“Good choice,” Eli said. The grey lady appeared, and he ordered two shots. Then he turned to Kate. “You know, they say agave nectar don’t mix well with secrets.”
“Secrets?”
He inclined his head. “There’s two kinds that cross the border in a town like Presidio – tourists looking to go native, and folks with secrets.”
The woman slapped the shots on the bar along with a dish of lime wedges and a salt shaker. Eli ignored the garnish, picked up his glass and tossed back the tequila. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “You, Katie, are no turista.”
She tried to mimic his action – the flick of the wrist, the toss of the head, the quick swallow. She managed all but the last part, gagging on the alkaline sear. Eli pounded her back with a good-natured grin.
When she’d caught her breath, she asked, “What makes you so sure I’m not a tourist?”
He signalled for a second round. “Seems to me, you’re a woman on a mission. Running to or from something. Am I right?”
Somewhere Kate had read that the way to make a tall tale convincing was to add elements of the truth. No time like the present to start.
“Bad relationship,” she said. “Turns out I make a lousy trophy mistress.”
And that’s where the irony came in, because if Phillip had married her, she probably would’ve made an excellent trophy wife – well groomed and easily placated, if a trifle too inquisitive for her own good.
“Phillip? What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing. Go back to bed.”
“Who is this man? My God, Phillip, where did you get that gun?”
“You see? Now you’ve involved my girlfriend in this nasty business. How many innocent bystanders have to get hurt before you pay what you owe?”
She could still feel the cold press of the muzzle against her temple, and see how the strange man’s eyes widened in horror as her lover threatened to splatter her brains all over the tasteful, cream-coloured carpet of her TV room if the debt wasn’t paid.
Phillip apologized later, of course. He swore he’d never meant to go through with it. It all had been a spur-of-the-moment charade.
“Baby, you inspired me, looking so innocent in your white nightgown, with your hair down around your shoulders.”
“But Phillip—”
“Hush. We won’t speak of this again, will we, baby? That’s my good girl.”
That’s when she knew she’d always be less a prize than a hostage. There weren’t enough beach houses and diamond tennis bracelets in the world to make up for that.
The grey lady returned with their drinks. This time, Kate mastered the flick–toss–swallow. When she set the glass on the bar, she caught Eli staring at her mouth. Not the cleavage in the V of her T-shirt, or her ass where it rested on the stool, but her mouth. Another surprise.
He shook his head as if to clear it, and his browline dipped in a frown. “There’s gotta be more to your story than that.”
“Not really
“Confession’s good for the soul.” He rapped his ring on the bar for a third round that Kate knew was a very bad idea.
“And you’re a priest now?” she asked him, the sarcasm tasting as bitter as the tequila.
He shrugged. “Just an interested bystander.”
A little too interested. What the hell was she thinking, engaging in even the most mundane bar chat with a stranger? She fumbled for her bag. “Time for me to go. Thanks for the drinks.”
Eli dropped a large, square hand on her shoulder. Her heart skipped two beats and raced forwards like a sports car slipping into fourth on a straightaway.
“Don’t le me scare you off,” he said. “I’m just talkin’ to hear my own voice.”
“I need to go.” But she didn’t move, couldn’t seem to find the floor with her feet.
“You’re staying at the motel across the road.”
It wasn’t a question, and there didn’t seem much point in denying it. She nodded.
The grey lady set the third round of shots on the bar in front of them.
“Drink up,” Eli said. “I’ll walk you back to your room.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Sure it is.” He looked genuinely puzzled, as if he couldn’t fathom why she’d reject a simple offer of safe passage from one side of the highway to the other.
“I don’t suppose you’d tell me if you were planning to kidnap me and sell me as a sex slave, would you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t suppose I would.”
The sharp edges had worn off his smile, and his face glowed with a warm, open expression she found herself wanting to trust. Purely as a distraction, she fiddled with her shot glass, sloshing drops of tequila over her fingertips.
Eli bumped his shoulder against hers. “I’m harmless. Ask anybody.”
She looked towards the grey lady, dimly hoping she’d suddenly become protective and maternal, and tell this pushy, pool-playing cowboy to let Kate alone. The woman stood at the other end of the bar, wiping out the inside of a glass. At Kate’s glance, she lifted one eyebrow in a perfect arch, spit into the sawdust and turned away.
Kate laughed and tossed back the shot.
The alcohol was making the muscles in her legs feel warm and loose, but she wasn’t drunk – not with her well-developed tolerance built on parasol drinks and half-carafes of wine with lunch. So what happened next couldn’t be blamed on the tequila.
She stood and reached for her bag where it had fallen beneath the stool. Eli stopped her with a hand cupped around the nape of her neck like a collar made of new-forged iron. In contrast, his silver ring felt icy against her skin. A spray of goosebumps blossomed where it touched. Her mouth went dry, and sweat sprouted along her hairline. It wasn’t all fear.
He leaned in close. “I could use some good company tonight. How ’bout you?”
It was a reckless thing to do. More reckless than leaving her loan-shark boyfriend. More reckless, even, than stealing her loan-shark boyfriend’s secret stash of cash on her way out the door.
