Heatseeker (Atrati) (26 page)

“It’s just skin.”

“Shaped into kissable lips and a tasty morsel I like sucking.” His words alone sent electric bolts of sensation zinging through her.

He dropped down until his mouth hovered over her mound and inhaled deeply. “Mmmm . . . you smell so good, too, so sweet.”

“I smell like sex.”

“Yeah.” That one word was laced with enough satisfaction for a soliloquy.

His tongue darted out, flicking her clitoris with unerring accuracy before he licked the highly sensitive flesh, tasting her as only he had ever been allowed to do. He played with her clitoris, alternating between using the tip and flat of his tongue, enhancing her pleasure with every tiny movement but never pushing her over to orgasm.

“Kadin . . .
please,
“ she groaned.

He lifted his head, their gazes meeting, his lips slick with her wetness. “Please what, angel?”

“You know.”

“Why don’t you tell me, anyway?”

“Make me come!” The demand would have been more forceful if it hadn’t sounded so much like a plea.

He smiled, and a thick finger slid inside her. She contracted around it, whimpering and squirming, needing more.

“You are the most beautiful women alive when you are like this.”

Back in the day, she might have teased him about thinking she wasn’t beautiful
all
the time. Instead, she whispered, “I’m glad you think so.”

He nodded, his brown eyes so dark with passion, they were almost black. Then he lowered his head again, and it wasn’t his tongue that scraped against her swollen bud. It was his teeth. Oh, so gently, with exactly enough pressure, his teeth worried her clitoris with devastating effect.

She nearly came off the bed, her body bowing in intense pleasure. “Kadin!”

His only answer was to slide his other hand up her body until he could reach one of her nipples. He tweaked and played, alternating between plumping her breasts and teasing the oversensitive buds at their tips.

Her climax came roaring out of nowhere, the scream that accompanied it a pure release of passion so primal, she didn’t care about the twinge it gave her throat.

She was still shaking with aftershocks when he surged up over her, sliding between her legs with his newly engorged sex. He stopped with the head pressing against her entrance.

“Okay?” he asked, his skin flushed, his muscles rigid with the effort it took to control himself.

She nodded, knowing it should be too much, but somehow it wasn’t. His possession stretched her swollen, tender flesh to a point just short of pain.

This feeling that she knew no other man could ever give her had less to do with climaxing than the sensation of completeness during coitus.

He pressed forward so their bodies touched from the juncture of her thighs up to the point where her breasts pressed against his hairy chest. Covered in a fine sheen of sweat, they slid against each other, the extra load of sensations of that simple movement impacting her sensitized body with tsunami-like power and making her post-orgasmic aftershocks into mini-cataclysms all their own.

His big, soldier’s body shuddered as her vaginal walls contracted around him over and over again. “Oh, yeah, angel . . . just like that.”

She smiled, feminine power surging through her, and repeated the involuntary movement voluntarily, squeezing so tightly, she gave herself another mini-climax.

“Shit . . .” His voice trailed off as he thrust deep inside her. “Nothing else like this ever.”

And there wouldn’t be. For either of them. Because this kind of sex? It was like worship, and it only happened once in a lifetime. She was sure of it.

“We fit here,” she said on gasping breaths as he moved against her, his big body covering her and filling her with sensual delight and that ephemeral sense of safety she knew better than to ever take for granted again.

“Yes, angel. I never should have walked away.”

Sex confessions didn’t count. They weren’t real. Everybody knew that, but her heart still liked hearing him admit the mistake. Even if he wouldn’t feel the same when his dick wasn’t buried as deeply inside her as it could possibly go.

“I loved you, Rachel.”

“Yes.” For a long time, she’d convinced herself it had all been a lie, but life wasn’t that black-and-white.

And she knew it now.

“You loved me, too.”

“I did.” Enough not to have cared that he’d become the kind of man who did things he thought her idealistic self couldn’t have handled.

But there was no point in saying that now.

