Falling for the Enemy

by Samanthe Beck

  Damn it, who was this guy? Impatient with herself, she gathered up her tools and set about putting things away. She removed the cape and shook it out, but he barely stirred. He snoozed with the same quiet containment he radiated when awake. Her trip to the supply closet for her broom and dustpan went unnoticed, but on her way back to the workstation she heard him moan—a flat, reluctant sound escaping from the depths of a dream. Not a fleeting noise though. It increased in volume and urgency as she approached the chair, and the haunted, hopeless tone sent a shiver down her spine. Then his whole body jerked, and she nearly choked on her own startled scream.

  Enough. She propped the broom against the wall and crouched down in front of him. “Hey,” she said gently, not wanting to startle him, but determined to coax him away from whatever nightmare had sunk its claws into him. His moaning stopped, but his breathing turned choppy and a bead of sweat trickled down his temple. Without thinking, she reached up to wipe it away.

  As soon as her fingertips brushed his skin his eyes popped open. Hard hands clamped around her upper arms. The room spun, but before she could utter a single cry of alarm, she was face-first against the mirror, trapped by his weight and his arms banded around her.

  She swallowed hard, drew in a breath, and called, “Shaun!”

  Chapter Three

  Congratulations, you’ve finally had a psychotic break. Just as quickly as the unhelpful thought formed, he pushed it away. This was a dream. A bad one, mixed with flashbacks to make it extra nasty. Except…something wasn’t right. An out-of-place, citrus-y smell didn’t mesh with the all-too-familiar flashes of darkness, rubble, and some other horrific crap his mind refused to acknowledge. A voice called to him. Too high-pitched and feminine to belong to one of the other SEALs on the strike team, and laced with urgency—which in and of itself was not necessarily wrong, considering their target and what had gone down—but wrong because this voice called him by name.

  Wake the fuck up. Now. He forced the word “Stop” from his tight, dry throat, and used the sound of his own voice to wrench himself out of the nightmare, and into…oh shit.

  Adrenalin originally activated by the dream continued pouring into his overcharged system, even as he realized he had Virginia trapped between his body and the mirror, restrained in a bear-hug, with his forearm wedged against her soft breasts and a hard-on of undisguisable proportions prodding her backside. He immediately released her, stepped back, and waited for her fist to connect with his face, or her foot with his balls, or whatever else she dished out, because he definitely had it coming. She turned to face him, staring up at him with wide, cautious eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said lamely into the yawning silence. Heat crawled up his neck. His sleep problems usually took the form of insomnia, but on rare occasions he sleepwalked. He’d woken up in his closet once, the kitchen a few times, and in the garage once, which had been inspiration enough to flush the last of the sleeping pills his doctor had prescribed. Up until now he’d figured he’d flushed the sleepwalking as well, but tonight took the prize. He’d never laid a hand on anybody before. Of course, he’d been bedding down alone for the past several months, too tired and, frankly, too screwed up for company. Way too screwed up. He opened his mouth—to say what, he wasn’t sure—but she interrupted him.

  “Sugar, if you’re not happy with your haircut, all you have to do is say so.”

  He caught the glint in those clear, green eyes. “Not funny.”

  “Oh, come on. It is kind of funny, when you think about it.” She straightened her top. He ordered his eyes forward but they went AWOL and dropped to her chest. The skin on the inside of his forearms prickled with the phantom sensation of her rigid nipples poking him. His cock throbbed hard enough to have him biting back a groan. He had to get out of there. Now.

  “Besides,” she said, and smoothed her hands over her short denim skirt in an unconscious gesture designed to kill him, “you were having a bad dream. You didn’t jump me on purpose. No harm, no foul…” She looked up at him and trailed off, her eyes wide. He knew then and there all the desire surging through him showed on his face.

  Retreat. But he didn’t. He reached up and touched the small red mark riding high across her cheekbone—a souvenir from the mirror. Her skin felt like warm silk. “What would you have done?”

