“Roger that,” he whispered and sealed their lips again, making her senses reel.
With a nudge, Alec pushed aside her bra, freeing her pregnancy-swollen breasts for his exploration. His nimble fingers cupped and caressed, tested and teased. His touch made her breasts tingle and tighten, sending spirals of liquid heat to her core.
He moved his kiss to the hollow below her ear, along her throat and down…down. When he reached her chest, nuzzling the valley between her breasts, Alec paused. She peeked up at him, puzzled why he’d stopped. In the watery morning light, he stared at her nakedness. The untamed hunger in his eyes stole her breath. Set her on fire.
Erin’s breath shuddered from her on a shaky sigh. She ran her fingers through his mussed hair and savored the exquisite sensations he stirred with his hands, his mouth. Hooking her leg behind his knees, she raised her hips to grind against his, longing for more contact with his body. In response, he wedged a leg between hers, pressing his thigh high against the juncture of her legs. While he continued nibbling and kissing her breasts, her neck, her ears, Erin insinuated a hand between them and found the thick, rigid proof of his arousal. She closed her hand around him, and Alec bucked as if hit by an electric bolt. He sucked in a sharp breath and met her eyes with a gaze that was pure blue fire. With a grin tugging her lips, she drew one finger up the length of him, then back down. A growl of satisfaction rumbled from his chest, and she felt the shock wave that shuddered through him. His response to her was encouraging, empowering.
“Ah, sweetcakes, you’re killin’ me.”
She smiled smugly. “Good.”
Bracing on one trembling arm above her, Alec used his free hand to drag her panties down and invade her most intimate region. She arched into his hand, eager for his touch. He sank one finger deeper into her warmth and stroked until she thought she might fly apart. She clung to him, her body tense and vibrating, careening toward oblivion.
Then he stopped.
Pulling his hand away from her, he raised his head and grew still.
Erin almost wept with frustration. “Please, Alec…don’t tease—”
He laid his fingers over her mouth and shushed her. “Do you hear that?”
All Erin heard was the pounding of the blood in her ears, the rasp of her shallow, agitated breathing. “No, I don’t hear any—”
The low rumbling reached her, and she perked her ears to the sound.
“What time is it?” Alec asked as he grabbed her arm and turned her wrist to check her watch. He bit out a curse and flew into action.
“Get a move on, sweetcakes. That’s our ride. We’ve got to make tracks down to the pickup spot, or Jake’ll leave without us.”
Erin blinked at him in disbelief. “N-now? But we—”
“Now. Grab only what you have to take. No time to break camp.” With quick, efficient moves, Alec found the sleeping-bag zipper and peeled open their snug cocoon.
The cold morning air hit her overheated and thrumming body like a slap. She gasped and bolted upright. Disappointment and unspent passion swirled through her, and she wanted to scream her frustration as she started gathering her clothes to dress. With effort, she squelched the urge to complain. They were both alive and rescue was imminent. So what if she’d lost the chance for a few moments of unbridled bliss with Alec?
Erin sighed, unconvinced. She still felt robbed of something precious and rare.
Alec grunted as he yanked a shirt over his head and paused long enough to roll his shoulders and rub his neck.
Pausing, she sent him a concerned glance. “Alec?”
“Just stiff muscles. Nothing a little heat and hydration won’t fix.” He slipped a finger under the strap of her bra and slid it up to her shoulder. Catching her chin between his fingers, he smacked a kiss on her mouth and gave her one of his intense, soul-shattering stares. “Later.”
The accompanying heat in his eyes left no question what he intended for later, and the quivers of passion that had receded in her blood flashed hot again.
Once dressed, Alec snatched open the tent flaps and rushed outside. Erin scrambled to follow. She donned as many of the dry shirts as she could find and held the parka out for him. “Your turn to wear this.”
He waved it away. “We’ll be moving fast, making our own heat. The bulk will just slow me down. Grab that pack, and let’s go.”
As soon as she picked up the dry backpack, Alec took it from her, slung it over his shoulder and seized her hand. “Tell me if I go too fast for you.”
