Enemy Mine (The Base Branch Series Book 1) (16 page)

“
Y
ou have
no idea what you’re asking me to do.” Sloan’s voice didn’t pitch or rise, but the tremors shaking her body said she clung to her resolve with white knuckles.

Baine ignored her and pulled the trashcan out from below the sink and dumped several errant tissues into the washbasin. He collected the C-4, detonators, and wire into the metal bin, placed the garbage on top and foisted it into Law’s hands. “You know where to put it. You’ve got the exterior guards. I’ll take Kobi and the interior mob. She’s got Devereaux. We move five minutes after Sloan and Devereaux leave the dining room.”

Sloan barked. “Thirty.”

“Ten,” Baine countered.

Law stuffed one more pistol into the garbage can and headed for the door. “Move ten after they leave the dining room. Got it.” He turned back and touched his index finger to his brow. “You two be safe.”

The angry lines that marred Sloan’s delicate features softened. “Thanks, Law. You be careful too.”

His friend smiled, turned, and from the noise beyond, collected the tray and left the room.

Sloan and Baine squared off, both silent and still before the metal click of the bedroom door-latch. Then Sloan snatched one of the Sigs from the counter, holding it out to him in an open palm.

“In my mind, a part of it, I know I shouldn’t kill Devereaux. The line I’ve lived by is clear, and if I kill him I know I’d be crossing it in the most egregious manner.” Her head shook slowly back and forth. “But every time I clean a gun—which is a damn lot with what I do—when I wrack the chamber and pull the trigger, every time, it’s his face I see.”

Baine placed his hand over the gun, holding hers around it while she continued.

“I want to kill him. I want him to look into my face. To see realization smack him between the eyes when he understands a little girl, a monster of his own creation, is about to end his life.”

A single tear brimmed over onto her cheek and she swiped at it with her free hand. “I want him to beg and plead like my mother did. I want to hear him scream like my father. Then I want to pull the trigger. To watch the gnarled life leave his pitiful body. And spit on him when he hits the floor.”

The gun slid from her hand and Baine set it on the counter. He interlocked their fingers and cupped the nape of her neck. “I know you want to. Believe me, I do too. I’ve daydreamed about taking his life in a hundred thousand different ways. But we can’t become killers.”

“I already am,” she snorted.

He pulled her closer. “You know you’re not. You just said it yourself. You’ve killed out of duty. For the greater good. Never out of hatred. Sloan, if you kill him, you’ll hate yourself and be no better than he is.

“I won’t let you do that to yourself. You have a future that doesn’t include Devereaux Kendrick, and as hard as it is for me to see right now, so do I. I won’t let him take that from you or me.”

Sloan buried her face against his chest and screamed. The heat from her fury leaked through the vest and shirt, thawing the lump of ice around his heart. He loathed her pain, but knew her surrender now would hurt less than her regret later. Every muscle in her small frame contracted and the sound, though suppressed, rang in his ears like a screeching missile and devastating explosion.

Baine wrapped her in his arms. “Let it out, love. Let it go, so you can be ready. Your time has come. I believe in you. I know you can do this. No one else. You.” He whispered the litany, finished and repeated it, doubting she could hear it over the din of her roar, hoping the entreaty took root in her heart and mind.

Finally she sagged against him, spent. He caught her and eased them both to the floor. The cool wood cabinets braced his back while his legs stretched the territory, nearly butting the bathtub. Sloan curled into a ball on his lap, fisting his hand to her chest like a security blanket.

Were he not already on the ground, she would have brought him to his knees. And not for the first time. Something about Sloan, Sia, humbled him. She stripped away all his walls. Every pretense of distance and protection. Leaving his soul bared. Leaving only one desire. One need.

Her.

When they were kids she’d brought him the first sense of peace he’d ever known and now she sent his body shooting in five different directions at once. Peace. Lust. Possessiveness. Devotion. Love. Each emotion wrestled for dominance in a cartoon cluster of chaos.

He hugged her to him so tightly he feared he’d crack a rib, but she didn’t complain. She wound an arm around his neck and squeezed him just as fiercely.

