Kiss and Tell (21 page)

"And how was it with the fiancés?"

"Oh, I didn't sleep with them," she said honestly, then cocked her head. "Are you going to tell me about all your lovers? Or would that take too long?"

"We're not talking about me."

"Ah."

He scrunched his eyes shut, then opened them to glare at her. "I
hate
when you make those noises."

The same noises he'd wanted to bottle not two minutes ago? Marnie stood on tiptoe and kissed his mouth. "We had great sex, Jake," she murmured against his lips. "I hope we can do it again soon."

"How about right now?" he said flatly, holding her upper arms. "We're both naked, and the mood's still right. How about I just screw you out of my system? Bury myself deep inside you again until you scream and I pass out?"

"Uh, sure," she whispered uncertainly, incapable of reading the lightning fast emotions flashing through his eyes. Tension radiated from him as he searched her face.

Damn
, Marnie thought, panicked.
Now what?
She thought it was only women who had morning-after syndrome.

He backed her up to the bed. "A little recreational sex to relieve the tension, is that what you think, Marnie?" He was practically snarling now as he tipped her over onto the rumpled, sex-scented sheets.

A gurgle of laughter bloomed. She nipped it in the bud and grabbed two handfuls of his hair, tugging him down on top of her. "You find me resistible, remember?"

Jake's smile was raw and humorless as he dug both hands under her hips and jerked her toward him. "You might have noticed I'm not immune. You're beautiful and soft, and I'd have given up a lung to make love to you the second I saw you."

"Then isn't it lucky," Marnie said, feet braced firmly on the floor as she opened her thighs for him to slide home, "that you can have me without giving up any of your stupendous parts?"

Their open mouths met, as hungry now as they had been an hour ago. She sucked his tongue. He surged into her. She bit his shoulder. He nipped her hard on the side of her neck, his arms extended beside her head, fingers laced with hers on the mattress, tendons and muscles taut, bulging as he pumped his hips.

This was primitive and basic, with none of the finesse and gentleness he'd used before.

Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine
, Marnie thought with each piston stroke. Feet braced on the floor, she met him thrust for thrust.

She took savage delight in hearing his inarticulate groans, seeing sweat sheen his face and chest, watching his muscles flex and strain. She brought her arms down and her short nails dug into the clenched muscles of his butt, urging him to a faster pace. He hammered into her, teeth bared, holding her gaze with a fierce wildness in his eyes.

War.
Oh, Jake.

Marnie couldn't help the smile tugging at her mouth as the pressure inside her built. She wrapped her arms around him and held on tightly.

Jake scowled, then nipped the smile from her lips with his teeth.

Her smile widened into a grin.

She felt laughter bubble alongside her climax. Every nerve and pore shimmered with delight as Jake staked his claim.

"Crazy," Jake breathed hard, "woman."

For you.

She wrapped her legs around his hips, pressing down with her heels, driving him insane, and knowing it.

He took no prisoners.

But then neither did she.

*

"Okay, tell me what they took out of your backpack."

"My backpack?" Marnie yawned, stalling for time.

Jake, braced on his elbow, traced a path with his finger from the damp nest of curls at the apex of her thighs to her throat.

"That tickles."

He cupped her chin and turned her to face him. He looked far too serious for a man who'd just had fabulous sex. Sweat glued them at the hip. It felt wonderful.

"Did they take your medication, Marnie? What're you on? A blood thinner?"

"Coumadin." She sighed. "I'll be okay without it for a few da – for awhile. Don't worry, Jake. I've forgotten to take it a couple of times," she lied. "I'll be fine."

"Until the blood clot hits."

"It won't. Sheesh, did you
have
to talk about it? Here, feel this." She pressed his open hand over her breast. "Ninety-nine percent of the time I forget I even have that little piece of metal in there."

His fingers flexed on her breast. He bent his head and touched his mouth to her skin in a gentle tribute. The kiss he pressed to her heart made that organ speed up and do somersaults.