With that, he turned and ran, hauling her along behind him.
Erin stumbled as she tried to keep up with his fast clip. No doubt, without her in tow, he’d be flying down the steep slope toward the helicopter.
The whop-whop-whop of the helicopter grew louder as they dashed down the mountain. Adrenaline alone kept Erin moving.
Within minutes they reached a clearing where a sleek helicopter sat, turbine rumbling and propellers spinning. Her pulse and her pace picked up speed as they darted out of the trees and made tracks across the snowy field to meet their ride.
They’d nearly reached the chopper when Alec stumbled to a stop. Reached for his gun. Shoved Erin down in the snow.
“Stay here. If anything happens, run for the trees and keep going.”
Her heart slammed against her ribs and, winded from their run, she gasped for breath. “What’s…wrong?”
Leading with his weapon, Alec approached the chopper. “That’s not Jake!”
Chapter 10
As Alec charged the helicopter, the pilot whipped out his own gun, a large military-looking weapon that sent icy chills through Erin that had nothing to do with the snow she lay in. Her breath clouded in white puffs that obscured her view as she watched the tense standoff.
“Who are you? Where’s Jake?” Alec shouted over the roar of the helicopter.
“Flu. He sent me.” Machine gun still poised in one hand, the pilot flashed a badge of some sort. “Name’s Carlisle. Oscar.”
Alec motioned with his fingers. “Toss it here.”
The pilot threw the badge toward Alec. Alec caught it and cautiously studied the I.D. while keeping an eye—and his gun—on the pilot.
Erin waited, her nerves doing a tap dance, her hands and feet growing numb from the cold.
Alec snapped the I.D. wallet closed, stared at Carlisle for a moment, then tossed the I.D. back. “Jake didn’t sound sick when I talked to him.”
The pilot shrugged. “I’m not a doctor. All I know is, he called me this morning and asked me to make the pickup. Said he had a fever of one-oh-three and a vicious cough.”
Still Alec didn’t seem satisfied.
Erin knew he operated in a world where trust wasn’t a given, where betrayal was a deadly and constant threat. But his reluctance to go with the different pilot seemed overkill to Erin. Surely his secure connections and top-secret contacts were enough security.
Alec flicked a worried glance toward her, and she felt a kick in her chest. In that instant she knew—his overzealous caution was for her. Perhaps he thought he could risk trusting this unknown pilot if he was alone. He could probably even fly the helicopter for himself if needed. But her presence changed the situation. She was an inconvenient responsibility he had to factor into his assessment. A leadlike weight settled in her chest. The last thing she wanted was to be a liability to Alec. A problem.
“Who authorized the use of the chopper to come out here?” Alec called to the pilot.
The pilot chortled. “Who authorized it? Hell, this chopper’s not even here. It’s in the maintenance hangar back at Boulder at this very moment.”
Alec’s posture relaxed a degree, and he nodded in response to Carlisle’s odd answer. Finally he trotted over to her and helped her to her feet. “Okay, we’re going.”
Erin frowned. “Did he mean he stole the helicopter?”
“Stole is such an unforgiving word,” Alec said and tipped a grin at her. “Borrowed has a nicer ring.”
“All in a day’s work for a secret agent?” she asked, dusting snow from her clothes.
He cocked his head and lifted one eyebrow but said nothing. With her hand in his, he tugged her toward the waiting chopper. Alec settled in the seat beside her, then leaned toward the front long enough to confer with Carlisle.
The pilot nodded, flipped some switches, and soon the aircraft lifted smoothly into the sky. Erin held her stomach as they swooped around and swung in a wide arc, heading back toward civilization.
Alec took her hand and rubbed her fingers between his palms, much the way she had done for him the night before. The warm abrasion of his calloused palms on her cold hands soon had tingling heat flowing through her fingers again. Her thoughts jumped to the moments right before they’d heard the helicopter. Those same rough palms had scraped lightly over her breasts, her belly, her legs.
