“Good save,” she said, noting that he hadn’t argued with the “bad” or “dangerous” bit. She tugged on his hand, pulling him toward the hallway. “That first part didn’t quite sound like a compliment, but then you pulled it off.”
Rick came to a sudden stop, nearly jerking her off her feet.
“Ow.”
“I was serious,” he said, frowning.
She let him keep his grip on her hand. “I know that,” she retorted. “It scares me a little that you’re thanking God for me, so I made a joke. Okay?”
He met her gaze. “Okay. But I still can’t help that I love you.”
“That’s not as scary as it used to be. And I love you, too.” She pulled on his hand. “Can we go get our picanha now?” The sooner they went, the sooner she’d be able to get back, and the sooner she’d be able to rescue Clark the Anatomy Man.
Chapter 18
Saturday, 2:08 a.m.
“I didn’t ask to fly the helicopter until we were out over the water and away from any civilians,” Samantha said, climbing out of the back of the stretched Mercedes S600.
“That didn’t make me feel any better. The Atlantic Ocean is rather substantial. And deep.”
She laughed. “The pilot was right there. And we had flotation devices in the back.”
Ben closed the rear door behind them. “Would you like some assistance getting into the house?” he asked.
Samantha patted him on the shoulder. “We’re good. If you come out in the morning and find us on the driveway, though, I give you permission to drag us inside.”
With a quick, stifled smile Ben nodded. “With pleasure. Good night, Miss Sam, Mr. Addison.”
“I think the lad believes we’re pissed,” Rick observed as the car pulled around the side of the house to the garage.
“You’re pissed,” Sam amended. “I’m a little tipsy. What the hell are mango mojitos, anyway?”
“Mango rum and mint leaves,” he answered, “among a few other things.”
“I’m glad I only had two of them.” She glanced at her wristwatch. Damn. Her buzz wasn’t too bad, but she was not going to try a B and E unless she was one hundred percent sober. Clark’s rescue would have to wait until tomorrow.
“Do you have somewhere to go?” Rick asked, pushing open the front door and stepping aside to let her enter first.
He was obviously more sober than she’d given him credit for. “I was going to go on a dummy rescue,” she said, deciding she’d give that honesty thing a try again, “but it can wait until tomorrow.”
“Good.” Rick snagged her arm, tugging her up against him as he backed into the closed door.
She leaned up along his hard chest, kissing him openmouthed, their tongues dancing. With his free hand he unzipped her jeans and slid his fingers beneath her panties. The pleasant warmth already running through her spiraled into intense, insistent heat.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice a little ragged, “does this mean you’d like to make an appointment with me?”
He curled a finger, pressing into her. “Clear your calendar,” he murmured, taking her mouth again.
Holy smokes. She’d gotten to fly—or hover, actually—a helicopter for a couple of minutes tonight. It had been thrilling and exciting, but this was better. Much better. Rick’s arms, his skin, his warmth and the way she knew she was safe in his company—he stirred her up more than a boatload of mango mojitos.
Withdrawing his hand from her pants, he went to work unbuttoning her blouse, trailing his fingers across her breasts as he did so. She hissed in a breath. During the day the foyer would have been busy, crisscrossed with maids, housekeepers, and security. At this time of night the only people she had to look out for were the three security guards who patrolled the inside of the house.
Whether she had the power to hire and fire them or not, she still didn’t want anybody stumbling over her while Rick had his hands in her bra or underwear. “Let’s go upstairs,” she rasped, as his fingers closed over her right nipple.
“Right here on the floor,” he said, pulling her blouse and bra aside and replacing his fingers with his mouth.
Samantha put a hand against the door to brace herself as her knees went wobbly. She knew it wasn’t from the rum. Christ, he felt good. But her brain hadn’t totally shut down. Not yet, anyway. “Pick a room, sailor,” she insisted, grabbing his hair and pulling him away from her chest.
