by Alice Orr
“I can’t keep my hands off you,” he said in a voice so raspy he wondered if she could understand him.
They’d reached the top of the stairs. He walked faster, nearly stumbling in the intensity of his need to get her to their room and behind the closed door. She was clutching him around the waist and walking fast, too. He had to force himself to take his hand from the yielding firmness of her breasts in order to grope for the room key in the pocket of his pants. He fumbled for the lock while still holding her close.
“Hurry,” she whispered.
She’d said that in a soft voice, but he heard the urgency there. She reached out and gripped the door handle.
“Let me help,” she said.
He stuck the key into the lock and turned. She turned the knob at the same moment and pushed the door open. In the next second, they were over the threshold and she had shut the door behind them. Slater fumbled again to lock it with the key from the inside as was necessary in this old hotel. He barely had the lock turned before she was urging him toward the bed. He didn’t bother to remove the key from the keyhole. His mind and his senses had already sped on to other things.
She was facing him now, only steps away from the bed. They’d both kicked off their beach sandals on the way from the door. His hands moved, as if by a will of their own, back to her breasts, fondling and stroking and pulling her toward him. He bent his knees and crouched slightly to align his hips to thrust forward against hers. She reached around him, and he felt her hands slide down his back to his buttocks. He registered a very pleasant surprise as she gripped him there and pulled him closer still. Her thighs parted, and he pressed between them.
Her body began to move sensuously, grinding against him, just as she’d done the other night on his patio. He thrilled, as he had then, at the passion of her response. He could hear her ragged breath as she murmured unintelligibly and he found her mouth with his. She rubbed her breasts against his palms, urging him to knead her flesh so hard he might have thought he was hurting her had it not been for the unmistakable sounds of pleasure she was making beneath his mouth. Phoenix was the most sensual woman he had ever known. She was more beautiful, more intoxicating, more unashamedly hungry to be loved by him than he’d ever thought it possible for a woman to be.
As if she’d heard that last thought of his, she pulled her mouth away from his and breathed, “Take me. Take me now.”
He moved his hands, if only for a moment, from her breasts and around her back to grab for the tie of her halter top and yank it loose. Her hands were moving also, pushing his tank shirt up his torso and over his head. He snatched the loosened halter from her body and froze for a moment. Her breasts were pale and flawless from her tan line down. Her nipples were rosy pink at their full circles and red at the tip. That redness pushed toward him in invitation.
Slater could do only one thing in response. He dropped to his knees and pulled her into his mouth, suckling one breast as he fondled the other. His tongue grazed her nipple. He marveled at its hardness, as hard as he was now beneath the beach slacks she’d bought for him at the marketplace. She put her hands behind his head to press him even more tightly to her breast. His teeth nipped her flesh, and she groaned. She moved one hand away from his head then, while the other continued to hold him close as his tongue tasted her.
Suddenly, her fingers were over his where he’d been touching her other breast. She pushed his hand down her body, over her bare skin to the band of her skirt, over her skirt and the small mound of her belly. She pushed his hand between their bodies where they were pressed hard together. She guided him to the cleft between her thighs and held his fingers beneath her own as she rocked her body back and forth. Then, she left his hand there to continue what she’d shown him she wanted. A moment later her fingers brushed the side of his face as he devoured her breast.
He had closed his eyes in concentration and ecstasy. He opened them now to see her touching herself, circling her nipple with her finger then grasping the full flesh and kneading it as he had done before. He heard her moan and glanced upward. Her mouth was open, and she was smiling in an expression of pure delight and desire. A flood crested inside Slater at that moment, and he could think of only one thing. He had to be inside her. He couldn’t wait a single minute more.
The few articles of clothing they still had on fell away between them. He couldn’t tell who took what off whom as they grappled together in mutual frenzy. Then, she was naked on the bed. He gazed down on her, aching at how unbelievably lovely she was. He could only allow himself a glance. He could feel her need was clamoring as wildly as his own. She opened her thighs, and he fitted himself between them and felt the moistness there.
He had no thoughts after that, except for one. When he had thrust inside her for the first time, he stopped dead still for a moment. In that instant, he knew that he had never felt anything like this before. The wet warmth of the most intimate part of her clutched him as closely as a glove and as perfectly fitted as if he’d been born to be there. He reveled in that perfection until her hips began to move beneath his, rising to meet him and press him still deeper inside her.
Slater pushed into her as she timed the rhythm of her hips exactly to his own. In what remained of his mind, he could see them moving together. With each thrust, she rose beneath him then drew him back into her each time he rocked away. Without words, she told him what she wanted from him, and all he cared about in the world was to give her that and much, much more.
At last, they reached the destination they had been rocketing toward. He heard her cry out, and he guessed he must have cried out, too, as he erupted into her. She stiffened, then let herself go. They pulsed together, their hips arched above the bed, for what must have been long minutes. Slater couldn’t tell. He had gone beyond any sense of time or any sense of where he might be, to a place of pure sensation and, finally, of pure peace. Phoenix sighed in his arms, and he knew she must be in that place, too.