He lifted his head, looking grim. "I have to get you over that damn river."

Marnie ran her fingers through his long dark hair. "Until you do, I'll be fine."

Jake swung his legs off the bed and looked down at her. "I'll make sure you are."

*

Marnie leaned over the back of the couch. She'd slept for a couple of hours and felt refreshed and full of energy and high spirits. By the time she'd blinked awake, Jake had showered without her. She was sorry to have missed the show. But she planned a little audience participation for next time.

She'd showered and dressed in another pair of his boxers and one of his flannel shirts while he sat at the computer. She'd watched him. He hadn't turned around once.
Darn him
.

She'd finished several drawings of him, his feet, his hands, and secretly some of his more interesting body parts. Now she was bored, bored, bored.

"Can I go with you when you take Duchess out? I'm going stir crazy in here. I need fresh air and light."

"It's starting to get dark out, the air in here is fresh, and there's plenty of light. Hang tough – you'll have your freedom the second the river subsides. Read a book or something to keep yourself occupied."

"Got any good romances?" she asked dryly as Jake leaned over the console to manipulate a camera. He had great buns.
Very
nicely displayed in those worn jeans.

"All those books have romance in them," Jake told her, opening a closet to pull out a handful of black fabric.

"I didn't mean a cowboy kissing his horse, Jake."

He walked away from the console and started stripping off his shirt. He pulled a scrap of skin-tight black spandex or something over his head and tugged it down to cover his chest. It accentuated every contour of his shoulders and chest and covered him from neck to wrist. He looked exactly like the assassins. A chill of foreboding raced down her spine. She tamped it down.
This
was Jake Dolan.

He undid the top button on his jeans. Her eyes followed the movement avidly.

Jake shot her an amused look. "You're staring."

Without taking her focus away, she grinned. "It's a good show."

Jake shook his head and finished undoing the zipper on his jeans.

*

Storming down the mine shaft tunnel, boots crunching on the gravel, he rechecked his weapons as he walked and swore silently under his breath. The woman muddied his thinking.

"Only sex." Jake repeated out loud what he'd been churning over since they'd made love. Only sex? Judas Priest. For some inexplicable reason he felt cheated.

He didn't know what or how, but he felt gypped nevertheless. It didn't matter how many times he had her, he was insatiable around her.

Only sex. Judas.

He was a man who liked things neat. Compartmentalized.

It
was
only sex. Of course it was. They were two healthy animals with a damn good chemical thing going. Why deny it?

He felt slightly mollified. He'd only been ticked because she'd taken the words right out of his mouth and said them first.

He'd made her a promise. The only kind of promise a man like him made to a woman like her. And he would keep that promise if it killed him. If he had to swim across the swollen river with Marnie strapped to his back, that's what he'd do. He swore again. He'd thought he had all the goddamn time in the world to play with these goons topside.

Marnie had upped the ante with her need for medication.

He was no doctor, but he knew that putting a patient on a blood thinner for life was done for good reason. A blood clot would kill her.

How long did he have? Hours? Days? Jake didn't know. But he could hear the ticking clock, like a time bomb, resonate inside his head with each step he took.

It was Sunday night. She'd been without her medication since sometime on Friday. How much longer?

One bridge was washed out. The other, as he'd seen on the monitor, still flooded.

Fury and frustration seethed in Jake's gut.

Who the hell could he trust?

Who could he call to medevac her out? Who in their right mind would chance landing in this terrain and in this kind of weather?

There was a clearing a couple of miles upstream. He'd used it several times airlifting stuff in for the lair. A good chopper pilot could navigate the mountains, trees, and weather to land and take off in relative safety.

And he'd have to be satisfied with "relative." He didn't have a choice. He thought of Skully with a pang. His daredevil friend would have flown in despite the odds.

He didn't know who the assassins were. But he had to find out, and fast. Playtime had run out, he thought grimly. Not for the first time in the past several years, he missed his three friends fiercely.