As they relaxed, only because they needed to breathe, Sloan warmed him with her expression. Her whiskey eyes softened and smile lines creased. He didn’t know what it meant, but it made his already goopy heart melt a bit more. She looked upon him as though he was the only thing in the world that mattered. Lord knew there wasn’t much he cared about outside the circle of his arms.

The silk of her cheek glided over his palms as he framed her face. Unable to stop himself any longer, Baine lowered his head. His lips hovered over hers while he drank in her heat, breathed her air, soaked in the aura of the woman he loved. Then he grazed his lips over her parted mouth. He swallowed Sloan’s exhale and concentrated on her upper lip. His tongue licked the fine edge where rouge met caramel.

Baine planned to savor her, take care and time to bring her from heartache to desire. Sloan, apparently, didn’t need time. While moving his seduction magic to her supple lower lip she attacked. Sloan threw her entire tiny, but surprisingly formidable, weight into the kiss, fusing their mouths together by force. Her hands weaved into the knit of his hair and latched on with bite.

Sloan raised herself, straddling his lap in a graceful swing of her leg. Her knees hugged the outside of his thighs while he craned his neck to keep their gazes level. She stared down into his eyes, an unusual feeling for a six foot five man. But with the jolt of lusty steel it sent rushing to his cock, he could get used to it. Ardent lips coaxed his mouth open and Sloan’s tongue dipped into his warm depths.

So used to dominating where bedroom activities were concerned, this bit of domination
his woman
displayed thrilled his pants straight down to his ankles. Sliding his hands from her full bottom to the front of his pants, Baine planned to show her how much he enjoyed her display. Before he reached his mark, however, he found his forearms pinned to the cabinets by her knees.

“Control yourself, big guy. I’m running the show right now,” she whispered.

“We sure do ask a lot from each other,” he near panted.

“Mmm,” she moaned into his mouth.

He took a mental breath and concentrated on relaxing and enjoying Sloan. Yep, his inner He-Man longed to plunge his sword deep into her slick body, but he could wait. Hell, he’d once waited fourteen hours laid out on the ground, looking through the scope of a sniper rifle, to get his target.

He could do this.

Baine thought that until she maimed his control with one zealous mingling of tongues. Her entire body got into the exchange, rocking against his chest, rolling against the tip of his pulsing erection. Sloan pulled his tongue into her mouth and worked it like a dick from base to tip several times before sitting on his lap and smiling.

“Woman, you’re tempting the beast.”

With one raised brow and that damn sexy smile, she said, “Good.” Her gaze sharpened. “What was it you said to me? Oh, I remember. ‘I was about to release your hands, but that look says you
can’t be trusted.’”

“Risk for reward,” he answered.

“So right.” She eased off his arms, but pinned him with those lion eyes. “Control, remember? It’s my turn.”

“Yeah, right.”

As Sloan unfastened the sleek buckle at his waist and snapped the leather from its loops, Baine held tight to his tattered restraint. Holding onto a tree trunk in a hurricane might’ve been easier. When she spread the fabric of his slacks the broad head of his cock peeked out through the slit in his boxer briefs and she moaned. At the sound, sweat beaded on Baine’s forehead and his hands fisted at his sides.

Sweet Lord!

Her cool hands wrapped around his hot girth as she guided it from the soft cotton to the silk of her mouth. He watched his mushroomed tip disappear between her red lips and his rod stretch her sweet mouth wider to accommodate. All ten of her fingers cloaked his base, working in tandem with her lips and tongue as she bobbed up and down his length. She set a grueling pace for the start.

The sight of her, the feel of her, the contented moans emanating from her throat and the vibrations they wrought all combined to snap his reserve. His hands gripped the edge of the counter as his hips jerked, shoving him into the back of her throat. She swallowed him down. Once. Twice. The third time he barked a curse at the intense pressure building in his balls. He did not want this to end. Then again, he did not want to waste a good orgasm in her mouth. Shit, as wild as he was for her he’d be in danger of piercing her brain. He wanted to pierce her womb. Come deep inside her, looking into her flushed face and loving eyes.

