Shadow Alpha (10 page)

She had just—Kat wasn’t quite sure what she would call what she had just done to Dair, when he had obviously been a more than willing participant in what had happened. Seduction didn’t describe it; it had been far too wild, raw, and out of control for that.

Whatever it had been, Kat had never experienced anything like it in her life before. She had felt her orgasm so strongly, and so deeply, she had thought it was going to rip her apart—

“Should you?” Dair answered her, his expression enigmatic as he moved to the galley to pour them both a fresh cup of coffee.

As if stiltedly polite conversation and a civilized cup of coffee was going to allow either of them to forget that a short time ago Kat had
taken
this man.

She may have thought she was still caught up in a dream—a dream such as she had never known and enjoyed before now—but that didn’t mean she hadn’t known exactly whom she was with and what she was doing. Whom she had wanted. And who had wanted her in return.

She could still feel the pleasure if she gently squeezed her thighs together.

Mm, just like that—

“Maybe we should both apologize?” Dair shrugged as he put the mugs of coffee down on the table before sitting down opposite her. “Seems to me I was the one fully awake, and that you thought you were still…dreaming.”

Kat gave a wince. “We both know I was having the nightmare,” she stated dully. “The one where I start kicking and hitting out at anyone who tries to touch me?”

He raised a hand to his jaw. “You do have a pretty solid left hook, yes.”

Her eyes widened. “I punched you?”

He smiled ruefully. “Don’t worry about it; I’m sure I’ve done something in my past to deserve it.”

“Not to me you haven’t,” Kat groaned. “That is so—I am so sorry. For everything.”

Dair knew, by the way Kat could no longer look at him, that she was apologizing for stroking and thrusting her pussy against him until they both came. Something he really couldn’t bring himself to feel a moment’s regret about. Kat may have thought he was part of her dream, but the fact that she had said his name told him that her subconscious, at least, had known exactly whose cock she was rubbing against.

Hell, he had already decided he was never washing this pair of jeans again, not when they had the smell of Kat all over them. It would fade with time, but for now he would only have to take one sniff of that delicious smell to become hard again. Kat Markovic had just become his favorite wet dream.

“Tell me what happened to you, little Kat?” he prompted gruffly. “The reason for the nightmares. The clinic. I realize that losing your baby must have been traumatic for you…”

“But most women don’t go off their head and have to be admitted to a clinic,” she finished derisively.

“Hey, what happened to you was a tragedy.”

“But one that women around the world suffer through every day without ending up as a mental patient!”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to, Dair,” Kat sighed. “And that isn’t what happened to me, either.” She looked across at him quizzically. “Do you have a wife and children?”

Dair gave a self-derisive smile. “If I did then I would have some serious explaining to do when I get home!” Stripping off and washing his own cum off him hadn’t been the most pleasant experience of his life, but worth every uncomfortable moment for what had come before it!

Jesus, having Kat take him in that way, rubbing herself all over him, those soft little purrs in her throat as she came, and the pleasure of his own release, that had been something he would never forget. Didn’t want to forget.

It certainly wasn’t something he would have been able to keep from a wife. If he had one. Which he didn’t. He would have to trust a woman before he could marry her, and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Kat drawled dryly, at the same time as she felt an inner relief at knowing Dair wasn’t married.

Although why she should feel that way she had no idea. She was damaged goods—very damaged goods—and the man Dair now was gave the impression he disliked emotional entanglements. Of any kind.

But there was no changing the fact that he
had
come in response to her.

That he would come again if she—

If she what?

Wasn’t her life already complicated enough, without dragging Dair into it? That was no way to thank the man who had gotten her out of the clinic and away from New York.

“What did Gregori use in order to…persuade you into rescuing me?” Her brother’s powers of persuasion weren’t usually of the verbal kind.

Dair shrugged. “He was worried about you, explained that he thought you were in trouble.”

Kat frowned. “And that was enough for you to do what you did today?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not going to lie to you, Kat; going up against the Orlovs wasn’t at the top of my to-do list. But Gregori’s hands were tied, and he was obviously going out of his mind with worry about you. He wanted an outsider to check the situation out, and if there was a problem, to resolve it.”

Dair had certainly done that. Decisively. Coldly. At great risk to himself.

“That still doesn’t explain why you agreed to do it?” Kat pressed.

A part of her, that teenager crushing part that she had buried long ago but was apparently still inside her, wanted Dair to have done this for
her.
Not for anyone else, but for Kat, because he remembered her with affection, if nothing else.

Dair was no longer a hundred percent sure himself why he had agreed to Gregori Markovic’s request. A memory, perhaps. Of a leggy teenager, whom he now realized had once looked at him as if he were the sun, the moon and the stars to her.

He really hadn’t been aware of Kat’s crush on him at the time, but he could see it in hindsight. At the time he had just been drawn to her because she had seemed like light and innocence in a world that was so often full of violence and distrust. In order to escape that world of violence and distrust he’d had to give up that light and innocence too.

The light was still inside Kat somewhere, even if the innocence had been eroded away by too many years spent living in the Orlovs’ world, leaving shadows on her soul that now haunted the darkness of her eyes.

This darker, less innocent Kat was more of a danger to Dair, to his emotions, than the innocently trusting Katya ever could have been.

Because Dair knew he had those same shadows on his own soul.

“It’s my job,” he answered Kat harshly. “I don’t just run a security company, my men and I specialize in retrieval during kidnappings and abductions.”

