The Chosen Sin (30 page)

Daria looked away from him. She was liking this guy less and less.

“We were just talking about the fact we're going to have to leave off on the Ari Templeton kidnapping issue.” Alejandro went to stand near the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “Early indicators are that those closest to Sante believe he and Templeton are the real deal. That means that even if Sante is playing her somehow, we don't have a case.”

“Either way she's here by choice,” Daria put in bitterly.

“Who did you talk to?” Brandon asked sharply.

“I talked to Eleanor Matthews tonight. You probably recognize her name from the files we received. She was with Sante romantically, and has been loyal to him ever since he started the Shining Way. She and Sante share the same blood mother.”

“Yeah.” Brandon rubbed his chin. “Try Carlos. He's Sante's right hand, his muscle. If any of his people know his plans, it's that one.”

“The thought occurred to me, too,” answered Daria. “He hates us with the fire of a thousand suns for some unknown reason, but we can do our best. In the meantime—”

“Try to get me in,” Brandon interrupted.

“We're working on it,” Alejandro snapped in a voice with a sub-text that clearly said,
Shut up about it already
. He stood in the middle of the room barefoot, shirtless, and with his hair mussed. He looked positively edible that way to Daria. “We're new to the inner circle and need to wait for the right moment. If we move too fast, we look suspicious. So, chill out on the issue, Brandon. We haven't forgotten.”

“Yeah, don't.”

“In the meantime,” Daria continued pointedly, “I'll try and use my new position of honor to get me into the packing room at the factory.”

Brandon walked to the door. “Good idea. All right, then. I'm out of here. I have some work to do of my own now.” He lifted his eyebrows and grinned. “Of the female kind. Evening.” They watched him leave, and Alejandro closed and locked the door behind him.

“Man, I knew my gut instinct about that guy was right from the beginning,” Daria muttered. “He is a pain in the ass.”

Strong arms took her from behind, his palm spreading flat over her lower stomach. The heat of his bare chest bled through the material of her T-shirt and warmed her back. His mouth came down by her ear and he murmured, “Forget about other men now, Daria. I want you to only think of me and what I want to do to you.”

Daria ran out of breath. His silky voice and smooth accent rolled over her, making her cunt warm and wet. It didn't matter that they'd just had sex. She wanted him again.
Damn it all to hell.
It was like she was completely powerless against him. “And what, exactly, would that be?”

His hand slipped past the hem of her T-shirt and closed around her breast. With the pad of his finger, he teased her nipple back and forth. He dragged her earlobe between his teeth slowly, and then whispered, “To fuck you breathless.
Again.
You didn't think I was done with you yet, did you?” He pulled her sweatpants down and off. Hell, she'd just put them on.

“I'm already breathless.” She could practically hear his grin.

 
 
THE sound of his belt coming free from his waist was loud in the quiet room and gave her shivers. “Get on the bed.” His voice was already rough with lust.

Before she slipped from his arms and crawled onto the mattress, she fitted her rear into the curve of his pelvis and rubbed against his hard cock through his jeans, making him groan.

Oh, yeah, she was getting the hang of this sex thing again.

On the bed she lay facedown and listened to him strip the jeans off. The rustle of the garment hitting the floor was like a promise.

He hit the light and plunged the room into darkness, but for the moonlight glowing softly through the courtyard window. In the sudden silence, she waited, the air cool on her bare legs. She wore only her panties, having already discarded the rest.

Then he was there, breath warm and sweet along her skin. He had a long, thin piece of rope in one hand, which he looped around her wrists before she could say a word. She opened her mouth to protest, but he slipped a hand between her thighs from the rear and touched her clit. Pleasure flared through her body and she fell silent.

He placed his mouth to the sensitive skin beneath her ear. “Do you trust me?”

Again,
this
question. This complicated fucking question. It was one she had trouble answering fully. Daria trusted Alejandro to watch her back on this mission, or in a fight. She trusted him enough to let him tie her up and do delicious things to her body tonight in this bed.

But she didn't trust him with her heart. No. Not that. She didn't trust him not to mind-fuck her.

Daria didn't trust
any
man not to do that.

“Sometimes.” The word floated out like a slap to Alejandro's face in the quiet air. “In some ways.”

He hesitated. “It will have to be enough. For now.”

Alejandro tied a knot around her wrists like a man who'd had a lot of practice securing women's wrists. Momentarily, she wondered about all the things his blood mother had made him do. Tying people up had definitely been one thing. It had to be. He took his belt, threaded it around a slat in the headboard, looped the other end around the rope, and secured it.

It left her on her knees, facedown, cheek against the mattress. He put his hand to the nape of her neck and massaged a moment, before running his palm down her back inch by slow inch, over her rear and then between her thighs.

Through the cotton of her panties, he found her clit fully aroused and practically panting for his attention. Taking it between two fingers, he rubbed it through the material until she moaned.

“
Mmm
, very nice. I'm going to enjoy having you at my mercy,” he murmured. “Again.” Then he tore her panties off, leaving her sex to be bathed by the cool air of the room.

22

SHE gasped. Damn it, she was running out of underwear with this guy.

Not, uh, that she minded at the moment. She could buy more.

Daria twisted her wrists in her bonds, wanting with every fiber of her being to touch Alejandro, wanting to feel his cock in her fingers and to trace over his velvety, muscular chest. “Alejandro,” she breathed.

He didn't want her to touch him, though. That was clear enough when he swore low and mounted her. His body pressed her down against the mattress as the head of his cock found her slick entrance and pushed within. Daria gasped and cried out as he used her moisture to thrust balls-deep within her, stretching her muscles so deliciously it almost made her come.

He took her by the hips and rode her fast and hard, edgily, like touching her had driven him half mad and now he had to slake his need with her body. His cock slammed in and out of her cunt with an erotic ferocity that possessed her body completely and stole both her breath and her thought.

