Hot Contract
Page 15
He slipped her bra down over her shoulders. “The subject isn’t closed,” he told her, “it’s shelved for later. Tomorrow or...I can’t believe I’m going to let this go, stop looking at me like that.”
“Like this?” she whispered, lifting her face to his.
He kissed her deeply as she arched her hips and settled over him. She slid down on him, inch by inch—until the mind-blowing pleasure ran perilously close to pain. A faint, terrified tremble started in the back of her knees. He was big, and she'd only had sex once. Was it supposed to feel this way?
Keegan cupped his hands around her face, holding her until she had to look into his eyes. “Look at me,” he said. “Look at me, Jen. Tell me who I am.”
“K-Keegan,” she said.
He rolled up over her and held her tightly. “You aren't fat. You aren't frigid. And if you don't move—just a little—my balls are going to explode.”
Jen twitched—just a little, and was rewarded by his groan.
“You're killing me. Do that again.”
He stretched her until she could feel every inch of him sunk deep within her, but he wasn't trying to hurt her. He didn't get off on pain. He was funny and honorable, and…Keegan.
She took a quick breath. “I don't want you to die…of exploding b-balls.”
“You know I'm just shitting you, right?”
Her laugh choked on her lips, but it was still a laugh. “If you're trying to impress me with romantic language, you might want to try harder.”
“Damn, Jen. I—” He shook his head and gave her a hard, deep kiss, pushing her knees back over her shoulders.
Looking down over her belly she could see his length disappearing into her curls. The sight was incredibly erotic, and she shivered uncontrollably. His eyes glittered, and this time—he twitched.
Pleasure kicked her in the gut. “How many...of those condoms, do we have?”
“A box,” he ground out, “back at the campground.”
He moved slowly, letting her get used to his intrusion in her body. The way he was eating her with his eyes made it hard to think.
“I won't break,” she told him. “This isn’t a one-time deal. We have a whole box, remember?”
The look he gave her was pure sex. “Only a box?” He slipped his hands under her ass. He pounded into her, hard and fast, taking her with thrusts that shook her breasts and sent them bouncing. “Make it three,” he said breathlessly, “and you’ve got a deal.”
Her thighs quivered, trembling in a way they’d never done before. His fingers curled, lifting her as he reared back.
“Keegan? It feels strange. Damn it! I think I’m going to come—”
“Come? Jesus, I’m going to detonate a nuke.”
She clung to him but still flew apart, shattering around him as he threw his head back and bit down on his lip, letting out a low groan.
Her entire body throbbed. “Omigod...” she whispered, collapsing in utter exhaustion. “Omigod.”
His arms were tight, holding her to him as if he could force them together to make them one. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely, “that about sums it up.”
He pulled back, only to stop when she refused to release him. “C’mon, Jen. Let me up. These things aren’t reusable.”
She grinned lazily. “Maybe if we don’t move?”
“No.”
“Or—”
“No.”
“All right." Jen caught his mouth in a long, sweet kiss. “I’ll listen, this time. But be warned, I’ve upped the ante to four.”
Chapter Seventeen
Keegan swung down to sit on a rocky outcropping and rubbed his arm. The back of the hill rolled down and away from him in ripples of broken lava. No-fly on one side, a bullet hole in the other. Between lingering nausea and a constant, all-over ache the way down looked just as hard as the way up.
“What am I supposed to be looking for again?”
Jen slipped into place beside him on the narrow ledge and shaded her eyes. “Production wells. We built up instead of out, so they should be easy to see. We can take a bearing and come out near the Project.”
“Honey, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but it’s going to be dark soon. We should get back on the road. This place is like a minefield.”
“If we make for the wells, we’ll cut across the North Quadrant ring trail. The markers are tagged with luminescent paint.”
