by Black, Incy
“I don’t care.”
“You might not, but I do. You deserve silk and soft music, candlelight and loving—”
“No, I don’t. I need fu—”
He kissed her, swallowing the word she’d been about to say. He’d give her what she needed, but not that, and not here. She was looking for a memory. Fucks were easily forgotten. He should know.
“You’re up for this,” she breathed when he released her mouth. “I can feel it.”
He groaned as her hand brushed his cock. “That’s standard when I’m around you,” he bit, his teeth grit together tight. “But it’s still not happening. Not down here.”
Her naughty hand edged behind the waistband of his scrubs, her fingers tightening around him. “Yes. It is.”
“Angel—” he warned.
“I don’t need sweet music, Will. I don’t need silk and romancing.”
“No, but you deserve it.” He needed her lips to stop tracing his throat, the tip of her tongue pressing and tasting. He needed her fingers to stop stroking. He needed for her hips to cease sliding his outer thigh. He needed her to stop…everything, because any more, and he wouldn’t be able to.
Maybe one more kiss would be fine. Couldn’t hurt to remove her top, seemed unappreciative not to. Maybe just one gentle flick of her tight nipple with his tongue. Maybe just one more pass of his fingertips over the low sweet curve of her mound. Hard to tell how or when his hand had passed into two layers of cotton, but maybe just one little dip of his fingers into wet…
Oh, bollocks. He’d never pretended to be any kind of saint.
He eased down her body, pausing only to nip or lick at silky smooth when she grew impatient and growled. He preferred purrs.
“Will, I can’t—”
“You can.” He smiled against the naval, tracing the curve of her hips, his expert fingers sliding her scrub bottoms and panties simultaneously passed her thighs, down her legs, as his mouth inched lower and lower…and fastened.
Well, a husky moan was almost a purr, given he’d just started. And the way she tasted, piquant sweet coating his tongue, so delicious, he’d forgive her anything. He gave her a swirl, another, and plunged deep.
And over she went, silently, gracefully, politely, so ladylike.
Bloody brilliant, but he wanted her noisy. He wanted her unleashed. He wanted her wild. She’d begged for a memory. He wanted to give her more than that. He wanted this moment in time stopped, seared on her soul.
He went in for Round Two and after that earned him some filthy mutterings—so hot—a tingling scalp from where she directed, tugging at his hair, and a whole cluster of urgent protests, pleas, and gasps, he climbed back up her body for Round Three before his furious cock rebelled at being denied for too long.
He’d just shuffled his scrubs past his stiffness when he remembered: condom.
“Will,” Angel cried out breathlessly, squirming violently beneath him.
Christ, he’d asked for wild, but she was going to kill him…and he’d die a happy man.
“Will,” she repeated more urgently.
Rhys’s medical kit, he remembered, relief and gratitude flooding him. He’d seen condoms in there. Stretching, he reached for the green box on the shelf where he put it. Another couple of inches…he got the bugger. Flipping the lid, he dug blindly inside and found the foil square he need.
“Will!” Angel shouted, her hands now slapping at shoulders.
“Jesus, patience, woman.”
More slapping and flapping. “No, Will. We’re being watched.”
He lifted from her, his elbows and body locking into a suspended press-up, his expression one of pained disbelief, if the tight pull of skin across his face was anything to go by. “What?”
“We’re being watched,” she repeated on a hiss. “A vagrant, I think. I didn’t get that good a look. Quick, get off me.”
Taking advantage of his temporary stunning, she slid from beneath him, reached high for a set of scrubs hanging above them, wriggled into them, and slipped off the table. She padded to the bars and wrapped her hands around two struts. “Hello… Hi, I’m Angel,” she said, keeping her voice to a low hush.
Bloody hell!
He scrambled to the fool woman, wrapped his arm across her midriff and tugged. “What the fuck, Angel? Have you no sense of self-preservation? Step back.”
She jarred him with her hip—not playfully. “And miss the possibility of us getting out of here? No chance. You step back.”
