Big Guns Out of Uniform (4 page)

Not that Brad wasn't gorgeous. He was. In fact, he was almost pretty. But his looks didn't make her weak the way Kyle's rugged handsomeness had.

Just as she was about to lament the lack of fireworks, a large unidentified object went whizzing over her head. The next thing she knew, something exploded to her right.

A tree crashed down.

“What the…?” Brad whirled around to face a man in green camouflage.

His features obscured by the paint, the unknown man swung at Brad and knocked him back, then he turned on her, and before she could see much more than a blur, he tossed her over his shoulder and ran for the trees.

Draped over him, she caught sight of an exceptionally nice ass.

Kyle?

The hope hung in her heart as they raced away from the others.

Marianne couldn't form another coherent thought as he sped with her through the dense brush. His shoulder wasn't exactly comfortable as it slammed repeatedly into her middle.

She was about to tell him to put her down when more explosions sounded.

He turned sharply, narrowly missing another bomb.

“What's happening?” she asked in a broken voice that reminded her of Katharine Hepburn as her first real wave of fear went over her.

This wasn't part of the book.

“It's the Big Bad, love. Keep your head down or lose it.”

She would have recognized that deep, husky voice anywhere. “Kyle? Is it really you?”

He stopped and slid her down his body, which made her instantly wet and needy. Oh, but he had a body and build made for sinning. But she hated the fact his face was completely obscured by the green and black paint.

“Shh,” he said, placing a finger over her lips.

He cocked his head as if listening for something.

She heard the faint sound of firecrackers.

“They're coming for us,” he said. Taking her hand, he pulled her deeper into the woods.

“Who?”

“Tyson Purdue.”

Her scowl deepened at the unknown name. “Who's that?”

“A nasty arms dealer. He's been looking for me for a long time now.”

She looked at him skeptically. “Tyson Purdue? Why do I have a feeling that's a name you made up while at the grocery store?”

Kyle ground his teeth. Damn, she was a little too intelligent. Coming up with cover stories had never been his forte. He left that up to operatives such as Retter and Hunter. They were slick and fast with a lie.

His forte was explosives and muscle.

Still, the other agents had taught him one thing. People would believe anything provided you said it with enough conviction.

He gave her a sincere stare. “Well, we call him the Chicken Man. He kind of looks like a chicken. It's why he has such an inferiority complex. Imagine being tagged with such a name. You'd be psychotic, too. What can I say? The man wants me dead.”

“So why am
I
running?”

Kyle froze at her question. The only thing he could come up with was a lame excuse he'd seen once in a bad spy movie.

“You kissed me,” he answered partially. What the hell, it made about as much sense as anything else. “One of his minions saw it and now he's after you. I had to go back for you to save you before he used you to get to me.”

By the look in her brown eyes, he could tell she wasn't buying it. “Yeah, right. I don't—”

He pressed the trigger for another remote explosive. Marianne took the bait. She cringed in his arms. “Are you serious?”

“Baby, I never lie about minions out to get me.” At least not unless it was helpful, and not unless it would keep her in his arms.

“Is this for real?”

He triggered another explosion. “We have to get moving,” he said, letting just a hint of an edge into his voice. “It's going to get ugly if we don't.”

Marianne swallowed at that. Part of her still doubted that this could be real, but the look on Brad's face had been sincere. The man wasn't that good an actor. He'd had no idea that Kyle was going to show up.

Any more than she'd known.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Don't worry. I have a safe place.”

Not sure if she should trust him, but having no other choice, she followed him through the woods until they came to a sheer drop-off near the crashing waves.

Kyle gave her a heated stare. “Feeling adventurous?”

“I can't go down there.”

“Sure you can, love. I won't let you fall.”

I must be insane.

She hated heights. She hated the thought of falling into the ocean below, and yet something inside her trusted Kyle implicitly. Not to mention the fact he seemed to know what he was doing, while she had no clue whatsoever.

With him helping her, they carefully slid down the steep side of the cliff and moved across the beach until they came to a small cave.

Marianne looked at it skeptically. “You know, I have a really nice room back at—”

His peeved look interrupted her. “And it's just as likely to be riddled with bullet holes. Trust me, being shot hurts.” He gave her a devilish grin. “Don't tell me my little teacher has lost her sense of adventure.”

“No, but…” She paused as his words sank in. “How do you know I'm a teacher?”

“Aren't you?”

“Yes, but how did you know that?”

He hesitated before he answered. “The way you dress.”

Marianne looked down at her khaki shorts and white button-down shirt. There wasn't anything to mark her as a teacher. She looked just like anyone else out for a stroll on the beach. “My clothes don't say anything.”

“Sure they do,” he said, moving closer to her.

Closer and closer until his large muscular body overwhelmed her with desire.

He unbuttoned the top button at her throat, making her entire body instantly hot with sexual anticipation. When he spoke, there was a deep, erotic timbre in his voice. “Only a teacher would have her collar buttoned all the way up to her chin. What? You afraid of driving your students wild?”

“Hardly!”

