One Wrong Move (26 page)

“Hmm,” she murmured, tugging up her stocking. “No, I don’t think so. You’re a hound dog, Roy. And bestiality just isn’t my thing.”

“Come on,” he said. “You’d do dogs. You’d do anyone.”

She thought of that helpless, dazzled look of adoration her lovers gave her when she sparkled, and blew him a kiss.

“No, Roy,” she said. “Dogs don’t have anything I want.”

It was the dark cavern again. The chill air clung to his clammy skin,
heavy and unwholesome. The cavern extended into the dark, with
many dark nooks in which anything could be lurking.

In the middle of the chamber lay a girl, dressed in a wet, dirty nightgown. Julie. She lay on her side on the jagged rocky floor, as if her body
had been dumped there.

He knelt. She was dead, of course. Her face was gray, tinged with
green. Her long dark hair was tangled with seaweed. Her blind, open
eyes were full of silent accusation. Eternally asking the same question.

Why didn’t you save me?

He woke with a jolt, and found his limbs tangled with Nina’s.

Her hair draped his chest, tickling his jaw. Her weight pinned down his gun arm.

Two things happened. His cock hardened, and his stomach dropped. Like a rock lobbed over a freeway overpass, about to crash into a windshield and cause a twenty-car pileup. This scenario was exactly that bad, that stupid. What the
fuck
had he been thinking?

Alarm pulsated like a strobe light, jangling his brain. He tried moving slowly, but he was tangled up in all that curly hair, terrified of waking her.
Danger.
It was all around. He felt it, smelled it, tasted it. He’d always had an instinct for it, but danger had always threatened from the outside. Guns, knives, grenades, bombs.

Not his own gut-twisting issues with sex and intimacy. He couldn’t tell them apart. Fear was fear. Who knew what this red alert was about? No one could have found them. No one could have connected this hotel to them. Except from the hospice. But he would have noticed if they’d been followed.

Or would he? He thought of the shell-shocked state he’d been in when they left. Nina had practically been carrying him.

She felt his tension and stirred in his arms. He angled himself so that she slid off his plank-stiff body and thudded onto the sheets.

She rubbed sleep from her eyes and hoisted herself up onto her elbow, lush breasts dangling. Her puzzled, misty gaze took on focus, and started looking worried.

Yeah. As well she might. They stared at each other. His stomach kept plummeting while pressure built inside him, like steam.

“Wow,” she murmured. “Eight thirty. I can’t believe it’s so late.”

“You slept like a rock,” he said. As if he hadn’t, too. He should have stayed awake. But no, he’d forgotten about the mortal danger and conked out into a postcoital haze after the three-hour fuck fest.

Dickheaded self-indulgence. Selfish, brain-dead asshole. He deserved to get bombed into a thirty-meter crater for being so sloppy. He wished there were two of him so he could kick his own ass.

“Looks that way,” she said cautiously, wary of his steel-cable tension. “Um. Aaro. Are you, uh, OK?”

“You told me you couldn’t sleep.” The words blasted out like an accusation. “You said you could only sleep if you had a hiding place.”

This hung in the air. She finally spoke. “I guess you were my hiding place last night.”

Her tone was gentle, but he still recoiled. “Don’t lay that on me,” he said. “I can’t carry it. I can’t be that for you.”

He felt her hurt vibing against his back in the appalled silence.

“I’m not laying anything on you,” she said. “I was just saying.”

He shook his head, and declined to reply, or to look at her.

“So,” she said, after moment. “It’s like that, is it?”

Yeah, it was exactly like that, and too fucking bad. Welcome to cold, hard reality. He’d warned her. She’d practially signed a waiver. He had never misrepresented what he had to offer on a personal level.

Which was exactly nothing.

He got busy with the coffeemaker, just to do something with his hands. Hoping she’d just chalk one up for experience, and they could get through the morning without any more misunderstandings.

She went into the bathroom. The shower started to hiss, but not for long. He could tell by the look on her face when she came out, wrapped in a towel, that she’d been working up a rant. She groped for her clothing. “This sounds like my cue to grab my clothes and split.”

“If you want to die young, sure.”

She tried to cover herself, but the towel wasn’t up to the task.