But desperation bred recklessness, and Kate had been desperate since the night she found out her entire life was a lie. That same desperation had grown more urgent over the following weeks as she quietly unearthed what a vicious, cold-hearted blight on society she’d been living with for the past three years.
It was the discovery of another beach-housed girlfriend in Miami and one more in Key West – both younger and blonder than she – that transformed a big chunk of her desperation into rage. As it turned out, desperation, rage and recklessness went together salt, tequila and lime.
Now she only needed a durable target. Something or someone resilient enough to withstand the force of her anger as she worked it out of her heart and mind. Then she could be free of it. Then she could move on.
This smooth-talking cowboy looked like he was up to the job.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
Eli had been doing this kind of work for a while now, ever since he’d quit the rodeo circuit after busting both arms and a collarbone in a single afternoon. Other guys in the business called themselves “retrieval specialists”, but Eli always said his job was to find misplaced items and return them to their proper owners. Mostly, the items were money or jewellery. Sometimes they were documents or computer files. He’d never before been hired to find and return a human being. So far, he didn’t like it much.
She wasn’t anything like how she’d been described. He’d been told to expect a spoiled bimbo prone to tantrums and tears. His assignment was to keep her in one place till her boyfriend showed up and dragged her back to Florida. For that he’d get ten per cent of the hundred grand she was carrying with her.
Before Eli met the lady in question, it had seemed like an easy piece of work with a damned generous payday. Now, as he watched her exit the bathroom, walk across the mud-coloured carpet and drop a plastic-wrapped condom on the bedside table, he wondered if maybe he hadn’t oug
ht to reconsider.
Because this was no bimbo. This woman had both smarts and guts – two things that didn’t bode well for the success of the operation. In Eli’s experience, smart, gutsy women didn’t much care for being told to sit down, shut up and wait for their men to come fetch them home.
On top of that, he liked her.
Sweat beaded along his upper lip. “You mind if I turn on the air conditioner?”
She jumped like she’d forgotten he was in the room. “I’ll do it.”
She turned her back to him and fiddled with the ancient unit. Her random turning of knobs and pressing of buttons told Eli she was nervous, as if inviting strangers into her motel room wasn’t an everyday occurrence. The dim light from the single lamp gave her skin a golden glow.
He moved towards her till he stood close enough to lay a hand on her shoulder. She went dead still at his touch. He saw the leap of her pulse in her throat and thought of a skittish horse. Would she stand for him, or bolt?
The air conditioner came to life with an unhealthy whine. She turned, dislodging his hand from her shoulder, but she didn’t move away.
“We don’t have to …” he started, but the pleading way she lifted her pretty brown eyes to his face told him they most surely did. Even if he hadn’t liked her so much, he was never one to disappoint a lady.
Their first kiss was more like an experiment, both of them licking quick and light into each other’s mouth for a taste of salty skin and the last traces of tequila. He took charge of their second kiss and found her lips hot and plush, just as he’d known they’d be. He slid his fingers into her hair, pulling it loose, and cupped the back of her skull. Pleasure already throbbed like a bass line under his skin.
He went slow, teasing her with the barest of touches along the line of her jaw, the curve of her breast. Allowing the tension to build between them till it burst like a too-full rain cloud. She grappled with him then, pushing at his chest and clawing at his neck in plain frustration.
He caught both her wrists in one hand and used the other to urge her backwards till her shoulders thumped against the ugly, faded wallpaper.
“Ey now,” he said. “There’s no call to draw blood.”
She glared at him. “I’m not some delicate damsel in distress.”
“Well, that works out fine, ’cause I’m nobody’s knight in shining armour.”
He released her wrists. She didn’t fight, so he bent and ran his lips along the line of her collarbone. When he slid his thigh between her legs and pressed his palm against the small of her back, she began to tremble. Right about then, he figured they’d both had enough of taking it easy.
He stepped back, pulled off his shirt and unbuckled his belt. She kept her hands on him, kept reeling him in for more kisses, interrupting his quest to get them both as naked as they could be in as little time as possible. He broke away and yanked her shirt over her head and down her arms to her wrists, trapping them a second time.
She arched off the wall and hissed in his ear like a scalded cat, “Get on with it, already.”
He twisted the fabric tighter and used the other hand to unbutton her jeans and shove them to her ankles. Then he slid his fingers up her spine to the clasp of her bra. She lifted a single, well-groomed brow – a challenge if he’d ever seen one.
“I can pick a lock in fifteen seconds flat,” he told her.
Her bra fell open before she had a chance to answer.
He tossed her shirt away, and the bra with it, and closed his lips over the peak of one pale breast. Her skin had a peppery bite that made his mouth water. He pulled off slow to see her nipple flush dusky pink and hard, and watched with satisfaction as her eyes fell closed. He continued like that, alternating between her breasts with lips and teeth and tongue, till her sighs trailed off into moans and her chest heaved under his mouth. Then he started working his way down.
The scrap of silk between his tongue and her flesh didn’t keep him from finding all her sweet spots. He licked and nibbled till her panties were soaked through and her thighs quivered under his hands. He slid the waistband past her hips and down to join her jeans in a puddle at her feet, then leaned in for a real taste.
