by Lora Leigh
“Do you really want to walk away from him, Sabella?” Kira asked, stepping to her, laying her hand on her shoulder as another sob shuddered through her body. She leaned close. “He may not be your husband. But do you really want to walk away from who he could be to you?”
“You’re the same one who told me to fuck him and get the sexual crisis out of the way,” she bit out, sniffing back the tears. “That didn’t help, Kira. Not at all.”
“Didn’t it, Belle?” She smiled, a sad, gentle smile. “Your husband is gone. But you didn’t die with him.”
“Kira, tell me the truth,” she whispered, so filled with pain and suspicion it was ravaging her.
“Enough.”
Sabella lifted her head to see Noah walking into the living room, almost staggering. He wore the jeans he had worn earlier, snapped and zipped and obviously straining beneath an erection.
Kira sighed as Ian came to his wife and wrapped his arm around her waist. “Come on, troublemaker.”
Noah eased to the counter and stared at the weapons she had managed to locate.
“How did you find them?” he asked her, his voice more grating than normal.
Sabella clenched her teeth then smiled mockingly. “You hid them exactly where my husband would have hid them.”
There, she’d said it, it was out in the open and she could have sworn he barely held back a flinch.
He was silent for long moments before he finally nodded.
“I’m a contract agent for a private company,” he finally said, reaching out to pick up the Glock before edging around the counter.
He replaced the first two weapons.
“An adrenaline junkie.” She sneered. “Just what I needed in my life. Tell me, Noah, did you know my husband?”
She cocked her hip and crossed her arms over her breasts as she stared back at him, looking, searching, desperate to either confirm or disprove the suspicions rising inside her.
He paused, staring down at the counter, his hands braced on it before his eyes, just his eyes, lifted to her.
“I knew your husband. We weren’t exactly friends.”
“Enemies?”
His lips quirked mockingly. “No, we weren’t enemies. We just knew each other.”
“So is Noah your real name?”
He nodded slowly, still watching her. “It’s my real name.”
“And what made you decide to come to Texas to fuck Nathan Malone’s wife?”
He flinched. Sabella could feel the hurt radiating through her. Betrayal. It felt like betrayal. Like deception.
“That’s not what happened.” He shook his head, and she knew he was lying. She could feel it. Like instinct. Like a scent that teased at her senses. Just as she had always known when her husband was lying to her.
“You knew who I was, you knew who Rory was, and you targeted us, didn’t you?”
He licked his lower lip. The action wasn’t nervous, it wasn’t hesitant. It was sexual. The look in his eyes was sexual. Everything about him screamed hard-core sex.
“I did.” At least he didn’t lie to her.
“Why?” she cried painfully. “Why did you do this to me? I didn’t hurt enough? Do you think I wanted another adrenaline junkie who doesn’t care for anything more than he cares for his fix?”
He stared at her in surprise. “Is that what you think being a SEAL was to your husband? A fix you couldn’t give him?”
“What else could it have been? Look at you.” She flung her hand toward him. “Admit it. You love the adrenaline. You love how it hypes you, makes you high. It’s better than sex.” She sneered. “Isn’t it, Noah?”
His eyes. Those eyes. They were rapacious, blazing, so hot they melted parts of her she didn’t want to admit existed. They weren’t navy blue, but shades lighter. Not Irish eyes, but neither were they entirely natural.
His gaze roamed her body and she swore heat licked over her flesh.
“There’s nothing as good as sex with you.” His voice was guttural now. “There’s nothing, no high, no drug, no amount of danger as good as burying my cock inside you. And I’d give the last ounce of blood in my body to come inside you, one more time. But I’m not Nathan Malone.”
She lost her breath. Sabella stumbled back a step, her chest tightening as the need for oxygen battled with the shock that seared her insides.
“You want him back until it rips your guts inside, don’t you, Sabella?” He pushed himself back from the counter, moved around it. “You want him until you live and breathe the memory of a man that’s never going to come back to you.”
