Enemy Mine (The Base Branch Series Book 1) (10 page)

Sloan dug her heels into his butt and began rolling her hips in time with his pounding. Hell, that’s what it was. Unabashed. Uninhibited. Animalistic blows between bodies. Never before had he been this barbaric, this mindless with lust. Unchecked for care or concern about his sheer size compared to a woman’s.

But she made no move to stop him. In fact, she skewered his lats with her fingers, biting into his skin through his damn shirt. She pulled him into her as fiercely as he pushed. She bucked and moaned.

“That’s more like it,” she breathed.

Her words spurred him on. He braced his feet farther apart and supported Sloan’s weight with his arms on her thighs and his hands cupping her lush ass. Repeatedly, he raised her high then eased her down his shaft.

Baine could tell she was close. Her body was one hundred percent wet and willing. She panted and purred, and nearly strangled him with her tight channel and her roving hands. But something about the way her brows knitted tight told him her mind was getting in the way. Her eyes had been closed for too long.

“Sloan, open your eyes. Look at me. Look at us. How well we fit. How needy we are for this.”

She bit her lower lip, but looked down where their bodies joined. Her breath rushed over his chest, sultry and warm. Their gazes met, her brow smooth. Red flushed her cheeks as she wrapped her hands around his neck and rolled her hips. Those dark creamy breasts spilled over the top of the dress again as she arched and vibrated in his arms. Her head turned toward the night sky.

“Oh yes,” she shouted.

Her inner muscles shackled his dick deep inside her body. His balls weighed a thousand pounds before she squeezed the most painfully amazing orgasm from them. The pressure raced up his cock and exploded into her womb. His eyes closed against the exquisite ache. Every muscle in his body contracted as he came. Hard. So hard his knees buckled as the last of his ejaculation spilled into her.

Slowly he sank to the floor, supporting them both on his knees and the balls of his feet with the last vestiges of his strength. Sloan lay draped over him. Her head rested on his shoulder while her arms dangled over his back. The closeness surprised and sated him. He hadn’t expected her to be so passionate, open, and engaged. Especially considering who she was, who his father was, and who she thought him to be.

A ruthless killer.

Maybe she wasn’t far off the mark. Because, when he needed to be, he was exactly that.

He shoved the mental monopoly to the side and focused on the strumming heart, not inside, but against his chest. It hummed like the flaps of a hummingbird’s wings. Baine turned his face toward hers and savored the warmth of her flushed cheek on his. His hand smoothed the ebony hair over her head then lifted the damp strands off her back. As though the grasslands were in tune with their consumed state, a gentle wind skipped across their skin and rustled errant wisps of her hair.

The breeze must have revived Sloan. She peeled herself off his chest then stared down at their still connected bodies. Her eyes widened as they met his gaze. Her jaw jetted out slightly.

Totally spent, Baine braced, the best he could, for the storm.

S
loan had never been a fool
, until she fooled herself.

She hadn’t lied to Ryan when he’d asked if she could kill Baine. She had and would never lie to him, but apparently she didn’t hold the same scruples about lying to herself.
Mother fucker.
She could no more kill him than she could put a barrel in her mouth and pull the trigger. She could no more turn him away than she could refuse water after spending two days jogging across the desert. And both went against every scrap of intel, training, and intelligence she possessed.

He was the enemy. No matter how much sorrow his eyes held. His touch stirred the need within her soul. Despite years of longing for something more than hate to fill her heart, she found herself longing for the security Baine had once given her.

What had she done?

Betrayed her country. And worse, betrayed herself.

Disgust roiled in her belly. A cold sweat broke out on her upper lip. She pushed Baine’s chest, but his arms held her firm. Again, she pressed.

“Please, don’t do this,” he begged.

The pleading in his voice squeezed the welling tears from her eyes. She fastened them shut against the torrent of emotion. Her head shook back and forth, as if her brain couldn’t comprehend the sentiment.

In response to her jostling, he stood. The movement caused the length of him to shift inside her and she was struck with grief. Their bodies tangled together created the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen or experienced in her entire life. And they could never be.

