by Cindy Dees
It was a waiting game now until the call came in from Al Dhib’s henchman to set up the meet.
As night fell over Marrakesh in a wash of dust-laden crimson, he sat on the third-floor balcony, overlooking the courtyard below, its fountain bubbling sleepily.
Tessa strolled through the courtyard, and he was reminded of how beautiful a woman she truly was. Her dark, wavy hair flowed loose around her shoulders tonight, and she wore a pale pink gandouri, a loose caftan-like garment made of some filmy, soft material that flowed around her body like water.
Seeing her like this made him wish he’d taken more time to find this woman under the warrior.
He leaned forward over the balcony and took advantage of the tall space’s excellent acoustics. “You look beautiful,” he said quietly.
She looked up at him sidelong, slanting him a look that was pure seduction. One corner of her mouth turned up, and she looked positively Mona Lisa–like—except totally hot—in that moment. “Thanks,” she replied, her voice low and husky.
He all but pitched over the railing as his body roared to life and demanded that he carry this woman off and make slow, passionate love to her all night long. He opened his mouth to invite her up to his room when Gunnar Torsten strode into the courtyard without warning.
Torsten said, “There you are. Tessa. Ray’s about to call his contact to let him know we have the End User Certificate. Wanna come listen?”
“Of course.”
Torsten looked up at Beau, pinning him with a stare. Crap. Gunnar knew Beau had been up here watching Tessa. “You coming down to listen, Lambo?”
“On my way.”
He jogged down the steps, swearing every step of the way. Torsten had to be aware that there’d been something going on between him and Tessa in Louisiana. The guy didn’t miss a thing, after all.
Beau rounded the corner into the living room and everyone was there.
Torsten asked him, “And the generals who signed the EUC know to expect a call from Al Dhib? They’ll verify its authenticity?”
Beau nodded. “Their phone numbers are even included in the document.”
“All right, then,” Torsten declared. “Everything’s in place. We’re ready.”
Marco said briskly, “Let’s pull the trigger, then, and catch this bastard.”
Low-level panic had been humming through Beau’s gut all day, and it exploded now. He should speak up. Voice his objections. Tell them all to come up with another plan, one that didn’t involve throwing a rank amateur into a deadly situation she was no way, no how, prepared to handle.
Of course, Tessa would disagree. And furthermore, she would never forgive him if he yanked the rug out from under her when she was so close to becoming operational. Better than most people, he knew just how stubborn she could be. She would die before she admitted she was in over her head. Dammit.
Later. He would pull Torsten aside. Have an honest conversation with him about his reservations. Convince him Tessa wasn’t ready to go into the field. And that she certainly wasn’t ready to go into the field alone and face off against one of the world’s most dangerous men.
“Make the call, Ray,” Torsten was saying.
Nonononono. Beau watched in dismay as Torres pulled out a cell phone and called Tarek Sadiq to let him know the End User Certificate had arrived and the meet with Ray’s “boss” was a go. Tessa being that boss, of course.
Curses flowed through every corner of Beau’s brain, but there was nothing he could say to stop this runaway train. Everyone else seemed to think it was a just peachy idea to throw Tessa to the wolves like this. Couldn’t they see? Didn’t they know she wasn’t trained for this?
Sure she’d had a few months of running around in the field with the rest of the guys. But he knew what initial training with a team entailed, and it was mostly how to divide up the jobs of a mission and avoid shooting each other. The mental toughness required to go undercover and maintain a cover identity against a hardened arms dealer was a totally different ball game.
“Okay,” Torres announced. “The meet’s on for tomorrow night. Tarek will call me with a location an hour or so before we’re supposed to be there.”
As Beau continued to scream silent objections in his head, the others pored over a map of the city, guessing all of the places Al Dhib might choose for the meeting and planning contingencies for pulling Tessa out of each if the meeting should go badly.
Ideally, Ray and Marco would be allowed to stay with her during the meeting with Al Dhib. They wouldn’t be armed, for surely Al Dhib’s security team would disarm them. But they were both highly trained hand-to-hand combat specialists. And they could still be lethal with improvised weapons like a broken glass, a heavy ashtray or even a ballpoint pen.
In all fairness, Tessa was also a trained martial artist. She wouldn’t be completely helpless, either.
Still. Three unarmed soldiers against a small army of Al Dhib’s bodyguards, all armed to the teeth? If even one thing went wrong, it would turn into a suicide mission.
He couldn’t lose Tessa. He’d just found her again, dammit!
Of course, he didn’t want to see Ray or Marco die, either. They’d been teammates of his for years, and he considered them brothers.
But Tessa—that was different. He would die, too, if something happened to her. He’d been responsible for training her and clearing her to go on with her training. If she died, it would be on his head. He would have killed the woman he lov—
Whoa. Hard stop. The woman he what?
He couldn’t even bring himself to think the L-word.
It was bad enough they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other. And if he had anything to say about it, they would get back to that state of affairs as soon as possible. But that was just healthy lust and mutual attraction. When had it turned into...more?
“You with us, Lambo?” Torsten asked from the head of the table.
