“They shouldn’t make you go back,” I say, clinging tighter.
“It’s a condition of my protection. I’ve got to testify if and when they need me to.”
“And in the meantime, you have to stay in Nebraska.” It’s not a question. I know all too well how this works.
“I was planning on staying here for a while,” he says, lifting my face so I’m looking at him. “I like the scenery.”
My eyes widen. “If the Feds find out you’re here, they’ll relocate us. They’ll never place us together.”
I cling tighter when he starts to untwine his limbs from mine.
He drops a kiss on the end of my nose and grins at me. “I’m not going anywhere, Cheetah. Promise.”
I let him go and he leans over the edge of the bed. He drags his bag closer and digs in the side pocket. When he brings his hand out of his bag, there’s a ring pinched between his fingers. It’s a large round solitaire in a delicate platinum band; simple and classic.
He rolls toward me and sits up. “My WITSEC Memorandum of Understanding specifically states I can bring my wife with me wherever I end up.”
I can’t breathe as I pull myself up to sit next to him.
“I can’t make any guarantees as far as what this life will hold for us, but I can promise whatever it is, we’re in it together. If you have me, I’ll weather it all with you, from now until the end. That might come sooner than I hope, but I guarantee it will be the ride of your life right up until it’s over.”
Chapter 21
Oliver
In my head, when I planned this all out—both times—I pictured her throwing herself into my arms and saying yes, over and over. But that’s one of the things I love about Lee Delgado. There’s not a predictable bone in her body. She always leaves me guessing.
Or hanging, in this case.
It feels like forever that I sit here with my heart on my sleeve—or really my arm, I guess, since I’m not wearing any sleeves. I’ve forgotten to breathe, so I’m probably turning blue. My palms are damp and my throat is dry.
And still, she just looks at me, something devious flashing in those hazel eyes.
“Are you waiting for an answer to some question?” she finally asks, raising her eyebrows. “Because I didn’t hear one.”
I roll and pin her to the bed under my weight. “Will you marry me, Cheetah?”
She gives me the sexiest fucking smile I’ve ever seen as her heels dig into my ass. “What are you willing to do for it?”
I send my cockiest smile back at her as I slide down her body. “Game on,” I say, spreading her wide.
One flick of my tongue over her clit and her fingers comb through my hair, pressing me deeper. Two, and her hands fist, nearly ripping out handfuls of hair as she gasps. Three, and a long moan purrs up from her chest as she rolls her hips and gives herself up to me completely. When I suck her hard and graze my teeth over her clit, she breathes, “Yes! God, yes!”
She says it five more times before I’m done with her. As she lays panting afterward, I slip the ring onto her finger.
All I can do is stare at her. She’s incredible. More than I deserve. I never could have called this; forsaking everything I’ve ever known, turning rat—the only thing I was raised to despise more than the Delgados—for the love of my enemy.
But here I am, the rat on the sinking ship helplessly in love with the siren who sank it.
I reach for the phone on the nightstand and punch the room service button, ordering up a bottle of their best champagne. “And a large pepperoni pizza,” I add when I hear Lee’s stomach growl.
I hang up and pull her to me, holding tight to the only thing left in my world that makes sense. “This is going to be amazing, Cheetah. You and me against the world. Bonnie and Clyde got nothing on us.”
I kiss her and we’re still kissing half an hour later when the knock comes at the door. We throw on the hotel bathrobes from the closet and let room service in. The waiter rolls our feast in on a cart and sets everything up. Once he’s gone, we decimate the pizza in ten minutes flat.
She pulls the tie of her robe loose, then comes over to where I’m sitting in the desk chair and tugs at my knot. Just the look on her face, all sex and desire, makes my balls ache.
I brush my fingers over her tightening nipple. “You have something in mind?”
With a quick yank, the tie to my robe is loose in her hand. “Just a little game I like.” Her smile turns decidedly sinful and her eyes spark. “You might remember it.”
