Dangerous Curves (9 page)

His hands were on her hips, his mouth on hers, his tongue deep inside. Just as he was thrusting, she
matched him. She took both as fast and deep as she could. She felt him gather beneath her as his own climax built. She bit his bottom lip, making him growl and buck higher, which made her cry out as he reached a place even deeper inside her. She tightened her fingers in his thick black hair and held on as his fingers sank into the soft flesh of her backside, likely marking her there as he tugged her harder, faster, against his now-bucking hips.

He reached some spot that sent sparks shooting all over again, and she arched back, trying to keep him right there, on that spot. And her arching took him over the edge, groaning, growling, as he pistoned inside her while coming in a shuddering fury.

She clung to him when it was over, and he clung just as tightly to her, clutching her to him, even as she struggled to stay upright in his lap, her fingers still in his hair, her face buried in the crook of his neck.

Their breaths came in heavy pants, and she slowly became aware that she was damp and sweaty. The air was heavy with the smell of rain.

She reeled from the need to keep this man safe. Joining this way with him was more than she’d ever felt for any other man. It was a special kind of love that lasted a lifetime, but she knew that she couldn’t take what he offered. Her heart simply broke inside her at the thought of leaving him, but she had no choice. She was going to lead Eduardo’s goons off if it was the last thing she ever did.

It was shocking to her that she and Max had found each other in the midst of this dangerous situation. Of
course, the suspense certainly heightened their sensations, so there was that element, as well, feeding into this.

None of which explained the knot in her stomach, or her reluctance to let him go, to look him in the eye and share this wonderful thing, and then place it out of bounds. Did she have the courage to walk away and not look back?

Max’s tight grip was crushing, but she understood it. He wasn’t ready to let her go, either. His arms tightened around her reflexively when she tried to move away.

But she willed herself to break contact, sever the bonds that made her too weak.

She would have pulled away, but he pressed his lips against the damp, heated skin of her neck, the kiss sweet and gentle. She almost lost it there, but instead kissed him, drawing her mouth closer to the hard edge of his jaw, before nuzzling against his cheek, until he turned his face and met her lips with his own.

They kissed, softly, silently, reverently. Every moment of which quenched her thirst for him in a way that the most fierce, rocking orgasms could never hope to match.

“We should get back on guard.”

“Yes,” Max said, his voice raspy and sounding gruff.

She did move then, but he captured her face between his palms before she could slide completely off his lap. His expression was as serious as she’d ever seen it, his gaze locked on to hers so intently it was as deep a connection as the kisses they’d just shared. There was a stunned silence between them, the power of which she saw reflected in his gaze, as well.

It was both a relief to know she wasn’t alone in reeling from the magnitude of what she’d felt had
happened just now, even if she couldn’t define it, as well as a threat to what little sense of self she still maintained.

She had no idea what would happen now, what meaning he might draw from this, or what actions it might motivate him to take. Those thoughts both alarmed and thrilled her.

He said nothing, just held her gaze for the longest moment. Then he took her hand and pulled it up to his mouth. He nipped each fingertip, and then kissed them each, too. Then he closed his eyes and kissed the center of her palm before curling her fingers—still damp from his mouth—over it.

He wrapped his hand around hers as he looked up into her eyes, his own an almost impossible cerulean blue now through the thick fringe of his dark lashes. “I trust you. I trust us. That’s a promise. Don’t lose it. Keep it safe.”

She was torn by the almost overwhelming instinct she felt to pull his hand up and give him the same gift, demand the same vow, startled by how strong the urge was to bind herself to him in such a significant way. Ultimately…she couldn’t. There was so much between them, but even more still left unsaid. And if she couldn’t tell him the rest, then she had no business making promises. Of any kind.

And yet she curled her fingers tightly into her palm knowing he felt her do it. It was as much of a vow as she could make. That she did, indeed, want what he wanted. She just couldn’t accept making such a promise.

She couldn’t keep it safe.

Not without putting at risk the trust that had already been bestowed on her, and the vows she’d made to her dead stepbrother, her agency and the boss she so respected.

S
HE LAY NEXT TO HIM
on the soft bed he’d made of leaves, waiting for her chance. She sighed heavily, quite disgusted with her pent-up self, and tucked her arm beneath her head. She was staring at the sky, but seeing something else entirely. Someone, actually.

Max Carpenter.

He was the most confounding man she’d ever met.

Mostly because he’d given his trust to her so deeply and she was only minutes away from breaking it completely.

Maybe that was why she was stalling.

