by Stacy Gail
“I may wear glasses but I’ve got pretty good eyes. And they’re liking what they’re seeing right now. What are you doing?”
A smile curled the corners of her mouth, and she swayed her back again to give him a nice view of her backside. “It’s called the cat-cow exercise. You should try it, it releases a lot of negative tension.”
“I am feeling a certain tension, but I wouldn’t call it negative.” He rolled to his side and out of the corner of her eye she saw him adjust the front of his semi-undone jeans. Her smile widened. “You don’t do this yoga stuff in public, do you?”
“Of course I do. There’s a great gym at the office that I’d love to show you some time.”
“I’m not sure I like the idea of anyone seeing you like this.”
“Like what?” Some little devil prodded her to sway her bum in a slow, rotating hip roll, and it felt so good she did it again. It was entirely possible she’d made up a new yoga move. “Do you have a problem with how I look, Mandeville?”
“Oh, no problem. No problem at all.” His voice was low, mesmerized. Just the way she wanted it. If he couldn’t love her, at the very least she could try and hypnotize him into believing he couldn’t live without her. Needing wasn’t loving, true. But if that was all she could have, she would hold onto it for all she was worth.
* * *
There had to be something wrong with his wiring, Gideon decided as he watched Sara’s sinuous movements. It’s as though somewhere along the way he’d become a hardcore sex-addict. His lower region gave him sweet agony every time he looked at her, thought of her. Hell, when he caught the scent of ginger flower he became as hard as a steel rod. Heaven help him if he ever got trapped in a gingerbread factory. He’d be arrested for public lewdness in a heartbeat.
But that was how he had always been with Sara. From the moment he’d met her, Gideon had plummeted right off the deep end with no hope of hauling himself back onto the firm ground of sanity. Worse yet, now that he’d had the exquisite pleasure of being sheathed inside her, his craving for her hadn’t gotten better. All he wanted was more.
Too bad he couldn’t be fused to her for life.
“I’m not comfortable with the angel tarot cards.” She rolled over onto her back, knees bent and arms at her sides. Then she lifted her hips upward in a pelvic thrust that hit him so hard in the throbbing head of his manhood it was almost like he was already inside her. “I think I’d like to set up an official meeting with the FBI and ask Father Vargas’s opinion. Since he’s supposed to be their expert, I’d like to know if there are any fringe groups out there who either focus on or have a profound belief in angels.”
Her hip thrusts were slow, measured. Fluid. His mouth went bone-dry as his jeans became uncomfortably tight. “Right. Angels.”
“I’d also like to talk to your dad. I know Lynchpin isn’t an active investigative firm, but I would like to know in which direction I should look for possible trouble. I need to know if Noah has told anyone about my father.”
“He didn’t, I’m sure of it,” Gideon denied, but it was absent. If she didn’t stop those thrusts soon, he wasn’t going to be responsible for his actions. “He never told me about it, and I’m his son. What about someone at Lynchpin? Everyone who works there seems to be in on your family’s secret.”
She made a dubious sound. “All the higher-ups know about it, but the reason for that is either they or a loved one were saved by the special abilities of the Savitch family. The probability of an internal leak is low.”
“But not impossible.”
“True. And just to cover all the bases, I’ll have Marcel conduct the internal investigation.” She rolled up to a sitting position to smile at him. “It does help to talk things out, doesn’t it?”
When she smiled at him, he felt like the most important man on the planet. “I’m happy to listen to whatever you’ve got on your mind.”
“That makes you a rare man, indeed.” She pursed her lips, and something changed in her expression, something that made his pulse go from zero to ninety in about a second. “What I have on my mind at this very moment in time is...you.”
“Yeah?” He pushed to a sitting position while his muscles thrummed with heady anticipation. “What about me?”
“Since you’re not a morning person, I can’t help but wonder if you just want to go back to sleep, or if you could be persuaded into keeping me company a while longer.”
