Black Jack

by Lora Leigh

  She wasn’t thinking right, she wasn’t acting right. In a way she couldn’t blame her mother and uncle for being so upset when they had to face the woman she was becoming. The question, though, was why wasn’t she upset herself?

  “Speaking of last-minute guest invitations.” His lips quirked mockingly. “Santos Bahre and Rhiannon McConnelly have managed to procure invitations.”

  She did freeze then. Staring back at him silently, unblinking, as she absorbed the information.

  “How interesting.” She breathed in hard and deep. “And what should I expect when my former employers arrive tonight?”

  It wasn’t tears that rose inside her, it wasn’t depression. She hadn’t been a call girl, but the world would see her as one, if that report ever became public. According to Desmond, it had taken an irrational amount of money to keep it from becoming public.

  “Do you care what you should expect?” His head tilted to the side as his fingers slid into her hair, holding her in place as he gazed back at her, demanding answers.

  “I don’t think I care,” she answered despite the tremors racing up her spine. “Would it do me any good to care, Travis? Would it make that report any easier to swallow?”

  His fingers tightened in her hair for just a second as something hard and brutal flashed in his gaze. There was a glimmer of rage, carefully banked but not hidden. He didn’t like that report any more than she did, possibly less.

  He had been her first lover, he had been her only lover, but there was a part of her that was terrified to trust him. A part of her desperate to trust him.

  Believe in me, Lilly. His voice whispered through her mind now as it did in her dreams. No matter what, Lilly. Trust in me. But she was terrified to trust anyone.

  “The report doesn’t matter,” he growled. “Do you hear me, Lilly?”

  “Unless the international news stations get hold of it.” She felt her lips tremble and fought to stop it.

  She was not a crier. Her father had taught her she wasn’t a crier. She kept her chin high, a cool smile on her face, arrogance gleaming in her eyes. She was royalty. Well, distant royalty, but royalty nonetheless.

  Or she had been.

  Travis watched her eyes, he always watched Lilly’s eyes. Once, they had been a pretty, clear hazel. They had been filled with innocence and ideals. She had been young, sweet, and lying through her teeth whenever she had played the sweet, curious little cat.

  She wasn’t lying now, though. He could see the humiliation that flashed in her eyes at the thought of the investigator’s report, at the thought of those she believed to be her former employers showing up at her family’s party.

  There was no fear in her eyes, but there was pain and confusion. And a hunger for something more than sex.

  “I promise you, Santos and Rhiannon don’t want that report revealed any more than you do.” He wanted so desperately to tell her the truth, to at least hint at the fact that she had been playing a role, that she had never been a woman for hire.

  “Isn’t that reassuring.” She moved to pull away from him.

  Travis refused to release her hair, knowing it would hold her there, hold her in place. She had never moved whenever he caressed her hair, let the tips of his fingers caress her scalp.

  She stared back at him, but her gaze still had that edge of steel, that cynical distrust that gleamed beneath the still-present arousal.

  “It should be very reassuring,” he promised her. “Lilly, no matter what you fear, there is no one who wants to see the past become a risk to your life now.”

  He released her hair, let his fingers trace down the side of her cheek, to her jaw, as his thumb caressed her trembling lips. The woman he had known as Lady Victoria Harrington had been soft, gentle. She had been a true lady. The woman known as Night Hawk had built herself a new life. She had trained, she had learned. She’d gone from mission to training and back again. She had never stopped, she had never rested.

  “That past is still a risk,” she informed him. “If it’s true, then I’ll never be free of it, will I, Travis?”

  If it was true. She was pressing him, asking, testing him.

  “You will never be free of that past, Lilly,” he agreed.

  Before she could say anything more, ask him anything that could, at this moment, endanger them both, he let his lips cover hers, let his kiss steal the questions from her lips.

  They weren’t safe here. She had been betrayed by someone within this house.

  He let the hunger overwhelm her for a few precious moments. Lips to lips, tongue to tongue, his hands caressing beneath the robe, stroking satiny flesh, tracking the few scars her body held. At her thigh, her hip, along her shoulder. He found them, caressed and stroked them, and stoked the fire beginning to rage between them.

  It was always there, just below the surface, awaiting him. A fire hot enough to burn through the coldest night and to warm the hardest heart.

  Stroking his hands back to her thighs, he let his palm slide between them, felt the soft, silken curls, the rain of sweet juices that slickened the plump folds.

  It was like a rain of honey meeting his caress. Her thighs shifted apart as her breathing became hard, jerky. Sliding into the dew-rich slit, he found the plump swollen nubbin of her clit, so sensitive she arched and moaned in hunger as he caressed a tight circle around it.

  Locking her to him, he let his fingers stroke over the tight little bud, rubbing to the side as he knew she liked, stroking the thin little hood over the delicate, sensitive bud.

  Her head fell back, her hips arched forward, and Travis could have sworn her clit swelled tighter, harder, as she began to tremble in his arms.

  She was so close to release. This fast, this easy, for him. She responded to him, she trembled in his arms, ached only for him.

