DRAGON SECURITY: The Complete 6 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  She came to after about ten minutes, jerking forward and taking a big gasp of breath as though she’d drowned instead of froze. Then she looked at me, her eyes wide with fright.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Cadence, you were near frozen—”

  “How do you know my name?”

  Her voice was low, filled with fright. I tried to touch her hand, but she pulled away. And then she became aware of her nudity and immediately rolled up into a ball.

  “I was just trying to warm you up. You fell into a snow bank.”

  “I know what I did.”

  “You could have frozen to death. Gotten frostbite.”

  “Maybe that was preferable to being in the same cabin with the man who shot at me!”

  “Cadence—”

  “How do you know my name? We never exchanged names. You never told me your name.”

  “I’m Marcus.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t care who you are. I want to know how you know me.”

  I studied her face, running my options around in my head. I could tell her the truth and risk losing my job. Or I could lie and risk causing her to run out the door again.

  I got up and grabbed a towel out of the bathroom.

  “Why don’t you get dressed first? Then we’ll talk.”

  She dragged her fingers through her hair, pressing the moisture against each strand. Then she looked at me.

  “What choice do I have?”

  I held the towel out between both hands. I refused to look away and she refused to pretend she didn’t know what I was doing. She stood, the water rushing away from her body as she did. Her nipples were standing erect, nearly pointing toward the ceiling. There were goose pimples all along her belly, her arms and legs. Just below her navel was another tattoo, this one a tiny heart that was shaded red and pink. Her hips flared out, her thighs rounded and perfectly toned. And then her beautiful cunt, the hair carefully trimmed.

  She was beautiful. My heart was pounding as I stared at her, my body responding to hers in a way it hadn’t done in a long time. There were women, but this…there was more than attraction going on here and it scared me a little.

  I wrapped the towel around her and picked her up, carrying her over to the bed. I wrapped her in blankets as she began to shiver.

  “You need to warm up.”

  “I need to know what the hell is going on!”

  Her eyes were snapping with anger, but she was shivering so hard that I knew she’d go into hyperthermia very quickly. I had to do something.

  I pushed her back against the mattress even as she began to protest, her hands pressed against my chest. I grabbed her wrists and trapped her hands over her head. Then I lay my body on top of hers, trapping her underneath me.

  “Get off me!”

  “You’re cold, Cadence. I’m just trying to warm you up.”

  “I’m not that cold!”

  But she was shivering hard enough that the bed was vibrating. I tugged away the blankets that were between us, pulling them over my own shoulders so that my body was directly against hers. She was struggling, moving against me, and it wasn’t really doing me any good. My cock was hard as a rock and her movements were just making it impossible to control. Or hide. Her hips came up against me and she suddenly went as still as a statue.

  We lay there like that for a long few minutes. She smelled so good, her wet hair releasing the rose and lavender fragrance of her shampoo, her skin giving off the soft, sweet scent of whatever she put on her skin, whatever made her smell so incredibly good. I wanted to kiss her, my lips were so close to her neck. I wanted to taste her, to nibble at her throat like she was the best food ever placed in front of me. I wanted to devour her.

  I lay very still, afraid if I moved, I wouldn’t be able to control myself.

  “Did you do it?” she asked softly. “Did you shoot at me?”

  “Yes,” I whispered softly. “But I never meant for you to get hurt.”

  She groaned as she pressed her head backward into the mattress. Tears spilled from her eyes.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “No.”

  She looked at me, fear making her eyes wild. “Why? Why are you here? Why did you shoot at me? What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why?”

  I let go of her wrists. I could feel the tension in her body and I knew she wouldn’t fight me anymore. She was too frightened. Too confused.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was trying to scare you, that’s all.”

  “Why? Why would it matter to you?”

  I brushed a couple of tears from her cheek. “It’s not about you.”

  “Then what?”

  “Blake. It’s about Blake.”

  She pushed at my shoulders, tried to get me off of her, but I lay still, refusing to budge. “Why would scaring me do anything to hurt Blake? Why would you think that doing that would do anything to him?”

  “He wants a kid and you’re his only option at the moment.”

  “So you thought scaring me off—”

  “It would hurt him.”

  “You want to hurt him?”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  I brushed my hand over the side of her face, trying to remember what I’d been thinking when I aimed that gun at her car and fired. She’d moved the wrong way. I expected her to drop to the ground, not fall into the front seat. That’s how the bullet grazed her leg. She was lucky it was so low or it might have gone right through her thigh muscle. Not what I’d wanted.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “I’m just, what, collateral damage?”

  “Something like that.”

  She smacked my shoulder. “You’re an asshole.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She hit me again, tears beginning to flow down her face again. “Asshole,” she moaned, sobs coming with tears. I grabbed her wrists and pinned her to the mattress again. She was no longer shivering, but her lips were still tinged blue. And those lips… I kissed her. I hadn’t meant to, but I couldn’t seem to make logic come back into my head. She was naked and she was upset and her hips kept doing this thing against mine and…Megan wasn’t here. What did she know about the line of professionalism?