It took a better class of hotel to get towels big enough to wrap all the way around ta-tas that luscious. Her glance fell to his crotch, skittered nervously away. He glanced down at his massive hard-on. Let out a harsh laugh. “Take a look at the circus sideshow act.

Sad, isn’t it?”

Her chin went up a notch. “It didn’t have to be.”

“No?” He grabbed his cock, massaged it with a rough hand.

“So you’d service me again? Great. Get over here, lose the towel, bend over.”

“Why are you doing this?” Her voice shook. “Do you suffer from some rare mental illness? Why do you have to be so ugly?”

“It’s my nature,” he replied. “I’m hardwired that way. I warned you last night about that, Nina. Repeatedly.”

“Oh, shut up!” she snapped. “I am so sick of your bullshit.”

There was a tune he’d heard before. “Of course you are,” he said. “It happened even faster than I thought it would.”

“What?” she yelled. “What’s happened? Other than you freaking out on me, and acting like a spoiled child?”

He gestured at the space between them. “You, hating my guts.

You were halfway there yesterday, more than once. The only thing that kept you from going all the way is because you wanted me to fuck you.”

She was so angry, her tits slipped out of the towel and she didn’t even notice. “You arrogant son of a bitch,” she breathed out.

“Yeah, yeah. And now you’re all confused, because I’m not following the pretty script in your head.”

Her mouth flapped in outrage. “What? I don’t have any script!”

“Sure you do. You can’t help it any more than I can help being an asshole. But I’m not going to play nice. Get it through your head.”

She drew herself up, fiercely dignified. “It’s through my head.

You can stop hammering it in now.”

He was breathing hard. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

They stared at each other for a moment, but the horned berserker that had taken over his body wasn’t done hacking and rending yet.

“So,” he said. “Do you still want it?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Want what?”

He gestured at his cock, still cluelessly begging for action.

“This.”

She stared at him, mouth hanging open. “You just can’t stop pushing, can you?” she asked, in a wondering tone. “You have to push us all the way off the cliff, no matter what. You just can’t stop.”

“I could make you come again before we hit the rocks,” he offered.

“News flash, Aaro. We’ve hit the rocks already,” she informed him. “We’re splattered all over the place down there.”

“Oh, no,” he assured her. “You have no idea. There is so, so much farther yet that we can fall.”

She clapped her hands over her mouth, and for a second, he was afraid she was going to burst into tears.

It was with huge chagrin that he realized she wasn’t crying.

She was laughing. At him. He stared at her, unsure if this was a worse state of affairs, or better. “Yeah,” he said, through his teeth.

“Yeah, go for it. I know I’m just a big laugh riot.”

“You’re ridiculous, Aaro,” she told him. “And I am still not fooled.”

“You’re superimposing dumb girl fantasies over everything I say. I’m trying to be straight with you. That’s all I’ve got to offer.”

She gave him a cautious nod, her lip trapped between her teeth.

“I will be straight with you,” he went on. “And I’ll try to keep you alive. And I will fuck you properly. If you want me to.

That’s it.”

“Hold on.” Her eyebrow twitched up. “That’s three things.”

His brain wouldn’t process that, being starved of the oxygen-bearing red blood cells which had all defected to his crotch.

“Huh?”

“First you say it’s only one thing you have to offer. All of a sudden, it’s three. Watch out, Aaro. Before you know it, you’re going to start opening doors for me. Flowers, chocolates, champagne . . .”

“You’re doing it again,” he growled. “Stop that shit, Nina.”

“And you’re panicking. Chill, Aaro.”

Her lips were still twitching. So he was an object of amuse-ment to her now. He was that desperate, that pathetic. That transparent.

He should say something vicious, to drive the nails deeper into the coffin. But he couldn’t. Nothing was coming to him. Not while she looked at him with that hot glow in her eyes. His cock throbbed with each heartbeat. They stared at each other, tension tightening. That high-pitched hum of sex about to happen.

Amazing, juicy, improbable sex.

If he didn’t kill it, right now. He could. But God, he did not want to. He opened his mouth. A croak came out. He coughed.

“No promises.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Not even common courtesy?”

