by Karen Anders
The sheet was pooled low around his hips, revealing the hard-packed thickness of his chest and the tantalizing sight of the ridged muscles of his abdomen and hips.
He had symmetrical features, the appealing combination of genes and sex appeal that he’d been born with.
She let her gaze drift over him again, wondering what in the world she was supposed to do now. Hiding was what she usually did, what she’d been doing all her life, and it still seemed like the logical answer, but somehow, she didn’t have the heart to hide from him.
She reached out and gently ruffled the hair on his forehead, hair that was normally brushed to the side. The scent of him filled her senses, and she breathed in deep. Watched the gentle rise and fall of his chest. His even breathing was a soft cadence as she did something she never did.
She just lived the moment, absorbed the experience of lying next to him while he slept and dreamed. She greedily captured the memory, holding it in her heart as her eyes went over him again and her fingers played with the ends of his soft hair.
She thought back to her one and only sexual encounter. She’d barely had a chance to feel anything before it was over. Now she realized that she hadn’t been the only inexperienced person in the room back then. Was Vin experienced or was it just a natural extension of his personality? His confidence and take-charge attitude were both arousing and annoying.
He shifted, and he took a deep breath. His hand came up and captured hers without even opening his eyes.
He brought her hand to his mouth, kissing her palm. Then his eyes fluttered open, the green of them potent and penetrating.
“Hey there,” she said as her heart fluttered.
“What’re you doing?” he asked, his voice rough with sleep.
“Staring at you.”
He smiled. “You working out some kind of experiment, Doctor? Going to use me as a lab rat?”
“No... Well, maybe, but any testing I would want to do with you would require that you be fully conscious.”
He smiled again, wider. “Oh, Doctor, usually in the morning, I’m fully up.” He drew her hand down his body to settle on his thick, hard erection.
She gasped at the deep visceral reaction she had to touching him. He closed his eyes when she wrapped her hand around him, making a soft strangled sound in his throat. The power of his response settled inside her, and she wanted to see how everything she did to him affected him. She pushed the sheet aside so that she could immerse herself in him. He was so powerfully built, so male, she reveled in the differences between them. She moved then, straddling his hips, and his eyes popped open as the soft heat of her settled against his raging hard-on.
She kissed his temple, burying her nose in his hair, rubbing her cheek against all that sexy stubble. One hand gloved him, and her other hand braced her upper body over him. When she stroked him, he arched his back, his eyes glazing, opening his legs wider, his hips shifting restlessly.
“Oh, yeah, baby,” he said softly, his tongue wetting his lips, the look on his face tight with desire. “Use me.”
She kissed her way down to his jaw. “Would that be an order, Mr. Special Agent?” she whispered into his neck, the scent of him charging her up. “I really liked your orders last night.”
He groaned softly when she rubbed her thumb over the head of his shaft at the same time she sucked gently on his nipple.
“Looks to me like you have the control stick this time, sweetheart.”
She giggled, flushing at his teasing words. The man was so much fun. She drew the tip of her tongue down his torso, pressing hot kisses against all that thick muscle.
“You in the palm of my hand sounds so good. But I’ve wanted to try something else.” She lowered herself down the length of his body and took the crown of him into her mouth and sucked. Not really sure she even knew what she was doing, but she remembered what he’d said. Do what felt natural. Chances were he’d like it.
“Oh, damn,” he rasped as she took more of him into her mouth. “Sky,” he moaned, burying his hands in her hair, tugging gently against her scalp. His chest heaving, his hips lifting, he grabbed her under the arms and dragged her up his body, flipping her onto her back. He made quick work of the protection.
After he slipped inside her in one stroke, she wrapped her legs around him, momentarily worried about his shoulder; but he didn’t seem to be in any pain, so she let it go.
He covered her mouth as he thrust deep over and over again, the frenzy in them out of control. His breathing harsh in her ears, she cried out at the thick penetration, his need for her in every harsh breath he took.
She scored his back with her fingernails, and he groaned, pumping harder, faster until he came, stiffening above her, his back arched, his eyes closed, and he looked so magnificent in his release, she couldn’t stop looking at him.
Then he collapsed against her for a few moments. With a soft sigh, he dragged her out of bed and into the bathroom, where he turned on the water to the shower. Stepping inside under the warm spray, they lathered each other up, and he tenderly washed her hair.
When they were rinsed off, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her gently on the mouth. “So, do you like studying me?”
She sighed deeply and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Yes, I very much like...um...analyzing all that data. I want to become an expert.”
“I’d say the experiment was a success.” He grinned.
She looked up at him and couldn’t look away. She should keep this on a casual level. It should be casual, but it wasn’t. It just wasn’t.
“You’re staring again.” He rubbed his thumb over her moist mouth.
She kissed the pad of his thumb. “I like looking at you. But I bet you get stared at a lot, especially by women.”
