The Bane Affair Page 8

  He thrust forward and filled her, and even her heels weren't a high enough lift. She swore he took her off the ground. The railing edges bit into her palms as she held on for what felt like her life. It wasn't a fear of falling over the edge, but one of tumbling into a well of bottomless need.

  He gripped her hips, the fingers of both hands digging into her muscles with near bruising strength. She didn't care. She wanted it all, the powerful thrusts as his cock hit bottom again and again, the fullness, the feeling of being stretched beyond what her body was built for.

  No, that wasn't true. She was built for this, for him, and pushed back as he pushed forward, the wild coiling tension tightening so deeply inside her body that she feared relief would never come. But then it did, a shattering, consuming burst of heat searing her nerves.

  She couldn't move, couldn't stop moving. Squeezing, flex­ing, dragging him as deeply inside as she could with nothing but muscles in spasm. Her legs shook uncontrollably. She wanted to scratch and claw and, oh, again, she was coming apart, undone, thrashing, her throat raw, her chest burning, aching, the strain beyond what she could bear.

  He waited for her to begin the long trip down, his strokes increasing in speed and in force the further she fell. He grunted, pounded, groaned, shoved into her with thrusts she felt all the way to her toes.

  He came then. Almost silently. If not for the spike in the temperature as his semen spilled, she wouldn't have known. He slowed his movements, strained, then shuddered until it seemed he would collapse. She wanted to help, to soothe him, to hold him. She could do nothing without the use of her hands.

  Another long moment, another quake that ran through his body and into hers, and he pulled free. She felt the loss imme­diately. She wasn't ready to let him go.

  "Peter? Please untie me?" Her back ached. She needed to stretch, needed to turn and run her palms over his chest to his belly. She listened to him breathe, waiting. Finally, he loosened her bindings and set her free. She rolled her spine from base to nape, rubbed the circulation back into her wrists, and stretched into an upright position.

  Then, pulling her shawl closer, she kicked off her shoes and stepped out of the emotional fantasy she always tended to weave out of good hot sex. She didn't hurry as she bent to re­trieve her sandals and her panties. She'd heard him step back into the room, leaving her alone once again.

  This vanishing act was a habit she wasn't going to put up with after tonight. Else he could find himself another tour guide and companion. Starting now.

  Seven

  Christian lay on his back on the bed in the dark, Natasha asleep at his side beneath the blankets he'd thrown back an hour ago. He hardly needed the protection from the cold. Not with his body bathed in sweat.

  Why the hell did Peter Deacon's sexual preference have to be bondage?

  All that talk on the balcony earlier of alabaster and ivory. Christian wanted to choke on the sleaze. Yeah, Natasha was gorgeous, beyond gorgeous, amazingly sexy, hot, and his dreams embodied. But he sure as hell didn't want to tell her that with words that would've come out of Deacon's mouth.

  He wanted to tell her as himself. And was so fucking screwed with it he hurt.

  He'd expected to come here, get in good with Bow, spring Jinks, leaving no one the wiser, and get out. He hadn't ex­pected to be blindsided by one of the bad guys who happened to be female—and who his gut was now telling him wasn't a bad guy at all.

  If nothing else, the number one thing he'd learned these last seven years was to listen to his unfailing gut.

  He'd been prepped. He'd been briefed. He'd been fore­armed, ready, and good to go. All of that, but he'd never been prepared for what taking her to bed had made him feel, for the fact that it had made him feel. And right now he wanted noth­ing more than to grab Hank Smithson by the throat and shove him into the nearest wall.

  Staring at the triangle of light where the curtain's edge caught the windowsill, Christian admitted to himself that wasn't ever going to happen. He owed the old soldier too much. He loved him even more.

  The complexity of his indebtedness to the older man was no secret in the ranks of SG-5. The rest of the guys had been in deep shit and on their way down when Hank had ridden to the rescue. How and when he'd learned about any of them, why the hell he'd gone to such extreme lengths in terms of cost and red tape in order to secure their futures and their freedom . . .

