She’d demanded a divorce out of nowhere, or at least that was how it had seemed at the time. She’d accused him of wanting everything his way, saying that he’d chosen the military, then the police force over her. She’d claimed he’d given her no choice but to have an affair, and said he couldn’t blame her for going elsewhere for the love and single-minded attention he’d been unable to give her.
Well, he damn well did blame her. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a kernel of truth to what she’d said.
He wanted what he wanted and did what it took to get it.
And right now, he wanted Chelsea.
She was softness in his arms, sweet flavors in his mouth and soul as he eased her down atop him and their bodies aligned. He held on to that sense of sweetness as he kissed her, trying to give her back the humanity she gave him, fighting back the beast inside him, the cold-blooded killer who took what he wanted and to hell with the world.
One kiss spun into another as he shaped her body with his hands and lips, relearning the curves of a woman, and recognizing the ones that were hers alone.
For all the times he’d sat in the hell of solitary confinement and imagined being with someone, he’d forgotten the reality of the sensations of sex, the heat of it. Or maybe he’d remembered correctly, and Chelsea wasn’t like any of the other women he’d been with before.
It was a daunting thought, and one he brushed aside almost the moment it was formed, reminding himself to stay in the here and now, because there was no guarantee of tomorrow.
He tasted that knowledge on Chelsea’s lips and heard it in her soft, wanting sigh. Part of him had regretted telling her about Abby, but he realized it was all for the best, because at least it put them on level footing, with understanding and expectations—or the lack thereof—on both sides.
Then she smiled against his lips and shifted to get her hands under his shirt. Splaying her fingers over his abdomen, she murmured, “You’re thinking too much. I can feel it.”
“I want this,” he said, uttering the words before he was really aware of thinking them.
“Me, too. So why the hesitation?”
“I don’t want to take advantage.”
“Of?” Her eyes held a glint of humor, a hint of impatience that made his blood burn hotter, even though that should’ve been impossible.
He was tempted to kiss the wickedness off her face, turning the humor to heat, but he held his baser self off a little longer, saying, “You and me. Us. The situation.” He gestured to the window, not at the night, but at the figment of the cops and terrorists who were looking for them even now, and would find them before too long. “We wouldn’t be together like this if it weren’t for some pretty extraordinary circumstances.”
Her expression saddened a little. “And we won’t be together after all this is over, one way or the other,” she finished for him. “Don’t worry, I get it.”
He cupped her face in his hands and looked deep into her eyes. “Do you really? Or is this just part of some spy fantasy, an escape from what’s really going on?”
But for the first time he couldn’t read her every thought from her expression, leaving him off balance when she said simply, “Does it matter?”
Before he could even think to formulate an answer, she leaned in and touched her lips to his, slipping her tongue into his mouth at the same time she slid her hands beneath his waistband.
And then he pretty much stopped thinking at all.
CHELSEA FELT THE CHANGE in him, knew the second he got out of his head and into the moment, because that was when he leaned into the kiss and opened to her, deepening and intensifying caresses that only seconds earlier had seemed hotter than was possible. Before she could brace herself, buffering against too much sensation, her body flared higher and higher still, driven by his clever touch and the raw need she tasted on his lips.
Earlier she’d been the instigator, seeking to push him past his hesitation before he talked them both out of giving in to the needs of their bodies. But now he was the one doing the pushing, heating her up and over her inner barriers before she was even aware of their existence.
Always before for her, sex had been part of a relationship, an outgrowth of love. Here, though, it was all about the physical sensations, about sex rather than love. And if a small piece of her wondered whether there might be some love on her part when there was zero expectation of that on his, the heat quickly rose up and swept away the worry, leaving nothing behind except the sensation of his lips on her skin, his body against hers.
Leaving nothing but him.
They stretched across the bed together, twining arms and legs and tongues until there was no clear end to one of them, no clear beginning of the other. There was only them, and the heat they made together.
His skin was a tough expanse of maleness, roughened in places with faint tracks of masculine hair. Wanting more of him, needing more, she pushed his shirt aside, rucking it up under his arms until he chuckled and eased away so he could pull it off. While they were separated, he skimmed what was left of her shirt down over her arms and off, and released the catch of her bra.
Naked from the waist up and bathed in the yellow light coming from the bedside lamp, she would’ve blushed and covered up if it hadn’t been for the look that softened his hard blue eyes—a sort of wistfulness she hadn’t seen from him before.
“You’re perfect,” he whispered harshly. And although he was looking at her breasts when he said it, she had a feeling he was talking about more. Then he looked at his own chest, which was sharply defined with muscle and bone, and marked with a half-dozen scars of various size and ugliness, along with a ripe bruise, no doubt acquired earlier in the day. “I’m not exactly perfect,” he said ruefully before looking at her once again. “Far from it.” And this time she was positive he was talking about more than just their bodies.
Emotion jammed in her throat at the suspicion that he felt things far more deeply than he let on, and that he, too, knew they’d found something together that didn’t come along every day.