He jerked his attention to the satellite image of Al Dhib’s residence lying on the table. The white stucco structure, a freaking palace, was surrounded by manicured gardens, huge fences and dozens of roaming bodyguards.
“Ingress and egress points are limited to here and here...” Torsten droned.
None of this planning mattered. Not one bit. If the meeting with Al Dhib went south, Tessa and the other guys would be dead before they could get out of the room.
Beau pretended to play along with the idea that they could save Tessa if the meeting imploded, but neither his heart nor his head was in the charade. He was relieved when the planning session broke up, and he retreated to his room immediately afterward.
He stretched out on the low platform bed and stared out the window. Light pollution from the city obscured all but the brightest stars, and the night sounds of Marrakesh washed over him. Cars, the occasional siren, a church bell—there must be a Coptic Christian church nearby, calling for the last prayer of the night.
The sounds faded but not his panic over Tessa’s meeting nor his sense of utter helplessness to stop this travesty of sending her to her doom.
The moon, a waning crescent, came into view.
It wheeled out of view again. And still he lay there trying to figure out a way to pull Tessa out of the meeting. Hell, every guy on the team knew the Venezuelan dossier as well as she did. Why couldn’t one of them take the meeting and pretend to be Ray and Marco’s “boss”?
He knew the answer, of course. Tessa was half-Venezuelan herself and had spent time there as a kid. She was by far their best bet to pass for a Venezuelan revolutionary.
Tessa not only was the right nationality, but her gender would also unquestionably startle Al Dhib. Beau could only pray that it would throw him off enough that the arms dealer would terminate the meeting without ever doing a deal. Then maybe Tessa had a chance of escaping alive. Maybe.
He did
n’t know how long he lay there, tossing and turning. Hours. It had to be approaching 3:00 a.m. when he heard his door latch squeak faintly and jerked to full combat alert.
The door eased open just far enough to admit a slender figure in gym shorts and a baggy T-shirt.
Tessa.
A dozen emotions roared through him. Lust. Frustration. Satisfaction. Relief.
But mostly relief.
Wordlessly, he held up the thin blanket, and she slipped under it and into his waiting arms. He wrapped her in his embrace wordlessly, too emotional to do anything else at first. She matched the urgency of the embrace, clinging to him like her life depended on it.
She didn’t need to speak. Her first mission as a Medusa was tomorrow, and it was going to be dangerous as hell. She would be on her own to spar with one of the world’s most dangerous men. Of course she was tense. Nervous. Scared, maybe.
For all he knew, her adrenaline was so jacked up that this was a pure sex visit.
He didn’t care. If she wanted to use his body for meaningless sex, he was all over it. He would take her any way he could get her. And if he was lucky, she would receive the unspoken message he was trying desperately to send to her, that he still had feelings for her and wanted to be with her for the long-term.
“Why can’t you sleep?” she muttered. “I know why I can’t.”
“I’m worried about you,” he admitted.
“At some point a person who’s been learning to swim has to get thrown into the deep end of the pool. You guys can train me forever but eventually, I have to go out on missions and learn the rest of being a Medusa in the field.”
“This shouldn’t be your first op,” he growled.
She shrugged. “It is what it is. And it’s not like any mission we do is easy.”
We. She was, indeed, one of them now. He bit out, “I still don’t like it.”
Her palm slid up his chest and came to rest cupping his cheek. “I know. But Gun saw something in me. He thinks I’ve got what it takes and even you agreed I’m Medusa material.”
“If I’d known how I was going to feel about you, I’d have washed you out the first day I met you.”
She sat up indignantly. “Seriously? Are you really that selfish? You would have denied me achieving my lifelong dream because you were afraid?”
He huffed. “You know it’s not like that. This—whatever it is between us—isn’t just sex. Believe me. I’ve jumped in and out of the sack with enough women for just sex to know the difference.”
She subsided slowly, lying back down beside him. “Agreed,” she said reluctantly.
“What? You’ve had meaningless sex with women, too? Hawt. Can I watch next time?”
She poked him in the ribs, and he rolled over on an elbow to tickle her back. She muttered “Uncle” quickly, which was just as well. It was hard to engage in a tickle war in silence. And he shared each of his bedroom’s side walls with one of the other guys’ rooms.
Propped on one elbow, he stared down at her in the faint starlight. Man, he never got tired of looking at her. He pushed her hair off her forehead gently, reveling in the way her cheekbones cut the darkness and the curve of her jaw seduced the night. He leaned in to taste her full lips, to sink into her heated breath, to lose himself in her and to forget what she was going to attempt tomorrow.
“I didn’t come here to talk,” she murmured.
Fair enough. He hadn’t invited her into his bed to talk, either.
She reached up, wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down to her as her mouth and thighs opened to welcome him.
His thoughts still spun. Not only did her life rest on her performance, but the future of the Medusas might very well depend on how tomorrow went. That was a crap-ton of pressure to carry around. The kind of pressure that led to miscalculations and mistakes. The kind that got good operators killed.