She shook her head, agony searing her heart to hear him say that. To hear the words, when that fragile flame of hope had been moving inside her. A hope she refused to even name, because she ached so desperately for it.
“They wouldn’t let you see his body, so you prayed he was alive.” The cruelty of his words bore down on her, the very gentleness of his tone struck inside her like the vicious lash of a whip.
“Don’t.” She shook her head, feeling the tears that eased from her eyes, feeling the pain that dug into her soul and tore at the last dream of ever holding her husband again. “Please don’t.”
His hands touched her. He pushed her hair back from her face, his thumbs eased over the tears and more fell.
“Your husband is dead.” Pain echoed in his voice as well. “He’s gone, Sabella.”
“No.” She shook her head. “No.”
“He’s only alive in your dreams.” His lips touched hers. “But I’m here. Right here. Let me, Sabella. Let me have what Nathan Malone didn’t have. Let me have all of his wild witch.”
“No!” She screamed out at the rocking agony. She wanted to strike him. She wanted to tear at his hair, at his eyes, and all she could do was jerk away from him, jerk away and force her feet to the kitchen, and no further.
“You didn’t give him all of yourself,” he accused her, his voice grating, soft, as he followed her. His hands gripped her shoulders, fingers splaying, holding her firmly as she tensed in his grip. “You give it to me. Admit that much. You give me the woman you didn’t allow him to see.”
“I love him.”
“You loved him.” The fire in his eyes burned with pain, bleak sorrow, and lust. “Loved, Sabella. Because he’s gone.”
“Stop.” She shook her head.
“I’m not Nathan Malone!” He yelled the words at her, striking her with them as she hunched her shoulders against the blow and the firm shake he gave her.
She shook her head, sobbing, the cries tearing from her chest.
“Get that in your head, Sabella. I am not Nathan Malone. I am not the man you loved, but by God I am the man that’s going to fuck you. That’s going to hold you when you cry in the night, and the man that’s going to bind you to him so tight, so hard, that you’ll never think to hide even a partical of who and what you are from him.”
“Stop. Stop.” She sobbed. Her breath was heaving, tears dimming her vision, as the words tore through her with the effect of a jagged knife.
“I won’t stop.” Hard hands held her to him, refused to let her go. “Look at me, Sabella.”
His features were blurred, the need to lean against him, to find something to hold on to, weakened her knees.
“I’m not Nathan Malone. But I’m your lover, Sabella. And I need you. I need you like your husband had no idea how to need you. I need you until the fever burns inside me for your touch, your kiss.”
He clasped her head in his hands, lowered his lips and smoothed them over hers, sipped from hers. He tasted her tears and her pain, and something inside his soul tore loose.
Ah God, how he was hurting her. Hurting her until her sobs tore through him like dull spikes and ripped at his insides. But he knew. The second he heard her questioning Ian, he knew she had begun to suspect. Somehow, some way, his too perceptive little witch had sensed the ghost of her husband inside him.
She shuddered against him. The whore’s dust, those last mi
nute amounts that infected his system, pumped through him, overshadowed everything but the feel of her. The feel of her soft lips, the taste of her pain in her tears.
“Sabella,” he whispered. “Touch me. Just touch. Close your eyes and be with whoever you need to be with, but touch me.”
He lifted her hands, pressed them against his hard stomach beneath the bandage that covered the knife wound. He felt her jerk, felt her response.
“I would die for your touch.” He kissed her lips again, watched as her head lifted, her soft gray eyes cloudy with her tears, with the lost dreams.
She shook her head and he kissed her again. His lips caught hers this time, settled against them, and rather than devouring as he needed to, he let himself sip, let himself taste.
Because she responded. Torn between the man she loved and the man she wanted. And he couldn’t allow her to suspect both were breathing and aching for her.
“Please don’t,” she whispered when his head lifted and he drew her back into the living room. Drew her to the bedroom.