He shifted, the sweet anguish of desire lengthening his hardness even more. When was it that she’d gotten so good at twisting him around her little finger? “I might need a bit more persuasion.”
“It’s a good thing I like your company. Otherwise I might not feel you’re worth the effort.” But her smile never wavered as she rolled to her knees to position herself between his, her hands coming to rest on his thighs. “Scratch that. You’re definitely worth the effort.”
The heat of her hands soaking through his jeans ignited a blaze of wildfire along his nerves. “The feeling’s mutual.”
“Good.” She slid a hand higher to cup the now-throbbing bulge behind his zipper. “You know, I think I’m getting used to having another person close to me.” Long, delicate fingers squeezed the sensitive head until his eyes drifted closed on a sighing moan while his whole nervous system rushed to attach to that one point of contact. “I don’t even need any words from you to know you want me. You respond so quickly to me here...and here.”
Just as Gideon was ready to believe this slice of heaven couldn’t get any better, Sara leaned into the cradle between his knees and nuzzled her mouth against the flat hollow that existed between his pectorals.
“My sense of hearing is far better than that of a normal person’s, so when I hear your heartbeat rev I know you’re getting as excited as I am.” Her tongue drew patterns over his flesh while she dragged her fingernails over the thick denim corralling his iron-hard flesh, and he half believed he’d died and gone to heaven without being aware of it. “Oh. It just skipped a beat, Gideon. Does that mean you liked that?”
As if she wanted to test the theory out she caressed his pulsating length again. He arched so hard it was a wonder he didn’t snap his own back. “Damn... Sara.”
Her hair, tied up in its usual high ponytail, tickled his flank as she let the tip of her tongue trace the brown disc of his nipple. “Is that a complaint?”
“You know better.” Helpless to stop himself, his hand came up to cradle the back of her head in a wordless plea for more. “The feel of your mouth on me...I don’t know how I ever lived without it. It’s enough to make me completely lose it.”
“What a waste that would be. You need to find a way to control this—” she gave his stiffened manhood a friendly squeeze, “—while I go about seeing that you are properly persuaded to stick around.”
Gideon ground his teeth on an incoherent curse as the lush heat of building rapture gushed into every corner of his universe. He could do nothing more than thank his lucky stars when at last her lips closed in on the nipple she’d teased so mercilessly, her teeth coming to hold it so her tongue could play with it until he wanted to scream.
“I love how every muscle in your body tenses when I touch you, almost like you’re preparing for hand-to-hand combat.” She was sounding a bit breathless herself when she finally lifted her magic-giving mouth. But she’d only done that so she could concentrate on taking great care in loosening the front of his jeans. Before he could sigh in relief at being free of the confining material at last, she slipped her hand inside and showed him what real tension was all about. “I love knowing you want me, Gideon. You don’t know how excited that makes me.”
There was nothing he could say. In that moment, she closed her fingers around the base of his staff and slid all the way to the tip while her mouth moved lower. His thigh and stomach muscles began to rhythmically flex in time with each spine-shuddering stroke of her hand, and it occurred to him how completely helpless he was. He didn’t care. He was literally
and figuratively in her hands, and there was no place he’d rather be.
“Going commando, huh?” With his cooperation, she shucked his jeans aside. Helpless, he shivered with a surge of rapture as she squeezed his swollen sex as if testing his thickness before stroking him from the base to the tip, and back again. “I don’t know why you put on jeans in the first place.”
“You started it.” His capacity for coherent speech was just about at its limit. Who gave a damn about communication when the pleasure was starting to fold in on itself? “You got dressed, so...”
“I had to get dressed. Whoever heard of naked yoga?”
“I think that’s, uh...tantric, or...Sara.” His head fell back as she kissed a path past his navel, her hair sweeping over his lap in a mind-blowing caress. “Oh, God. I don’t know if I can take much more of this.”
“Try and think of something else,” she suggested, always ready to help. Then she licked her lips before closing them over the sensitive head of his erection.
