“Kinsley?”
“Coming. Just a minute.”
King mutters something from the other side of the door, and I feel lighter somehow when I hear the bedroom door close. I do what I have to do quickly and rush out to grab my hair dryer, makeup bag, and the perfume Mama bought me for Christmas.
Fifteen minutes later, I look like a rock star, albeit a casual one with a slightly damp boot attached to her foot.
Forgot about that beauty when I dove into the shower.
“Hey babe, uh…”
He trails off as I walk in and smile at him, my mask firmly in place as I hobble to the table and sit gracefully.
“We should talk, King.”
“Um, ‘kay. Just let me dish up the food and grab us both a coffee, okay?”
I allow that because I am hungry, and the man just cooked for me—score—and I sit back long minutes later with a slightly fuller belly and a mouthful of straight talking.
I feel as if I need to use at least a little bit of me—the mask is not happy with me—to settle this situation. It was “me” who got screwed last night, or not, as the case may be.
“Okay, so, as you probably know, last night was a first for me. The oral sex, I mean.”
He grins.
“Yeah.”
“And while that was very satisfying and completely brilliant as experiments go, I have to tell you, the end result left a lot to be desired. Now, I don’t know if we were just at cross purposes last night or something, but I fully expected you to return so that we may have had full intercourse. I guess that was not on your list of priorities, but I was not impressed when you left me waiting for you without even a call to let me know that you’d found a better alternative.”
King’s mouth falls open at my blunt words, and I smile, some of the real me, the no nonsense mouth, just tumbling to the forefront.
“Babe—”
“Now, I did not like that. For many reasons. Firstly, you left me high and dry. That sucked, because contrary to popular belief, men do not feel more just because they have penises. My vagina was not happy about last night. Secondly, you hurt my feeling a little, but not to worry, I have that situation under control. Thirdly, I am really disappointed in us both as human beings since I know you better than this. What was I thinking, right? Tell me, do you always get a girl hot and ready for intercourse and then slink off to find a better model?”
His eyes narrow as I finish the question and go back to eating, his mouth thinning just enough to let me know he does not like being called out.
Like I care. In a few hours, I’ll be somewhere that is not here, and I won’t have to worry about looking at him again. Hopefully. Because I have feelings, and while I can block them with most people, King’s just one of those really lucky assholes who can make me feel way too much to hide.
“I didn’t go looking for other pussy.”
“Language. Honestly, you can’t call it a vagina?”
“No! Because that’s just nasty, Kinsley. And clinical in a way that makes my balls shrink. Christ, what’s wrong with pu—?”
“It’s crass.”
“I don’t care. I’m not calling it a vagina. I fucking hate that word, even when I think it. I did not go out trolling last night with the smell of your pu—your sex on my fingers and the taste of your juices on my tongue. I may be an asshole, but I’m not an idiot. I had to go help Jericho break up a fight, one that he made worse in fact, and then Storm called and I had to go to work.”
Okay, that totally puts a different spin on things. And yet, not.
“Did you suddenly forget how to dial a phone? Were your ape-like opposable thumbs not capable of holding your phone for one two-minute call?”
“Shit. By the time I realized it was so late, I thought you’d be sleeping.”
“Well, I wasn’t! You know what I was doing? I was waiting for you, and then eventually I realized you weren’t coming back, so I did something I hated doing and that just made things worse. Do you know what it feels like to masturbate without orgasming, King? Not good,” I snarl, looking him dead in the eye.
“You…?” he chokes, his face flushing deep red.
I roll my eyes at the look of lust that sparks there and push my plate away to grab my coffee, staring at him over the lip of the cup.
“Rubbed one out, as all the cool kids say? Well someone had to do something about the arousal you left me with, and as I did not see anyone else here applying for the job, I just assumed it would be up to me. By the way, your sheets need another wash if you don’t want to smell my vaginal fluids on your sheets.”
“Jesus.”
“Not to worry, though. I’m pretty sure the perfume I was wearing will mask most of it. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you so much for this latest rejection, it was educational. I’d also like to say, fuck you for making me feel like shit. Again. Oh, and by the way, Dandy called you at half past midnight and we had a really nice conversation.”
That is a lie, but I really enjoy the way his face just falls as he stares at me with horror. Dandy—what sort of name is that anyway?—called and left a very suggestive message on his machine, one that made me want to do her.
Some women just know how to work a sexual innuendo.
“Er, it’s not what you think.”
“I don’t think anything. I want to go to Lex’s. Be a good sport and help me with my bags, will you? Oh, and I’m gonna need help down the stairs, too.”
I rise with dignity, though Lord knows I should not have an ounce of it left, and hobble-stomp my way to the bedroom with the grace of a hippo on beach sand.
I’m almost there when he spins me around and pulls me into his chest, his face set in stone.
“You’re not going any fucking where, and you most certainly will not ignore me just because of a misunderstanding! I told you, I had to go to work.”
“On Dandy’s vagina?”
“Dammit. No. We’ve had some trouble lately, and I went to talk to my guys about a possible threat to us.”