“I haven’t really noticed,” he said, pulling back the curtain and grabbing towels.
As she stepped out, he wrapped a towel around her from behind, just as she had for him. He tied the other around his waist. “It’s because your face is symmetrical.”
She grabbed another towel and started to dry her hair, but he took it out of her hands and started doing it himself. “That’s a good thing, huh?” he said as he squeezed the water out.
She wrapped her hair up in the towel and turned to face him. “It’s a scientific explanation of beauty, attractiveness, sex appeal. Movie stars, models and performers usually have symmetrical features.”
He snorted.
She moved behind him, grabbed a smaller towel and started to dry his back; interacting with him like this was so far out of her comfort zone, she was surprised it was so easy. “Oh, come on. You’ve seen yourself. You know what I’m talking about.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders and turned to give her a grin. “I just see myself. I don’t go posing for the mirror. It’s just my face.”
She wiped at his damp face and moved back around to his front to dry his hair, saving him having to use his shoulder. “It’s a very attractive face, science aside. And it’s much more than your looks.” She finished and draped the towel around his neck. “Women, on average, tend to be attracted to men who are taller than they are, display a high degree of facial symmetry, and who have broad shoulders, a relatively narrow waist and a V-shaped torso.”
He smiled indulgently, and she found that she liked that. She felt it was supportive of the way she viewed the world.
“I know a lot of useless information. When I get nervous, I kind of blurt it out as a buffer, I
guess.”
He bent his head and kissed her. “You don’t have to be nervous with me, Sky. Although, I really enjoy the useless information. You can let go of that buffer. You don’t need it.”
He stood in front of the mirror and grabbed some shaving cream. Lathering up his face, he picked up his razor and started to shave.
“That’s good, because I’m not sure I could control it anyway. I like the way you are comfortable with my intelligence. Many men get antsy around me, as if I’m going to belittle them or something. I’m not like that. At least, I hope I’m not.”
“You stimulate me,” he said with a wicked grin, and she couldn’t help but smile back.
The buffer was all about self-preservation.
After getting dressed, she mulled over his words and wondered if she didn’t need a bigger buffer against him. They ate breakfast, and Vin went outside, telling her that he would call her when he was finished with his project. She literally didn’t have a thing to do other than clean up after breakfast. She flipped on the TV and let it play in the background. She found some yarn and a set of knitting needles behind one of the chairs in the living room. There was a pattern for a scarf. She wondered if Vin’s buddy knit or if it was some other acquaintance.
She hoped the person wouldn’t mind, but she desperately needed something to do. She took up the knitting needles and read the preliminary directions. She practiced working with them. It was at first awkward, as it was learning any new task.
It helped to take her mind off Vin and where this relationship could go.
She’d made a choice a long time ago. Her heart squeezed at her limited memory of her mother and father. They were shadows of her past now. The only thing she had of her father was his words. Stay strong, my sweet child. Make your life have meaning and live up to the potential you have in you, so that our sacrifice isn’t lost. So much had been taken from her at such a young age. The endless expectations that she harbored deep inside her were all generated by her need to honor her parents’ deaths. For her.
But did that mean she couldn’t be happy? Would she lose something—respect? Value? Herself? Who she had planned to be for all of her life? But that was before she even realized that there was a man like Vin out there. She hadn’t known it could be like this, and now her world felt so cold and empty.
No, not empty. She had her honor for her parents and their sacrifice. She’d made a choice.
And yet, despite all of that, or perhaps because that was what she’d been born to bear, she’d always believed that immersing herself in a career that could give something back to her adopted country and honor her parents’ sacrifice at the same time would be enough.
Shockingly, she felt a sudden burn behind her eyes and squeezed them immediately, tightly shut to ward off any ridiculous tears that might form.
Even as her mind whispered it wasn’t enough, she shut down those mutterings.
Pursuing anything beyond this casual sex with Vin was out of her reach. Completely.
Sacrificing meant exactly that. Heartbreaking, difficult sacrifice.
Dry-eyed, her jaw set, she started to get the hang of the knitting after a while and settled in, determined she would make something. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough yarn to make one uniform scarf, but bits and pieces of skeins that would work.
As the morning flowed into the lunch hour, she found herself looking at the somewhat crooked rows of her half-finished scarf.
When she heard the door handle turn, she quickly put it away, not wanting Vin to see it until she was done.
“Hey, come outside. I want to show you something. We need to talk.”
“All right. I’ll be right there.” She rose as he retreated and closed the door. She bundled up and slipped on boots.
As she closed the door, she saw him moving in the trees at the side of the house. The air was crisp and cold, her breath fogging the air. She went down the steps and walked off the path, the snow crunching beneath her feet. As she approached, he was looking off into the distance. The river rushed past with a soft gurgling sound. It seemed so peaceful here, and she could imagine why he wanted to come here for a break from D.C.