  Her eyes were round and all pupils. “What would I have done if…what?”

  “If I’d jumped you on purpose?”

  He honestly didn’t know who moved first, but in the next heartbeat they were on each other. Mouths fused. Hands grasping. He pulled her in closer and somehow ended up with her legs around his waist and her smooth, round handful of an ass right there in his palm. He squeezed. She moaned and tried to crawl under his shirt.

  He tangled fingers into her hair, tugged her head back, and recaptured her mouth. Her kiss was as tantalizing and vital as the rest of her, and made him want to taste her everywhere—to consume all the heat and energy she offered. He moved his hand from her hair to the back of her neck in some primitive strategy to foreclose any escape route, and deepened the kiss, plunging his tongue into the sweet recess of her mouth with more hunger than finesse. She moaned again and raked her fingernails along his spine, setting off tiny bolts of lightning everywhere she touched.

  Uncensored, unsupervised lust tore through him. Desperate to feed it, he sank his teeth into her lip and tightened his grip on her ass. She squirmed against him with such force he suddenly worried it stemmed more from agitation than pleasure.

  He pulled back. “Fuck, I’m—”

  No apology necessary. She yanked him back and took hard, fast little bites out of his lips while she worked his shirt up his chest. They wrestled his arms free, and then she swept it over his head, dragging some of his hair along with it.

  “Sorry…I’m not usually…so grabby, but…”

  “I don’t care,” he managed when she ran her lips over his chin. Her fingernail etched a trail across his chest. He knew without looking she traced the gothic script letters tattooed there. The only easy day was yesterday.

  Over the last seven months the sentiment had never felt truer, except right here, right now, because falling into Virginia felt easier than breathing—and just as critical. He slid his hand from the back of her neck around to her throat, over her collarbone and down the inviting slope of her chest.

  A shiver racked her when he squeezed her breast. Her legs tightened around his hips. “It’s just lately…I’ve been on…this…sex hiatus.”

  Him, too, now that he thought about it, but then thought got more difficult because her soft, quick lips scorched a path from his chin to his earlobe, and then she latched on and sucked so hard he almost went lightheaded at the thought of that mouth on his cock, sucking with the same brutal intensity. He shoved her tank top up to her armpits and took a second to appreciate the sight of her pale cleavage swelling above a red, push-up bra. “Sex hiatus?”

  “Yeah.” She was on the move again, raining hot little kisses along the side of his neck. “Fun’s fun, but I figured it was time to stop making the same mistakes with the same old guys.”

  He reached behind her and unclasped her bra. Her breasts sprang free from their satin and lace restraint. Compact, upswept, with tight, pink nipples pointed straight at him. His mouth watered with anticipation. “Time to make a new mistake, with a new guy?”

  She laughed, and the low husky sound pulled his attention back to her face. Her grin slipped a bit off center as she stared at him and smoothed her hand along his cheek. “This is, without a doubt, a huge mistake.”

  He didn’t know if she was trying to warn herself off, or him, but it didn’t matter. Good judgment had abandoned him the second he’d walked into her shop, or, in truth, the minute he’d left the house this evening, knowing full well where he’d end up. “Then we better make it count. One night. No apologies. No regrets.”

  A wiggle of her hips served as a cue to put her down. For a moment of staggering disappointment he
thought she’d changed her mind, but when he put her on her feet, she leaned over and dug around in the bottom drawer of her workstation. A second later she straightened and tossed a handful of condoms onto the surface. She stared at him in the mirror and added, “I’m a big believer in no regrets.”

  To show her she wouldn’t have any, he hitched up her skirt, yanked her tiny, red thong out of his way, freed his throbbing cock from his jeans and nestled it along the cleft of her ass.

  Her mouth dropped open and her eyes went wide. “Holy mother…load.”

  “You don’t know the half of it…well…maybe about half.” And he was only half-joking, which must have shown on his face because she wrapped her hands around the edge of the counter in front of her and shivered.

  “Are you going to sweet talk me, or dirty talk me, before you—?”