Well that told Kat exactly where she stood.

She was just another job to Dair, nothing more. He probably considered what had happened between them earlier to just be one of the ‘fringe benefits’ of that job.

“In that case I hope Gregori is paying you danger money on top of your usual retrieval fee,” she came back hardly, unable to completely hide her disappointment.

A job.

She was just another fucking job to Dair.

Another
fucking
job…?

How aptly put, in the circumstances.

“I’ll be sure to put a little extra on the bill,” Dair replied harshly.

“Do that.” Kat nodded abruptly, no longer able to look at him as she turned to look out the window, the tears once again stinging her eyes.

God she hated being emotional and weepy all the time. Five years of living with Sergei, a man she didn’t love and never could love, and she hadn’t cried once, and now she didn’t seem to be able to stop.

She had no doubts that some of this was a remnant of the hormonal changes that had already begun in her body before she lost the baby.

The rest of it she could put down to the almighty fuck-up that was now her life.

Well it was time for the self-pity party to stop. Time all this nonsense stopped and she took control of her own life.

For the moment that life included Dair.

And the two of them alone together on a Caribbean island.

An island they were fast approaching, if she was correct in that the jet was now flying lower and slower than it had been, so low she could see lots of tiny islands set like jewels in beautiful blue-green water.

Although none of them looked as if they were big enough for this private jet to land on.

“Five minutes until we land, Dair,” as if on cue, the pilot’s—Lijah’s—voice informed them.

Kat’s hands immediately tightened on the arms of the chair, fingers white-knuckled.

“Relax, Kat,” Dair advised dryly as he fastened his own seatbelt. “Lijah has done this trip a dozen times, and we haven’t crash-landed yet. I would have flown her in myself if I thought it was going to worry you.”

“You can fly jets as well as helicopters?” Kat looked up at him.

He nodded. “And a tank. Any sort of armored vehicle really. Oh, and a motorbike.”

Dear God, what had Dair been doing in the military all those years that he could drive a tank, armored vehicles, as well as helicopters and jets?

“What’s in the two suitcases?” Kat looked down at them as Dair took them out of the jet and carried them over to another SUV parked in the hanger beside the helicopter.

This island hadn’t looked any bigger than any of the others they had flown over, and yet somehow Lijah had managed to land on and stop the jet before they hurtled off the end of the small landing strip into the sea. Dair had been completely unconcerned by the landing, of course, while Kat sat white-knuckled and jaw-clenched opposite him.

She had caught a brief glimpse of the pilot when Dair said goodbye to him; he looked every bit as big and muscled as Dair, but there the similarity ended. Lijah had long, dark hair that brushed the collar of his fitted white T-shirt, his arms deeply tanned, and he wore a dark Stetson pulled low over eyes that gleamed deep indigo. He’d given her an abrupt nod of acknowledgement before turning away to finish his quiet conversation with Dair.

If Lijah had been in the military too, then unlike Dair, he had completely lost the haircut and dark clothing since leaving service.

Kat had stripped off the heavy sweater she was wearing the moment she stepped down from the aircraft, glad for her foresight in wearing a T-shirt beneath it as she felt the heat of the Caribbean sun beating down on her. At the time it had just been another layer of clothing to keep her warm, now the T-shirt was necessary for her comfort.

In contrast, Dair seemed as unaffected by the heat as he had been unaffected by the cold the previous night. “Clothes for both of us,” he answered her dismissively as he stowed the two suitcases in the back of the four-wheel drive before moving round to the driver’s side.

“Really?” Kat slid into the vehicle beside him.

He shrugged as he straightened from collecting the keys from under his seat. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to bring any of your own stuff with you.”

Kat wouldn’t have brought the clothes from the clinic with her even if she had been able to; Sergei had chosen and packed them, and she never wanted to set eyes on any of those pieces of clothing ever again. In fact, as soon as she could, she was dumping what she was wearing now too.

“Did you choose the clothes yourself?” she prompted as Dair turned on the ignition.

He gave her a sideways frown. “Do you see anyone else around here to do it?”

Kat kept her expression mildly curious. “Including the underwear?”

Dair mumbled something under his breath as he drove the vehicle out of the hanger and out onto the road.

“Sorry?”

“I said yes, including the underwear,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

Kat was enjoying herself too much, at Dair’s expense, to let him off the hook just yet; so far in their re-acquaintance Dair had always seemed to have the upper hand. It felt good to see him as the one discomforted for a change, if only for a few minutes.

Whereas Kat wasn’t sure she was ever going to get over the embarrassment of what had happened on the plane earlier.

“How did you know what size to buy?” she prompted lightly.

“I guessed, okay?”

Kat drew her bottom lip between her teeth to stop herself from smiling; obviously discussing buying a woman’s underwear was Dair’s cutoff point in regard to tolerance. “I’m sure it will all be lovely.”

Dair shot her an impatient glance. “Of course when I chose it, I pictured you as having more…curves.”

Now she was the one discomforted. “And what gave you the impression I would ever have
curves
?” Even before her recent weight loss, Kat had never been particularly curvy.

Dair gave a shrug. “I hadn’t pictured you as having had all your hair cut off either, but we all have to learn to live with disappointment.”

Disappointment? Dair was
disappointed
with the way she looked now?

Well she hadn’t exactly imagined him as being the scarred warrior he was now either—

Oh give it up, Kat
, she immediately mocked herself. The man sitting beside her was so damned hot she had even jumped him in her sleep.