by Lora Leigh
Short, fierce thrusts. Once. Twice.
The third stroke buried him inside her to the hilt.
And then there was no stopping either of them.
Skye’s legs wrapped around his hips as Logan’s hands clamped to her rear and added yet more sensation to the mix. Parting the tender curves of her rear and sending striking flares of heat through the rear entrance as his thrusts began in earnest, Skye gave herself completely to the power of his touch and the pleasure.
A pleasure she had only ever read of and had known she could never experience.
Yet here it was.
Locked in his gaze, held by the thrust and power of his cock filling her, throbbing inside her with each impalement. Bearing down on the shuttling, iron-hard shaft, her muscles tight and quivering, flames beginning to race, to sear, to strike at her clit, her vagina.
Nerve endings flared, expanded, and as she felt his cock expand, the heat of it intensifying, Skye felt herself exploding.
The pleasure ruptured inside her in a wave of such destructive rapture that she was certain she wouldn’t, couldn’t, come out of it the same.
She tried to scream, but there was no energy, no breath, no thought capable of any other function but the hard, clenching power overtaking her, stroking through her veins, over her nerve endings like a thousand tiny electrical currents of ecstasy.
Shaking in his grip, held suspected within the rapture as he continued to thrust harder, faster, driving inside her, fucking her past reason and restraint. Another brutal explosion before the first had even had a chance to ease, then the pleasure drove into her very core with the final thrust and the feel of his release, hot and silky smooth, spurting into the unprotected depths of her pussy, only threw her further into the ecstasy.
It should have thrown her back to reason, to reality. It should have left her in a state of panic and chaos and screaming in fear.
Instead, the feel of his release jetting to the sensitive tissue, searing it, adding to the sensations, only sent her reeling into a wave of such ecstasy that for a moment she felt blinded, held suspended in a world the color of emeralds, dark and mesmerizing and filled with wave after wave of pleasure that she knew she would never find again outside his arms.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Skye was replete, sensually satisfied and feeling the effects of complete exhaustion as it dragged at her body.
And she was waiting for daylight.
Lying against Logan’s shoulder, if she opened her eyes she would be staring into the squished little face of the pup who had demanded to sleep on his chest.
And with both of them lying on him, Skye against his shoulder and the pup sprawled, front paws spread out from her wrinkled face, sleeping on his chest, Logan was still breathing heavily and sleeping as deep as she imagined he could.
She imagined that, like her, he rarely slept very deeply.
Was it a part of the life, the realization of the dangers that could visit as they slept?
Skye knew well what could visit as she slept; she’d been up close and personal with it. Just as she’d learned, as fate would set it for her, most of those monsters had rarely visited when the sun rose. They came in the dark, while hidden, while shadowed and unable to see themselves the horrible destruction they wrought.
Daylight was less than an hour away, though. If she stayed awake until she could see the dawn beginning to brush against the curtains covering the windows, then when she slept it would be without nightmares.
Warm, so drowsy that it would be a struggle to remain awake this last hour, she found herself visiting areas of her life that she never had allowed herself to visit. Memories she hadn’t realized she had, hadn’t realized were there.
She’d always been scared of the dark, she knew. A fear she remembered her parents actually encouraging.
Nightmares, her father had told her gently, if firmly, were the mind’s way to warn her to be wary, to sleep lightly.
She frowned as she felt Logan shift against her, his hand stroking over her hip before he stilled against her once again.
Whenever the nightmares woke her, screaming and in tears, her parents had been there at first, soothing her but always making her aware that the nightmares were warning her. But her parents had never told her what the nightmares were warning her of.
Over the years, though, the screaming had stopped. By the time she reached her teens she found herself waking silently but unable to go back to sleep, always watching the night. It had been hell when she’d begun private school. She’d had to learn how to hide the fact that she was only sleeping a few hours a night. For a while she’d actually found herself depending on medicinal aids to stay awake.
