Blood Bound

by Rachel Vincent

  He sighed and propped himself up on one elbow, running the fingers of his other hand lightly over my stomach. “Olivia, neither of us is going to die anytime soon. I’m not going to let that happen, so worrying about it is pointless. As for the rest of this…” His hand slid lower, and I caught my breath. “I make time for the important things, and you’re the most important thing in the world to me.” He leaned closer and whispered against my skin as he dropped kisses down my throat. “Besides…” Kiss. “Anne texted ten minutes ago.” Kiss. “They’re all fine.” Kiss. And when he reached my collarbone, I threw my head back. “That gives us fifty minutes to play with.” Kiss. “And I can do a lot in fifty minutes….”

  His hand slid lower, and I arched into his touch. My body was alive every place my skin met his, and I craved more. And for the first time in six years, I could have more. I could have all of him. It might not be smart. It might even be the last time we’d be alone together, if whatever Elle had seen was related to this new working relationship. But no matter what had come before or what we would be made to do next, these stolen moments belonged only to us, a victory of faith and second chances.

  I pulled Cam up for a kiss I never wanted to end, then he helped me get my shirt off without aggravating my injury. I lifted my hips so he could slide the borrowed skirt down my legs, trailing his fingers the whole way. His touch gave me chills, yet somehow stoked a growing flame inside me, and the conflict of fire and ice amplified every touch. Magnified every sensation.

  I squirmed out of my underwear while he stepped out of his jeans, and then there was nothing between us. Nothing but memories, and the desperate hope that there’d be time to build a few more.

  For one long moment, Cam stood in front of the couch staring down at me. Looking at me as if he was trying to memorize the sight. I looked back, aching to touch him, and treasuring that moment of anticipation, when possibilities abound and reality promises even more.

  Then the moment was over and I had to touch him.

  I pulled Cam onto the couch with me and indulged my greedy hands, my selfish lips. I wanted to touch all of him, and his desires mirrored my own, and the blaze between us burned so hot anyone standing near would surely have been scorched.

  When I could stand no more teasing, no more promises without payoff, I arched into Cam’s touch, aching for more. Demanding it. His laugh was soft and deep in my ear, and his hand played a little deeper. A little rougher. “What do you want?” he whispered, and I groaned, overwhelmed by the possibilities. By needs I couldn’t put into words.

  “You.”

  “Anything more specific?” His lips trailed down my neck again, and I closed my eyes when he lifted my breast. My back arched when his mouth closed over my nipple, pulling gently, sending waves of heat to echo lower.

  “You. Now.”

  “Not yet…” he murmured, and I groaned. His tongue trailed down the center of my stomach slowly, leaving a hot, wet trail as he crawled down the length of my body. I writhed beneath him and sucked in a sharp breath when his hands slid beneath me, lifting my hips. His stubble scratched my thighs and I opened wider, breathing heavily, anticipation a wild blaze consuming me from inside.

  With the first stroke of his tongue—fire given rhythm and form—his hand slid up my side and over my stomach to cup my breast. I gasped and arched into him, lost in need building with every pause, cresting with every touch. Pleasure coiled, so hot and fast nothing else existed in that moment.

  “Wait!” I gasped. But he only pushed my hand away when I tried to pull him up. The strokes came faster, hotter, and I clenched the couch cushion beneath me. Then that single point of heat spilled over, and my entire body rocked with wave after wave of pleasure.

  Cam groaned, and for a second, the air was cold where he’d been. Then his weight settled over me and I pulled him closer, clutching at him as the muscles in his back shifted beneath my hand. He slid inside me in one stroke, then stayed there, moaning, while aftershocks of my own pleasure clenched around him. Then he was moving inside me, and that heat built again with every stroke.

  So familiar, yet so much better than I remembered, and the whole world funneled around me until there was only him, and us, and the rhythm that defined our reunion. And in that moment, as pleasure built between us, racing toward a conclusion I needed, yet was desperate to delay, it felt possible that there might never be anything else. That we could live like this forever. That I could subsist on Cam Caballero alone and never want for a thing in my life.

