by Lora Leigh
She wasn’t going to cry, she told herself. She wasn’t going to allow the tears to fall, because if they did, then she might never stop.
“You’re my lover.” She shook her head slowly, desperation clawing inside her. “Can I even trust you?”
“You can trust me, Lilly.” There was a promise in his voice, there was sincerity and emotions she couldn’t define. But a part of her recognized an underlying warning as well. “You can trust me with your life.”
“Then tell me what I was. Tell me who I was,” she demanded roughly. “Stop stringing me along.”
“How did you know where your safe house was located?” he asked softly.
She licked her lips nervously as she shook her head. “I knew the memory was just there, as though it had never been lost.” Her shoulders lifted as she felt the confusion herself. “I don’t know how I knew, Travis. I just knew where it was.”
“You knew your weapons were missing earlier,” he pointed out. “How did you know?”
“I just knew,” she snapped. “I just remembered that they should be there.”
Lilly ran her fingers through her hair and clenched at the strands as though she could force the information out of her brain.
She wanted the information out. She wanted her memories back. She wanted her life back. She wanted to know who she was. Lilly or Lady Victoria Lillian Harrington. Which was she, and which life should she be living?
“What else do you just know?”
“Answer my question first,” she cried out. “Enemy or ally?”
“What the fuck are you doing, asking me that question?” The words tore from him furiously as he stepped quickly to her, grabbed her arms and jerked her against him. “Tell me that, Lilly. Why the hell are you fucking me if you don’t know whether I’m your friend or your enemy, your lover or your assassin?”
“Are you my assassin?” Her head shot back to stare into his furious gaze. “If you were my lover, my ally, you would give me the information I need to survive,” she argued, just as furious as he was now. “You wouldn’t lie to me, Travis, and I know you’re lying to me.”
“How? If you don’t remember anything, then you have no idea what is truth or lie, Lilly,” he snarled back at her. “Keep it that way, damn you. In this case, trust me, ignorance is truly bliss.”
“No . . .” Ignorance was going to get her killed, she could feel it.
She would have argued, but before she could get the words past her lips, he was kissing her again. He was always kissing her when there was something he didn’t want to deal with. He was always stealing her senses, her resolve, by throwing her into a maelstrom of pleasure that she couldn’t deny.
The pleasure was as fierce as ever, but the tears fell anyway. Silently, slowly, Travis felt the salty warmth against his lips, tasted it against his tongue.
Pulling back, he stared down at her still-too-innocent eyes, and watched as the pain built in her eyes, the tears dampened her face.
“God, Lilly,” he whispered. His thumbs ran beneath her eyes to wipe away the wetness as a small sob shuddered in her chest.
Leaning his forehead against hers, he stared down at her and breathed out heavily. “I can’t give you what you want. Not because I don’t want to. Because I won’t. I won’t risk you to that point.”
She had no idea how dangerous the information was that she wanted. There was a chance, a slim one in his opinion, but a chance that she could hold on to her life here.
The tears fell faster as she trembled in his arms, pain and confusion sweeping through her with a force that lanced his soul. “I’m going to die anyway, Travis. Whoever is determined to kill me will succeed eventually. Without the truth, I have no way of defending myself.”
She didn’t want to die. She wanted to live, to laugh, to love Travis. She wanted to hold on to him forever, but she wanted to know about the life she had lived, the enemies she had made.
She was vulnerable right now, and she knew it. She was too vulnerable.
“I won’t let anything happen to you.” His arms tightened around her, his hand pressing her head against his heart, where she wanted to stay forever.
“You can’t stop it.” She knew it. “There’s so much I don’t know, Travis. But I know I can protect myself.” She fought the wrenching sobs trying to tear from her body. “I know I can. Just as I know . . .” Her fingers dug into his flesh as she fought to hold on to him. “Just as I know you’re going to leave.”
She couldn’t hold on to him forever. Agony resonated through her at that realization. It was like a dagger, tearing holes in her heart, shredding her hopes. She was living day to day and she knew it, just as she knew she would be living a fool’s dream if she let herself believe otherwise.
“I won’t leave you in danger.” She could hear the promise in his voice. The sincerity.
“Unless you’re ordered to do so!” Anger was burning inside her along with the tears, tearing at her, driving a wedge through her soul and splitting it apart.
Jerking away from him, she swiped at the tears on her face before turning to face him. “Tell me who I was. Tell me what I was.”
Let me be able to trust him. The knot of hunger in her stomach was only building, the need to trust someone, anyone, was ripping her apart.
His nostrils flared as she watched the struggle on his face then.
“You’re asking me to sign your death warrant,” he finally said softly.
Lilly shook her head. “I’m asking you to save me, Travis. I can’t live like this. I can’t stumble around blindly any longer. I can’t live without trust, without someone to turn to, and I can’t live without understanding why I dream of blood and death and a fucking rifle in my hands that I know I’ll use to kill.” With each word her voice was rougher, more strained, the rage bleeding through until her fists were clenched, pressed into her stomach as she fought to hold back the agony resonating through her.
