The SEAL’s Secret Lover (7 page)

“All of them?”

“I read some of them,” she said. “A few. That Grannie sent me. But I’d like to read
The Iliad
.”

She offered him his copy, but he held up his hand. “Keep it.”

“Thank you,” she said, smoothing her hand over the cover. “I’ll take good care of it.”

“Don’t worry about it, Jetlag. It’s been through more missions than I can count.”

Carefully she laid it beside her laptop, away from the sweating beer bottles, then checked the email download process. Thirty-two percent complete. “This is a complete waste of time, isn’t it?”

She half expected him to repeat his line from the previous night, that he could take her mind off it. He didn’t. Instead he watched her for a long moment, until she looked away.

“You’re afraid,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” she said quickly. Admitting fear was tantamount to being the slowest gazelle in the herd. “I’m … on completely new ground. No map. No project plan,” she said quietly. “That kind of … loss of control … I don’t like it.”

He relaxed, signs she could read only because she was watching for them. She was studying Keenan’s body with the focus she normally reserved for the really important things. Management committee meetings. Negotiations with vendors. That sort of thing.

“So it’s not about the threat of violence. It’s about the loss of control.”

“Always,” she said. “Always.”

He thought about this for a moment. “If it helps, it’s not a loss so much as a surrender.”

She laughed. “What’s the difference?”

“When you lose control, it’s taken from you. When you surrender it, you’re giving it away. It’s still yours, in a way.” When she shook her head, he continued. “BUD/S feels like a loss of control. The instructors have total control over your body and mind, and they beat the hell out of you in every possible way. But it’s actually a surrender. I gave them everything, knowing that at the end of the course, I’d get it back, sharper, stronger, honed like a blade.”

Her eyebrows were in the vicinity of her hairline. She got them under control, but there was nothing she could do about her heart, alternately skipping in her chest and thumping a slow drumbeat of desire. “I didn’t know I could
want
like this,” she said.

“You can know it better,” he said.

His knee still rested against hers, his hand resting on the arms of the chair, fingers relaxed. But there was no denying the tightly leashed male demand simmering under the surface of his skin.

She looked at the laptop. Forty-two percent. That was a fact, the place she felt safe. During one conversation she’d downloaded forty-two percent of her email, and those emails would contain situations she could manage, emotions she could handle.

There was nothing factual or manageable about the way she felt with Keenan. The whole situation, the bar, the night air, the unfamiliar language and terrain, wasn’t fantasy, either. It was more real than either fact or fantasy, simmering deep in her core, heightening her senses. Lighting her up.

Her hand was steady when it reached out and closed her laptop, severing the connection to her life, half a world away. She neatly stacked
The Iliad
on top of the laptop. Keenan held her gaze as he held out his hand. Puzzled, she handed over the laptop and book, the gesture oddly out of place, a gentleman offering to carry her books, but she went along with it. In the elevator he reached out with his free hand and stroked down her arm to her hand, weaving his fingers through hers. Again, gentle, the move matched by a slow pace down the hall. He let go of her hand to slide the key card into the door and open it for her.

It was all completely out of character, until the door closed with a thud at the same time Keenan’s fingers closed around her wrist, muscle and bone that was for all practical purposes as strong as steel when it halted her progress into the bedroom.

Then he yanked, pulling her stumbling back toward him. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew he was using a fraction of his strength, but all her animal body knew was the bolt of crazy hot lust that shot through her when she came up against his hard body.

The impact didn’t even rock him back on his heels. She looked up into his face, saw the thin line of his lips in his beard, the veneer of calm over his eyes totally at odds with his hard cock, currently pressed against her hip.

Using his body he maneuvered her to the bed. The incomplete friction of his body against her struck sparks as he moved, until her breathing was erratic, shallow. Then he pulled her wrist between their torsos and around, spinning her so she faced the bed. She had time to draw one startled breath before he guided her down to the mattress, their entwined arms clamped at her waist partially breaking her fall, then used some combination of hand and hips and legs until she was lying facedown, his legs between hers, the weight of his torso pressing her into the bed.

