Tapestry of the Past (23 page)

He arched up into her, his body already aching. Son of a bitch. If he didn’t slow down, he’d come before he was ever inside her.

Sucking in a deep breath, he rolled over, pinning
Kalesia
beneath his taut, aroused frame. Unable to resist the sensual, feminine scent of her skin, he nuzzled behind her ear before stringing tiny, stinging kisses down her neck to the curve of her breasts. “Oh God, sweet witch,” he muttered against her soft skin. “Do you know how much I need you? Need you to bring warmth and chaos into my life? Need you to chase away the shadows?”

He tasted between her breasts with the tip of his tongue and groaned. God, she tasted so good.

They needed to talk. Settle things between them.

Kalesia
wrapped one leg around his hip.

Gabriel fought the sheet for a moment, before sweeping it to the foot of the bed. He clamped his hand around her leg, just above the knee and placed it back around his hip. The hell with it. There was only one thing he needed to know. The rest they could work out later.

He lifted his head and met her eyes, all pretense seared away. “One last chance. If you’re not sure, absolutely sure, this is what you want, walk away now. Because if you stay tonight, tomorrow I won’t give you a choice.” Propped up on one elbow, his shoulders held tight, he waited for her answer. Son of a bitch, he felt naked.

Her hair spread like a dark flame across his pillow,
Kalesia
smiled, eyes gleaming in the muted light. “If I hadn’t been sure, I never would have come to your room. Make love to me,” she pleaded, the passionate demand in her voice a siren song he had no desire to resist.

Gabriel closed his eyes. He dropped his forehead against her. He opened his eyes. “Son of a bitch, I’ve missed you, sugar,” he admitted.

“Would you have really let me walk out of this room tonight?” she asked, her breathing light and rapid.

Gabriel slid his hand slowly up the outside of her leg, loving the feel of the smooth, resilient flesh under his palm. “I thought I could when I asked.” He shook his head. “I was just fooling myself. I knew that the moment you said you’d stay,” he confessed starkly. “I could never let you go.” He claimed her mouth in a deep, tongue-tangling kiss. “Not if my life depended upon it.”

Hot. So hot. He could feel the heat from her pussy just inches from his fingers. Her position left her open to him. Gabriel moved his hand a fraction of an inch and stifled a groan against her throat as he found pure liquid fire.

Shit.

Son of a bitch.

She was going to burn him alive.

He tasted the skin where her neck and shoulder joined before biting down gently and sucking. Hell, he’d never felt this primitive with a woman but something inside him demanded he mark her, leave evidence for everyone to see that she was his.

Kalesia
moaned, a breathy, husky sound, her arms coming up to hold him tight. “Yes.”

He thrust his leg up, rubbing against her mound.

“Gabriel!” His name broke from her lips at the rough demand of his leg.

His tongue traced a wet path to the peak of the other breast. The nub stood up, hardening in anticipation.

“What, sugar, tell me what you want!” Half plea, half demand, he teased her with the tip of his tongue, never quite hard enough, never quite long enough.

Kalesia
sank her nails into the firm muscle of Gabriel’s buttocks in sensual retaliation.

A harsh groan tore from his throat and he let her feel his teeth on the tiny, hard bud.

“Don’t. Don’t tease me. Not tonight. I want you too much.”
Kalesia
ran her foot down the back of his leg.

He arched, rubbing his cock against her thigh. He slid one finger inside, testing her readiness.

Hot.

Wet.

Heaven.

Aw, fuck. He couldn’t take it slowly if a gun was pointed at his head. “Good.” Gabriel clenched his teeth against a moan when her inner muscles tightened around his finger. Blindly, he opened the drawer on the nightstand and withdrew a small, foil packet.

Unable to wait any longer, he shifted, replacing his finger with the head of his cock. He surged into the hot, clinging depths. Gritting his back teeth together, he stilled, just managing to hold still to give her time to adjust to his length inside her.

“Next time,” he promised. “Next time I’ll take all night.”

Kalesia
locked her legs around his hips and smiled up at him, passion and understanding glittering in her eyes. “Less talk, more action.”

