The Nauti Boys Collection

by Lora Leigh

  Chaya shook her head slowly. “Something better than diamonds, Natches.”

  “What could be better than diamonds?”

  “Your trust.”

  Natches stared back at her now, almost confused. Chaya’s eyes were shining, the golden brown a rich honey color, filled with warmth and some strange glow of happiness. Hell, a man would think he had just given her the crown jewels or something.

  “Chay.” He shook his head, letting his fingers trail down her cheek before pulling back and continuing to stare at that strange sight. “Baby, you’ve always had my trust.”

  “Not all of it, Natches.” She shook her head. “Not when it came to being here for you, with you. It’s something you don’t even fully allow Dawg and Rowdy.”

  He frowned at that. “I discussed this with them. We made up the plan together.”

  “And then you sent them away,” she told him. “You gave them just enough to satisfy them, just enough to make them feel as though they were a part of it, but you were still going in alone.”

  “I’m still going in alone,” he warned her, making certain she understood that. “You’re not going in with me, Chay.”

  “But I’ll be there with you,” she whispered. “And I’ll be close. I’ll know you’re safe, and you’re willing to allow that risk, so I can make certain you’re safe.”

  “Hell.” He rubbed at his jaw roughly. “Like you’d back down.” He glowered back at her. “You’d give me a run for stubborn any day, do you think I don’t know it? You just came up with a solution I wasn’t aware of. I’d have figured something out before the meeting.”

  It wasn’t that big of a deal, he kept trying to tell himself. He’d walk into the meeting, see what the hell was going on, get some information then hand Dayle Mackay over to Timothy Cranston and DHS. It was that simple. But he didn’t intend to take any chances with Chaya’s life.

  “And let me tell you something now,” she said then. “Earlier, you said he created you. Dayle Mackay didn’t create you. You made yourself. That’s all any of us do.”

  Natches shook his head at that before reaching out and dragging her from the chair to his arms.

  “You’re a dangerous woman,” he told her as he held her against him. “And maybe you’re right. Either way, I’ll be the one to bring him down. Now make that call to Alex and get your plan set up. I don’t want Dayle calling before you have everything ready.”

  He let her go and watched as she moved across the room to retrieve the wireless earpiece to her laptop.

  “Just in case the cells aren’t secure enough at the moment.” She frowned as she sat down in front of the laptop. “I prefer not to take chances.”

  She sent the encrypted e-mail quickly. A short, terse request for a new cell phone and accompanying accessories. Cranston would know what she was talking about.

  Within minutes, his reply came through. An affirmative and already in place. As usual, Cranston was moving ahead of everyone else, she thought with a smile as Natches read the message over her shoulder.

  “Bastard,” he muttered, but there was that vein of amusement again.

  “What time are Dawg and Rowdy supposed to be here?” she asked as she rose to her feet and moved to him, eager, almost desperate to touch him now.

  She needed him, a part of her was so hungry for him, to be held by him, that she wondered if she could bear to wait even as long as it would take to undress.

  He caught her immediately, his arms, so strong and sure, wrappingaround her, lifting her to him. “We have plenty of time,” he promised. “God, Chay, I’d steal time if I had to for this.”

  He tumbled her to the couch, coming over her as his hands pushed at the cotton leggings she wore and stripped them from her.

  His lips came over hers, his tongue delving deep, tangling with hers as her hands tore at his belt, at the fastening and zipper of his jeans.

  It was always like this with Chaya. Wild and explosive, so searing that sometimes he wondered if he would survive it. And always desperate. As though a part of him couldn’t believe she was actually here, in his arms, a part of his life.

  He’d let her run from him for too many years. Trying to let her have the time and the space she needed to come to grips with everything that had happened in her life. And he wondered if that hadn’t been a mistake. For both of them. The years they had lost could never be returned. But they would ensure that he cherished every moment he had with her.

  As he stripped off her clothes, then tore his own off, he stilled, staring down at her, naked and aroused, her body flushed and heated as he spread her thighs and moved slowly between them.

  Her breasts were swollen, her little nipples peaked and hard, reaching out to him, eager for his hungry mouth. He took first one, then the other, sucking at the sweetness of her flesh and the tight warmth of the tender peaks. He kissed the curve of her breast, then her shoulder, as he rose over her.

  “I love you, Chaya,” he whispered in her ear as he began to press his cock inside her.

  Instant, silken heat began to enclose his sensitive cock head. Liquid fire tightened around it and sucked him inside, inch by inch until he was gritting his teeth against the pleasure consuming him as he buried himself full length inside her.

  It was like living in ecstasy, the moments that he was a part of her. The way she took him, so freely, without hesitation, giving every part of herself to him whether she realized it or not.

  He had always known it. Whether it was one of the kisses he stole, or now, buried so deep inside her that he didn’t know where he ended and she began, he could feel her soul clasping him. Just as surely as the depths of her pussy encased him, her soul encased him as well.

  Natches sheltered her beneath him, held her to him and began to move, to thrust slow and easy inside her. Each penetration dragged a hard breath from his chest and caused her to breathe in roughly. She trembled beneath him, shuddered with the pleasure he gave her. She made him feel stronger than he knew he was, more powerful than he had ever imagined he could be.