My dick stiffens and my balls pull tight at the memory of the last time I let her blindfold me. Even though it’s against every instinct I have to hand over control, I let her tie the sash around my eyes. I hear her robe hit the floor in a whoosh, and then she’s pulling my hands behind me and tying them together with the other sash.
“You know I wouldn’t do this for anyone but you,” I say when she finishes.
“I’m flattered,” comes her breathy voice in my ear. The pebbles of her nipples brush against my back as she takes my earlobe into her mouth and sucks, then bites.
“Ah, there’s my Cheetah.”
She licks the rim of my ear, then she’s gone.
I slump lower in the chair, letting my knees fall open. “Bring it on.”
Her warm, wet finger slicks over my parted lips, and when I suck her inside, I taste her juices. “I’ll take more of that,” I say when she pulls away.
“You’re not giving the orders. I’m in charge.” She swirls her hot tongue over the head of my rock-hard cock, then sheathes her teeth behind her lips and takes me deep.
“That’s it,” I groan, grinding my hips against her.
I hear her pull the champagne bottle from the ice bucket just before she presses it to the inside of my thigh. The cold, in contrast to her hot mouth on my cock, pulls my balls tight. But the next second I growl in agony as she removes her mouth and grabs my cock with a fistful of ice. She strokes me hard in her icy grip and, “Oh, Jesus, fuck!”
She keeps stroking, the ice hard and cold against my skin, and I feel a rush to my groin. It hurts so fucking bad, but she’s got me an inch from coming anyway. My muscles pump with her, but all my insides are a brick of shock. I can’t breathe, my heart’s struggling to beat, and my gut pulls into a hard ball as everything in me clenches.
I start to pant against the pain, but suck in a sharp breath when the ice is gone a second later and her hot mouth closes over me again.
“Christ, Cheetah!” I yank my hands loose and fist them in her hair as I come.
There’s a long moment that I’m totally incapable of moving. Bestial sounds I’ve never made before choke their way up my throat. Finally, when I can breathe again, I untangle a hand from her hair and tug off my blindfold.
She’s still on my cock, her tongue making lazy circles over the head and sending aftershocks through my insides.
“Who taught you this shit?” I pant, stroking her hair. “Because I want to shake the fucker’s hand before I rip his dick off.”
She gives my cock one last lingering suck, then lifts her head and smiles, all fucking sex goddess. “You inspire me.”
I pull her off the floor into my lap. I drain the last of the champagne into our glasses and hand one to her, then turn the dead soldier upside down in the ice bucket.
“I can die a happy man now,” I say, holding up my glass. “To going down in a blaze of glory.”
A crease forms between Lee’s brows. “Don’t say that.”
“If it means I get even a little bit of that,” I say, gesturing to the spot between my feet where she just was, “I’d take on every rat bastard in Chicago.”
“Stop it, Oliver.” She pushes me away when I try to hold her. “I hate that I did this to you.”
“None of it is your fault, Cheetah,” I say when I realize what’s going on inside her head.
“It’s all my fault. Every part of it.”
I coax her into giving me her hand and thumb
the diamond on her finger. “You couldn’t have known how my father would react to the book losses. Most parents wouldn’t contract a hit on their own kid.”
She pulls her hand away and moves to the bed, leaning against the headboard, her gaze pinned to where she’s picking at a cuticle. “I knew there’d be blowback. I just thought it would be on us,” she says, pressing a hand to her chest. “On my family. I was counting on it.”
It takes me a minute to process what she’s saying. “You wanted us to take a contract out on you?”
“No, not a contract.” She takes a deep breath and holds it for a second before exhaling. “You were part of my plan to get my family out from under Papa. He was destroying all the good in Rob—turning him into something less that human. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“So you … ?” I start, hoping she’ll finish, because I have no clue where she’s going with this.
