Amazingly, at this stolen moment in time, as he stood beside the bed looking down at her, Julianne felt exactly like some precious treasure.
His
treasure.
“You are so beautiful.” His drawl was deep and rougher than she’d ever heard it. “And for some reason, which I’m not even going to begin to analyze, you’ve chosen to be with me. Here.” He combed his fingers through the hair he’d loosened after their bath. “Now.”
“Sometimes,” he continued, “when you look at me the way you’re looking at me now, with your heart shining in those magnificent tropical lagoon eyes, I haven’t a clue what to say.”
He was bending over her. As she lifted her hands to frame his serious, unsmiling face between her palms, Julianne smiled.
“You don’t have to say anything, Dallas.” The name, which she’d used only twice, tasted delicious on her tongue, like a warm chocolate lava cake topped with cream. “I don’t need the words. Not from you.” Her gaze was warm and earnest, even as her hands trembled. “Never from you.”
Breathing out a long, relieved sigh, he lowered his forehead to hers. “Although I was in deep denial, I’ve recently realized that, as impossible as it sounds, even to me, I’ve wanted to be like this since almost the first time I saw you.”
“I know.” If she lived to be a thousand, Julianne would never forget the way he’d looked when he strode into her interrogation room, looking like a Spec Ops warrior in those Air Force blues. “I felt the same way.”
She had. Which was what had made the investigation even more difficult. Made her behave even cooler and tougher than usual. And had left her thinking too much and too often about Tech Sergeant Dallas O’Halloran.
“It was like getting hit by a Sidewinder missile.” Unfastening the tie of the thick robe, Dallas skimmed his strong, rough hands down her sides, where they settled at her hips.
“It was exactly the same for me. But I was thinking of a Patriot missile.” She drew in a quick, anticipatory breath as his mouth came closer. “It was too much. Too fast.”
“No.” His mouth touched hers.
Once.
Twice.
A third time.
“It wasn’t nearly enough,” he said. When he caught her bottom lip between his teeth and tugged, Julianne felt her bones begin to melt.
“I was afraid.”
He lifted his head, looking stunned—and not all that pleased—at her confession. “Of me?”
“No.” She drew him back down to her, plucked reassuringly at his firmly set lips with her own. “Never of you.”
She pressed her naked and too hot body against his. He felt so strong. So solid. So
right.
“I was afraid you’d make me crazy.” It was something she’d not, until this moment, admitted to anyone. Not even herself. “Crazy for wanting this.”
She thrust her hands through his dark hair and pressed her mouth even more firmly against his. “Crazy for wanting you.”
“I know the feeling.” He pulled the T-shirt he’d put on when the ensign had arrived over his head. Stripped off his jeans.
“I’ve dreamed of this,” he said as he lay down beside her and took her into his arms. Mouth to mouth. Hot flesh to hot flesh.
Julianne wanted to tell him that she’d dreamed of him, too. But when he began blazing a path down first her throat, then her torso, with hot, wet, openmouthed kisses, she could no longer talk.
She could barely breathe. All she could manage were throaty moans and shuddering breaths.
Greedily, his mouth returned to her breasts. When his lips closed around a taut nipple and tugged, Julianne felt a series of tiny explosions that rippled their way from her breast to the source of the heat pooling between her legs.
When he took the other pebbled nipple between his finger and thumb, she moaned and arched her back.
Dallas explored every inch of Julianne’s sleek body with his mouth and hands and found her wonderful. He tasted every bit of fragrant flesh and knew that there had never been—would never be—a woman more perfectly suited to him than this one.
Her body was sleek, moist, and stunningly responsive.
She’d abandoned her inhibitions, surrendered the control she’d always worn like a second skin, trusting him implicitly.
His name tumbled from between her lips as he laid a wet swath down her stomach with his tongue. Her hands gripped his hair, urging his head lower.
Dallas willingly obliged.
His teeth scraped against her smooth inner thigh, drawing another of those sexy moans from deep in her throat. He grasped her hips, lifted her to his mouth, and feasted.