His mind stuttered. Jesus, he knew exactly what he’d do with glow in the dark paint. “Jen, about today. You know, I was wondering if this—today, you know, I mean—I mean if it meant anything to you.” He trailed off, hoping he’d managed to sound coherent long enough for her to get what he was working at. “The sex—”
“Wasn’t sex,” she said tightly. “It was love, we made love.” She turned to look at him. “What part did you misunderstand?”
Keegan took a deep breath, scrubbing at his face. Shit, he couldn’t fall apart now. He turned his head to keep her from seeing the look in his eyes. “StallingCo—”
“Is not a nice company, and we’re not nice people.” She loosened her grip on him and straightened her shoulders beneath her stained pink ruffles. “Please don’t have second thoughts.”
The growing fear pounding in Keegan’s heart half-clotted his words. “Jen, I—”
“No need to explain,” she said tightly. “If anything, I expect the last couple of weeks have taught me that I can’t run from my past. I’m Jen and Guinevere Morgaine, and if you can’t deal with the fifty percent of me that's genetically messed up, this isn't going to work.”
“StallingCo is a fucking giant. Your world is so damned big. How,” he cleared his throat, tried again, “how the hell can you want me?”
“I can’t change my family. It's unfair to ask.” Her eyes closed. “I don’t live at StallingCo and I want my job back. I don’t think I’ll ever lose weight—”
“Honey, we both have issues.”
“Piles of issues.” She finally looked into his eyes, the line of her mouth taut with unhappiness.
He started to look at her, lost his nerve and looked away again. He wasn’t afraid of much, but Jen was right there on his short list. He gathered the courage to look over into her eyes.
She shoved him and he fell over off the ledge into the grass. She followed him down, threw a leg over his hips to complete his capture and sighed, fingers curled loosely against his bare chest. “We can wait until sunset.”
Keegan sat up on his elbows. “Umm, Jen. Think you could give me a hand?”
Jen grinned, one finger hooked in his pants. “If that’s what you want....”
****
Fallon closed the front door and held it tight while Corlis looped a restraint over the knob and ran it back over the rail. They'd taken two bags of weapons from the trailer. Fallon picked up the largest while Corlis slung a slender black duffle over her shoulder.
She held out a grenade launcher and a long, flat-headed screwdriver. “Found these in the evidence room,” she said, letting her fingers touch his.
Her knuckles were bruised and her hand was filthy, but he held on to her anyway, his heart up in his throat. “Thanks,” he managed.
She shrugged.
Was it his imagination that she was holding on to him as hard as he was holding on to her? He didn’t want to move and break the moment, but he had to touch her cheek and from there it was a short distance to her lips.
She closed her eyes and turned her cheek into his cupped palm. “There’s ammo,” she breathed.
“I can use ammo," he said softly. Corlis was touching him on the doorstep of a freaking police station, out in the middle of nowhere. Hell, he wanted to do her right up against the door.
She took a step closer. He could feel the heat of her body and see the uncertainty in her eyes. She pecked him, a quick brush of her lips on his, and pulled back quickly, shoes scuffling on the worn wooden steps.
“Corlis.”
She turned back to him, her expression closed.
Her lips parted and for a second, he thought she was going to say something, but she nodded instead, before starting away.
“Get something inconspicuous,” she called over her shoulder.
A ragged row of silver gray trees sheltered them from the main road. Lights flickered through the branches, coming from out on the highway, headed up the mountain.
Fallon dumped the bag and pointed to a little brown two-door near the entrance to the parking lot. “That one.”
"You get it, I’ll dump these.” She took the bag, popped the trunk on a police cruiser, threw the bags in and broke the key off in the lock.
Whoever drove the brown car hadn't bothered to lock the doors. Fallon put his grenade launcher in the back seat before he sat down and broke the casing from the steering column.
Corlis got in a minute later.
“Should have got coffee,” he said. “The cops had a machine right next to the desk.”
“You turn it off?”
“I’m not trying to burn down a trailer full of cops and innocent bystanders, babe.” He jammed the screwdriver into the ignition slot.
