Out of Control (8 page)
She looked at him sharply. “You don’t think I can do it?”
He shifted his weight, clearly uncomfortable. “I’m not sure I want you to—”
“You don’t think I’m doing this for you, do you?” Rose asked him. “I’m doing this for me. If Alex is missing, I want to know exactly what’s going on. I want you in the thick of it.”
“When my boss finds out that you found out about all this from me . . .” George shook his head. “Let’s just say that I’m not going to get a promotion. Certainly not a transfer into the top counterterrorist team in the country.”
“I found out about this from Bob Heath,” Rose informed him. “Alex’s assistant. Go home, George, because after I call Bob, I’m going to call you for the details. It would be nice if you had some new ones to tell me. Oh, and start packing. You’ll be going to Jakarta via Washington.”
George sighed. “Rose.” He was trying hard to be diplomatic. “It’s just that, well, I happen to know that Bhagat handpicks his team.”
“He’ll be told to handpick you.”
He laughed in exasperation.
“You don’t think I can do it,” she said. She took her cell phone from her purse. “Just watch me.”
A week ago, Savannah had gone out to dinner for the third and final time with Vladamir Modovsky, an actual Romanian count, a man accessorized with a title and a real crumbling castle.
He also had a mortgage that was coming due, but that wasn’t to be spoken of—certainly not in public, definitely not with Vlad-of-the-big-white-teeth. And in private, in phone conversations with her mother, the subject was either ignored or heavily glossed over. There was no doubt about it—old Vlad was Priscilla’s latest favorite candidate for the role of Savannah’s husband-to-be.
Savannah had been out with him three different times—which was three times too many in her opinion—enough for her to feel as if she’d given him a fair shot.
Each time, they’d been followed by paparazzi. Most of the photographers were from eastern European newspapers. Only one of the photos had shown up in an American rag, and in the back pages, thank God.
Vlad had actually enjoyed the attention. He played to it, throwing kisses to the photographers.
Savannah had gritted her teeth and gone home after that last dinner—Vlad’s third and final strike—and left a message on her mother’s answering machine, telling her that under no condition—not even as a favor to the President of the United States—would Savannah go out with him again.
Of course, her mother was out of town and unlikely to receive the message for another week and a half.
“Are your parents still alive?” she asked Ken, over a second glass of wine. Unlike big-toothed Vlad, he didn’t have a clue that he was dining with the daughter of one of the richest men in America. He had absolutely no idea that, as an only child, she stood to inherit an enormous fortune, that she already had more money in her personal bank accounts than most people earned in a lifetime.
His interest in her was genuine.
Well, okay, sure. Ken’s interest in her was based on sex. He wanted to sleep with her. She knew that. Still, even if that was his sole motive in gazing into her eyes as if he’d be content to sit there talking all night, it was refreshing.
The light from the candle he’d lit when the sun had gone down flickered over the planes of his face, making his dark eyes even darker. Mysterious. “My dad died of a massive stroke about four years ago,” he told her quietly.
Oh, God. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well . . . thanks, I guess. He was . . .” He shook his head, flashed his smile. “My mother’s still alive. Still lives in New Haven.”
New Haven. Home of Yale University, her alma mater.
“What’s her name?”
“Mary. Dad was John. How’s that for keeping it simple?”
“Mine are Priscilla and Karl.” She rested her chin in her hand as she looked at him across the table. “Do you ever think of your mom by her first name?”
He laughed. “No. Not really.”
“I do. My mother can be . . . kind of like a human steamroller. It helps me remember this is my life and that I don’t have to live it on her terms if I think of her as Priscilla.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “I’ve had a little experience in trying to live life on someone else’s terms. I had this girlfriend who—” He stopped short, taking a long slug of his beer.
“Who what?” she asked, fascinated, knowing he was talking about Adele. He had to be.
He looked at her dead on, the flame from the candlelight reflecting in his eyes, making them seem twice as warm. “Nah, I don’t want to talk about her. She doesn’t matter anymore. She doesn’t have anything to do with me, and she certainly doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
Oh, God. Savannah leaned forward. “What’s the one thing you’ve done that you regret the most?”
This was how she was going to do it, how she was going to tell him the truth. She would get him to bare his soul and then she’d bare her own. It had come to her a few minutes ago. It was something Rose would have done, something right out of the story of her grandmother’s life.
“Jeez, it’s kind of hard to narrow ’em all down to just one.” Ken leaned forward, too. “Right now I’m really regretting that when I said we should talk all night, I forgot that I’ve got to be on base for training at 0430.”
Savannah tried not to be distracted by the fact that he’d reached across the table and taken her hand, that he was playing with her fingers, that he was looking at her as if, were the table not between them, he would kiss her again. “I’m talking about . . .” She had to clear her throat. “About serious regrets.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been more serious in my life.” But then he smiled. “You know, you still have this big streak of grease on your neck.”
She froze. Oh, God. “I do?”
“Yeah. Right under your left ear.”
Savannah pulled her hand free. “You let me sit here all through dinner with . . . ?” She pushed back her chair, ready to run for the bathroom and the soap, but he stood, too.
“Hey, Van,” he said, catching her. “Whoa. I didn’t tell you so you’d run away. I just . . .”
At close proximity, she could see that he was probably as nervous as she was. That he wanted to kiss her as much as she wanted to kiss him.