Rather than ruin the moment with analysis, especially when she wasn’t sure she was going to like the answer she came to, she lay back on the bed and smiled an invitation, offering herself to him, no strings attached. Aware that he was watching, she shimmied out of her pants and panties, leaving herself naked beneath the soft light.
She let him look, aware that he seemed to have stopped breathing as she stretched out an arm and snagged her purse off the nightstand beside the bed. From her wallet, she pulled out a condom—one of two she kept in there as part of her “just in case” stash.
Holding it up, she tilted her head and smiled at him.
“Chelsea,” he breathed, only her name, but in a tone that suggested she’d just given him a gift beyond measure.
He stood then, rising from the bed to strip out of his remaining clothes. His motions were efficient and practical, like the man himself, but the play of muscle beneath his skin was an erotic dance that made Chelsea’s pulse pound a greedy beat. She’d wanted him this way since the first moment their eyes had locked. She was done with waiting for the time to be right.
The time was now, right or wrong.
“Come here,” she breathed, and he made short work of donning the condom over his proud, jutting flesh. Then he joined her in the center of the bed and covered her body with his.
He might’ve thought to prolong the moment with another kiss or some teasing caresses, but she took that inclination away by reaching up and pressing her lips to his, pouring herself into the moment and making her urgency known.
No less urgent himself, Fax kissed her long and hard as he touched her, shaping her body with his hands, sliding his fingers along her torso and hips, then inward for a long, soft rub against her center, where she was wet and wanting already.
She arched against him and cried out, her wordless plea muffled against his lips. He heard and understood, though, and shifted to poise himself at the entrance to
her body.
Then he paused, waiting.
Want spiraled to a tight core within Chelsea, centered on the empty void where her inner muscles pulsed, waiting for him.
She opened her eyes and found him braced above her, looking at her. When their eyes met and the connection clicked as it had done from the first, then and only then did he nudge his hard flesh against her, into her.
His solid length invaded her, filling her and setting off an explosion of pleasure and sensation.
Chelsea gasped and arched against him, digging her fingernails into his back and reveling in his hiss and the fine tremors she could feel in his muscles.
When he was seated to the hilt he paused again and looked at her, and this time she couldn’t meet his gaze, she just couldn’t. The feelings he brought out in her were too huge, too raw, so she leaned up and pressed her cheek to his, closed her eyes, and hung on for the ride as he withdrew and thrust, withdrew and thrust.
The two of them surged together, racing each other to the peak while dragging one another along at the same time. The heat built and meshed within Chelsea, a building urgency in search of an outlet, concentrating at the point of contact where he filled her and withdrew, filled and withdrew.
The orgasm slammed into her unexpectedly, a freight-train hammer of pleasure and greed that gripped her, controlled her, made her arch against him and scream his name, not Fax but Jonah. She hung on to him, used his strength as an anchor while the pleasure washed over and through her. She felt him stiffen against her, inside her, and heard him give a hoarse, wordless shout. Then they were clinging together as the passion slowed and faded, leaving them limp and breathing hard, survivors of a mad rush to the finish.
And what a finish, Chelsea thought with the few brain cells left in her head unscrambled.
Where always before she’d come on a tug and roll of pleasure, this orgasm had left her flattened and defenseless, stripped bare by feelings that were too huge to deny, too important to cope with. That, and the knowledge that the two of them were a fleeting thing, a union of flesh and convenience.
The realization chilled her and made her cling to him a little too hard. She could tell it was too much because he stiffened, then he pulled away. He pressed a kiss to her cheek, but didn’t look at her as he stood and headed for the bathroom, weaving slightly on unsteady legs. He shut the door behind him, leaving her utterly alone.
Feeling utterly rejected.
FAX LEANED ON THE EDGE of the sink and closed his eyes, totally undone by what had just happened between him and Chelsea.
He’d tried to hold a piece of himself back, tried to keep hold of the shell protecting himself from the outside world and vice versa, but all of his defenses had failed in that last moment, when Chelsea had grabbed on to him and let herself go, and he’d been unable to do anything but follow where she led.
“Idiot,” he muttered, glaring at himself in the mirror. Worse, he’d been irresponsible, letting down his guard way too far when neither of them could afford for him to make a mistake.
Chelsea wasn’t Abby, not even close. But trusting her not to cheat wasn’t the same thing as trusting her to have his back. She wasn’t Jane, didn’t have Jane’s physical or emotional tools.
Cursing, he cleaned himself up. Then, wrapping a towel around his waist in a feeble bid for the armor of clothing, he made himself leave the bathroom and face Chelsea, knowing she was likely to be beyond furious over the way he’d boogied it out of the bed they’d shared.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he began the moment he hit the main room, guilt making his tone more defensive than he’d intended. “I know that probably looked pretty bad.”
“It was bad,” she agreed levelly. She was up and dressed, and had already pulled the bed more or less back to rights, as though she was trying to remove any reminder of what they’d just done. “But I’m a big girl, I can deal. We both needed some skin-on-skin after what we’ve been through together. Doesn’t have to be any more than that.”
