by BETH KERY
“Walker,” she moaned miserably when she glanced down and saw how erect her nipples were, how the center nubbin had elongated beneath his mouth and fingers, how rosy they’d become as he sucked and blood gathered just below the surface. She’d lied when she said she sunbathed topless all the time. Her breasts were paler than the surrounding skin, a stark contrast to her tan and dark pink nipples.
“You used to be able to come from nipple stimulation alone,” he said in recollection, his breath whisking across her moist nipple. He pursed his lips and blew at her softly. Shivers rippled down her spine. “Do you know how rare that is?”
She didn’t answer, but groaned in an agony of arousal, wriggling in his hold.
He moved his hands to her sides, stilling her. She saw the gleam of his blue-green eyes in the shadows.
“Do you?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“And can you still? Climax from nipple stimulation alone? Can Tony make you come that way, Madeline?”
She opened her mouth to tell the truth, but made a choked sound as she cut herself off at the last second. He sensed the truth anyway, despite her stinginess in saying it. She could tell, because his lips quirked into a small, satisfied smile. Bastard. He knew he’d been the only one who could ever evoke such a response from her.
He lowered his head, and Madeline cursed under her breath. She was handcuffed with her hands above her head, helpless, hot and so aroused her pussy was drenched. She didn’t have any choice but to stand there while Walker proved to her he could still create a riot in her flesh. She hated him for exposing her vulnerability, but she couldn’t stop the pleasure that tore through her flesh like a fire rampaging in a rain-thirsty forest.
He suckled her the way she liked it, firm and just a little rough. She mewled and twisted like a helpless fish on a hook. He bit the tender flesh while continuing his relentless suction. He pinched her other nipple rhythmically: hard, gentle, hard, soothing.
Madeline cried out as she came. It hurt a little to climax without stimulation on her sex, sending tight, cramp-like spasms through her. She writhed, desperate to get pressure on her pussy.
“Shhh,” he soothed when he released her nipple from his mouth. He went to his knees before her. She craned toward him, her wrists pulling at the handcuffs. He glanced up. “Don’t, Madeline. You’ll hurt your wrists. Do you hear me?” he asked sharply when she continued to stretch in her restraints, mindless with lust. She blinked, unable to speak in the midst of her crisis. “That’s right,” he whispered when she eased the pressure on her wrists. “I’ll come to you.” He jerked her panties down to her ankles and pressed his face to her pussy with no further ado.
She let out a scream of delight when he laved at her clit with a stiffened tongue. It was like he threw a switch in her body. Her former orgasm ratcheted up exponentially, detonating like an explosion. He continued to tongue her while he applied a firm suction, and she shuddered in bliss. Thank goodness the fabrics in the changing rooms were rich and luxurious, absorbing her sharp cries of pleasure, because she couldn’t control herself.
Her eyes blinked open heavily a moment later. His head moved between her thighs as he gathered her cream, his actions unapologetically greedy. Madeline panted and tried to bring the room into focus while her orgasm still echoed in her flesh, thanks to Walker’s stroking, stabbing tongue.
He slowly lifted his head. For a moment, their gazes held. In the distance, Madeline heard a shout and male laughter. She started.
“They’re back. It’s Tony and the others.”
He didn’t respond with the haste she thought the moment warranted. Instead he rose until he once again towered over her. He began to unfasten his jeans.
She gaped, stunned by his boldness.
“No, Walker,” she whispered.
“We’re going to finish this even if your fiancé walks right through that door.”
She swallowed thickly. Tony wasn’t her fiancé. They’d seen each other on and off over the years. After her father had died, Tony and his family had consoled her, made her one of them ... and helped her feel she belonged in a world that had suddenly grown alien and cold with her father gone.
And Walker.
She knew Tony felt safe with her, unlike most of the women who crowded around him for his good looks and monumental wealth. Sex hadn’t been a factor in their relationship for over a year now. It’d been her choice, although Tony was known to test the waters every couple weeks or so, shark that he was. It didn’t upset her much when he tried. She understood Tony and forgave him his weaknesses. Tony went through women like Kleenex. That hadn’t changed when she’d agreed to sleep with him years back. The realization that his infidelity hadn’t wounded her much at all had been her first true indication Tony wasn’t the man for her.