“Straddle me, Sloan,” he demanded. “Ride the fuck out of me. But I want to look in your eyes when I come. When you come.”

She popped off the head of his dick and pouted. “Thought I was calling the shots?”

“You were. Now I am.”

He slipped the gathered sundress up over her hips, plunged his finger inside her nude thong, dragged them across her swollen pussy and positioned her over his cock. With a firm grip he wrenched her down his rod, until her ass grazed his balls.

They both cried out at the exquisite pleasure and slight pain of the joining. Baine wound his hands up her back and gripped her shoulders for leverage as he pulled out then rocked back into her. The weapons and ammunition clipped onto the vest chaffed the cotton covering her breasts. He smiled when she leaned into it, increasing the friction on her beaded nipples.

Sloan brought her knees up on either side of him, allowing better access. Her gaze seared into his as they rode each other like desperate souls contented only by the other. She wrapped her hands around the nape of his neck and arched into him. He nipped her breasts through the slight material.

Sloan bit her lower lip and her head lolled back. Fresh moisture coated his already slick cock as Sloan groaned her orgasm. Her body rolled with the gratification of climax. The sensation overcame him and Baine let her wring a fierce ejaculation from his body. He went tight all over, straining against his own skin until he went slack, completely sated.

His love nestled onto his chest. Amazingly, he found the strength to wrap her in his arms.

“And you said we couldn’t make love on the bathroom floor.”

“That was too primal to be called love-making.”

Sloan nuzzled his neck with her cheek. “Thank you.”

“Thank me? Love, you never have to thank me for that.”

She giggled. “Not that. But yes, I, along with entire cultures, should thank you for that demonstration.” Baine cupped her hand in his. “Thank you,” she continued, “for making me see the ugliness in my hatred, for stopping me from doing something I would regret, something that would destroy the person I am, who I want to be.

“I love you,” she whispered.

The words should have made him smile. But the way she said them twisted his gut. Because they sounded a lot like
goodbye
.

The best laid schemes

Of mice and men go often awry.

And leave us nothing but grief and pain.

For promised joy!

T
he food
, though gourmet as money could buy and a personal chef could prepare, rolled around Baine’s mouth like pub peanuts scraped from the floor weeks ago. Where Sloan was concerned, each task associated with the magnificent woman ratcheted up a notch in difficulty.

First, he’d been unwilling to contact her because of his father’s psychotic tendencies. Locked into a life of emotional solitude, guessing and wondering how Sia fared in this world for years, had been difficult. He’d nearly broken his promise to keep her safe and out of his life after a night of pub-crawling the first semester of his freshman year at Cambridge.

Baine had been practically on his own since the age of five, when his father fired Nanny Pat. Independent. Self-sufficient. Yet, that day, restlessness wriggled through his body from the early morning hours and didn’t let up through his first or second classes. By the third he shifted so often in his seat the professor actually asked him to leave. He hadn’t known what he’d been looking for when he fled campus, but he didn’t find it in the bottom of his many pints or in the blue eyes of a barmaid.

So, he gave up, deciding Sia’s voice was the only thing to give him peace. As luck would have it, he bumped into Law on the way to the bar phone to track her down. The big guy’d been a little miffed about wearing his beer, and Baine had been more than happy to oblige him with a fight. He’d woken the next morning in his London house propped in a wingback with a bloody headache, busted lip, and the chap snoozing on his couch.

He hadn’t found Sloan that day which was best for her own safety. Surprisingly, he’d found a friend to carry him through the next miserable years of his life.

The second task, and slightly more difficult than the first, was cracking her on the head in D.C. to save her life. Third, trying to control his impulse to fuck her like a crazed animal.
Fail.
And now, watching while his father devoured her from across the table with his eyes, and not being able to do a damn thing to stop it.

More and more difficult. No doubt.

To her credit, she played Devereaux like Jimmy Page played the guitar. The man hung on her every glance, the rise and fall of her chest, the curve of her smile. And it was hard to blame him. Sloan, like Pages’ textured notes plucked from the string, mesmerized.

Too damn bad he couldn’t kill the man.

