Cherry Adair - T-flac 03 (13 page)

"God, you're hot. Let's go in the house. I can't wait to get some of what you've learned since the last time."

She opened her mouth to let him have it. His arm was already across her back, effectively pulling her closer. Her oath died in a strangled gasp as he once again fastened his mouth on hers in one quick move.

He felt her internal muscles tighten around his fingers. God Almighty. He had to let her go before he lost it.

He couldn't. He'd started down this path. He'd burn in hell for this, but he had to make sure she got the message. With no room for interpretation.

To be effective, Kyle knew his attack had to be intimate and very, very personal. And with extreme prejudice.

Struggling in earnest now, Delanie made a furious muffled noise against his lips. He didn't have to fake the hard-on. Just the smell of her skin triggered some primitive response inside him.

Jesus. Shame curled ugly in his gut.

"Show me what you've learned, baby," he taunted, "show me—" He murmured against the impenetrable seam of her lips. He used a little pressure, her mouth opened, and she moaned in frustration, the kick she tried to administer thwarted by the water.

She bit his lower lip and struggled harder. She pushed at his shoulders, her hands skidding off his wet skin. He pulled her up, hauling her tighter against him. Grinding his mouth down on hers. Pressing his flattened palm hard against her under the water between their bodies. Hot, tight female muscle started to spasm.

She shuddered.

And helplessly kissed him back.

The hands that had been trying to push him away clung, eyes squeezed shut, her internal muscles tightened with the force of a powerful orgasm. Christ.

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She whimpered.

He answered with a rasping curse.

And let her go.

He couldn't take any more.

She'd swum a good five feet away before her eyes lost their glazed look and she said venomously, "You are such a… such a… pig." Her voice wobbly, her color high, she glared at him, as she trod water.

He gave her a nasty smile. "Wanna get porked?"

"Get near me again, and I'll throw up on you." She scrubbed at her mouth with the back of her hand.

"You really are a sick excuse for a human being, aren't you? No morals, no principles, no… whatever!"

"Ethics? Integrity? Moral fiber?" All things he'd woken in a cold sweat thinking about in the lonely hours before dawn for the last four years.

Delanie glared at him. "All of the above." The smoldering fire in those eyes was for real now. "Let me make something perfectly clear, Dr. Romeo." Breathing hard, she yanked up stretchy fabric, covering the tanned globe of her breast, and leveled him with a dark look. "Keep the hell out of my way. Don't touch me. Don't talk to me. In fact, don't even
look
at me."

She swam away with long angry strokes, a flume of white water frothing behind her. He ran a careful tongue inside his lower lip, tasting blood and regret, then followed her at a more sedate pace.

He caught up to her without effort, but she stopped so suddenly his arm almost clubbed her on the head.

"What the hell—?" He put out a reluctant hand to steady her, then dropped it uselessly into the water when the color leached from her face.
Be careful what you wish for
—

"There's—" Her lips moved without sound. She cleared her throat, eyes fixed, and said roughly,

"S-something in the water."

Kyle followed her line of sight to a rapidly moving V-shaped ripple in the water. His heart lodged in his throat.

The large head of a snake broke the surface of the water, as deadly and direct as a heat-seeking missile.

Forty feet away. And closing.

"Jesus." he grabbed Delanie's arm. "
Move
!"

«^»

They shot back the way they'd come, through water suddenly as thick and viscous as honey. At least thirty feet separated them from the safety of the rim of the pool. Delanie's arms and legs sliced
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automatically through the water beside him. But she was slow. Too damn slow.

The anaconda, all fifteen-plus feet of it, swam with amazing agility and speed. Its dark green-and-black body sinuously glided through the water, as its powerful muscles propelled it across the pool. Closer and closer. Close enough for Kyle to see its elliptical eyes. Venomous or not, he knew all it would take was one bite for it to grab and never let go. The result would be slow death within its coils.

Despite her protests, he flipped Delanie onto her back midstroke, and using an almost superhuman spurt of energy, managed to haul her across the pool and shove her out of the water onto the blistering hot cement apron. He was a split second behind her.