“Stay,” he whispered. His hand cupped her cheek, stilling her outburst. The pad of his thumb swiped at the wetness on her face.

“Let me go,” she demanded.

“I can’t. I should, but I can’t.”

The tenderness in his voice and actions unhinged her. It pushed her too near the edge of hope, and her cynical core revolted. Anger met and surpassed misery. The need to be free of his embrace vibrated through her body.

Sloan’s fists beat his chest. She kicked and tried to lever herself off him, but Baine held tight. Her eyes flew open and she seared him with a hostile gaze. “Let me go,” she demanded again.

“Sloan, please let me—"

She stopped him with an uppercut to the jaw.

He didn’t stagger, but she’d stunned him enough to slip from his arms and place several feet between them.

“Damn,” he said, shaking his head to clear the fuzz.

While she adjusted and zipped up the dress the best she could, Baine righted his pants and waggled his mandible. Sloan grabbed her shoes from where they’d fallen and stepped around him into the doorway.

His words stopped her.

“I heard the crash. There was no warning. No squeal of brakes. Not the small silence before impact. You know the one where everyone holds their breath, hoping not to hear the impending collision? It was just this awful screech of crunching metal. I knew without a doubt my mother was dead.”

When she turned back toward him, Baine shifted and looked down at his hands as he scrubbed them together, obviously uncomfortable. He’d fastened one of the remaining buttons on his shirt, but the tails hung open. He looked younger and somehow smaller, maybe. No, not smaller. Hard for a man who stood four or five inches over six feet and weighed about two of her to appear small…but vulnerable, maybe? The adjective seemed out of place on such a man, and, Lord help her, endearing.

“All the reports said she had a massive stroke, causing her to lose control of the car, and she died from injuries sustained when she struck the building.” He smiled and Sloan saw roots of deep sadness in the glint of his eyes and the wrinkle of his brow. “But,” he continued, “a head-on impact doesn’t leave a circular entrance wound on one side of a person’s skull and blow the other side completely away.”

“He ordered the hit,” Sloan stated more than asked.

Baine’s gaze met hers for the first time since she fled his arms. “She was leaving him. We both were. Not that I’d ever really been with him. I spent most of my youth at boarding schools in London, I had thought, because both my parents didn’t give a shit about me. Turned out, it was my mother’s way of protecting me.”

A silent minute passed then Baine stepped forward and pinned her with his blazing no-nonsense gaze. “I will strip my father of everything he holds dear. His wealth. His business. His power. And his legacy. I’ll make him go on living in the dirtiest back hole prison with nothing, hurting him more than any physical pain or death could.”

He closed the gap between them. His scent polluted her air. Sloan bit her cheek against the piercingly decadent aroma. His warm fingers on her chin turned her face up to his.

“You can help me, Sloan, or you can get the hell out of here. Out of this house and this continent. Do you understand?”

Her fists balled at her sides.

“You want to hit me again, don’t you?” he asked. The barest hint of a smile played over his swollen red lips.

Damn him and his smile because the expression infuriated and softened her at the same time. “I want to knock the smugness right off your face.”

“That’s my girl,” he nodded.

“I’m no—"

“Figure of speech,” he cut in, holding up a palm. “What’s it going to be?”

She swatted his hand from her face. “There’s no way in heaven or hell I’m leaving.”

“I know,” he responded with a purse of his lips. “So, you’re going to help me?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether you have a solid plan or not.”

He took a step back and raked a hand through his already rumpled hair and down his face. The scratch of his whiskers sounded like the ripping of Velcro. Her face and neck burned where the hair had buffed her skin.

Baine grabbed her hand and, once again, dragged her behind him. He towed her so often she felt like she owed him money for the service. Tired of being jerked around, Sloan put on the brakes.

He kept tugging, but placated her in soothing tones. “Can’t really talk out here and I have some things to show you.”

“Okay, but you know I can manage walking
all by myself
.” Her voice went soft and sweet on the last few words.

He freed her hand and continued walking. “Smart ass.”