  Then the rhythm changed. The strokes deepened. And I fell right over the edge of need into a wordless, thoughtless convulsion of pleasure. Cam groaned in my ear, and my legs tightened around him, and we rode the last waves together until electric aftershocks gave way to a pleasant numbness, and he collapsed on the couch beside me, his body stretched down the length of mine.

  His hand splayed over my stomach, damp with our combined sweat, and his lips found my ear one more time. “I love you, Olivia,” he whispered, and my heart ahio as if it would break in half. “You think we’ll die if we stay together, but I’ve been dying slowly for the last six years. I’m taking my life back, Liv. Our life together. And this time, I’m not going to let you go.”

  Seventeen

  My phone rang in the dark, interrupting my first sleep since I’d been called out for Rawlinson’s job at two the previous morning. I glanced at Cam’s alarm clock, glowing red from his nightstand. Eleven o’clock at night. Shen had been dead twenty-seven hours. I’d been asleep for three.

  My nap was just a tease, and I knew before I even glanced at my phone that it was over.

  Groaning, I twisted away from Cam to free my good arm, then reached toward the nightstand to unplug my cell from the travel charger. Cavazos’s private number flashed on the screen.

  Son of a bitch… What the hell did he want?

  “Don’t answer it,” Cam mumbled, trailing one finger down my arm as I turned on the lamp. “You’ve earned a nap. Hell, you’ve earned a coma.”

  “No choice.” When Cavazos called, I had to answer. I sat up, and Cam’s warm arm wrapped around my bare waist. “Can you…not talk?” I turned to give him an apologetic smile, and he nodded. But he wasn’t happy.

  I pressed the accept-call button, and Cavazos was talking before I even had the phone at my ear. “What are you doing, Olivia?” He was pissed. I could tell by how smooth and low his voice was—the calm before the storm.

  “Working.”

  “You’re working? Right this minute? Getting paid?” he said, and my internal alarm sputtered to life and tried to wail.

  “Yes.” I knew the lie was a bad idea even as I said it, but no matter what he thought or wanted, Cavazos didn’t rule my life, and he had no right to monitor every second of it.

  Then the pain hit, right behind my eyes, and the room wobbled around me. And that’s when I understood. We’d found and disposed of Shen’s killer. My job for Anne was technically finished, and since she hadn’t paid a new retainer, I was no longer officially working for her.

  I hadn’t just lied, I’d lied about my state of employment, a minor breach of my contract with Cavazos.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  “If you’re getting paid for whatever you’re doing with Caballero, you’ve expanded your services since our agreement,” he said, and my heart dropped into my stomach with an almost-audible plop.

  He knew I was with Cam. Had one of his men seen us together?

  I took a moment to weigh my options: feign ignorance, or unleash honest anger? I went with the best of both worlds: feigned angry ignorance.

  “What the hell, Ruben?”

  “Get dressed. There’s a car waiting for you downstairs. If you’re not in it in five minutes, I’m sending them in after you.”

  Fuck. Fuck! He knew where we were. “You had me followed?”

  “No, I had you tracked.”

  Motherfucker! I stood and headed into the living room, in search of my clothes.
r />   “What are you…?” Cam asked, standing naked in the doorway, but I silenced him with a look as I stepped into my underwear, the phone pinned against my shoulder, wincing at the fresh pain spawned in my arm by the movement.

  “Is that him?” Cavazos said into my ear, sounding almost…eager. Hungry. He wanted a fight.

  “Leave him out of this,” I said, pulling up my borrowed skirt.

  “Leave me…?” Cam sputtered, and I scowled at him again, shoving my good arm into Vanessa’s T-shirt.

  “Leave him out of this?” Cavazos said. I had to take the phone away from my ear to pull the shirt over my head, and I could still hear him yelling. “If your ass isn’t in that car in—” he paused, and I pictured him looking at his watch “—three and a half minutes, I’m going to pull him so far into this he’ll wish he’d never even met you. No piece of ass is worth the pain you’re bringing to his doorstep. Are you hearing me, Olivia?”