Alejandro slipped his hand down between her abdomen and the mattress to find her clit. He positioned it between his first two fingers and rubbed. The head of his cock dragged over her G-spot with every punishing inward stroke. The combination made a powerful climax slam into her body. Daria cried out from the intensity of it, the waves of pleasure swamping every part of her mind and making her knees weak.

He rode her through it, whispering low, dirty, sweet things. “You like when I'm inside your cunt, don't you, baby? You love it when I fuck you.” She couldn't help that the coarse words excited her.

The orgasm stuttered to a halt, then flared to brilliant life once again. Her sex pulsed and rippled around Alejandro's thrusting cock. He groaned and let loose, his shaft jumping deep within her as he came.

He collapsed on top of her and she moved her wrists against her bonds, signaling without words that she wanted freedom.

“No.” The word rang sure and low through the room. “Not until you admit you care about me.”

She let those words—the last ones she'd expected to hear at this moment—sink in before exclaiming, “What?”

Alejandro used his full vampiric speed and strength and flipped her so she lay on her back, her arms bound above her head. “I'm not untying you until you admit it.”

“Alejandro—”

He kissed her. A hot, mind-bending slide of lips over lips and the penetration of his tongue into the depths of her mouth. He didn't just kiss her, he ravaged her mouth. He tasted every bit of her that he could, almost like he tried to consume her.

Finally, he broke the kiss. “Tell me.”

Daria could merely pant, unable to catch her breath. “Tell you what? What do you want to hear, Alejandro?”

He stared down at her. Her stomach did flip-flops. “The truth.”

Her eyes widened. The truth about how she felt about him? Did he want to hear that she watched him sometimes when she knew he wasn't looking? That she loved the way his dark hair curled around the collar of his shirt, or how he drummed his fingers on his knee when he was deep in thought?

Should she tell him how much she loved how relaxed he was about everything . . . except when he got possessive about her and that, secretly, she loved it? Should she tell him there wasn't anyone she'd trust more at her back, with her life, than him?

There were many things she could tell Emanuel Alejandro Martinez, not the least of which would be that she thought she was falling in love with him and that, well,
that
. . .

“You scare me,” she breathed into the short distance separating their mouths. She'd settled for the truth, part of it anyway . . . the most important part. “You confuse me.”

He made a frustrated sound. With one harsh move he unbuckled his belt and rolled off the side of the bed. He walked a short distance and sank into a chair.

She pulled the rope from her wrists and propped herself up on her elbows to stare at his shadowed silhouette. “You asked for the truth.”

He didn't say anything for several moments. Alejandro glanced at her. “And now I wish I hadn't.”

Daria rolled from the bed and went to him. She set her hand on his bare thigh and tried not to let herself be distracted by the silver moonlight bleaching the warm gold color of his skin. All she wanted was to run her hands over it. Even now, after they'd made love, she still wanted—needed—to touch him.

She squeezed his leg. “I don't understand what you want from me.”

He covered her hand with his own. “I'm in love with you, Daria.”

She stilled as her mind tried, and failed, to process that simple sentence.

“You're a total pain in the ass, high-maintenance woman,
querida
. You're also passionate, caring, and the bravest damn person I've ever met.” He leaned forward and captured her face between his palms. “I love you.”

Daria swallowed hard, at a loss for words. “You want me to love you back.” Her voice quavered on the question that wasn't really a question. Of course that's what he wanted. She was dangerously close to giving it to him, too.

Memory that was never far from her reach roared to life. Christopher Sante had said those words to her once, too, with that same sincere look in his eyes. He'd knelt on the floor and smiled up into her face one breezy, sunshiny afternoon with a bottle of champagne opened beside them on her kitchen table.

She had believed him. She had loved him back. Then he'd killed her best friend.

“I want . . .” He started and trailed off. “I just want you, Daria.”

Heart. Soul. Body. Mind. Betrayal. That's how it had been the last time she'd loved.

Tears stung her eyes. Daria pulled away, stood, dressed, and left the room.

 
 
“LOVERS' spat?”

The toe of a boot nudged her side, and Daria's eyes flickered open. She'd gone to Brandon's room the night before to flee Alejandro, only to find Brandon was out. Since the door to his room was set into an alcove, she'd curled up on the floor. It was as out-of-the-way as she was likely to find under the dome, unless she found a place to sleep in the middle of a hedge somewhere.

She pushed up into a sitting position and ran her fingers through her hair. If she'd been human, she knew she would've been hurting from sleeping like that. As it was, with her body strong and supple from the Choosing, her neck just had a crick in it.

“Where were you all night?” she grouched.

Brandon keyed his security code into the pad beside his door. “I only answer to my girlfriend and my mother. Seeing as how my mother's dead and I have no girlfriend”—he looked down at her as the door clicked opened—“I have no one to answer to.”

Daria yawned. “Fine, whatever.”

“Come in and have some coffee. Tell me why you're sleeping outside my door.”

Daria climbed to her feet. “I'll take the coffee at least.”

He went for the console in the wall and got them both steaming hot cups. “Just don't let Sante see there's trouble in paradise.”

“Look, couples fight sometimes, even mated Chosen.” She took a grateful sip of the hot brew and closed her eyes for a moment, savoring it. “Even if anyone found out there were problems between me and Alejandro, it would be construed as a natural bump in the relationship.”

He grinned. “Actually that was total bait. There's trouble between you and Alejandro, is there?”

“I wouldn't call it trouble.” She set her coffee cup down and glanced at the unmade bed and clothes scattered on the floor. What a bachelor. “We're just having . . . issues.”

“Issues, right. Well, a blind man could see Alejandro's crazy about you, and it doesn't have anything to do with the mission, either.”