“I like your personality, Trap, and it’s one I understand. I’m not easy, and I doubt that I ever will be. Yes, it hurt when you were so cold when we were in town, but you explained that and I understood. Now I know what to expect and why you need to be that way. I don’t need you to be anything but who you are. If you’re rude to me and I don’t like it, I’m going to say so. We’ll probably exchange hot words, and then I’ll probably fling myself at you because I like to see all that ice melt and I know I can melt it.”
He closed his eyes tight. He’d been alone so fucking long. Never had he ever considered that he might fall so hard so fast or even that he
could
fall. But there she was, the woman who could match the wild in him. She really would understand his driving needs in the laboratory, and he was fairly certain she’d be there with him, working right alongside of him.
“I don’t like a lot of people around me either, Trap. Even if I make friends, and right now you have far more than I do as I don’t have
any
, I don’t foresee myself overcoming years of being alone in a cell and wanting to be with tons of people. Being with you is the longest I’ve ever been with another human being. I can’t relax without my silks surrounding me. It’s how I kept my privacy in the cells with all the cameras on me. I need them. I’m not certain too many other people are going to understand that. So you can cross that worry off your list. It’s you I want to be with.”
He heard the ring of honesty in her voice. She wasn’t ever going to be the type of woman who liked to go to parties and get her photograph taken with him in order to have her fifteen minutes of fame in magazines. If anything, that would be another detriment. But she’d do it for him. He got that now. She was in as deep as he was in spite of his sins.
“I like your bossiness and your demanding because I can be the same way. As far as you making demands on my body – seriously, Trap? Can you not feel what you do to me? I look at you and melt. I want to have sex with you. I
love
having sex with you. I may not know what I’m doing exactly, but I learn fast and I know I can give you whatever you need. I trust that you’ll do the same for me. Trap.” She turned her head to look at him over her bare shoulder. “I want you with every breath I take.”
There it was. Cayenne handing him everything. She didn’t have to, and most women wouldn’t. She didn’t play games, she wouldn’t know how. She was strictly honest and meant every single word she said. He let his breath out slowly, his fingers, as they stroked her stomach, reverent.
“My father was a mean son of a bitch, Cayenne. I didn’t have one of those happy homes like you see in the movies or read about in books. He liked to beat up my mother and his children. He didn’t work much, so he had a lot of time to think up ways to fuck with all of us. My mom worked and she didn’t often see what he did to us, but eventually she decided to take us and run.”
Her hand moved over his, stroking caresses, but she remained silent. Waiting. Knowing it wasn’t good, but wanting him to understand she was with him no matter how bad it was. He was in her mind and he felt that solidarity. It was strange to share space in one’s mind because the loneliness simply disappeared. Every last vestige of it. Cayenne filled those deep cracks and wide gaps. Her strength. Her warmth. Her caring.
Trap had never really believed in love – not since he was a boy. He hadn’t dared believe in it. He’d felt that emotion for his sister and his mother. Both had been ripped from him. He’d felt it for his aunt, and she’d been ripped from him as well. That had been soul-destroying. Utterly soul-destroying. He had forced away all emotion, turning himself into a glacier to survive.
Wyatt had found a small crack in the ice and wormed his way in. Then one by one the other team members had followed Wyatt until he accepted them into his life, but he still held himself aloof. Apart. There was no staying apart from Cayenne. None at all. He didn’t want that. He wanted what he had right in that moment. That connection. That closeness.
“I was different. He fixated on that. My sister Dru was different as well, and she understood me when no one else did. My mother loved me, but I was strange and she didn’t really have time for that strangeness. She worked all the time and coped with him, trying to keep him off of us. He grew to despise me. No matter how much Dru and my mother tried to keep him away from me, he beat the hell out of me and made my life as miserable as possible.”
Cayenne’s fingers tightened over his hand and she pushed back into him until she was practically sharing his skin. He found he couldn’t get close enough to her. Sharing her skin was fast becoming a necessity. He trudged on, wanting her to understand why he was the way he was and what that would mean to her. She
had
to choose him. He couldn’t see himself letting her go.