  Hank refused to talk about any of it. He wouldn't even talk about his motivation for assembling the Smithson Group in the first place. Gratitude naturally fueled a big part of their in­dividual loyalty, but there was more. A lot more. Christian couldn't speak for the others, but he doubted not one of the four did what they did, putting their reputations and often their lives on the line, because they were thankful.

  No. He knew without being a betting man that it was be­cause of what they saw in Hank's eyes. His ferocity of convic­tion, his willingness to wade into the thick of the bullshit, his compassion for what they'd each been through, and his sworn oath that he would never leave them alone to face a court or more deadly consequences made doing what they did second nature.

  He was Saint Hank, and they were the lucky five over whom he'd chosen to watch—though right now Christian would have preferred a simple guardian angel to whom he owed nothing. And it was that personal reality, the full extent of that debt, the one hundred percent likelihood that he'd die still indentured, that had him in such a foul mood.

  Yet none of that held a candle to the conundrum of why he'd gotten off so completely on the power of binding Natasha, when he loathed the idea of bondage, hated confinement, couldn't shake the Chiang Rai association no matter that doing so would be worth singing soprano.

  Almost. But not quite. Because that would mean never again knowing a woman as intimately as he intended to know Natasha—and that was too much of a sacrifice to make when he'd just gotten started. He would've been a lot further along, in fact, if she hadn't fallen asleep.

  Yeah. Asleep. He couldn't believe it. He'd come out of the shower to find her curled up in his bed, eyes closed, breathing soft and even. His own fault, really. They could've been going at it like rabbits for hours now if he'd invited her to join him and kept her wide awake. The hell of it was, even for hours of wild sex he wasn't going to expose himself like that.

  To answer the questions he knew she'd ask about his deal with tight spaces, the fact that he showered with the curtain hanging open, or with the stall's frosted glass panel left ajar. Hell, most of the time he didn't even bother closing the bath­room door. But this time she'd been here, and he'd had little choice. The shot of scotch he'd downed standing in the cloud of steam had marginally helped.

  He stared toward the balcony and the sliver of light knifing through the glass. The drapes over the window were drawn as well. He'd made sure of that, not wanting to take in the view of the lake again until he was bloody well forced to. At least the next time he looked that way he'd have the visual memory of Natasha's bare body silhouetted against the scene, her legs spread wide, her ass in the air.

  He reached down to his crotch, scratched, adjusted, stroked his hardening cock once, twice, more than ready to have her again—and this time to have her his way. Fully involved bod­ies, tongues and fingers and teeth. Enough with the props and the power plays and the fetishistic exposure. Enough with sex being no more than a game. That wasn't what he wanted, what Christian Bane wanted.

  Because Christian Bane wanted it all, to explore the con­nection he was already feeling with her, to see where beyond the bedroom it might lead, to find out why. Why her, why now, and why after all this time.

  Yeah, he'd made her come. The least he could do consider­ing the way she'd questioned nothing of what he'd asked, the way she'd bent over and bared herself, opened up, grown wet. She hadn't even fought the bonds, a thought that had him stroking faster, harder, cupping his palm over the head of his dick, rubbing in a firm circle until it was almost too late to stop himself from shooting his
load.

  He pushed out of the bed quietly, picked up the glass of melted ice and watered-down scotch Natasha had left on the bar hours ago, and finished it off. A check of his watch on the desk told him dawn was at least two hours from reaching the hori­zon.

  If she hadn't been sleeping behind him, he would've used the time to pull up his files, scan the mission's portfolio for de­tails he might've missed connecting her activities and Bow's deal with Spectra. He didn't want to risk an uplink to the audio files stored on Smithson's secure communications server, but reading the transcripts would've made for a good use of his time if his body wasn't hard with other ideas.

  He turned back to the bed where she faced away from his side, lying on her stomach, one leg extended, one knee drawn up, her arms wrapped around her pillow, her ass temptingly raised. The blanket covering her did little to hide the rounded curves he'd grown so familiar with on the balcony while using her in a way he wasn't particularly proud of.

