Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games Series Book 2) (10 page)

Her eyelids flutter. Her fingers, still dug into the flesh of my ass, twitch. “So very, very adequate,” she breathes, arching.

Watching her reaction, I want more. I slide my hand down her thigh, feeling her muscles flex under my hand, and pull her leg up so its wrapped around my waist. It changes the angle between us, opening her slightly, allowing me to press deeper inside. I slide in and out, then back in again, amazed she’s allowing this, wishing it would never end.

Tabby, so beautifully responsive to me, wraps her other leg around my waist and rocks her hips. “Almost…mediocre,” she says between breaths.

The feel of her rocking against my cock, using her hands and hips to manipulate my body to her own pleasure, is so hot and amazing, I shudder. Tabby looks up at me with dark, half-lidded eyes.

And then I’m fucking her. Slowly, deeply, the entire time staring down into her eyes. She stares back at me in a hazy sort of amazement, like she can’t believe it’s happening either.

It’s intense. Intimate and personal. Quiet, unlike the beat of my heart, which is deafening.

Her brows pull together. She whispers, “
Lírio
,” and I’m almost out of my mind with masculine pride.

“Already?”

She nods, biting her lip.

“You’re so goddamn perfect.” My voice is hoarse, the words torn out of me against my will. “Sweetheart. I want…I—”

Tabby kisses me, swallowing my words and the emotion that’s threatening to drown me.

It’s never been like this for me before, the pleasure of the physical act of sex overwhelmed by a sheer enormity of feelings. Part of me hopes it will never happen again. I’m a soldier. A mercenary. A Marine with twenty-three confirmed kills. And yet, with her, I’m as weak as a newborn baby.

She makes an inarticulate sound of pleasure, slides her hands up my back, and suddenly I need something more.

Taking her with me, I roll to my back. She settles on top of me, blinking in surprise for a moment before gazing down at me with a smile. “Getting lazy, are we? Or just running out of gas? I know at your advanced age—”

“I want to see your face. I want to see everything. I want you to ride me and come again that way, and I want to watch as you do it.”

I push the jacket off her shoulders, let it fall to the floor. She’s fully bared to me now, straddling my body, her long hair brushing her breasts and the flare of her hips warm in my hands. She watches me with those piercing eyes, and I know she sees more than I want her to, because her smile slowly fades.

The sound of the storm outside grows louder. Wind whistles through trees.

She encircles my wrists with her hands, slides them up her body to her breasts. The silver studs in her nipples wink, catching the light. I cup both her breasts in my hands, softly squeeze them so they spill out, more than a handful, and she sighs.

I would kill a man to hear that exact sigh even one more time.

“Tabitha,” I growl, and she moves.

A stroke and a slide and an easy, graceful flex, her body begins to move over mine. The pleasure is intense. I look at her bitten lips and pink cheeks and the rosy flush on her chest, and fight against my instinct to drive hard up into her, force those wanton cries from her throat. I want her to set her own pace, find her own rhythm, using me as a tuning fork to find the perfect pitch at which her body will sing.

The rhythm she finds is agonizingly slow, minute sliding and grinding movements that have me panting and sweating within seconds. I stroke her rigid nipples with my thumbs, and she rewards me with a moan of such voluptuous sensuality, I almost come.

When I apply one of my thumbs to her clit, she moans louder.

A moment later, rocking faster on my cock, she whispers something in Portuguese.

My smile is savage.
Adequate, my ass.

“Feel my cock deep inside you, sweetheart. Feel how hard I am for you. Now tell me you like it.”

Her breasts bounce. Her lips part. She says breathlessly, “You know I do.”

“Say it.”

She groans, her head falling back. I stroke her clit between two fingers, tugging at the stud. She gasps, her entire body jerking.

I pant, “Talk to me, sweetheart. Tell me…tell me how it feels.”

A short silence, faster rocking, the tension in her body rising until her back is stiff with it, and then words burst out of her in an almost incoherent rush.

“God you’re so hard and big and good it’s so fucking good I love it oh God Conner I love it please don’t ever stop!”