Tony insisted he could wait while the idea of marriage grew on her. She knew he occasionally referred to her as his fiancée with his friends and his parents. Madeline had grown weary of denying it.
She certainly wasn’t going to tell Walker Gray she wasn’t engaged to Tony. He already held too many cards in this little game.
She watched as Walker shoved his jeans around his thighs. His boxer briefs looked snow-white in the shaded room next to his golden brown tan. A moan of longing leaked out of her throat when she saw the heavy package of his cock behind stretched cotton.
No protest could form in her brain as he stretched back the boxer briefs and exposed his naked length. Lust burned everything else away. His cock fell free, the weight of the head pulling it at a downward angle. He leaned down and lifted her off her feet, bringing her flush against him. He reached and unhooked the handcuffs from the metal post. Madeline sighed shakily at the feeling of being pressed against his body. She lowered her arms to his shoulders, bracketing his head. Her legs wrapped around him, seemingly of their own volition, as he staggered a few feet, his knees bound by his clothing.
She gasped when her back thudded against the wall.
“Help me, Madeline.”
It was an order. It was a plea. Whatever it was, Madeline couldn’t stop herself from succumbing to it. She shifted her body to accommodate him. She held his stare, wincing at the sensation of his cock carving into her flesh.
“Jesus,” he mumbled in a pressured hiss. Madeline knew what he meant. They both had to apply a firm pressure to force her narrow channel to part for him. He fired her flesh even as he stretched it. She hungered for his stark, hard presence at her core. Her pussy may seem to be resisting harboring something so large, but once he’d conquered new territory, she melted around him, welcoming him like a warm, sucking kiss.
Outside, Madeline heard something hit the dock, as if Tony or someone had tossed some gear from the boat. Within the cool depths of the boathouse, she sweated in a blaze of need. Walker began to pump even before he’d fully sheathed himself. He was greedy, and she liked it.
She liked it a lot.
“Let me in, you little tease,” he said between clenched white teeth. Strangely, it sounded like an endearment instead of an insult.
She pressed with all her might against his driving cock. She bit her lower lip and gave a harsh moan when his balls pressed against her damp, sensitive tissues.
“That’s right. Now show me how you fuck with that tight little pussy.”
But she was already showing him, just like he was showing her what he could do. It was difficult to tell who put on a more enthusiastic demonstration. She drove down on his length just as he slammed into her. Madeline couldn’t catch her breath. Just when she did, he’d pin her against the wall with his cock, and air would pop out of her lungs. He held her in an iron grip just above her waist, his hands stretching onto her back and encompassing a good portion of her torso. His muscles flexed tight beneath his cotton shirt as he jerked her back and forth on his cock, the relative ease of his mastery over their movements shocking and thrilling her.
They were both so lost in their greed, united in their goal for mo
re friction, more pressure, more bliss, that they were hardly aware of anything else. They heard Tony’s and Hal Margrave’s casual banter in the distance and the sounds of feet hitting the dock, but they were knotted exclusively to each other in those frantic seconds.
He pumped into her to the hilt, and her breath exploded out of her. He paused. A drop of sweat trickled from the side of his forehead down to a whiskered jaw. He held her against the wall, her body skewered on his cock, and rotated his hips slightly. Her legs were parted wide. He ground his pelvis against her exposed clit.
“If I’d ever been here before, I wouldn’t have been able to leave. I’m not going to be able to sleep or eat if I’m thinking about this pussy.”
He watched her while she came, his face rigid, his body drawn as tight as a bowstring the moment before the arrow rips through the air. She shook in pleasure, all the while aware of his lancing gaze and feeling vulnerable for it.
Feeling beautiful.
He nursed her through her orgasm by moving his hips in tiny, subtle circles, giving her pressure on her clit. His cock throbbed high and hard inside her. She bit her lip to stop from keening. It felt decadent, so hot and forbidden.