“UP IN THE ROOM,” Porfiro said to Sax and gestured toward the second floor of Las Tres Marias Hotel. “They went for a walk on the beach, then upstairs.”
“Siesta time,” Sax said with a lewd laugh that made plain what he was thinking.
Porfiro had met Sax at the highway junction as planned. Now, they were back at the hotel leaning against the hombre McCain’s Jeep. Porfiro looked away, off down the dusty road. He didn’t like this Sax at all. Porfiro was sorry to say that he probably liked Sax even less than he liked the big guy over in the hotel. That hombre might play the bull and push his weight around, but this Sax was a snake. Porfiro would prefer a bull to a snake any day.
“You take a break now,” Sax was saying. He shoved some bills into Porfiro’s hand. “Get yourself something to eat in the cantina while I size up the situation here. Then you can take this wreck of his back to town for me. I’ll pay you more tonight at the Esperanza Club.”
Porfiro counted several fifty-peso notes in his hand. He nodded, then headed for the cantina. He was thinking how the only thing good about this Sax hombre was his money.
Meanwhile, Sax had slipped behind the Jeep, ready to slide under the chassis just long enough to do what had to be done.
Chapter Thirteen
Phoenix had been lazily, luxuriously half awake for quite some time before the phone rang.
“Let me talk to McCain.”
The man’s voice sounded familiar to her but distant in memory like someone she might have heard on television or radio. Phoenix covered the receiver and shook Slater’s shoulder. His skin was warm and smooth to touch, but she had already begun to feel a chill as she wondered how the man on the phone could have known they were here at Pie de la Cuesta.
“Slater, someone wants to talk to you.”
He moaned and rolled toward here, reaching for her bare thigh under the damp, rumpled sheet.
“What?” he said with a yawn.
“There’s a man on the phone for you.”
Slater bolted straight uprigh
t grabbing for the nightstand then looking almost frantically around the room. Phoenix guessed what he was after.
“I put your gun over on the dresser,” she said.
She’d done that some time earlier, on her way to the bathroom. She hadn’t been with Slater long enough to get used to the fact that he slept with a loaded firearm within reach. The thought of that made her very nervous. What if he had a violent dream and mistook it for reality? She was beginning to wonder if his life might not be a violent dream in general. That possibility all but destroyed the romantic reverie she’d been drifting through before the phone rang. Which reminded her…
“Slater. The phone.”
“I know.”
He took the receiver from her hand. The softness in his face, which she remembered from earlier on the beach, was gone now, replaced by hard angles and tension.
“Who is this?” he barked into the phone without the nicety of a greeting.
He listened a moment, then barked again. “Where are you?”
Slater must not have liked the answer to that because he leapt out of bed with a scowl on his face. Phoenix still couldn’t help noticing how gorgeous he looked standing there nude in the shaded light from the half-open blinds. Mostly, however, his agitation frightened her.
“What do you mean you’re here?” he growled into the phone.
He covered the receiver and growled at her as well. “Get the key out of the lock.”
He gestured at the door. Phoenix hesitated only a second before jumping out of bed herself. She pulled the sheet with her, wrapping it around her body. She could sense that this wasn’t the time to be naked and vulnerable. She hurried to the door, but the keyhole was empty.
“It’s gone,” she said. How could that be? She looked around on the floor but found nothing.
“You’ve been up here, haven’t you?” Slater shouted into the phone. “You stole the room key.”
He gestured toward his pants which were just out of reach on the floor. Phoenix picked them up and tossed them to him. She was already struggling as fast as she could into her own underwear.
“Slater, what’s going on?” she asked.
He made a warning gesture as if to silence her.
“I want to know what is going on,” she said again.
Phoenix grabbed for the skirt she’d worn earlier then discarded it. Instinct told her something more substantial than that gauzy garment might be in order now. She hurried to the tote bag she’d left on a chair and rummaged for a pair of a shorts. It was still too much the hot part of the day for long pants. What she really wanted, of course, was some answers. Slater didn’t appear inclined to provide any. He’d turned his back to her as he pulled on his pants with one hand while the other clutched the receiver so hard his knuckles were white.
“You stay away from this room,” he was saying into the phone in the most menacing tone she’d ever heard him use.
“Who’s coming up here?” she asked as he slammed the receiver back into the carriage.
Phoenix scrambled into her shorts and pulled on the T-shirt she’d been wearing when they first arrived here. Slater pulled on the loose-fitting tropical print shirt she had bought for him at the market this morning. He grabbed his gun from the dresser. Phoenix had no experience with guns—in fact, she hated them—but she thought he was checking to make sure it was loaded.
She was dressed except for her shoes, but what should she do now? The glow of lovemaking, which had been so much with her when she first awoke, had totally dissipated now.
Slater cursed under his breath.
“What’s going on here?” she demanded yet again. “I want to know.”
“We were followed after all.”
“Who followed us, and how did he get the key?”