  Being pissed at himself because of that, because he'd used sex to further a cause, to break his enemy, to take her down . . . he poured a half shot, downed it, hating how much he was drink­ing tonight. Being pissed at himself because all of that didn't mean he wasn't going to take full advantage of her very fine body and the fact that she was naked in his room.

  He fought off a shiver as he crossed the room and returned to the bed. Not a shiver resulting from cold but one brought on by the sort of fear he'd thought himself beyond feeling. Yeah, he knew all about cold sweats, about panic, and had a healthy respect for his body's fight or flight response. This wasn't the sort of adrenaline-charged alarm that had kept him one step ahead of Spectra in Thailand until hit square in the face with the shovel of Malena's betrayal.

  The woman in his bed now was Natasha, and this fear was about how vulnerable wanting her left him. Yet he hesitated no further in rejoining her, slipping his fevered body between the cool sheets and spooning up against her, damning himself all the while for this primal need that had him rutting like a buck on a doe.

  His erection prodded her hip; he wedged one leg between hers, spreading her open with his knee, molding his palm to the round of her rump and massaging the toned muscles he found there.

  She lifted into his caress, whimpering in her sleep and cud­dling back against his chest. His head braced in one hand, he leaned over her, rubbing tiny circles in the small of her back above the cleft of her bottom before his fingers drifted down to explore, first the round bud of her ass then seeking below, her moisture easing the slide of his fingers deep into her folds.

  She arched her back, raised her lower body far enough off the bed for his hand to slip beneath and cup her sex. The tips of his fingers teased the fluff of hair hiding her clit. She was al­ready aroused, the knot of nerves engorged, the surrounding lips of her pussy plump and soft. He teased her, soft brushes of his fingers over and around even as he pushed his thumb inside of her, past the barrier of her clenched muscles and found her swollen G-Spot.

  She gasped, caught her breath, moaned into her pillow, and tried to turn toward him only to find herself trapped by the weight of his leg. And so, instead, she thrust her sex into his hold, pumping her hips in a hard mating rhythm as he fingered her clit and fucked her with his thumb.

  She was so hot, so responsive, so unrepressed. His cock pulsed and he shoved his hips forward, getting off to the slide of his flesh against the curve of her bottom, the crease of her thigh. And then the bed became frenzied, the mattress heaving beneath his pistonlike thrust, the bucking of her hips against his thumb, the grinding of her clit against his fingers. When she came, she convulsed and shuddered, reaching between her own legs to apply the pressure she needed to finish.

  Feeling her there, her small fingers winding through his to add her own pleasure to that which he gave, slicking her mois­ture around and around, making soft throaty sounds as she slid her thumb along his into her cunt. . .

  Christ, but he wanted to taste her, wanted to drive his cock as deep into that gorgeous juicy pussy as he could, to come all over her and watch her eyes as he did. He jerked away, rolled to his back, grabbed the sheet in his dry hand, grabbed his cock with the one wet with her cream, stroked hard and stroked fast.

  But she was faster. On her knees and between his legs, her hands beneath his thighs forcing him open. And then he was in her mouth. All of him. The capped head of his cock rubbed the back of her throat as she pulled her lips the length of his shaft, sucking him back in to repeat the torture again and again.

  She held one hand wrapped around the base of his cock, sent the other exploring—his balls, the hard extension of his erection, the puckered entrance to his ass. She played with him and sucked him and never let up, blowing him below the belt but blowing his mind as well.

  He'd think about that later. Wonder later how she'd gotten to him. Later, that's when he'd figure out when he'd let himself become susceptible, putty, at risk. But right now the moment was all about relief. And so he let himself go, pulsing his re­lease into the warm wet heat of her mouth, shuddering as she demanded every last drop until he was spent, and he col­lapsed.

  She let him go then, reached for the blanket and sheet that had been shoved to the foot of the bed, and pulled both with her as she crawled up beside him and sighed. She didn't say a word. In fact, in less than five minutes she fell back to sleep, her knee cocked over his thigh, her arm draped across his belly, her face nuzzled close to his armpit as he pillowed his head on crossed wrists.

