Surge: Bolt Saga Volume Five (Bolt Saga #13-15)

by Angel Payne

  Her new position immediately affects opposing parts of my body. My mind instantly calms, accepting what she’s saying with a massive rush of relief. But the perfect cushion of her thighs around mine, joined with the snug slide of her crotch, means my cock already has bigger, better ideas than the “talk” we need to have right now.

  Much.

  Better.

  Ideas.

  “Holy God, I love you.” I croak it against her lips and into all the soft, perfect curves of her chin, her cheeks, and even across her eyelids and brows.

  “Hmmm,” she murmurs, raining the same adoring affection across my face—between her aroused little sighs. I’m not the only one aware that she’s poked at the lightning. “So you enjoy showing me.”

  “That an invitation, Mrs. Richards?”

  As I trail my touch beneath her sweats, lightly fingering the sensitive spot at the top of her ass, she unfurls a sweet mewl against my neck. “Well, as long as we’re talking about women going insane today…”

  “Hmmm, yes.” I dip my other hand around, adding the abrasion of my fingernails to my fuller, deeper caresses on her soft globes. “That does seem to be the popular theme…”

  “Maybe you should alert marketing.” She adds the edges of her teeth to her nuzzles, angling a little higher to hit the curve of my ear. My groan breaks free as she lingers over the top, knowing exactly what spots send the most electricity through my system. I’m crackling with arousal and energy, my face filled with biting wind and white-blond hair, my veins alive with lightning-bright fire.

  “Maybe I should throw you over my lap and spank you for damn near turning me into a neon sign in the middle of the beach.”

  She ceases the blow job to my ear. “Ohhhh.” But compensates with a worse torment—straight along my cock. “Yes, please.”

  Jesus fuck. Where the hell has the woman learned how to roll her hips over me like this? Knowing just where to push in, slide along, and bear down until I feel like nothing but one massive, exposed nerve, waiting with bated breath for another stroke of her exquisite crotch? And how the hell have I gotten so lucky to capture the passionate heart that goes along with this talented pussy…the wondrous woman who feeds the fires of this astonishing sensuality?

  “Emmalina.” I croak her name, knowing I shouldn’t—and won’t—even try to answer those queries either. “Dear God.”

  She lifts up just a little, wiggling her head to let the wind yank her hair out of both our faces. Once the path is clear from her lips to mine again, she leans in but doesn’t touch down. Hovering those lush pads just a breath above mine, she whispers, “Still want me to bend over for that spanking, sir? Or should I just—oh!”

  The little minx stops her purposeful undulations along my dick as soon as I raise a hand, push it against her sweats, and then slap her right ass cheek with a noticeable smack. “Who said anything about you moving, little Bunny?”

  “Oh!” she cries again as I repeat my incentive to her left cheek. “Certainly not me, Mr. Richards.” She drops her forehead to my sternum, turning into a puddle of sighs and whimpers as I deliver a couple more strikes to her firm, full backside.

  “Holy fuck.” My voice is as husky as hers. “Now I do want to bend you over, woman.” I massage away the minor pain I’ve doled, transforming the stings into tingles along her ass and thighs. At least that’s what her gorgeous little sighs tell me. “And then slicken this sweet little back hole, preparing you for the pleasure of my cock…”

  A long, high hum flows out of her. “I’ll just have to make sure we have some lube loaded into a TSA-approved receptacle, then.”

  This time, I’m the one coming to an abrupt stop. Tends to happen when dawning comprehension turns into a holy-shit moment at the speed of light. Nevertheless, I manage to utter, “A TSA…what?”

  Emma’s brows knit, though the rest of her face is still filled with sultry inquisition. “Oh. Maybe we don’t have to worry about them, if you’ve booked a private charter?”

  I plan on doing exactly that but quickly decide that’s not a detail she needs to know—not when it’s clear we haven’t gotten to the bigger point here. Fuck. Wedding ring’s on my finger and I’m off the bad-boy billionaire list for the rest of my life, but my cock is still getting in the way of this Reece Richards adulting bullshit.