“In a way, I almost didn’t mind. When he focused on me, he wasn’t going after my younger brother, Brad, or my baby sister, Linnie. He left my mom and Dru alone. One day, though, he broke my arm and a couple of ribs. We couldn’t hide that from Mom and she took me to the hospital. He was arrested and taken to jail. Dru told Mom everything, and Mom decided it was enough and we left.”
He slid his hand down her soft stomach until his finger could caress the soft triangle at the junction of her legs. He needed the soft feel of the hourglass. Her hand went with his and there was something sexy and also loving in that. He found stroking the hourglass, tracing the shape of it in all that soft silk soothed him.
“He found us. Mom took us across the country, and he still found us. He wasn’t alone. He had two brothers. Like my father, they were vicious and cruel. They liked hurting others. They stayed outside pouring gasoline all over the walls and then coming into the house and doing the same in all the rooms. They’d planned it with him. My dad, my uncles,
planned
to murder his children and his wife.”
He felt her breath hitch. Her stomach contracted and he pressed his fingers deeper into the hourglass.
“My father shot Linnie and Brad and my mother. Then Dru. She tried to protect me. There was so much blood, and I couldn’t make it stop flowing out of her. Her eyes were open and she looked so horrified. Terrified. Lifeless. He should have shot me right there, with my body under hers, but my seeing him kill her wasn’t enough for him. Knowing I was going to die wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to beat the shit out of me one more time. I was nine fucking years old, he’d just killed my mother, my brother and my two sisters, and that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to beat the shit out of me one last time before he killed me.”
“Trap.” She whispered his name and pressed his fingers tight against her.
His heart tripped. Stuttered. She was so beautiful to him. Everything about her. She felt compassion for that little boy. She wanted to wrap him in her silk and protect him from what was to come. He knew, because he was in her mind. Her hand was on his and he actually felt the silken slide against the back of his. He slipped right past need and hunger to something else altogether. Something he didn’t believe he’d ever feel for anyone, let alone a woman. He’d protected his heart for years. With Cayenne, he just couldn’t find the ice to keep her out.
“I went after him. I was nine years old and I went after him. I slipped on Dru’s blood, Cayenne. It was everywhere.
Everywhere.
All over me. All over the floor and walls. I rammed my head into his crotch and I got the gun and shot him. He had a knife and he stabbed me with it a couple of times, but I didn’t even feel the blade go in. Not then.”
“Your belly and thigh.”
She’d seen the scars. She knew them intimately. She’d even traced them with her tongue. He rubbed his face in her hair. “He kept slipping in Dru’s blood. Even after she died she saved me. He wasn’t dead, but he was gone. I made certain when I shot him that he wasn’t going to live.” He told her the stark truth. “Even then, barely nine, I knew anatomy. I knew where to place bullets to do the most damage and cause the most suffering. You need to know that about me, Cayenne. The worst. Because I’d fucking do it again if I had the chance.”
“So would I,” she admitted quietly.
Trap searched her green eyes until he saw the truth there and he believed her. He pressed his face against her hair, burrowed into it so the silk concealed his expression. She faced away from him, but he was confessing and he didn’t take chances. “His brothers threw gas on him and all around the room. They lit it on fire and got out. I crawled through the flames and lived.”
“The scars on your feet and ankles.”
She’d kissed them too. Her hands had been gentle, soothing. Amazing. She’d nearly torn out his heart when she’d done that.
“I went to live with my aunt. She wasn’t very old, but she took me in. It was just the two of us. I began making money because I invented shit and got the patents and then sold them. We lived well for a while. Apart from everyone else, but well. We changed our name and hid in a city. They – my uncles – found us. Kidnapped her. Tortured and raped her. Threw her on my doorstep after I paid the ransom. She was dead.”
Cayenne’s body jerked. Hard. She made a sound low in her throat.
“I hired the best detectives to look for them, but they’re in the wind. I did everything I could to hone myself into something that could take them down, but I’ve never been able to find them. They said, if I found a woman, they’d come after her and they’d take her away from me and do the same to her – that I couldn’t protect her.”
