Playing for Keeps (7 page)

Surprised that dawn had broken while they’d been inside, Dani clutched the stitch in her side and kept pace with him as he ran.

They reached the first truck. “Get in,” he yelled, tossing the guns on the bench seat before reaching for the steering column. In under three seconds, and with only a ballpoint pen at his disposal, he had the engine purring to life.

“Where are we going?”

Raven glanced over and saw, in the milky dawn light, how the color had drained from her face. Typical reaction. The adrenaline rush from the fight was wearing off. Shit.

“Gotta get to a phone.” He gunned the engine, checked the rearview mirror for a tail, and peeled down the dirt road back to town in a rooster’s tail of dust. He ran through the cards in his mental Rolodex. “Donovan and I agree on one thing,” he told her grimly. “That chip’s gotta come out.”

Danica grabbed the dashboard as the truck bounced in the deeply rutted dirt road. The vegetation on either side of the road was coming alive. Flocks of small birds dived and swarmed, feeding on the clouds of insects drifting like smoke between the trees. “That makes three of us. But there was that little addendum about ninety-five percent probability of the patient’s demise, remember?” Her knuckles were white as she clutched the dash, but her voice was steady.

“I know what he said,” Raven acknowledged as he stomped the accelerator all the way to the floor. “But the chip was what he wanted. You were. . .expendable.” He reached over and closed his fingers over her knee. “There has to be a way to remove the chip without harming you in any way.”

“And until then?”

Yeah. Until then. . . He narrowed his eyes against the brilliance of the rising sun. He’d let this incredible woman down more times than he could count.

His security business had always been his 24/7 priority, to the exclusion of all else. He hadn’t realized she’d trip over his ambition on her way out. Nor had he realized Danica needed him too. He simply assumed she’d always be there. He hadn’t blamed her for leaving him when she did. But now he had a second chance, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to screw this one up.

He was not going to let her die, and when this was over, he was going to prove to her exactly why they belonged together. Most of all, he’d tell her the truth. He’d been an ass to let her slip out of his life. She’d always been his number one priority; he just stupidly thought she’d sit on the sidelines waiting until he amassed enough money, enough power to make them both happy. It wouldn’t happen again.

On either side of the narrow track, the jungle closed in around them, a hot, green, impenetrable wall of vegetation. His fingers gripped the wheel as he took the corner too fast on the unevenly packed dirt. “We’re winging it here,” he told her grimly, swerving to avoid a ragged boy and two goats who emerged from nowhere into the middle of the road.

“I have a contact in DC; I’ll call and see what he knows about the chip. In the meantime, I know someone here who’ll hook us up with a reputable doctor ASAP.”

“We still have an immediate problem,” Dani said, her voice amazingly calm, considering. “This thing can blow up at any time.”

Like he could possibly forget. “Not if I can help it,” Raven said, feeling grim and manic, as though time was spinning out of control while his brain raced like a rat in a maze to come up with a viable solution.

Dani unsnapped her seat belt. “I think I have a way around it.”

She was too calm, he thought with rising panic. He knew his girl. The more pissed and scared Danica became, the calmer she got. This was a bad, bad, bad, freaking time for her to be calm and collected.

“Which is what?” he asked, mouth dry as he started praying like he’d never prayed before. Help us out here, God. For the first time since leaving the tutelage of Sister Mary Angelica, Raven said the Our Father, followed immediately by the Act of Contrition. Hell, he’d recite the Gettysburg Address forward and backward if he thought it would curry favor with the Almighty.

The truck swerved as she whipped her T-shirt over her head, exposing her pretty, bare breasts, kicked off her sneakers, then lifted her butt off the seat to pull down the zipper on her skintight jeans. “Pull over.”

Y
ou’re freaking nuts,” Jon murmured, spearing the truck into the overhanging trees like a hot knife through butter. The jungle closed in around the vehicle with a rustle of leaves and the snap of branches, cocooning them in verdant green. He shut off the engine and silence rushed at them. “Do you have any idea how insane this is?” His voice was thick as he turned to look at her.

Danica smiled, and her heart started pounding as if his hands, rather than his gaze, touched her. “Do you have any idea how messy it could get in here if we don’t?”

He cupped the back of her head and brought their heads together, touching his forehead to hers. “Ah, Jesus, sweetheart. Don’t—”

“Shhh. Shhh. Keep me safe, Jon. Make love to me.”

