Mercury's War (26 page)

    She shrugged. “I was on the estate one weekend when I was sixteen. I’d been driving Leo insane. I was always being a brat.” She lowered her head. Mercury guessed she had always been looking for attention, looking for a place to fit in. “Anyway, he pushed me into his office, sat me down at a desk and told me that if I could find the puzzle in the papers there, then he would teach me to ride one of the horses on the estate. That was what I was begging for.” She smiled. “I thought he didn’t think I could do it. Five minutes later, I found the code he had me looking for, but I had also broken the code.”

    “And did he teach you to ride?”

    Her gaze slid away from his. “Eventually, yes. Leo always keeps his word.”

    But he hadn’t taught her to ride that day, he guessed.

    “I went back to my foster family that week and I was placed in special classes. When I turned eighteen, Leo had my own apartment waiting for me, and a job, as well as training. I’ve been there ever since.”

    And she had always been alone.

    “That was when Dane started sneaking into my bedroom,” she sighed. “He would leave things on my pillow. A trinket. Tickets to a movie or concert. Vouchers to a clothing store. But it was usually about the same time that I caught the evidence of his recklessness.” She flashed a smile, one that told him she had enjoyed the game as much as Dane had. “He bribes me now, to keep me from going to the Leo. Leo likes to rage at him for endangering himself. And he rages at me for not telling on him,” she finished mockingly.

    Leo wouldn’t be raging at her again, Mercury promised himself. He would make certain Dane, as well as Leo, clearly understood that Ria was no longer the other man’s keeper.

    “You never married?”

    She shook her head, lowering it once more, letting her hair hide her expression as she worked. Or pretended to work. He could sense her uncertainty flowing around her now.

    “Did you have many lovers?”

    She shrugged. “A few,” she answered, still not looking at him.

    “No one that stayed?” he asked gently.

    Her chin lifted. Pride glittered in her eyes now, her expression tightening as she glared back at him.

    “I don’t need a man to complete me,” she informed him as she moved to her feet and walked around the desk to the file table. “I had dates for whatever functions required one, and if I decided I wanted a lover, I knew how to find one.”

    “I don’t doubt that for a moment, Ria,” he murmured. “I wonder though why you rarely wanted one.”

    She frowned. “And what makes you draw that conclusion?”

    He flicked his fingers to her outfit. “You have a gorgeous body but you dress like someone’s maiden aunt. You pin your hair up in that tight little bun and whenever you work you wear glasses that come from the last century rather than having corrective surgery done. You dress to hide.”

    And the light of battle glittered in her eyes.

    “I dress to work,” she told him stiffly. “This,” she waved her hand down the outfit, “is safe. Unassuming. And completes the image of the poor little orphan child the Vanderales felt sorry for. It gets results. I’m not seen as a threat, nor am I seen as someone who needs to be suspected of searching for secrets.”

    “And you didn’t risk your heart, because you made certain you wore a shield that screamed
keep away
,” he told her.

    He could see it now. He had seen it the moment she stepped off the plane, those sharp eyes taking everything in, that homely bun in place and those dowdy clothes covering her body.

    She was silent. She crossed her arms over her breasts and stared back at him impassively.

    That look made something rise inside him that had him cautiously probing for the feral displacement he was so wary of. It was like a primal stretching, an arch of challenge to an inner part of him that he hadn’t felt in so long it gave him pause.

    As though the animal the scientists thought they had killed inside him were reaching out, demanding that he push her, to bring out the woman he knew hid behind those eyes.

    “What would you wear for me, Ria?” he asked her, letting his eyes rove over her body. “You have gorgeous legs. High heels instead of those thick heels you’re wearing?”

    Her lips pressed together tightly.

    “You wear silk to sleep in, gowns that make my mouth water to chew off your pretty body. I know your breasts are perfect, perfect for my hands, for my lips. Would you wear silk that hinted at those curves? Skirts that bared your pretty legs?”

    “Trying to change me already, Mercury?” she asked with false sweetness. “You actually lasted longer than I expected.”