“I’ll just pop in and shower and meet you two up at the lodge,” a woman’s voice called from outside the entrance to the changing room.
Panic clutched at Madeline’s throat. She gave Walker a wild glance. It was Kitty Margrave, Hal’s friendly, middle-aged wife.
“Move. Do something,” she whispered.
Her eyes went wide in shock. He did something, all right. He started to fuck her with long, thorough strokes, holding her stare the whole time.
“Walker,” she mouthed helplessly. The thrusts of his cock in her pussy had sent her to shivering again with the aftershocks of her orgasm. She rested the back of her head against the wall and surrendered.
Anything else was impossible.
“Didn’t you leave your clothes up at the lodge?” Hal’s voice resounded in the distance. Madeline’s heart seemed to want to explode out of her chest, but she just stared into Walker’s blazing eyes as he fucked her, faster now, hunting down his own bliss.
“Oh, you’re right, I did,” Kitty said sheepishly.
“Maddie must have run up to the lodge for a book or something. I told her to bring one, but she said she wouldn’t get bored,” Tony said, the sound of his voice growing more distant as the three of them made their way through the sprawling lawn.
Walker saw the finish line, Madeline could tell. Not just from the feeling of his cock swelling huge inside her, but from the fact that he no longer tried to mute the sound of their flesh slapping together as he fucked her. She whimpered when he slammed into her one last time, his face contorted in an agony of pleasure.
He’d grown so erect, so swollen with need that it hurt a little to harbor him so deep while he exploded. She broke the skin on her lower lip with her own teeth when she heard his guttural, wild groan as he emptied himself inside her. She grasped his back with her handcuffed hands, absorbing his shudders, greedy to experience his surrender.
But it hadn’t been him who had surrendered in those tension-filled moments, Madeline admitted as he panted, his head lowered next to hers, his forehead against the wall. It had been she who had sacrificed her pride by allowing a man she hadn’t seen in eleven years—a man who had once rejected her—inside her mind . . . inside her flesh.
He lifted his head slowly. His short, wavy hair shone like dark, burnished gold in the shadowed room. He stared at her mouth. His face lowered over her.
“No,” she whispered harshly. He’d been about to kiss her. Madeline couldn’t take that.
“Your mouth is bleeding,” he said quietly, his lips just an inch away from her own.
She slicked her tongue along her lip. “I bit it.”
“I know,” he murmured.
“Let me down, Walker.” She hated that her voice shook.
He didn’t move. Madeline felt his gaze on her, but she kept her eyes lowered.
“I came back for you, Madeline.”
She did look him full in the face then.
“You fucking liar,” she said incredulously. It was bad enough that he’d hauled her into this changing room, handcuffed her to a shower and screwed her until she didn’t know her own name. Now he was telling her ridiculous lies. Those six words he’d uttered felt like the equivalent of a slap. Tears sprung to her eyes.
“Let me down. I need to shower. You came inside me!” Panic swelled in her breast. She cried out when he did precisely what she’d said, lifting her off his cock. He set her on her feet. Her teeth clenched in rising anger when she realized she was still attached to him with her arms looped around his neck.
“Hold on,” he said sternly when she struggled against him like a wild animal that had just realized it was trapped. She held the spasm of emotion that wanted to leap out of her chest down with effort as he helped her unhook her arms from his head. He bent and pulled some keys out of his jeans. As soon as he’d unlocked the cuffs and her wrists were free, she staggered away from him. He caught her with a hand on her elbow.
“Leave me alone,” she bit out, made even more angry at the realization that she was about to cry. Why had she just allowed that to happen? Now he held even more power over her, and he knew it. “Just get out of here. Now.”
She didn’t turn around as she hurried into the room that contained a steam sauna and shelves filled with towels. He’d gone by the time she returned.
He’d done what she’d asked, for once.
Unfortunately, given what Tony had hired him for, Walker Gray wouldn’t have gone far.
Two
Walker glanced up from his computer screen when he heard the beep of a card being swept through the security entrance into Tony Hallas’s large den.
