I Dream of Danger (4 page)

Finally— “Okay, hon. That’s fine, then. But the wine will be on the house.”

Yes. That was acceptable. A gesture of solidarity, not charity. “Thanks, Jenny.”

“I loved that old man,” Jenny replied and Elle nearly burst into tears.

That
was what her father had been. The kind of man other people loved because he’d done such good in the world.

“Yeah,” she whispered, forcing the word out, and broke the connection before she broke down.

She raised her eyes to Nick.

“I loved him, too,” he said quietly.

And that broke her. It was like a sharp punch straight to the heart. Reaching past skin and bone in a nearly fatal blow.

“Then why did you leave us?” she whispered as tears began rolling down her face.

Chapter 2

O
h fuck.

That was the last thing Nick wanted, to make Elle cry. She was sitting across from him, crying her heart out without making a sound and it nearly brought him to his knees.

She
nearly brought him to his knees.

She’d been a beautiful little girl when they’d found him that winter night. He’d run away from his fourth foster home. The last one had been the worst of all, run by a true sadist. Everyone in the household walked around with scars and hollow eyes. How the fuck the authorities managed to avoid reading the signs was beyond him. But they did. They kept shipping kids to Carlton Norris, and Old Man Norris just kept taking them in and cashing the checks. His beaten-down wife fed them shit food and did just enough housekeeping to keep cockroaches at bay, then would disappear into her room when the old man got that crafty look in his eyes.

It wasn’t rage, it was addiction. He fed off other people’s pain. He didn’t feed off Nick’s. Nick was five foot ten by the time he was eleven years old and he kept himself strong. No one messed with him. Norris didn’t want to mess with him, anyway. Norris liked the smaller kids.

One night Nick stopped the beating of a small boy, Tim, who had that look about him. The look of someone who wasn’t going to survive much longer. There wasn’t anything Nick could do to help the kid’s long-term survival, but by God he was going to survive this beating. Nick swung at Norris and connected well. He pulled the punch at the last minute so all Norris got was a black eye. It could have been a shattered jaw.

Nick woke to blinding pain. Norris had taken a hammer to his wrist and was shining a blinding light in his eyes. Just past the light Nick saw a gun barrel.

“You run, boy,” Norris growled. “You run as fast as you can because in an hour I’m calling the cops and reporting a dangerous juvenile on the loose. He beat me up, and he beat up a younger boy. And don’t think for one minute that little worm won’t rat on you and say you gave him the scars and bruises.”

No, Nick knew enough of the world to understand that Tim would be too terrified to contradict Norris.

The safety went off the gun. “Run, you fucker.”

He ran.

He ran and ran. He hitched rides, was a stowaway on long-haul trucks, and once hid in the luggage compartment of a Greyhound bus. He didn’t even know where he was going. He survived on stolen food and water bottles from service stations, but in the end his wrist blew up like a balloon and infection set in.

He dropped—in an affluent part of a town—unconscious with, as he was later told, a temperature of 104.

He came to very briefly to see an angel looking at him, so he knew he was dead. She was beautiful, a tiny sprite with light blue eyes, fair hair a halo around her head, screaming,
Daddy, Daddy
!

That’s nice,
he remembered thinking.
I died and went to heaven. Fucking A.

Only he hadn’t died and gone to heaven, he’d gone to Lawrence, Kansas. And his life split into two, because he was picked up by the finest man on the face of the earth, Judge Oren Thomason.

He was taken to a hospital where the little blond angel rarely left his side, and when he was better, he was taken home to the kind of home he never even knew existed. Calm and gentleness reigned there, along with love and respect.

The angel turned out to be Elle, a beautiful little girl who became his shadow. Nick had never been loved before, but Elle made up for that. She loved him fiercely. He went home with them—to his own room! With a bed with clean sheets, a closet full of clean new clothes, books, and a laptop on a desk. All his own. He’d gone from the hospital straight into bed, still too weak to stand up for long. Elle ferried in trays full of food she could barely carry and stayed with him until he finished every bite, then read to him, endlessly, from books he’d never heard of but which fascinated him. A wizard called Harry Potter. Lions and witches and wardrobes. A whole world called Middle-earth.

