by Liz Maverick
Nick looked right at her as he gave it to her. Jane was tempted to close her eyes, bury herself in sensation, but that wouldn’t be fair. He wanted her eyes. She knew it by the way one of his arms curled around the top of her head, a handful of her hair in his fist.
Jane arched up against him, wanting yet more. Nick groaned. “Fuck, Jane, fuck . . . ,” he whispered as she put her head back, the orgasm swelling within her.
Against the whispered sounds of Nick’s pleasure at making her come, Jane climaxed with an uninhibited cry.
She curled into him with her face pressed into his chest and let the waves of bliss wash over her. Nick actually held her in his arms for a good long while before he let go.
“Hold on a second,” he said. He grabbed his phone. Jane winced as he focused on typing something into a mobile app. It was taking him a little while.
“Um, are we done then?” Jane asked, her buzz dying a slow death.
Nick looked up, his finger hovering over the screen. “Are we done? Are we done? We aren’t even close to done. We’re just getting started!”
Jane giggled. She couldn’t help it. His expression was such a delicious mix of outrage and delight.
Nick punched his finger down with excessive drama and then added, “It says twenty minutes, but the way I tipped, it’ll be fifteen.”
He tossed the phone to the bedside table and said, “Okay, let’s get serious.” Apparently, “serious” was a word Nick liked to use for “naked,” because—still wearing a massive grin—he started taking his clothes off.
“Jane, don’t leave me hangin’,” he said with an adorable lopsided smile. His tie went flying across the room, and he started working on his shirt buttons.
Jane stared at him incredulously and then got off the bed and shucked her dress off, throwing it onto the growing pile on the floor.
He paused when she took off her bra, his appreciative gaze taking in her body; for a second there, she wanted to know what he was seeing, what he thought about her nakedness, but then she remembered the words of his poem. “Body of a woman.” Well, I am who I am.
“Man, you’re gorgeous, Jane,” Nick said, leaping onto the bed.
He gave her a show in kind, holding up his arms, with his junk bobbing like a split mast hanging from the mothership during a storm. He turned in a circle to show it all off and yelled, “I feel fucking fantastic!”
Jane was laughing so hard that when he gestured for her to stand up and join him, she couldn’t keep her balance. Of course, he was jumping up and down and nearly bouncing her off onto the floor. So he put out his hand and pulled her up, and they both jumped, stark naked, until Jane yelled, “We’re gonna break the bed!”
“We’ll get another one,” Nick yelled back, but he stopped jumping and hooked his muscular arm around her neck and pulled her in. The bed was still wobbling a bit, and the friction of his cock against her body was beyond distracting. The two of them stood there, breathing hard, Nick’s cock going full-mast as they swayed gently in a sea of rumpled covers.
With his arms around her, he touched his forehead to hers and whispered, “I don’t remember the last time I felt this much joy.”
Just as Nick was pulling her down to the bed by her hips, the downstairs phone rang. He moaned his frustration and let go.
“The way you tipped,” Jane noted with an exaggerated sad face.
Nick leaped off the bed, grabbed a pillow for his privates, and went out to retrieve his delivery. Jane contented herself by appreciating the cut of his body and the curve of his ass, and when he was out of sight, she flopped down on her back to wait.
The enormous smile on her face just wouldn’t go away. Even in the moments when she had time to think, time to make a different decision about where the rest of this night was going to go, time to process that she was running around like a naked banshee as if they were part of a rock band trashing a hotel room and that in hindsight, this might all seem like a really bad idea.
This is not a bad idea. This feels right. This feels so right I don’t even feel like I need to analyze this. Jane winced for a fragment of a second over having to explain to Nana that having a relationship with her boss was not stupid or damaging, but there weren’t any words to differentiate what had gone on before with what was happening now.
“Get out of your head,” Nick barked, as the pillow barricading his privates came sailing back onto the bed next to her. He had an enormous tray positioned like wainscoting above his enormous cock, which was still noticeably hard and erect. “I’ve been in the kitchen torturing myself as I arranged all this shit on the tray, thinking about what I’m going to lick off you first.”
