Tag, You're It! (17 page)

"I didn't get to use my hands last time," he said, sliding a palm over her nipple.

He barely touched it, but the sensation speared through her, again and again until it was all she could do not to scream.

"Or my mouth."

His tongue flicked out, teasing her nipple, drawing it deep into his mouth. She clenched every muscle in her body against it, fighting the pleasure for all she was worth.

"Let go," he whispered against her breast, his hands stroking over her, between her legs, finding the exact spot begging to be touched.

She did cry out then, his breath was so hot against her skin, the pleasure so intense that she heard herself whimper, "Stop."

And he did, instantly easing away. "Say that again," he said, "and I will."

His breathing was as ragged as hers, his voice sounded like it had been dragged from the depths of hell. Alex opened her eyes and realized that for each second he pleasured her he was torturing himself.

No
, was her immediate reaction,
don't stop
. But it went so deeply against everything she'd become in the last four years that she couldn't bring herself to utter that one syllable and surrender.

"Alex?"

Her eyes shifted to Tag's face and she understood that no matter how much safer she felt in her isolation, she couldn't do that to him. That didn't mean she couldn't put the game back on a more comfortable footing. "Untie my hands."

He shook his head. "Drop your armor, Alex. I won't hurt you." He nuzzled her breasts. "And I'll let you tie me up later."

She heard the smile in his voice along with the strain of holding back. It was the same strain inside of her, and in that one instant, she understood that there was protection in shutting out the rest of the world, but there was also pain and loneliness.

She closed her eyes and let her muscles go lax, her breath sighing out at the feel of two-day-old stubble raspacross skin already sensitized. "Yes," she said. There was an endless second of stillness, and then her world narrowed down to sensation, to the touch of Tag's hands and mouth on her skin, hot and gentle at first, burning and uras his control began to shred.

His breath was coming in harsh bursts by the time he slipped his knees between her legs, lifted her hips in his hands and joined their bodies in one long, slow thrust. She cried out, he groaned, and then they both began to move. Tag dropped his mouth to her neck, and Alex begged. She heard herself begging. A part of her was appalled by it, but she'd come too far to turn back now. And it felt too damn good, which was her last thought before the world exploded. Tag went rigid, she locked her legs around him, and they stayed that way for what seemed like forever, wringing the last ounce of pleasure out of each other before he collapsed next to her.

He wasn't so gone that he didn't untie her first, though. Alex was too spent to do more than pull her arms down in front of her. Her wrists still wound in his shirt, she turned onto her side and curled herself within the pleasure. Tag spooned himself around her, slipped his arm over her, and snugged her back against him, his breath, easier now, warm against her ear.

One of his fingers tickled lazily over her skin. She squirmed, and when that didn't stop him, she opened one eye and found him grinning down at her. He cupped her breast, sliding a thumb across her nipple, so sensitive now that she hissed in a breath and dragged his hand down—which he then tried to slip between her legs.

"Keep that up and I'll be using this shirt on you," she said.

He groaned and flopped back down. "If I let you use that shirt on me in the next hour, you will kill me," he said, adding philosophically, "but at least I'll enjoy it more than the last time you tied me up."

"IS THIS STILL BOTHERING YOU?" TAG RAN A FINGER lightly along the healing scratch on Alex's thigh.

She pulled his hand away. "You're bothering me," she said. "That tickles."

"You weren't complaining a minute ago."

"True." But now mat the pleasant hum of the orgasm was fading away she was able to count the damage to the rest of her. She was exhausted, for one thing, her thigh still hurt, and her face and neck were raw from Tag's beard. "When's the last time you shaved?" she asked him.

"Huh?" he mumbled, sounding half-asleep.

"We're quite a pair," she said, propping herself up and taking a good long look at him, not including his most poweapon. She knew firsthand—and secondhand—what he was packing there.

He was spotted with yellow and purple bruises, espealong his ribs, from falling out of the plane, and the insides of his thighs and knees looked like they'd been rubbed raw from Angel's saddle. She ran the tips of her fingers over a particularly large bruise blooming along his side and came across a rough patch of skin just under his arm. "What's this?"

"Nothing." He rolled over and got out of bed, wobbling a bit before he found his feet.

She would have smiled over that if she hadn't caught a good look at the scar, that nice round little scar, when he reached for his pants. "That looks like a bullet wound." And depending on the direction of the bullet, it could have killed him. "Somebody shot you?"

"Treasure hunting can be a dangerous game." He gave her one of his disarming grins. "And not all the danger comes from armed opponents. I think you damaged me for life."

"It's been a while," she said with a slight laugh.

"I'm not complaining. What puzzles me is how someone so passionate can just cut herself off from the human race for months at a time."