She sets her glass on the nightstand and slides down so she’s laying on her side. “So I gave Agent Callahan Papa’s books. I’m the reason they arrested him in the first place.”
I remember the stories. The Feds found those books on a raid on the family home after Felix Delgado’d already been arrested on racketeering charges. Lee was forced to testify against her father as a hostile witness for the prosecution. There’s a second I can’t even think, trying to straighten out all the twisted lines in my head. She’s saying she wasn’t a hostile witness—that that story was fabricated to protect her.
“You gave your father up to the Feds,” I say as it starts to compute.
“He’s evil, Oliver,” she says defensively. “I don’t think he was always that way, but when Mama died, something just snapped. I don’t know if it was because she was his moral compass, or if maybe she just hid all the violence from us, but … I was afraid for all of us.”
If I understand what she’s saying, she’s the one who started the dominoes that ended up with my father in prison. But … “I still don’t see how that relates to wanting us to retaliate against your family.”
“Papa was only going to be inside for five years. He left Rob in charge. I’d begged Rob to take the WITSEC deal the Feds offered. Agent Callahan told him it was part of Papa’s plea bargain when he flipped on your father, but really, I negotiated witness protection as part of my deal when I gave them Papa.” She gives her head a mournful shake. “But Rob wouldn’t do it. I knew when Papa got out it would be back to business as usual and everything I’d done would be for nothing.”
“So you thought someone trying to kill you kids would force your brother into WITSEC,” I say as the pieces start to snap together.
“I didn’t really think you’d have us killed.” She blows out a sigh. “When Papa gave up your father, I waited. I didn’t know if Victor would go straight for Papa in prison, or if he’d come after us. When nothing happened, I decided to come at it from a different angle. I just wanted to stir the hornet’s nest and make you or your father do something so Rob would see things were too dangerous to stay in Chicago.” Her face twists. “But then that Yankov guy is in our living room with a gun pointed at Sherm’s head and I thought I’d gotten my family killed.”
I push out of the chair and pace to the window, trying to get my mind around everything she’s saying. All either of us have ever known is the Life—deception, manipulation, violence, whatever it takes to get the job done. Even when I left, when all I was trying to do was protect her, I did it by turning her own gun on her. “How are we ever going to trust each other?”
I realize I said it out loud when she stands from the bed and stares at me, shaking her head. “I didn’t know you then, Oliver. I didn’t … I was just trying to protect my family.”
I give a slow nod as the statement sinks in. “And you’ll continue to do whatever it takes. No matter what.”
Her expression hardens into determination. “Nothing is as important to me as they are, Oliver.”
I spin and brace my hands on the window frame, staring into the setting sun until I’m blinded by it. I’ll always come second to a family she’ll lie and kill to protect. Part of me knows that’s the way it should be, but I can’t reconcile that with the ache in my chest.
There’s a rustle of sheets and the bathroom door closes. When it opens a few minutes later, I turn and see Lee, dressed with her long hair pulled back. She holds her left hand up and thumbs the ring. “You’re my family now too, Oliver. I know what I did was crazy, and dishonest, and manipulative, and I can’t promise I’ll never do anything like that again. But the next time I do it, it will be for you.” When I don’t respond, she lowers her gaze and shakes her head, moving toward the door. “I’ll go,” she says.
I reach the door a fraction behind her, and it slams shut. I spin her back up against the door and kiss her, letting the intensity of all the lust and regret and loss and love I’m feeling flow through my body into hers.
Slowly, her lips start to move. She rests a hand on my hip. The other is on my shoulder. She draws me closer and opens her mouth, letting me in.
We kiss, deep and desperate, a tangle of battling tongues and wrestling limbs.
I pull away and hold her in my gaze, trying to convey with a look everything she is to me. “Don’t go. Stay with me, Cheetah. Forever.”
Chapter 22
Lee
“Where the fuck are you?”
I pull the phone away from my ear. Not a good sign that Rob is already this pissed before I’ve said a word.