  “Oh God, Natches. It’s so good.” Her breathless cry sent a surge of pleasure racing up his spine.

  “Hold on to me, Chay.” Her arms were already wrapped tight around his shoulders, her nails digging into his flesh. He carried her marks every time he took her, and he gloried in it.

  His head lifted so he could watch her face as he took her. Watch the flush that washed over her expression, the perspiration that gleamed against her flesh.

  Nothing in his life had ever been so beautiful as Chaya in her passion. And nothing, no one, could strip his control from him as she did.

  He moved against her, harder, deeper. He groaned out at the tight clasp, the feel of her pussy tightening around him, trying to hold him inside her each time he withdrew. The feel of her pleasure mounting, the convulsive clench of silken muscles around him, her rising cries, the demand in the return thrust of her hips.

  He was losing control. He could feel it. His muscles tightened as he fought to hold back just a little bit longer, to feel just a little bit more of her pleasure.

  Then she melted beneath him, around him. Her hips slammed into his and her cry filled his ears, and holding on was impossible.

  Her name was on his lips as he thrust inside her again, again, lost in the release rising inside him until he buried inside her one last time and felt the hard, forceful jets of his release throbbing from his cock.

  Nothing had ever been this good in his life. Nothing else had ever filled him, fulfilled him, as Chaya did.

  “I love you,” she whispered at his ear. “God help me, Natches, I love you so much.”

  And those words, they completed him.

  NINETEEN

  Natches moved the Nauti Dreams from her berth beside his cousins’ houseboats and pulled her into a spare slot at the other end of the marina. To preserve the illusion, he had told Chaya. His expression was still, too still and too quiet, as though he were with her in body only.

>   Chaya leaned against him as he maneuvered the craft from the second-floor control room. He sat back in the custom leather captain’s chair, guided the huge craft into the empty slot, and watched as two of the marina’s part-time workers secured her to the dock.

  It was dark; clouds rolled over the moon and blocked the stars as a cold wind whipped around the glass-enclosed control room.

  “When this is over, we’ll find a house,” he said as he stared off into the mountains surrounding them. “I think a baby needs a real house.”

  Chaya pressed her lips together and found the ache and the panic building inside her at his voice.

  “A baby just needs a home, Natches,” she told him softly. “And two parents.”

  What he was getting ready to do wasn’t without an element of danger. Chaya had read Dayle Mackay’s Marine file. He had been a mess cook with control issues. He used his fists indiscriminately, not caring who he hurt, or how he hurt them. But he was proficient with weapons, namely, a knife. His hand-to-hand skill rating was high, and from everything else she knew about him, he didn’t have a conscience.

  But it wasn’t the thought of the physical danger that had him staring off into the distance; it was who he was going up against. What he was going against. The man who should have been his father.

  “I was seven the first time he locked me in the closet,” he said. The lethal throb of cold determination in his voice had her hands tightening on his shoulders from where she stood behind him.

  “He kept me in there until I thought I was going to die,” he said.

  “Almost two days. No food, no water. When he dragged me out, I was almost senseless with fear. After I managed to get cleaned up and he gave me a drink of water, I lied for him, just like he wanted me to do before he put me in that closet. And he told me, ‘Loyalty, son. That’s all I want from you. Just be loyal.’ ”

  Natches couldn’t even remember what his father had needed him to lie about at the time. Something inconsequential. It always was. Just something to prove his loyalty.

  “And what did you want?” she asked him.

  Funny, he could hear the ache in her voice for him, just that easy. As though he were that much a part of her, that he knew how much she ached as he talked.

  He had never felt another person the way he felt Chaya. The way he had always felt Chaya.

  “I caught Faisal’s transmission the day they brought you into that camp,” he said instead of answering her question. “I checked the area, desperate for a place to hide you, because I just knew I was going to pull out a mess when I went in for you. The caves were a no go. It was the first place they would have checked. There was no other cover, no other place to hide but a hole.”

  Chaya felt her heart clench as he caught her hand and pulled her to his lap, surrounding her with warmth when she wanted to surround him with it.

  “I made that hole. I was going to shove you in it and try to find cover above you. I hate closed-in places, Chay. Dark, small places. That was always my weakness.”

  His cheek brushed against her hair.

  “You were in that hole with me,” she whispered.

  And he nodded.

  “I couldn’t leave you in there by yourself. You were all but blind, hurt. When I killed Nassar later, Chay, I think I scared myself, because I enjoyed it. I saw you, so brave and strong, and trying so hard to fight when you should have been leaning against me, crying, doing something other than storing your strength in case you had to go down fighting. And you would have gone down fighting.”

  She felt his heart beat beneath her cheek and held on to him, because he had forced himself into that hole with her.

  “I was losing it,” she told him then. “Before you pulled me out of there. I was ready to break, Natches. And in that hole, when I heard them coming for us, I was screaming in my head until you kissed me.” That kiss had pulled her back, it had saved her. “You made me strong. Because of you I was able to run. You held me up, you almost carried me. And because of you, I was able to stand the darkness in my own mind, and the fear that they were going to hurt me again. I didn’t want to hurt anymore. And when I lost Beth. You kept me sane. With your touch, with your kiss, with all the wild pleasure you poured into me that night.” She stared up at him, seeing his somber expression, even in the dark, her heart breaking for the man who had forced himself into that hole with her, and was now trying to face his own nightmare. Alone.