“Has she come downstairs?” he asked, his fingers pausing on the keyboard.
Barry nodded and plunked down into a chair. Barry had obviously used his time off this morning to take advantage of the undercover assignment location and bask in the Tahoe sunshine. He wore hiking boots and canvas shorts, and his nose was sunburned to a shiny glow. “She’s on the patio with Tony. She’s an eyeful, I’ll give her that, but about as friendly as a piranha on a diet. She sure doesn’t try to hide the fact that she doesn’t want our protection, does she?”
Commenting on Madeline’s hostility seemed about as obvious as saying the Lake Tahoe view was spectacular, so Walker continued with his task of checking for attempts at breaching Tony’s security system. There were only a handful of individuals on the planet as well trained at securing a compound from either a physical or technological threat as the Secret Service. Tony Hallas wasn’t the president of the United States, but he’d hired Walker and his crew because he believed Walker could offer him similar protection in his Lake Tahoe vacation lodge. Even Tony, who owned the largest computer systems security company in the nation, had to admit he didn’t know some of the stuff the Secret Service did.
“Do you know what Madeline just told me?” Barry asked.
Walker frowned as his fingers continued to fly over the keyboard. “I can just imagine,” he murmured.
“She told me that I was infringing on her right to privacy by guarding her.”
“Did you tell her that since she decided to have a relationship with Tony Hallas, she lost a few of her rights?” he asked evenly, his eyes fixed on the computer screen. “Anyone close to Tony is a potential security breach. Kidnap Madeline Sayer or threaten to kill her, and Tony is suddenly at risk for giving away software to China or Pakistan or who-the-fuck-ever who wants the opportunity to attack U.S. financial institutions.”
“You mean beyond the stuff we think Tony hasn’t already given to the Russian mob?” Walker gave Barry a wry glance before he continued his search. Barry had just mentioned the crux of the reason he, Barry and two other members of his team, Arthur Lange and Jim Stephano, were in Lake Tahoe undercover—because the Secret Service crimi
nal investigations division believed that Tony Hallas had been selling software to the Russian mob, information that had been used for a recent hack into U.S. ATM accounts. Over 10 million dollars had been stolen before the breach could be sealed.
Tony hadn’t questioned Walker’s cover about moving back to Lake Tahoe in order to start his own corporate security operation. Tony had bought his cover because, in fact, that’d been precisely what Walker planned to do. He’d already handed in his resignation with the Secret Service and was counting the days until he returned to Lake Tahoe when they’d received some alarming intelligence in regard to Tony Hallas.
One of the Secret Services’s missions was to investigate computer-based attacks on the nation’s financial and banking infrastructure. Tony Hallas was suspected of breaching that security, and Walker was tailor-made to go undercover. Walker’s boss had begged him to stay on the Secret Service payroll for a short period of time and lead the Hallas investigation.
Tony trusted Walker. They’d been friends since they were both seven years old. Walker’s father used to be Tony’s father’s gardener, and the two boys had spent more than a dozen summers practically attached at the hip.
Until they’d met Madeline Sayer, anyway. Until they’d both vied for her attention. Walker had been the clear winner in their younger days. He’d left Tahoe, though, and the spoils went to Tony.
Barry rubbed his sunburned nose and continued. “I did explain things to Ms. Sayer about why she was a weak point in security, and do you know what she asked? How come we didn’t have a person guarding all of Tony’s friends?”
Walker stopped typing and glanced up. “He’s not planning on marrying all of his friends,” he said grimly.
“I told her that. How do you suppose she manages to pull off looking down her nose at you when she probably barely tops five foot four?” Barry mused.
Walker grinned. “Forces of nature can come in small packages.”
He didn’t waste time telling Barry that Madeline was actually one of the warmest people he’d ever met in his life. The fact that they were discussing her like she was a royal bitch was as good an indication as any of how off balance she was with him being there. It was something, he supposed, knowing he was having an effect on her. He couldn’t be too choosy about her manner of reacting to him when the woman he wanted like his next breath was engaged to another man.