Yes.
The sensation that sweeps through my body is one big, epic
yes
.

I roll her to her back, take her face in my hands, kiss her deeply, and thrust into her.

Hard.

Moaning into my mouth, she throws her arms around my neck, wraps her legs around my back, and moves her body in perfect counterpoint to my every thrust.

And I’m gone. Destroyed. The restraint I’d been so carefully maintaining snaps. I become a slave to sensation, to instinct. With some vague part of my brain I hear the sounds I’m making, the animal grunts and groans, but I don’t care. In part because she’s making the same sounds, but from her they’re deeply sexy, viscerally beautiful.

She sounds, tastes and feels like art, she smells like heaven, she fucks like she’s possessed, and she is the single most perfect woman I’ve ever met in my entire existence on this planet.

My final coherent thought is
I’m so fucked
.

Her pussy clenches around my cock once, and then again. Her body stiffens. She sucks in a sharp breath through her nose. I slide my hand over her ass, find the tight, puckered bud between her cheeks. When I stroke it, she shudders and makes a sound like a plea.

I gently push. Her body opens to me. I push deeper, sinking my finger to the knuckle, and Tabby convulses around my cock.

I try to hold on, desperate to experience everything just a moment longer because I know tomorrow it will all be gone, but my body is relentlessly pushing me toward the end that aches inside me, and all I can do is helplessly ride the wave of pleasure as it crests over me, breaks, and sends me crashing into oblivion with the boom of thunder in my ears and her name a strangled cry on my lips.

N
ear dawn
, the rain tapered off. I was awake to hear the wind die too, and the sounds of a new day beginning: birds chirping, the hushed murmur of voices down the hall, the low drone of a garbage truck lumbering down the street.

Outside the world is stirring, but here, in this shadowed room, in this warm, rumpled bed, I’ll make time stand still for as long as I can.

Tabby is a soft weight beside me. Her head tucked into my shoulder, she slept deeply all night. Now with the first of the day’s light, her breathing changes. With a quiet sigh, she shifts against me. Her eyes drift open. Sleepily blinking, she looks up at me, and I experience a tightness in my chest at the simple pleasure of watching her come awake in my arms.

Her shy smile unwinds the knot of worry in my stomach. I didn’t know how it would be, if she would bolt in horror or be filled with regret, but she’s smiling at me so sweetly, I let the anxiousness go and gently press my lips to hers.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.” Her voice is drowsy and warm. “I suppose I have you to thank for my incredible night’s sleep.”

The tightness in my chest turns into an ache that I’m astonished to realize is happiness. I can’t think of anything to say but a husky “You’re welcome.”

She gazes at me in silence for a long moment, and then curls a finger around the chain on my neck and uses my dog tags as a leash to pull me down.

Then we’re kissing. Slow, amazing kisses that ignore the clock, the rising sun, everything we have ahead of us. Her arms slide around my neck. Our legs tangle together. I grow hard.

With a soft laugh she says, “You’re insatiable.”

“Yes.” The word is raw in my throat. “For you.”

She traces the outline of my lips with her fingertip. Her touch is tender, thoughtful, and sends a rush of hope through me. Hope that’s smashed when she says, “So our one night is over.”

I swallow. There isn’t a word for what I’m feeling or a way to deny the obvious truth of her statement, so I say nothing at all.

Softer, with such innocent hesitance it nearly breaks my heart, Tabby asks, “And…what did you think?”

Groaning, I drop my head and hide my face in her neck.

Mistaking my longing for something else, she tenses. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me—”

“I loved it. Every minute.” I say it roughly, against her neck so she can’t see the wild hunger in my eyes. I’m afraid of what she might do if she sees how much I want to keep her. How much I want her to be mine.

A shade of the tension fades from her body. After a while she says quietly, “It’s still early.”

I lift my head and stare at her. Color suffuses her cheeks. Her lashes sweep downward.

She clarifies her meaning by wordlessly pressing her pelvis to mine.