She nipped his lip with enough force to yank his full attention back to her. He smiled against her mouth. She was right. If he was in bed with the hottest woman on the planet, the least he could do was pay attention to her.
He pushed her sleep shirt over her head and skimmed his hands down her hips, taking her shorts with them. He discarded them somewhere across the room. She returned the favor quickly, stripping his shorts and T-shirt off, too. And then they were body to body, flesh to flesh.
She was sleek and warm against him, and his entire being strained toward her. He wanted to engulf her, to pull her into his heart where she would always be safe. To protect her forever.
Which she was having none of.
Using a slick wrestling move, she dumped him onto his back and straddled his hips, taking control of their kiss. Amused, he let her. Frankly, her assertiveness was a huge turn-on.
He reached up to cup her breasts, and as she leaned forward, took them into his mouth one at a time, licking and sucking her nipples into hard, excited peaks. Tessa was breathing in little gasps now, and she arched her back, offering her chest more fully to his mouth.
He suckled at her breasts gently, then hard, then gently again, laving the nubs with swirling strokes of his tongue until she moaned under her breath. He ignored her tugs at his hair. She wanted to kiss him again, but he wasn’t done with her body yet. He lifted her by the hips, nibbling his way down to her waist, relishing how it tucked in sweetly to muscular abs that were, at the moment, soft and welcoming.
Laying his hand on her belly, he relished the magic of her body. Life maker, life giver. Mother, lover, warrior. Somehow, she managed to encompass all of them, and he stood in awe of her for it.
Her fingers wound into his hair again, but this time, she wasn’t taking no for an answer. She slid up and pushed him downward at the same time. My, my, my. She’d gotten bold in her old age.
He slid between her thighs and lifted her hips to meet his mouth. God, she tasted good. Salty and sweet. And her folds were already plump and swollen, the bud of her desire a hard pearl hiding between them. He swirled his tongue around it and she gasped.
Hah. Thought she’d exhausted his bag of tricks, did she? He still had a few tucked up his sleeve. He sucked at her hard enough to make her hips rock forward involuntarily.
Her thighs trembled and she breathed in short, sharp little gasps that drove him out of his mind. She came apart on him, shattering violently, both hands slapped over her own mouth to keep from crying out.
He eased his ministrations, laving her flesh softly for a minute until her breathing settled slightly. And then he did it all over again. After her next hard orgasm, she toppled over onto her side, panting.
“You’re not worn out, are you?” he teased. “I’m just getting warmed up, babe.”
“I sincerely hope so,” she responded breathlessly.
He surged up over her, his thigh between hers, her body pinned deliciously beneath his. “What do you want?” he asked her low.
“You know darned good and well what I want.”
“Tell me.”
“I want you. All of you. Until I can’t remember my own name.”
He all but came apart then and there. But he gritted his teeth and hung on to sanity. Barely. If she was going to die tomorrow, he was by golly going to give her the night of her life.
Huh. The married guys talked about farewell sex being the best sex they ever had with the possible exception of homecoming sex. He got it now.
He trailed his fingers down her belly and between her legs, stroking her slick folds, teasing her ultra-sensitized core.
“More?” he murmured.
A short laugh. “Jerk!”
He laughed quietly and started all over again, bringing her right to the edge of an orgasm and then retreating. She caught on fast, though, and grabbed his shoulders with all of her considerable strength, wrapping her muscular legs around his hips.
“If you even thin
k about trying that again, I’m going to have to hurt you, mister. I need you inside me. Right now.”
Laughing under his breath, he leaned down to kiss her. “You’re amazing. As the lady wishes...”
He reached over her to the nightstand and with one hand found a condom. He ripped the packet open with his teeth and rolled on protection. Neither of them were likely to have any diseases, for they were medically tested all the time. But neither of them needed a surprise pregnancy, either. Assuming Tessa was even fertile at the level of intensity she exercised at.
He rose up on his knees and positioned himself at her eager entrance. “Ready?” he murmured low.
“I was born ready, soldier.”
She reached up over her head and grabbed two of the elaborately carved spindles that formed the headboard. Her eyes glowed like embers, sensual and wild, daring him to take her.
He plunged forward. Hard. He seated himself to the hilt in her tight heat and paused to absorb the heady glory of making this woman his. Her internal muscles pulled at him hungrily, silently begging for more. He fell forward onto his hands, one on either side of her head.
She stared up at him and he stared down at her. He would like to say he knew what she was thinking, but she’d changed in the past six months and held her cards a lot closer to the chest than she had in Louisiana. He silently tried to communicate how much he’d missed her and how badly he’d wanted her. It was anybody’s guess if she got that message or not.
He withdrew partway. Paused for an endless, agonizing moment, and then plunged home again. She groaned under her breath, and he was shocked to realize he’d done the same. Man, the pleasure this woman dragged out of him. It was unlike any other sex he’d ever had.
“Again,” she commanded.
One corner of his mouth turned up. “So pushy.”
“You’re gonna see pushy if you don’t get busy.”
Laughing silently, he plunged into her again, this time setting up a slow, mind-blowingly incredible rhythm he kept up until he couldn’t think and practically couldn’t see.