“I’m, um … Are you home?” I glance across the bed at Oliver, twisted into the sheets with his head propped in his hands, flexing alternate pecs at me. “Not helping,” I mouth.
A shit-eating grin spreads across his face and my stomach does some flippy thing.
“You haven’t been answering your goddamn phone,” Rob growls as if I asked nothing. “Ulie said you’d gone school shopping for Sherm, that you said you’d be back before dinner. It’s eleven fucking o’clock, Lee. We thought you were dead.”
“Something came up. I’ll explain when I see you.”
“Which will be … ?”
“Tomorrow.”
“What the hell is going on?” he asks low into the silence that follows my statement.
“I’m with someone. I’m staying here tonight.”
For several beats of my racing heart, all I hear is his breath bellowing through the airwaves. “Tell Buchanan he’ll be dealing with me tomorrow,” he warns.
“We’ll talk when I see you.” There’s a shake in my voice that I can’t fully control. I hope he doesn’t hear it. “Will you be home tomorrow morning?”
“You damn well better believe I’ll be home. And if Buchanan’s a man, he’ll be showing his face here too.” He disconnects before I can get another word in.
“He thinks I’m with Wes,” I say when I lower the phone. “Wait till he finds out who I’m really with.”
“What’s with you and that Fed?”
I lift my eyes from the phone at the jealous current in Oliver’s tone. “Nothing … really.”
He cocks his head to the side and his eyes narrow. “Elaborate on really?”
I put my phone on the nightstand and lean against the headboard, bringing my knees up and hugging them to my chest. “I lied to you. I never slept with him on that first date. But when I thought you were dead I got drunk and … we came close. I was … numb, I guess. I needed to feel something.”
He grabs my ankle and drags me down the bed to where he lays. He rolls on top of me and his erection presses against my thigh, hot and hard. He quirks an eyebrow at me. “Do you feel something now?”
I wrap my legs around him and he presses inside me. “Uh-huh,” I answer on a breath as he stretches me.
He makes slow love to me, and I feel more than I ever have. Oliver is a human amplifier. Every sensation is bigger, every sound louder, every touch more intense when we’re together.
Afterward, we curl together and I hear his breath sink into the slow c
adence of sleep. This is where I intend to spend every night for the rest of my life—which may be very short when Rob finds out the truth.
***
The Loveland County Courthouse is a two-story stucco building wedged between the fire department and the Quik Lube on the corner. When Oliver and I walk in hand in hand, I try to pretend the sweat slicking our palms is his.
He knows it’s not.
“We don’t have to do this, Cheetah,” he says, leaning close and talking low in my ear. “I want to spend every night I have left just like last night, but if you’re having second thoughts …”
I squeeze his hand tighter. “I’m not. I’m just dreading what comes next. How am I going to explain this to my family?”
He cradles my cheek in his palm and holds me in his gaze. “Just tell them the truth. I love you more than life and I’ll never let anything, including my family, hurt you.”
His words turn me to goo and I ooze into his arms. “This is why I love you.”
He kisses me, then guides me to the reception desk.
“Give me one guess,” the middle-aged receptionist says, beaming up at us from her seat. “You’re here for a marriage license.”
I smile. “You don’t miss much.”
“Down the hall and to your right, in the county clerk’s office,” she says, pointing the way.
We follow her directions and find a short line ahead of us. The guy currently at the desk is arguing with the guy behind the bulletproof glass that he should be allowed a hardship postponement for jury duty because his cat needs surgery. The guy’s not buying it.
Another window is opened and the two people ahead of Oliver and me are helped and gone while jury duty guy continues to plead his case.
“Can I help who’s next?” the woman in the other window says.
“We’re here to apply for a marriage license,” Oliver tells her as we approach her window.
“I need some form of ID for each of you and your ninety-three-dollar fee.”
Over the Line: On the Run Novel Page 20