by Lynne Silver
He nodded but quickly forgot all discomfort when she lowered back down and his erect cock made contact with the lacy strap of her thong. In this position, his lips reached the top curves of her perfectly formed breasts and he took advantage kissing and nuzzling. She was sweeter than sugar.
He slid his fingers down to her thong, nearly snapping it in half in his haste to touch her wetness. “I don’t want to rip these. You know how I love your sexy lingerie.”
She smiled and did something with her hips that had the crown of his erection perfectly poised at her entrance. His vision blurred from pleasure. “Are you wet enough for me? ’Cause I want in you now.”
In response she pushed down as he pushed up, sheathing himself in her tight passage. Her tight heat squeezed him, making him groan with need and desire. He’d missed their sex. Every time they made love it got better, and this time was no exception. Their bodies ignited with the passion they’d been missing during their time apart. His hand and a hot shower was no substitute for the reality of Ari’s curvy body urgently riding his.
“I missed this,” she gasped in his ear.
“Missed you,” he grunted back. His shot-up thigh had been declared good to go by the docs, but they hadn’t imagined his thigh needing to balance a gorgeous redhead while she undulated with abandon on him. She was wild in his arms, and selfish as she writhed, seeking her pleasure. He didn’t need to work for it.
Right now, she couldn’t get closer except for the layer of clothes keeping them apart. Yet it was hot as anything to have her riding him fully dressed with his dick buried deep. They were in plain view of the glass entrance doors. Anyone who drove by and looked at the correct angle might guess what they were doing from their movements, but he didn’t give a shit. He needed to make her come. Now.
His mouth found hers as his arms bound her closer to his body. With his feet braced on the concrete floor, he pushed steadily up, driving himself deeper in her wet heat. It was too good. He was close. When her inner muscles spasmed around his shaft in ever-tightening waves, he knew he was a goner.
They came together in a searing, wild explosion, each trying to get closer to the other. All too soon he pressed his forehead to her damp, bare right shoulder, gulping in air, trying to slow his breathing back to normal. “I’ve missed you too damn much,” he said against her neck, hoping she’d say something, anything, that this was more than a sexual quickie for her. He didn’t know if what he’d said about quitting his job for her had penetrated. But it was true. He’d spoken to his dad and sister about MarketFresh and only had to give notice to Sullivan before leaving the service for good.
She didn’t say anything encouraging, but rested her cheek on his right shoulder and sighed deeply. He wanted to sit like this holding her forever. Here, in this room, in this chair, at this moment, none of their problems mattered.
“You can’t quit your job,” she whispered against his shoulder. At his immediate protest, a rush of words fell from her pink lips.
“I don’t need the grand gesture. I’m overwhelmed you would quit your job for me, but please, Lance, please. Don’t quit.”
His arms tightened around her lush frame, and his palm traced circles around her back. “All right,” he finally whispered, holding her close, feeling his heart fill with love.
They sat in stillness for a long, healing time until a series of beeps came from the corner of the room. Ari leapt off his lap before the noise registered in his ears as her cell phone. She raced over to her purse, tugging her dress down over her hips as she ran.
“Who’s calling you at this hour?” he wondered, shifting around to yank up his pants.
She didn’t respond; she pulled her phone from her purse and glanced at the screen, but didn’t answer it.
“Ari, who is it?” Lance rose to cross the room at the sight of her suddenly ashen face. “What is it?” He zipped his chinos, leaving his belt buckle undone.
Wordlessly, she turned the phone to face him. He squinted at the small text. “Happy Birthday, Arbey.” He looked at her incongruous reaction, feeling a bit foolish. “Who’s Arbey? Is today your birthday?”
She nodded with a frown. “Arbey is me. It’s what my dad calls me to be silly sometimes. It’s short for Ari Baby.”
“Wow. Is the text who I think it’s from?”
“Uh-huh. My father,” she whispered, and sank to the floor.
Chapter Seventeen
Ari shuddered as her blood froze in her veins and she barely registered Lance pulling her onto his lap and cradling her in his strong arms.
“You’re shivering.”
She nodded numbly. “What do I do?” After months of complete radio silence from her father, she now had contact. Six months ago she would have texted back; now she wasn’t sure.
Her brain told her to hand the phone immediately over to Lance and let the feds work their wiretapping, tracing magic, but her heart whispered that this was her father who’d simply texted a birthday wish to his only daughter. Did it make her an awful daughter to use the birthday message against him?
She looked up at Lance, expecting to see Mr. Letter of the Law holding his hand out for the phone, but he sat cradling her with sympathy on his face. “It’s totally up to you, Ari. If you want to keep the text a secret from the FBI, I won’t say a thing.”
Her eyes widened and tears entered them at Lance’s total loyalty to her. He’d said she could trust him, but those were just words. Agreeing to keep the text from her father a secret broke down her barriers like nothing else. He was willing to break the law for her, or at least stretch it a little, which for Lance was the equivalent of committing murder.
“The FBI probably already saw the text, since they’ve been monitoring my phone for weeks, but I’ve received dozens of birthday calls and texts today. They won’t know to pay special attention to this one unless I tell them, right?”