“You’re a tease; that’s what you are,” he panted, and grabbed her hand, towing her into the downstairs sitting room and slamming the door behind them. “There.”
“Lock it. You just made a lot of noise.”
“Bloody…Fine.” Rick strode back to the door and twisted the lock.
As he came back to where she stood beside the old Georgian cabinets, he pulled his jacket and shirt off, tossing them onto the floor. Even if she’d come up with another thing to protest she wouldn’t have, not when he had that look on his face.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Just you.”
Samantha pulled off her own blouse, knowing that if he had to mess with it much longer he would just rip it off, which would suck because she happened to like it. She let him unfasten her bra, since he liked that. Sinking onto the floor to lean back against a leather-covered chair, she tilted her head back as his mouth closed over her left tit. Mm. With his mouth occupied, he pulled off her shoes and then tugged down her jeans, dropping them somewhere close to his shirt.
Her panties followed; she’d lost a handful of them over the past year, and wondered on occasion what the housekeepers must think, discovering them tossed behind bookshelves or hanging off lamps or burning in the fireplace or something. Rick, of course, thought it was some kind of mark of his virility when he could make her underwear vanish. Like he needed anything other than himself for that.
Rick took her by the hips and tugged her forward away from the chair. When she was flat on her back he sank down, wrapping his hands around her thighs and leaning in to tease between her legs with his lips and tongue.
Samantha gasped, her eyes practically rolling back in her head at the sensation of his mouth on her. Pretty much from the time their clothes started to come off she was ready to go, but Rick liked to drive her right to the edge—or past it—before he got down to serious sex.
“Get your damn pants off,” she demanded, writhing and making pitiful moaning sounds.
He lifted his head to meet her gaze. “You do it,” he said.
Tightening her legs around his shoulders, she rolled them both over, putting herself on her stomach and him on his back. She didn’t stay in shape for nothing. She sat up, straddling his bare chest. “Are you ordering me around?” she asked with a slow smile.
Rick nodded. “I am.”
She bent down and kissed him again. “In that case,” she murmured, having trouble breathing as his hands cupped her breasts again, “I guess I’ll make an exception and take care of that.”
With a laugh he rose up on his elbows to watch as she slid off him and went to work on the fastening of his jeans. “I’m glad you’re feeling cooperative.”
“Yeah, well, that’s your fault. You have quite the incentive package.”
“Don’t you mean packet?”
“Nope.” She opened his pants and pulled them down as he lifted his hips to help her. “Package.”
He kicked off his loafers, and she tossed his jeans and boxers over the chair. Sedentary as his life could be, he still managed to keep in shape—a living, breathing, sexy-as-hell work of art. And he was all hers, apparently.
“Come up here,” he said, taking her hand and drawing her up along his body again.
“You revved me up,” Samantha breathed, reaching down to close her hand around his cock. “Now it’s your turn.”
“I’m always revved up around you.” He kissed her, slow and deep, rolling them at the same time so she was underneath him. “The second you walk into a room, every time you smile,” he
continued, pushing his hips forward and sliding inside her, “your laugh, your frown, your—”
Samantha covered his mouth with her fingers. “I get it,” she managed, locking her ankles around his thighs as he started a slow, deep thrust, “I’m very cool.”
“You’re more than cool. You’re…amazing.”
Blue eyes held her gaze as he moved inside her. Tonight he looked so…soulful, almost like she could drown in those deep blue eyes of his. All the arguments lately, the destruction of her emergency backpack, the insistence that she get going on the garden, lunch with Katie and all the talk about kids, and she still couldn’t imagine anything better than this.
It all spun together in her mind, mixing with arousal and pleasure and memory—her memory of that weird conversation with Donner and his saying Rick was dancing around giving her something…
“Oh, my God!” she gasped, her body shuddering with release even as her brain seized up.
“That’s what I like,” Rick breathed, speeding his pace until he shuddered and lowered himself on her.