Slater waved toward the door. “He snuck up here when we were asleep, poked the key out of the lock, then fished it through the crack under the door. It’s an old trick.”
She gasped. Maybe this kind of thing was an old trick to Slater, but not to her. “He could have been up here when we were…” she trailed off, looking toward the bed.
They’d been making so much noise while they were making love that they would never have heard someone at the door. Phoenix felt herself blush despite the circumstances. Slater only nodded and hurried to the window which looked down on the parking area at the road side of the hotel.
“Damn,” he said. “The Jeep is gone.”
“Somebody stole your Jeep?”
“I’m going down to the beach to take care of this guy,” Slater said. “You stay here.”
“I’m not staying anywhere, especially not if somebody’s wandering around with the key.”
Slater grabbed her shoulders before she’d finished speaking. He gripped her so hard it hurt. She tried to pull away but couldn’t.
“Listen to me,” he barked in just about the same tone he’d used with the man on the phone. “This is a very dangerous man we’re dealing with. You should know that. I want you to stay here.”
Why should she know how dangerous he was? She didn’t know anything…except one thing. Slater had let go of her and was on his way to the door. She raced ahead of him and blocked his path.
“Don’t go,” she said. “We’ll call the police.”
He stared at her.
“I know getting the police involved could mean trouble, but anything’s better than having you get hurt.”
She meant that more than any words she’d ever spoken in her life. She said it with passion. Slater must have been affected by that because he took her face in his hands. He looked deep into her eyes for a moment then kissed her on the mouth hard but not for long.
“Don’t worry. I won’t get hurt,” he said, pulling away. “Now, I have to go.”
Moving his hands from her face to her upper arms, he picked her up off the floor as easily as if she were a rag doll. He lifted her away from the door then set her back down. He had the door open and was out into the hallway before she could make a move to stop him.
“Stay here,” he said once again as he shut the door behind him.
Phoenix knew that staying here while Slater went out to face danger alone was the one thing she couldn’t do.
SHE’D ACTUALLY SAID they should call in the police, and Slater could tell she’d meant that, too. He knew he should be concentrating on Sax and nothing else right now, but he couldn’t help thinking about what Phoenix had said back in the room. She really did care for him after all, enough to put herself in possible danger of going to prison to keep him safe. From that moment on, Slater knew he would do everything in his power to save her from that fate. Until today, his first loyalty had always been to his badge, but that had changed. Nothing was more important than Phoenix now.
Sax had said they should meet on the beach, but Slater was alert to a possible trick of some kind such as an ambush before he could get to the beach. He edged down the stairway with his back to the wall and his gun out. When he reached the bottom he lowered the weapon to his side where it was less noticeable but still at the ready. He didn’t want to cause a panic or to prompt the hotel staff to come after him. He was certain some of them would be armed. This was Mexico after all, and this little cantina was most likely beyond the reach of the Acapulco city police. Proprietors of places like this small hotel had to be prepared for trouble. He didn’t want them to think of him as that. While he was explaining himself, Phoenix would be on her own with Sax in the vicinity, and he couldn’t let that happen.
Slater peered out from the bottom of the stairway, first to one side of the opening to the patio, then to the other. Sax was nowhere in sight. The two men who’d been drinking beer earlier were gone. A tourist family with three children filled one of the red Formica-topped tables. The mother studied the all-in-Spanish menu with a perplexed expression on her face while her husband glanced furtively around as if he might be wondering how he’d managed to take such an obviously wrong turn off the beaten path. The children b
egan to squabble among themselves, and their parents turned their attention to that. Slater used their preoccupied moment to slip past without being noticed. He’d checked out the parking lot from the doorway. There was no vehicle he would guess to belong to Sax, who probably wouldn’t be seen in a car as old as any of these. Slater also noted that his own rental Jeep was still nowhere to be found.
He palmed the pistol and slid it halfway into the pocket of his pants where it could be hidden by the tail of the boxy, bright-patterned shirt he had pulled on upstairs but hadn’t taken time to button. As-his feet hit the beach at the bottom of the steps, Slater was glad he had bothered to grab his sandals. The burning hot midday had passed, but that didn’t mean the beach had begun to cool. He could feel the scorching sand radiating heat through his sandal soles. It occurred to Slater that he must look like a refugee from an Hawaiian golf tournament in this outfit, but he didn’t have time to care about appearances now.
Slater kept to the high side of the beach closest to the hotels where a low wall offered some potential cover. He could hop over it if he had to, provided there was time to do that before the bullets started to fly. He was a few yards along that wall, and he still hadn’t spotted Sax. In the other direction, the beach was nearly deserted except for a few strollers at the edge of the surf. Slater could tell that none of them were Sax. He had to be along this stretch of sand before Slater, if he was really out here at all. Slater had a scary thought. What if Sax had lured Slater away from the hotel in order to get to Phoenix? She was back there now, alone in the room. Slater stopped in his tracks, clutching the gun in his pocket. He glanced back at the hotel shining white in the sun, then down the beach ahead. That was when he saw what he’d been looking for.