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Each thrust was agony and ecstasy. Each second without coming, without spilling himself inside her . . .
She tightened beneath him, hips writhing, a low, breathless wail tearing from her. The feel of her coming around him again, so fucking tight and hot, rippling around his cock, clenching on the throbbing shaft, was too much.
“Fuck . . . Angel . . . Baby . . .” Plunging inside her to the hilt he threw his head back, a throttled groan escaping as each heavy pulse of release shot from the tortured head of his cock.
Agony and ecstasy didn’t come close.
Duke knew he’d never find this again, never know anything this perfect, this complete with another woman.
“Oh, baby.” He shuddered against her, caught his weight on his elbows, and fought to catch his breath, to find reality once again. “Sweet, sweet Angel.”
She shivered beneath him, her hands gripping his shoulders, little cries escaping every few breaths as her flesh still rippled around his.
“Don’t let me go. Not yet,” she whispered, the plea broken by her heavy breaths.
About the same time he realized that sometimes breathing takes effort.
“Never, baby.” Rolling to his side he took her with him, holding her against his heart. “I’ll never let you go.”
FIFTEEN
Angel woke, surrounded by warmth as she lay against Duke’s chest, sprawled across it actually. Her head rested against his heart, one arm flung over his hard abs, a leg thrown over one of his.
She was draped over him like a clinging vine.
And she couldn’t quite figure out how she’d managed to do that without becoming aware of it. She was a light sleeper; she woke herself if she shifted from her side to her back when asleep. But she hadn’t awakened when Duke had come to bed, nor had she become aware of shifting against him and flowing over him like she wanted to sink right inside him.
A part of him.
She’d never been a part of anyone before, she realized. She’d been so aware of the horror that losing someone could be, at such a young age, that she’d made certain to keep defenses in place so that she could never be hurt like that again. So that if she failed to protect someone she loved again, it wouldn’t destroy her as it had when she was three.
Somehow Duke was slipping past any shield she could put up, though. He razed them, tore them aside, and touch by touch, he was beginning to own a part of her. The question was, did she own a part of him as well?
Stroking her hand along his side, she remembered overhearing his conversation with Ethan about Duke checking in with Tracker. She was bothered that he didn’t tell her, because Duke had broken a rule he almost considered sacred: lying, even by omission. Not that she shouldn’t expect it in some cases. The lives they led required lies and omissions to everyone. Sometimes even to each other.
Each of them had their own safe house, one the others knew nothing about just in case. After all, everyone was breakable under torture, Tracker was prone to say. If they didn’t know where it was, then they couldn’t tell. He believed in safeguards and backup plans, and extreme wariness.
Yet Tracker had allowed Duke and Ethan into their personal lives. Duke and his brother had met the man and woman everyone believed were not just Tracker’s parents but hers and Chance’s as well. For the past several years he’d joined them during their two-week vacation in Bermuda.
He’d seen baby pictures. J.T. and Mara had even told Duke of Angel’s childhood. They’d raised her in one war-torn area after another as they worked together. Homeschool lessons weren’t just reading, writing, and arithmetic but self-defense, shooting, and tracking. They’d recounted the more harrowing events of that life growing up in a world soaked with blood and violence at times.
They had never told anyone else.
They had never trusted anyone else.
Tracker must have known who Duke was, she suddenly realized. He’d known all along that Duke was a Mackay, and if he had known that then he would have known exactly who Duke’s parents were. And he hadn’t told her.
She was his second-in-command and he’d kept that information from her as though she didn’t need to be aware of it. Because if she had been aware of it, then she would have run. She would have done everything possible to avoid him and she wouldn’t have been part of the team when they were hired to kill Lyrica Mackay.
Tracker sometimes saw ties, bonds, and potential events in the littlest things, but he would have seen something more than that in Duke. He would have seen the means to do exactly what Tracker and the family had been urging her to do since she’d remembered exactly who her parents were and what had happened when she was three. To go to her mother.
For years she’d suppressed the memories of her mother, Craig, and Jenny. It had been normal for her to wake screaming from nightmares as a child, crying out at someone that they weren’t her father. They would never be her father again.
She still didn’t remember what happened during the time between the explosion and the day she regained consciousness as Angel Calloway, though.
Nearly a week had passed before Angel awoke, unaware of who she was, where she was, or how she knew that Mara wasn’t her momma.
The death of Brutus, the war dog that had led her to J.T., brought back the memories. From her earliest childhood memory of taking her first step to her mother’s arms, to the second the missile had slammed into the hotel, exploding around her as she lay beneath the metal desk, aware that Craig hadn’t managed to get Jenny there with her.