Jane stared at the massive pile of strawberries, the pot of chocolate sauce producing a faint wisp of steam, the crystal glasses, and the limited-edition bottle of Cristal.
God, I could get used to this.
Nick stuck the tray on the bed and climbed on next to it. “In case you were wondering if I cooked,” he said, “watch this.” He very dramatically took a strawberry, swathed it in chocolate, and held it out to her.
Jane giggled and took the offering, but a bit of chocolate dropped from the strawberry onto the extremely-high-thread-count sheets covering the bed. She sucked in a breath of horror and said before she could stop herself, “Shit. That’s gonna stain.”
Nick looked at the blob of chocolate. He looked at Jane. “You are not serious,” he said.
Jane stared at him wide-eyed, unsure what he meant.
“You are serious!”
Then he grabbed the pot of chocolate, dipped a finger in it, and sucked it clean with exaggerated lasciviousness.
“How hot is it?” asked Jane, fluttering her eyelashes like an innocent maiden. (Ha!)
“How hot is it?” he asked. “HOW HOT IS IT?”
Jane’s stomach already hurt from laughing so hard, and now this. THIS. Nick being happy. Fun. Sexy. THIS was the best. And, yes, sir, it was hot!
“Oh, you have no idea. I’ll show you how hot it is,” he growled, pouring a stream of chocolate down his chest, not missing the opportunity to drizzle it across his erection. He then put the pot of chocolate down so he could use both hands to smear it all over himself, giving a couple of extra glides to his cock through chocolate-covered palms.
“You worried about a little stain, sweet thing?” he asked Jane. Then he spread his arms out eagle-wing wide, yelled, “There is nothing left to fear, but fear itself,” and jumped.
This was, of course, ridiculous and hilarious and sent Jane into hysterics . . . before the weight of him and the sexy of him pressed her down to the bed on her stomach and replaced her laughter with a racing pulse that she could feel between her legs. She sucked in a quick breath. “Oh, yes, please, sir,” she teased.
Nick’s erection pressed against Jane’s ass crack; he nudged the head of his cock downward until it slipped around in the wetness of her pussy. “Jane,” he moaned, and then somehow decided to drive both of them crazy by pulling away.
“You’re killing me,” she managed to pant while looking over her shoulder at him. She wanted Nick inside her, and the intensity of her desire for him made it sort of difficult to think. But Nick had a plan . . .
“I think we’re already still boozed up from the party, but what the hell,” he said, popping the cork out of the champagne bottle. She heard him guzzle from the bottle and then . . .
The cold, fizzy sensation of champagne pooling on her skin was surprising; the warm, sensual sensation of Nick licking it off the small of Jane’s back was spectacular.
Jane vaguely processed the sound of a drawer opening, and then the crackle of a condom wrapper ripping, but she was mesmerized by Nick’s clever tongue.
The pool overflowed as he lapped, sending a drizzle of champagne down between her cheeks. Jane gasped at the erotic charge as he licked the champagne out. “Oh, my god,” she mumbled, feeling the liquid mingle with her natural wetness.
“Good?” Nick whispered. His
cock nudged her clit, and his finger gently traced where his tongue had been between her cheeks.
“Yes,” she managed to say, as he pressed easily into her wet slick.
Both of them groaned as he filled her. Nick pumped slowly at first, and then harder, with his hands gripping her hips. Suddenly, he slipped out, his head bowing down to her back, his breath hot against her spine.
“No, don’t stop,” Jane begged, hating the loss of him.
“Gonna make me come,” he choked out. “Hard control inside fucking wet fantastic.”
Jane had to laugh. “I’ve rendered you completely unintelligible,” she said into the sheets, really quite pleased she’d brought badass Nick Dawes to his knees. “I want you to come.”
Nick disputed her suggestion of weakness by flipping her over on her back and pouring warm chocolate sauce across her chest.
It was Jane’s turn to be rendered speechless as he simultaneously licked her nipples while moving two fingers inside her.
She squirmed on the sheets, nearly jolting off the bed with every flick against her clit.
“Come on, baby,” Nick whispered.
“I need you,” she said into his ear.