“Lilly Belle was trained to work with covert ops.” Travis’s voice was strained now, his gaze tormented. “You know that, Lilly, it was in the report provided by the investigator.”
“According to that report she was a high-priced call girl trained to protect herself and the agent she was fucking.” She sneered at him.
That hurt the worst. Knowing there was a chance, no matter what he said, that the world would see her as a whore.
“Don’t lie to me,” she whispered as his lips parted. “I know I wasn’t a call girl. I know I wasn’t there to provide a little secure entertainment for whatever bullshit agent needed a friendly fuck at the time. But that’s how the world will see me if that report is revealed. At least give me the truth, allow me that much.”
“No, you weren’t.” He breathed in deeply, Travis raking his fingers through his hair and glancing at the water running in the shower.
“Then what was I?” Desperation clawed at her chest then. If she couldn’t trust Travis, then who could she trust?
He moved closer. “I am the only friend you have in this situation,” he warned her, his voice so dark now, so rough she flinched. “You have no other allies. You have no one else you can discuss this with, do you understand me, Lilly? To the bottom of your soul, understand me or you will die. You will die and there will be no way in hell I can save you.”
Her lips parted, fear and hope slamming through her now as she stared back at him, her gaze still hazy from the tears.
“I already knew that.” She tried to stop her lips from trembling. “I’ve known since the second I awoke in that hospital six months ago that every breath I draw could be my last.”
“Only if you fuck up,” he growled. “Only if I fuck up. Lilly Belle was a private contract agent that worked with a select group of agents both private and government. She wasn’t trained to fuck, Lilly. She was trained to provide a dis
traction or to back up operations. And you were one of the best.”
“I killed,” she whispered as another tear fell.
His thumb eased the tear from her cheek. “You killed, just as I have, to save lives. That rifle you used covered my back more times than I can name, and each time, you saved my life. You kept me alive, Lilly. And as God is my witness, there are times you kept me sane.”
“I’m not the real Lilly Belle, am I? She enjoyed killing, Travis. I read the whole report. She killed for sport.”
He shook his head. “You’re not the real Lilly Belle. But the real Lilly Belle was the only identity available that could be used at the time. She was killed in Beirut six months after the crash you were rescued from. That cover worked perfectly. She wasn’t well known, she wasn’t seen often. Many of her jobs coincided with training exercises your father sent you on while you were learning to work with MI5. So it was the identity you were given.”
She shook her head slowly then. “You’re not the real Travis Caine either.” Pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place now. Memories were slowly shifting, revealing themselves as he spoke. Bits and pieces, shards of memory not yet whole.
Travis shook his head slowly. “I’m not the real Travis Caine.”
Lilly stilled. She could feel a part of herself flooding with hope now, emotions surging, demanding to race through her body at this tentative proof of trust.
If he trusted her, he loved her. A part of her knew that what Travis had just admitted would seal his own death if she ever revealed it. Not just at the hands of his enemies, but those he worked with as well.
Shadows shifted now and raged through her brain. Pain struck at her temples as she fought to pierce the shield between herself and her memories.
She could feel them closer now than they had ever been before. As though this small measure of trust from him had weakened whatever wall had been placed inside her head to keep the memories at bay.
“Who are you?” Her hand lifted, her fingers trembling as they touched his lips, felt the warmth there, remembered the passion. He touched her as she knew no other man could have touched her, emotionally as well as physically.
She needed him to trust her completely, just as she had done with him.
She had trusted him with her fears, her knowledge; would he do the same? Would he give her a piece of himself that she knew he would have given no one else?
His head lowered, his lips moving to her ear.
“I’m Lord Xavier Travis Dermont,” he whispered. “I’ve danced with you and once watched your eyes fill with dreams, and in that second knew I had taken the wrong woman to wife. I knew, Lilly, because that was the moment I first fell in love with you.”
A gasp passed her lips a second before his covered them. Filled with life, trust, and truth, the feel of his kiss shot straight to her soul, clenched her heart, and tore away the control that held back her tears.
Her hands speared into his hair to hold him closer to her. Her lips parted, her tongue stroking against his as it sipped from her, tasted her.
For the first time, they were meeting as equals. As two people who trusted, perhaps two people who loved, she thought as his arms pulled her closer and lifted her against him.
He shielded her with his body as he had always shielded her with his protectiveness. A sense of something falling into place inside her moved through her as she heard herself cry out, felt the crumbling of the wall that had surrounded her heart.
“You’re mine, damn you,” Travis said as he lifted her and placed her ass on the counter behind her. “You were always mine.”
She had truly always been his, because she remembered that dance. It had been her eighteenth birthday, when her hopes and dreams had been so strong. She remembered dancing with Lord Dermont and feeling the magic that had surrounded them. The same magic that surrounded them now, that fueled their kiss as his lips covered hers once more, magic that fueled each touch as he quickly removed the remainder of their clothes with desperate, eager hands.