He was deaf to the shattered cry that broke from him. He arched as if tortured, the muscles in his back and legs clenching so hard he froze in a posture of exquisite torment. All he knew was how good she made him feel—the wet suction of her mouth surrounding him, the hot silk of her lips and relentless teasing of her teeth and tongue against the super-sensitive ridge. If he lived to be a thousand he’d never be able to get enough of her, and that was what had lain in the heart of his need to push her away. He’d been terrified she would see his ugliness, but now there was nothing to hold him back. She’d seen him at his worst and accepted him anyway.
Hell, he’d be lucky if he didn’t OD on her.
Gideon gathered what little willpower he had left to pull her pleasuring mouth from his ready-to-burst staff, his stomach muscles clenching in a sweetly agonized need for release. With more fumbling urgency than grace he helped her out of her clothing, retrieved a condom from his replenished supply, then positioned her so that she straddled him. His fingers bit into the earthy flare of her hips as he held himself at her threshold, his entire body shaking with the effort to stay in control long enough to be inside her.
The slick sheathing of her body over his was a piercing bliss. The white-hot heat enveloped him so that he could do nothing more than throw his head back as if she was burning him alive. The tendons in his neck strained, but he never felt it as he pulled her down hard enough to smack flesh against flesh. Before giving her a chance to settle, he lifted her bodily to the point where their physical connection was almost lost before he plunged her down again. The impact was earth-shaking, a violent symphony of almost painful joy that whiplashed through every last corner of his soul. Helpless, desperate to drown in that sensation, he lifted her yet again. Plunging, retreating, thrusting, sliding...the glorious madness of sensation doubled and trebled as he impaled her for a mindless eternity, and if he couldn’t reach that rapture just beyond his reach, he’d damn well die trying...
Sara’s sudden cries, bordering on breathless screams, arrowed through his dimming consciousness. She shuddered, and the tight, hot muscles clenched around him with magnificent intensity. Her release sparked his own, at last falling into the airless realm of an ecstasy that was the beginning and end of his universe.
Chapter Thirteen
The sound of the upstairs shower was in full swing when Sara slid into the chair behind her desk and logged onto Skype, an almond biscotti and cup of white-chocolate cocoa steaming away at her side. When her father’s face appeared, she couldn’t help but smile. “Good morning, Dad.”
“Look, she’s alive,” William drawled, though his smile was a masterpiece of happiness mingled with relief. “Noah and Marcel are in the room with me, so no wild swearing.”
She heard Marcel’s snort and Noah’s cheerful greeting in the background while her father momentarily adjusted the angle of his smartphone to encompass the room. “Good morning, gentlemen. I was calling in to see if there’s an update meeting with Agent Tuttle today. If there is, I’d like to sit in on it.”
“You’re definitely feeling better,” William observed with an approving nod. “We were just discussing that, actually. Things are going haywire at Lynchpin with you down for the count—other cases hanging fire and KJ has come down with the flu—so I was informing Noah that I wouldn’t be available for the daily update meeting with Agent Tuttle today. How about you take the meeting while I get things settled down, then meet up later here at Noah’s for a briefing?”
“Sounds like a plan. Sorry to interrupt your plans of getting ready for retirement with all this work,” she added with a grimace. “I promise I’ll get you back to your sunny beaches and cruise line shopping posthaste.”
William waved this away. “Don’t be an idiot, it doesn’t become you. You did an excellent job protecting both the client’s son and your team, so there’s nothing to apologize for.”
Sara didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh over how William avoided saying Gideon’s name. “Gideon has taken excellent care of me. He’s the reason I’m bouncing back so quickly.”
William made a sound that could have meant anything before Noah’s voice chimed in from across the room.
“Gideon is an excellent doctor, but that wasn’t the reason he insisted on staying with you, Sara. I’ve never seen him so worried.”
