The SEAL’s Secret Lover (3 page)

Jack, the
lying bastard
.

With his peculiar mixture of half-truths, half-lies, Jack had managed to keep the fact that his sister was a knockout from a team of Navy SEALs. He rarely talked about Rose, and when he did, he made her sound like a ballbreaker. He bragged up her fast-track promotion to the leadership team, highlighting the way she kicked ass and took names, totally focused on her career. He probably sorted through pictures for the ones that showed Rose in the least flattering way possible. Eyes closed. Hair in a ponytail. Suit jacket obscuring her curves. Mouth full of food. Jack, the most outrageous storyteller in a group known for tall tales, had fooled them all into thinking his sister was a cross between a drill sergeant and a maiden aunt.

Rose Powell was a knockout. She wore black leggings and gray knee high boots, a gray long-sleeved T-shirt that hugged her chest and hips, and a swingy loose black sweater that drew his eye every time she moved. She’d obviously ignored any advice Jack gave her about walking around tumbled ruins and streets unevenly paved with marble blocks carved thousands of years ago, and she was obviously strung as tight as parachute cords after a High Altitude Low Opening jump.

He needed to forget about Jack. Jack was half a world away, unable to pound Keenan into the earth for what he’d just said, but it was entirely possible Rose would do her best to end him, right now. She could do it too. Every time she looked at him he sat up a little straighter, but that was probably because when they made eye contact it was like taking a punch to the solar plexus.

She’d been a little unfocused there at the end, but now her eyes sharpened. For a long moment they were frozen, Rose with the bottle in her hand, Keenan meeting her gaze. The only thing that moved was the wine, gently flowing back and forth along the neck.

If she poured the glass, she was out. No way would she get drunk to sleep with a man. Wait. If she poured the glass she was in, because wine was sexy, lowered inhibitions, that kind of thing. Christ. He wasn’t the one with jet lag. He should be thinking more clearly than this. He’d landed in Istanbul months earlier, and somehow never caught a flight stateside, somehow never went home. He was an expert at navigating from point A to point B using only the sun, but he didn’t have the map that showed him how to get home.

“You
can
do better,” she said, repeating his words. “You must like living dangerously.”

Not as much as he liked the light in her eyes. “I’m good with it, yeah,” he said.

“I think I want to be sober for this,” she said, and tugged her wrist free from his to set the bottle on the table. But she didn’t say anything else. She didn’t bring Jack into the conversation, or her grandmother, or set any other parameters, much less boundaries. Instead, she looked him right in the eye and let the silence flow between them like the wine in the bottle, something on a physical level getting asked and answered.

“Shall we?”

He pushed back his chair and went to stand behind hers, then put his hand at the small of her back to escort her from the bar, through the lobby staffed by a sleepy night clerk, just let his hand hover at her waist while they waited for the elevator, close enough to feel heat radiating through the thin cardigan and T-shirt. But heat wasn’t the only thing radiating from her. Tension, tight muscles, and nerves made her twitchy.

“I should take a shower,” she said conversationally as the elevator doors opened.

“Don’t,” he said. He braced his feet and folded his arms across his chest. The scent of her body, strong and musky, rose from her, twice as dizzying in the close confines of the tiny elevator. “I like it.”

Leaning against the wall across from him, she had one hand on the brass railing, the other loosely cupping her phone. When the doors opened on their floor, she looked down the hallway, then back at him. “I really should … just … check on Grannie,” she said, apologetically.

And that was the end of that.

“Sure,” he said, trying not to feel disappointed that he wasn’t getting something he shouldn’t have asked for in the first place, something that wasn’t his to have.

He let himself into his room. Out of habit he scanned the corners, floor and ceiling, then flicked on the light in the closet-sized bathroom. Empty. His toiletry kit sat on the counter, his duffle bag on the chest of drawers. He could be gone from this room in seconds. Not like his apartment in Istanbul. That would take minutes to evacuate. Two minutes. Maybe.

The room didn’t even smell like him. Had he become the kind of person who didn’t even leave behind enough molecules to register in the air?