She was as ripe as a late August peach and twice as wet. His head buzzed with the liquid sounds of his lips and tongue on her swollen clit. He exhaled, and her scent washed over him, mixed up with the faint smell of perfume and a hint of gasoline.
She buried her fingers in his hair to urge him on, but he took his time over it till she pushed against his mouth in greedy, helpless little thrusts. He pulled back and grinned up at her.
“Give it up, darlin’,” he said. “I’ll make you pop like a fire-cracker.”
He was off-balance – down on one knee and not expecting the sudden shove that knocked him back on his ass. That’s what he told himself as he watched her kick off her boots and what was left of her clothes and reach for the condom on the bedside table. Then she was on him, yanking his jeans to his knees and straddling him like she was born to ride.
“Oh, it’s like that, huh?” he asked, half-laughing and altogether amazed at how easily she’d overpowered him. The crinkle of the plastic wrapper was almost drowned out by the sound of their breathing. He clenched his jaw at the touch of her fingers, praying he wouldn’t embarrass himself with a too-quick finish.
“Yeah,” she said and dropped down, sheathing his cock in her body with one quick, hot slide. She braced her hands on his chest and smiled, looking pleased with herself. “That’s what it’s like, cowboy.”
He bucked, not so much trying to throw her off as give her a reason to hang on. She went one better and twisted her hips in a hard figure eight that made his blood roar in his ears.
The cheap cat burned his bare ass as she rode him. The air around them felt heated, as if it had passed through a brushfire. Her fingertips bit hard into his chest, but her mouth was the same soft, sulky pout that caught his eye in the roadhouse. He stared, hypnotized. There was a cut-loose feeling in his chest, like he’d jumped off a cliff of his own free will.
But at the back of his mind, he knew how it was supposed to go.
And this wasn’t it.
She loved the way he stared at her mouth. The way his gaze roamed over her, but always returned to her lips. The way his face creased in a frown of perfect concentration, as if she were the only thing in the world worth watching. It detonated pulse after pulse between her straining thighs.
Every shift of her body brought her down hard on his cock. She rocked and bounced, full to the edge of discomfort with a sticky-sweet friction that shot jets of pleasure out to her toes and fingertips and the ends of her hair.
But pleasure wasn’t the point of this encounter. Where had all her anger gone? She was supposed to be working out her fury and desperation on this rugged cowboy, but all she felt desperate for was more of his skin against hers, more of his lips and teeth and tongue, more of his clever, calloused hands. More of that look on his face when she ground herself against him and felt herself throb around him.
The light caught the sweat forming along his collarbone and the stretch of muscles in his throat as he pulled one ragged breath after another. His half-closed eyes looked lazy, but they glittered behind the dark sweep of his lashes, and she knew he could see right down to the black, murderous rage in the tar pits of her soul.
“Harder,” he muttered and curled upright to grip her tight around the waist. “You do me hard as you like, darlin’. No shame in it. Go on and ride,” he said, one staccato thrust of his hips for each diamond-cut syllable. She let go with a wild, spooky laugh and took him at his word, glorying in the slap of skin on skin.
She was thinking how this change of angle rubbed her clit just right when her orgasm crept up on her like a dirty thought in church. It started as a slow pulling apart deep in her belly and spread outwards, shredding every cell till she was blind and deaf with it, lost in a storm of pure sensation.
She fell forwards, her face tucking
into the crook of his neck like the spot was crafted for her. Beneath her, his body stiffened. He groaned low in her ear, the tremble and twitch of his fingers along her spine telling her everything she needed to know.
“Thank you,” she whispered when she’d caught her breath.
“I’m much obliged, myself,” he returned, and she could feel him grinning against her cheek. “You make real good company.”
They moved to the bed, sore and sated and propping each other up like the last two cards in a fallen deck. She turned her back to the windows and let him curl around her. His breath was warm on the back of her neck. She felt safe.
The last thing she saw before closing her eyes was the red glow of the roadhouse sign reflected on the opposite wall.
Sometime after dawn, sleep slithered off Kate like a shed skin, leaving her mouth dry and her head clear. She slipped out of bed and into the bathroom. Her hands shook as she splashed water on her face.
“Stupid,” she told the mirror. “What an unbelievably stupid thing to do. He could’ve hurt you. He could’ve killed you.” She paused as the worst occurred to her. “He could’ve taken the money.”
She crept back into the bedroom on her hands and knees, paus/span> to peer beneath the bed. The suitcase was right where she’d left it. Relieved, she crawled to where they’d dropped their clothes.
In the bed, the cowboy didn’t stir.
She pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. Inside it she found a few small bills, a driver’s licence photo that didn’t quite match his face, and a handful of credit cards emblazoned with an odd assortment of names.
A torn scrap of paper fell to the carpet. She unfolded it. Five words, in neat blue ink: “Melissa – tall, blonde, good body.”
She was fumbling in the bottom of her leather bag before she made it to her feet.
The Mammoth Book of Hot Romance Page 42