The last shred of his control disintegrated. Fingers biting into her hips, he withdrew until just the tip of his cock was inside her, before surging back inside again. In and out. Faster and faster.

He wasn’t being a considerate lover, Gabriel knew but damned it he could help himself. The fact that
Kalesia
had come to him, had trusted him, was the most powerful aphrodisiac in the world. He wanted to overwhelm her, drive from both their minds the harsh words of the last few days.

His heart pounded. A drop of sweat ran down his temple. Leaning down, he took her bottom lip between his teeth and nipped sharply.
Kalesia
arched upward, her head thrown back, her eyes squeezed shut, a strangled scream of fulfillment escaping.

Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.

The base of his spine tingled. He pumped his hips harder, pure animal instinct driving him. The first hot spurt of semen jetted from his cock and his vision grayed out. At last, he collapsed on top of
Kalesia
, his breath rasping out of his lungs in harsh pants.

Oh God. His balls were broken.

Long, slender fingers trailed up his spine and back down, petting and soothing him. A low, contented rumble broke from his throat. “Umm, now I know why Hannibal fights so hard to sleep in your bed. Your fingers are pure magic. Pet me some more and I might even purr.” Gabriel felt like tomcat after a busy night, all sated and lazy and content. He knew he should be a gentleman and get off her.

He grinned in the dark. Good thing no one ever accused him of being a gentleman.

Unable to resist the plump mound under his mouth, Gabriel dragged his tongue across the damp flesh, tasting salt and woman.

Kalesia
dragged her nails up to his nape, leaving a trail of goose flesh in her wake.

Perhaps his balls weren’t broken after all.

“Chaos?”

“As in wild, primal, unorganized.” Gabriel smiled as
Kalesia
sifted her nails through the short strands of hair at the nape of his neck. “Like what you did with my living room.”

“I resent that,”
Kalesia
defended, lazy amusement in her voice. “I am not unorganized. Just because I didn’t arrange things with surgical precision does not make me unorganized.”

“I notice you don’t object to wild and primal.”

She laughed and moved beneath him, a faint musical chime from the charm on her ankle accompanying the shift. She ran her hand down his side before slipping it between them so she could tease his stomach, halting within a hairsbreadth of his cock.

It filled, reaching for her touch.

“I like wild and primordial. It makes me sound exotic and exciting.”

“Trust me, sugar, if you got anymore exotic and exciting, my balls would never recover.” An aching need that had nothing to do with sex sprang to life.

“You weren’t a cop, were you?”
Kalesia
smoothed one finger over his eyebrow.

Somehow, Gabriel met her gaze without flinching. “No.”

“How much of it was true?”

Pain flickered like the serrated edge of a blade across his soul. “Most of it.”

Instant denial washed across
Kalesia
. “I don’t believe it.” She set her mouth in a stubborn line. It didn’t matter that it had taken her days to see beyond the façade created by the anonymous sender. Because now that she had, nothing would convince her that Gabriel was a soulless killer.

“Believe it,” he told her harshly, surging to a sitting position. She sensed, rather than saw, him take care of the condom.

Kalesia
sat up too, finding and pulling the sheet across her legs. She pleated the starched cotton as she considered Gabriel, her head tilted to one side. “I believe you’re capable of killing but not as an assassin interested only in money.”

“Trust me, I earned my paycheck. Whether you’re working for the government or freelance, you are getting paid to kill,” he grated. “It’s all the same.”

Although she disagreed,
Kalesia
held her tongue, sensing that arguing would cause him to clam up. “Tell me about it.”

He shot her an enigmatic look. “Are you sure you want to know? You might find in this case that truth is worse than fiction.”

“I need to know. You tried to hide the truth before and look where we wound up.” Nothing, absolutely nothing could be worse than imagining. She shuddered.

“Once I tell you, we might very well be in exactly the same situation. Or, this time you might run from me.”

“Trust me,” she said without thinking.

Though Gabriel didn’t say a word,
Kalesia
could see he remembered her previous avowal of faith. She placed a hand on his arm, feeling the hard tension in the muscles beneath her palm. “I believe in you, Gabriel. Please believe in me.”