She rolled to her side, agitated, too sick at heart to be closer to him. The warmth of him drew her, but she had to do this. It was the only way to keep him safe and to break her tie with him.

The moon was a big, round ball of light in the sky and she closed her eyes against the pain. She was glad she’d had those last moments of closeness with him. It would have to last her a long time.

A lifetime.

Okay, she had to stop procrastinating. She rose up on her elbow, waiting a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness a bit more.

Max slept on his side, one arm close to his body, but the other extended as if reaching for her.

She looked away and rose. Silently she made her way
over to the backpack and took the items she needed. He’d have no problem finding Makawao.

It was dead ahead of them, but she needed the GPS to get her farther away from here, drawing off Fuentes’s attack dogs.

She silently moved out of the camp and down into the valley, until she got to Max’s false trail. It would be the most logical place for Fuentes’s men to spot her. She made sure of it. She brought up the GPS and then consulted the map. She’d head to Pukalani.

From there she could rent a car and somehow charter a flight, or contact her boss. Max had been right. She’d either have to trust a stranger or put other people at risk. She wasn’t without skills, but stealing a boat wasn’t a good idea.

“Our lives are so very different, Max,” she said, her voice not much more than a hushed whisper. She lifted her gaze to where he was sleeping and her heart felt crushed in her chest. “Goodbye.”

She turned toward the west, consulting the GPS one more time. Tucking it into her pocket, she took off at a run into the dark night.

Alone.

Just as she liked it.

She’d draw the wolves off Max, and set them squarely where they needed to be. Right on her heels.

Whatever happened over the next few hours, she’d already resolved one thing: pairing up with Max wouldn’t have worked. She was doing her thing solo. It was pure fantasy to have believed, even for that one shining split second, that there was ever going to be another way.

I
T WAS STILL DARK
when Rio hit the outskirts of Pukalani. She started seeing signs of civilization. She also knew she was being followed. She put on more speed, but the fatigue was catching up to her. Her heavy breathing could attest to that.

She used the gently sloping terrain to her advantage, adapting to the topography of Maui as easily as she would if she were in Colombia, or Fiji, or New York.

Rio hurried as fast as she could in the dark, skidding down a slope, then feeling it rise again. At the next dip, she changed direction. Ducking behind the curve of the hillside, she waited. Only one man came over the hill after her.

She reached for the weapon she’d placed at the small of her back. When her hand settled over the grip, someone grabbed her wrist, spun her around and hit her hard in the chest so that she fell to her back.

She gazed into the eyes of Eduardo Fuentes and fury ignited in her, burning hotter than a blue flame. Before he could utter a sound, she was up and at him, her fists and feet flying. It was clear he was used to bodyguards because it took him too long to react and Rio laid him out cold.

She bent down to pick up her Glock, thinking one shot to his head and it would all be over. But that decision was taken out of her hands.

Another man came over the rise and she instantly recognized him.
Max
. What was he doing? He was completely out in the open and vulnerable. But before she could do anything, the crack of a rifle reverberated in the night and she saw Max clutch his arm and dive for cover.

Rage and pain gripped her as she saw a man rise and his intent was clear.

Rio raced toward him, but he rolled to his side and fired. Bullets chipped the ground near her thigh and she flung herself to the ground, losing her gun. The thug approached, but Rio leaped to her feet and balled up her fist, hitting the man as hard as she could. He staggered back and dropped his rifle. Snatching up the weapon, Rio cracking the butt of the gun against the man’s temple, driving bone into his brain.

Max rushed to a stop in time to see it.

The man dropped instantly, but he wasn’t dead, his body convulsing. Rio staggered, her gaze locked on the man’s bloody head.

Max walked over to her, his eyes full of anger and relief, cocked the Glock and finished off the goon.

His arm was bleeding. But he offered her his hand to help her stand. “Max, I’m—”

“Can it, Rio,” he growled. “We don’t have time for that now. There’s a pick-up truck not far from here. Let’s go. I’ve got a feeling the Ghost isn’t done yet.”

She bit her tongue. Now was not the time to say
anything about who was really after her. Eduardo was unconscious and so close, only a jog away. She could go back and just finish him off. But Max was bleeding from a wound in his arm and she’d need to administer first aid. Max was simply much more important. There was also no way of knowing how many other goons they had on their trail.

Max led the way to the truck that was parked next to a grove of pineapples; the trees were planted in neat spiral rows that looked like the whorl of a fingerprint.

“Get in,” he said. “You’ll have to drive.”

He never even asked her if she could hot-wire the truck, and after a minute, she got it started.