His tongue dived into her hot center. She cried out as the first orgasm shuddered through her.
“Please.” She writhed on the tangled sheets, fusing her body to his, struggling to capture him between her legs.
But Dallas wasn’t ready. Not by a long shot.
He drove her up again, higher and higher, to peak after torturous peak. All the time he watched, incredibly aroused, hard as a rock at her abandon, which he knew did not come easily for her.
She was hot and damp and exhausted. But still she wanted more.
She met his gaze, her eyes as hot and wild as he suspected his own must be.
“Now, dammit,” she said. It was not a plea, but a demand.
“Now,” he agreed.
He left her only long enough to sheathe himself in a condom then slid slowly, tantalizingly inside her. Teasing himself as he teased her.
“You’re right,” she said as she cupped his butt and tried to pull him deeper.
“About what?” When he slowly withdrew, she moaned, a small, ragged sound from deep in her throat that he could feel vibrating through her.
“That you’re really, really good when you’re bad.”
He lowered his head and touched his smiling lips to hers as he returned, repeating the slow in-and-out movement, going deeper on every return, and all the time she was begging him with words and motions not to stop.
Which he had no intention of doing.
Not with every pore in his body screaming for release.
It was torment. It was also the closest thing he’d ever known to paradise.
Her body pulsed around him as they took each other higher. And higher.
Just when he was certain he was on the verge of exploding, they crested the peak. And they were flying.
Together.
57
Okay. It might be a cliché, but where the hell was she?
The last thing Merry remembered was those two men practically pushing her into that black car. The next thing she knew, she’d awakened to find herself tied, ankles and wrists, to a hard wooden chair that did nothing for her aching back, and her head felt as if a battalion of maniacs were conducting a war inside it.
The headache, along with the fact that she couldn’t remember arriving at this cabin in the woods, made her think they’d drugged her.
Which gravely concerned her. What if some drug was, at this very moment, in her stomach, about to go into her bloodstream and poison her babies?
She had to get rid of it. Now.
“Excuse me,” she said to the two men who were sitting across the room, sprawled on a leather couch, playing a video game.
Their blue digital cammies—though one was wearing a black T-shirt that read, GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, CHUCK NORRIS KILLS PEOPLE—along with their short haircuts, suggested they were military. And not just military. Navy.
Actually, now that she thought about it, she should have been suspicious when they’d first approached her. The cammies were the answer. Because, although Tom was a Marine, word got around in the closed military community, and she’d heard enough bitching to know that updated Navy regs stated that sailors were only allowed to wear them to and from work, and, unlike with the former working uniforms, they weren’t even permitted to wear them to pump gas or buy milk off base.
So obviously this pair weren’t exactly rule followers.
Duh.
Adding to the deduction that they were current military was the fact that they were both armed. Actually, as she glanced around the open room overlooking the blue water, she realized they had enough weapons in the place to begin their own private war.
Was that what they intended to do?
And if so, what did it have to do with her?
First things first, Merry decided.
“Excuse me,” she repeated. More strongly this time.
“What?” The guy with the T-shirt—which didn’t exactly make him a candidate for a recruiting poster—didn’t look up as his fingers danced over the black plastic controller. The character on the screen was kneeling over two males dressed in Arab garb who appeared to be begging for their lives.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Tough.”
The cartoon soldier swung a sword he’d undoubtedly taken from one of his prisoners. Blood spurted across the screen like a crimson fountain as the captive’s head rolled across video sand.
Well. This wasn’t exactly working.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m pregnant.” She pulled out the tough, no-nonsense tone she’d heard her sister use time and time again growing up. It always worked for Julianne, and it appeared to work now, as the guy finally glanced over at her.
“Which means that I have two babies pressing against my bladder,” she said. That much was definitely true. “Now, since you’re obviously the ones in control here, I can sit still and pee my pants, which I really don’t think you want me to do. Because then you’ll have to stop fighting pretend terrorists to clean up my pee. And believe me, we’re talking a
lot
of pee.”