He reached between his shoulder blades and pulled his shirt over his head, then tossed it at the foot of the bed for easy access the next morning. He had his hands on his belt buckle when a soft knock came at his door.

Maybe that wasn’t the end of that.

He peered through the peephole. Rose stood on the other side, her head tilted to the side, the soft fall of her hair tucked behind her ear. He opened the door, and watched her gaze flick over him, shoulders, abs, the waistband of his shorts visible just above the waistband of his cargo pants. “I thought checking on Grannie was code for changing your mind,” he said.

One eyebrow shot up. “I’ll tell you if I change my mind. Anyway, why would I? We’re both consenting adults. Do you have condoms?”

Jack had clearly told her zip about life in the SEALs. As if he went anywhere without condoms. “I have condoms,” he said seriously.

“Let’s do this,” she said, and stepped past him.

By the time he closed and locked the door, she’d kicked off her shoes and tossed her sweater on the dresser. “Whoa, whoa,” he said, reaching for the hands at her T-shirt hem.

“You really don’t have to, you know, romance me,” she said.

He smiled. “I’m not going to romance you,” he said. “Let’s just slow things down a little.”

The hotel was eerily quiet around them, the only thing audible in the room his breathing, deep and regular, and hers, a little shallower, lighter, getting shallower and lighter when he stepped right into her space and used chest and hips to back her into the wall. She projected big—he didn’t realize how small she was until he got close enough to feel her stomach graze his with each breath. He looked down into her face, then watched her straighten and peer right back up at him.

Her hands lifted, then came to rest on his hip crests, visible above his waistband. Her fingers tightened, trying to pull him closer. He stopped her by the simple expedient of not letting her move him. Although he was damn near desperate to feel her skin against his, he wanted to stretch this out, make it last.

Twin lines appeared between her fine, arched eyebrows. Up close he could see how tight the muscles in her face were. This was as good a way as any to start this. He leaned forward and pressed his lips to the furrowed spot and stayed there a moment, until the muscles relaxed. She gave a soft, hitching little sigh, and her fingers tightened on his hip again, but he still didn’t close the distance between them. Slowly, he tilted his head and kissed the soft skin by her left eye, remaining there until the delicate muscles quivered and gave way. Next was the hinge of her jaw, the muscle there as tight as if she were clenching her teeth, fighting him. Knees bent, a susurrus of sound as skin rasped against cargo pants. Then he opened his mouth and closed his teeth ever so gently around muscle and bone.

A softer, deeper sound, and the muscle went lax, her breath leaving her in the first deep exhale he’d heard her make. Encouraging further surrender he brushed his lips along her jaw to the corner of her lips. The temptation to kiss her was strong, growing stronger when her mouth opened and she turned to bring their mouths together.

One hand on her hip, the other forearm braced against the wall, he took advantage of her slight weight and momentum to turn her to face the wall. The sound she made when he did, a soft, helpless hitching breath, went straight to his cock. He swept her hair to the side and bent to put his mouth to the knotted muscle joining neck and shoulder. Ruthlessly he used teeth and tongue and lips until the knots gave and her head dropped to the side.

Rose gave way like a bridge over a gorge. What was it going to be like when he had her under him, clinging with all her might as he drove inside her, watching the flush spread in her cheeks and throat until she let go?

One hand crept up to cup the nape of his neck while the other slid alongside his forearm. Then she turned her face to his, seeking his mouth. He gave it to her, the contact maddeningly incomplete with her face twisted over her shoulder. She turned another hundred and eighty degrees, back to where she started, except this time her hands cupped his face to keep him close.

This time he went, pressing them together from thighs to chest as if full body contact flowed from the kiss. Her lips opened under his, her tongue flickering against the roof of his mouth, his tongue. She tasted of red wine and desire, and for a moment he was immobilized by the electric contact of her hands on his jaw, her lips against his. His heart jumped and stuttered as she smoothed her palms down his shoulders and chest, to the button of his pants.

Smiling during sex was new to him, but smile he did, the configuration of lips and teeth against her open, ravenous mouth breaking the tension a little. “Wait,” he murmured. “Wait for it.”