"It's not that difficult." She hesitated for a second, but it felt so good to let go with Tag that she decided to get it all off her chest. "All you need is the right incentive, and trust me, I ran into a doozy named Bennet Harper."

Bennet Harper
. Shit. Tag sat down in the chair—collapsed would be a better way to put it, crushed under the weight of his own stupidity.

"We were engaged," Alex said, thankfully not looking at him. If she looked at him she wouldn't finish the story because she'd be asking him who he wanted to kill, and he wouldn't know whether to say Bennet Harper or himself.

"I grew up in Boston," she continued. "My parents—"

"Alex."

That one quiet word made her jump. "Too much intimacy?" She got up and drew on her clothes, not bothering with underwear. "You've been asking about my past since the day you fell on me, and now you don't want to hear about it?"

No. Suddenly he didn't have the stomach for it. "Only if you want to tell me."

She must've realized she was wringing her hands because she stuffed them in her pockets. And paced instead. "I grew up in Boston ," she said again. "My parents were an interestcouple. From what I hear. My mother was—is wealthy. Old money,
Mayflower
old. My father didn't have any money, and the marriage didn't last very long. My dad left before I could crawl, and he died not long after that. But that's not really the point of this story. My mother is.

"I don't know what brought her and my father together, and since it's my parents I don't think I want to know anyway, but somewhere along the line she grew afraid that my… lowlier genes would rear their ugly heads someday, so she decided I was going to be the perfect little debutante. It worked." Her mouth curved in a half smile. "For a while.

"And it sounds like I'm complaining." She drew both hands through her hair, stopping to look out the window. Tag didn't think she'd say any more, but the view must have steadied her. "I had all the advantages, and oddly enough a lot of what my mother insisted I learn has come in handy out here. Horseback riding lessons, skeet shooting, even the pageant." She glanced over her shoulder, still with that slight smile curving her mouth. "There's nothing as cutthroat as a beauty queen on a quest for a crown. Some of the girls I competed with make that guy in the alley look like a playground bully."

"You never got stabbed by a beauty queen."

"Not with a real knife." She turned away, started pacing again. "That wasn't the biggest problem with the pageant circuit. The biggest problem was the men. Sometimes escorts were provided, but there were men hanging around at all the pageants. That's how I met Bennet."

Fuck, Tag thought, the name hitting him like a solid right to the gut, even though she'd said it once already. He still had trouble believing Alex would have anything personal to do with a man like Harper. Sure, it had been six or seven years ago; she wouldn't have been the suspicious soul she was now… Until Bennet Harper got through with her. And Tag would have bet his right nut that whatever Harper had done to her, she'd paid him back, at least in part. Why else would he be so hell-bent on dragging her into this mess that he'd burn her out of her home?

The really tragic part was that that should have been his first clue, and looking back now there'd been plenty of other opportunities to figure out the connection. Not to mention Mike Kovaleski. Mike had been trying to tell him something about Alex that first morning in Casteel. Giving the phone up to a bad-tempered hick with sewer-breath might have been the right decision; not calling Mike back, that was sheer stupidity.

But hindsight was twenty-twenty, and if he kept looking over his shoulder he wasn't going to see what was about to hit him in the face. That would be the biggest mistake of all.

"Tag?"

"I'm listening," he said, focusing on her face but tuning her out almost immediately. Nobody was dead, he reminded himself. Alex was going to be pissed off. He caught sight of the rumpled bed behind her. Okay, she was going to be repissed off, but he could get around that. He'd just have to find the right time to tell her the truth. And the right time, he decided, would be when they were out in the middle of nowhere and she wasn't anywhere near her horse. Or her gun.

"—after my money," Alex was saying when he checked back into the narrative, "or rather my mother's and stepfather's money. Bennet started his career off as an investment banker, and when he failed at that, he decided to become a financial planner."

And now that he'd failed at that, Tag thought, he was selling fantasies.

"He was building a client list when I met him," Alex continued. "About five seconds after we began dating he started filling that list with friends of my parents'."

"And then he lost their money."

"Sounds like you know him."

"I know the type," Tag said. "He's a user. He wants—no he deserves certain things in life and he'll use anyone he has to to get them. It probably wasn't personal, Alex."

She winced a little at that.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"

"No, you're right, it definitely wasn't personal. I was just another of those things he wanted to acquire, a wife with a pedigree who opened the door to a class of people with nice, plump portfolios he could hijack. It took me a little too long to figure that out, but once I did I called off the wedding. My mother didn't want to go public with the reason, but it was enough for her friends and my stepfather's business associates to know we broke up. He'd already made so many bad investments, lost so much money… Once we were through, nobody wanted anything more to do with him."

Nobody in Alex's social class, Tag thought. Harper had found investors somewhere.

"I went back to college after that," she continued, "took classes year round until I finished my PhD. Then I won the grant to study mountain lions and came out here."

