Bear Claw Bodyguard (13 page)

His athlete’s body surged against hers, sure and strong.
She moaned at the building sensations and her hands splayed open on his back as pleasure robbed her of the ability to do much more than hold on and counterpoint his thrusts with an instinctive rhythm of her own that made him growl her name low at the back of his throat.

They rocked together, and the heat built within her. They kissed, and needs coiled tighter and tighter still. When he rasped her name and pressed his forehead to hers, she felt powerful, and when his thrust worked that secret inner spot that drove her wild, she could moan and cling, because she felt safe with him.

Passion swept over her like a spring storm at high altitude, powerful and lovely, leaving her breathless with the climb. She dug her fingers into the strong columns of muscle on either side of his spine, helpless to do anything other than ride the surging ascent as she rocketed up, up, up…and then hung poised.

In that moment, she was wholly aware of her own body and his, and the way they fit together. Then the quiet shattered into a tingling chorus of pleasure that contracted inward around his hard, driving flesh as he rasped her name once more, and then exploded outward, toppling her from the high altitude she had attained and plunging her into the vibrating waves of a huge orgasm.

The starbursts of color behind her eyelids went to red and then blurred to gray as every fiber of her being concentrated itself at the point of their joining. Her inner muscles closed around him, worked him, milked him, and she whispered, “Oh,
Jack
.”

He stiffened and bucked against her, once, twice and a third time, and then he let out an inarticulate noise and sank into her, against her, grinding with delicious thrusts
as he came, shuddering and groaning her name. His pleasure prolonged hers, sending the delicious tension spiraling through her once more. She wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed her face into the side of his neck and reveled in the sensations as her orgasm faded to aftershocks, and then to a deep, drugging, warm afterglow of satisfaction.

They lay like that, wrapped together and breathing in synchrony, for a long time. Long enough that their bodies cooled and she started to notice the chill mountain air.

She must have shivered, or else she and Jack were on the same wavelength, because he lifted off her, shifted them so they were on their sides facing each other, dealt with the condom and then brought up the blanket and tucked them in together with a gentle thoroughness that made her heart give a little
thudda-thudda.

It was tempting to burrow into him, close her eyes and doze. She didn’t want to analyze a sexual encounter that had catapulted right into her top-five list—she wasn’t willing to really think any further than that—but it was inevitable, wasn’t it? So as her brain started to come back online, bringing with it new nerves and a sense that what they had just done together might not have been her best move ever, she stirred against him, starting to rouse.

“Don’t,” he said softly. “Not yet.”

Her eyes flew open. “What?”

“Don’t think about it. Just let it be for tonight. Okay?”

Body easing of a tension she hadn’t even consciously recognized until that moment, she smiled softly. “I thought that was my line.”

“Maybe I’ve learned a couple of things in the past few days.” He kissed the corners of her mouth, expression se
rious but not dire, and more relaxed than she’d seen him before. She was struck anew by the mountain-lake-blue of his gorgeous eyes, and remembered noticing them that first time in the airport and thinking he was way out of her usual league.

Apparently, she’d been promoted, at least temporarily. And thank God for that.

“Okay.” She blew out a breath, letting go of more of the unacknowledged tension. “Yeah. Okay.” Then, flushing a little at the loss of her usual postcoital no-harm-no-foul cool, she said, “That was pretty special.”

“That’s because you’re pretty special.”

She wasn’t sure which was worse, the fact that he said it with a bit too much feeling, stirring low-grade nerves in her belly…or the fact that hearing it made her want to cuddle into him and bask in the shared warmth of their bodies, the shared afterglow of their lovemaking. Which wasn’t her usual style, not by a long shot.

It wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule that she didn’t spend the night with her lovers, or vice versa, but it was a rare event. Here, though, although she could blame it on the cave and the danger, the reality was that she would have wanted to stay regardless. Which was usually her cue to leave.

“You’re doing it again.”

She snapped her gaze back to his. “Doing what?”

