“Serrano is looking for leverage. The inspection is only forty minutes away. You’ll reek of sex and they’ll use it to get at me and they’ll use me to make you break.” He cupped her cheek. “You’re too soft. Most people are too soft.”
She thrust her leg into her pants. “Are you detouring into your standard security lecture for the morning after, Daniel?”
When he didn’t answer, she looked up at him. He grimaced, the expression making his mouth twist savagely. There wasn’t enough light to see the expression in his eyes. “The words are practiced, but it’s still the truth.”
“No, it’s not. I’m stronger than you think.” She thrust the other leg inside and fastened her trousers. “You keep making that mistake.”
“You keep making bad decisions. I can’t see it any other way.”
“I keep making bad decisions about you,” she corrected gently. “For everything else I do just fine.”
“Ouch.” He handed her the hairclip she thought she had left behind in the narrow passageway. “Can you get your hair up without a mirror?”
“Of course.” She took the clip. “It’s not the first time I’ve had to dress in the dark in a hurry.”
She wished it was light enough to see Daniel’s expression, because for once he was speechless.
* * * * *
Twenty-four hours after the wedding, Téra wasn’t any closer to learning why Lucas wouldn’t touch her, even though he clearly wanted her. The more remarkable thing was that the whole camp wasn’t buzzing with the fact that Captain De la Cruz had the hots for Colonel Peña’s sister. Somehow, astonishingly, Lucas had hidden his obsession.
Obsession it was. No man could secretly gather and brood over such a collection of photos and materials as Lucas had of her and not call it an obsession. Was it an unhealthy one though? Not if she reciprocated, Téra had decided. She was of age. Even Duardo had tacitly approved.
She just couldn’t figure out what was stopping Lucas.
The next evening, around sunset, she gave up the mental puzzle and went for a run. Grounds security gave her clearance for up to two miles along the cove. She gratefully slipped on her running shoes at the edge of the high tide line and eased into the first mile at a slow jog. Then she pushed up to her normal running pace, feeling her breathing settle in and her mind drop down to neutral. This had been a good idea. The waves were a perfect accompaniment, with their constant noise and rhythm.
Toward the end of the second mile, she could see a figure ahead, standing on the hard sand. She was going to have to run around them.
As she got closer she could see the person was going through ritual movements for some sort of martial arts as they faced into the sunset. Well, they’d picked a great place to do it. They had to be Vistarian military, which was why grounds security had said she was safe anywhere up to two miles from the house. There was obviously some personnel operating this far away.
Then details grew clearer as she got closer. The height of the figure. The way he was moving.
Lucas.
Clearly, he’d thought he would never be disturbed here, especially by her. He was wearing old sweat pants that hung low on his hips and nothing else. His olive skin shone in the last of the day’s light, highlighting the muscles beneath.
She was a quarter of a mile away when he turned and spotted her. Téra slowed to a jog. Then a walk. She halted several hundred yards away from him, but even from that distance, she could see his fury.
“I didn’t know you were here,” she called. “They didn’t tell me.” Even as she was apologizing, she was absorbing his appearance. The details. He was lean, with hard-packed muscle that came from honest work, not hours in the gym. Her hands itched to run all over his body. Especially, she wanted to slide them under the band of those low-slung sweats.
Lucas stared, not giving an inch.
She spread her hands. “Fine. I’ll go.” She turned and jogged slowly back the way she had come, following the line of her footprints. She had barely traveled a hundred yards before she became aware of the fall of running steps behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. Lucas was running after her and he was gaining.
Irrationally, she abruptly didn’t want him to catch her. Even though he had longer legs, she could probably outlast him over distance. She ran—not an all-out sprint. Not yet.
He gained ground steadily to the point where she could hear him pounding the sand behind her. It gave her a spurt of speed and a dose of adrenaline.
With a roar, Lucas lunged for her. His arms wrapped around her middle and she tripped and fell in a flurry of sand and limbs. Lucas’ dead weight stopped her from rolling across the dry, white sand. She came to a halt on her side, fine sand covering her, her chest heaving from the hard sprint.
He didn’t leave her there. With a growl, he threw her on her back and pinned her arms above her head. His knee rammed between her thighs and pushed them apart, the rough cotton of his sweats scraping over her sweaty skin. They were thin, hiding nothing.
The odd look in his eyes made him seem like a stranger to her, yet the black eyes and sharp planes of his face she had spent weeks studying had become so familiar to her, she almost wept with the comfort they brought her. This was Lucas. She knew him, even though she knew little about him.
His strong masculine scent seemed to settle over her like a blanket, even as his thigh pushed up high between her legs. She gasped at the rough contact.
“Scream,” Lucas growled. “I know that hurt.”
“Is that what you want?” she asked. “You want me to scream?” She was already breathless from the running and the adrenaline spike. Now the adrenaline overload was converting to a languorous, far more pleasurable reaction.
Téra shifted on the sand, her body rippling as the images of what Lucas might do to her, here on this lonely beach, flittered through her mind.
“Make me scream, Lucas,” she told him. Her voice was still breathless, but raw with lust.
