Tag, You're It!

by Penny McCall

  She stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and turned around. The stalker’s eyes widened. Alex recognized the split-second hesitation for a frantic attempt to consider his options and decide he had no choice but to keep walking. He veered to the right, but Alex sidestepped so she was right in front of him again. Confrontation might not be the smartest thing, but what could he do on a busy street?

  “Why are you following me?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled, head down, angling to go around her.

  Alex caught his sleeve. He jerked to a stop and looked at her, half panicked, half pissed off. They stood there staring at each other until the screech of tires broke the standoff.

  Alex whipped around and saw a long, black car at the curb behind her, the driver leaning over to yell, “Get in, Franky.”

  “Franky?” she echoed. “Franky from Casteel?” She shifted her grip to his shirt front, although she had no idea what she was going to do with him. Give him another shot to the balls?

  He broke her grip with one arm, cupped his crotch with the other, and made a break for the car. Alex was one step behind him until an arm wrapped around her waist, holding her back long enough for Franky to jump in the car. Mick sent it shooting away from the curb and into traffic, tires squealing, horns blaring, pedestrians gawking.

  Alex slapped Tag’s hands off her and spun around, drilling a finger into his chest. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “Protective custody.” He caught her finger so she couldn’t poke him again. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Those guys are the ones who tried to kidnap me in Casteel.”

  “And what, you were going to jump in the car and make it easy for them? How can you be so sure they were the same men anyway? They give you their names again?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Tag threw his hands up in the air, walked away, then back. “They have to be the stupidest kidnappers ever.”

  “Why are you so disgusted? And why did the second guy show up at the same time you did?”

  “They must’ve split up,” Tag said. “One of them was following you, and one of them was following me.”

  “Not so stupid.” Alex searched his face, but if he was lying she couldn’t see it. “Where did you go this morning?”

  “I had breakfast with the guy who comped the room for us.”

  “Why didn’t you invite me? I’m hungry in the morning, just like normal people.”

  “Need another chocolate fix?”

  “You’re changing the subject,” she said, refusing to be embarrassed. Or amused.

  “He’s a hound, okay?”

  “It’s not like I haven’t dealt with the type before.”

  “True, but I know how you hate it, so I thought I’d spare you the trouble of fending him off.”

  “It sounds more like you wanted to keep my presence a secret.”

  “If you don’t trust me, there’s no point in taking this any further.”

  “Easy to say when you know I’m a target and I don’t have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice,” Tag said, going inside and across the lobby, bypassing the elevator to stiff-arm his way through the door to the stairs. “You can still take off, disappear until this all blows over. In fact that’s the best idea I’ve had in at least a week.”

  Alex double-timed after him. “How did they know we would come to Denver?”

  “It was the logical next step, after we stole the map.”

  He had her there, but Alex couldn’t shake the feeling she was missing something. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Tag pushed through the door two floors above and headed for their room. “You’re like a dog with a bone,” he said, “a pesky, annoying dog that won’t stop yapping.”

  She smiled, far from being insulted. She’d rather be compared to an animal than a person any day of the year. “Your point is?”

  “Whether I lie or tell the truth is moot.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “It is when you don’t believe anything I tell you. I don’t know what happened to you, but I’m sick of being punished for it.”

  She knew he was turning the tables on her, changing the subject, but he’d pushed a button she couldn’t ignore. “I’m not punishing you.”

  “You can stand there and tell me that with a straight face but don’t lie to yourself.” He keyed the door lock, stalked into the room, and began to throw things in his duffel.

  Alex stood in the middle of the room, watching him, at a loss. Tag had been irritated, exasperated, aggravated, and downright mad at her so many times she’d gotten used to it. This time, though, she could see he was on the ragged edge of control. What she didn’t know was why. “Tag,” she said, laying a hand his arm, “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  He grabbed her and plastered his mouth to hers. She should have felt violated, or at the very least insulted. But he broke the kiss first. “That’s why” he said.

  Alex stared at him, shocked, disappointed, turned on. And then she was on him. No way was she letting him kiss her like that, like he wanted to get back at her for something. If anybody needed to get back at anybody, it was her. He’d dragged her into this… this stupidity. Now he thought he could kiss her, get her all stirred up, and then just walk away?

  Tag fell back on the bed, Alex on top of him, disaster on his mind. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than Alex’s hands on him, but he knew it could only complicate things. And things were already complicated enough.

  “Wait,” he said, “we shouldn’t do this.”

  “Nope.” She ran her hands down his chest to the snap on his jeans and the complications faded to insignificance. Once she learned he was an FBI agent and he was using her to accomplish his mission, she’d hate him anyway. Adding sex into the mix wouldn’t make it any worse. Probably.

  He had two choices. Do it right, or do it right now. She reared up and stuck her tongue in his ear at the same time her hand snaked down into his pants. His eyes rolled back in his head, his temperature shot up so fast it felt like his skull was going to explode, and right now was the only option left. Especially since somehow his clothes were disappearing. So were Alex’s, and if he hadn’t completely lost the ability to think he’d have taken a couple of minutes to appreciate the long, lean lines of her.