Lance nodded. “I’d like to say they’re on it and you don’t have to do a thing, but there is a bit of backlog in the wiretapping business. There’s a lot of contracted labor and they can’t follow up on every phone call and text. It could be days before that text is noticed and by then your father could be in a new location.”
She nodded sadly, knowing what she had to do. “I need to delete it, then.” She scrolled through a few screens, gauging Lance’s reaction. Was he truly going to let her delete the best possible clue to her father’s whereabouts? Though his lips compressed into a tight line, he made no move to stop her.
She stood up, shaking out the skirt of her dress, and made her way to the front door of the skate park, where she knew her FBI followers waited in the shadows of the parking lot. She’d invited them in to the party, but they’d declined.
“Where are you going?” Lance asked, rising and following.
“To hand this over to the feds, of course.”
“But I thought you were deleting it?” He scratched his temple.
She gave him a wry smile. “No, I was testing you.”
He frowned. “Did I pass?”
“With flying colors. Of course I’m handing over the phone. How could I look Kevin or any of the victims in the eye if I deleted the text?”
Her breath squeezed out in a rush as Lance scooped her up in a big bear hug.
“God, I love you.”
She hugged him, not quite ready to give him the words back yet, even though her heart burst with emotion for Lance. An alluring part of her brain screamed to accept him and take everything he had to offer and reciprocate it tenfold.
He released her and held the door open for her to make her careful barefoot way through the parking lot and over to the black American-made sedan. At her approach, the agents opened their windows, releasing a blast of icy air-conditioning into the steamy June night.
If they were surprised at Lance’s appearance, they didn’t mention it. “Ms. Rose,” the driver said. “Ready to call it a night and head back to your hotel?”
“Not yet,” she said. “I
have something that may interest you.” She passed the phone through the open window and leaned her elbow down on the doorframe. “It’s from my father. He texted about two minutes ago.”
The agents glanced at each other, then looked over to Lance, who responded with a curt nod. He stepped over to put a supportive hand on her lower back. “It’s for real.”
She released the phone into their care, and took a deep breath and leaned farther into the car to pass another message through the open window. “When you catch him, tell him…” She broke off, not sure what message to pass to her criminal, escapee father. “Tell him, he’s got a wedding to pay for.” She stood back up and smiled at Lance. “Ready to go home?”
“With you? Always.”
About the Author
Romance author Lynne Silver writes the popular Coded for Love series and other hot contemporary romance novels, such as Love, Technically. Before writing romance, she wrote fiction of a different sort, drafting press releases for technology corporations. Washington, D.C., is her home (non)state, where she resides with her husband and two sons.
Learn more at:
LynneSilver.com
Twitter: @LynneSilver
Facebook.com/LynneSilverAuthor
Also by Lynne Silver
Hot Nights with the Fireman
Please turn the page for a preview of the next book in Lynne Silver’s sexy Alpha Heroes series
In Deep with the FBI Agent
Available in early 2016
Chapter One
FBI Cyber Attack Team Office, Washington, D.C., Present Day
The invitation to hell popped into Sam’s personal email in-box two minutes before he was headed to lunch. His appetite jumped ship as fast as a puppy went after a tennis ball. How had they even gotten his email address? As far as he knew, he’d left his prep school days behind with no plans to return. Ever. Not even for his ten-year reunion.
Agent Suarez stuck his head into the doorway. “Cooper, you ready to go?” Sam looked up from his screen. Suarez stepped fully into the office. “Need a rain check?”
“No, why?” Sam asked.
“You look like my pregnant wife does every morning before she loses her midnight snack. Need a bucket?” Jack bent to lift the small trash can in the corner and thrust it toward Sam, who recoiled.
“I’m not going to vomit. Put my trash can down.” He rose and grabbed his jacket. “Let’s go.”
As the men wound through the maze of cubicles and private offices toward the exit, Jack asked, “What put that look on your face? Work or personal?”
Sam unconsciously patted the phone in his pocket. “I got an email invitation to my ten-year high school reunion.”
“So?” Jack asked. “What’s terrible about that? No date, and you want a hot woman on your arm?”
He swallowed, hating to even dwell on his teen years. “I was kind of a loser in high school. Those were not remotely the best years of my life, and I have no desire to rehash them with a bunch of people who ignored me then and haven’t made an effort to contact me since.”
Jack clapped him on the back. “Got news for you, Cooper. We work in the cyber security division of the FBI. We were all losers in high school.”
Sam laughed, because it was true. He worked with a bunch of computer geeks. Granted, they were now computer geeks who carried weapons and had the right to arrest bad guys, which upped their cool factor. “At least I’ve grown an inch or seven since high school.”
“Late growth spurt?” Jack asked.
“I was five-five until my freshman year of college. I had to essentially buy a new wardrobe overnight.”
“I wish that had happened to me.” Jack said almost wistfully, and Sam glanced down at his partner, who was five-nine on a good day. “If I were suddenly six feet tall and now an FBI agent, I’d go back to my high school reunion and rub it in the faces of every person who was ever mean to me.” Jack glanced over at Sam and correctly read the expression on his face. “Not going to happen, huh?”