He was watching her every move. He’d seen the change in her, seen the lust take her. His eyes, already black, seemed to darken further. They narrowed. “You should be afraid. You should not invite such things.”
She lifted her thigh, the one between his. She pushed it up against his groin. She moved her knee so she could apply a gentle pressure. “Make me scream,” she repeated. “And I will do the same to you.”
He shut his eyes. “Usted es una bruja,” he muttered.
“If I am a witch, then I’m a crappy one. My spells don’t work on anyone.”
“I have only to see you from a distance and my mind fills with thoughts of taking you in ways that would have me arrested in Mexico and probably in Vistaria. Your brother would shoot me in the back of the head if he knew of the ways I have had you in my dreams, Téra.”
“Do it,” she whispered.
“Do what?”
“All of it.”
For a moment he was silent. If a silence could be said to be full of astonishment, this one was. He stared at her. For the first time, Téra knew she had genuinely surprised him.
The grip he had on her wrists loosened. He sat up on his heels, his gaze still taking her in, as if he was reassessing her.
He was anything but calm. She could see it in the way his chest was lifting as he drew in more and more air. His pulse was throbbing in the base of his neck.
For the first time in their dealings together, she realized that they were close to an equal footing. The balances were tipping. She could feel it.
If she was careful, she could win. She could have her way.
Téra slowly sat up, pulling her leg out from between his. Then she got to her knees, facing Lucas. Moving carefully, feeling as if she must not startle him, she laid her hands on his chest. When he did not flinch or throw her hands off, she let out her breath.
Progress.
She realized she was trembling. The stakes here were high. The next few minutes would decide many things.
His skin was
warm! Surprisingly soft, too. She had not expected that. Lucas seemed to be made up of harsh planes and solids, except for his lips. She had expected the solidness to extend to his flesh, but it was soft and pliant.
Téra smoothed her hands over his chest and felt the tattoo of his heartbeat under her right hand. Lucas stayed silent and still, even though his breath whooshed out from between his lips as she leaned forward and kissed his throat.
She let her fingers trail up to his neck, to curl around his throat and circle around to the back of his neck. A shudder ran through him.
He was either ticklish or highly sensitive. Either fact delighted Téra. She thrust her fingers into his hair and used the leverage on his head to bring his face down to hers so she could kiss him.
At the first touch of his lips, she knew she could kiss Lucas forever. The soft lips tasted faintly of something cinnamon and something sweet, beneath the unique taste of Lucas himself. She found herself thrusting her tongue into his mouth, moaning with delight.
His tongue touched hers. Tentatively. He was meeting her halfway, but not committing himself yet. That was okay. That was enough for now.
Téra spread the fingers of her other hand against his hip, over the low sweats. Her thumb stroked the flesh above, where the flesh was soft and pale.
Lucas tore his mouth from hers and sucked in a deep breath. For the first time, he touched her. His hand gripped her hip, curling over the satin of her running shorts, the nails digging in.
His eyes had a haunted look that made her hesitate. Why would this put such an expression on his face?
Yet the need to keep giving him pleasure drove her to keep her fingers moving, to keep stroking his heated, soft flesh. She slid them beneath the sweats.
“Téra….” Lucas whispered. His fingers touched her hair lightly. Entreaty, or perhaps encouragement. But the tone of his whisper sounded like a man being tortured.
She’d worry about that later. She bent to place her lips against his belly.
“God help me. No!” He wrenched himself away from her mouth and pushed her from him with his arm thrust out like an iron rod against her shoulder, sweeping her aside.
Téra lay sprawled on the sand where he had thrust her, the arousal in her body turning sour. She hadn’t imagined that haunted look in his eyes, then. Or the tortured tone in his voice.
She understood, at last. There was something bigger than her and Lucas, something big enough to stop him from taking her.
She just had to find out what it was.
* * * * *
Daniel had taken a tiny measure of comfort from the way Ibarra used to inspect the guests. Colonel Ibarra remembered they had no military training and did not recognize Vistaria as a formal diplomatic country yet. He had not insisted on recognition of rank and privilege. He wasn’t on his own power trip and still hoped a diplomatic solution might be found from among the mess he’d been handed. The inspections had maintained a veneer of civilization. The guests sat down in the lounge while he had ranged around the room, stopping to “chat” to one or two while he’d decided which one of the guests he would pick out for his questioning session that night.
Serrano operated from a different set of illusions. If anyone in the hotel was still under the impression they were guests, not hostages, then his inspection at six o’clock that evening quickly corrected their mindsets.
They were herded into the foyer under gunpoint. For the first time the guards weren’t reluctant to lay hands on them. They were prodded, shoved and manhandled into two ragged formations along either side of the grand old stone foyer, with five guards apiece at their backs. Each guard had a submachine gun cocked and held at their hips.
The guards looked pissed. Clearly, they had been whipped this afternoon. Verbally, or possibly even physically. They would be looking for someone upon whom they could take out their bad moods.
Daniel could feel sweat wanting to break out on his temples and back just at the sight of the cocked guns, despite the thirty-foot high cavernous and airy ceilings and the cane ceiling fans circulating the air every ten feet, pushing it around over the cool marble tiles.