If matters weren’t bad enough, Kobi fed the combustibility of the room by sending
fuck you’s
with his
darting glances. Sloan was the object of Kobi’s sharp gaze through the first round of drinks and appetizers. Now, finished with the main course and with a few more drinks down his gullet, he spread the hateful glare between Sloan and Devereaux, though never making his disdain for either too obvious.

Baine knew the guy had plenty of hostility for him. The run-in earlier must have ignited his disdain for his master, as well as added to his raging obsession with Sloan, making Baine yesterday’s headache.

Time to draw that attention elsewhere.

One more minute of Kobi’s snarled gaze on the mocha skin that rocketed him to the moon with one touch, and Baine would blow the whole half-cocked plan to shit by ramming his thumbs into the man’s eye sockets.

Try ogling her now, asshole.

With a finger, Baine signaled Law. His friend, the last guy in the world to be wrestled into a suit, straight-backed his way across the room like a professional butler. One hand tucked behind his back while the other he held in a stiff L before his middle, complete with a crisp, dangling, stark-white towel.

“Yes, sir?” Law asked with a slight incline of his neatly quaffed dirty-blond mop.

Law had to buy a brush and
hair
products for this gig and clean shave his perpetual stubble. A smile threatened Baine’s lips. Hell, he was all over the place today. Gooey happy. Pissed. Smiley. Scared, for the first time in a long time. Since he now had something to lose.

Head in the game, McCord.

“Scotch straight, for me.” He motioned toward Kobi. “And a vodka martini for him. Apple. Yep, an appletini for my friend.”

“Right away, sir,” Law replied.

As Law turned away to fulfill the request, Baine met Kobi’s glower with a smile. “Something to brighten your mood a bit. You seem glum. We can’t have that, now, can we?”

Bingo.

The sorry excuse for a barroom bouncer ground his teeth like an angry animation, flexing the muscles in his neck.

Baine knew the guy came from screwed up beginnings, but shit, these days who didn’t. Baine certainly had. He looked across the table at the guy who’d profited from death and destruction, oftentimes orchestrating it to turn a nickel into a quarter. In spite of his father—or maybe to spite him—Baine had chosen a different path. Kobi, on the other hand, had chosen the path to hell, and boy was Baine going to enjoy helping him complete that journey.

A server entered from the butler’s pantry carrying a tray of fluffy confections. Baine breathed through the spike of adrenaline in his veins, knowing the time grew nearer. No sugar for him. His nerves already vibrated.

Across the table Devereaux declined his finisher with a wave of his hand. The man’s eyes, the ones Baine thanked his mother everyday he didn't see when he looked into the mirror, zeroed in on Sloan. “I have something much more delicious in mind for dessert tonight.”

Yeah, me too. Your balls roasted on a spit.

Beside him Sloan bowed her head as if shy, but offset the move by smoldering the man with a come-hither gaze beneath her thick fan of lashes. What no one else in the room saw, except Baine, was her fisted hand in her lap, the way the veins in her small hand bulged and her knuckles whitened.

Devereaux stood, dropping his burgundy napkin into the seat. “Jesus Christ, Abram! Elbows off the table.”

The room stilled and the thick man at the other end of the table straightened. “Sorry, sir,” Abram said, returning a fork-full of soufflé to his plate. Nena’s mouth hung open expectantly while her wide gaze jumped between Devereaux and the dessert. Thoroughly chastised, the chap’s hands disappeared under the table. As though pulled by an unseen magnet, all eyes in the dinning room shifted back to Baine’s father.

Conqueror of all, Devereaux smiled and met Baine’s gaze while holding his hand out to Sloan. Baine didn’t swallow the rock in his throat when his father said, “Come dear. I’m ravenous.”

Now, why the fuck did he look at me when he said that?

Based on the report he’d falsified and placed on Devereaux’s computer, and by Sloan’s description of the confrontation between her, Kobi, and Devereaux earlier in the day, the old man should have needled that comment at Kobi. The hair on Baine’s arms and neck all stood at attention.

Son-of-a-bitch.