He saw the icy rush of fear in her eyes as he helped her to her feet and turned back to gauge just how close a shave they'd had. Mesmerized they watched the snake S lazily through the water. Standing above it, the damn thing seemed a mile long, its strong, muscled body terrifyingly graceful as it made its way under the waterfall and out of sight.

"You're certainly having an exciting day, aren't you?" Kyle said wryly, wringing the water out of his hair, then securing it with the thong from the inside pocket of his trunks.

"Aren't I just?" Delanie rubbed her hands up and down her arms, shivering despite the heat. She chewed her lower lip. "I'm going to s-sue my travel agent when I get home."

Adrenaline leaked slowly out of him, leaving Kyle chilled to the marrow and more terrified than he'd ever been in his life. And that was saying a hell of a lot.

Tomorrow wasn't damn well soon enough to get Delanie the hell off this mountain, and away from these people. All his years of patience would be worth nothing if he spent every moment worried she was going to be dead on her next breath.

Patience had kept him alive, and
necessary
, thus far. More lives than their two were at stake. He couldn't forget that.

No matter how terrified Delanie was.

No matter how scared he was
for
her.

Delanie's brow knit. "How'd a snake that big get in the pool?" She continued to stare at the water.

"There's a boy who's supposed to keep the pool clean and watch out for snakes."

Kyle wanted to run a hand up and down her back in a gesture of comfort, but restrained himself.

Coupled with his crude seduction attempt, this might work to his advantage. Problem was, her shell-shocked eyes damn near twisted his gut.

"I guess he was taking a siesta," she answered herself, then glanced up at him with narrowed eyes.

"Unless
you
had something to do with it?"

He gave her a faint, mocking smile and heard her teeth snap together. Good. She'd already managed to put starch in her knees.

"I'm sorry I warned you your
brother
was in the water. With any luck you might have come out on the unpleasant end of some sibling rivalry."

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Not giving him a chance to retort she said savagely, "And I'm even sorrier I didn't shoot you when I had the opportunity last night. You really are a despicable piece of—"

"I get the gist," he paused. "Are you done?"

"N—"

He grabbed her hand, dragging her after him to the table where the others were finishing lunch and staring at the two of them in puzzlement.

"For goodness sakes, slow down." Delanie hurried to keep her balance, her feet burning on the hot brick.

"Move it." He didn't slow his pace. Right now having her pissed
and
terrified seemed like a good thing.

Montero rose, Bruno, his "Mister Clean" shadow, right behind him. Both men impassively observed Kyle, a belligerent Delanie in tow, approach the table.

"Tell me you had nothing to do with that snake being in the pool," Kyle demanded in a deceptively affable voice, keeping his razor-sharp gaze on Ramon Montero's ridiculously handsome face. Delanie yanked her hand free and flopped down in an empty chair to glare at them.

"
Claro que no, mi amigo
," Montero protested, hand over his heart.

"
Of course not" my ass
, Kyle thought, annoyed. He didn't appreciate Montero's dangerous games.

He'd seen the son of a bitch lie through his teeth with the same altar boy-sincere smile he wore now.

"I've had about enough of this crap. I'd've been considerably more amused," Kyle said to him, "if
I
hadn't been the one it was aiming for."

"I will take care of this immediately, my friend. You can be assured." Montero snapped his fingers. A soldier raced across the steaming patio in full battle fatigues, sweat standing out on his face as he came to swift attention.

Montero fired rapid instructions and the man strode off, his sweat-darkened uniform clinging to his back as he rounded the side of the house and disappeared.

Delanie said something snotty under her breath, but Kyle kept his focus on Montero. No one else at the table uttered a word. In a state of relaxed alertness Kyle watched as the soldier returned poolside, dragging a kid dressed in servant's whites. The pool-boy's eyes rolled with fright as Montero strolled toward them.

The kid tried to run.