  I sat on the couch next to Cam and pulled on my left sock, then shoved my foot into my boot.

  “I said, are you hearing me?”

  “Yes!” I shouted into the phone. “I fucking hear you! Three minutes.” Then I pressed the end-call button and dropped the phone on the coffee table. “Damn it!” Pissed beyond all control, I kicked the table with my booted foot and it skidded across the room, launching my phone into the wall. It hit the floor undamaged, unfortunately.

  “Cavazos?” Cam righted the table as I pulled my second sock on, and I could see the flare of temper in his eyes.

  “Yeah.”

  “He called you in?”

  “Yeah.” I shoved my foot into the last boot and laced it up like my fingers were on fire.

  “Don’t go. You don’t have to go.”

  I stood and met his gaze. “Anne’s no longer paying me. I have to go.”

  “But you already reported to him this week.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” I headed back into the bedroom to unplug my phone charger, and Cam followed, arms crossed over his chest. “He can request additional reports, at his convenience.” Or he could offer me side jobs, which I had to take unless they conflicted with existing work.

  “That didn’t sound like a request to me. Did he say there’s a car outside?”

  “Yup.” In the front room again, I picked up my satchel and shoved my phone charger inside, then bent for my phone, glancing around to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything. I’d have to leave everything related to Shen’s murder—I couldn’t take anything I wouldn’t want found in a search. Which meant my gun would have to stay, too.

  “How the hell does he know you’re here?”

  “Sometimes he has me watched. This time he had me tracked.”

  “You’re serious?” Cam said, and I glanced at him with both brows raised in answer. “He wants more from you than a tracking job, Liv.”

  “I’m aware. He just wants what he knows he can’t have—a pretty standard obsession for the rich and spoiled. But that doesn’t invalidate the importance of the work I’m actually doing for him.”

  Cam stepped between me and the front door. “The Liv I knew would never jump just because some abusive asshole told her to.”

  I exhaled slowly. “The Liv you knew didn’t have to jump. This one does.” He started to argue, but I put my whole hand over his mouth. “Stay here, Cam. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Just…stay in the apartment. Please.” He shoved my hand away, but I spoke over whatever he’d been about to say. “Swear.”

  “Hell no. If you’re going, I’m going with you.”

  “You can’t.” I tried to pull him away from the door, but he wouldn’t move. “Cam, you have three marks from Tower on your arm. If you come anywhere near Cavazos’s house, they’ll kill you….”

  “They’ll try.”

  “They’ll succeed. You can’t fight his entire security detail by yourself,” I insisted, and Cam tried to interrupt, but I spoke over him again. “And after you’ve tried and failed, Ruben’s going to take it out on me, for bringing you.”

  Cam’s mouth closed, and his protest died. But he stayed in front of the door. “If he touches you, I’ll kill him.”

  I sighed, hyperaware of the seconds ticking away while we argued. “He’s going to touch me. He’s been touching me for a year and a half, and there’s nothing either of us can do about that.” Except plot his ultimate destruction in new and sadistic ways.

  “We can kill him.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “Maybe we can.” If I could sneak a weapon in and kill him with one blow. My mark would die along with Ruben, so there’d be no resistance pain—in theory, that was as close as I could get to an easy out. However, if I couldn’t kill him with one blow, I’d wish I’d died instead. “But even if we manage to kill Ruben, we’d never make it out of there alive. I have to go, and you have to stay here until I get back. I’ll be fine.”

  Cam took me by both arms, below my bandage. “Olivia, you’re not listening.” He stared straight down into my eyes. “I can’t stand the thought of him touching you. At all. I can’t just sit here and wait for you to come back, imagining him all over you. Or hitting you. I can’t.”

  I pulled free from his grip, wincing over the fresh pain in my left arm, and returned his steady, pained gaze. “I’m only going to say this once—get over it. If I can deal with the reality, you can survive imagining it. Now move. I have to go.” This time he let me pull him away from the door. I kissed him one more time, then stepped out of the apartment and closed the door.