She was in the academy before she’d realized what her parents had been doing and who they were. Even after their deaths she hadn’t suspected what they were or the fact that from a young age she had been trained specifically for one thing. To join the academy.
Staring into the darkness, she wished that she’d known what her parents were doing, that they had explained it to her before their deaths. Instead, they had left the explanations to Carter, and there were so many of her questions that he couldn’t answer.
Some people had no business being parents, she thought. They had no business breeding, because even with the affection they might feel for their children, to some people their children were still possessions. They were extensions of their parents rather than beings in their own right. And that was what she was to her parents. She was an extension of what they were, of what they were doing, and, in their eyes, the future of their ultimate goals.
Just as Amy had been to Carter Jefferson. And after Amy’s death, Carter had transferred his plans from his daughter to his foster daughter, knowing that she had already been prepared for the life her parents had expected her to live.
Was that why the nightmares had grown so difficult? So bloody and violent? Or was it really, as she’d told her director and Carter, a result of that final assignment and a killer’s vindictive nature?
She suppressed a shudder, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt it would awaken Logan.
Instead, she gave a hard jerk at the almost-silent vibration of the phone beside Logan on the bed.
Instantly he was reaching for it and bringing it to his ear as he murmured to Skye, “It’s Crowe.”
“Which house are you in?” Crowe demanded quietly before Logan had a chance to speak.
“Skye’s.” He was moving even as Crowe spoke, knowing he would have never called if it weren’t an emergency.
Skye was rolling from the bed as Logan gently set the pup on the bed and rose quickly to his feet, reaching for the clothes he’d brought into the bedroom after carrying Skye to bed earlier.
“Check the security cameras for anyone around the house,” Crowe ordered. “I have Rafer and Cami with me. She was attacked and two bodyguards nearly killed. She’s been hurt.”
“The cameras,” Logan told Skye as she quickly tied a pair of sneakers on her feet. “Crowe’s coming in with Rafer and Cami. She was attacked.”
Following Skye as he pulled his weapon from the bed stand and checked the clip efficiently, Logan felt himself slipping into the cold, steely skin he had used while in the military.
The door to the camera room popped open as Logan and Skye approached it, the door sliding back easily as Skye began working the remote.
The six cameras’ four sections popped up instantly, the thermal imagining and digital status reports lighting the closet.
Pulling up the three rooftop views rather than the sectioned displays, she began rotating the cameras slowly to scan the entire area around the house.
“We have an all clear if they come in around the back as we did. We have several neighbors preparing to leave for work, as well as a deputy drive-by beginning at the end of the street,” she told Logan as he flipped the phone to speaker.
“All clear for a back entrance,” Logan told Crowe. “Keep to the thermal path and you�
�ll come in without detection.”
One camera focused automatically on the three images moving into the heated path the cousins had lain in months before. The path, heated to varying degrees, showed shadowed shifts and temperature variants that could be blamed on the thermal activity the area also possessed. The same activity they had tapped into for the pipes buried just beneath the ground.
Turning to move, Logan saw that Skye already had her weapon in one hand, the pup in the other. A dark jacket covered the dark T-shirt Skye had pulled on, and a hat covered her head.
Taking Bella in his free arm, he led the way through the house to the patio doors.
Unlocking the doors and sliding them open soundlessly, Skye crouched and stepped out, covering the area as Logan followed and moved quickly across the small yard.
Opening his patio doors to his own house, he set Bella on the floor, closed the doors enough to keep her inside, then turned and gave Skye the motion to follow.
Having already secured her own doors, she followed him quickly, slipping into the house as he opened the door once again, then pausing as he stepped in.
Bella was across the room in her heated puppy bed, slipping back into sleep as though nothing were wrong. The puppy’s appearance of unconcern assured him the house was empty. He’d been working with her, him and Crowe, teaching her to alert him to any other presence in the house, even one she was familiar with.
Motioning to Skye, they did a quick sweep of the house anyway, Logan headed through first.