  “I’m going to fuck you.” So saying, he reached past her, grabbed a condom and tore it open.

  “Oh, God, okay, that works.” He got the condom on, then reached around and sent his fingers into the neatly groomed, gratifyingly damp strip of red curls between her thighs.

  “Until you scream my name, sweet Virginia,” he added, just to see what she’d toss back, and gave her a slow, thorough stroke.

  “Sugar…” She leaned into the workstation and raised her hips to give him more access. “I don’t even remember your name.”

  How had he resisted her for two weeks? He laughed, but the laugh was on him, because he was the one who wouldn’t survive their night of no regrets. Her heat, the feel of her, slick on his fingers as she grinded against his hand, and the slow, condom-lubricated slide of his cock along the ripe-peach contours of her backside had his mind racing with a thousand possibilities, and his body ached to act on them all at once. Incompatible impulses he scrambled to organize and prioritize. Kiss her until their lips went raw. Take her breast into his mouth and suck her nipple so she felt the pull all the way down her spine. Drop to his knees and devour her until she came with a scream and coated his tongue with her taste. But all of that was impossible, because the strongest urge, the one forcing its way to the forefront, involved one thing only—him sliding into her slick, tight heat, and losing himself there, fucking her so long, so hard, they’d both have scars by the time he was done.

  Seven months suddenly struck him as a reckless amount of time to have gone without an orgasm involving another living, breathing, feeling human being, with needs and priorities of her own. He was like a ticking time bomb.

  She arched her back and came up on her toes, squeezing his cock again in the process.

  Jesus. He slid one finger inside her. She sucked in a breath and went higher on her toes. He eased another finger in. Her body clenched around him and she let out a small, impatient “Now.”

  “Take another finger,” he whispered.

  “No more. I want you.”

  He worked the third finger in anyway, because what came next was a hell of a lot more than three fingers. “I want to make sure you’re ready. Otherwise, when this is all over, you’ll be cursing me for the next week.”

  “I’ve been cursing you for the last two. What’s one more?”

  There it went. The end of his rope. He pushed her down until her forearms rested on the surface of her workstation. “Hold on, sweet Virginia, we’re about to find out.” With that, he drove into her. In some detached, disassociated part of his mind, he heard her cry out…first a high-pitched gasp, which slowly tumbled into a long, soul-deep groan.

  Experience told him to stay still and let her adjust. Keep his hand cupped to her body, stroke her so she moved against him, pushing back as he pushed forward, finding a pace she liked. Basically, hold himself in check until she’d worked herself into a frenzy. But tonight the voice of need overrode the voice of experience, and demanded more. More. Deeper. Harder. Faster. He pumped his hips in an insatiable, instinctive urge to find what his body craved. Blood rushed in his ears. His heartbeat thundered in his chest. Tremors started somewhere around his calves and worked their way up.

  Virginia clamped around him like a fist, over, and over, and over again, and called his name. And still it wasn’t enough. Not for him.

  “I need more of you…all of you,” he ground out.

  She raised her head, looked in the mirror, and her frantic gaze crashed into him “Please, please, please Shaun…I have to come now. I don’t care what you do, or how you do it. Just…fucking…do it.”

  Chapter Four

  From somewhere over the runaway train of blood pumping in her ears, Ginny heard herself calling Shaun’s name. More than once, and fairly desperately. Pride goeth before the fall. But hell’s bells, she hadn’t been prepared for this fall.

  Okay, yes, she’d had sex—maybe more than her fair share—for the fun of it, or to relieve the boredom of another predictable Bluelick Friday night, or for the ego-validation of the conquest. Sometimes playful, sometimes sweet, sometimes purely physical, but never anything like this. Shaun’s urgency made her feel as necessary as a heartbeat, as important as oxygen, and the ruthless honesty of his need wrung a response from her she hadn’t dreamed existed. She might as well have been the virgin he’d teased about, because now, in this moment, she found herself grappling with symptoms she didn’t understand, and had no idea how to deal with, and she would have offered him anything, opened up to him in any way he demanded, as long as he delivered the relief his touch promised.