The inside of the army surplus truck was hotter than sin, despite the thick jade canopy. Danica intended to make it even hotter. Naked, already damp with equal amounts of perspiration and desperation, she reached for the hem of his T-shirt. “Clothes off. Now.” She dragged the damp fabric up his body, over his head, and tossed the garment over her shoulder.

Just seeing the heated desire flare in his eyes as he looked at her made her adrenaline race. She grabbed his hand, placing his fingers at the base of her throat. “Feel that? You, touching me -anywhere-gives me the biggest rush. You make my heart race and my blood boil.”

“I’ve never stopped wanting you,” he said in a ragged voice, thick with urgency. His fingers glided down, caressing first her throat where her pulse pounded, and then trailing down her chest in an almost lazy caress.

Her skin was hot and damp with perspiration, and she loved the familiar feel of his hand on her. Her body remembered every caress, every touch, every brush of his fingers. She looked down, watching as his lean, tanned fingers curved to cup the weight of her breast.

Her breath caught and her body shuddered with anticipation as he bent his head, the long dark silk of his hair brushing her skin in its own caress. She squeezed her eyes shut, threading her fingers through the skeins, holding his head to her, dizzy at the exquisite pull of his wet mouth on her painfully erect nipple.

“Nobody—” she tried to say. His tongue stroked the distended bud in slick, rapid movements that sent her heart slamming erratically into her ribs and shuddering through her entire body, scrambling her thoughts. She fumbled with the top button of his jeans, feeling his furnace heat and clenched muscles against her fingers. An electric current zinged through her.

Come on. Come on. Come on. “Ah—could ever make me ache as you do, Jon Raven.” And nobody else ever would.

He skimmed out of his jeans, shoving them aside, all hard, sinewy muscle and bronzed satin skin as he slid into the center of the bench seat, taking her with him. He lifted his head, and Danica shuddered as this beautiful man, this primal male, gently cupped her jaw, tilting her face to meet the hard pressure of his mouth and kissed her as though they’d been apart for a hundred years.

“You are my water in the desert.” He lifted his mouth from hers long enough to murmur it. “My reason for being.” Then he lowered his mouth again gently biting the fullness of her lower lip, tugging at it to access the inner softness, before he crushed her mouth beneath his in a kiss so raw, so desperate, Danica moaned, feeling the power of it all the way to her toes.

He reached down and activated the seat so it slid back as far as it would go.

Arms around his neck, fingers gripping his hair, she straddled his lap, opening her body to him. The hard steering wheel dug into her back, but she didn’t care. A deliciously had Jon dug into her front, that was all that mattered.

He glided his hands around her waist, neither insisting nor holding her back-simply holding her. Still kissing her as though there was no tomorrow. His thumbs moved in lazy circles, dipping into the creases at the juncture of her thighs.

Taut with anticipation, she stayed poised there, braced on her knees, feeling the jut of him, so hard, so ready, against her eager core. Liquid heat filled her, surging and rushing through her veins. The sensitive tips of her breasts rubbed against the solid plane of his chest, teased by the wiry hair narrowing down to his groin. Every part of her yearned for him, while the kiss went on and on.

She tore her mouth from beneath his as she impaled herself, then stopping because the sensation of having Jon inside her was so sharp, so unbearably sweet, she couldn’t move. Jon, being Jon, and knowing her so well, let the pleasure build and build as the muscles in his neck corded and his body shook with the effort to remain still while buried deep inside her.

The magnitude of his control stunned and humbled her.

When her nerves quivered unbearably and her muscles jumped with the strain, when the urgency encompassed her entire world, only then did Jon grip her hips in his strong hands and set a rhythm that had them both panting and gasping. Everything seemed to tighten inside her in concentric circles. Danica’s vision blurred. She went deaf, blind. Nothing would compare to this—this driving compulsion. This overwhelming race to the finish.

Jon cried her name in a garbled voice, his sweaty face buried against her equally sweaty throat as they came together in an apocalyptic finish that left them both weak, shaken, and on an adrenaline high.

“We made it even hotter in here,” Raven murmured against her temple. Sweat glued their skin together, and he was still deep inside her. He had to get to a phone. Now. But Dani was a wilted, gloriously satiated, limpet on his chest, and he didn’t want to move any more than she did. As relaxed as her body felt, her heart pounded in a comforting, rapid, erratic beat beneath the hand cupped around her breast.
“Hmmm,” she murmured, not moving.

Unfortunately, move they must. “There’s a spider the size of my Porsche on the hood of the truck.”