And in the meantime, Judge Thomason was working his own wizard’s magic. By the time Nick was on his feet, he was a ward of the judge and enrolled in middle school.

Kindness like a warm, gentle tsunami washed over him, a strong and utterly irresistible tide that carried him forward.

Somehow Nick Ross, mongrel dog, had been folded into this loving family and he simply lapped it up.

Until his body betrayed him. He had just turned eighteen and had a man’s body. One summer evening, Elle came in from the garden. Overnight, it seemed, Elle was turning into a woman. She’d been a beautiful little girl and was turning into a spectacular woman. Right then, on that summer day, with a sundress that outlined her small perfect breasts and tiny waist, shiny pale blond hair rippling down her back, she dazzled Nick. From being Elle his little shadow, she had suddenly morphed overnight into Elle a stunning girl on the verge of womanhood—and his body reacted instantly, instinctively.

He’d been having sex for a couple of years, but none of his bed partners had looked anything like Elle.

Before he could think, before he could shake himself from staring at her, he got a massive hard-on. Right then Elle was the most desirable sex partner any man could ever want and before he could will his dick down, before he could even be ashamed of himself, he caught the judge’s hard gaze. Nick was wearing sweats and the judge could clearly see the effect Elle had on him. A boner big as a house.

And his life split into two once more.

No words were spoken. None were needed.

That afternoon, the judge called Nick into his office. The huge safe was open, empty. A stack of bills in plastic-wrapped bricks sat on the judge’s desk.

The judge was sitting behind his desk, his gaze stern but not enraged. Nick understood completely. The judge had a beautiful and innocent young daughter to protect. Nick would have done the same. Actually, being more hot-blooded, if he had a daughter like Elle to protect, he would have beaten the mongrel to a pulp if he saw the guy get a woodie staring at her.

The judge shoved the bricks of hundred dollar bills across his desk and pointed to an open sports bag on the floor. Inside were some of Nick’s clothes, clean and ironed, but most of the space was for the money. Nick stacked the bills inside, looked at the judge, nodded, and walked out of the study, out of the house, and out of that life.

In the bag, he later counted twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, obviously all the cash the judge had at hand. More than Nick deserved.

He’d headed south, to Fort Bragg.

Why did you leave us
? Elle asked. He’d left because he was unworthy to stay in that house one more minute, but Nick didn’t know how to say that.

He also didn’t know how to watch Elle cry. It unmanned him, made his stomach swoop with distress. Worse than that first jump out of a plane.

“Why?” Elle asked again, and reached out for his hand.

There was no resisting her. He wouldn’t have done anything five years ago. She’d been a young girl. His body had betrayed him. Luckily he’d known better than to give his body what it wanted.

But now? She wasn’t a young girl, she was a woman and blindingly beautiful. She was no longer the pretty girl of privilege, she was a beautiful woman who had suffered. Overly thin, unsmiling, stunning.

Absolutely irresistible.

When her small hand closed around his, he felt an electric shock go up his arm and his body betrayed him all over again. A nuclear reaction he was totally unable to control.

He stood up so fast his chair fell over, pulled her into his arms so hard he could feel the breath leaving her body, but it didn’t make any difference because she could breathe through his mouth, through him.

And oh, how she tasted. Like honey. All those years of fucking other women and he hadn’t allowed himself once to wonder how Elle tasted. Not once, not while he was awake. His dreams—ah, that was something else. In his dreams he wondered . . . in his dreams he sometimes felt her presence, but this was nothing like his dreams; it was a million times better.

She was struggling against him, but he was so blasted with lust it took some time for him to catch on. She was fighting him, trying to get away . . .

Oh God.

It was his worst nightmare, worse than when the judge caught him staring at her and getting an erection. Because then it was just between him and the judge. Now he was getting the message from her, from Elle, and he was a hairsbreadth from coming while being intensely ashamed.

This was
Elle.

He lifted his mouth, opened his arms, stepped back, feeling like shit.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” he began when she threw herself back into his arms, mouth awkwardly searching for his.

Oh.
He’d been holding her arms down and she wanted to hold on to him.

She’d been standing on tiptoe to kiss him and dropped back down onto her heels. Nick looked down at her, nearly blinded by the fact that she was so beautiful and . . . she was
Elle.