  I need more of you. All of you, he’d said.

  She couldn’t fathom what more she had to offer, given he had her bent over a workstation and filled to the bursting point while she danced on the edge of the most crucial orgasm of her entire life, but she’d take it. All of it.

  Long, blunt-tipped fingers glided over her jaw. Then he cupped her chin, traced her lips, and slid two fingers inside. A shockingly intimate and inexplicably controlling move—as if he intended to invade and possess every part of her. Even though the notion disturbed her, she couldn’t help tightening her lips to keep him there.

  He groaned his approval, then took a deep breath, opened his eyes and met hers in the mirror. “It’s about to get rough.”

  Her inner walls spasmed at the prospect. And then he was moving again. Every powerful thrust rocked her forward, forcing the breath out of her lungs, shoving her swollen, aching parts into his waiting palm down below, pushing the fingers of his other hand deeper into her mouth. Every withdrawal pulled her back, gave her a fleeting moment to inhale and try to rub against his hand in her own personal rhythm before he slammed into her again and bounced her around like a small aircraft caught in turbulence.

  He surrounded her, filled her so he was all she could taste, all she could breathe. She sweated him out her pores. The ache inside tightened, and twisted, and turned so sharp she couldn’t focus on anything else. Her muscles quivered against the ferocity of what was coming. She heard him grunt, and in some remote part of her mind she knew she was biting his fingers and ought to relax her jaw, but then he thrust again and relaxing any part of her body became impossible. She whimpered and trembled as the world started to crumble and fall away.

  Another thrust. A low, groaning curse, and then a shudder shook his rugged frame. She clung to the workstation and raised her head to watch him. Their eyes met just before his went dark and glazed. He whispered, “Come for me, sweet Virginia.”

  She did, with a soul-crushing force, and his name on her lips.

  …

  “Something is definitely wrong when I’m the pace-setter.” Melody’s teasing jibe didn’t hide the hint of concern in her voice. Ginny inwardly grimaced and picked up her speed as they jogged along the magnolia-flanked perimeter of the freshly mowed town square.

  “Maybe I’m going easy on you because of your…ahem…condition?”

  “Oh, please. A thirty-minute, three-mile jog at lunchtime is perfectly fine for a healthy woman in her first trimester. Besides,” Melody wiped the glow from her forehead and Ginny caught the glint of her frie
nd’s brand new engagement ring. “Ellie cleared it.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Right, but you’re still going slower than normal.” Mel’s long, blonde ponytail swished as she turned and looked at Ginny. “Are you second-guessing my boss?”

  “Who, me? Hell no. I’m just a hairdresser. I’m not going to second-guess Dr. Ellie Swann.”

  “Okay then, since we’ve established there’s no need to go slow for me, it must be for you. Why so pokey today?”

  Ginny glanced around to see if anyone stood within earshot, but the coast was clear. “Um, because I got poked last night. Repeatedly.”

  Melody skidded to a stop. “What?”

  Ginny kept running, but slowed to give her friend a chance to catch up. “Now who’s the pokey one?”

  “Still you, apparently. Details, please. Who? When? Where? How? And most importantly, why? I thought you were on a sex hiatus.”

  “Geez, let’s see. Wolverine. Last night. At the salon, after I closed. Given your condition, I think you know how. I’m a little fuzzy on the why part myself other than he’s so damn hot, because I’m not sure I even like the cocky so-and-so. And yes, I think it’s safe to say the sex hiatus ended with a bang. Technically, a series of bangs. More like a fireworks finale.”

  “Wow.” Melody’s sky-blue eyes went wide as she absorbed the information. “This is so… I don’t even know where to start. No, wait,” she quickly corrected, “I do. Start with the fireworks finale. Tell me everything. Evvvvrything.”

  Ginny didn’t bother holding back a grin. “Those pregnancy hormones are really raging, aren’t they?”