Corlis looked out the window, her face a pale blur in the night-darkened glass. She tried to work it out, to give her fear a name. “It's time to call for backup. We can't do this on our own. Percival Stalling is—”
“Yeah,” said Fallon, willing to label Jen's brother anything from the Devil to an asshole to make his partner happy. He wasn't about to get between Corlis and her emotions. They were both damaged. Fallon pulled out and joined the flow of traffic headed to the park. “Call after you eat. There are granola bars in the glove box.”
“Chocolate chip?”
“I don’t know where you think we are. But this ain’t no Wal-mart, the box says raisins.”
That snapped her out of it. “Raisins?”
Fallon reached over, grabbed the box and dropped it in her lap. “Get something in your stomach. You're too damned thin.”
****
Keegan pushed out from under a wind-flattened tree and stood, looking out over the lava barren. “There’s a break halfway to the front,” he said, helping Jen out from under a low-hanging branch.
He didn’t let go. She didn’t want to let go, either. How they'd managed to get where they were going was a miracle. Their earlier run had been beyond stupid. Even if Keegan didn’t, Jen knew better. This whole plain was littered with hornitos and lava tubes. Without help, a fall through the fragile surface of the lava into an underground conduit or one of the deep holes left by the receding magma would more than likely kill them.
The small break in the escarpment was eroded to the point of being unstable, and neither of them wanted to risk a jump. Keegan lowered her to the ground and followed, his boots crunching down through the loose patina. He was hurting worse than he said. The rings around his eyes stood out like bruises. She caught him when he would have fallen, staggering back under his weight. He gave her such a fake smile that she had to laugh, despite her fears.
He brushed her lips with his, and Jen kissed him back so hard he let out a grunt. “Keep doing that,” he said, “and we’ll never get out of here. Now what?”
Long shadows slanted across the desolate landscape like blackened fingers. They had to get back to a point where they could strike out toward the trail.
“We look for a way around,” she said. “It’d help if we could lose a little height, maybe follow a crevice or something. I don’t know if anyone will come back down the road, but we’re really obvious.”
Keegan gestured to a fracture in the smooth lava. “What about that?”
Jen tapped the ground with her sandal and cocked her head over, listening. “It looks solid enough, but if you step on something and it starts to crack, move fast.”
Keegan dropped out of sight, and when his voice came again it sounded like he was at the bottom of a well. “It feels solid.”
His voice didn’t echo.
Jen slid down into the space beside him, hands brushing at the sides. The flow that had created the hollowed out half-tube wasn’t as old as the eruption that had splintered up around the escarpment. Like two cake layers, the more recent flow had settled on top.
“...he’s got a sat-phone.”
Jen jumped, hand fisted over her mouth. She knew her eyes were wide, but the look Keegan gave her told her that she’d just lost her color, too.
“God,” she whispered.
Keegan shook his head, putting his hand over her mouth when it looked like her own wasn’t going to be enough. “Tell me,” he breathed over her ear, barely moving his lips.
“Conduit,” she mouthed, horrified she was being too loud, and scared Keegan wouldn’t hear her.
“The heiau?”
She nodded.
“...anyone see where he went,” called a voice she recognized as her cousin, Dave.
“It’s that security guard. The blond guy.”
“Shit, I saw him at the luau. Watch it, man! He’s going for the fuses.”
A man shouted. “...shoot him, shoot him!”
Keegan froze, every muscle in his body tight. “C-4,” he breathed. “Oh, Jesus.” And Deacon was going after it.
“C-4?”
“Plastic bonded explosives, composition four. I saw the boxes—”
Her mind was going a mile a minute. “Explosives?”
Boxes of...explosives? Her aunt was crazy, but Jen had simply assumed she was one of those fire and magic people, waiting for Pele to come out of Her crater and blow the desecrators away. But what if Aunt Kate had been playing them, waiting for her chance to blow the rift? There was always the chance that a well-placed charge would trigger enough of a reaction to send the entire side of Mauna Loa sliding down into the sea. More likely that it would divert the current eruption into a new channel. The Project was down-slope. And no one, least of all Kate, knew enough about the complex interconnections present in the magma chamber to guess at the impact of a violent explosion on the fragile rift-zone. The real probability genius had been Terri.