“And I’m the insatiable one? You’re downright greedy!” I tease, enormously pleased. I’m even more pleased when she echoes my words from moments before, with a smile made all the more beautiful because it’s genuine.

“Yes. For you. Now make love to me before you say something stupid and ruin the moment.”

With a glad heart, a hard cock, and a head full of possibilities, I oblige.

* * *

A
fterward
, I drowse. When I awake several hours later, I’m dehydrated, disoriented—

And alone.

“Fuck,” I mutter, leaping out of bed. I grab my watch from the dresser and check the time. It’s late, much later than I thought. I jump into my pants, drag a clean T-shirt over my head, strap my watch to my wrist and shove my feet into my boots. I’m about to call Tabby’s room when I notice a note on the floor near the door.

Heart pounding, I snatch it up. When I read its contents, I groan.

It could only be worse if she’d signed it “Friendly regards.”

I curse again, passing a hand over my face, and then crumple the note and throw it on the floor. Fuming, I stare at it for several seconds, but then expel a hard breath and pick it up. Smoothing out the creases, I carefully fold it and tuck it into my wallet.

I pack up the rest of my things in my duffel bag and head out.

* * *

I
arrive
in Los Angeles eleven hours later, overcaffeinated and jumpy as hell. True to her word, Tabby has had her phone turned off all day. I’ve dialed her number no less than ten times, my frustration growing each time I hear the toneless electronic voice on the recording directing me to leave a message. I never do.

Finally, on the eleventh try, she picks up. Her voice is mild, businesslike, impossibly impersonal.

“You were supposed to text me an address.”

I don’t bother to ask how she knew it was me. “Are you all right?”

That might have come out more brusquely than I intended, judging by the surprised pause on the other end of the line.

“Of course. Are you?”

No
. Standing in my dark hotel room overlooking the bright lights of Century City, I bite back the word and rake a hand through my hair. “How did you get to LA?”

“I rented a car. Did you think I sprouted wings and flew?” She’s amused.

“Where are you now?”

Another pause. “Venice.”

I release a breath. From my investigation of her background, I know she grew up in Venice Beach, blocks from the ocean. Her parents were well-educated, a political science teacher and an artist, bohemian and antiestablishment, basically hippies.

And then they were dead.

“Visiting the old neighborhood?”

The pauses in this conversation are growing longer and longer.

“Connor.” Her voice is soft around my name, a caress. I close my eyes and listen to it, let it steady my jagged nerves. “I’m fine. Thank you for asking. And I’m ready to go to work. Whatever I need to know, text me—”

“I’ll email—”

“
No email
.”

Something cold snakes through my gut. “I use the highest encryption protocols commercially available, Tabby, and tweak them to my needs. You know I take precautions. It’s my business.”

“I’m sure Miranda took precautions too. You know as well as I do that email can never be one hundred percent secure.”

“The encryption I use is the closest thing to bulletproof. It’s based on what they use at the National Security Administration, customized for me.”

Her tone goes flat. “I see. And I suppose you think a universal encryption key is a myth.”

The cold unfurls, spreading to my chest. “Of course it is. Not even the NSA or Homeland Security has that kind of technology.”

“No,” she says after a moment. “They don’t.”

“Are you telling me—”

“By the way, if you’ve ever used this phone to contact Miranda, assume all your voice communications are compromised as well. My advice is to get a few burners for this job, use a new one every day. It won’t matter in the long run, but it might slow him down a little.”

Him
. Søren. Like a bad rash, he’s suddenly back.

I say slowly, “If someone is intercepting my calls, watching my electronic activity, that means you’ve been exposed too.”

That charming sound on the other end of the phone is Tabby softly laughing. “Just text me the information about where we’re setting up shop, Connor. Leave the heavy lifting to me.”

She disconnects the call.

I stand there in the dark, staring at the phone in my hand, wondering why it never before occurred to me to ask her the reason she took the job in the first place, and understanding with sudden, awful clarity that it was the most important question of them all.

I’m in,
she’d said.
I hope you’re prepared for war.

With new foreboding about what that might mean, I take the elevator to the lobby of the hotel, in search of a payphone.