That little bit of news glowed deep in her heart, but she tried to take it in stride. “He can rest easy now, along with everyone else. Though I’m not back to one-hundred percent yet, I am anxious to get back to work, which reminds me—I wanted to ask if there was any other assault on the Mandeville estate that occurred during the fire-bombing. Was the barrage of Molotov cocktails just a diversion?”
“It doesn’t appear to be.” William frowned down at the smartphone he held, a focused expression Sara recognized in herself. “That was my first thought as well—start a fire at the furthest point from the entrance, then have a go at Noah while everyone is distracted. But according to the motion detectors placed throughout the property as well as the guard left at the gate, no one attempted to get through the perimeter.”
“Then what could possibly be the point of fire-bombing the property?”
“Maybe it was a diversionary attempt that failed,” came Marcel’s melodic tone. “Or maybe it was a test to see how quickly we responded to an emergency. Or perhaps it was a tactic to see how many personnel we had onsite.”
“Or maybe fire is a specific sort of message that goes along with the dead doves and angel tarot cards,” Sara said, trying to see all the possibilities and coming up with the equivalent of a fistful of smoke. “Or it could be nothing at all, and this wacko has just spontaneously discovered a new love for fire.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s nothing. Far from it.” William tilted his head as if to see the problem from another angle. “I find it highly unsettling that up to this point, fire has never been part of the killer’s MO. In fact, both the messages and the Molotov cocktails are a completely new wrinkle. All the other transplant patient victims were simply tasered in the privacy of their own homes, then killed. No muss, no fuss. And while they didn’t have the protection Noah has, that still doesn’t explain all the differences going on here.”
“Do you think it’s someone else entirely going after Noah?”
“No, that doesn’t feel right, either. It’s the same person. I just have a gut feeling that in Noah’s case, things are far more personal for our killer. It could be that the other transplant patient victims were just a precursor.”
Sara opened her mouth to ask another question when movement out of the corner of her eye had her glancing over the top of the monitor toward the doorway. Fresh from the shower and wearing nothing but water droplets, Gideon was toweling off his hair as he sauntered in.
“Do not tell me you’re sneaking off to work the moment my back is turned, young lady,” Gideon admonished, missing her wildly waving hand as he rubbed the towel over his head. “FYI, I know you did it earlier when y
ou thought I was asleep, and I let you get away with it. But this time I’m going to be a hardass and put my foot down.”
“Gideon—”
“You have a nasty habit of not looking out for yourself, you know that? That’s why it’s now my mission in life to be your bodyguard, so fair warning—I have no problem with hauling you over my shoulder and carrying your perfect little ass back to bed so you can rest.”
Please God, kill me now. “I’m on an online conference call with our fathers and Marcel,” she said loudly enough to stop him in his tracks and poke his head out from under the towel. “And I’m feeling well enough to meet with the Feds for an update later today.”
“Oh, yeah?” For only a heartbeat Gideon’s caught-with-his-pants-down shock froze him in place. Then he wrapped the towel around his waist and rounded the desk to lean over her shoulder to look at William’s image on the screen.
“You’re the expert when it comes to recovery-time from absorbing fire, William,” he said without a hint of embarrassment, while Sara considered crawling under the desk as a viable option. “Sara’s still running a fever, she can’t stand up quickly without coming down with a bad case of the woozies, and she gets breathless from climbing the stairs. If these were ordinary circumstances I would insist she stay home until her temp reads normal. In your opinion, is she ready for fieldwork?”
“A sit-down meeting won’t be too taxing, but she won’t be running marathons for about a week,” came the unruffled reply, and Sara tried to keep her jaw from hitting her lap at the reluctant smile that curled William’s mouth. “You should know Savitches are typically difficult to take care of, Gideon. Don’t be surprised by some push-back—just stick to your guns. I remember Sara’s mother pretty much put her foot down on me early on in our relationship, saying almost exactly the same thing you just did.” He paused and the smile went into eclipse. “Except for the whole throwing me over her shoulder part.”