“You piss, you clean it up,” said the second guy, who was steering a Hummer through what appeared to be a desert town. As he plowed down a black-garbed woman and child rushing to cross the street, kill points flashed on the screen.
Lovely.
“Have you looked at me?” Her tone took on even more of Julianne’s iciness. There’d been times, growing up, when she’d actually idolized her older sister’s strength. And more than once over her life she’d tackled a problem by asking, WWJD?
What would Julianne do?
She sure as hell wouldn’t sit here and remain a victim.
“I’m carrying twins. I can’t even bend down to tie my shoes.” Which was why she’d abandoned her beloved stilettos for flip-flops the past three months. “And even if I could, getting down on my knees to wash the floor could put me into premature labor.
“So, unless you want to put down your game and deliver a set of twins, I suggest you just untie me so I can save us all a lot of trouble by going to the bathroom.”
The men exchanged a look, and in it she could see the common fear that all men—including her macho Marine husband, who’d actually nearly passed out while watching the birthing video in her prenatal class—seemed to share about all things concerning childbirth.
“Untie her,” the first guy said. After blowing away the second captive, he’d moved onto a rooftop, where he was engaged in the middle of a gun battle, his cartoon character holding the SAW, obviously a phallic symbol, she thought, at his waist just like Rambo tearing up a forest, or Chuck Norris singlehandedly destroying a horde of jihadists.
Merry might have shot a gun only once in her life, and that was when her father had taken her and her sister to the range to ensure that they knew how to protect themselves, but even she knew that holding an automatic rifle flat and parallel to the ground was flat-out stupid, because it caused the casings to fly up out of the ejection port instead of sideways, as the gun manufacturer had intended.
Plus, tactically it took away the ability to use the sights, which—hello?—were there for a reason.
Fortunately, apparently in the world of fictional video war games, the bad guys were all horrendous shots.
As soon as she was alone in the bathroom, she turned the water on to drown out the sound of her puking. Not that they could hear anything with the TV gunfire blaring.
Then she knelt in front of the toilet, which could really use cleaning, and stuck her finger down her throat.
After she was down to dry heaves, she pushed herself to her feet, actually did pee—that part wasn’t a lie; she always had to go these days—flushed, washed her hands, then looked at herself in the mirror.
She was a mess. Her hair was standing up in a wild halo around her head, her face was both pale and blotchy, and her eyes were red rimmed, making her wonder if they’d also maybe put something over her face, like chloroform, to help knock her out.
But in those bloodshot eyes she saw the same fury that had blazed in Julianne’s eyes when her sister had taken off after two bullies who’d knocked Merry down into a mud puddle the first day of school in Hawaii, ruining her pretty new sailor outfit, which had been a knock-off of the ones TV stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen had worn on the July cover of
Sassy
magazine.
The bullies, she remembered, had shown up at school the next day with swollen jaws and black eyes. And had never bothered her again.
“Don’t worry, tadpoles,” she whispered to her babies, pressing a hand against her belly. They’d been kicking like demons earlier. But now they’d gone strangely quiet. Maybe sensing her own fear?
She hoped that was all it was.
“I’ll protect you.”
Merry thought about trying to escape. Which, even though the men appeared to be engrossed in their stupid game—like there wasn’t enough violence in the real world, in real wars?—didn’t seem practical, considering how many weapons her kidnappers had stockpiled.
And besides, no way could she outrun them in flip-flops, with her pregnant elephant waddle.
WWJD? What would Julianne do?
That, she reminded herself as she did what she could to smooth down her hair and left the bathroom, was the key to survival. For all three of them.
58
Dallas was sitting in the bed when Julianne came out of the luxurious bathroom—which was nearly larger than her apartment—after having taken a shower. She wished they could have wrapped up the case earlier, so they’d have been able to spend the entire night together, rather than these few stolen hours.