Threat? My mind shifts gears immediately, and I feel myself go still as he pushes me onto the couch and starts pacing in front of me, his hands running through his hair.
He’s dressed in only a pair of old sweats and looks so yummy I have to threaten to bite my tongue off if it so much as peeks past my teeth to lick at my lips.
“Threat? What kind of threat?”
“A few months back, we had a situation where Lenny almost died.”
“Yeah, the girls told me all about that. Poor Lenny.”
“She made it because someone was watching and shot at her attackers when she twisted her ankle and couldn’t run anymore. Then Cleo got into a scrape and she was almost shot at point blank range by some idiot her stepbrother hired to kill her so that he could get her inheritance when her father died.”
I know that, too.
“Then Evie was attacked as well—”
“I know. They told me all this.”
“Did they mention that in all three cases they only survived because we seem to have a mystery shooter on our hands who’s made himself some sort of guardian angel?”
“Um, they mentioned it, but we were too busy discussing sexual positions and technique to get into it,” I admit, ignoring his look of lust.
Sheesh, give a guy one chance to think about sex…
“Positions? What positions?”
“Oh, just quit it and tell me what the heck kept you from coming home and relieving the sexual frustration you left me with. Not cool by the way, since I don’t even know how to fix that shit. Masturbation is not my forte.”
“Christ—”
“Continue,” I demand, sighing when he licks his lips and seems focused on my crotch.
“Er, well, in all three instances the shooter was always there to save them just in time. We originally thought it was just one of our enemies toying with us, but we went to Evie’s designers’ ball a few weeks ago and someone went that extra step.”
>
“The shooting. Yes, Lenny already told me about that. I thought you shot them all.”
“Most. One lived long enough for Storm to get information out of him, and it turns out he was hired to make a hit on Storm. And Lenny.”
Yes, they did tell me that, but it didn’t really penetrate much because, to be honest, all I was focused on was learning enough to make this sexual affair as good as I could possibly make it with my lack of sexual experience.
His words cool my anger right on down as my mind starts working, focusing on all of the information he’s giving me.
“You think someone is targeting you all?”
“The Watchers and their wives? Yes. So I’ve been digging a little, trying to establish some sort of link. One of my contacts called Storm last night and sent him intel on a man we think may be part of an old mission we undertook just before retiring.”
Hmm. I need more information, I think as my mind starts working overtime and things start to swim in my vision. I have this ability to look at information and analyze data in such a way that I can slot it into place, almost like some weird sort of puzzle.
One professor told me to apply to the CIA instead of wasting my mind on tax law, but I declined on the grounds that I did not think America could withstand the loss of an entire intelligence unit when Lex heard about that.
“Zulu. I remember. Now don’t frown. Lex didn’t tell me everything, and since I wasn’t about to divulge classified information, he felt okay about that. He asked me to look at it all and make a guess as to whether that man would be present at the hostage retrieval you were set to go on. His colonel cleared it.”
Because I was already being pseudo recruited by the agencies at that stage, though I will ask that no one tell Lex that. He’d shit his pants.
“You…?”
“Yep, I was the one who analyzed all data and made the call to send you in. He was there. From the intel received and some of the satellite imaging, I deduced that the camel train they’d spotted days earlier had actually been his means of getting into the area without detection. Plus, I ran the variables and realized that this man had a strategic plan set in place that required a woman like Rachel to complete.”
“I don’t get how,” he says, sitting on the coffee table.
“Okay. Well, look at it all. His first blip onto your radar was a bombing in Seattle, right? And then another on the East Coast. It suggested that he had at least two working cells on U.S. soil. We actually confirmed that he had two more, one in the Southern states and one in the Midwest. The FBI took out two of them when they tracked them through suspicious chemical purchases, and the other two either moved or were taken out of the equation at an earlier date.”
“Okay.”
I can see he’s confused, and so was the handler who’d been feeding me info after I ran the variable on the hostage rescue mission the guys went on.
“I’m good with variables and analysis. I take all data acquired and plot possible scenarios. For instance, one of the working theories was that Zulu was actually a man named Khalid Ben al Hussif? Wrong. That man was nothing more than a scapegoat. He had two years’ worth of military training, sure, but he’s a large contributor to a children’s fund in the U.K. and he bought his wife a dog for her birthday. That suggests progressive thinking and, while not total equality, he does see his wife as a partner. Also, he’s too small to have fit the description. Oh! And he adopted a little girl in the U.K. She was white.”
“Ahh.”
“Yeah. A very big tell about the kind of man he is, huh? Anyway, we scrapped that one quickly and then moved onto his movements. He went from the western territories all the way south in a matter of months. He was spotted moving again and going east and then disappeared somewhere in between his home base and the Afghani border.”
He’s still looking at me with a blank expression, and I could almost roll my eyes but force myself to remember that the others also did not want to try to understand my non-linear thinking. One agent called me a moron until a bomb went off in southern France, an attack I had predicted.