“You’re all I wanted in a woman,” he said against her neck, the words achingly sweet and sad at the same time.

She turned her head, brushing his lips with her own. “Shh . . . no more talking.”

No more lies, even if he thought he meant them.

He kissed her, saying things with his mobile lips and surging body she couldn’t believe any more than the words he’d spoken out loud.

They’d both climaxed once already, so the pleasure built slowly, and Rachel let herself get lost in the slide of their bodies, the devouring of their lips. The urgency increased so subtly from one moment to the next that, once again, she was on the edge without realizing it.

But he wasn’t ready to let her go over. He wanted more. She remembered him in this mood, and she let him have his way.

He pulled out, maneuvering her onto her stomach and then up onto her hands and knees before slamming back into her with one long, powerful thrust.

Mewling sounds fell from her lips, and she felt no shame in that. “You feel even bigger this way.”

He went deeper, bumping her cervix, completely claiming her body with each tilt of his pelvis.

He reached around, pressing his middle finger into her slickened folds, caressing her clitoris and heightening her pleasure until her second, mind-shattering climax exploded through her.

She cried out, the aftershocks so intense, it was like a string of orgasms devastating her body and rocking the very foundation of her world.

“Yes, Rachel, my angel!” he shouted as he came inside her, coating her channel with his seed.

Hot moisture tracked down her face to drop below her onto the bed. She would never have let anyone else see those tears, but when he turned her head to the side to kiss her, she made no effort to hide her reaction to what they’d just done.

His dark eyes filled with an emotion she would never trust again but that warmed her all the same. “It’s almost too much, isn’t it?”

He understood. Someone else might have thought she was crying with regret or pain, but not him.

He understood that it was part of a release so intense, her body needed more than a scream to acknowledge it. It needed tears.

Kadin brushed his hand down Rachel’s cheek. She was so beautiful in sleep, peaceful in a way she never could be awake. She’d fallen into slumber almost before he’d pulled out of her earlier but had snuggled right into him as he tucked them both under the light blankets.

Her tears after climax had nearly unmanned him. Damned if he hadn’t felt moisture burning in his own eyes, as well. The sex had been
that
good.

Powerful. Miraculous, even.

He didn’t know how he was going to live the rest of his life without it, but one thing had become very clear when they talked before making love. Rachel blamed him as much as she blamed herself for Linny’s death.

Maybe even more.

She might have been able to forgive his stupidity as a twenty-year-old kid thinking she was better off without him. She might even have forgiven his weakness in walking away rather than facing her rejection. But she could never let go of the resentment she felt for the loss of her baby sister.

How could she? Linny was gone, just like Rachel’s parents, leaving her alone in a world that had taken so much more from her than it had ever given.

And he’d been part of that loss, making everything worse when he’d convinced himself he was protecting her, giving her a chance at a normal life.

He’d been twenty and, yes, an idiot.

He was older and wiser now, but his window for happiness with Rachel was closed, and he was the one who’d pushed it shut.

Regret rode him harder than a Humvee trip through the mountains of Afghanistan, and there was nothing he could do to alleviate it, either.

No magical mix of words that would make it all better. Not when his weakness had cost Rachel the one person she’d always wanted to protect above all others.

Rachel stirred beside him. He forced the sadness from his expression, giving her a smile as her pretty pale eyes fluttered open.

She didn’t return it, further emphasizing the yawning gap between them.

“What time is it?”

“Time for dinner.” Spazz had knocked on the door a few minutes earlier.

Rachel nodded, moving to get up.

He pulled her back to him. “Hey.”

“What?”

“This.”

He kissed her. It wasn’t all-out passion. They didn’t have time for that. Spazz had found information on who lived in the house they were investigating and said Roman had sent a troubling e-mail.

Whatever that meant, it precluded more hours of pleasure in bed with Rachel.

Forcing himself to remember that, Kadin pulled back from the kiss.

“As things to wake up to go, that’s pretty much in the top five,” Rachel said, sounding happier than she’d looked upon waking.