“You don’t know who or what’s out there,” he growled, tightening his grip on her waist, which earned him a silent blast of her Siberian frost.
“I’ve just got free of one man who questioned my every action; don’t you dare step into the shoes he vacated. I’ve got this, Berwick. Step back.”
He stepped back. Not because he felt threatened. Because he had a feeling if he didn’t show confidence in her now, Angel would never again give him the chance to do so. “Okay. I’ll switch on the other lamp. Just be careful.”
“No. More light might frighten whoever it is away.”
Jesus. Him leaving her exposed went against his every instinct. He opened his mouth to argue.
“Please, Will. Don’t back down on me now. Don’t steal back the faith in me you’ve just shown. It matters. More than you can possibly know.”
He sighed and nodded. “Fine, do your stuff, Angel. Just…step a little farther away from the bars, yeah?”
Hesitation flittered her eyes. She rolled her lips inward. “I—”
He brushed a tangle from her face. “Confidence, Sunshine. I’ll be close.”
He retreated to the half shadows to the left of her. She turned back to the curtain of blackness in front of her, lowered to the floor, and pulled her knees to her chest. “You still there?” she called softly. “How about I tell you all about myself and Mr. Cock-Blocked-And-Not-Happy-About-It over there?”
His mouth hung open for a nanosecond, and then he grinned.
Chapter Eighteen
In the end, it took Angel damn near an hour of quiet coaxing—with only one interference from him when he passed their last can of beans through the bars to the vagrant in a show of good faith—to persuade the derelict drifter to help them.
After which their unlikely guardian angel had disappeared for what felt like too fucking long, only to return dragging a long scaffolding pole.
With which between the three of them, and using a whole lot of body force, they’d managed to buckle a gap in the bars wide enough for him and Angel to squeeze free.
The thumb drive safe in his pocket, he’d thought their immediate troubles largely over. Until, after scrambling endless tunnels and crawling air vents, they’d reached the base of a deep circular shaft, and the vagrant had fast disappeared at their discovery of Rhys’s body. Folded backward, awkwardly, across a long, low lying concrete plinth, his neck twisted at a hideous angle, his face and hands gnawed by hungry creatures, suggesting he’d fallen to his death a couple of weeks ago.
Fuck. With Angel close to catatonic, how the hell was he supposed to convince her to make the hundred-foot climb out? Because he sure as hell wasn’t leaving her down here on her own with just her brother’s smashed corpse for company while he went for help.
Holding her close, her face pressed deep to his shoulder, he felt her stir then try to wriggle free. He tightened his arms not yet ready to let her go. She’d scared the bejesus out of him. Not screaming or crying out at the sight of Rhys, but instead locking silent and as still as a stone angel statue marking the grave of a beloved one.
Little quakes wracked her frame.
He had to get her out of here.
Making sure to obstruct her view of Rhys’s body, he turned Angel in his arms so her back tucked against his front and pointed at the iron ladder fixed to the wall of the deep shaft. “It’s a hell of a climb out, sweetheart. Do you think you can make it with my help?”
She twisted, trying to get a glimpse of her br
other. He re-angled his shoulders so she couldn’t. She did not need that foul image of Rhys broken, indelibly carved on her mind.
“What about… What about Rhys?” she pressed quietly.
“First opportunity I get, I’ll call Jack Ballentyne and Nick Marshall to recover his body and take it somewhere safe.”
“Safe is for the living, Will. The dead don’t much care. I just don’t want him lying here. Like a piece of garbage to be chewed on by rats.”
“I’ll sort it, Angel.”
“Do you… Do you think he suffered?”
His heart twisted. “No, sweetheart, he’d have died on impact.”
He felt the tremor run her entire body. He should have chosen his words more carefully.
“I should feel anger…sorrow…something, but I don’t. I feel not one damn thing. What does that say about me, Will?”
He shuffled her to the foot of the ladder. “It tells me I need to get you out of here. Hold on to one of these rungs. No climbing until you feel me at your back. I need to grab your brother’s laptop.”