  His lips covered hers once again, his fingers parting the plump lips of her pussy further to circle the clenched, snug entrance that drew him like a magnet.

  He circled the heated, slick entrance again, then dipped slowly inside.

  He had to tear his lips from hers and grit his teeth as the tight muscles of her pussy gripped his finger, rippled around it and tried to milk it in deeper. It was the sweetest, hottest flesh he’d ever known in his life.

  “Finish this,” she moaned, her knee bending, leg lifting along his thigh, to open herself to him.

  He slipped a second finger inside her, feeling the tender tissue stretching around the impalement. It was the sexiest feel he had ever known. Lilly wasn’t the first woman he had touched so intimately, but damn if she wasn’t the most responsive, the sweetest. She was the one that made the blood boil in his veins, in his dick. She was the one that filled his nights with fantasies and kept his hungers on a sharpened edge day or night.

  “Travis, you’re torturing me,” she moaned, a whimpering little sound that drew his muscles tight and left his balls throbbing with the need to get his cock inside her.

  She was making him crazy for her. When Lilly was around, even the mission took a back seat to the woman.

  “I need you,” she cried. A soft little wail had his fingers driving deeper inside her, feeling the snug flesh suck at his fingers as her hands tore at his pants.

  God, if he didn’t fuck her he was going to die from the need. He had to get inside her. He had to fill her, pump inside her, feel the pleasure that exploded into complete nirvana when he came inside her.

  Her silken, deft fingers stroked his cock, holding it firmly as it hardened to painful intensity.

  Dragging his fingers from the tight grip of her pussy, Travis gave a desperate growl as he lifted her leg with one hand, her hips with the arm wrapped around them.

  “Put your legs around me,” he ordered her desperately.

  Whimpering cries came from her lips as he lifted her from h
er feet and felt her legs circle his hips as he guided the blunt head of his dick to the sweet portal between her thighs.

  It was paradise. Pure ecstasy engulfed him as he began to press inside her, taking her, possessing all that sweet, fiery heat to warm the places in his soul that had been cold before her.

  Lilly felt the iron-hard, white-hot entrance of his cock inside her. Her head fell against his shoulder, her arms and legs tightening around him as he shoved inside her, sending half the length of his erection powering inside her with a stroke of violent pleasure.

  She wanted to scream but she couldn’t find the breath, the wash of sensations were too intense, too fiery.

  She could feel the thick length of his cock stretching her, burning her, as her juices rushed to lubricate and prepare the ultrasensitive nerve endings exposed by the penetration. Nothing could have prepared them. She had to learn that. Each time he took her it was the same, so much pleasure she was lost inside it.

  She could only hold on for the ride as she felt her back meet the wall, felt his hands clamp on her ass to hold her to him as he began to fuck her with hard, powerful strokes.

  Each shafting entrance tore a cry from her lips and sent pleasure tearing through her as she fought to thrust back at him, her thighs tightening on him, her hands clenching on his shoulders as she let the exquisite sensation rule her.

  The deep penetrating strokes stretched and burned, stroked naked nerve endings to a precipice of sensation so intense she was gasping for breath, begging, pleading.

  When the explosion came, it hurled her through ecstasy. She felt as though she were a creature of pure sensation. A mass of sensual impulses that exploded over and over again, leaving her limp, breathless, and completely sated in his arms.

  Chapter 11

  lilly put the final touches to her makeup and applied the last sapphire-studded pin to her hair when Travis walked out of the bathroom, fully dressed in his black tuxedo. The dark blond and light brown strands of hair that grew long at the nape had been tied back. The short growth of beard and mustache was still present, neatly trimmed and giving his face a dark, rakish look.

  He was too damned handsome, and too damned dangerous. There was no mistaking the fact that Travis Caine was a man that others would be careful not to cross.

  What did he have planned tonight? she wondered. She didn’t believe in coincidence, and the presence of her so-called former employers at the party, as well as Travis, was a fairly good indication that something was up.

  Or someone was trying to learn something. That suspicion was firmly implanted in her head now, and it refused to leave. She couldn’t help but believe that Santos Bahre and Rhiannon McConnelly were hanging around for the simple reason that she was some kind of threat to them.

  Rhiannon McConnelly had assured her that she and Santos Bahre weren’t there to drag her back into whatever life she had lived for the past six years. There was a part of Lilly that actually believed that. So what else could they be after?

  How far could she trust them? She had a feeling that trusting them was the last thing she should do.

  So where did that leave her with Travis?

  “Are we arriving on time, or fashionably late?” he asked as he came up behind her at the mirror and adjusted the bow tie at his neck.

  For a moment, a spurt of fear washed through her, a premonition that she was going to lose him. She could almost see him walking away from her, refusing to look back, leaving her cold and alone. She had to prepare herself for that. Nothing lasts forever; she had learned that lesson already. In the blink of an eye, or the shot of an assassin’s bullet, it could all be wiped away.

  “You’re not answering me, Lilly,” he pointed out, his voice gentle. “Are you feeling well?”