She worked well with him. The house was given a quick scan within minutes before they moved through the dining room to the patio doors just as Crowe and Rafer approached the entrance, Cami cradled in her lover’s arms.
Leaving their entrance to Crowe after unlocking the doors, Logan dragged the fully stocked military medical kit from beneath a cabinet in the kitchen and returned to the dining room as Rafer laid the delicate form of his lover on the long couch Logan had placed in the room.
“What the fuck happened?” Logan snarled as he knelt next to the couch where Cami lay on her stomach, a makeshift bandage covering the back of her shoulder.
Pulling the gauze and tape aside, Rafer cursed as she jerked at the pain. Her smothered moan had each man grimacing in fury.
Logan had turned to order Rafe to gather clean towels when Skye was suddenly at his side, a stack of clean dish towels in her hands.
“Two of the bodyguards watching her were taken by surprise by the third when he tried to kill her. If that weren’t bad enough, a fucking sniper decide to come out to play at the same time.” Tortured and filled with pain, Rafer’s voice was like a dark vision of coming death. “I was coming in as it happened. Cami managed to get out of the house with the help of one of the guards as the other tried to distract the sniper. She was clipped as the bodyguard threw her out a fucking window when they couldn’t disable the third.”
“Clipped?” The flesh wound was a vicious slash across Cami’s shoulder.
The bullet had dug in deep, tearing across flesh and muscle in a ragged gouge that Logan knew had to be agonizing.
Cami’s face was buried in the couch, and now that her lover couldn’t see what she would feel was a weakness, Logan could feel the slight tremble of her shoulders and knew she was crying.
“It’s okay, little sister,” he murmured, knowing if Rafer saw those tears, he would go ape-shit. None of them would be able to control him then. “I’ve got something for the pain.”
She gave a jerking nod.
Glancing at Rafer as he crouched at the arm of the couch, his fingers buried in her hair to keep some connection to her, Logan knew his cousin was well aware that she was crying. His gaze was tortured, filled with the knowledge of her pain. And he hated it.
Hell, they all hated it.
Pulling a syringe and small bottle from the med kit, Logan quickly filled it with enough of the medication to not just fight infection but also take the pain away. Something that would help her rest.
“Here we go,” he murmured as he quickly gave her the injection. “Just a minute, sweetheart. All the pain is going to go away.”
Literally, no more than a few seconds.
Logan prepared the sutures as he waited, watched the tension in her small body slowly ease away until she was breathing more normally and the slight hitching of her breath from her tears eased away.
“God. Thank you, Logan,” Rafer whispered, his voice hoarse as Cami finally relaxed and drifted into a medicated drowsiness.
“She’s going to be fine,” he promised his cousin. “We’ll just close this up and I’ll even try to do it pretty enough that, hopefully, she won’t even know there’s been a wound there. I promise she won’t be afraid to wear that bikini for you again.” Logan smirked, hoping to take Rafer’s mind off his fury. Just a little.
“Bastard.” Rafer gave a rough grunt. “You weren’t supposed to see her in that bikini.”
“I promise, I kept my eyes closed.” Logan forced a chuckle as he lied.
“God, Logan, I didn’t think I was going to get to her in time.” His voice was a tortured rasp of pain.
“But you did. That’s what counts, Rafe,” Logan assured him. “That’s all that counts.”
“Are the bodyguards alive?” Skye asked Rafer as Logan motioned to her to hand him the next suture.
“All but one. The one trying to kill her.” Rafe’s voice was hard now. “He was the one I was heading up to talk to. I received a blocked text informing me that the bodyguard had contacted John Corbin and offered to give up Cami’s location for payment.”
“And you didn’t call us?” Logan snarled, careful to ensure the stitch he was applying pulled the flesh together gently despite the rage pouring through him.
“There was no time,” Rafe snapped back. “You were too far away to help, Logan, and what you were doing was just as important. I was only ten minutes from her location going through that damned lawyer’s files. I just ran when the text came through. I thought there was still time. The information said Corbin had just received the information.”