She turned her face to the side, watched his hand leisurely reach up and set the laptop and book on the nightstand, blocking the clock’s red display. He’d done all that while holding her laptop and
The Iliad
. Oh dear God, yes.

With his free hand he gathered her hair and swept it to one side, then tipped her head forward, baring her nape to him. For long minutes he used his mouth on the sensitive nerves there, starting with breath and lips, then adding tongue and teeth when she softened and heated under him. Frissons of pleasure trickled along her nerves, the heat and pressure of his cock against her ass a constant presence compared to the alternating textures of soft lips, bristly beard, and the occasional nip of teeth.

By the time he’d finished she was pliant under him, her body hot and loose around a tight coil of need low in her belly. “Let’s see if you like the game as much as I did,” he whispered.

One-handed he unfastened her belt and button, then curled his fingers into her waistband and panties, then tugged her jeans, panties, and shoes right off and tossed them to the floor. He pushed up her shirt up to expose most of her belly. It should have felt awkward, bared from the waist down, spread to him. It should have looked awkward, when Keenan, still fully dressed and in total control of her body, leaned forward to press a kiss into her belly, just below her navel.

Her first thought was that he was shockingly flexible. The bumps of his spine stretched against his shirt as he slowly kissed his way down to the soft mat of hair covering her sex. Then he paused, his hot breath so close to the sensitized flesh she knew was slick and ready for him. He waited, the hot caress of his breath maddeningly close to her clit, until her body, taut with longing, lifted toward him in a pleading movement.

He shifted down, using his shoulders to keep her open for him. She couldn’t look, couldn’t bear the intimacy of his mouth between her legs. The darkness heightened her other senses. Sweat, and the scent of her musk. The hotel’s silence. She even thought she could taste the heat simmering just below a boil as she ached for the touch of his tongue to her clit.

When it came, the confident stroke was a soft, electric contrast to the fierce, bruising grip around her wrists. She arched into the touch, murmuring
yes, yes, yes
as she struggled and writhed. He ignored both her pleading and her struggles, caressing her clit with his tongue in circles that tightened or widened according to some rhythm she couldn’t track. With a soft, bone-deep exhalation she surrendered, spreading her legs wide, and gave herself over to his pace.

His groan, bone-deep and chest-rough, eddied over her skin to seep into her nerves. He was as into this as she was, poised on a knife-edge for her surrender. But absolutely nothing changed. He continued to go down on her with the same relentless drive until every muscle in her body was drawn tight, clenched with the need for release.

He sent her over with a shockingly lavish, open-mouthed suckle at her clit. Her release pulsed through her, one starburst after another, stopping the air in her lungs until spots danced in the blackness in front of her eyes.

When she surfaced she heard the sound of cloth against hair-roughened skin. She opened her eyes to find him kneeling naked between her legs, studying her body as he sheathed himself. That sight was so shockingly erotic she had to close her eyes again, so she felt but didn’t see him shift lower, align his cock with her sensitized, quivering opening, and slide inside.

The compelling stretch, no less powerful after one night, tightened all her muscles to her bones with fine gold wire, until she was drawn tight around him, inside and out. He hadn’t asked if she was still with him. She was his for the claiming, so he took her conquered body because she’d surrendered it to him. Shivering, unable to process what was happening, she pressed her forehead into his shoulder, and looked between their bodies.

Big mistake. He pulled out and paused, his cock thick and flushed and gleaming with her juices, heightening her awareness of the delicious stretch as he glided back inside. Fire rippled up the nerve endings in her sheath, eddied to her nipples, the sensitized skin of her throat, making her lips tingle. She felt like her hair was standing on end, sweat-dampened and clinging to her cheeks and shoulders.

His pace was so slow, and she realized that he was totally immersed in how her body clung to his, hot and tight and wet. But he wasn’t like other men who pounded into her after she came, using her body to get off. Keenan was totally immersed in how her body made him feel, and it was the hottest thing she’d ever seen.