  There was a brief power struggle, which Tag won by flipping her onto her back, staking her arms to the mattress, and dropping his head to her breast. Instead of taking the fight out of her, it felt like he’d found her “on” switch.

  She wrapped those hiker’s legs of hers around his waist and practically crushed his spine. Okay, he thought with his one remaining operative brain cell. They weren’t going to waste any time, so he’d give her what she wanted. Since it was what he wanted, too, it worked out for everyone.

  He searched for his pants, fumbling in the pocket for one of the condoms he’d picked up that morning. Alex plucked it out of his hands, ripped it open with her teeth, and rolled it on. Her eyes were on his the whole time, her hands slipping down and back—

  Tag lost it, fisting his hand in her hair and dragging her head back, plundering her mouth while he buried himself inside her. And even though he’d have bet every last nugget of the Lost Spaniard that she couldn’t make him any more desperate, he’d have lost. And his control shredded in direct proportion to his level of desperation.

  He’d known she was a strong woman, but she was also an elemental one, a woman in tune with her body, and almost scarily intuitive about his. She did things he couldn’t describe except in terms of how they made him feel, and how they made him feel was criminally, intensely, erotically fantastic.

  Her hands moved over him, lingering at places he’d never thought were so sensitive. Her body met the rhythm his set, seeming to tighten around him more with each thrust. Her eyes held
his the whole time, stormy gray and intense, until he all but lost himself in them, in her. And just when he thought that sex with Alex couldn’t possibly get any better, it did. She rose up and used her mouth on him. Her teeth scraped along the straining ridge of muscle on his chest, his shoulder, finally reaching his mouth, her tongue tangling with his. At the same time she reached down between their bodies and touched him in a way that dragged a soul-deep groan out of him, and when she came he’d barely begun to enjoy the way her body clenched around him before the agony and ecstasy of it yanked him over the edge.

  By the time she was through with him he was flat on his back, weak as a limp rag and dragging in air like he hadn’t drawn breath for an hour. She, on the other hand, had barely broken a sweat.

  “I’m not sure you’re human,” Tag managed to mumble.

  “You did most of the work,” she pointed out. “I tried to help, but you were pretty insistent about being on top.”

  “If you’d been on top I think you’d have killed me.”

  “Not until I was done with you,” she said, stretching her hands high overhead and then running them down her sides all the way to her hips, which did a little shimmy like she was enjoying an aftershock of the orgasm they’d just shared.

  Tag nearly swallowed his tongue.

  He shifted to his side with his head supported on one bent arm, and slid the back of his fingers down from her collarbone, between her breasts to her belly. His eyes were on her the whole time.

  She didn’t like the look in them. There was intensity and mischief, both shadowed with something calculating, something dark and dangerous—

  He rolled the rest of the way suddenly, kneeling over her. Before she could scoot away, he’d wound her wrists tightly with his shirt, pulled them over her head and tied the arms of the shirt to the headboard. The binding didn’t hurt, but she couldn’t get free.

  “What’s this all about,” she asked, hearing the breathless sound of her own voice. She twisted her wrists, feeling a small flutter deep in the pit of her belly. It wasn’t entirely fear.

  “You’re a strong woman.” Tag lay on his side next to her again, weighing her legs down with one of his. “You like to be in control,” he said, easing one hand up her rib cage, “but there’s strength in being vulnerable, and more pleasure than you can imagine.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I didn’t get to use my hands last time,” he said, sliding a palm over her nipple.

  He barely touched it, but the sensation speared through her, again and again until it was all she could do not to scream.

  “Or my mouth.”

  His tongue flicked out, teasing her nipple, drawing it deep into his mouth. She clenched every muscle in her body against it, fighting the pleasure for all she was worth.

  “Let go,” he whispered against her breast, his hands stroking over her, between her legs, finding the exact spot begging to be touched.

  She did cry out then, his breath was so hot against her skin, the pleasure so intense that she heard herself whimper, “Stop.”

  And he did, instantly easing away. “Say that again,” he said, “and I will.”

  His breathing was as ragged as hers, his voice sounded like it had been dragged from the depths of hell. Alex opened her eyes and realized that for each second he pleasured her he was torturing himself.

  No, was her immediate reaction, don’t stop. But it went so deeply against everything she’d become in the last four years that she couldn’t bring herself to utter that one syllable and surrender.

  “Alex?”

  Her eyes shifted to Tag’s face and she understood that no matter how much safer she felt in her isolation, she couldn’t do that to him. That didn’t mean she couldn’t put the game back on a more comfortable footing. “Untie my hands.”

  He shook his head. “Drop your armor, Alex. I won’t hurt you.” He nuzzled her breasts. “And I’ll let you tie me up later.”

  She heard the smile in his voice along with the strain of holding back. It was the same strain inside of her, and in that one instant, she understood that there was protection in shutting out the rest of the world, but there was also pain and loneliness.

  She closed her eyes and let her muscles go lax, her breath sighing out at the feel of two-day-old stubble rasping across skin already sensitized. “Yes,” she said. There was an endless second of stillness, and then her world narrowed down to sensation, to the touch of Tag’s hands and mouth on her skin, hot and gentle at first, burning and urgent as his control began to shred.

