by Snow, Nicole
And I don’t even resist as she suddenly flexes, grips me tight in her thighs, and flips me over in an agile twist of her body.
My thrusting hardness moves inside her in ways that have my eyes rolling back in my head from the friction.
Suddenly, she’s on top, straddling me.
Cocky as hell as she looks down at me and undulates her hips in this gyration that makes my balls clench in perfect hot knots of pleasure, a groan rumbling in my chest.
“Now,” she murmurs, flicking that candy on her tongue like she’s strumming it against my pulsing cock, already starting to move. “Now, we do this my way.”
I don’t have it in me to argue.
Not when she’s so gorgeous, arched above me and rolling her entire body with perfect control, throwing herself into using my cock to pleasure herself, leaving me shuddering.
Savage waves of tightness roll over me, squeezing me until I growl like I’ve lost my damn mind.
Yeah.
We do this her way.
And maybe I have.
Maybe I’m never coming back.
Because she’s got me turned inside out and not thinking straight.
Even if it means risking my life against one of the most powerful corporations on Earth.
Just to do the right thing by her.
Just to free Fuchsia from whatever the fuck must’ve haunted her since the day she was born.
* * *
In the cooling sweat of the afterglow, she lights a cigarette, offering me a drag before taking it back.
And she’s still got that candy, sucked down to a tiny ball but persistently clicking against her teeth.
I wonder how it tastes with menthol.
I’d half expected her to go squirming away once she was done with me, disdaining all affection—but instead she’s tucked in the crook of my arm, her head draped against my shoulder while she stares up at the coils of smoke rising toward the ceiling.
I just stare at her, trying not to be too obvious.
What can I say?
It’s comfortable.
More familiar and easy than it has any business being, really.
But as she clacks her candy again, I ask, “Do you never take that shit out of your mouth?”
In response, she glances past me, grey eyes cutting toward the mess of our clothes on the floor.
When I see what she’s looking at, I lose it, breaking the silence with a loud chuckle.
Tumbling out from the pockets of her tactical pants, several more of those pink spheres in clear plastic wrappers spill across the floor.
“That you trying to tell me you’ve got an oral fixation?” I can’t help laughing again.
“Not quite like that.” She smiles in a sort of vague, self-mocking way, pulling her smoke from her lips and blowing out an ashen puff.
It’s almost graceful. Serene. My dick stirs to life again for the fourth time tonight.
She makes an O of her mouth around the remnants of pink in her lips before sucking it back in. “It keeps me calm. That’s all. It’s like...as long as I’ve got that to focus on, nothing will ever startle me or make me afraid.”
“Thought it might be a comfort object.” And I can’t help holding her closer, just for a moment, as if I could protect her. “Did you start that with the Nightjars training?”
“No.” Bitter, but amused, she stares through the wall. “Dr. Ross hates it. But he can’t get me to stop.”
“It’d be a sorry day if you took orders from that quack,” I say.
She snorts. Her eyes unfocus for a moment, her brows knitting. “I can’t remember anyone. It’s like they were all wiped away, and when I look for where they should be, there aren’t even holes that tell me something used to be there. No mother, no father, no sisters or brothers.” Her voice softens. “But I think...maybe I had a grandmother, once. And she gave me candies like these.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
I don’t think she wants me to, as if I’d be looking directly at her weakness to acknowledge something so personal.
So I don’t say anything at all.
I just hold her close, and hope that one day, we’ll settle a few scores.
Secretly, I hope I won’t be a blank space in her mind, too, erased from her memory with only the vaguest idea that something should be there.
* * *
Present
Goddamn, she’s still just as beautiful as yesterday.
It doesn’t matter if she’s a ragged stray cat or the sleek luxury show creature she’s grown into, adopting a taste for the finer things over the years—my fault, wooing her with designer brands and watching her discover the power in feeling beautiful, the pleasure in having lovely things to call hers instead of what the company just provided for her.
She’s still this vibrant whirlpool of energy who attracts everything around her like a magnet.
Men.
Money.
Trouble.
And she’s about to get herself in deep trouble now, if she’s not careful.
Well, shit.
If I’m going to rise from the dead, I guess there’s no better reason to do it than to pull the woman now known only as Fuchsia Delaney back from the brink.
Again.
Because that promise she made years ago was dead right—nobody forgets Fuchsia.
After all these years, I damn well haven’t.
I just wasn’t expecting to pull into Bellingham to see her right there, stepping into full view in the middle of a day full of pouring rain as silver as her incisive eyes.
She’s come to town as fashionable as ever in a high-necked black velour coat, a high-belted black dress with a tight pencil skirt, and sleek black stockings paired with gleaming black pumps.
I’m not surprised she didn’t notice me tailing her across town, even if she glanced back over her shoulder a few times.
That sixth sense we have for each other lives on despite no contact for well over a decade.