“Walk away then.” He turned, shucked his jeans, and palmed the thick, heavy erection pounding with lust.
Her gaze flickered to him and she trembled. He could see the battle on her face. Sweet beautiful Sabella. Battling her anger, her fear, her want.
He lay back on the bed and stroked his heavy cock. And she watched. Her fingers fisted in her T-shirt now, her face flushed though tears still glittered in her eyes.
“I’ll lie right here,” he promised her. “I’ll be a good boy and you can ride me, Sabella.”
She used to love that, he remembered. She had loved rising over him, taking him, working his cock inside her at her own pace.
He watched her gaze darken, watched the hunger crawl inside her, watched as her breathing deepened, grew heavier. Her breasts lifted against her shirt, hard little nipples pressing into the fabric.
“Come here.” He held his hand out to her. “Let me tell you what it feels like inside you. How your mouth feels going down on me. Your hands on my flesh.”
He was dying for her hands on him. Aching. Racked by the need in ways he had never been tortured before this.
She hesitated. He watched the battle in her gaze. The battle between him and the memory she refused to let go.
Forever. Something inside him gentled as he remembered the vow she had always whispered to him. That she would love him forever. And he had sworn he would return to her forever.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, her hands lowered to the hem of her shirt and she removed it. Slowly.
Her hair was unbound, lying past her shoulders in thick, heavy waves as she tossed the shirt aside, leaving her breasts covered only by the filmy silk of her bra.
She sat down, unlaced her boots, and pulled them free of her small feet, then pulled off her jeans. It wasn’t a seductive striptease. It was a woman finally releasing something inside herself. Or testing something. He wasn’t certain, and his mind was clouded by the lust raging inside him.
“This isn’t normal.” She stepped to him, easing onto the bed beside him as she let her hand smooth up the inside of his thigh. “This hard. This aroused. You were bleeding bad last night, Noah. Give me this much at least. Tell me what’s wrong with you.”
He clenched his jaw. He could feel the sweat popping out on his flesh, dampening him as the fever nearly took his head off it spiked so hard inside him.
“Have you heard of whore’s dust?”
She blinked. “It’s a date rape drug. Or was.”
“Was.” He nodded. “We were tracking the man selling it and I was captured. Pumped up on it for a while. There are still minute amounts of it in my body. Adrenaline pumps it through me. Wounds, fevers. I get hard. I need to fuck.”
“Anything? Anyone?” Her lashes lowered as her fingers eased over the torturously tight sac of his balls.
He shook his head. “No.”
“How many women have you had since they did this to you?”
“Does it matter?” He wouldn’t lie to her, not now, not while her fingers were caressing his balls.
His thighs shifted apart, allowing her to cup him as a ragged groan tore from his lips.
“Right now, it won’t matter. Later, maybe it will.” She lowered her head, and Noah felt live electricity sear his nerve endings as she tongued his balls with her damp little tongue.
She gave him a wet kiss. Cupping her lips over his balls she licked him until his hands were buried in her hair, pulling at it, then pushing her head closer. Kneading her scalp like a cat and flexing beneath her touch.
There was something different in her touch now. He couldn’t pinpoint it. Not yet. He’d figure it out tomorrow. Later. After he got her mouth on his dick. But damn, those sweet lips felt so good on his balls. They were tight, they were always tight when the fever hit him, when the need for her touch was an agony, a starvation.
When nothing mattered but feeling her. Just feeling her. Just for a minute, before the hunger sharpened and he had to move.
She sucked at his balls, kissed them.
Had she ever done that when they were married? He swore she hadn’t. But he hadn’t exactly pushed her to be adventurous. He had always been too damned greedy just to get into her pants in the first place.
Now, now, he wanted more. He wanted that wild woman he was glimpsing. The one who liked being talked dirty to. The one who burned in his arms when he let her have her way with his body.
“Is this what you want?” Her voice was velvet soft, a rasp of pleasure so sweet he felt it lance through his body as her tongue licked up the heavy stalk of his erection.