  His breath was coming in harsh bursts by the time he slipped his knees between her legs, lifted her hips in his hands and joined their bodies in one long, slow thrust. She cried out, he groaned, and then they both began to move. Tag dropped his mouth to her neck, and Alex begged. She heard herself begging. A part of her was appalled by it, but she’d come too far to turn back now. And it felt too damn good, which was her last thought before the world exploded. Tag went rigid, she locked her legs around him, and they stayed that way for what seemed like forever, wringing the last ounce of pleasure out of each other before he collapsed next to her.

  He wasn’t so gone that he didn’t untie her first, though. Alex was too spent to do more than pull her arms down in front of her. Her wrists still wound in his shirt, she turned onto her side and curled herself within the pleasure. Tag spooned himself around her, slipped his arm over her, and snugged her back against him, his breath, easier now, warm against her ear.

  One of his fingers tickled lazily over her skin. She squirmed, and when that didn’t stop him, she opened one eye and found him grinning down at her. He cupped her breast, sliding a thumb across her nipple, so sensitive now that she hissed in a breath and dragged his hand down—which he then tried to slip between her legs.

  “Keep that up and I’ll be using this shirt on you,” she said.

  He groaned and flopped back down. “If I let you use that shirt on me in the next hour, you will kill me,” he said, adding philosophically, “but at least I’ll enjoy it more than the last time you tied me up.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “IS THIS STILL BOTHERING YOU?” TAG RAN A FINGER lightly along the healing scratch on Alex’s thigh.

  She pulled his hand away. “You’re bothering me,” she said. “That tickles.”

  “You weren’t complaining a minute ago.”

  “True.” But now mat the pleasant hum of the orgasm was fading away she was able to count the damage to the rest of her. She was exhausted, for one thing, her thigh still hurt, and her face and neck were raw from Tag’s beard. “When’s the last time you shaved?” she asked him.

  “Huh?” he mumbled, sounding half-asleep.

  “We’re quite a pair,” she said, propping herself up and taking a good long look at him, not including his most powerful weapon. She knew firsthand—and secondhand—what he was packing there.

  He was spotted with yellow and purple bruises, especially along his ribs, from falling out of the plane, and the insides of his thighs and knees looked like they’d been rubbed raw from Angel’s saddle. She ran the tips of her fingers over a particularly large bruise blooming along his side and came across a rough patch of skin just under his arm. “What’s this?”

  “Nothing.” He rolled over and got out of bed, wobbling a bit before he found his feet.

  She would have smiled over that if she hadn’t caught a good look at the scar, that nice round little scar, when he reached for his pants. “That looks like a bullet wound.” And depending on the direction of the bullet, it could have killed him. “Somebody shot you?”

  “Treasure hunting can be a dangerous game.” He gave her one of his disarming grins. “And not all the danger comes from armed opponents. I think you damaged me for life.”

  “It’s been a while,” she said with a slight laugh.

  “I’m not complaining. What puzzles me is how someone so passionate can just cut herself off from the human race for months at a time
.”

  “It’s not that difficult.” She hesitated for a second, but it felt so good to let go with Tag that she decided to get it all off her chest. “All you need is the right incentive, and trust me, I ran into a doozy named Bennet Harper.”

  Bennet Harper. Shit. Tag sat down in the chair—collapsed would be a better way to put it, crushed under the weight of his own stupidity.

  “We were engaged,” Alex said, thankfully not looking at him. If she looked at him she wouldn’t finish the story because she’d be asking him who he wanted to kill, and he wouldn’t know whether to say Bennet Harper or himself.

  “I grew up in Boston,” she continued. “My parents—”

  “Alex.”

  That one quiet word made her jump. “Too much intimacy?” She got up and drew on her clothes, not bothering with underwear. “You’ve been asking about my past since the day you fell on me, and now you don’t want to hear about it?”

  No. Suddenly he didn’t have the stomach for it. “Only if you want to tell me.”

  She must’ve realized she was wringing her hands because she stuffed them in her pockets. And paced instead. “I grew up in Boston ,” she said again. “My parents were an interesting couple. From what I hear. My mother was—is wealthy. Old money, Mayflower old. My father didn’t have any money, and the marriage didn’t last very long. My dad left before I could crawl, and he died not long after that. But that’s not really the point of this story. My mother is.”

  “I don’t know what brought her and my father together, and since it’s my parents I don’t think I want to know anyway, but somewhere along the line she grew afraid that my… lowlier genes would rear their ugly heads someday, so she decided I was going to be the perfect little debutante. It worked.” Her mouth curved in a half smile. “For a while.”

  “And it sounds like I’m complaining.” She drew both hands through her hair, stopping to look out the window. Tag didn’t think she’d say any more, but the view must have steadied her. “I had all the advantages, and oddly enough a lot of what my mother insisted I learn has come in handy out here. Horseback riding lessons, skeet shooting, even the pageant.” She glanced over her shoulder, still with that slight smile curving her mouth. “There’s nothing as cutthroat as a beauty queen on a quest for a crown. Some of the girls I competed with make that guy in the alley look like a playground bully.”