She gave a little growl. “Why?”

Heat radiated from her skin through the soft cotton of her T-shirt, but he kept the barrier between them, cupping her breast through shirt and bra, brushing his thumb back and forth until her nipple peaked, then kept on until she arched against him. He leaned, unsubtly rubbing his erection against her soft belly until she raised one leg and hooked it around the back of his knee. When they had a fucking fabulous shimmy going, when he could feel the heat of her sex against his thigh, when her body was undulating against his as he pinched her nipple through T-shirt and bra, when she fucking
whimpered
, he put his mouth to her ear, slid his hand under her shirt to ruck up her bra and gather the soft, hot flesh of her breast in her palm. Then he pinched her nipple again, rough fingertips to tender flesh.

Her head hit the wall with a thump and her fingernails dug into his bare shoulder hard enough to sting.

“That’s why,” he said.

She gave a high-pitched, startled little laugh that eddied into a series of soft moans as he set about discovering exactly what she liked. Her skin heated, dampened under his touch until the friction made her bite her lip hard enough to leave a dent. Then she looked at him through her lashes, holding his gaze as her fingernails left fire in their wake. She didn’t go for his button, or zipper. Instead she turned her hand and cupped his balls, pressing the heel of her hand against the base of his shaft.

“Can I do this?”

He meant to say
yes
, or rather
hell, yes
, but what came out was a deep rumble, a sound he’d never heard himself make before. A sudden, thick heat coursed along his nerves, more like being dipped in lava than shocked. He pushed into her hand, loved the way she pushed back, handling him damn near as roughly as he’d handle himself. He crowded right up against her, using his body to wall her in, pushing beyond the boundaries of male and into possessive, territorial, dominant, half expecting her to slip away, put space between them, reestablish some goddamn rules.

Instead she brought her open mouth to the pulse pounding at the base of his neck, and licked it. Then she nuzzled into the hollow of his throat, and for the life of him, he couldn’t get the image of a lioness out of his mind. Surrendering, but with just enough fang and claw to remind the lion to give respect where it was due.

“I really want to get my hand around your cock,” she said.

He was way too close for that. Someday he’d let her go to town with her hands and mouth, but not tonight. This was too raw, too hot, too unexpected to waste on anything less than full contact sex.

“Bed. Now,” he said, and stepped back, out of her reach.

“No, no,” she said.

“What?” he said, instantly alert. “No” meant all kinds of things. It meant
Stop right this goddamn instant
; it meant
Don’t fucking stop
; it meant
Stop doing that and do this instead
. She was staring at him, back to the wall, eyes wide and shocked and so vulnerable it made his heart stop. “No what, Rose?”

She lifted her hands in front of her chest, the fingers spread wide. “I need,” she started, then stopped. She patted her upper chest, the tendons in her hands standing out from the strain of reaching for something. “I need you … against me.”

Oh, fucking Christ. She was vibrating with tension, shaking with need, a multifaceted trembling that stopped when he used the strength in his legs and hips to trap her against the wall. Her eyes fluttered closed, and the sound that came out of her mouth went straight to his back brain.

He kissed her again, thrusting his tongue into her mouth with the same hard rhythm as his hips ground against hers. Her hands slapped at his shoulders once, twice, until he grabbed her wrists and pinned them behind her back with one hand, then clamped his other arm around her waist and lifted her right off her feet.

Keeping her immobilized, he knelt on the bed and bore her backward, a Hollywood move he couldn’t have performed if he’d stopped to think about it first. But then they were on the bed, his hips between her thighs, his hand loosely holding her wrists. But she was thoroughly pinned, her legs spread, her body arched into his.

He transferred the hand not occupied with restraining her to her hair, fingers sliding deep into the shining strands to hold her mouth for his kiss, rested the full weight of his torso on hers, and kissed her until she was gasping, pleading, grinding her sex against his erect cock. When he couldn’t take it any longer, he leaned over the edge of the bed to rummage in his duffle and come up with a condom package. Then he tugged down her elastic waist leggings, shoved her shirt and bra to her collarbones, and put his hands to his zipper.