The lawyer their parents had seen regarding the details of the resort they were combining their finances to go into in partnership with a resort developer the day they were killed. According to the lawyer, the Callahan couples had not been in that afternoon, while Clyde had known for a fact that they had been there. Clyde had known because he had set the appointment up himself.
Now, twelve years later, the lawyer was claiming he had never met the three couples.
“And why would someone at the Corbin ranch try to warn us of anything?” Crowe asked broodingly.
Rafer smoothed Cami’s hair back from her drowsy face, his eyes never leaving her as he answered. “I don’t think the caller was from the ranch.”
“If the Barons are upping the ante like this, then we’re going to have problems,” Crowe stated, the ice forming in his voice sending a chill of warning up Skye’s spine.
“That shooter was good, Crowe.” Rafer sounded strangled by the emotion in his voice as Cami gave a small, unconscious moan. “Damned good. There shouldn’t have been a soul left living. And the only reason Cami was shot, according to her, was because the bodyguard bargaining to reveal her location tried to take her out himself. She tried to run when he turned the gun on her. The other guy threw her out the window but not before his partner shot. She turned in time to see the bastard’s fucking head explode.” His eyes blazed with fury; his face was taut with it.
Logan wiped his hand over his face. “This isn’t worth it,” he whispered, sitting back on his heels when he finished the fifth and final stitch. “Hell, give them fucking trusts. It’s not worth another life.”
“If we could do it, legally, I’d be all for it,” Crowe snarled. “They don’t get the property or anything else unless we leave the area and stay gone for three years. Or unless we die of natural causes or suicide. Otherwise, it goes to our heirs, if there’s even a chance of an heir. Do you want t
o leave Cami unprotected that long, Rafer?” He turned to Logan. “Would you leave Skye that long?”
Logan glanced at Skye and knew he wouldn’t.
“Hell, our parents weren’t even certain they wouldn’t try to kill us for it,” Rafer stated, his voice grim now. “Our mothers were spoiled every day of their lives until they married our fathers. The hell the Barons must have put them through to make them distrust their own fathers to that extent.”
Skye watched the three men then, their expressions, the savagery in their eyes, the way their jaws clenched tight, the disillusionment and bitterness on their faces.
“Suddenly the bastard stalking us is using a rifle instead of a knife?” Crowe sneered. “If he was that damned good with one, why wait until now to start using it?”
“None of this makes sense,” Skye said then. “There’s no way he could be in two places at once.”
“What do you mean?” Crowe turned to her quickly when Logan spoke.
“He was waiting in Skye’s house when she came from the Social.” He stared back at Rafer. “I’m going to guess, not long before Cami was attacked.”
“A new player? Or do you think his partner is coming out to play?”
“His partner wouldn’t be trying to save Cami,” Skye pointed out. “None of this is adding up. The Slasher is suddenly changing his habits? That’s very rarely seen in a serial killer. They get off on keeping to their agenda and to their little rituals.”
“What do we do now?” Rafer whispered, desperation filling his gaze as Logan bandaged the wound. “Cami’s not trained for this, Crowe. Hell, I can’t even hire bodyguards to protect her. How the fuck are we supposed to keep her and Skye safe? Hell, I don’t know if we’re trained for this.”
“She’s considered a weak link,” Skye stated softly, almost wincing as their gazes jerked back to her. “But even more, kill her, take your reason for fighting, and you could simply give up.”
“Why?” Rafer lashed out, his gaze livid. “Why go after her at all, let alone consider her a weak link?”
“As you said, she’s not trained,” Skye pointed out. “And because she has the potential to conceive another heir. That heir would acquire everything if the three of you were dead or if you left the county and decided to just give up. That option would be considered voided if there’s an heir. I think that’s the same reason your lovers have been killed. That’s the only reason to kill the women you’ve slept with, or had relationships with.”