The muscles in her neck were trembling. Her head dropped back to the pillow. He’d been watching her watch him fuck her. When their eyes met his cock throbbed inside her, forcing him to slow down, then stop entirely to close his eyes and breathe.

“Are you taking what you want from me?” she whispered.

Another pulse inside her. He was right on the edge, fighting it. “Yes,” he growled, grinding his forehead against her shoulder. “Fuck. Yes.”

She waited until he lifted his head and looked at her. Sweat trickled from his temple to his jaw. She lifted her fingers and gathered the moisture on the tips, then brought them to his lips. His tongue flicked out, and she quickly lifted her head, touching the tip of her tongue to his, then licking the sweat from his mouth.

“Fuck. Rose.
Fuck.
”

For a long, hot moment their tongues tangled, clashed. He was trembling as the desire to thrust warred with the desire to hold back.

“Please,” she whispered. “Keenan. Please.”

He fisted his hand in her hair. Mouth hovering over hers so that each breath and glancing contact made her lips tingle, he pounded into her. Each stroke hit her clit with such force that she arched and cried out. Then he buried himself inside her. The grinding pressure set off another shock wave that sent her into a long fall into the void.

Chapter Five

Jack was going to have to get in line to kill him. Rose was going to give him a heart attack.

Keenan knew he should pull himself together. Roll to the side. But his muscles were slack and trembling, his joints so loose as to be useless. All he could manage at the moment was shifting his weight partially to his elbows and wait for his heart rate to drop out of the red zone.

Rose’s thighs quivered against his hips, then relaxed.

“Okay?” he asked.

She made a soft humming noise that didn’t seem to signal immediate distress, so he stayed where he was. Inside her. The connection still vibrated between them, and he was reluctant to stretch it, much less sever it. Connections weren’t supposed to happen. Pleasure, yes. Fun, absolutely. But connections weren’t in the playbook, especially a connection to Jack’s not-really-a-dumpy-ballbreaker sister. The conversation opened doors he didn’t want to open, memories of days in the woods, hours spent trying to figure out what he needed to do to earn his father’s approval. The waves of adrenaline and testosterone were crested with emotion, as dangerous as unfamiliar terrain. He swiped at his face with his shoulders, kept his gaze fixed on the wrinkled sheet under Rose’s bare shoulder, trying to get himself under control.

He was softening enough to make the condom situation perilous. He pinched the end and pulled out, for a brief moment regretting the need for one at all. But that was sheer craziness. No condoms meant blood tests and commitments, and commitments were a canyon-leap past connections that wouldn’t stretch halfway around the world. He forced his limbs to start functioning and went into the bathroom, where he dealt with practicalities, and ran a wet washcloth for Rose.

“Thanks,” she said when he came out.

He pulled on his shorts and cargo pants while she cleaned up and dressed. She picked up his copy of
The Iliad
, the copy he’d carried from the time he finished BUD/S. The copy prior to that had fallen apart during his first enlistment, and was now in a box in a storage unit he kept in Virginia Beach. “You’re sure you don’t mind if I borrow this?”

“Take it,” he said.

“You don’t need it to fall asleep?”

He grinned at her. “No. I can fall asleep anywhere, any time.”

“Thank you,” she said. “See you in the morning.”

He almost asked her to stay. Almost. But if her grandmother woke up and found Rose’s bed empty, she’d worry. Or not. Grannie seemed pretty savvy, even if everyone was pretending to be blind as bats.

The door closed behind her, leaving Keenan in a room scented ever so faintly with the unique smell of Rose’s heated skin, and the disconcerting knowledge that the soft snick of the latch catching hadn’t severed the connection at all.

*   *   *

The next morning dawned gray and blustery, gusts of dry wind battering at the big windows in the hotel’s dining room. By now the Bucket List Babes knew what to do, having left their big suitcases outside their doors for the hotel staff to collect and load into the Land Rover. Ignoring the eggs and sausage the kitchen made for tourists, Keenan loaded up a plate with Turkish breakfast food and sat down beside Marian.

“Morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” everyone chorused.