  But I still have to find my balls—the right-choice-over-easy-choice kind, not the ones beating at my track pants like lightning trapped in golf balls—and use them to stomp all over her verve in ways that are not going to feel good.

  “Uh…yeah…” Definitely not good. Not even two syllables in. “About that charter, baby.”

  “It is a charter?” She bites her bottom lip and waggles her brows, unwittingly twisting the emotional knife.

  I’m tempted to jab a fist toward the sky where a few stars still linger. Got the point, Big Guy. Loud and clear. Thinking with the nuts means winding up as the putz. Yeah, okay. I know, I know.

  “Did you get one with one of those cool bedrooms too?” Her eyes dance with such provocative promise, I’m on the brink of reneging on the promise I’ve made to my own heart for the sake of keeping hers this glaringly happy.

  “Probably no bedroom this time, baby.”

  “Well, fiddlesticks.” She pushes out one of the cutest pouts God ever fashioned for a woman. “That’s all right.” Then hovers it close to my lips while molding those perfect breasts of hers even tighter against my chest. “We’ll make do, no matter who’s on board. We’ve done it before…”

  I clamp back a moan but only by grinding down a layer of tooth enamel. She had to go and get heavy-lidded on me, betraying exactly what images are filling her heated thoughts. An empty first-class cabin. Clouds outside the windows, and our steamy stares inside. Champagne bubbles on our lips. Macaron frosting across her pussy…

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Do it. Talk to her. Tell her.

  “Velvet—”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Only Alex will be on the flight with me.”

  Shit, shit, double shit.

  Her lip slips free from her teeth. She jerks up—okay, shoves away—from me with rigid shoulders and a stiff spine. The only characteristic she keeps? The bright-blue glints in her eyes—the same and yet as different as a forest fire from a hearth. As pure ire from gathering lust.

  As a graveyard stillness in the middle of such a dazzling dawn.

  And when she does finally speak, leading to an accusation straight out of a Poe poem. “Because you’re only taking Alex on the mission.”

  I drag in a long, hard breath. Expel it so heavily, I’m stunned the seagulls riding the sea wind really haven’t turned into ravens by this point. “Because it’s not just a damn ‘mission,’ okay?” I reach for her. She shirks away. But despite her hair whipping back into her face, hiding her tightening features, I spit out, “Can you please, just for a second, try to understand that, Emmalina? I could barely think straight in Paris knowing what kind of danger I was exposing you to, and everything—everything—we’ll be facing in Barcelona is going to be a hundred times worse than any of that game. We’ll be at the hellmouth, baby. This isn’t my father’s cat-and-mouse game. It’s Faline’s. Remember her? The one who’s joined the ‘Superpower of the Week’ club and is now going for the commemorative collectibles option as well? Can you wrap your mind around even part of what I’m saying with that?”

  She swings her head back around. Damn it. There are a billion gold blades now forged in her stare, and when she twists her lips, tiny sparks rupture from their enticing corners. I’m damn glad I got my Paragon of Protectiveness speech out, because I’m damn sure I’m an inch away from hauling her back for a fierce kiss, a frantic apology, and a complete stance flip on the decision I’ve made about her and the hellmouth trip.

  Never have I been more grateful for one of the woman’s now-you’ve-really-pissed-me-off modes. “I’d ask if you’re even kidding, but I already know the answer.” Her impudence kills the
lip sparks, and I attempt, unsuccessfully, to be grateful. “You’re not kidding, because you’re really that stupid, aren’t you?” And as she jerks to her feet, the rest of my morning wood becomes as flimsy as the boards of this lifeguard stand. “But I’m going to humor you by answering your ridiculous question. Yes, I can wrap my mind around what you’re saying. Not part of it; all of it—because yes, I remember exactly who we’re dealing with here. I was there when she almost shredded ’Dia and me in a jet turbine. I was also there for the trap she had your dad set up at the Virage, and I watched the city I love be laid to waste because of her lust to get that damn virus into your head. But most of all, I was there when she strapped me down and turned my blood into funnel cake—only to throw away my chance of eradicating that sadistic witch when I had the chance.” She stops, pulling in air in heaving spurts, as if all her fury has wiped breathing off of her body’s to-do list. The morning light washes over her grief-stricken face, highlighting the thick aqua tears in her eyes. “So don’t tell me I don’t know what hellmouths look like yet, mister. I think I’ve got that part more than covered.”