"He wasn't just marrying you for your money," Tag said, taking that for the end of the story.

"No, he was getting social standing, too."

Alex might choose to believe that, but Tag had seen Bennet Harper's face when he talked about her. And a man, even one like Harper, didn't go to such lengths to get revenge on a woman if there weren't any feelings involved. "If all he wanted was social standing and exposure to people with money, he would've found someone less intellito marry."

Alex stared at him blankly for a few seconds, and then she smiled. "You're good for my ego, Donovan."

"You're entitled to your ego, Scott. Colorado couldn't have been easy, compared to Boston."

She bumped up a shoulder. "It was a big transition, but I fought my way through it and I'm glad I did. Bennet Harper may be a large part of the reason I came out here, but he's not the reason I stayed. And on that embarrassing note, I think I'll take a shower." She started for the bathroom, then thought better of it and came back, resting one hand on his bare chest and leaning in to kiss him.

It was a hell of a kiss, too; it would have incinerated his thoughts, if his thoughts hadn't already been on fire, burning with questions. He finally understood why Alex was in this mess, and it wasn't good news for anyone on her side. Revenge was definitely part of Harper's game plan; the question was, what could he do to her that was worse than what he'd already done? And what part did he expect Tag to play in getting even?

As soon as he heard the shower running, he got Mike Kovaleski on the phone. He filled Mike in on what had happened since their last conversation just three days ago— omitting the hour he and Alex had spent in bed—and gave him the high points of the story Alex had just told him.

"She was engaged to Bennet Harper," Mike confirmed, "which I tried to tell you the last time you called."

"I don't have time for a lecture," Tag said. "Harper doesn't trust me anymore. I handled the meeting with him all wrong. The fact that he ended the conversation with a threat proves that."

"You think he knows you're…"

"No. If he knew who I was, I'd be dead. He said as much, said he has an investor who knows how to deal with cops— he's heard stories the law enforcement agencies would be interested in, is how he put it. Including the FBI."

"Zukey?"

"The thought crossed my mind."

"Maybe it's time to pull Sappresi in for questioning."

Tag almost said yes. It lodged in his throat, that single word, and it went perfectly with the picture in his brain. Tony Sappresi in an interrogation room, spilling his guts, was the one thing he'd wanted for months, right before Tony went to trial and then to jail for the rest of his life. And if they brought him in, what would happen to Alex? For the first time since Zukey's murder, something, or rather, someone, was more important.

"Nothing I'd like more than watching Sappresi sweat," he said to Mike. "Problem is, we don't know if Harper is talking about Sappresi, and if he is, Sappresi is just an investor. A victim."

"We could bring Harper in. How long do you think he'd hold up in interrogation?"

"Forever. We don't have any proof yet that he's done anything wrong. No proof, no leverage, so how do we get him to roll on Sappresi?"

"I think you're overestimating his ability to withstand questioning," Mike said.

"I think you're underestimating Harper's fear. He was real careful not to name names, and trust me, he was trying to scare me because he's scared himself. He knows exactly what will happen to him if he rolls on somebody nasty enough to take out an FBI agent. And what about Alex?"

"What about her?" Mike asked in his usual terse style. 'Taking Harper out might solve her problem—"

"Or it might not. Harper is after more than treasure here. He wants something from Alex, but he doesn't want to hurt her," at least not physically, "as long as she's of use to him."

"Okay." Mike went silent, thinking.

Tag heard the water cut off. "Can't talk much longer," he said. "Put somebody on Harper's investment list. We need to find out if Sappresi is on there, and there's no way I can do it myself right now—not with Alex around anyway. She won't agree to stay in Denver while I wait for an opportunity to search Harper's room unless I give her a good reason." Which meant he'd have to tell her the truth, and if he did that the whole fiasco was going to blow up in his face.

"Jesus, Donovan, you really have got your nuts in the wringer on this one."

"Brilliant observation," Tag said.

"I'll put Jack Mitchell and Aubrey Sullivan on digging out Harper's investor list," Mike said.

"Wait, Aubrey Sullivan? She's an agent?"

"Yep."

"Jack Mitchell took a partner. Never thought I'd live long enough to see that. Or he'd live long enough to do it."

"It's quite a story. I'll tell you about it someday when you're not in mortal danger from Miss USA and her boy toy."

"Funny," Tag said. "Just get Mitchell started on that end. I'll take care of things in Colorado."

"How?"

"Play the game. What else can I do?"

The only response he got was a dial tone, none too soon, it turned out.

Alex poked her head out the bathroom door just as Tag put the phone down. There was a question in her eyes.

"I was going to order room service for lunch, but I thought maybe you'd rather get out of here for a while."

"I was kind of expecting you to join me in here."