“Thinking. I’ve got a better idea for what we can do instead.”

Arching an eyebrow, even though it didn’t take a rocket scientist—or a plant doctor—to guess what he had in mind, she said, “Oh, really? Why don’t you whisper it in my ear?”

She was aiming for playful, but that got derailed when
he leaned in, cupped one of her breasts in his wide, warm palm and told her, in explicit detail, exactly what he wanted to do. As he spoke, her breath came short, her nipples peaked and she shuddered with a new wash of longing made even more intense than before because she knew now what it felt like to be with him.

This time she heard the warning bells loud and clear: they said she needed to ease back and regain control of both herself and their encounter.

Before that thought could fully form, though, he rose over her, pressed his body full-length against hers, and took her mouth in a long, slow, drugging kiss that sent her floating once more, awash in a storm of sensation and desire. On some level she told herself that this was a bad idea, that she shouldn’t let it go on like this. But as his hands moved up her body, caressing and inciting with achingly slow gentleness, she melted, unable to remember why the balance between them even mattered.

So she softened against him, letting him be in charge, and felt an added frisson of excitement at the realization that she could do that with him. She trusted him that much.

As if realizing what she was giving up to him, what it meant, he caught her face in his hands, murmured her name and pressed his lips to hers in a chaste kiss that somehow said
Thank you,
or maybe
I won’t let you down.
And if the second sentiment brought a quiver of nerves, they were quickly swept away by heat and longing when he kissed her again and, without warning or preamble, positioned himself to slide into her once more.

She felt the slick heat of a fresh rubber, the hard pulse of fresh need, and parted her legs for him, inviting him
inside. He seated himself on a powerful thrust that tugged at her out-of-practice muscles even as it brought new pleasure spiraling inside her. She would have moved with him, urged him on, even set the pace, but when she shifted to get a hand between their bodies, he caught her wrists, drew her arms around his neck, and said softly, “Let me love you.”

Again, a quiver of nerves. Again, lost in the heat of desire.

He kissed her over and over, and all the while moved within her, with thrusts that began as slow hip-roll pulses and built from there. As before, he absorbed her responses and used the information to bring her pleasure spiraling higher and higher still. Now, though, it seemed he was anticipating those responses because he touched her in all the right places, stroked her with exactly the perfect pressure and speed. And where with another man all that attention to the details might have seemed calculated, coming from him it made her chest ache with the knowledge that he was paying attention to her, thinking about her. Only her.

He caressed her, kissed her, thrust into her…and he made love to her, well and truly.

She had long called the act by that name, but now the two words took on a new and deeper meaning for her. On one level, she knew that should be a terrifying concept to the woman she’d worked so hard to make herself into. On another, though, she couldn’t find any terror amid the passion. She burned beneath his touch, coming alive in a second orgasm that caught her by surprise, sliding through her on a long, rolling wave of pleasure that leveled off but didn’t subside. Instead, her senses hung poised as
his tempo quickened and his breathing increased, and he started to thrust in a new and determined rhythm.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yesyesyes!” Another orgasm washed through her, or maybe this one was a continuation of the last; she didn’t know. All she knew was that the right answer for her, then and there, was to tighten her arms around his neck, press her cheek to his and ride out the huge, pleasurable waves as he shuddered and came deep inside her, with an orgasm that, like the act itself, seemed somehow far more meaningful than it ever had for her before.

And this time when they lay cooling once more, she didn’t have to work at keeping her brain quiet; it just
was
quiet. She was content to lie there in his arms, warm, drowsy and drifting, and listening to the sounds of the night falling around them.

She was, so very atypically, content to just
be
.

Even later, after the lethargy passed and they got up and moved around a little, smiling softly when their eyes met or their bodies brushed in passing, they didn’t really talk about what was happening between them. And the same held true when, long after dark and working by the illumination of tiny flashlights that they used as sparingly as possible, they finished assembling the stove and cooked a decent camp dinner by the dim glow of the propane burner. They talked, of course—about the meal, the terrain, a bit about their respective childhoods, but not about them.