  “Agreed.” I’m able to give up that part without second thought—but take a turn at sucking down some massive breaths before going on. “Which is why you can’t, and you aren’t, coming to the one in Spain with me.”

  She doesn’t release a single sound. This time, her wrath gets plated in gold: the sun-colored stuff that radiates out of her palms and across the sand, detonating a hunk of the berm into a flume at least fifteen feet high…

  Until it heats into a towering flume of flared glass.

  Locking me into yet another conflict of reactions.

  At once, the mushy poetic parts of me are nearly moved to fucking tears of my own. Though her rage constructed the sculpture, her love birthed it—and her heartache is evident in every swooping, shimmering inch of it. But it’s also the monument to her inexperience—an ignorance that could have deadly implications, if exploited by the wrong circumstances—or the most heartless opponent.

  In this case, that might not even mean Faline.

  For all we know, that bitch could be just the gatekeeper for worse monsters.

  As if my churning gut needs one more tap toward full nausea, there’s a blast of strong wind across the shore, instantly turning the sculpture into a pile of shattered shards on the sand. I bite my tongue, holding back the obvious commentary. I married one of the smartest women on the planet. She already gets the symbolism.

  Still doesn’t mean she’s approving of it.

  “Damn it.” She sobs out the growl, bracing her hands on the railing and dropping her head between her slumping shoulders. The damp wood smolders beneath her bitter grip. “I’m your wife,” she spits. “I’m your wife.”

  “A fact I haven’t forgotten, Velvet.” I rise as well but stand well clear of the invisible force field of tension she’s thrown up around herself. “And haven’t stopped being grateful for.”

  “Of course,” she counters. “So grateful, you’re jetting off to Spain less than twenty-four hours after our vows.”

  Since I’m clearly going to owe somebody for a new lifeguard stand, I let my sparks fly, carving a couple of baseball-sized holes into the boards next to my feet. “Because you’re not just my wife, damn it.” I let the seethe of that sink in for a couple of long seconds. “You’re the center of my soul. The compass of my integrity. The love of my fucking existence.”

  The wood beneath her hands starts to char. “Oh, damn it, Reece,” she softly moans.

  “So you know what that also makes you, right?”

  She shoves out a sound as jagged and violent as her falling sculpture—though this time, I’m sure parts of me have been sliced open from the fallout. I’m about to break my pledge about giving her space, when she whirls and covers the distance between us in a single lunge. At once I wrap her close and tight, uncaring that I can’t control my laser fingers in time. I can buy Lydia a new sweatshirt. I can’t recover the trapped sweetness of this moment, engulfed by the wind and the sunrise and the silent sanctity of our pressed hearts.

  And the truth they must now accept.

  With slow reluctance, Emma finally slips one hand free from my neck. Slides it down to the plane of my pectoral, where she rubs her fingertips in a soft, cherishing circle.

  “Will there ever be a day when I’m not your liability?” she rasps.

  I pulse a quick laugh into her hair. “In the truest sense of the form?” I return. “Good fuck, I hope not.” I clench my pecs, already anticipating the whap that earns me. And then continue the tension into the coil of my grip, also already knowing how she’ll try to step away. “But in the sense that you’ll have your skills trained and your instincts honed so I don’t have to split my mind worrying about you in a battle or fight?” Since that stills her, I shift my hold up the backs of her shoulders and start a few worshipful caresses of my own. “You’ll get there, Emmalina—faster than you probably think. You’re just not there yet, and that’s no reflection on anything other than the fact that you’re still piecing your bloodstream back together and learning what it can do.” When she attempts a new huff, I dig my massages in with new intent. The disciplinary kind. “You remember what happened just yesterday? With the cloak of invisibility on the obstacle course cutout?”

  She rolls her eyes. “I was kind of there.”

  “But what if you’d gone wide with that pulse and made it so I wasn’t?”

  Well, there’s my definitive eye-roll killer. “I-I wouldn’t have let it get that out of control,” she defends. “Besides, the cutout wasn’t gone. I just made it invisible.”