He smiled against her skin and pushed his cock back inside her body. He moved, slow and languorous, still working hard to keep himself under control, and brought her back to the cusp of orgasm.
Everything he does . . . Jane thought in a haze, before she couldn’t keep a thought in her head at all. This climax was even brighter, bolder than the first, a bolt of extraordinary sensation coursing through her body. But that didn’t even begin to capture the emotional rush of watching Nick follow her there, his face alive with pleasure, relief, freedom.
Tangled in the sheets, tangled in each other, they lay quietly, skin on skin, soaking up the glow.
Until Nick playfully bit Jane’s shoulder, and Jane giggled.
“Oh, do tell,” he whispered, the curve of his smiling lips tickling her skin.
“We just fucked like rock stars. That was awesome! Sex like this doesn’t come around every day. And I don’t just mean the champagne and chocolate. This is special.”
His eyes went soft and warm. “No, it doesn’t. And . . . yes. Yes, it is. We could go to sleep, or we could . . .”
Jane and Nick could.
An hour later, Jane was lying, spent again, in the circle of Nick’s arms. “Do you want a shower?” he asked.
“I think I’m going to regret this, but no,” Jane said. “But if you do . . .”
“I’m in bed with a beautiful woman, and tomorrow’s Sunday. I don’t want anything but this, right now,” Nick said.
“Let’s wake up and do this all over again,” Jane murmured sleepily and somewhat drunkenly.
She didn’t hear Nick’s answer. Too much champagne.
Then again, there was a lot she didn’t hear.
CHAPTER 29
A waving gun was not the curved butt Nick was hoping to wake up to after a hot night with Jane. In fact, he wasn’t exactly awake when the wake-up call came, and he wasn’t expecting it to be four in the morning.
But there was an unwelcome and familiar face, and an arm wielding a fucking hatchet, in his bedroom, not two feet from his woman. Nick weighed the likelihood of disarming Tristan without, oh, disarming himself. And then he weighed the possibility that Jane would wake up and get caught in the situation. And then Tristan pulled out a gun, and it was no consolation that he looked less comfortable waving a gun around than a hatchet. Goddamn computer hackers. They were tricky when it came to field duty.
Tristan winced at the sight of a naked Nick smeared with what he might or might not have realized was a paste involving chocolate, champagne, and, well, sex, but he was apparently not inclined to allow Nick the courtesy of a shower.
Nick looked over his shoulder at Jane snoring just slightly with a little sated smile on her face, and he wanted to curse the gods at the top of his lungs for the karma of having to keep his mouth shut and walk away from the best thing that ever happened to him.
Tristan stuck the handle of the hatchet under his armpit long enough to pocket Nick’s cell phone, which was sitting on the bedside table. Then he grabbed the handle and gestured with the hatchet, with the other hand waving the gun in Jane’s direction in a clear statement of “Come quietly or choose which kind of metal I bury in her head.”
Nick stood up and moved quickly out of the bedroom, grabbing his pants off the bedroom floor on his way out. Tristan afforded him no more than that, which Nick thought was pretty bad form. At the very least, it suggested that Tristan was not feeling enough empathy to afford a man even a pair of underwear, which was definitely not a good sign.
In the foyer, Tristan snapped a pair of handcuffs around Nick’s wrists with a disconcerting snick sound. At which point Nick whispered, “You freelancing with Sokolov again? I hear he doesn’t pay on time.”
Tristan shrugged. “Once you commit, there’ll be no hard feelings between us.”
“Between us? Who? You and me? Or you and Sokolov?”
Tristan didn’t answer, and Nick cursed the weapons and the cuffs that were stopping him from shoving his fist into Tristan’s face, because you don’t get “no hard feelings” when you’ve just dragged a naked man out of bed from his naked woman, and pointed a gun and a heavy blade in her direction to boot. Not to mention, What the fuck? Once he committed to what, exactly?
CHAPTER 30
Nick wasn’t sure where he was when the car stopped. Tristan dragged him out of the vehicle and down some stairs into what felt like the garden level of a larger building. It was tough to say because he had a laundry bag over his head. But judging from the look of the sidewalk and the city sounds and the flight of below-level stairs, it was his best call.