If their ride hadn’t come, she had no doubt she’d have made love to Alec without a second thought. Until later.
The interruption of the arriving chopper had probably saved her from making a costly mistake. Alec was right. She couldn’t make love without involving her heart. Joining her body with Alec’s, no matter how blissful and sweet at the time, would have hurt her far more in the long run. They had no future together.
As she’d just witnessed, she was a liability to Alec.
When Alec found Daniel, found the men who’d set him up in South America, found the people trying to kill them, where would that leave her? When she no longer needed his protection, would he walk out of her life without a backward glance? Alec just wasn’t the home, hearth and family type.
What’s more, his dangerous, sometimes seamy lifestyle was not compatible with raising a child. She knew, better than most, the devastating cost of having a child idolize the wrong role model. She wanted her child to have a father figure, but that man couldn’t be someone who jumped from moving vehicles on the interstate, or crashed airplanes to elude killers, or hunted terrorists in jungles. Alec simply wasn’t the right man for her—or her baby.
Erin turned to watch the landscape below them and sighed. The truth was she needed to get out of Alec’s life, out of his way, as soon as possible. When they landed, she’d tell him goodbye. If he felt she still needed to hide, she could go to a hotel, leave town, buy a disguise. But she wouldn’t be a burden to him.
Her decision made, her throat clogged with emotion and sharp-edged regret sliced through her. She’d miss Alec. Despite his perilous lifestyle, he had a caring and gentle side that touched her. He was a man of courage, conviction. A man she could easily have fallen in love with under different circumstances.
Perhaps she’d even lost a bit of her heart to him already.
* * *
When Erin fell asleep against him, Alec battled down the barrage of seductive memories that assaulted him. Waking with her in his arms, feeling her warm skin against his, kissing his way down from her sweet mouth to her smooth shoulders and full breasts…
Making love to her, even though he’d warned her of his inability to give her more than the here and now, would have been colossally foolish. He already had a difficult time keeping his mind on his business when he was near Erin. And now he had her taste lingering on his tongue, the feel of her supple body burning his skin, the sound of her sighs echoing in his mind.
His blood still ran hot, and the simple brush of her silky hair on his cheek as she napped against his shoulder taunted him with what had almost happened between them. Being inside Erin would have been nirvana, he had no doubt. But dangers lurked even in paradise, and he had a responsibility to protect her, not jeopardize them both for the sake of sex, no matter how earthshaking it would have been.
He eased her head from his shoulder, resettling her with a folded-shirt pillow against the headrest, then slid up front into the copilot’s seat. He put on a headset with a lip mic so he could talk to Carlisle.
The last-minute change in pilots had him on edge. The fewer people that knew he was alive, the better. And the fewer people who saw Erin with him, the better off she’d be, as well.
“What’s our ETA into Boulder?”
“About ten more minutes.” Carlisle tossed him a side glance. “Mind if I ask what you and your woman were doing up on that mountain in weather like this?”
“Yeah, I do.”
The pilot snorted. “Fine. Never mind that I risked my ass to save yours.”
Alec frowned at Carlisle. What did the guy want? A damn pat on the back? An attaboy?
The men and women who worked for the black ops team knew risk, secrecy and spur-of-the-moment assignments were part of the job. Carlisle’s question rang warning bells that already vibrated warily.
Alec said little to Carlisle until the outskirts of Boulder came into view. As they made their approach to the private airstrip, Carlisle lifted the handset mic, changed the radio frequency and held it to his lips. “Charlie one-niner, this is Carlisle. ETA two minutes.”
“Roger that, Carlisle. Good work,” a new male voice, not the controller in the tower that had been on the radio moments earlier, replied.
Bristling, Alec nailed a narrow-eyed glare on the man at the controls. “Who the hell were you just talking to?”
“Just reporting in,” the pilot said with a shifty grin.
If he’d had any doubt before that Carlisle wasn’t who he claimed, that someone had gotten to Jake and that his and Erin’s cover had been blown, he didn’t now. Carlisle’s arrival announcement reeked of a setup. Icy prickles scraped down Alec’s spine.