It’s hard to hold on to when she thinks I’m dead, and I’ve let her think that.
Hell, I’ve let everyone think that, because it was what Galentron wanted. Me out of the way.
So I went to ground after they failed to ice me out, striking back when I could, foiling their schemes and blunting their crawl into darker directions. Always waiting for my knockout blow and a chance to make amends.
I just hadn’t expected her to get there faster, much less catalyze the company’s downfall with the shitshow that happened in small-town Heart’s Edge.
But it’s turning into a pattern.
I don’t know how she found out the truth about Leland Durham.
My intel came from a few off-record contacts in underground intelligence communities. Fuchsia’s got a few too many arrest warrants out for her sweet ass right now for anyone smart to risk talking to her. Not willingly.
She’s been making bold moves these last few years.
Maybe too bold.
I don’t think she’s even trying to hide herself as she slews her rental car to a halt outside the Bellingham airfield and steps out, hefting a bulky hardshell luggage bag from her trunk, then stalking through the chain-link gate and right past two security guards in rain slickers, ignoring their annoyed shouts.
She’s going in hot with big enough lady-balls to knock down a house.
Shame she doesn’t know what I do.
That the rain just delayed Durham’s flight to Fiji, and while he’s grounded, he decided to expand his crew manifest rather than wait for them to join him on a later illicit flight.
He’s called in the cavalry.
A full personal guard, not just the skeleton crew scheduled to fly with him today.
He’s not taking any chances.
And dear, bright, bold, fearless Fuchsia Delaney is about to plant her pretty designer heels in the muck.
About to make the biggest fucking mistake of her life.
About to die if I don’t do somethin
g to save her.
6
The Sweetest Thing (Fuchsia)
I think what I’m afraid of most?
That my daughter could turn out just like me.
That when I find her, I’ll actually recognize the girl who was stolen away from me...and not like any mother ever should.
She’ll be a cold, empty husk, drained of all humanity, transformed into this thoughtless, obedient creature who can never have any hope of being an ordinary, happy girl.
Taken from a normal life and put into one of those abominable training programs Galentron fosters, or worse. If I’m lucky, they didn’t use her as a fucking test case for the more exotic, horrifying biological schemes they were planning to the bitter end.
The foster homes and secret dorms are bad enough.
They paint it as philanthropy.
Funneling unadoptable male orphans like Lion-boy Leo into programs that will give them an education, a home, a future with one of the most elite military programs in the world. States and private orphanages practically jump at the chance to sign the NDA and hand over the kids.
Guiding vulnerable young women with no home, no living guardians, into career paths that will teach them valuable corporate skills and the diplomacy necessary to function in the world of high-powered politics. I’ll let you guess who they pushed along that path.
It’s not a lie, not wholly.
Except the part about having a future.
Or any shred of normal civilian freedom.
There’s no life worth living in becoming an obedient, brainwashed machine deployed as a tool for unspeakable espionage and murder.
I can’t even name the number of international laws I’ve violated.
All for the sake of lining Durham’s pockets.
And the idea that Durham took my daughter away so he could raise her into a carbon copy of me, so he could ruin her the way Galentron ruined me?
If sheer rage could power anything, this entire airfield would be launched into the air in a rubble-strewn mess of tarmac and shredded planes.
Probably a few body parts, too.
Definitely a lot of blood.
Because I’m vibrating so hard, I could probably kill someone with a look, burning so hot inside that not even the rain pelting down through my hair and clothes cools me off.
I’ve found a place out of sight after bulling my way past the minimal gate security guards. They’ve probably been bribed handsomely by Durham’s entourage to ignore anything strange happening today, anyway.
Gate security isn’t a problem.
They’re just there to make sure no one storms the place with a bomb and makes the TSA look bad. They have no way of knowing I don’t belong with the boarding party. All I have to do is look impatient and important to keep them from questioning me.
The problem is the ground crew—several near-identical men in coveralls, moving around like they’re servicing the sleek, silvery private plane currently grounded and waiting for takeoff on one of the airstrips.
They aren’t ordinary ground crew.
Those are Nighthawks.
The successors to the Nightjars program that created me—and these guys are far more deadly. Dr. Ross was only experimenting with trigger words and deep liminal brainwashing techniques with the girls who became Nightjars.
He perfected it on the Nighthawks when he created massive, supremely refined supersoldiers like Leo.
And those men down there aren’t interested in handling anyone’s baggage.
They’re just there to make sure no one gets within a fifty-foot radius of Durham’s plane alive.
Good thing I’ve never let things like that stop me.
Fun fact: any good bitch scorned runs just like the post office.
Neither rain, nor sleet, nor shine, nor oversized dick-waving brutes will stop me from getting my man.
Trust me, I’ve powered through worse.
Much, much worse.
And today, I’ll do it again.
* * *
Fifteen Years Ago
I thought I’d forgotten how to feel fear years ago.