“You’re so beautiful, it scares me a little,” he said softly, “because I don’t really get what you’re doing here with someone like me. All during dinner, I was having these real freak-out moments, you know? But then you turn your head to the right and there’s that grease under your left ear, and I think, well, okay. This is all right. I think, she’s here because she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty, because she’s not afraid to get up to her neck in things, because she’s willing to take chances, to go for it, to get real.”
Savannah gazed up at him, unable to respond.
People usually saw her quietness as timidity, her politeness as conservativeness. But when Kenny looked at her, he actually saw someone strong.
And instead of running for the bathroom, she kissed him.
It was quite possible that she was never going to wash her neck again.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Three
Slow down. Slow. Down.
But, great holy God, when Savannah slipped her hands up underneath his T-shirt, when she kissed him just as eagerly as he was kissing her, slowing it down was the last thing Ken wanted to do.
No, the sensation of her cool fingers against the heat of his bare back was not one that would normally evoke feelings of caution and deliberation.
She was pressed full against him, and sweet mother, the idea of taking a step back from that . . . Well, he’d have to be a saint or a madman, and he was neither.
“Savannah,” he managed to say. “I don’t want to wait until tomorrow.”
She stood on her toes for another soul-shattering kiss. He took it as a good sign. But her real answer came when she slipped one of her hands out from under his T-shirt, and down beneath the elastic waistband of his swim trunks to cup his buttocks. Talk about mind-blowing surprises. This woman knew what she wanted and, thank you, thank you, Jesus, it sure as hell seemed as if she wanted him.
“I don’t want to wait either, Kenny,” she breathed, looking up at him with those incredible eyes.
Kenny. It was what Adele used to call him, and for two-tenths of a second, it threw him. But this woman was not Adele. In fact, she was the opposite of Adele. She was small in stature, slight in build, while Adele had been tall and stacked. Savannah was sweet and polite and honest.
They were as different as two women could be.
Except, of course, for the fact that, like Adele, Savannah lived on the freaking other side of the country. If he let himself fall for her too hard, he’d either wind up broke or frustrated as all hell.
Or both.
Ken tried to stay cool as he swept Savannah into his arms and carried her into the house, into his bedroom.
But she laughed as he kicked the door closed, as he dumped her onto his bed, and he knew he was screwed. This wasn’t going to be a one-night or even three-night thing. He was going to New York. A lot. And it was going to be okay. Somehow, some way, this time, he’d make it work.
Savannah was too freaking amazing for him not to try.
She pulled him down with her and he found himself exactly where he wanted to be—between her legs. All they had to do was lose the few pieces of clothing they had on between them, and find a condom.
Bedside table, top drawer. He kept a stash there in the eternal hope that Sarah Michelle Gellar would come to San Diego for a party, meet him and follow him home.
He pulled off his shirt—Savannah helped.
He pulled off her shirt—she helped with that, too.
God, he loved everything about women, but he especially loved breasts. Savannah was not voluptuous in any sense of the word, but she was so perfectly feminine, he briefly considered weeping with joy at the sight of her, lying there, bare-breasted in his bed. But that would’ve taken way too much time.
Instead he kissed her, caressed her, licked her, touched her. She smelled like his soap, like the chlorine from his pool, like his clean laundry on top of her fancy perfume. She smelled like he’d already, at least partially, claimed her as his own.
God, what a turn-on.
The sounds of pleasure she was making were inspiring, too. When he lifted his head to look at her, her eyes were half closed, the expression on her face an image he’d take with him to his grave.
She didn’t say a word. She just pulled him down and kissed him, pressing herself up, rocking against him, leaving him with absolutely no doubt as to what she wanted.
What he wanted, too.
He kept kissing her as he pushed at his swim trunks, as he reached for the drawer where he kept his stash of prophylactics. Somehow they both managed to get naked amidst a tangle of arms and legs, her skin heart-stoppingly smooth against his. Somehow he covered himself in spite of the fact that he couldn’t stop touching and kissing her, that she couldn’t stop touching him. His world became a blur of her bare skin beneath his hands, her soft hands exploring him, her mouth and his, the wet rasp of tongues, kissing, tasting, licking . . .
“Please,” she was saying. “Please . . .”
The sound she made as he entered her was enough to bring him dangerously close to losing it. But then he realized she was coming. She was shaking apart, completely unraveling beneath him. Just like that. Just from his being inside of her.
It was too much of a turn-on, and, combined with the too many months since he’d last had sex, it pushed him over the edge.
Four more thrusts and he was done, too, in a blinding rush of pleasure.
“Oh, my God,” she gasped, clinging tightly to him. “Oh, my God.”
Good thing she didn’t seem to want him off her, because he wasn’t sure he could move. He just lay there with his face buried in one of his pillows, completely trashed by the mind-blowing intensity.
Jesus, that had been fast.
It would’ve been completely embarrassing if she hadn’t been even quicker on the trigger than he’d been.
He lifted his head, suddenly filled with trepidation. “That was you coming, wasn’t it?”
She opened her eyes and smiled. It was all the answer he needed.
God, she had beautiful eyes, a beautiful body. He rolled off of her, propping himself up on one elbow, head on his hand, so he could just look at her.
“Did you have a dog growing up?” she asked, reaching up to trace his lips with one finger.
What?
She laughed at the look he knew was on his face. “I figured even though we jumped the gun, this is the part where we should talk all night. At least until you have to go.” She hesitated, suddenly uncertain. “Is that all right?”
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