“Never. There were a handful of friends from school who were cool, and I still keep in touch with them.”
“Like the infamous Arianna Rose?” Jack asked with a knowing laugh. It was common knowledge around the office that Sam had gone to high school with the year’s biggest scandal in America. Arianna Rose’s father had operated a Ponzi scheme to rival Bernie Madoff’s and then fled the country, leaving Arianna as the public and only face of the Rose family.
“Yes, like Arianna,” Sam replied, still a little sensitive about the ribbing he’d taken for months for defending his flighty but trustworthy friend. Luckily, Arianna had lived up to his trust and helped the authorities track down her father. “There aren’t that many other people from Montgomery Prep that I want or need to see again.”
“What about your girl crush? Don’t you want see if she put on the freshman fifty? Rub it in her face what she missed out on?”
“Fifteen,” Sam corrected. “I believe the correct term is freshman fifteen.”
“I know, but in her case, you’re hoping for fifty.”
Sam froze silently in front of the elevator bay. His girl crush had never put on the freshman fifteen. She’d kept her killer body all through high school, college, and still had it. At least she had last time Sam had stalked her on social media. “No. She knows exactly what she missed out on and isn’t mourning for a second. No high school reunion for me.”
Montgomery Preparatory School, 2001
“Welcome, new freshmen, to Montgomery Prep. Thank you for giving up your last day of summer break to come get oriented.” A tall, austere woman stood in front of the classroom addressing the thirty or so fourteen-year-olds who were sitting as far back in the room as they could. The front row remained empty. Sam had arrived slightly early, and, not quite understanding the social dynamics his peers seemed to intuit, had sat in the second row, center desk, then watched in dismay as all the other kids shuffled in, finding seats in the last row and working their way up.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” the woman continued. They’d been told that she was Ms. Reamer, their freshman coach, but not like a PE coach. Sam had never heard of a coach who didn’t do sports. Already things were weirdly different from his public middle school. “I’m going to ask you all to stand up and we’re going to get started on the first activity to help us all get to know one another.”
Uneasily the kids looked around at each other, no one wanting to be the first to stand. Ms. Reamer approached the front corner desk and said loudly, “Don’t all stand at once.” She smiled as if she were the school’s version of Chris Rock. “To get to know one another, you’re going to arrange yourselves in alphabetical order by first name and reseat yourselves starting at this front desk. You have four minutes. Go.”
There was a mad scramble and a cacophony of blurted names as the kids raced, eager to accomplish their first task at their new school and prove they were worthy of being students at what was considered the best private college preparatory school in the Metro D.C. region.
They bumped into each other and shouted their names, trying to figure out which desk would be their own. Sam hated stuff like this and hoped this wasn’t a precursor to the next four years. There were at least six different better ways to approach this task, yet they all insisted on acting like imbeciles. Why wasn’t someone taking charge? Why wasn’t he?
“Two minutes,” Ms. Reamer called, and a moment of panicked silence fell before the chaos rose again. They spent the next two minutes trying to get themselves seated properly until “Time!” The final two kids standing made a mad dash for seats.
A hush fell over the now slightly sweaty occupants of the room, but they were fourteen— BO was one of those sorry facts of life.
“Not bad,” Ms. Reamer said, standing at the front. “But not great, either. Let’s check your work.” She pointed to the front corner desk. “Name.”
“Alex.”
“Amanda.”
They continu
ed down the rows until a red-faced Erica and Eric had to swap seats. Holy crap, how was that Eric kid only in ninth grade? He looked like a senior. Junior at the minimum. Sam tried to memorize as many names and faces as he could, but being in the last row now had its disadvantages.
When the last kids had said their names, Ms. Reamer said, “One of the things you will learn during your years at Montgomery Prep is teamwork and leadership. I didn’t see either of those things happening during that exercise. What was something you could’ve done to expedite the process?”
Sam raised his hand while a lot of his new classmates were visibly trying to define “expedite.” But he didn’t get called on. Instead, Eric called out, “Name tags,” hoping to get a laugh. Sam inwardly groaned. The guy was big and thought he was a comedian.
“That’s an idea,” Ms. Reamer answered diplomatically. “Any other ideas?”
Sam raised his hand again, but a girl with long, straight reddish-blond hair seated near the front answered. “We could’ve divided the room into three sections. A through H up front, I to O in the middle, and P to Z in back. Then from there, if we’d said our names one at a time in the group, it would’ve gone faster.”
“Excellent idea, Casey. So good, I think we’ll try it. But this time, we’ll alphabetize by last name, and the Z’s will start us off in front and work toward the A’s in the back.”
Ms. Reamer barely had the words “Ready, go” off her tongue before the new freshmen were out of their seats and scrambling to get themselves in the right seats.
Sam stayed where he was and was pleased when the take-charge girl, Casey, headed toward him. About seven kids huddled in the last row, and when Casey pointed at them, they said their last names and stood on either the left or right of the person who’d gone before, depending on their last name. It was much faster and less chaotic than the first go-round, but still tricky because last name spellings were more complicated than first names.
“Cooper,” Sam said, and Casey, whom he now noticed was extremely pretty, grinned.