Her voice sounded reasonable, but her shoulders were tight, her jaw was set, and a flush stained her cheeks and throat.
He wanted to tell her it hadn’t been like that, at least not for him, but he stopped himself because what was the upside of explaining? It wasn’t like things could go anywhere between them from here. It was probably better to have her mad at him, for both their sakes.
“Sorry,” he said again, but didn’t contradict anything she’d said.
“What now?”
It took him a second to realize she’d shifted gears, that she was asking about a plan, not a relationship. He was selfish enough to be relieved, wise enough to know that just because she wasn’t talking about what had just happened between them, it didn’t mean the issue was dead.
Or rather, it meant exactly that. Whatever might’ve been between them, it was over.
Guilt stung alongside another emotion he didn’t really recognize, one that in another man might’ve been grief. Both were quickly gone as he put himself back in the agent’s frame of mind he never should’ve let slip away.
She was right. They needed some sort of a plan.
He took a seat in the desk chair in the corner of the room, staying far from the beds, as though that would neutralize the hint of sex on the air. Thinking aloud, he said, “We know he’s aiming for the parade, day after tomorrow, right? So tell me about it. You’ve been, right?” Hours earlier she’d identified the parade from the flyer he’d seen in the cabin.
“Sure, everyone in the city goes, pretty much.” She perched on the edge of the far bed, the one they hadn’t used, and frowned, thinking. “It’s a local chamber of commerce thing that got picked up in the national media a few years ago during a slow news cycle. The idea took off after that, and it’s become the Bear Claw equivalent of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York. You know—floats, bands, balloons, lots of people lining the sidewalks.”
Which was exactly the sort of target al-Jihad favored. During the Santa Bombings, his men had planted explosives in the highly decorated thrones of the Santas at a half-dozen malls all operated by the American Mall Corp. The charges had gone off thirty minutes after the Santas had arrived for the year, in the middle of the highly publicized kickoff parties that had been coordinated across all the locations owned by AMC.
The fatalities had numbered in the hundreds, the list of wounded topping a thousand. Even more devastating was the nature of the casualties—six Santas, along with mothers, fathers and dozens of children small enough to want to sit on Santa’s lap and tell him their dreams.
It had been a truly disgusting attack, and al-Jihad was no doubt looking to improve upon it this time around.
Think, Fax told himself. Focus. What sort of target would appeal to the bastard during the parade? “Is there a place where there’ll be a particularly large crowd?” he asked. “Lots of young kids, families, that sort of thing?”
She thought for a second, then a stricken look crossed her face. “There’s an open-air party at the ski resort stadium where the parade winds up, followed by a concert and fireworks. It’s the big finale.”
“That’ll be the target,” Fax said, though it didn’t play quite right in his head. The schematics he’d glimpsed in the terrorists’ cabin—which had no doubt been evacuated by now—hadn’t been for a stadium. Did that mean there was a second target? He didn’t know and didn’t have the tools or the resources he needed to figure it out.
“We need to tell someone,” she said urgently. “Mayor Proudfoot will need to cancel the concert, if not the entire parade.”
Fax shook his head, knowing the conversation had approximately two seconds left before it went downhill fast. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”
It took a moment for his meaning to penetrate, another for the anger to gather in her eyes and face. “You mean you want to let him attack the festival? You’re going to use all those people as bait?” She must’ve seen the answer in his eyes, because she blew out a hollow, di
sbelieving breath and answered her own question. “You are, aren’t you?”
He steeled himself against her disillusionment. “This business is about making tough choices.”
“Choices like letting the guards, two of whom were father and son, die so you’d have a chance to uncover a plot that could kill many other people?” she challenged.
“Yeah,” he said, thinking of the three innocent guards who’d been in the prison van during the escape, and the way two of the men had grabbed on to each other as they died, each trying to protect the other. Father and son, he thought, and could see the resemblance in his mind’s eye. Damn.
When he’d first taken this job he wouldn’t have cared as long as he reached his main objective. Now he wished he’d tried to find some way to spare the guards.
Somewhere along the line his necessary detachment had started to erode, and that was a problem. It clouded his thinking and messed up his judgment.
A prime example of exactly that was the way his heart kicked when Chelsea scowled at him. “You’re not doing this, Jonah. I won’t let you put the people of my city in danger.”
Guilt flared alongside grief, and for a change he didn’t force either of them aside. Instead, he rose to his feet and crossed to her, taking her hands. She leaned away from him, still sitting at the edge of the second bed, and he kneeled at her feet, keeping his eyes on hers, wanting, needing her to believe him when he said, “I’m sorry, Chelsea.”
Her eyes filled and she shook her head. “I can’t let you do this. I have to call Seth and Tucker and have them pick us up.”
“I know.” He slid his hand up her arm in a lover’s caress that stopped at the place where her neck and shoulder joined. He said, “I’m sorry,” again, and pressed his thumb against the vulnerable place where the nerves ran close to the surface.
She stiffened and collapsed.
Manhunt in the Wild West Page 11