“Right,” he said, and the part of him that just could not shut the fuck up kept on blathering. “Here’s a tip, to put you on the right track.”

“This is sure to be fascinating,” she said. “Enlighten me.”

His eyes dropped to her muff. Fuzzy ringlets that hid juicy, pink, folded secrets. “Shut me up,” he told her. “The sooner my mouth has a job to do, the sooner I’ll stop shooting it off.”

“Ah,” she murmured. “You mean, um . . . ?”

“Stop playing coy.” It burst out of him, steam blasting out of a valve. “Get over here and sit on my face.”

“Stop it.” Nina’s voice rang out imperiously. “Don’t say another ugly, vulgar, hurtful word, Aaro. Just shut . . .
up.
”

His chest heaved, painfully. “Make me.”

Make me.

The words rang, flung down, like a gauntlet. His tone was pure taunting provocation, but after yesterday, her reality had split. There was the old reality, which had become transparent, and the new one, the real one, shining underneath. She heard things, saw things, knew things she’d never known before. With her new ears, she heard very clearly that his words were not a taunt.

They were a plea.

She’d felt it last night, too, but today the sensation was stronger. He was trapped behind a booby-trapped, land-mined fence, strung with razor wire, desperate and alone. If she had half a brain, she’d leave him there, write him off as more trouble than he was worth. He didn’t expect her to do otherwise. No sane, self-respecting woman would put up with the shit he dished out.

That was the point. He did it on purpose. It was his automatic security system, functioning exactly as programmed.

And she saw right through it.

The feeling was seductive. She felt flooded with energy, bright and hot. She tingled and glowed. Fearless. Inspired. She followed the inner prompting, let the towel drop to the floor, let her spine stretch up to maximum height and then a little more.

Shoulders expanded. Hair, tossed luxuriously back. Boobs, tilted provocatively up.

He opened his mouth. “Don’t start to—”

“Shut up.” The punch of power behind her words startled him.

His chest jerked, with ironic laughter, but he did not speak.

He just swallowed hard, staring hungrily as she came closer.

Every step she took, the glow of power got hotter, stronger.

When she was inches from his body, the buzz of his aura electri-fied her. Her nipples hardened, her hairs rose up, her lungs hitched.

She didn’t touch him, just let the charge build as she looked him over. Reached out, boldly stroking the angles and dips and bulges. Not a pinch of fat on the guy. All lean, taut, sinewy. No soft spots, inside or out. She dragged her fingernails in his chest hair. His nipples were as hard as little rocks. The arrangement of the muscles and tendons in his throat was a marvel of human physiology. She wanted to sink her teeth into his deltoids. And his ass, oh. She’d never been the ribald, ass-ogling type, but there was always a first time. And as for his manly member, ah.

She wanted to make him gasp, sigh. To knock that frozen look off his face. To make him relax. Trust her.

Talk about the impossible dream.

But now, he needed something else, something so hard to grasp, she had to feel her way toward it . . . or she’d blunder right past it.

“You know what I think?” she said, her voice throaty and low.

“I think you’re sorry Bruno’s bodyguard is on his way. I think you’re going to miss me.” She gripped his cock. “I’m sure this fellow will.”

“Nina,” he began, in a tight, warning tone. “I can’t—”

“Shut up.” She put her finger on his lips. “Didn’t you hear me the first two times?”

His lips twitched under her finger. His lips were so soft, so warm. She had to stay on top of this. She channeled all the most regal queens and empresses of history. “I did not give you permission to speak.”

She felt his teeth beneath her finger as his grin flashed.

“You’re getting off on this,” he said softly. “Check you out.”

“Shut up,” she snapped. “You’re breaking the rules.”

“There’s rules now? Since when?”

Since you begged me for them, lout.
“Shhhh.” She swatted his chest, and put her hands on his big shoulders—and pushed down.

His eyes widened, startled, but he sank to his knees, fascinated.

She grabbed his hair, pulled his face back, and perched a leg up on the bed, waving her muff inches in front of his delighted face. “This is the part where you make up for every rude, nasty, unnecessary thing that you just said to me. Make me forgive you.”

His eyes lit up. Seized her hips in his big hands, and put his mouth to her without an instant’s hesitation.