face, he was even more wary. And even though his father and Itor wanted the creature captured and brought back alive, after what happened to Chance, Logan had other plans.

He dialed his father, who answered on the first ring.

“Logan! Did you recapture the Unclass 8 yet?”

He bit back a sharp reply. “No. And the SEAL survivor? Apparently, he was infected by its bite, and now he’s turning into that fucking creature.”

When his father spoke again, he sounded shaken. “Let me call Itor and see what they want to do.”

“I don’t really care what they want,” Logan said evenly. “I want to kill it.

And we need to find a cure for the man who’s been infected. We fucking owe him that.”

“Don’t be hasty. Let me make some calls. In the meantime, find that creature before it does any more harm.”

Logan didn’t agree to anything, hung the phone up and took a breath. He didn’t like thinking about the experiments that had already been performed on the chupacabra, and why. Didn’t like thinking about himself as an experiment either, but that’s what he was. One giant mishmash of scientific parts that needed a daily injection simply to keep it alive.