“In all that time, there were certain things that occurred. The first was the firing of a broadcaster. The second was the theft of a food supply truck that was scheduled to supply one of the bases. The third was the capture of two Spanish tourists. And the last was Rachel.”
I see him thinking and know the minute he clicks.
“Shit! He was setting up…”
“A hostage negotiation. Yes. That’s how I deduced that he would be going for your Rachel. You see, he wasn’t as free to move around as he had been before, not with your tracking him and searching so hard. So he had to go underground. The cells he had left here in the States weren’t enough for what he had planned.”
“So he was going to bargain for—”
“For the release of his men to the Afghani government. At least that’s what I thought he’d do. All information pointed to that. As far as I can tell, you missed him by maybe a day. The colonel and your captain sent you all in about a day too early. Zulu was counting on that, I think. It makes sense to me at least. If he couldn’t get the reporter, then at least he’d be setting you up for ambush and get rid of you. Your team proved to be the first and last to actually get close enough to drive him into hiding.”
His mouth twists at my words, and I see him shake his head.
“That mission was a clusterfuck from the minute we took it. We lost a friend trying to get Rachel out and almost died ourselves when we were hemmed in.”
I refrain from saying anything because, as much as I want to point something out to him and his friends, I have no proof to go on, just my analytical deductions, and that is not proof enough for what I have always suspected.
Although, with the information of that mysterious shooter’s presence, well….let’s just say that I think I know something that they don’t. Something they haven’t ever considered and probably never would.
“Okay. So…so you understand why I didn’t come home?”
Yes.
“Partly. Look, King, let’s be very clear about things here. I expect nothing from this little affair you proposed. When my house is ready, I’ll go home and live my life just the way I want to. This? This is a little bubble of time where I decided to just enjoy things before I rebuild my life.”
“But—”
“And that’s good. I don’t feel hurt or loss or anything about the end of our time together. We’re like night and day the two of us, and to be honest, I probably couldn’t live longer than a week or two with you and your habits. But that doesn’t mean I’m okay with being treated like something you can just use and walk away from. I have feelings too. So you tell me, is this going to actually go somewhere more than a little hand fucking, or should I just cut my losses now and focus on something else?”
“Hell fucking no! You think you’re leaving? Let me tell you something, little lady. I’ve waited years for you, for a chance to get my dick in you, and nothing and no one will stop that now that I’ve had a taste of you. I want you, and I damn sure do not plan to just let you walk away because you’re throwing a tantrum.”
“Not a tantrum, a logical response to a failed experiment,” I say matter of factly, though God knows my heart is pounding so hard it’s a wonder he can’t hear it.
King growls, and I’m pinned to the couch, his hips settling into the cradle of mine before I can draw a breath.
Gosh, the man can move fast.
“Experiment? This isn’t a fucking experiment, Kinsley! I’m a man. I want you, and from the smell of your pussy, you want me too.”
He kisses me savagely before I can point out that his being a man is quite an illogical example of proof that he wants me. I groan minutes later when he’s still kissing me, his tongue digging so deeply into my mouth that all I can taste is him, coffee, and the need that’s steadily building between us.
This is our first real kiss, one that he’s initiated of course, and I’m str
uck dumb by the erotic, perfect slide of his tongue against mine as he continues to kiss me, eating my every breath and pushing his own into my mouth.
The feel of him pushing his thick erection into the seam of my thighs is so arousing I feel a wet gush between them and groan my delight when he starts rubbing against me in short, hard jabs that hit my clit just right.
“Uhhm.”
“Yes. You feel that, Kins? That’s just a taste of what I’m going to give you, babe. You want to walk away from this?”
No. I shake my head to answer and gasp when he slides his arms beneath me and stands, taking me right along with him as he leaves the couch and stalks into his bedroom.
He’s breathing so hard, his face set so harshly, that I expect a little roughness and maybe some angry sex, but he surprises me by lowering me gently to the bed and staring down at me, his mouth set.
“I’m going to undress you and then myself, Kins, and then I’m going to do things to you that no one ever has before. You can’t come from flicking that little clit of yours? That’s because it was made for this mouth and this dick.”
Holy…
I almost giggle at his growl when, instead of just lying there waiting for him to undress me, I sit up and pull my shirt and bra off over my head, going for my jeans next.
Those are a little harder to dispose of with the boot back in place, but King is there instantly, tugging and pulling them away until I’m naked and completely up for whatever he wants to do to me.
Lying back, I watch him disrobe, as I settle my injured ankle to the side and spread my legs completely, my hands holding my sex open. His snarl is lusty and loud, and I giggle when he almost trips getting out of his pants.
That giggle doesn’t last because he’s on me in a second, his mouth landing on me without finesse or warning. His wet, hot tongue slips over my clit. I feel hard suction as he reaches down and dips just the tip of a finger into me.
There’s a glorious rush, as my sex starts flowing and readying me for his penis. I almost scream my outrage when, with one last lick and a kiss to my clit, he moves up, his mouth leaving a wet trail all the way up my belly to the hard globes of my swollen breasts.
THE WATCHERS: 6 Military Romance Bundle Page 55