  I kissed her like I hadn’t kissed a woman in years. And she kissed me back, her mouth pressed to mine, her lips parting ever so slightly, welcoming me inside. My heart leapt into my throat, my breath becoming her breath. She tasted like everything I’d imagined she would and more, tasted like all the things that were right about the world. Our tongues danced and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt quite this alive.

  She pulled a hand free and slipped it down over my back, sneaking her fingers under my shirt. She touched my side, touched the space between each of my ribs. And then her hand moved lower, touching the space just above my hip. When her fingers began to play with the waistband of my jeans, I knew she was mine if I wanted her.

  I nibbled at her throat, listened to the soft moans that slipped from her lips. I cupped one of her breasts and bent to run my tongue over her nipple. She cried out, arching her back so that I was forced to take as much of her nipple as possible in my mouth. That was fine. I loved the way the erectile tissue felt caught between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. I gave the other nipple equal time, suckling at it softly, making her moan again.

  And then she gave me her mouth, her hot breath blowing over my face, her tongue making itself known inside of me. She was a good girl on the outside, but she was a firecracker when she was going after something she wanted. And I knew she wanted me. She left no doubt in the way her tongue possessed me, in the way her hand tugged at my jeans, trying to get inside, trying to touch me in places she couldn’t with that denim prison intact.

  I slid my hand over her thigh, tugged at it, lifting her leg high to expose that luscious cunt that was hidden between our bodies. I needed h
er. Wanted her. I reached between our bodies and, just as I was about to free my hard cock, she pushed me back.

  “We can’t,” she said, a dark blush burning across her cheeks.

  “What?”

  “We can’t. I’m…” She was breathing hard, her hands still playing with the top edge of my jeans. But then she turned her head, a single tear spilling down her cheek. “I’m taking hormones for the insemination. Unless you want to be a father in nine months…”

  I groaned. I’d forgotten about the whole surrogate thing.

  I licked away that tear and kissed her again.

  “There are other things.”

  Her eyes widened in that way they did when she was surprised. Or angry. Or frightened. I just smiled as I slowly began to work my way down her body.

  Nipples…damn, they tasted so good! But so did the soft flesh over her ribs, the tender flesh of her stomach. A little dip in her belly button, a nibble at that little heart low on her belly. Slowly I slipped further down, sliding off of the bed, urging her thighs apart. I ran my tongue along her outer lips, listening to her soft sighs. I lifted her ankles, braced her feet on the edge of the bed, spreading her cunt just by spreading her legs.

  Her clit was poking its little head out of its hood. I touched it gently with the tip of my finger. I thought she might jump off the bed, or she might tear my hair clear off my head. Her fingers were wrapped in the short tresses that were growing out of my buzz cut, pulling me close to her. I happily allowed her to direct me, burying my mouth against her gorgeous lips. Then I slid my tongue carefully between them, causing her to buck her hips, her fingers tugging me closer against her.

  I found her clit again and took it into my mouth, rolling it around until she tugged me back with those trusty fingers. I used my own fingers to fill her, to feel the heat and moisture of her need. She moaned, writing on the bed as I administered to her needs, my own need growing with her obvious pleasure. I loved that she was enjoying my touch, loved that she wasn’t so shy about her need that she couldn’t show me what she wanted. I liked a woman who knew that pleasure was a two-way street.

  She was growing close. I could feel it in her movements. I ran my thumb over her clit and I thought she might jump out of her skin. I wanted to taste her kiss again. I wanted to see her face as the ultimate pleasure burst through her. I climbed back onto the bed, and she was ready, her lips softly parted as she watched me. She rolled into me as I lay back, stealing my lips. We kissed, the heat between us only building. I slid my fingers over her clit, pressed two inside of her and felt her writhe against me, grinding her cunt against my hand. And her hands…she pressed both hands under the waistband of my jeans, wrapping one hand around the length of my cock as the other sought out my balls. I cried out against her mouth as she found them, her fingers doing the most incredible thing as she rolled them, playing with them like they were a bag of marbles, but her touch gentle and kind, sensual in a way I’d never experienced before.

  We moved together there on the bed in the middle of a blizzard like two teenagers copping a feel in the back of Mom’s station wagon. I’d not done anything like this since I was fifteen. But I couldn’t argue with the way it felt.

  Her hands stopped moving when her orgasm hit, just the one squeezing my cock like it was a safety bar on a roller coaster. I brushed her hands away, using the moisture of her need as lubricant, finishing what she’d begun. There was nothing more beautiful than the sight of her face twisted with pleasure, or the sight of my relief moist on her breasts.

  She began to shiver again when it was all over. I pulled her up against the pillows and tugged the blankets up around us. She curled up against my chest and went right to sleep. I did, too, surprisingly. It’d been a long time since I’d slept so easily.