Serrano had rolled up his sleeves and was getting down to business. The big man stood at the head of the two ragged columns of civilians, his hands on the hips of his ample khakis as he stared at them. His piggy brown eyes, buried deep inside the folds of extraneous flesh, watched them as they fidgeted.
Even though he was just an army general without specialized training, Serrano was no slouch when it came to human psychology. He was sizing them all up, looking for the weakest among them.
Daniel fought hard not to look at Olivia, because that would betray a weakness Serrano could exploit, too. Yet the thought itself made his mind tumble back to twenty minutes before.
Why hadn’t he just dropped her at her hotel room and gone to his own? She had been safe there. She could have quickly showered, changed and arrived here in time for the inspection, smelling squeaky clean and innocent.
But instead of letting her step inside and shutting the door, some perverse imp had made him step into the room with her and shut the door behind him. He’d taken twenty seconds to disarm the bug under her bed, then thirty seconds more to rip her clothes from her body and get rid of his. By the time she was naked and beneath him on the bed, he wasn’t sure who was trembling more.
All she had done was moan and wrap those incredible legs around his hips and beg him for more, her nails digging into his shoulders. Then her eyes had opened and she had watched him take her.
He had drowned in her blue, blue eyes as he came—came so quickly and powerfully he was shocked almost speechless.
Afterward she had not clung to him, or even kissed him.
Daniel frowned down at the cool white Terrazzo marble tile as he realized that it had been he who had leaned down and kissed her peach-tasting lips.
She had lifted his chin and looked him square in the eye. “And now we have only eleven minutes,” she’d said softly, but firmly.
Daniel shook off the memory and made himself look up and around the foyer. Being lost in thought was also a good signal to Serrano that you had secrets to delve into. He let his gaze pass over Olivia and move on, not lingering.
She was pale, but looked quite normal, otherwise. Nothing out of the ordinary marked her, or showed that a few minutes ago she had been pressed against the side of her shower, locked in his arms. Or that he had delayed her getting dressed so much she had forgone underwear. Or was wearing the minimum of makeup and that was why she looked pale.
Why had he run it so close to the wire? He usually didn’t play it so tight.
He fought not to frown again, to keep his expression neutral.
Serrano was still watching, still weighing them up. Behind him, Ibarra stood erect and at attention, not a button out of place, his eyes shadowed by his peaked cap. There was an armed captain at Ibarra’s shoulder, standing at parade rest, an automatic rifle resting against his shoulder.
The silence and examination was making the civilians edgy. There were coughs. Shuffled feet. Clearing of throats. These people were diplomats, but they had been under high tension for far too long and these changed circumstances had thrown them. They were uncertain. Fear ate at them.
Serrano was letting that uncertainty and fear do half his work.
The big man moved. With a squeak of boot leather, he walked slowly down the line of civilians, pausing for ten seconds or so to examine the face of each one.
Daniel swore under his breath. The up-close-and-personal examination was guaranteed to unnerve the weakest of them. He scanned the line Serrano was moving along, assessing who was in it and came to Ernesto. His gut tightened.
Ernesto was already jittery, licking his lips and shooting glances at the soldiers with their machine guns leveled and ready. His eyes were rolling and sweat glistened on his temples next to his graying hair. The aging diplomat had never been trained to handle this sort of pressure.
Daniel couldn’t help it. He glanced at Olivia.
She wasn’t looking at him. She was watching Serrano and as Daniel looked, her gaze flickered toward Ernesto.
She knew he would break, too. She stood right next to him.
Serrano was two people away from Ernesto now.
Daniel wasn’t psychic. He didn’t believe in all that mystic shit. Even so, with a sinking, heartsick feeling he knew Olivia was going to try to do something to shield Ernesto. He could see it written all over her, even though her face was expressionless. It was in her posture and the way she was holding her shoulders.
When had he got so damn good at reading her?
There was no time to figure that out. Serrano was in front of Ernesto.
The Spaniard was licking his lips again, staring down at Serrano, who was shorter than Ernesto by a good four inches. The height difference made no difference at all. No one had any doubt about who was the superior man of the two. Serrano held the upper hand. Period.
When looking at the others, Serrano hadn’t bothered swiveling to face them full-on. He had barely turned his shoulders. Now, he sensed blood in the water. He turned completely. Shoulders. Feet. Hips. He spread his feet a good shoulder-width apart and planted them. He studied Ernesto.
“You wish to say something to me, señor?”
Ernesto shook his head.
“You have been here a long while, señor,” Serrano crooned, his voice dropping to a softer pitch. “You must be tired of all these silly games. Do you not want them to stop? To go home to your loved ones?”
Ernesto licked his lips again and took a deep, shuddering breath. “I-I…hardly know.” He sounded like he was about to cry.
Olivia put her hand on Ernesto’s wrist and squeezed.
Serrano looked at her. “Did I tell you it was permitted to touch him?”
“He is upset. I offer comfort.”
“Who are you?” Serrano demanded.
“Olivia,” she answered calmly.
Daniel could feel the mental shout in his mind, though he kept his jaw clamped tight and said nothing aloud. “Don’t say anything else!” he begged her in his thoughts.
Hostage Crisis Page 10