Samantha didn’t feel nearly as relaxed as he obviously did, or as she usually did after a very nice orgasm. He was thinking about proposing to her. About marriage. What the hell was she supposed to make of that? Holy crap. She pushed at his shoulder. “Off,” she demanded.
He lifted his head to look down at her. “What’s wrong?” he asked, his breathing still hard and fast.
She felt even less ready for conversation. “You’re heavy,” she improvised, shoving again.
Rick lifted off of her, sitting as she scrambled to her feet. “Did I hurt you?” He ran a hand gently down her calf, his voice husky.
“No! Of course not.” His shirt would do a better job of covering her than her own, so she snatched it up and pulled it on, buttoning up the front despite her shaking fingers. “Something just occurred to me, and I need to take care of it.”
“You thought of something else you needed to take care of right in the middle of us making love?” he asked darkly.
“‘Making love’ sounds lame. We were having sex. And I wasn’t doing my taxes or anything, so don’t get your testosterone all in an uproar. Something just popped into my head. Don’t get all bent out of shape.” She hurried over to the door and unlocked it. Air. She needed some air. A lot of air.
Rick pulled on his jeans and stood, striding over to close the door again when she started to pull it open. “I am bent out of shape,” he snapped. “So tell me what thought popped into your head, Samantha.”
“It’s my thought, not yours. Get out of the way.”
“No.”
She let go of the door handle. “Fine. I’ll go out the window.”
He grabbed her shoulder, pushing her back against the door. “What the devil’s got you so frightened all of a sudden that you’re trying to run away?”
“I am not fucking running away. Quit screwing with the way things are before you totally ruin everything! Now let go!”
Richard let her go. She scrambled out the door and for the stairs, which relieved him a little bit. At least she wasn’t running out the front door. Yet. He squatted down to gather up the rest of their scattered clothes, then sat in the old leather chair, the shoes and garments in his arms.
She’d figured out that he meant to propose. That was the only reason he could think of for her to make the “quit screwing with the way things are” statement. Not quite the reaction he’d hoped for. And he had a ring to pick up tomorrow. “Shit,” he muttered.
How could he do what he did, successfully managing several billion dollars’ worth of business concerns, and not be able to figure out one woman? What was the difference, anyway, between staying together and staying together with rings on their left hands? Okay, kids, roots—he understood all of that. But they were so alike. How could he want it so badly and her not at all?
It wasn’t possible. Whatever she might say, she was just scared. She’d lived day to day for so long that of course the idea of committing to a future terrified her. “You stupid git,” he said to himself, standing again. He couldn’t leave it like this. If he did, she might very well vanish before he had a chance to convince her otherwise.
The bedroom door was closed and locked. Bloody wonderful. He maneuvered the clothes and shoes around until he had two knuckles free. “Samantha?” he called, knocking.
Nothing.
Since he’d wrecked her backpack, and thank God for that, she couldn’t have gotten her things together and left already. He knocked again. “Sam?”
At the far end of the hall he heard a low cough, and jumped.
“Problem, Mr. Addison?” Pablo Esqueda, one of Solano Dorado’s night security guards, asked as he walked closer. “I have a master key, if you—”
The door clicked and opened a couple of inches. “I’m good,” he said, using one of Samantha’s expressions and elbowing the door open far enough for him to get through it. He closed it behind him with one bare foot and dumped the clothes onto the couch. “Why do the security guards have master keys?” he asked, spying Samantha’s backside as she disappeared into her dressing closet.
“Because if there’s a problem inside a locked room, they should be able to get in,” her muffled voice came.
“Into our bedroom?” Yes, he was avoiding the subject, but just talking with her might get him some of the information he very badly needed.
“I just wanted some breathing room, Rick.”
Of course she wouldn’t want to avoid the subject, but he still needed to tread a little more carefully. “What happened to the thing you needed to take care of?”