“Did you do more recon?”
He gave her a wry look and looked away. “We’re pretty isolated from the road,” he said, gesturing. “A lot of good cover. The town is that way and Harrisburg is the other way. Toward the south. There’s a nice little town with pretty good nightlife, places to eat and a grocery store. I’ve got a good amount of cash to last us for a bit. We can stay here for at least two weeks.”
“Do you think they will give up after that?”
“They won’t give up. I know that’s hard to hear, but that’s what my instinct tells me.”
“The stuff I’m working on is classified. They could be after that.”
“I have a top secret clearance. You can confide in me.”
“I mostly write algorithms in conjunction with sonar and radar. I’m working on a very top secret project called Stingray. I’m the only one in the company who is working on this. My boss isn’t even privy to the schematics.”
“What is Stingray?”
“It’s a submarine that uses silent sound waves that can’t be detected by conventional sonar equipment. I’m still perfecting it.”
“Silent sound waves?”
“A sound spectrum displays the different frequencies present in a sound. Most sounds are made up of a complicated mixture of vibrations, like the fan in your computer, perhaps the sound of the wind outside, the rumble of traffic or music playing in the background, in which case there is a mixture of high notes and low notes, and some sounds such as drumbeats and cymbal crashes, which have no clear pitch.”
“That’s right. You have a degree in sound. That’s what you’re working on for the navy?”
“Yes, sonar picks up vibrations in the water and can pinpoint where these sounds are coming from. No machine runs quiet.”
“Except your Stingray?”
“Yes, I’ve developed engines that produce minimal sound. The sub does produce very low-level sound waves intermittently that mix in with the sounds of the ocean until it’s almost undetectable.”
“Who else knows about this technology?”
“A few select naval personnel. It’s really hush-hush.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Yes, I am extremely careful with my research and take my top secret clearance very seriously. I would never have spoken about it to you if you didn’t have the clearance. There’s a prototype that I helped to fit with the new engines and it’s out in the Atlantic right now.”
“I need a name.”
“Admiral Jackson Bartlett. He is my navy contact.”
He pulled the burner phone out of his pocket and dialed. “Chris, it’s Vin. I have a name I want you to run.” There was a burst of response on the other end. “Yeah, it’s Admiral Jackson Bartlett. Could you check him out and let me know what you find?” He listened for a few minutes. “I’d rather not say over the phone.” He ended the conversation and stuffed the phone back in his coat pocket.
“What are you thinking?”
“I just have a feeling that this does have something to do with your research. You’re working on several top secret projects, but Stingray is technology foreign governments would love to get their hands on. We’ll wait to see what Chris digs up.”
She nodded, her stomach tying up in knots, racking her brain
trying to think if there was ever a breach in her protocol.
He took her arm and pulled her to the base of a wide tree. “I brought you out here to run through the plan if this location is compromised.”
She nodded. “What’s the plan?”
He gestured to the ground at a pile of leaves. She looked back up at him, frowning. “What? A pile of leaves?”
“In sniper training every recruit has to learn how to camouflage, evade and become invisible to the enemy. That’s a blind. I took the concept of my ghillie suit and adapted for this situation.”
He squatted down, grasped something and lifted. “A ghillie suit is something I wore as a sniper to make me undetectable in the woods or jungle.” The leaves rose, and beneath was a tarp. Sky studied it for a moment, and then her stomach twisted. “There’s only room for one person under there.”
He let the leaves fall and stood. He set his hands on her shoulders and looked her directly in the eyes. “If we’re compromised, this is where you’re going to hide.”
“What? What about you?”
His gaze didn’t waver, his eyes a clear, cool green. She bet he was an amazing sniper, patient, accurate, calm and deadly.
“To protect you from any threat, I need to know that you’re safe, and I need to be mobile. I’m going to take them down one by one silently until there is no more threat or lead them away from you. Whichever decision I make, I don’t want you to make a sound until they pass by it. Then you run for the road.”
“But...”
His hands tightened on her shoulders. “I know this scares you, but I also know you have the courage for this.” He pulled out one of the burner phones and a fanny pack. “Carry this with you from now on. I’ve already entered in the local sheriff’s number and my boss Chris Vargas’s direct number at NCIS. The number to the other burner is on this phone, as well. If I don’t answer, call those other two numbers only. Head toward the sheriff’s office if you can’t access the car or it’s disabled. It’s in the town located about three miles from here. Stay close to the road but don’t actually travel on it, just in case they are trolling for you. There’s an extra set of keys in there for my car. It has a GPS, and the address for NCIS in D.C. is already programmed into it. I’ll show you that in a minute. Drive straight there. There’s a map in here to show you how to get to the road and where the town and the highway are located, some cash and a few protein bars.”