He smiled down at her as he unbuttoned the next one. “I'll bet the guys you teach spend hours in your classroom staring at your ass while you're at the chalkboard, trying to imagine what you're wearing underneath all this conservative dressing—”

Marianne cut his words off with an outraged squeak. “Stop that. You're skeeving me.”

“Skeeving?” he asked with a laugh. “What kind of word is that?”

“A perfectly good one that means I don't want to even think about what you're describing.” She narrowed her gaze on him. “You're trying to get me off the topic, aren't you?”

Yes, he was. Damn, she was good. If he didn't know better, Kyle would think she really was a special agent. “Why would I do that?”

“I don't know.”

Kyle couldn't keep himself from touching her lips with his thumb. She had a mouth that had been made for long, hot kisses, and the memory of her taste was still fresh in his mind. Under his skin.

Simmering in his blood.

“You are beautiful,” he breathed.

She actually snorted at him.

“What was that?” he asked with a light smile.

“Disagreement. They must be paying you a lot to do this.”

“No one's paying me for anything where you're concerned,” he said, lacing his hand through her hair. “I've done a lot of bad things in my life, Marianne, but I would never toy with someone's emotions. I'm not that cruel.”

He lowered his mouth to hers.

Marianne sighed as his arms tightened around her. This man had more magic in his touch than every member of Harry Potter's school. She'd never seen anything like Jungle Jim.

He was incredible, and the woman in her was completely captivated by him and his powerful touch. His sensuous taste. His warm, male scent.

His mouth blistered a trail from her lips to her neck, where his breath scorched her. She buried her face in the soft locks of his dark brown hair and inhaled the warm, manly scent of his shampoo and skin.

Goodness, but this man set her on fire.

He pulled back to stare down at her with those captivatingly blue eyes. He rubbed gently at her face, letting her know he must have gotten some of his camouflage paint on her skin. “Have you ever made love to a stranger before, Marianne?”

“No,” she said, her voice weak. In truth, she'd never before wanted to.

But she did now, and the depths to which she wanted him scared her.

He was truly irresistible.

Kyle took her hand into his and led it to the swollen bulge in his pants. She could feel the whole outline of his cock in her palm. Feel it straining toward her hand as if as eager for her touch as she was to touch him.

She should be offended by his actions.

She wasn't.

“Would you like to take a walk on the wild side with me, little teacher?”

This was insane. The very thought of it was…

Heavenly.

Decadent and frightening.

Dare she?

He trailed her hand up to the top button of his pants, where he lifted his shirt ever so slightly so that she could touch the hard, warm skin of his lower abdomen. He curled her fingertips into his waistband, then released her hand so that he could cup her face with his large hands.

She swallowed at the sensation of the short, crisp hairs that led from his navel downward.

“It's entirely up to you, Marianne,” he whispered. “Do you have the courage to live out your fantasy?”

Did she?

How many nights had she lain awake dreaming of this? Dreaming of some hot man saving her from something bad and then taking her madly into his arms and making love to her in some wildly erotic location?

More times than she could count.

Seize it or leave it.

Woman or weasel?

I'm a weasel. I'm a weasel. I'm a weasel.

No, her days of weaseldom were over.

Taking a deep breath, she undid his pants.

Her heart stopped beating as she saw the size of the swell of him underneath the thin white boxer briefs. He was huge!

His smile was tender, warm, and if she didn't know better, she'd swear she saw relief in his gaze.

This time when he took possession of her mouth, his kiss was demanding. Bold.

His kiss literally made her dizzy. He pulled back long enough to jerk his olive green T-shirt over his head. He took a moment to wipe the paint off her mouth and then his, but ended up only smearing it more across his face.

Marianne laughed as she took the shirt from him and carefully removed the paint from his skin. “I suspected there might be a human somewhere underneath all of this.” She'd meant the words to be light and funny.

He didn't take them that way.

Instead, he made an odd noise in the back of his throat. “Not really. Once I don the garb and assume the mission, the human in me is trained to be shoved deep into the background.”

With his chin in her hand, she paused while wiping a particularly stubborn bit of camouflage from his temple. The sincerity of those deep blue eyes scorched her. “You were trained?”

“What they didn't kick out of me from birth, the military finished.”

His words tugged at her heart, and she felt strangely close to him, as if he had just shared something with her that he didn't normally share with others.

As gently as she could, she wiped his tawny skin clean.

He watched her with a hint of suspicion behind his eyes, as if it were more habitual than anything she'd done or might do to him, and at the same time she felt his trust. It was a heady contradiction.

And as she toweled the last of the color from his face, she let her gaze roam his hard body.

Her breath caught at the sight of his wide chest and broad shoulders that tapered down into a narrow waist and lean hips. He was built like a professional athlete.

Every single muscle in his chest was discernible.

But what caught her attention most was the sight of several scars over his ribs and the two in his chest, which looked vaguely like healing bullet wounds. Or at least what she thought healing bullet wounds might look like.

Having never seen a real bullet wound, she didn't have a basis for comparison. Still, those scars looked authentic, not like makeup or window dressing.

Before she could ask him about them, he picked her up, cradled her against his chest, and took her deeper into the cave. He laid her down on a pallet that was made up of several military blankets and an air mattress.