There’s no point in fear.
Either I’ll succeed or I won’t.
If I don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying—and frankly, with the kinds of situations I find myself in, if I don’t succeed?
I’ll be too dead to throw a tantrum over it.
Hard to really fear the aftermath if you’re not around for it.
But the fact that I’m still here should tell you I’ve got a pretty good win ratio.
On my missions, in my general life...it hasn’t been half bad.
I’m not that scrappy little girl anymore who draws men in by looking younger than I really am, yet wise beyond my years.
That was Patty Brin.
Fuchsia Delaney, on the other hand, is a superior model. She’s older, wiser-in-fact, more subtle, and she even enjoys a few sparse creature comforts.
I travel in style now, no thanks to a certain growly, handsome, strangely refined man introducing me to the glamorous stuff you only find in rich people’s magazines. And whenever I can, I travel with that man.
I keep Oliver Major on my arm quite happily.
I’m not sure how this thing between us has lasted so long.
Five years and counting.
Five years together, and somehow I didn’t even notice them passing in the blink of an eye.
Maybe because we don’t really put a label to it.
It’s easier that way.
We just slip in and out of each other’s lives. We’re both supremely busy people.
He’s still practically number one behind Durham at Galentron, and still despises it. Oliver’s less the power behind the throne and more the workhorse who has no choice but to take his king’s insane plans and make them a barely palatable reality.
I’m more the field work type.
Wetworks, espionage, the cause of most unfortunate accidents for enemies of the company.
I’m out a lot.
But somehow, the first thing I do, every time I find my way back to Seattle, is set out for this lofty penthouse and tumble into Oliver’s arms. Into his bed. Into his whiskey-dark eyes.
It’s a nice kind of weird having a man you want to surrender to.
As long as we don’t talk, it is what it is.
There are a lot of things we don’t talk about.
Like the grand plans we used to whisper about under cover of darkness, secretive and carefully coded. Running through the probabilities of how we could bring down Galentron or even conquer it from the inside out for ourselves, if we just had the right chance.
About how we somehow got snared deeper in the web because that chance never came.
Now, we’re just as guilty. I don’t know how to deal with that when “I had no choice, they indoctrinated me as a teenager” doesn’t really fly.
Not when you’re looking at more bodies than you have fingers and toes to count, plus a few cases of high-profile international data theft.
Like I said.
I get around.
Carmen Sandiego has nothing on me. Besides, I wouldn’t be caught dead in that Bloody Mary trench coat of hers.
After the hell I’ve walked through and the demons I’ve had a hand in creating, there are few things that can scare me.
But if anything can, it’s the idea of telling Oliver Major my latest secret.
I’m pregnant.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it.
And there’s absolutely no chance it’s anyone’s but his.
I may play the ever-deadly femme fatale when I’m after my marks, but no one so much as gets a hand up my skirt without losing it.
Par for the course.
It’s like everything is going wrong lately.
My relationship.
My life.
My ambitions.
Even my last mission. Somehow, I’m having some kind of—ugh!—conscience over neutralizing my last
target.
Galentron failed a federal medical inspection about six months ago and paid handsomely to cover it up, but a CDC scientist with a loud mouth went whistleblower. The rogue outed the dangerous conditions Galentron operates under when handling highly lethal viral payloads confiscated from rival countries developing unearthly biological weaponry.
That got Durham a lost contract—tens of millions with the government, pulled more to save face on the politicians’ sides than out of any real care for broken rules.
If they hadn’t gotten caught, they’d have greenlighted anything Galentron wanted to do.
And they probably don’t give half a damn that their faithful informant is now six feet under.
Still, it doesn’t sit right with me.
They didn’t have to give a kill order.
I could’ve just...done a little dirty work and made it look like he violated enough protocols with his report so he’d end up jailed for life on a treason charge. It would suck, sure, but he wouldn’t be dead.
His family wouldn’t be mourning him, and probably setting themselves up for a frightening visit the more they blab to news outlets about “suspicious circumstances.”
God. Don’t they get it?
It’s a domino effect that can only end in tragedy. One that never should’ve been kicked off in the first place.
Durham’s been getting more reckless. More ruthless. More angry.
Or maybe I’m just going soft all of a sudden, now that I’m facing an infusion of mommy hormones and the prospect of carrying a child to term when I know just how horrible the world it’ll be born into is.
Sigh.
I rest a hand over my stomach as I stand just inside the penthouse’s elevator, holding the doors open with my body and staring at Oliver’s door.
On the other side of it, destiny awaits.
A man who says he...
...he actually feels things for me.
Even after five freaking years, I don’t know how to handle that.
Maybe we don’t always see eye to eye.
We’ve had ripping arguments over the years about what to do with Galentron and our miserable careers, the best way to take them down from inside, only to flop back into ignoring it under the weight of our own helplessness.