“God yes!” He lifted to her, watching, his teeth clenched, pleasure ricocheting from nerve ending to nerve ending as her mouth finally closed over the head of his cock.
Ah hell yes. This. Her mouth sucking his cock head tight and hot, so sweet. His hips arched to her as he felt her tongue the underside, rub it, her tongue stretching against it in that hot little way she had.
He shivered at the sensation. Shit. That was good. It was too damned good because he was going to blow any second if she kept that up.
Then she changed tactics. She sucked him.
“Hell. Damn you.” His hands locked in her hair at the tight, deep strokes of her mouth. “Suck me, Sabella. God, that hot mouth of yours is like heaven. Sucking me straight to ecstasy.”
She took him deeper inside her mouth than he ever remembered going before. She worked his cock head against her tongue, the roof of her mouth. She stroked him with silken lips, a destructive tongue, and when he thought he was going to shatter from the pleasure, she released him.
“Pretty lips,” he groaned. “Swollen from my cock fucking them. Do you know how much that turns me on?”
His witch. His sweet hot little witch. She stared back at him, her gray eyes darkening, her face flushed, her hair wild around her face and shoulders.
“A lot?” she whispered, licking her lips, then licking the underside of his cock head. “I’m guessing you like it a whole lot.”
A temptress. A brazen little sexpot licking her tongue over the head of his cock and tasting the pearl of semen that beaded at the tiny slit of his cock head.
And then she moaned.
He was going to come with nothing more to spur it than the sound of that moan, hot and hungry. His cock jerked in her hands and she smiled. A sensual, confident little smile. The knowing smile. A woman that holds a man in the very palm of her hand, literally. Not just his soul, but his dick.
She held all of him. Noah knew it. He had known it since the first day he saw her, frazzled, worried about her job and her car and asking for a wrench.
Hell, if he’d known she meant the wrench itself rather than a helping hand …
And here she was now, her body sliding slowly up his, straddling his hips, easing over him and staying clear of his wounds.
That hot, wet pussy slid over the shaft of his cock, tucking it between his own body an
d her swollen flesh as her lips lowered to his.
He was waiting on her, hungry for her. Desperate. Dying in her arms and she didn’t even know it. He died in her arms every time he shot his seed inside her. Every time he felt her contracting around him in release.
“Kiss me, Noah.” Sweet, sensual, her voice worked his senses like a master musician with an instrument. She strummed through his heart, plucked at his ragged soul and left him reaching for her.
“You’re teasing,” he growled as her tongue licked over his hips.
His hand gripped her hips, moving her against him, feeling her pussy slide over his erection as her tongue tasted his lips.
“I intend to deliver.” She nipped at his lips, stared down at him.
“You better deliver fast.” He was this side of panting, one second from rolling her to the bed and burying the thick, tormented length of his cock inside her.
She lifted her hips as his hands slid up her torso, cupped her swollen breasts. He bent his head to her hard little nipples as she let the head of his cock tuck into her entrance.
Noah felt heat sizzle through his dick. It began at the tip, her juices kissed it, glazed it, then pure tight bliss began to enfold it.
He sucked her nipple harder, lashed it with his tongue and heard her cry out his name.
“Oh yeah. Baby, so good.” He had to release her nipple, had to hold her face in his hands, stare into her eyes. “So damned tight. Sweet. Ride me, sweetheart. Ride me out of hell.”
She took him deeper, rocking on him, moving against him as he lifted to her, watching her eyes, watching them as his chest tightened, exploded. She was staring at him the way she’d stared at him before he died. Before he was taken from her.
He had told her to imagine him however she needed to. To let him be whatever she needed. And this was how desperately she needed her husband. The man who had chased the adrenaline high rather than his future with her. But it had been more than that. So much more. And it ended here, in her arms, and he knew the loss hadn’t been worth it. Nothing was worth losing this woman.