Max didn’t say a word, but she could feel the anger and sense of betrayal that emanated off him. She had been trying to get away from him to keep him out of danger. True to form, he couldn’t seem to let her go.

When she saw the sign for the vet clinic, she pulled off the road. Max had fallen asleep by then and it didn’t take long to break in to the clinic to steal what she needed. To assuage her feelings of guilt, she left cash on the counter to pay for what she’d taken.

She cleaned Max’s wound and gave him a few stitches. She headed toward Pukalani and found a place to ditch the truck. After using an untraceable credit card to pay for the car rental, they were back on the highway.

“We’re headed away from the airport,” Max said.

“Yeah, we need to find a safe place to call your friend and get some sleep. They won’t expect us to head in the wrong direction. We’ll go to Wailea and find a hotel. I want a shower and some clean clothes.”

Every bone in her body ached, half-healed cuts and bruises in turn painful and stinging. Her feet throbbed in her boots and it would be good to have a chance to take them off and get some sleep in a real bed. She was done with roughing it for now.

He refused to look at her and she had to understand why, but it still hurt. With the loss of blood, the painkiller and antibiotics he received, Max fell asleep again.

It was a relief. The guilt twisted her up inside, but it was nothing compared to how she felt when she saw that man pointing a gun at him. Max could be dead now and it would be all her fault. She made the decision to separate from him and she still thought it was a better plan than sticking together.

“Why couldn’t you have just left me,” she murmured.

She wanted him to go on his own, and the only way to do that would be to tell him something that would show she wasn’t worth all the energy he put into protecting her. She had lied to him and soon he would find out to what extent.

It would violate the strict edict her boss had given her, but, at this point, she didn’t care. He shouldn’t have given her the assignment in the first place.

Suddenly, she wondered why he had. She’d been injured, not at the top of her game. Her suspicious mind grabbed on to the most logical reason. Her boss was trying to keep her out of the way, too. With her and Max ensconced in a cozy getaway for two, her boss effectively killed two birds with one stone.

The man she’d seen at Fuentes’s compound.

It had to be that. It had to be. She knew him from somewhere and her boss didn’t want her to remember where. It begged the question: why didn’t her boss want her to remember where she’d seen the man in Fuentes’s compound? What was the DEA trying to hide from her?

That added another layer to this already crazy situation she and Max were in. It was time to leave Maui and ask some pointed questions. In the meantime, she’d have to work on the dilemma of exactly who that man in the shadows was.

R
IO SAUNTERED INTO THE
hotel like a regal queen, not someone who was covered in dirt and grime, and a little blood. She gave them a good story about their car going off the road and how they’d lost all their luggage.

When she went to pay with a credit card, Max grabbed her wrist, ignoring the pain in his arm that pounded in time to his heartbeat. Even with the sleep he’d had, fatigue dragged on him.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” she said. “I’ll pay.”

When she finished the registration and they walked away from the desk, he asked, “Do you think that was smart?”

“It’s a card I applied for under my deceased aunt’s name. I signed up for it right after I went into the DEA. I only use it in emergency situations.”

“That’s handy and also illegal.”

“I know. But I’m not defrauding anyone. I pay the bills.”

Max had to cut her some slack. She used the card to support her job working for Uncle Sam. What could he
say? He’d been involved in stealing a truck and medical supplies from a vet.

Max had to give her credit, and he gave it grudgingly because he was still stinging from her duplicity. This was why he didn’t trust easily. He knew by the way she’d been acting she had plans to run. He wasn’t asleep when she stole out of camp, and it was only a matter of minutes before the men who’d been following them had shown up. It was an easy task to find her trail since she’d mucked with his carefully set false ones. When they set off after her, he followed.

A part of him was deeply relieved to know his instincts had been right all along. And yet, another part of him still felt thoroughly betrayed she’d held back when he hadn’t. This made no sense, since he’d pressed her about whether she was hiding something.

He had this gut feeling if he let her out of his sight, he’d never see her again. And trust had nothing to do with it. Things were happening here, things he didn’t understand. Until he had a better handle on who the players were and what the stakes were, he didn’t really want to separate from her.

He could see the fatigue etched on her face quite clearly now, and knew he didn’t look much better. “Let’s get a hot shower and hot food.”

“No,” Rio corrected him as she headed for the boutiques. “We need some clothes. Once I take these off, I don’t want to have to put them on again.”

He understood that reasoning quite clearly.

“You go up to the room and shower. I’ll be up shortly.”

“I think it’s better if we stick together.”