  “I’m supposed to be greeting guests with Mother.” She breathed in deeply as she fought to pull herself back from the mist of knowledge and memories she could feel awaiting her. “It’s a welcome-home party as well.”

  A celebration, her mother had called it. A time to celebrate with their friends the fact that Lilly had returned, that she wasn’t dead.

  The explanation given to friends and family had been a simple one. That she had run away, that she had hidden as she tried to come to terms with what had happened that night with her father’s death.

  The crash had been declared an accident. Lilly’s father had been behind the wheel, and several eyewitnesses had sworn they had seen them driving from the estate together.

  It wasn’t possible. She didn’t know who had been driving the car that night, but it hadn’t been her father. He had already been dead. She knew that. It wasn’t something she sensed or suspected, it was one of those things she knew without the memories to back her up and substantiated by Travis. According to him, this was what she had told him as well.

  When Lilly had had no answers for where she had been or what she had been doing for six years, her mother had gone looking for those answers. She had found far more than she had wanted to find.

  It was as though her mother had assumed no one else would bother to hunt for the identity her daughter had used those six years and conduct an investigation into it. And what did she think the journalists, who had been like rabid dogs after her release from the hospital, were doing? Twiddling their thumbs?

  “You’re worrying again,” Travis stated softly as he laid his hands on her shoulders and stared at her in the mirror.

  “Perhaps I have things to worry about,” she retorted as she moved away from him and smoothed her hands down the hips of the sapphire ballgown she wore.

  She checked her appearance one last time, adjusted the string of sapphires at her neck, checked the tips of her sapphire blue heels for any smudges, then turned back to him.

  “Why are Santos Bahre and his sidekick showing up tonight?” she asked point-blank, knowing he would at least have an idea why.

  “Curiosity perhaps.” He shrugged. “They could be hoping a part of you will want to return to your old life, or that any memories that resurface will give them some sort of business edge.”

  Her brows lifted. “I can’t imagine how their business interests would coincide with my family’s.”

  “You’d be surprised.” His lips quirked in amusement. “Santos and Rhiannon are extremely astute business people. They have many more interests than that of business managers.”

  “Business managers?” Her lips tightened. “That’s a hell of a title to give them, Travis. It’s my understanding they’re no more than high-priced pimps.”

  He surprised her.

  Gripping her arms, he swung her around and glared down at her furiously. “I’m growing tired of hearing you call yourself a whore, Lilly. You were never a whore.”

  “What else do you call a high-priced call girl?” she snapped back.

  “The title that damned investigator used was far from the truth,” he growled as he swung away from her then and paced to the end of the bed.

  As he turned back, his eyes seemed to flame with anger.

  “You were paid for a service rendered, and that service was not necessarily sex. You were trained for combat, for covert operations, and as a companion in dangerous situations. You were not paid for sex. If you had sex with the men you worked with, then it was your choice, not your job.”

  Lilly glared back at him. “Tell me, Travis, once the press gets hold of that story, how do you think it will be viewed? And they will get hold of it.”

  He shook his head to that. “That investigator wrote his report based on accounts given by less than reliable sources,” he growled. “Santos and Rhiannon operate a legitimate business. Their ‘escorts’ are advertised as those of a personal security nature. Do you truly believe they would risk either their reputations or their clients with anything less? They may get a hint of the trouble-making inclinations you see
med to have, or the less than savory individuals you may have worked with. But there is not a client that requested the services of Escorts Etc. that will ever claim you or the other girls to have been a whore.”

  Lilly’s chin lifted, her lips tightening. “That is not the impression that was given while I was working,” she bit out. “Don’t deny it, Travis.”

  “Impressions and truth are two different things,” he growled. “Escorts Etc. have reliable, reputable clients that will swear differently should anyone dare to accuse you of being anything less than a glorified bodyguard. Outside that, yes, you were known to deal with less than reputable individuals. Yes, the investigator may have spoken to one or more of them. But trust me, should the press actually manage to get one of them to talk, they will never dare to say you were less than a beautiful, companionable bodyguard. That cover will hold, Lilly, I swear it to you.”

  “Cover! You make me sound like some sort of fucking agent,” she snapped back. “For both sides? Don’t tell me fairy tales, Travis, because I’ve read the report Desmond has on you as well. You’re a ‘facilitator.’ A man that works both sides for any country. You’re no more a patriot than I was, evidently.”

  “I’m a businessman.” His jaw tightened furiously.

  “You’re a liar!”

  Lilly was shocked at the words that fell from her lips, the knowledge that suddenly stormed through her brain, bringing an explosion of pain to her temples.

  She nearly doubled over for the brief seconds that the agony radiated through her skull, but at least this time, the knowledge remained.

  He was lying. He was so much more than a businessman, and a hell of a lot more than a man that worked both sides. But what was he? That answer remained as elusive as ever.

  “Lilly!” She felt him jump toward her as she stumbled, the reverberating pain lancing through her head like acid through her veins.

  Pinpoints of rich colorful starbursts exploded before her eyes, nearly stealing her consciousness as the light from it intensified the pain to an agonizing level.