That was just fine with her. They had talked enough last night for any two of her other relationships, maybe three, and they had their ground rules, so they didn’t need to discuss any of it further. And she didn’t want to talk about
the case or about what was going to happen tomorrow. If tonight was the only time they were going to have before their higher-ups insisted that she leave Bear Claw for her own safety, then she wanted it to just be about the two of them.

And it was. It was just the two of them as they sand-scoured the dishes and packed them away, and it was just the two of them as they sat outside the cave mouth for a while, wrapped in a blanket and cuddled together to watch the impossibly starry sky. And it was just the two of them as they returned to the air mattress, which should have seemed far too small for them both but somehow didn’t.

They dozed, woke, made love and then fell asleep for real—or at least Tori did, because the next thing she knew, she was being nudged awake, confused and disoriented to find herself wrapped around a warm, naked male body. She reared back and blinked up into lake-blue eyes that looked far more awake that she was, and were filled with warm affection and, she thought, an undercurrent of wary regret.

Memory returned quickly, and with it came a throb that wasn’t quite horror, but wasn’t all that far off.

Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Ohboyohboyohboy.
She had done it; she had made love with Jack. She had spent the night with him, was waking up with him, had let him in deeper than anyone since…heck, deeper than anyone ever before. Nerves pinged through her and her heartbeat accelerated to a fast
thump-thump-thump
that seemed to echo in the cave, until she realized the noise
was
echoing in the cave, and it wasn’t her heart.

Glancing out through the cave mouth, where it was full daylight, the dawn long gone while she’d slept in her tem
porary lover’s arms. She couldn’t see what was making the noise, but as her head cleared, her stomach knotted on the sure knowledge of what she was hearing.

It was a helicopter. Morning had come, and with it, their rescue. It was time for them to return to reality.

She looked back at him, met his eyes and saw the knowledge there that they weren’t going to get a chance to postmortem what had turned out to be the best night of her life. They were just going to walk away from it, from each other, no harm, no foul.

Then again, there was no need to prolong an ending that they had both agreed was inevitable. For the first time, though, she had a feeling it was going to hurt like hell to walk away.

“W
E HAVE A PROBLEM
.” The Investor’s voice was an annoyed rasp on the other end of the line, sending a shiver down the back of Percy’s neck. “Or should I say that
you
have a problem?”

The shiver stayed put even though the thermostat in the mayor’s office was set to seventy-eight except when there were eco-lobbyists in the vicinity, which there weren’t today. He was still wearing his suit jacket from an earlier on-camera appearance, although he’d lost the tie. And, as he sat at his desk and covered his eyes with one hand to block out the too-bright sunlight coming in through the window, he started to sweat and the smell of his early lunch instantly went from tempting to puke-inducing.

“I did it,” he whispered. “Is that what you want to hear? I did it. I went up there and punched holes in the lines myself. I didn’t trust anyone else to do it right.” Or to stay quiet about it.

He hadn’t anticipated the guilt, though, or how he kept seeing the way the steering lines had bled bloody red, glistening in the feeble beam of his penlight after he stabbed them. He smelled the ooze when he closed his eyes, and he’d dreamed of the way it had felt to cut them—initial resistance followed by an easier give once the blade bit through the outer covering of each hose, making incisions small enough that the vehicle would be miles away from Station Fourteen—the last station at the edge of beyond—when it failed.

Guilt, yeah. That was the heavy pressure on his chest that wasn’t letting him breathe. He had killed Williams and the woman himself rather than just turning his usual blind eye while his business partner did the dirty work. And he hadn’t even had the guts to do it cleanly.

“You did it yourself so it wouldn’t get screwed up? That’s rich, because guess what? It got screwed up. More accurately,
you
screwed it up. I said to make it look like an accident, not give them every damn option to survive…and come close to blowing my operation right to hell.”