  Chapter 10

  Cadence

  The snow was finally coming to an end by morning. I slipped out of bed and dressed, covering myself with a bathrobe that was heavy enough to keep me warm in the chill of the room. I shoved another piece of wood into the stove and brewed some coffee, holding a mug between my hands as I stood at the windows, staring out at the acres and acres of snow that spread out between us and the road.

  “Hey,” Marcus said, moving up behind me and kissing my throat. I leaned back into him for a minute, the memory of last night still fresh in my mind.

  “We should probably talk,” I said.

  I thought I’d feel tension come into him when I said that, but I didn’t. He just wrapped his arms around me and held me close for a long second. Then he pulled away, going into the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee before joining me at the counter. We sat side by side on the low stools, both staring into the depths of our coffee cups.

  He reached over after a time and tugged my robe open, exposing my injured thigh. He touched the stitches, running his fingertip over the ridges of them slowly.

  “I never meant for you to get hurt.”

  “Why would you do something like that?’

  He didn’t answer me; he just kept running his finger over the stitches that held my skin together. I touched his hand and pressed his palm to my thigh.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “What is?”

  “My relationship with Blake. Your relationship with Blake. It seems like he just attracts these odd situations.”

  “What did he do to you to make you want to hurt him?”

  “I didn’t want to hurt him, exactly. I just wanted him to know what it felt like to lose something he wanted.”

  I shook my head. “You’re talking in riddles.”

  “I was hired to protect you. Isn’t that a riddle all in itself?”

  I sat back a little so I could see his face clearer. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I work for a security firm, and we were hired to protect you. But I was supposed to keep my distance because Blake didn’t want to stress you out during this very important time.”

  I shook my head, remembering the way Blake had checked my apartment the day he came to drop off the keys to the cabin.

  “From what?”

  “He thinks someone is trying to hurt you. He said that someone tried to run you over outside the lawyer’s office.”

  I snorted. “That was just a stupid accident. I never should have told him about it.”

  “Do you think someone’s after you?”

  “Besides you?”

  He looked a little shameful. “Besides me.”

  I shook my head. “Why would they be? No one knows about me, no one has reason to want me dead. And the only people who know about the surrogacy are Blake and Annie, their doctor and lawyer. That’s all.”

  “What about other aspects of your life? Someone from your past?”

  “I have no past.” I laughed when he shot me a funny look. “I grew up with my grandma. My mother’s dead, I don’t know who my father was—she probably didn’t, either. I have a small handful of friends. No enemies that I’m aware of. No crazy ex-boyfriends. Just…”

  “What?”

  I shrugged, a thought I didn’t like floating through my head. “There was this one guy, but…”

  Leon. He’d known about my grandma’s thrifty lifestyle, about the money she squirreled away for me before she died. He’d wanted me to invest in some crazy scheme of his and was pretty angry when I refused. That’s probably the closest I ever came to the whole crazy ex idea.

  “I don’t think anyone in my past would want to hurt me.”

  “Your mom? How did she die?”

  “Drug overdose. But that was when I was just an infant.”

  Marcus nodded, his attention turned back to his mug of coffee. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head.

  “Who hired you?”

  He looked up. “Blake.”

  “No, I mean who hired you to scare me away?”

  “No one. I did that on my own.”

  “Why?”

  He got up and walked around the counter, going to the stove to ch
eck the fire. I got up to follow, watching him move, watching the way his body flexed when he bent over. He scared me. I could still see his face with that gun pointed at me, could still see him racing out of the parking lot. I felt sick to my stomach, the memory of it burned in my thigh. The ache wasn’t about to let me forget.

  But there was another ache deep in my belly that wouldn’t let me forget his touch.

  “What would have happened if I turned the wrong way? What would have happened if you hadn’t just grazed my thigh?”

  Tension filled his shoulders, but he didn’t turn, didn’t respond.

  “What made you do something like that? Why would you take such a risk? Why do you hate Blake that much?”

  “I don’t hate him.”

  “Then why?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  He stood and turned to face me, his eyes hooded. But then he just brushed past me, snatching his jacket off the back of the chair on his way out the door. The snow had stopped, but the wind was whipping around the loose snow, creating a whiteout sort of thing. I could hardly see him through the kitchen window, just a hunched over shadow digging through the snow where I fell last night.

  He was looking for his gun.

  My heart jumped into my throat. I felt as if I should stop him somehow, run out there and demand that he leave the gun where it was. But then my thoughts moved to the threat he and Blake both seemed to think was after me. Maybe it’d be better to have a gun. But what if Marcus suddenly decided he wanted to try to scare me off again?

  I was so confused. Did Marcus want to hurt me or keep me safe? First he shoots at me, and then he saves me from freezing to death. It didn’t make sense.

  I felt frozen to the floor, unable to move, unable to make a decision. Marcus’ shadow disappeared. For a moment, I considered what would happen if he just vanished. I’d be alone, like I was supposed to be. Would that be better? Just the thought made my heart start to pound a little faster, made me want to reach for that knife hidden under my pillow. I was afraid with Marcus here. I was more afraid of the thought of being alone.