    He grinned at that. He was pushing her, daring her, and pricking at needs he knew she had. She had been Vanderale’s paper pusher for so damned long she didn’t know how to be anything else. He wanted her to be herself. He wanted that wild woman he could glimpse within her. The one who scratched at his shoulders, who bit his arm when she came, just as he bit her shoulder.

    “I dare you.” He voiced what he knew she didn’t want to hear. “Just one day. Just with me. Show the woman you hide, Ria. Show me how she dresses, how she laughs. Show me how she lives.”

    Her eyes darkened, regret and pain, want and need flickering within them.

    She shook her head and looked down at her clothes. “What you see is what you get, Mercury.”

    He shook his head to that. “What I see is the shell of the woman who opens up and screams beneath me every night. I want all of you, Ria. Everything.”

    “What you see is what you get!” she repeated as she straightened from where she leaned against the table. She jerked the files that she needed from the table and stalked back to the desk.

    He was waiting on her.

    As she moved past him, Mercury reached out, catching her around her hips and dragging her to his lap. He caught the files before she could drop them and placed them safely on the table beside him as he stilled her struggles by the simple means of kissing her.

    He kissed her wild and hard, the sudden need to fill her with all the lust riding him causing a growl to tear from his throat.

    Damn her. She made him crazy to kiss her. It was like sinking into pure fire, being enveloped by it and loving every second of it.

    He wanted her naked; he wanted to be naked with her. He wanted to feel her rubbing against him, stroking his flesh and pleading with those desperate little moans for him to make her come.

    “Mercury.” She sighed his name as his lips parted from hers and he opened his eyes, staring into her face, seeing the beauty she tried to hide from the world.

    Delicate cheekbones, such beautiful hair. Long and thick and sensual. He could bury his hands in it and never have to worry about not having enough of the thick, silken strands to caress.

    That stubborn chin. Perfectly arched brows. And beneath those clothes, created to drive men mad with their own fantasies of what she might be attempting to hide, was a gorgeous body.

    “Be wild with me, Ria,” he crooned softly as he let his lips trail over that stubborn little chin. “Stop hiding on me. Don’t hide from me.”

    He wanted the woman he had sensed in her from the moment he met her. The woman straining beneath her flesh to emerge.

    “Who could hide from you?” she whispered nervously. “You don’t even give a girl a chance to think before you start pulling her out of her safety zone.”

    “You don’t need a safety zone, Ria,” he promised her, lifting his head to stare down at her, feeling the hard, intense drive rising inside him, to take her as he felt her buttocks clench against the rise of his erection beneath his mission uniform. “You never needed one. All you need is all that wild passion inside you.” He grinned at the thought of it. “And you’ll make me crazy with it, even while I’ll love watching the woman you are.”

    Ria forced herself to struggle from his grip, to come to her feet and push her hair back over her shoulders as she stared at Mercury in confusion.

    He wanted something from her that no one ever had. Hell, he was seeing things in her she thought she had kept hidden, even from herself.

    She thought of the clothing she had at home, outfits she only wore for herself, that she rarely allowed those who knew her to see. The shorter skirts, the ultrafeminine clothes. The shoes that made her legs look longer, made her feel sexier.

    She shook her head at the thought of it and moved away from him, ignoring the wicked, knowing glint in his eyes.

    “You’re scared.” His voice was a deep rumble of certainty. “What are you so frightened of, Ria?”

    The things she had always been frightened of. Watching someone else leave her without the safety nets she had built for herself.

    “You’re asking for too much too soon.”

    “I’m only asking for the woman I know you’re hiding from me. I told you, I won’t accept that. I want it all.”

    He wanted it all. He wanted all of her, but she couldn’t have all of him? Somehow, despite his inability to control that, she couldn’t see the fairness in what he wanted.

    Shaking her head, she turned away from him, only to still a second later as she felt him behind her, pressing against her back. Lifting her skirt.

    She couldn’t move. As though his hands had the power to shackle her in place with no more than the lightest touch, she stood still.