  Cam’s wordless shout of anger and frustration followed me into the hall, chased by the crash of something heavy hitting the wall.

  I stomped down the stairs, cursing Ruben beneath my breath the whole way.

  The car was a shiny black sedan, a stereotype on wheels. It was also double-parked and idling. As I stepped onto the curb, the back door opened and Tomas climbed out. He grinned. “I almost didn’t recognize you in a skirt.”

  “That makes two of us,” I said, sliding into the backseat. He sat next to me, and the car was rolling before he’d even fully closed the door. “I didn’t think he ever let you out of the house.”

  Tomas laughed. “I think he was trying to find a messenger you’d hesitate to kill.”

  “Smart man.” I had a soft spot for Tomas, because he’d never leered at me, taken liberties while patting me down or made innuendos about my relationship with his boss. But that only went so far. “I’d have killed you in a second if you laid one hand on Caballero.” Assuming Cam didn’t do it himself.

  Tomas laughed. “I believe you’d try.”

  “You better believe I’d do more than that.”

  He looked as if he just might.

  Twenty minutes later, the driver parked behind Cavazos’s fortress, and Tomas patted me down in the driveway, while the driver went through my satchel. “A year and a half, and I’ve never once tried to sneak in a weapon,” I said, as the driver handed my bag back to me. “You know that, right?”

  “Just followin’ orders,” he said.

  I could swear he used to call me “ma’am.”

  Tomas relieved the man covering the back door for him, and I continued through the kitchen to the back hallway. Cavazos had never received me anywhere but his office. In fact, I’d only seen a total of four rooms in the huge house—one of them a bathroom—and I’d never been above the first floor.

  Exhausted, but even more pissed off, I stomped down the unlit hall, mining my own anger for enough stamina to get me through this unexpected tête-à-tête. I was so focused on the rage I was nurturing that I didn’t realize someone had stepped out of the darkened bathroom as I passed until a hand wrapped around my throat and shoved me backward into the wall.

  “What the hell are you doing here in the middle of the night?” Michaela Cavazos’s piquant accent was thick with anger, and her words practically floated on a tequila cloud. She was drinking alone on a Friday night, while her husband was having me tracked.

  When I
tried to push her away, something cold and sharp poked my neck.

  Shit. She’dfinally lost it. My heart jumped so far into my throat I could practically taste it.

  “I don’t know.” I swallowed, trying to ignore the blade poking me just below my jaw, praying it wouldn’t break my skin and give her access to even a drop of my blood. “Command appearance.”

  “I know you are fucking him, and you will pay for it,” she slurred.

  “I’m not…” The knife trembled in her grip, and my pulse raced so fast I could hear it whooshing in my ears. “I swear, Meika, I have never slept with your husband. And I never will.”

  “Lying bitch.”

  I exhaled slowly. “You’ve seen my mark. You know it’s not red.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s not fucking you. It just means you don’t have to let him.” The knife left my throat, though her hand did not. “The apartment. The bank account. The mark on your thigh. Those do not add up to innocence.” The cold blade lifted my left sleeve to bare the bandage she could probably barely see in the dark. “Fresh ink?”

  “Unrelated injury. No ink at all.”

  “So it’s just the one mark, whore?” she whispered, and I gasped when she used the blade to lightly drag the material of Van’s skirt up my left leg. “I’m going to cut it out of you, and cut your cancer out of my marriage….”

  “For the last time, I’m not the problem in your marriage. And if you don’t put that damn blade up, I’m gonna start yelling, and you can explain why you’re holding one of his employees at knifepoint.” Normally I hate a tattletale, but then, I also hate being threatened with a knife, and she sounded drunk enough to forget there would be consequences for stabbing me.

  Her blade stopped just above my femoral artery. Guess she wasn’t that drunk. “Shout, and I will cut you. Whatever comes after will be worth watching you bleed out on my floor.”

  And I had no doubt she’d do it. She could slice my artery before Cavazos even made it out of his chair. “I’m not sleeping with him. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you take this up with your husband?”