Tristan pushed Nick over a threshold and walked him into a room that stank of cigar smoke. The hacker then whipped the bag off with a comical flourish, and Nick stared into the eyes of Sokolov smoking at his desk in a pleasant, rather smallish dark-wood-furnished office. The fingers on his left hand sifted through a cloisonné bowl full of sunflower seeds.
Ta-da, Nick thought grimly. He blinked against the glare coming through a set of French doors leading to a small green area. Got the garden-apartment part right, anyway.
“What is this?” Sokolov asked Tristan, looking at Nick like it made him want to throw up. Nick kind of wanted to throw up too, but that had as much to do with his wicked hangover as anything else.
Tristan looked a little confused. “You wanted me to get Nick. I got Nick.”
Sokolov shook his head in disgust. “Maybe we keep you on computers after this.”
“What did I do wrong?” Tristan protested. “I hacked his security, I snuck into his apartment, and I extracted the target without even waking up his girl. It’s perfect.”
“His girl.” Shit! Does that mean he has specific knowledge of Jane’s importance to me, or does he think she’s just some girl I slept with last night?
Sokolov spat sunflower-seed shells to the side and then sighed. “I did not think I needed to request dignity.”
“Dignity?” Nick and Tristan both asked at the same time.
Sokolov looked really put out, but he gestured to a lovely twiglike blonde creature with thick bangs and enormous eyes who was standing by the wall, and said, “Find this man a shower and some clothes.”
After Nick took a shower under the dead eyes of a guard, who looked like he’d rather be anywhere other than watching some guy clean his junk in front of him, and got decked out in black pants and a white shirt and a pair of plain-toe oxfords that looked straight from Sokolov’s catering-staff closet, he was returned to the big man in the same office. One part of him wondered if he was being dressed in funeral clothes for a reason.
“Put on a coat, Nikolai. We go for walk,” Sokolov said, gesturing to the duster the pretty twig held out to him.
Nick shrugged into the coat and followed Sokolov through the French doors onto
what proved to be a small covered patio, complete with trickling fountain and risers full of shrubbery and potted flowers presented at three elevations. At the far end, peeking through chained iron doors, was the public street, where a black town car idled. “You wonder why you still so healthy?” the Russian asked. He took out a case and selected a cigarillo, which he lit.
“I try not think about it too much. I’m still looking for the money I didn’t steal from you.” Nick itched to confirm that Jane was being left unharmed, but he wasn’t going to do that—let on to his feelings for her. He still had a hard time believing that Sokolov would target her for real damage, but as Tristan proved, sometimes a man can’t control his underlings. Maybe Nick was just being naïve.
Sokolov puffed on his stick and exhaled with a sigh, the smoke escaping in a surprisingly elegant curl around his thick features. “I think Maksim is good friend. He makes suggestion I like.” The Russian eyed Nick like he was studying diamond facets through a magnifying glass. “You owe him two times now. Strange you owe him a marker when is from me you take the money . . .”
Once again, Nick had to wonder what sort of game Maks might be playing, but the conversation in Brighton Beach spoke for itself. He trusted Maks. He wasn’t lying. And he needed to hold on to that until there was proof that suggested otherwise. Yeah, I suspect I do owe him a marker. If I live long enough for him to call it in.
Sokolov coughed, producing that same old wet, labored sound of unhappy lungs. “So, I say to myself, a marker this big he should owe me, how does that get paid? And then I have my answer from Maksim. He say don’t kill you, take you for new team.”
Nick blinked, concealing the disgust welling up inside. “What?”
“How do you like to say?” He lowered his gun-shaped index fingers and thumbs to his waist and said in a really terrible American accent, “I own your ass, pal.”
“What do you mean?” Nick asked, thinking he knew exactly what it meant.
“You pack up from Hudson Kings, kiss Rothgar’s ring, and say good-bye. Sokolov is forming team now.” Vlad stubbed the butt of his cigarillo out on the garden wall so violently Nick heard the man’s fingernails scrape against brick. “I own Nick Dawes. I own his skills. He works for me now. And if he says no, I kill him. No more Maksim goodwill to keep Nick Dawes above water.”