“You seem to bring out the best in me.”

Inside the bathroom he closed and locked the door then made his way to a closet. Sloan hung close to the door ready to make her escape at any moment. The bathroom was large, but sharing the space with Baine made her twitch. Claustrophobia was a weakness she didn’t possess, but perhaps people could develop it. She’d heard it could be triggered by a traumatic event. And fucking like animals with the enemy certainly qualified as traumatic, dramatic, and too amazing to wrap her mind around.

“Come.” He urged her forward with an impatient hand when she didn’t move. “Jesus, I’m not going to bite.”

“You already did.” She pointed to the faint outline of teeth on her shoulder.

“And you survived.”

Would she? She wasn’t so sure the events of the night wouldn’t lead to the infection of a metaphorical organ she rarely used, and a slow painful death. Damn her heart.

She huffed out a breath, squared her shoulders, and walked into the closet. He’d had plenty of opportunity to kill her and he hadn’t. So, for the time being she trusted him not to hurt her. But after she’d served her purpose, who knew?

Baine turned his back to her and shoved some pricey clothes down the rack. He removed a panel and depressed a series of numbers on the keypad on the wall.

“You need a better safe. Give me a minute and a half and the right tools. I’d have you cleaned out.”

He slanted a look at her over his shoulder. “I was hoping you’d say that. See, to debilitate my father’s empire we must access his safe. In it he holds bank records, his dealings with every buyer and seller, and a list of government leaders on his payroll—all in one book.”

Out of the depths Baine extracted a folder and handed it to her. It held three pages—a sketched layout of the house, top and bottom floors, a layout of an office, and a photo of a safe, complete with make and model written in the margin.

“The plan is simple. Tomorrow after dinner, I distract Kobi and my father while you excuse yourself, break into the office, crack the safe, and swipe the book. We meet in your room after, confirm we have the intel to bring him down. Then we do just that.”

“If you have all this information, why haven’t you already gone after the book?”

Shit, if she’d had this intel, Devereaux Kendrick would’ve been worm food two days ago.

Baine shook his head. “Don’t get all blustery on me. Devereaux never entered his safe or even revealed its location to me until the day I shipped out to D.C. While away I confirmed the make, model, and specs of the damn vault, and it’s nearly impossible to get into without the code. Which I have been trying to find since I got back.”

“That puppy’s about as tight as they come.” Sloan didn’t even know if she could crack it, but she’d try her damnedest. “What about cameras?”

“He’s a paranoid bastard. So none in the office, out of fear someone in security would use them to compromise him. Only has them in the hallway and they sweep. If you’re as good as you think you are, they shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Fine. But you’re suggesting we do this—just you and me,” Sloan asked, trying to keep the
are you nuts
out of her tone.

His lips spread in a wide grin that made her swallow hard. “Pretty much.”

The twinkle in his eye told Sloan he left out some details. Thinning the particulars in a situation like this was a good way to get their butts shot off. She shoved the folder at him. “What?”

He hiked a brow. “What?”

“Deception doesn’t become you.”

Quiet for a while, Baine seemed to mull that over then cleared his throat. “You’re the first one to say so.”

She shrugged one shoulder, but didn’t let his comment derail her. “What aren’t you telling me?”

His hands nestled into his pockets. “Too perceptive for my own good or am I really that transparent?”

“Who knows. Now give,” she demanded.

“All I’ll say is I have an ace up my sleeve.”

That damn butler. It had to be.
But she didn’t reveal any hint she knew what he talked about. “Well, with twelve to two odds, we’ll need all the help we can get.”

His smile fell and the azure of his eyes darkened as his jaw strained. “We have to be on the same page. I know you’re capable, but I don’t want you killed cleaning up my mess.”

“Devereaux Kendrick is a lot of peoples’ mess. And don’t
you
worry about
me
.”

Baine set the folder on a mahogany dresser then placed his hand lightly on her shoulder. Eyes haunted and expression troubled, he said, “I can’t stop myself from caring about you.”

The best laid schemes

Of mice and men go often awry.