Until Death Do We Part (Sex and Vows #1) (11 page)

“WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK. MARTIN?” I was as close to screaming as I could be without drawing the attention of the people standing across the parking lot.

“Justice!” Evie hissed. “I don’t think the people in Spain heard you.”

“Chill, man,” Martin said tiredly. “I read something else in the cable. But, you owe me, Justice, because I kept it out of Colin and Donovan’s eyes.”

I took a deep breath, shut my eyes, and pinched the bridge of my nose. “What?”

“Someone must have spotted you because the team was warned to be prepared for a man and a woman.”

I sat in silence, having no ability to respond. My life had been officially turned into a shit show.

“Um, Justice?” Martin’s voice was very hesitant. “Are you with your Scarlett?”

My spine shot ram-rod straight and my eye lids tore up as I registered his question. “What do you know about Scarlett?”

At my inquiry, Evie sat up straight too, her eyes narrowed on my phone in suspicion.

“Just that she was on the contract too. I thought maybe you were working together because I couldn’t see you running around with a civilian while on a mission. Especially a female.”

“Their information was faulty,” I told him.

Something was wrong. It was all wrong. But, I needed focus, so I steered back to Heron. “Was he with them or was he only the financier?”

“We weren’t sure, but one of his aliases pinged five minutes ago at a bar in Barcelona. We sent an agent, but he’d cleared out by then. Looks like Colin’s
ass
-et was right though,” he snickered at his joke, and I rolled my eyes. The asshole must have been bragging to Martin. So professional.

“I’ve got a five o’clock ticket for the ferry,” I informed him. “I’ll be in Spain tomorrow, around one in the afternoon.”

Martin didn’t respond right away, and I knew he was trying to decide whether or not to let me change the subject. But, he must have known me well enough to figure out he wasn’t going to get anywhere by keeping at it.

“I’ll let you know if he pops back up on the radar.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” I snapped. “You’ll hear from me later. I’m ditching the phone.” I hung up.

I drove up to the ramp of the ferry. We were early so there was no line. They checked our tickets and waved us on.

Evie reached into the back and grabbed one of the jackets we’d tossed back there earlier. “Here,” she said, handing it to me. “Cover it up and we’ll take care of it in our room.” I nodded, still too livid to speak without shouting.

After donning the jacket, I picked up my briefcase and Evie slung her backpack over her shoulder, then we set off to find our private room. The trip would take about twenty hours, and while I wouldn’t normally have booked a private space, I didn’t want to spend the trip separated from Evie, out in the open. As we entered the room, I was immensely grateful for my choice.

We set our things down, and Evie went into the miniscule bathroom to get the first aid kit. I took off my shirt and tossed it into the corner where I’d set our bags. The room was tiny and I was a big guy, so maneuvering in it was a bit of a challenge. I kicked off my shoes and went ahead and ditched the pants too, then sat on the side of the bed and inspected my arm. It was little more than road rash, the broken skin wouldn’t need stitches.

Evie came back into the room with a wet cloth and the white kit, pausing when she looked at me. I took the opportunity to run my eyes over her as well. I’d had a knot in my stomach since we’d learned about the wet work team. It was becoming a slow burn, growing hotter as my eyes landed on her full tits and slim waist, the flair of her hips and the juncture between her thighs.

She visibly swallowed and moved toward me again. I was sitting with my legs off the side of the bed, knees open, and feet flat on the floor. She stepped into the V, putting her chest at my eye level, and I licked my lips involuntarily. When I felt the sting of the antiseptic, I hissed and put my head down, resting it on her stomach.

Her flat stomach. Which, hopefully, it wouldn’t be for long. It hit me, like a ton of fucking bricks, crushing everything except the one thought filling my head.

“You could be pregnant.” The words fell from my mouth without my permission, gritted out through clenched teeth.

“What?” She stopped her ministrations, but I didn’t look up, completely absorbed in staring at the place where my baby could be.

“I could have lost you both, Evie.” I finally lifted my gaze to hers, letting her see the growing fire inside me. “You stepped into the fucking line of fire, and I could have lost you
both
.”