The lashes of one eye brushed his chest as she stirred. “What color?”

“Silver.”

With a grin, Danica lifted her head. She gave him a not-so-gentle punch to the ribs. “The spider, you idiot.”

His throat closed, aching with how incredibly beautiful she looked as she sat up, pushing her hair off her face. Her stick-straight bangs fell into place above her sparkling eyes like black silk. Her cheeks were hot pink with the heat, her mouth slightly swollen and still damp from his kisses.

She lifted her leg over him, leaving him bereft at the loss of her slick heat, and felt around in the foot well for her clothes. “Guess we’d better go and do whatever it is we’ve got to go do before my head explodes. Right?”

“Jesus, Dani, don’t even joke about it. Nothing’s going to happen to you.” He needed to make that promise. The amazing sex sent a healthy dose of adrenaline and endorphins through her system. But how long would it last? How long before Villalba-Vera decided he wasn’t getting her back, and therefore, she was expendable? How long before Donovan and his soldiers found them and forced Danica to undergo surgery so they could keep their damned prototype of the smallest assassination tool ever made?

Raven pulled his T-shirt over his head then bent to retrieve his pants from the floor. “I’m prepared to pull over any time you feel the least bit calm,” he offered magnanimously, arching to do up his jeans while keeping an eye on the rapid pulse at the base of her throat.

“A prince of a guy.” Dani smiled. Not the wide Danica smile that always made his pulse go from zero to eighty in a second, but a knowing smile that sliced right into his heart. She reached out, cupping his cheek. Raven buried his face in her soft palm as the pressure in his chest built. Her other hand came up and stroked his hair back off his face.

“I’m not going to let that bastard make me explode. Got that, Jon Raven? The only person allowed to make me explode, and in the future I’ll use that term with all due seriousness, is you.” She stroked his hair, his cheek, her heart in her eyes.

His throat ached. Jesus, Dani—

Raven silenced her by pressing two fingers to her lips. “There’ll be plenty of time for this later. Let’s book so I can call my contact and resolve this once and for all.” He started the truck and backed out onto the road, cracking the window open once they started moving, to dissipate the fog on the inside of the glass. For a moment, he was back in his first car, out on lover’s lane, looking through the steamed rear window.

Danica finished straightening her clothes, moved the guns, and slid across the seat to tuck herself against his side, despite the stifling heat. Raven looped an arm about her shoulders and drew her hard against him, resting his fingers lightly on the pulse at the base of her throat as he drove.

Dense jungle eventually gave way to the poverty-stricken outskirts of San Cristóbal proper as the sun rose higher in the sky, heralding another hotter-than-hell day in paradise. The smoky smell of open fires mingled with the scent of spicy foods as Jon steered the truck into a rutted parking spot in front of a corner service station. A decades-old telephone booth stood guard over the antiquated pumps beneath a tattered awning.

He placed one of the guns on the seat next to her. “Shoot anyone who isn’t me.”

“That’s a little drastic, isn’t it? What if it’s someone who has nothing to do with—?”

“Then we’ll apologize profusely.” He made her pick up the weapon. “Here. Safety’s off. Point and shoot.” He hopped out of the truck, locked and slammed the door, and jogged over to the booth. Danica watched him through the grimy windshield as he made his call.

The interior of the truck was sweltering, and she prayed there wasn’t a temperature-sensitive component to the thing in her head. Absently, she brushed hair away from her face, lifting it off her neck in an attempt to let the pitiful breeze cool her flushed skin. A bite on her neck itched like crazy, and she reached up to rub at it. Her fingers moved across the small bump that had been driving her nuts for days. A small—minute actually—welt just behind her ear. Could it be. . .? Grabbing the rearview mirror, she folded her ear down and tilted her head in an attempt to examine the spot.

All she saw was what looked like a pinprick.

“We’re positive she’s wearing the chip,” Donovan had said. “My man detected it behind her right ear when you were picked up.” Danica felt sick to her stomach as she moved her fingers gently around the slight bump.

Fear welled inside her, mixing with the annoyance, frustration, and other emotions threatening to erupt at any moment. Jon’s call continued. He vacillated between periods of animated hand gestures and attentive listening. What was taking so long? Maybe there wasn’t a way to get this thing out of her. Oh, God! Maybe Donovan was telling the truth. Maybe—

A bullet shattered the windshield, sending a rain of safety glass pellets into her lap and eliciting a loud shriek of surprise from her. She ducked down low. Damn it to hell-

“Jon!”