She looked at him with sorrow in her eyes, but nodded.

What could he say? She had to know he wasn’t going to be as gullible as he’d been in the forest when he thought they had been working together only to find out she’d lied right to his face. He just had to wonder how long she’d been stringing him along.

He stared after her as she disappeared among the racks of clothing and felt his heart twist in his chest.

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER
M
AX
stepped out of the hottest shower he’d taken in a long time, happy to be clean, but not feeling as rejuvenated as he’d hoped. He knew that part of that was the betrayal he tried to get over, quite unsuccessfully. Rio hadn’t come into the bathroom, but maybe she had stayed away for fear of his rejection. He really didn’t want to make up right now. He needed to think and she would be a distraction.

Max was already confused enough. And he was feeling more preoccupied having been through the emotional roller coaster of the past several hours. Falling in love was a bitch.

Then he stepped into the master suite and found Rio stretched out on the bed, fast asleep. He admitted that falling in love was also one of the best feelings in the whole world. The relief was far greater than it probably should have been, but he was human. She’d stayed. And she was okay. In some ways, on some levels, that was all that mattered to him right now.

His body behaved in a predictable male way upon seeing her all flushed and relaxed, her dark auburn lashes stark against her cheeks. But this swelling sen
sation was new to his heart and would take him a while to absorb fully.

He hated to wake her, but he knew she wanted to be clean. She’d said so in the car. He was struck by how little he really knew her. And by how badly he wanted to change that.

Even now his anger was abating. He could understand why she ran. She was trying to protect him, but if he hadn’t come along when he did, who knew what would have happened?

He rubbed the towel over his hair, but paid far more attention to her sleeping form than to the new clothes tucked away in the colorful shopping bags she had dropped near the bed. He’d never seen power shopping, but Rio had been a whirlwind of activity in the store while he waited and kept a keen eye out for anyone who looked remotely suspicious.

He shook his head. Champion field agent, siren and martial arts expert. It seemed she was also quite the champion shopper, too.

“Are you still mad at me?” she asked, her voice soft and drowsy with sleep.

He glanced up at her in time to watch her stretch. He was supremely content to have a front-row seat to that beautiful spectacle. The arching alone was well worth the price of admission. Even though his body once again took on the predictable male role, his emotions were far too turbulent to deal with the temptation, so he turned and sat on the bed, rummaging through the bags. “Did they teach you power shopping at Quantico? I must have missed that class.”

“It was an elective.”

He glanced over his shoulder.

Her cheeks were a little rosy with sleep, her hair softly tangled around her face, her eyes a bit unfocused. “Did you guess at my size?” he asked. “I hope this stuff fits. Now that I’m clean, I don’t want to put on those dirty clothes.”

“I had my reasons, Max.” The serious look on her face was as provocative as her smile. She sorely tested his willpower.

“What were you thinking? We’re stronger together.”

“I didn’t want you involved anymore. They were going to kill you on sight.”

“You were trying to protect me.”

“Yes, as crazy as that sounds, I was. I couldn’t bear having your being hurt or worse on my conscience, Max.”

“If they caught you, Rio, they’d kill you as soon as they got the information they wanted.”

“I didn’t intend to get caught. I was sure that I could make it to Pukalani and a rental car.”

“Then what?”

“I would have thought of something. I’m not without skills.”

Thinking about her skills was not a good use of his time right now.
Keep your cool, Carpenter.
Time was ticking again.

He searched through the bag closest to him, but immediately set it aside when his fingers hooked a scrap of black lace. His body had enough to work with without sexy props. In the bag next to it, he found briefs and socks that looked to be his size. Checking out the
last bag netted him T-shirts, one green and the other gold. He chanced looking at her again. She’d sat up now, her legs relaxing against the side of the bed. “So, underwear, socks and shirts. I’ll take it, but eventually, I want to leave the room.” It was a joke, but since she didn’t know him that well, he added, “I can make do with the ones I was wearing.”

She leaned over and snagged the bag with the black thong in it and pulled out two pairs of shorts. “I gave you a choice, khaki or black. They took your boots for cleaning when you were in the shower.”

He looked at her and sighed. “Are we okay for now?”

“There’s more.”

“I’m not going to like this, either, am I?”

She scooped up two bags and skipped by him on her way to the shower.

“No. You’re not. You think you’re pissed now.”

It took almost superhuman control not to reach out and snare her and her bags full of lacy things and throw them all on the bed. Instead, he grabbed a pair of boxers.

She slipped into the bathroom and closed the door between them.