“It’s smashed, Will… Like Rhys.”
“If I could bring him back for you, sweetheart—”
“I wouldn’t let you. Broken is broken. Sometimes things can’t be fixed and need to be set aside. He wasn’t happy. I can’t recall a single image of him smiling, Will. That used to worry me. Until I realized he never did. Smile, that is.”
What the hell was he supposed to say to that? “I can’t risk leaving the laptop here and have it fall into the wrong hands. Jack’s twin Richard is a genius with computers. He’ll be able to retrieve any files.” It was official. He was a selfish dick. Taking charge and sticking to business might ease him, but what about Angel? Like she gave a shit about disk drives and files with her brother lying dead in the dirt. Were it physically possible to kick your own backside, he’d have done so.
“Well, you’re not going to be able to reach it if you don’t let go of me, Will. I promise not to collapse in a heap.”
In easing the laptop free from beneath Rhys’s buckled body, he’d silently thanked the man for selecting a notebook-size device, because it fit snugly down the front of his jeans with the other half rising across his lower abdomen, leaving both his hands free to grip the sides of the ladder.
Angel—him at her back to take her weight should her arms give out and she slipped, though his insistence had annoyed her—had climbed not twenty rungs when she stopped. “How do we know if Rhys deactivated the timer on his computer? What if he fell on his way out?”
“Vagrant Arthur made no mention of riots in the streets when I asked him about the situation up top. Which, there would have been had news of the medical trials leaked out. Rhys must have fallen on his climb back down. He didn’t abandon you, Angel. He was coming back.”
“Maybe, but that still leaves me as a threat. What with BT11 poisoning my… You saw what those crazed rats… With Rhys gone—”
“Trust me, I’ll fix it. Fix everything. Somehow. Now start climbing.”
“Okay,” she whispered, gripping the iron up-rail tight and taking her first step on the ladder.
Bizarre, inappropriate even, given the unknown dangers they still faced, but warmth flooded his body at her confidence in him. Christ, he hoped he wouldn’t disappoint her.
They’d cleared not twenty feet when Angel froze. “Will, without food and water, those rats will die.”
He went rigid behind her, saying not one word.
“Will?”
She must have felt his body shudder because, hooking one elbow over a rung to secure herself, she twisted and looked down at him. “You set them free, didn’t you? You couldn’t stand the thought of them suffering.”
“Just concentrate and keep moving, Angel. That rat room? Total amnesia from this point forward. Two of those little fuckers actually jumped from their cage and ran at me.”
She started laughing. “So that’s why you came flying down the corridor after grabbing the thumb drive, yelling ‘go, go, go’ like a maniac.”
“Move, Angel.” He knew her hilarity had nothing to do with amusement and everything to do with shock. He needed to get her out of here and somewhere safe fast.
Safe being a challenge, because who knew what had gone down in the days he’d spent out of contact underground. Angel was already a known fugitive with a target on her back. His sudden disappearance had likely triggered an all-out alert on him, too. Whether to find and safely secure or to find and shoot on sight—that was the question.
…
Angel didn’t know where Will had brought her, nor did she care. She’d ceased to feel a part of time and place back at the bottom of that deep shaft, Rhys arched backward over a steel support girder, his eyes open to the exit high, high, high above. Christ, she hoped his death had been instant. That his last thought hadn’t been agonizing fear and disappointment that she wasn’t there to save him.
She was abstractly puzzling why utter numbness should feel like a dead weight, when the red door of what she assumed was the converted stable block to the adjoining huge eccentrically Gothic main house, opened.
A jaw-droppingly stunning woman in flowing dove-gray silk with a cream lace trim gave them a quick body scan and arching her brow, asked, “Hard night, Will?”
“Hard fucking fortnight,” Will mumbled, hustling her into a wide hall and kicking the door shut with his heel. “Angel, meet my mother.”