He went utterly motionless. Even his breath seemed to stop. Suddenly, his hand shot out to cover hers, almost crushing the bones of her fingers.

It was the only sign of his agitation. Still, it shocked her as Gabriel was always unfailingly gentle with her.

“I have to. But God help us both if what I tell you drives you away.” He paused, looking uncertain. “I don’t know where to start.
”

“The beginning. Start at the beginning. It won’t drive me away,” she promised, a burning sensation in her chest. She braced herself, knowing it must be bad.

His hand still gripping hers, he took a deep breath. “The beginning. Okay. I was a loner as a kid and didn’t mingle well, not even with my parents. Hell, they didn’t know what to do with me but they tried. They were good people. Everyone always commented on how much they loved each other. It must have been hard on them to have a kid like me. After a while they quit trying to understand me. Honestly? I can’t blame them.

“I had a reputation for looking for trouble. Nothing really serious. Fights mostly. But I scared the other kids because I’d do whatever necessary to win. One of a long line of counselors recommended the military.” Gabriel shrugged. “He probably saved me from prison.”

A stray gleam of moonlight highlighted the wicked, curving scar on Gabriel’s shoulder as he shrugged again. A wry smile twisted his lips. “My parents were more than willing to sign the necessary papers. So, I upped with the Army. I liked it, liked the sense of order, discipline it gave me. As much as I liked it, I still felt something was missing. That changed when I was approached while in jump school. It seems I caught the attention of one full bird in particular. The Colonel thought I had the makings of a Ranger.”

“I take it you accepted?”

Gabriel gave her a look that questioned her intelligence. “Hell, yes, I accepted! Here I was, a boy from backwoods Florida, being given the opportunity to be part of the elite branch of the Army. It meant that for the first time in my life somebody thought I was special. You bet your ass I jumped at it.”

It had meant more than that,
Kalesia
thought, a peculiar lump jamming her throat. Even now, years later, there was something in the timbre of his voice. It took her a moment to place it. When she did, she almost smacked her own forehead it was so obvious. For all of Gabriel’s prosaic recitation of his family life, it was easy to see he hadn’t felt wanted. His parents had each other, they didn’t really need a kid. The Rangers, however, wanted him.

They gave him a home. A sense of belonging.

“Took to the training like a duck to water. I was good, very good. Rifle, knife, or hands, it didn’t matter but I had a special affinity for rifles and an eye that allowed me never to miss. It was inevitable.” He let go of her hand and clenched his into a fist until the knuckles shone white.

Kalesia
frowned. She’d missed something. “What was?”

He speared her with a hard glance. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yes.”

“Remember, you asked.” He took a deep breath and, one by one, straightened his fingers. “I became a sniper.”

The blunt statement managed to catch
Kalesia
off-guard. God, she hoped the darkness hid the look of utter shock she was sure was on her face.

“For the first couple years we did more training than missions. The Rangers hadn’t long undergone restructuring. Still there was enough action to satisfy a young man’s yearning for excitement that I was determined to re-up.”

Kalesia
slipped her hand back into his. He closed his fingers about hers with desperate strength.

“I was asked to volunteer for a black mission. We were to infiltrate and bring home captured soldiers from a leftist camp. What we were going to do was not sanctioned by the military or the government as officially we were not involved in that conflict. The long and short of it is we were sold out and I was captured.”

Kalesia
gasped but Gabriel didn’t seem to hear.

“The rest were killed.” His hand
spasmed
, squeezing her fingers until the bones ground together.

Kalesia
bit her lip to muffle the tiny, involuntary sound of pain.

“You’re trained to cope with the possibility of capture,” he drew an unsteady breath, “but the reality is something else again. I wanted to die. There are so many ways to inflict pain, ways a normal mind can’t comprehend.”

It was as if a dam had burst, the words just kept flowing out of Gabriel in an unstoppable flood.

“Small things, innocuous in themselves, can be the worst,” he whispered. “Mosquitoes on bloody flesh. The agony of river water sliding down a throat raw from screaming.”