His guard wasn't having any of it. As he bucked, trying to break free, the guard tightened his fingers on the boy's skinny arm, propelling him inexorably to
El Jefe
. Sweat beaded the teenager's face, and his hands balled into impotent fists at his sides. His mouth twisted in terror the closer Montero came.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kyle noticed the avid fascination on Isabella's cameo face as she set her fork down and turned her chair slightly for better viewing.

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Montero, followed by the soldier and struggling kid, moved closer to the edge of the water. For a few moments, there was much pointing and gesturing.

Shit.

Montero's voice was calm, low.

The kid gestured wildly toward the pool, the fence, the back of the house.

He pleaded. Fast. Frantic. Terrified.

Kyle
knew
. He just damn well
knew
what the sick little prick was going to do next. He shot to his feet—

Too late.

The black shape of the Magnum, obscene in the brilliant sunshine, came up in Montero's hand. The kid saw it, too, his eyes wide, white, wild.

Delanie's shoulders went rigid as her fingers white-knuckled the arm of her chair.

"Hey, Delanie! Pour me a drink." Kyle's words dropped into the highly charged atmosphere like confetti at a funeral. "Delanie!"

Her head whipped around and she glared at him over her shoulder. "Are you crazy? Pour your own damn—" She flinched at the deafening hollow crack behind her. For the split second they kept eye contact, he saw the spark of realization in her eyes. He'd protected her from seeing the actual hit.

Then she spun around, both hands gripping the arms of her chair again.

Well, no one could say he hadn't tried, Kyle thought as he leaned against the trellis post, his pose deceptively casual.

He was going to enjoy breaking Montero. Personally.

It took every ounce of self-discipline Kyle could dredge up to keep from grabbing Montero by the throat and playing anaconda until the sick bastard quit breathing.

Montero stood over the body, the Magnum loose in his hand, the pool-boy sprawled like a disjointed puppet at his feet in a pool of blood, dead before he'd hit the ground.

A .357 between the eyes will do that.

Kyle waited to see if Delanie would puke.

Isabella leaned over, saying something that caused the younger woman's spine to straighten. Delanie shook her head. Isabella brought her hand to Delanie's cheek, her expression almost maternal. More words were exchanged. Delanie's chair scraped against brick as she pushed away from the table.

Her face was taut and leached of color under her tan as she carefully pried her fingers loose from the arm of the chair and rose. Despite it all, she was steady as a rock. Without a word, she walked past him
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and into the house.

Kyle didn't realize he'd been holding his breath until she was gone, Isabella close on her heels.

The soldier struggled to get two hundred pounds of snake out of the pool. Sugano strolled over to stand beside Montero and was quietly chatting to him as two more uniforms arrived. The three soldiers battled to heave the twenty-foot, animated length onto the apron of the pool with the help of a long pole.

Kensington, his face flushed, started to join them, then changed his mind and subsided into his seat.

"Christ."

He glanced up at Kyle, then shot a quick look at Montero, before looking back. "He's going to feed the kid to that thing?"

Kensington, Kyle knew, wasn't concerned with the morality of Montero using the dead pool-boy as snake food, if the zealous intensity in his eyes as he watched the proceedings was any indication.

Kensington must have forgotten that Kyle had observed him offing someone in a far more brutal manner than a point-blank shot and a creative disposal of the body. The victim had been Kensington's wife. The infraction—a fabricated affair. Fabricated by Kensington himself for the girlfriend du jour.

Danzigger walked out onto the patio, a straw hat on his head, wearing his swimsuit, a Hawaiian shirt, and an expression of obvious disappointment that he'd missed the beginning of the drama.

"Don't worry, Danzigger. It'll take weeks for the anaconda to consume the body," Kyle assured him with a touch of irony. "There'll be plenty of time for you to watch each gory phase."
Not
.

He forced himself to wait an interminable twenty minutes before leaving the patio and making his way to his rooms to change. It irritated the hell out of him to find Isabella inside, waiting for him like a praying mantis rubbing its hands before dinner.