  She lay there sleeping, having just wrung him dry and ask­ing nothing, satisfied with what he'd given her, so content that when he reached over to tuck the covers around her shoulder, she didn't even stir.

  Peter Deacon, hell. It was Christian Bane up to his eyeballs here in horseshit.

  The next morning, Christian met Natasha in front of the second-floor elevator just before ten. He'd dressed and gone out to the water gardens before the sun was even up while she'd continued to sleep in his bed. He'd thought about wak­ing her, but then had thought better. He might be playing the part of Peter Deacon, but he was first an SG-5 operative and he had a job to do.

  This mission, unfortunately, was no longer cut and dried, leaving him with too many loose ends and no clear picture of what it was he needed to sew into a neat package for delivery to the Feds. Woodrow Jinks was obviously working with Bow of his own accord, which meant Christian's next move was to discover what Spectra wanted from the two men—and dis­cover what he could of their connection.

  He'd hoped to do that while eating breakfast with Dr. Jinks while Natasha simultaneously had her meeting with Bow. But Christian had arrived at the appointed hour for guests, only to be told by Mrs. Courtney that Jinks had mixed a protein shake in the kitchen at daylight, leaving his usual mess for her to clean up, mind you, and that Dr. Bow had called down and had her bring a tray to his room earlier. Poor man was barely able to lift a fork and spoon some mornings.

  While eating the cheese and spinach omelet Mrs. Courtney eventually prepared, Christian had made a mental note to find out more about Dr. Bow's illness. The files from Polytechnic had made mention of a motor neuron disorder, and Christian couldn't help but wonder if Bow's health wasn't having an impact on the decisions he was making these days. Dealing with Spectra IT seemed way out of character for the respected pro­fessor profiled in the mission's portfolio.

  At the subtle sound of footsteps on the plush hallway car­pet, Christian glanced up from his musings and watched Natasha approach. Today she wore another pair of stilettos with a funky pink suit. Classy and hot, through and through.

  The fabric was tweedlike, a light background striped in a darker, nubbier weave. The skirt was tight and hit her midthigh. The button-front jacket's sleeves ended in ruffles just below her elbows. And her hair swung above her shoulders like strands of the finest black silk.

  Knowing exactly how that hair felt sliding over the skin of his thighs, tickling his belly and his balls, had him shifting from one foot to
the other and wishing he could turn away and adjust the hardening goods.

  "You should have woke me when you got up," she said softly, smiling and stopping no more than two feet away.

  He wanted to reach out and haul her into his body, to drag her close and grind his mouth down on hers, to taste her sweetness and remember how far she'd taken him last night. But that was Christian Bane's reaction, one he didn't have time to analyze because he was Peter Deacon and he was here on Spectra business. He didn't have time to scrutinize the sex, simply time to engage.

  So what he did then—as Peter—was move closer, one slow step then another, until his lips grazed the shell of her ear. "Did you know you had kicked the blankets to the floor by the time I got out of the shower?"

  She shook her head, her breathing quickening, and so he went on, creating a gulf between the two men that he was and the ways both of him wanted her. Making sure she knew Peter Deacon because she would never know Christian Bane.

  "I watched you while I was getting dressed. You were cold. Your nipples puckered like ripe cherries on your tits," he added, skating his palm over the center of her breast that was hard even now.

  "Why didn't you cover me up?" she asked once she had found her voice.

  "Because then I wouldn't have been able to see your beauti­ful cunt." When she pulled in a shocked breath, he slid his hand from her breast to her waist and held her still. "Were you dreaming about sex, Natasha? About my thick cock buried in­side you? I think you were. I could smell you. And I kissed you before I left."

  She raised trembling fingers to her lips; he in turn slid his palm over her firmly rounded ass and squeezed. "I leaned in right here and ran my tongue all over you. I shoved a finger into you. I fucked you with it until you rolled over and stuck your ass in the air. Is that what you want, Natasha? You want me to do you like that?"

  "Stop lying," she whispered sharply.

  He grew very still. "What do you mean?"