“That’s why you hid my face from the camera.”
“Yes.” He was honest. “Eventually, someone is going to get a shot of you, but I want to minimize that risk. I’ll surround you with bodyguards, baby, but they’ll eventually come at us. I waited to claim you, tried to talk myself out of it to protect you, but I’m too fucking weak to give you up.”
“Trap.” Her voice was gentle. “I
want
them to come after me. I’m not defenseless and there’s no way they could hurt me without getting close. They get close and they’re dead. We both know that. I have no problem making certain they can’t do that to another woman. I’m the kind of woman who would have put a bullet in your father, one that made him suffer for as long as possible. That’s who I am.”
Again, her voice rang with honesty. She meant every word. There was no fear. None whatsoever. Just determination.
“Cayenne.” He whispered her name, closing his eyes against the burn there. “You know what I’m telling you, right? What to expect when you’re with me.”
“Did you think I’d run, Trap?” she asked gently. “I might not know the first thing about relationships or cooking or having friends, but I know how to defend myself and I have no problems seeing beyond smiling faces. I could always tell the worst of my tormentors before they ever opened their mouths. I feel it like an oil surrounding them. The more vicious and cruel they are, the thicker the oil. Your uncles could walk up to me with halos on their heads and I’d know what they were.”
“I don’t like putting you in this position, Cayenne, but I can’t give you up.” He made the admission softly. “I want to put a ring on your finger and make it official. The moment I do that, the moment the world knows you’re mine, wherever they are, they’ll come out of the woodwork and make their try.”
“Good. We’ll be ready for them. And don’t forget, Trap, while you’re taking on all this guilt because of two men who have no idea who you are anymore or what you’re capable of, I’ve got a death sentence on my head. Whitney will keep sending teams after me, which means, you’ll be in harm’s way because of me.”
“I think I can get that particular order rescinded,” Trap said. His finger stroked the hourglass again. She wasn’t going to like the
how
of it, but he didn’t feel the least remorseful. He
wanted
those ties to him. She had her silken threads, he had human ones.
She turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder. “What does that mean, Trap?
Exactly
what does that mean?”
He
fucking
loved that she was intelligent enough to be suspicious. She knew whatever plan he had, she wasn’t necessarily going to be down for, although he’d kept his tone strictly neutral.
“Whitney likes to pair his soldiers. He gives the pair the skills to be an effective unit in a combat situation.”
He spread his fingers wide again, covering her tummy, feeling the underside of her breasts with his fingertips. He stroked caresses along the twin curves. “I’ve never felt softer skin in my life, baby. I fucking love the way you feel.”
“Trap, don’t change the subject. I’m not going to be distracted.”
“Is that a challenge?” A teasing note crept into his voice.
He had learned fun from Wyatt. He’d been sober, incapable of laughter, when he’d first met Wyatt. Then the members of his team, no matter how aloof he held himself, gave him a bad time. He’d learned to handle that as well. Maybe all that had prepared him for a life with Cayenne. All he knew for certain was that he enjoyed teasing her. He let the pads of his fingers swirl up and over her breast to brush the tips, those beautiful rosy tips that were so very sensitive.
She shivered and her hand came over the top of his, clamping him to her, right over her breast so the hard little peak pushed into the center of his palm. “Behave yourself and tell me what your plan is to get my termination order rescinded.”
He liked her bossy. He liked her submissive. He liked every single thing about her. Especially that she could be lethal.
“I’m going to get you pregnant.”
She went very still at his confession.
He moved his hand back down to cover her soft little tummy, ignoring her body language, talking his way right through it. “He’s going to grow right here. Our child. He’ll be smart, and we’ll both give him all the love and happiness in the world. He’ll have everything neither of us ever had.”
“Trap.”
Her voice was as still as her body. He actually felt her withdrawing from him, pulling her body into the fetal position, moving a slight inch from him, but he felt the loss. She couldn’t separate herself any farther because he held her to him.