It was as though the walls that had come down between them had released something far more than just the truth. It had released emotions held in check too long. A hunger they had been unaware had been banked.
As he shed his jeans, Lilly’s hands were there. She gripped the thick shaft as she slid from the counter to her knees, staring up at him, allowing her tongue to flick out and lick the heavily engorged crest.
“Fuck. Lilly.” The sound of his voice fueled this particular hunger. It began to rage through her, to boil in her veins and cause her mouth to water for the taste of him.
Staring up at him she painted the heavy crest with her tongue, flickering over it, licking beneath it, teasing him with the touch of her lips as his hands buried in her hair.
“How bloody damned beautiful you are,” he whispered, the proper aristocratic English accent slipping past his lips. For her. He was giving her all of himself. In this moment, she held parts of Travis that no other woman ever had and probably never would.
The agent as well as the aristocrat. The man that had, for a few years, helped shape a nation publicly as well as covertly. The one that now only had the option of working behind the scenes.
Except in her arms. No part of him was dead now.
As her lips parted and sank over the engorged crown of his cock, Lilly knew that in this moment, she had all of him.
“Sweet, pretty Belle,” he growled as the hardened flesh seemed to thicken more, to tighten until it seemed as hard as iron. Like silk covering steel, thick enough that her lips stretched around it, hard enough that they felt almost bruised as he began to thrust in shallow strokes past them.
Her hands gripped his thighs, feeling the response of his body as she sucked, licked. The muscles tightened, flexed. A heavy groan passed his lips as she rubbed her tongue against the ultrasensitive spot beneath the head.
His fingers tightened in her hair as she moved one hand from his thigh to his balls. There, her fingers played wickedly, stroking the roughened sac, cupping it, flexing around it.
Oh God, it was so good. The feel of his cock filling her mouth, thrusting past her lips and heating her tongue, was incredible. She felt every response to the pleasure she gave him. There was no guesswork. It was there against her lips and tongue, just as the moans were filling the room, his as well as hers.
Travis stared down at her, watching as she sucked his cock into her mouth and laved it with her tongue. It was the most incredible pleasure he had ever known. Nothing could be so good as this, as watching her take him with such intimacy, such hunger that flushed her face and hummed in her throat with desperate moans. The vibrations of her sounds of arousal echoed on the stiff flesh of his dick and sent spiraling fingers of sensation to attack his balls.
It was like being immersed in pleasure. His entire body vibrated with it and he clenched his abdomen desperately with the effort to hold back his release.
Eyes closed, face flushed, her expression showed such sensual pleasure that Travis could barely hold on to his own control as he watched her.
Her silken lips, the wet heat of her mouth, the flickering of her satiny tongue combined to shred what little control he had left after committing himself fully to her.
He was hers. As surely as she belonged to him, he belonged to her now.
Groaning at the need to hold back just a little longer, he clenched his teeth against the ecstasy pounding through his body and realized that he was slowly losing his grip on the tightly held trigger of release.
“God yes,” he moaned. “Sweet Lilly. Your mouth is so damned good.”
Too good. He was going to come. Damned if he could hold it back much longer. It was ripping through him, tightening through his muscles, building until he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold it back much longer. He couldn’t hold it back much lon
ger.
His balls tightened further, the length of his cock throbbed, pounded with the need for release.
“Lilly. I can’t hold back,” he groaned as his hands tightened in her hair to pull her back. “I’m going to come, baby.”
She moaned against the head, a soft vibration of hunger that had his cock spurting in warning release.
A cry sounded in her throat at the slight release, her suckling became harder, her tongue licking, probing, drawing in as much of the taste as possible as he lost that final thread of restraint.
Rapture washed through him. Ecstasy on a scale of complete soul-destroying pleasure tore through him as he felt the fierce, hot jets of come racing from the tip of his cock, spurting into her mouth. His body drew so tight he wondered if it would break. His head jerked back, both hands clenching in her hair as hard shudders racked his body and fed the deep pulses of seed from his balls.
And still, he wanted more of her.
Still hard, his cock so sensitive he knew he’d spill again soon, Travis pulled from her, jerked her to her feet, and lifted her to the counter once again.
“Wrap your legs around me.” He lifted her legs to his hips as he gripped the shaft of his dick and found the luscious, slick entrance to her pussy.
It was like fucking into silk and syrup. Tight muscles gripped the head of his cock as he pressed inside her, and the silken feel of her flesh wrapped around him like an intimate fist and sucked him inside, inch by inch.
Lilly’s back arched. Her hands gripped the edge of the counter, her legs locked around his hips, and she swore she was flying in a world of sensation so intense that even the brush of air in the room was a caress against her flesh.
Travis’s erection burrowed inside her, stretching the sensitive walls of her pussy and sending her into a maelstrom of such intense sensation that it was all she could do not to scream.