Now he preferred to work alone, although he had been on assignments involving a full nine-man T-FLAC team. At those times, while scrupulously backing up anyone he worked with, he found it almost impossible to trust his life to someone else.

It was a matter of trust. And there was no one left to trust.

He wished to hell the assassins
were
tangos. But by every indication they were T-FLAC. Which meant he couldn't risk calling in the cavalry to extract Marnie.

He wondered if these were men who'd worked side by side with him. Men whose butts he'd covered in some war-torn armpit of the world. Men who'd faced him, and called him friend, while they sold him out.

For what?

He shook his head. Did the logic matter?

Whoever these guys were, they'd been exposed to the elements and he hadn't. Jake emerged from the mine shaft opening and started climbing through the canyon of rocks blocking the entrance. Icy snow pelted him from a charcoal sky, the clouds so low, so dark and heavy, they felt oppressive.

He'd been on countless missions where he and his team had had to make do with what they could carry. It was doable but not comfortable.

He counted on his enemy's inactivity and frustration to make them careless. Throughout last night and the better part of today, he'd watched their progress as they'd crisscrossed this section of the mountain.

Jake lightly jumped down from the rocks, scanned the area, and slipped silently into the trees. He slid from shadow to shadow, boots barely making a sound on the soft, wet, pine-needle-strewn ground. The storm front had fulfilled its promise, dumping inches of rain onto the already sodden landscape. Jake could feel the turbulence of the storm on his head and shoulders even as he walked beneath the sheltering trees.

The fact that the men knew to search for him here, this close to the lair, indicated they knew
where
he was, just not how to get their hands on him.

He didn't give a continental fig for himself, but without him, Marnie didn't stand a chance.

He'd just have to show the bad guys that their timetable had been seriously compromised.

A couple of hours later he found two assassins at the cabin. After securing the area, he returned to watch their systematic search. Not a board went uninspected. Jake stood in the shadows. Rain sluiced unnoticed off his head and shoulders as he watched each man move carefully over the entire face of the small structure. So they knew exactly
where
, just not
how
to open the can.

There was some danger of them discovering the elevator entrances from the cabin, but even if they did, they couldn't activate the retinal scan without his cooperation. And in that event there was a contingency plan.

Jake adjusted the black headpiece over his head and the lower half of his face. Only his eyes were visible when he strode into the clearing.

One man turned, his hand going to the weapon strapped to his thigh, the other man continued searching.

Jake took a chance and gave a hand signal as identification. The man stepped down, relaxed.

Jake said quietly in the T-FLAC shorthand, "I've come to relieve one of you. Go back to camp."

"We've only been on three hours."

"Fine." Jake allowed impatience to creep into his voice. "You do what you want. I'll go back and get some of that coffee myself." He turned to go.

"No. I'll take the break." The shorter of the two men came toward Jake, nodding as he passed. The garb made him unrecognizable. There was nothing familiar about him. Jake watched him disappear into the trees, then strolled up to the cabin through the long, wet weeds.

His glance flickered to what could be misconstrued as a sparkling raindrop trembling on the edge of the roof. He'd forgotten Marnie could see every inch of the cabin. For half a second he considered disabling the camera craftily hidden on the eaves. Then deliberately put her out of his mind and went to work.

The second man was now on the right-hand corner of the house, tapping each board, checking every window. Jake passed the open front door. Quick glance. No one inside.

Jake seized the split-second advantage. He came up alongside his prey, put his arm around his throat, and efficiently snapped his neck.

Seconds later he dragged the body away from the cabin and hid it beneath a dense clump of deadfall.

He looped up the mountainside until he was behind the soldier he'd relieved.

The man was good.

Jake was better.

When he found the camp and calculated the size of the cell, he'd know how to handle the situation. All he had to do was follow this guy to the end of the line.

They looked, smelled, and talked T-FLAC, but something about them didn't quite ring true. It made no difference. An assassin was an assassin was an assassin.