Her head, bowed and heavy, yanked up so fast it was a wonder it didn’t cleave from her shoulders. His mother? He’d used that mouth in front of his mother? The heat flaming her cheeks fueled the effort it took for her to glare at him.
Will swiped a hand across his face “It was a thought. I didn’t mean to speak it out loud,” he defended weakly.
The older woman’s laugh was husky yet rich and smooth, like crepe paper against velvet. “I see someone’s trying to take you in hand, Will. I can only hope she has more luck than I did.”
Will sighed. His mother’s smile widened.
Angel bit her lip and looked at her feet.
“I need somewhere for Angel to stay out of sight while I sort out a few things. I also need a gun, two burner phones, clothes, a couple of passports, and access to a significant amount of cash should things go tits up.”
“I take it you’re in trouble?” said his mother, sounding not the least nonplussed.
“Me, maybe. Angel, definitely.”
She could feel the tension rolling off Will. Hardly surprising when he’d just asked his own mother to arm him up.
“Well, yes to all your demands, but I do wish you’d learn to ask nicely. You know how resistant I am to taking orders.”
Angel tried to bury back under the heavy cloak of numbness that had lifted. Just how “underworld” was Will’s mother?
Will ignored the slap down. “The amount of traffic this hotel receives, we’ll need to use your private apartment. We can’t risk one of your girls talking.”
His mother huffed, her incredible eyes, the same shifting green as Will’s, performing an eye roll. “My girls earn five-thousand pounds a half hour, Will. The slightest hint of one misplaced word and they know that cash flow disappears. Not to mention, none of them would wish to feel the slap of my hand.”
Mother and son went into a hand-on-hip glare down. Will broke first. “Angel’s had a rough day,” he muttered, throwing her under a bus.
“Then I’ll show Angel through to your old room where she can wash up while I fetch her something more comfortable to wear,” his mother responded using that incredibly irritating “reasonable” tone that Will often used on Angel. The one that left her contemplating murder.
“She also needs something to eat.”
“Then fix her something, William. You know where to find everything.”
It was Will’s turn with the eye roll before he stomped across the small hall to a corridor leading, she presumed, to the kitchen.
His mother laughed and then turn
ed to her, hands back on her hips, her frown openly assessing.
Angel tried not to squirm and failed. “I’m sorry. I thought he was only abysmally rude to me.”
More laughter as his mother linked her arm through hers and drew her down a wide passage running in the opposite direction to the one Will had taken.
“Something to know about my son. He’s only abominably rude to those he likes. Take it as a compliment. Does that make sense?”
“No,” she answered honestly as the woman pushed her through into a large square room. A double bed centered on the wall opposite wide windows, a positive atlas of faded maps and posters of Marvel superheroes and archvillains covering the walls, floor to ceiling.
Will’s mother sank into an elegant recline on the bed, one leg tucked beneath her, the other swinging freely as she smoothed a crease that did not exist from the silk counterpane embroidered with flags from across the world. “Will was barely twenty-five. Diana gave him an enticing gift, let him play with it, delight in it, and then she stole it back. Now my son prefers to sit that particular game out altogether. The stronger his feelings are for a person, the harder he’ll work to repel them. You should be flattered.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t follow.” The woman was trying to tell her something, her mind was just too sluggish to figure out what, but her every instinct was screaming at her to work it out fast because this was important.
“Hmmm… Then let me put it this way. You break my son’s heart, Dr. Treherne, and I guarantee you won’t enjoy answering to me,” Will’s mother promised softly.
Chapter Nineteen
Angel, superheroes and villains staring at her from all sides, wondered if she’d somehow teleported to an alternate dimension. Why was this woman—who largely spoke in tongues—threatening her? What the hell had she ever done to her?
The burn started slow. She curled her fingers, her nails scoring crescents into her palm. “I did not ask for your son to bring me here, Mrs…Ms—”
Her nails dug deeper. Christ, did this woman go by Berwick or some other name. Naturally, Will hadn’t seen fit to enlighten her, to advantage her with even the most basic of social niceties. “Mrs…Ms…Will’s Mother.”