She stepped outside the closet as he approached it. Putting her hands on her hips, wearing nothing other than his gray shirt, she gazed at him steadily with her chin up. Scared, but defiant. His Samantha. “Are you going to bust my chops?” she asked. “Or are you going to step back and let me catch my damned breath?”
God, she was sharp. And lethal. And she’d just put this entire business squarely on his shoulders—which at the moment was precisely where it belonged. It was bloody tricky, when his action would depend on her reaction, and yet he had to make his move first. “I have never done anything with the intention of restricting your breathing,” he said slowly. “And I never mean to do anything to cause you hurt or distress, now or in the future. I hope the way I feel about you isn’t what’s distressing you.”
“I like the way you feel about me. Don’t screw with it. With this.” She gestured between the two of them.
“Take your breathing room, Samantha. But neither one of us is much for standing still. Sooner or later I’m going to want to walk forward, and I’m going to ask you to take that next step with me.”
She shivered; he could see her hands shaking. Despite the abrupt urge to wrap his arms around her, he stayed where he was and waited.
“That is not the thing to say if you want me not to pass out.”
“Apologies.”
Her lips quirked. “I can’t think about this while I’m looking for Stoney and Minamoto’s armor and Anatomy Man,” she finally said. “I’ve loved this last year. And I love you. Bu—”
He held up his hand. “Breathe,” he said, hopefully hiding his own abrupt alarm. He was not going to let her finish that sentence. “I love you. Relax. Let’s get some sleep.”
Samantha tilted her head. “You’re not going to push…anything?”
“Not tonight.” That was for bloody certain. As for after, he was already fighting against the ego and pride that were demanding to know why any woman would hesitate to marry him. He and Samantha would marry; he just needed to find a way to make certain that would happen.
Luckily at the last second Richard decided to take his cell phone into the bathroom with him, because it rang the second before he stepped into the shower a little after nine o’clock in the morning. He grabbed for it, hoping the echoing ring hadn’t awakened Samantha, and checked the caller ID.
“Tom,” he said in
a low voice.
“Are you in a cave?”
“The bathroom. What do you want?”
“I’m returning your message from yesterday.”
Richard blinked, trying to remember what he’d been doing yesterday before the helicopter ride to Islamorada. He definitely remembered what had happened after they’d returned. “Oh. Right.”
“So do you still want me to go with you to you-know-where in an hour?”
“Why are you speaking in code?”
“Because Jellicoe’s sneaky.”
He couldn’t dispute that. Did he want Tom to go with him to Harry Winston? This was his decision, his and Samantha’s. Tom didn’t approve, and while Katie liked Samantha, he knew she hesitated as well. And after last night, he didn’t want that around him. Not while he was picking up the engagement ring. Unable to help a quick glance toward the closed bathroom door, he lowered his voice still further. “No. I’ve got it covered. Thanks for returning my call.”
“Um, okay. I’ll see you later.”
“Ta.”
Slowly Richard closed the phone and set it back on the counter. Then he silently unlocked the bathroom door and opened it. Leaning out, he peered around the sitting room. Nothing. That didn’t mean she wasn’t there, though. He wanted to be certain that Samantha hadn’t overheard any of that conversation. As Tom had so eloquently put it, she was sneaky.
Naked, he crept through the dark sitting room and leaned around the half-closed bedroom door. She lay in bed, her eyes closed and her breathing slow and steady. He tried to feel relieved, but in truth he still couldn’t be certain that she hadn’t been on the other side of the bathroom door, drawn her own conclusions, and then fled back to the bed before he’d been able to move.
“Samantha?” he whispered.
She stirred, throwing an arm across her face. “What?” she grumbled.
“Did my phone call wake you up?”
“No, you woke me up just now,” she said, sitting up to look at him. “Is something wrong?”
Git, git, git. He straightened, since creeping obviously wasn’t necessary any longer. “No. I was trying to let you sleep in, and apparently I’m an idiot.”
A Touch of Minx Page 21