He didn’t ask what her number one would be, since he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Works for me, too.”

She nodded, squirming to get out of the bed. “We need to get a move-on.”

That was usually his line, so it made him smile to hear her use it.

She grabbed one of his T-shirts and yanked it on with quick movements before picking up her clothes from earlier and heading to the door. “I need a shower.”

“Rachel?”

She stopped at the door and looked back at him. “What?”

“You okay?” He didn’t come right out and ask if she wished they hadn’t made love.

That would just be too damn touchy-feely for him, not to mention that, if the answer was
yes,
he really would rather not hear it. But he didn’t like the preoccupied expression in her eyes.

“Not really.”

His gut tightened. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I just woke up with this feeling of foreboding. I’ve had them before, and it never means anything good.”

He remembered that. “Like when your parents died.”

Rachel had called him from work telling him about her feeling that day. Then she’d texted him later to say she thought it must have been about her friend cutting herself on a broken glass. She was taking the other girl to the ER.

The rest of that day and night and the one that followed it had been the stuff nightmares were made of.

And even after seeing how she reacted to losing her parents, how much she’d hurt, though she hid her pain from everyone but him, he’d walked away. He hadn’t just been an idiot at twenty; Kadin had been incredibly selfish and was only now realizing it.

How stupid did that make him as a thirty-year-old man?

“Yes.” She grabbed the door handle, her grip white-knuckled. “Is everything okay with Jamila?”

“As far as we know. Her family and Chuma left the hotel for dinner a few minutes ago.”

“Do we still have someone tailing them?”

“Cowboy’s on it with Abdul’s man.”

She nodded, looking no less tense. “That’s good.”

“There’s no reason to believe she’s not okay,” Kadin tried to point out. “She’s been engaged to the spawn of satan for nearly a year and not gotten caught in the grinder yet.”

“I know. I just . . . I feel worried.”

He jumped out of the bed, grabbing his own clothes, except a T-shirt. He’d wear the one she had on after their shower. Smelling Rachel on him would never be a bad thing.

“Let’s get showered, and then we’ll do a situation report over dinner, okay?”

“Okay.” She blew out a breath, as if she was trying to relieve the tension, but it obviously didn’t work.

Her entire demeanor was one of a woman on edge. And he remembered from past experience that feeling wasn’t going to leave her alone until she found out what was coming.

“Did you have this feeling before Linny?” he asked and then wished he hadn’t.

She stopped dead in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. “No. If I had, I might have been able to save her.”

He couldn’t argue that, but Rachel’s
premonitions,
for lack of a better word, were beyond his comprehension. He didn’t understand how they happened, why they occurred sometimes and not others.

All he did know was that they cost her emotionally, and she was a woman who couldn’t afford to pay more in that way.

“You are one of the strongest people I’ve ever known,” he said as they entered the bathroom.

She laughed at that, the sound more bitter than amused. “I don’t think so.”

“I do. You were stronger than me.” Stronger than he’d ever given her credit for. “Still are.” She was going to be able to walk away from him and survive.

He wasn’t so sure about himself.

Suddenly Spazz’s taunt-fate-and-be-damned attitude of the last year made a hell of a lot more sense to Kadin.

And only as he realized that did he also acknowledge that, in the back of his head for the last ten years, he’d had the hope that someday he and Rachel would find their way back to each other.

They ate their dinner on the rooftop, everyone there except Cowboy.

“So, the man living in the house Chuma’s been visiting is one Terne Lavigne,” Neil said, giving the name its proper French pronunciation. “He is a former corporate employee of SympaMed, living far beyond the means of someone with his background and without visible signs of income.”

“His name came up in TGP’s research,” Jayne offered. “But we dropped that line of inquiry because we could not locate him.”

Rachel remembered reading that in the file as well but said nothing.

Neil nodded to Jayne, giving Rachel a searching look before adding, “When I dug deeply enough, I found out that Lavigne is also listed as a contributor to two of Dr. Massri’s pet political projects.”