He hadn’t expected warm fuzzies when he watched Sloan leave the room hand in hand with the rat bastard. But every battle-honed instinct screamed inside his head as the last of her mocha skin vanished behind the double doors—because something was wrong.

As Baine replayed the meal in his head his heart did a S.O.S. against his sternum. His father had been unusually quiet. Not berating or saying a thing to Kobi, when even on the best of days the chav became the target of at least two back handed comments.

Baine shifted in his seat, ready to make a break for the double doors, when Law’s penguin chest blocked his view.

“Sorry for the delay, sir. It took me a moment longer to
place
the apple.” Law set his scotch in front of him and proceeded around the table to Kobi where he deposited one thin-stemmed glass of green appletini.

Kobi’s face reddened, but Baine ignored him, instead snagging Law’s gaze. “
Go ahead
and bring me another. It took long enough to get this one. I may die of thirst by the time you get back with the next.”

Law gave an exaggerated nod, showing he got the intended message.
Get the fuck ready because shit’s about to happen.

“Another for you, sir?” Law asked Kobi.

“Fuck you.” The chappie growled.

“Yes, sir,” Law said. Then left the room.

A moan from the opposite end of the table snagged Baine’s attention.

Yeah, if Devereaux didn't like elbows on his table, he might not be too wild about the half-naked ass on it either. Since he wasn’t the one to put it there.

Abram, Nena, Josh, and the blond escort—Baine couldn’t remember her name—tangled tongues and limbs in the beginnings of what looked to be a lively orgy. Abram, the bigger of the two lug heads, steadily eased Nena’s skirt up her body, revealing quite a bit of pale porcelain skin. Too bad for them the party was about to get shut down.

But before he gave voice to his thoughts, a streak of movement brought his focus front and center just in time to meet the cold smack across his face. Fruity vodka dripped down his cheeks and around his lips.

Kobi stood across the table, chest puffed and chin high. His fists rested on either hip, but Baine noticed he listed ever so lightly to the right. Most likely the work of dear old Dad. The wanker snarled, wrinkling the wide nose under his beady eyes, and showed off a set of teeth that would make a proper Brit cringe.

Next to Kobi, Lana gasped and the room stilled. Even the orgy.

Without a word, Baine slid his drink across the table. The dark liquid seesawed in the glass before coming to rest several inches from Kobi.

The man’s head jerked back in confusion while he stared at the glass as though it were a puzzle to solve. A really difficult puzzle…like why mass existed. When his gaze poked Baine again, he nodded toward the liquor.

“Mind tossing that one? I like to taste pussy, just not pussy drinks.”

Kobi’s yell split the air and ricocheted off the walls. Still no one moved until he pulled a gun from his shoulder holster.

Fuck you very much.

As if Baine’s concerns about Sloan weren’t high enough already, Kobi had to add to the cluster. Because no matter what happened to Baine, if that gun fired it could compromise Sloan’s mission, or worse, get her killed.

The room came to life as the two female orgy participants shrieked. Bare ass flew off the table and ducked behind Josh. She pulled the blond with her as they scrambled for the door. Lana didn’t scream, but hot heeled it out through the butler’s pantry while the chaps stared big eyed and goofy jawed at the drama unfolding.

Kobi’s hand gripped the gun like a little kid did a balloon that might be carried off in a swift breeze. His wrist quavered from the effort. Through gritted teeth he spoke. “One bullet’ll wipe that smug look off your face, boy.”

Boy? What the hell?
Kobi had ten years on him, maybe.

“Stand up. Keep your goddamned hands where I can see them. Push your chair back and move that way.” He motioned toward the head of the table with the barrel of his gun, away from the other men.

Having little option at the moment, Baine complied.

Kobi met him at the end of the room, leaving the table’s width between them. “Kneel.”

Again, what the fuck option did he have? None. So, he eased himself down until the hard wood greeted his knees. The weight of the weaponry under his vest embraced him, but did not a damn bit of good. He flicked a glance at the ornate wall clock. It had only been five minutes since Devereaux and Sloan left.

Too early to move.
Calm. Control.

The silent mantra worked, centering his thoughts and relaxing his body. He could do this. He had to do this. For Sloan.