Oh, God. Terri. Terri had been involved with the Aina. What had she seen beneath the heiau to make it worth Kate’s while? And why had the Aina killed her with their plans so close to completion?
Jen came back to herself to find Keegan staring into her eyes. He knew, even without her saying anything. In his own way he was as much of an expert as Terri.
“This isn’t one of my scenarios,” she breathed. “I could give you some tech-jargon, but no hard answers. There are too many variables. If you could get the charge to blow down like this,” she cupped her hands like an upside down bowl, “maybe something would happen.”
“The Project is downhill,” he whispered.
She nodded, throat tight. The odds weren’t good. Terri had known something and hundreds of people were going to die because Jen hadn’t seen the changes in her friend.
The voices got louder. “He’s down,” yelled Dave. “I got him in the leg.”
“Careful man, look for a gun.”
“The rangers start their rounds in an hour. We don’t have time for this shit.”
“Where’s Kuipo?” asked the second voice.
“She’ll be here.”
“Oh man, Dave. He’s bleeding.”
“No difference. He’s gonna die anyway. Throw’em in the vent.”
“They’re talking about Deacon,” said Jen, charging out of the hole.
Keegan caught her before she could go running off. “He knew the risks.”
“Terri was his fiancée. How can you just walk away?”
“Just watch me. I can walk away from anything.”
“If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
In his world, women died all the time and the horror of that happening to Jen was enough to immobilize him. Shit—caring made you weak. He had to get his head out of his a
ss and get his priorities straight. Protect her, save Connor. As far as he was concerned, Deacon was already dead. “You’re willing to trade his life for the lives of all the people on your Project? He died the minute he walked back in there.”
“I won’t abandon him. We can save Deacon and stop the Aina—”
“Jesus! This ain't no damned movie. I don't have some kind of special gun or backup waiting off-stage. If you die, you're fucking dead and if I die, you'll die soon after.” He grabbed her shoulders. “Listen to me!”
“Damn it, Keegan!” She stared into his eyes, hands locked on his wrists. “Help me,” she whispered. "Please do something.”
Chapter Eighteen
Keegan crouched just inside the outer curtain wall. He’d talked Jen into staying behind but he knew she was on the other side of the parking lot, waiting for a chance to rush in and fix things. Terri had personally, and with malice, screwed everyone in sight and Jen in particular. Now Jen was dealing with the consequences by trying to protect the one friend she had left. Jesus, he felt sorry for Deacon. Just looking at the big sloppy crescents where the former CIA operative had fought back told Keegan that he was fighting not just the Aina, but time.
Deacon had rarely interacted with SOSCOM, Special Operations Support Command. He’d specialized in South America, and done work on the Shining Path along with Fallon’s old group, the 7th SFG. The Project must have looked easy after field work. It’d have been easier still if he’d just backed away, but love made people do strange things, and Keegan wasn’t about to judge him. Deacon was up shit creek without a paddle, and Keegan was right there behind him. He padded across the crushed coral, careful to keep to the hard packed edges. There were fourteen boxes of C-4 and a flat case that might hold fuses perched on the table next to the water coolers. If Jen was right and Terri had been working with the Aina, the terrorists knew what they were doing. The nearby hill wasn’t just a vantage point. It was high ground.
He pulled himself up over the edge of the stone platform, wincing as the makeshift bandage around his thigh caught on a splintered rock. A flash of color near the rear wall turned into the men from the truck. Harmless-looking kids with the dark-haired build of Stallings. If Deacon hadn’t been laying there covered in bloody duct tape, Keegan would have taken his chances, but from Deacon's thoroughly professional beating, it was obvious at least one kid had a full measure of the Stalling crazies.