He seized the smirking man by the throat and growled, “Who was on the radio?”
The chopper lurched, and Carlisle’s face twisted in an ugly snarl. “Let go of me, or I swear I’ll crash this chopper and kill us all.”
Alec had called men’s bluff in more precarious situations than this. But never with the life of a pregnant woman he’d sworn to protect on the line.
Carlisle groped next to his seat and swung a Ruger P-series pistol up, jamming it under Alec’s chin. “Let go, you bastard,” he rasped.
Alec relaxed his grip on the man’s neck, but every other muscle in his body knotted, and his nerves jumped. When they landed, he was certain they would be attacked.
He sank back into the copilot seat and weighed his options, knowing he was losing valuable time to make his next move. His choice would have been obvious had Erin not been on board. He knew how to fly a helicopter, and Carlisle was expendable. But before he enacted any plan, he needed to review it for anything that would put Erin at unreasonable risk. His own life, he’d gamble. Erin’s was a different matter.
His hesitation sawed through him, went against all his training. Indecision or hesitation in the field could prove a costly mistake. A quick glance out the window to the landing strip settled the matter for him. A small posse of armed men waited to meet them. Hell.
From his peripheral vision, he monitored Carlisle. The instant the pilot shifted his gaze to the controls in preparation to land, Alec struck. A swift upward arc of his elbow knocked Carlisle’s gun hand up. The pilot tensed, firing the gun into the roof.
Erin woke with a scream.
Alec followed quickly with a knockout punch across Carlisle’s jaw.
The pilot wilted in his seat, and as the helicopter controls slid from the unconscious man’s grip, the helicopter dipped sharply.
“Alec!”
“Change of plans. Hold on and stay low!” he shouted to her as he grabbed the copilot controls. Pulling the cyclic, he swung the chopper around, sending them up and away from the landing strip—and the goon arrival party. Bullets pocked the windshield and dinged the nose of the chopper.
Erin gasped and shrunk to the floor of the back seat.
Sweat beaded on Alec’s lip. One bullet in the gas tank, and it’d be all over for him. For Erin and her unborn child. Protectiveness surged through him with a wrath that shook him. Grinding his teeth until his jaw ached, he focused his energy on flying the
helicopter.
“What happened? Who were they?” Erin called over the rumble of the turbine.
“I don’t know,” he grated. “Hang on. I’m going to dump some ballast.”
Alec swung the chopper low over an empty field and shoved Carlisle, unconscious and limp, out of the aircraft.
“He wasn’t one of your men after all?” Erin stared, wide-eyed at the man sprawled on the frozen ground below.
“No.” Maneuvering the cyclic stick again, Alec set a course headed north, mentally estimating the best city to ditch the chopper and hop a flight to Houston or New Orleans. They’d have to be careful, find some new clothes to disguise themselves.
If the greeting they’d received in Boulder proved nothing else, it made clear one truth. He’d have to keep Erin with him a little longer. Until he knew who was behind the attempts on his life and he’d eliminated that threat, he wouldn’t leave Erin unprotected. She was in the situation because of him, and he wouldn’t rest until he was certain she was safe.
“Ever been to Louisiana, sweetcakes?”
Clearing her throat, she said, “I had a layover in New Orleans once. Otherwise, no.”
In light of the events of the past twenty-four hours, she’d done admirably keeping her composure. The woman was made of tougher stuff than she gave herself credit for. She was a dangerously intriguing blend of courage and compassion, mettle and marshmallow, sugar and spice.
Alec’s body thrummed along with the helicopter engine, remembering his taste of Erin’s spice that morning. Groaning, he turned his attention out the windshield. With Erin along as he hunted down the location Daniel marked on the Louisiana map, he might get the chance to finish what they’d started that morning. If he dared.
He already liked Erin far too much, cared too deeply about what happened to her. And Erin deserved more than a sexual fling with a man who could only give her here and now.
Soldier's Pregnancy Protocol Page 12