  His expression was shadowed, dark, but his eyes were alive. And they brought tears to her eyes. Fierce, shockingly determined. He would do whatever he had to do to make sure Dayle Mackay never hurt anyone he loved, ever again.

  “Clayton Winston called while you were in the shower earlier,” he said. “He got to talk to Christopher. Then DHS called him back. They’ve arranged transportation through a private broker to D.C., where he can see his son in a supervised visit.”

  Chaya closed her eyes, thankful Cranston had followed through with that.

  “Clayton’s dying,” he said. “Doctors don’t think he’ll see the year out. He needed this before he passes on.”

  “And what do you need, Natches?”

  It felt like an epitaph, the way he was talking, as though he wouldn’t return to her, and she refused to consider that.

  “Come on.” He lifted her from his lap and drew her through the doorway into the bedroom. There, he closed the door to the control room and locked it with a flick of his fingers.

  “You didn’t answer me.” She turned to face him in the darkness of the room. The drapes had been drawn that morning and the room was almost pitch black now.

  He turned on the low lamp by the bed and turned to face her.

  “You’re coming back to me,” she whispered, her breath hitching. “Don’t you look at me like that. You’re going to be covered, and you’re coming back to me.”

  And tears filled her eyes, because she couldn’t imagine anything less.

  “I’m coming back to you,” he promised her. “One way or the other, I’m coming back, Chay. But how will you see me, how will our child see me if I come back with blood on my hands?”

  His father’s blood. She could see it in his face, his uncertainty that he could leave Dayle Mackay alive.

  “Bullies are weak,” she told him huskily. “You get what DHS needs and they’ll break him. I swear to you, Natches, they’ll break him and they’ll put the rest of that group away for good. You’ll win.”

  She knew they would. She was the interrogation specialist, but she only interrogated subjects of interest, she didn’t interrogate suspects, nor did she interrogate suspected terrorists, homegrown or foreign. There was a division for that, men and women who made her worst nightmares seem like a picnic in the park.

  He nodded. The confidence, the sheer knowledge in his eyes that he would do whatever it took to protect what belonged to him, humbled her. He tried to be a shield between the world and those he loved, always trying to protect them, to make certain danger never touched them. And he never expected, never asked, for the same, though he knew Dawg, Rowdy, and Ray Mackay had always been there for him. He had never asked.

  “We’re good to go then.” He nodded before moving to her, his lips settling on hers like a promise. A gentle, forever promise, as sweet and heated as a dream.

  “We’re good to go.” She nodded, and she pushed back the fears. She would cover the angles, she would create a bubble around him that could do nothing less than protect him from any outside forces.

  But inside that bubble, Natches had to face the knowledge that he wasn’t just betraying a monster. He also had to confront that last glimmer of hope, that the monster had a soul.

  Monsters didn’t have souls though, Natches assured himself as the meeting with his cousins and Alex Jansen drew to a close.

  Not for the first time, he found himself amazed at Chaya’s knowledge, and her ability to find workable solutions to the problems that were going to face them when it came to executing the plan th
ey had conceived.

  Illegal wiretapping was nothing new, and Cranston wasn’t above using it to make certain a plan was coming together. A call had been made to Dayle Mackay by one of the men watching the Mackay cousins, informing him of the division between Natches and his cousins over an old picture, evidence against a citizen of Somerset in the stolen missiles case, and Natches’s refusal to give the authorities pertinent information where that citizen was concerned.

  And Dayle had been interested.

  Natches listened to the other man’s voice on the digital recording Alex had slipped in to him. The smug certainty in Dayle’s voice—that, finally, blood had thickened in Natches’s veins and become more substantial than water.

  He turned his back on his cousins as the recording played, kept his expression calm. This wasn’t a Mackay he was going after; it was just another monster. Just as it had been in the Marines. It wasn’t a person. It was a target, nothing more.

  “Moving the Nauti Dreams was also noted,” Alex told them all softly and switched to the recording of another call. Natches’s phone call to another marina and the arrangement of transportation for his houseboat was given as well. With each call, Dayle became more confident, more certain that his son and cousins were finally making the split he had been waiting on.

  “That’s my boy,” Dayle mused softly, smugly. “I knew it wouldn’t take long.”

  “What about the woman? The agent with him?” the voice on the other end questioned him. Daniel Reynolds was one of the men in the photo, one of the fanatical leaders of the future revolution.

  “Women are easy to get rid of,” Dayle snorted. “An accident, a few little drugs popped into her drink, and she does the bar on a Saturday night. Natches’ll drop her.”

  “She’s still an agent.”

  “And she doesn’t have the information he has,” Dayle pointed out. “No doubt, that relationship will terminate soon enough, on its own. I’ll call him soon.”

  “Are you certain about this?” the other voice pushed determinedly. “We can’t afford to mess up.”