Her hair had escaped the French braid and formed a soft pale blond halo around her head, just as it had all those years ago.

She lifted a hand from his shoulder to cup his jaw, then her fingers traced his face. From forehead to cheekbone, down over his jaw and neck. “Nick,” she whispered.

He braced himself for more questions but she didn’t say anything, just lifted herself back up to his mouth. He took the kiss over from there.

She tasted so fucking good. So good he was hard as steel. There was no way Elle could miss it either, plastered up against him, rolling her hips against him—groaning as she felt a woodie so hard it hurt.

Which was crazy, because he’d been getting laid on a regular basis at the training camp in Fort Benning. Everyone told him to get as much tail as humanly possible during training because there were no opportunities on ops, and even if there were, he’d be too strung out and exhausted to take advantage. So he’d been on a tear.

Right now, it felt like he’d never had sex before in his life.

Elle was like a cat in his arms, open to him in every way, rubbing sinuously against him. He put a hand under her ass, lifted her a little and groaned when he felt her heat against his cock. He was holding her so tightly he could feel her mound through the thin layer of her pants and panties. She was a furnace there, emanating heat like a sun. He shifted her a bit and felt the lips of her sex open over him. She swung her hips forward and rode him, driving him crazy. If they hadn’t had clothes on, he’d be inside her.

Maybe he should dial this down a notch? It was crazy—they were practically fucking in the kitchen he’d eaten so many meals in, in this cold house on a cold January afternoon. And they’d reached this point in about a minute flat. Lips eating at each other, hips grinding together, one hand under her ass, the other cupping her small breast.

Their breathing filled the room, the sounds of their mouths catching, lifting, coming together again, echoing—and he was grinding against her, his mouth and his hips . . .

Down boy
! he told himself.
Jesus, act like the gentleman you’re not
. He was about ready to loosen his arms, put her back on the floor, step back, give them time to think this through when she said, “Take me to bed Nick.”

And he was lost.

I
t was exactly like in her dreams. The phantasmagorical ones, the ones other people had.
Exactly.
Except of course for the circumstances. They were never in her kitchen and it was never so cold, but everything else—oh yes, everything else was the same.

No. Better.

Because she hadn’t realized how
alive
this would make her feel. Hot and buzzing with life right down to her fingertips. These past years she knew she was alive because she ate and drank and cared for her father, but she hadn’t felt alive, not in any way. Colors were muted, food tasted like cardboard, eating something she had to force herself to do. She had to remember to eat and drink and go to bed.

She had to work really hard to get up in the morning.

And now? Now she was one with the earth. Now she could leap mountains, breathe fire. Now she could fly.

It was her first, but she’d known instinctively how to kiss Nick. Her mouth had known. Her breasts had known to rub against his strong chest because they knew better than she did how good it would feel. And her hips all by themselves knew to move back and forth and feel him as he grew.

He grew erect because of
her!
He was excited by
her!
She turned him on—that was the greatest turn-on she could possibly imagine.

It was what she thought it would be—except better, and hotter, and more exciting.

Kissing him—no wonder she’d never tried to kiss anyone else. How could any man’s kiss compare to Nick’s? Every time his tongue touched hers, her skin prickled with electricity. Every time she felt that hard club rubbing against her stomach, the muscles in her thighs pulled and her vagina clenched, as if seeking to pull him inside her quickly.

It was fast, but it felt like she’d been preparing her entire life for this, for feeling Nick against her, soon inside her, for him to be a part of her in the truest possible sense.

The words came out of her mouth without any volition on her part, low and sexy, so unlike her voice it took her a second to recognize the fact that she was the one who’d spoken. It felt like it wasn’t her vocal cords that spoke but her belly, the area between her thighs. The words simply welled up from deep inside of her.

“Take me to bed, Nick.”

This was the way it was supposed to be. At her lowest point, after years of grayness, merely existing, watching her father’s decline, at precisely this point Nick came back. As if the gods had sent him, as if the earth and the sun and the moon had sent him. An emissary from the forces of life to drag her back from the verge of death. She didn’t question it anymore. He was here. He was supposed to be here. And they were supposed to be together.