She started shaking her head. “Alex, I told you. The doctor said it would be a few months.”

“No,” I stood as I spoke. “The doctor said it
could
be a few months.”

Her head was still moving back and forth, her face clearly showing her state of denial. I gripped her arms and hauled her up against me. “I won’t do it, Evie. I couldn’t live without you. I won’t let you go.” I slammed my mouth down over hers, holding her as tightly to me as I could without hurting her. I wanted to fuse our bodies together so we would never be apart, so she couldn’t ever put herself in danger again.

I practically ripped the clothes off of her body as I backed her up against the wall. “You’re mine, Evie,” I growled. “You need to remember”—I ran my hands over her tits, before one traveled up to grip her pony tail and the other sliding down to cup her naked pussy—“this belongs to me. And I’m not going to let it go.” Dipping one long finger inside her heat, feeling how soaked she was, I couldn’t wait any longer to be inside her.

I took her mouth in another rough kiss, pulling her hair from the band and spearing my fingers through the silky strands. I pulled my hard, aching cock out of my boxer briefs and grabbing her ass, I raised her up enough to bring our sexes flush with each other. “Legs around my hips, baby,” I commanded, once I’d torn my lips from hers.

As she encircled my waist, I lined up my cock with her pussy and thrust inside. She instinctively clenched her legs and in turn, the walls of her pussy clamped down on my cock. “I didn’t think I could get any harder,” I said raggedly. “But fuck, Evie, your pussy is so damn tight.”

I took a minute, hoping to calm myself, but it was useless. Gripping her wrists, I shoved her hands up against the wall above her head, holding them there as I began to fuck her so hard she was sliding up the wall with each thrust. Somewhere in my haze, I worried about her delicate skin being marred by the wall paper, so I brought her hands down behind her back and held them there. “Hold on, baby,” I warned her before backing away from the wall.

The position thrust her tits up into my face, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to suck one rosy nipple into my mouth. She moaned and pushed her chest out even more. I was still a mess of missed emotions—fear, anger, love, they were all there. The fear had me pulling her as close as I could. The anger had me lowering her to the ground and spinning her around to face the wall. Returning her hands to the place above her head, covered by my own and fucking her as hard and rough as I could. The love kept me from taking it too far and poured into her through my kisses.

We were both reaching the peak and I wasn’t ready, so I abruptly stopped and she cried out in protest. I gave her a swat on the ass. “Don’t worry, baby. I’m going to have you coming so hard you’ll see stars. But not until I feel like you understand who you belong to. This body, this heart”—I brought one hand down to caress her stomach—“my baby in your belly. I love you so fucking much. No one is ever going to take you away from me. Including you. So I’m going to fuck you until you agree to quit this life, Evie.”

I pulled out and thrust back in, burying myself so deep in her pussy, I felt as though we were one. “I want you to choose me, our baby. Us. Until death do we part. And, forever after.”

I dropped my face into her hair and felt the strands turn damp as a few tears slipped down my cheeks. My hips started up again and I pumped into her, listening to her cries of pleasure. I couldn’t get close enough, deep enough. I was lost in desperation, terrified to let go and realize it was a dream and I’d really lost her in that shed.

But, I couldn’t hold us off forever. I glided the hand I’d kept on her belly down to her pussy. She was so wet, my fingers slipped through her lips. Finding her sensitive little nub, I pressed hard as I thrust in one last time and whispered, “I love you, my Evie.”

“I
love you, too.” My words filled the silence surrounding us. In the minutes that had passed since we’d climaxed, our breathing had evened out and our heartbeats returned to normal. My body wasn’t in its usual post-orgasm relaxed state, though. Even with Alex’s body wrapped around mine, pressing me against the wall, my muscles were clenched and butterflies swirled in my stomach as I considered how to talk to Alex about my job. About my decision to put myself at risk when I’d taken the shot at the bomb he’d improvised back at the safe house.

This was a discussion I’d never planned to have with my husband, the sexy man with a boring job as a contracts attorney. Turning in his arms and looking up at him, I knew there was no avoiding it any longer. He was a covert operative who knew exactly the kind of things Scarlett had been up to as a black ops assassin. I’d managed to put it off for the last couple days, but no more. Not when my strong man had actual tears on his cheeks over something I’d done.