  “But how do you know it’d have the same effect on a carbon-based life form, like a man?” I rebut. “What happens when you ‘erase’ something that breathes and moves? And for that matter, what if that organism shifts? What’s the danger to them? To you? And if you learn to control the beam, what’s the range you have on it? How effective is the power at a bigger distance? And for how long?”

  “All right, all right!” She doesn’t move away but shoves at my chest as if that option’s not off her table. Her bottom lip pushing out in a defined pout, she mutters, “All I want to do is help.”

  “And you do.” I dig fingers into her spine and pull in so hard she has no choice but to obey, wrapping her arms around my neck once more. “My incredible, brave woman…don’t you get it? You help more than anyone on the team. More than anyone can ever hope to.”

  “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

  I prevent her from being subjected to my laugh, likely as unwelcome as my schmaltz despite its loving intention, by taking her lips firmly but tenderly. “Well, right now, you’re going to be the biggest help by—”

  “I know, I know,” she grumbles. “By sweeping the porch, keeping my apron clean, and making sure there’s no troublesome smoke on the horizon.”

  “Huh?”

  So much for thinking her eye rolls are over. “I’ll keep the homestead safe, Pa. Don’t you worry none about your womenfolk,” she cracks—making me kiss her to save her from my laughter again.

  “My womanfolk,” I correct. “Just you, my Velvet Bunny. Only you. Always.” One more long, languorous kiss later, I growl, “And the only ‘broom’ I want to hear about in your hand is the one you use to sweep up the remains of Foley’s ass after you’ve kicked it into the training mat a bunch of times.”

  She punches out another sound of feral frustration—though the chest smack she joins to it is a flimsy stand-in for the same attitude. “You’re making it damn hard to hate you right now, Reece Richards.”

  I lean in, smooshing my lips to her temple in a passionate figure-eight. “Same way you make it damn easy to worship you, my goddess.”

  “Sweet talk isn’t going to help you.”

  “Then what will?”

  Three weeks and too many conscious hours later, I keep my mind engaged—along with my cock—by remembering exactly what her answer
was to that. By the time we finished, having broken into the shack on the lifeguard stand to do so, we’d missed Sawyer and ’Dia’s French toast and I was transferring a hefty payment to the Redondo Beach city works department.

  Worth. Every. Cent.

  Alex returns to our tiny table at the Granja Viader café, though I almost haul back and deck him as he does. Though I brought the guy along because his mind runs like a Bugatti, his crisis composure is steady as a Humvee, and he’s a theater geek who can turn a bull rider into Marilyn Monroe using a mop, a bed sheet, and some lipstick, it still takes me a second to remember he’s pulled off close to the same miracle for both of us. For the last few weeks, he’s been a swishy cross of Freddie Mercury and Fabio, and I’ve been a half-bald estate accountant with a thing for downing one coffee after the next.

  Upside? The habit has helped with staying awake for the nonstop pace we’ve kept since getting here. Downside? After three hundred coffees in twenty-one days, “jittery” has officially become a mix of high and paranoid.

  “Is that them?” I jerk my head toward the screen of Alex’s burner phone, not needing to elaborate any further than that.

  “Wrong burner,” Alex mutters. “This is my connecting line back to Wade and Fersh. I’m telling them that everything we thought was true.”

  Fast scowl. “About what?”

  “About you on caffeine.”

  Darker scowl. “So my little ‘character quirk’ was all a science experiment?”

  “Pretty much.” He smirks. I think. It’s either that or the fake caterpillar draped across his upper lip has constipation. “Controlled environment plus situational necessity. Seemed a natural fit to answer our collective curiosities.”

  I give up on the scowling, mostly because it makes my head itch. Emma pleaded that I not get my typical hair trim before the wedding, stating my “Edward Cullen side” is a definite turn-on. I’d obliged without thinking, anticipating a solid week of plunging it between her thighs during our time in Monterey. Now nearly all of it is stuffed under a latex dome stretched between my ears—and I do my best to distract myself from that weirdness by snapping, “If my caffeine sensitivity is really on your curiosities list, I’m worried.”