    “What do you want from me?” he asked, his voice moving through her as his lips stroked the shell of her ear.

    She shook her head. She couldn’t have what she needed from him. Or at least, she found herself fearing what she wanted the most.

    His hands shaped and cupped the bare curves of her butt then. The thongs she wore left her bare, left the tender globes naked beneath his hands.

    Ria could feel her body responding to him, felt his touch in places she knew she should have never felt it. She felt that core of long forgotten defiance welling inside her. The one that demanded action, that demanded she claim what she knew was hers.

    “I just want you,” she finally whispered.

    “Drive me crazy, Ria.” He smiled against her neck as his fingers slid beneath the material of her panties, followed the small strap between the cleft of her rear until he came to the aching center of her body. “You have my permission.”

    “You’re already crazy,” she panted.

    She couldn’t seem to draw in enough air, couldn’t seem to find her balance as she felt him work the tip of his finger inside her.

    Ria gasped, arched her back and felt her juices building between her thighs with his touch. She couldn’t get enough of him. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t sate herself with his touch.

    “Only you have ever made me this kind of crazy, Ria.”

    But another woman had made him another kind of crazy. The kind of crazy that had nearly destroyed him. The kind that had made him kill with his bare hands when he had lost her.

    “Do you think I’d be any different if I lost you?” His voice was suddenly savage at her ear, anger pulsing in his voice. “I can feel your pain, Ria, and I know what the hell you’re thinking.” He released her, letting her go so quickly she nearly swayed without the support of his body.

    “You don’t know what I’m thinking.” She shook her head, keeping her back to him as she fought to clear her expression.

    “I can feel how bad you hurt,” he snarled behind her. “I can smell your pain and it tears through me like a blade.”

    She turned back to him, watching him as he pushed his fingers through his hair before glaring back at her.

    “I’ll get a handle on it.” She moved back to her chair shakily. “It’s not you, Mercury, it’s me.”

    It was that vague feeling of panic moving inside her. The panic she had felt as a child when her mother was late. The panic she had felt before Dane arrived to take her from a foster family, to move her to another. It was the panic she felt each time someone walked away from her.

    She knew what was coming. She was going to lose him.

    She looked back at him, watching as his features tightened, making him look more powerful, more sensually dangerous.

    A second later he was moving behind her desk. He pulled her chair around and knelt before her. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but she hadn’t expected his hands to grip her hips, and she hadn’t expected to find her skirt around her hips so quickly she couldn’t combat it.

    And then she didn’t want to combat it.

    She drew in a harsh breath as he kissed the sensitive mound beneath her panties, as she stared at his large body bending to her, lifting her legs to his shoulders while his lips moved over the wet silk of her panties.

    “The smell of your need is driving me crazy. I’ve never smelled another woman’s lust like this. Subtle and wild, reaching into me and shredding my control.”

    She stared down at him in shock as he lifted her leg, his eyes staring back at her from beneath lowered lashes, as he pulled her shoe from her foot, tossed it to the side and propped her foot on the edge of the desk beside her.

    “I love these stockings.” He kissed the bare flesh above the lacy top of the silk stockings.

    “You’re depraved.” She sighed, and it wasn’t a protest. It was a sigh of complete approval.

    She didn’t think she had ever felt naughtier, or more female than she did right now. She should have been embarrassed. She should have felt at least a hint of hesitancy, spread open for him like this, her foot on the desk, blatantly wet and eager.

    “The door.” She swallowed tightly.

    “Locked,” he growled, lifting her other leg over the padded arm of the chair. “Camera’s covered, and you’re sweet and wet for me. I’m going to eat you like candy, Ria. Right here. Just like my own little treat.”

    He pulled her panties to the side, growled and licked through the saturated slit, with a slow, easy stroke of his tongue that was just a little bit raspy, a whole lot exciting.

    “I love these curls.” He rubbed his lips against the damp curls, blew against them, and Ria had to bite back the moan threatening to fall from her lips. “They’re so wet, so soft against my lips.”