I reached up and swept the moisture away with my thumb. “Thanks for the save back there.” I slid my hand down his neck, across his shoulder, and along his arm to twine my fingers with his and tug him over to the bed. He sat when I gave him a little push, and I climbed onto his lap. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

“Damn straight I was scared. What you did was reckless, putting yourself in the line of fire like that, instead of waiting to see if the acetone peroxide would ignite on its own.”

“I wasn’t reckless,” I argued. “I took a calculated risk, a necessary one since a team of hitmen had already marked our location. If your device hadn’t gone off, we would have been at a serious disadvantage. They were well-armed and all we had was my makeshift pipe gun.”

“Which you could have given to me so I could take the shot,” he growled.

“No, I couldn’t,” I sighed, hoping I’d be able to make him see reason. “Not only were we running out of time, but I’m the better shot.”

He stiffened under me and I hurried to explain. “I don’t mean that as an insult, Alex. It’s just a fact. I’m damn good with a gun. Any kind of gun. I have been ever since my dad first put one in my hands when I was little.”

“Your dad taught you to shoot?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “I remember being six years old, out in our backyard with cans setup on the fence. My dad was lying next to me with a .22 propped on a sand bag. His arms were around me as I tried to line up the sights and pull the trigger. I hit one of the cans on my first try.”

I hadn’t shared many childhood stories with Alex since it was hard to talk about my dad. Even after all these years, and knowing the culprit had paid with his own blood, it hurt to think about how he’d been stolen from me. Alex’s expression softened and his arms tightened around me in comfort. “Six seems early to teach you how to shoot.”

“Maybe, but it had only been a couple weeks since my mom had bailed and I think he was looking for a way to connect with me. He’d spent so much time on missions as a SEAL that we hadn’t really had enough time together to bond before she walked out on us.”

“Any time you’ve mentioned your dad, it sounded like you two were really close before he died.” His words held a questioning note in them.

“Shooting helped bring us together. That, and him leaving the Navy the first chance he got so he could be there for me,” I explained. “Target practice in the backyard turned into trips to the range. Eventually, he was taking me to marksmanship competitions and we bonded over all the awards I was winning. He was so damn proud of me, bragged to all his SEAL buddies about how his little girl could outshoot the lot of them.”

“With what I’ve heard about Scarlett, it’s not hard to believe he was right.”

“Oh, I proved it more than a few times,” I chuckled. “The guys got such a kick out of it that eventually, they all chipped in to teach me the skills at which they excelled. Hand to hand combat, knives, reading people, and foreign languages. My education was unusual, to say the least.”

“It’s hard to argue with the results because you turned into an amazing woman.”

My muscles unclenched a little at the pride in his eyes. Opening up to him like this and showing him the side of myself I’d kept hidden was scary as hell, but it didn’t seem to be changing his feelings for me. If anything, I found myself feeling even closer to him.

“An amazing woman who knows how to handle herself in tough situations.”

“I’m not trying to take that away from you, baby.”

It kind of felt like he was, though. I wasn’t sure how to make him see it from my perspective, but I needed to try. “I was recruited straight out of college, on the heels of my dad’s death, and went straight into dark ops after they helped me hunt down his killer.”

His eyes lit with understanding. “That’s how they got you, by playing on your vulnerability after your father died.”

“No, they played on my need for vengeance,” I corrected. “By the time I got it, I’d been sucked in too deep to walk away. That was years ago, Alex. It will be even harder to get out after everything I’ve done since then.”

“Will you try? For me?” I felt Alex’s chest expand as he took a deep breath and held it, waiting for my answer.

I nodded jerkily. “I think so. Maybe. I hadn’t really gotten far in my thinking process yet, but when I made the decision to stop taking my pills it was with the knowledge that something was going to have to change, because I don’t want to be out of the country for missions all the time. If we have a child, I want to be there for him or her in all the ways I wish my mom had been for me.”

“Thank you, my Evie,” he breathed out.