Page 30 of Hotter than Wildfire

Sex was instantly booted out of Sam’s mind. He smoothed back a lock of blue-black hair, tucking it behind her ear. He looked his wife straight in the eyes and spoke soberly.

“Oh, yeah. Mike cleared her room. He said that he left absolutely nothing of hers behind that could in any way identify her. You trust Mike, right?”

“Yes,” Nicole said softly. “Absolutely.”

His heart gave one of those hard little pumps it sometimes did when he realized all over again how lucky he was. He’d have married Nicole even if she didn’t get on with his brothers, but the fact was, they loved her almost as much as he did. Lucky, lucky man.

“We’ve gone over this, Harry and Mike and I, and we can’t find a way that Montez can connect her to us. So she can recover here and we can set her up in a new life when she’s ready.”

Nicole gave one of her mysterious smiles.

Sam frowned. “What?”

She shook her head, the scent of her shampoo whooshing out from her and messing with his head.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So—it’s okay then?”

“Absolutely.” Sam picked up her hand and brought it to his mouth, utterly sober and serious. “I would never—and trust me when I say never—let you be near any possible danger to you and our child. You have to believe me.”

“Oh!” Nicole looked startled. “I believe you, of course I do.”

“Good.” Blood was rushing out of his head, down, down…Sam bent and ran his mouth along her neck, and gave her a little nip. She loved that. It turned her on. He knew that through long practice. Nicole shivered and at that moment he lifted her leg and gently slid his dick into her. “Now.” He pulled slowly out, then pressed back in. “Where were we?”

Prineville, Georgia

Bearclaw Headquarters

“I’m sorry, sir,” the snooty political aide said on the phone. “But Senator Manson is unavailable at the moment.”

Montez gritted his teeth, pulled the handset away so the bitch wouldn’t hear him blowing his breath out in one controlled flow. Control. He needed to keep control.

“All right,” he said, when his voice was steady. “When will the Senator be available for an appointment?”

Never, you moron.

The unsaid words hung there, quivering.

Montez remembered this assistant to the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a tall, bony creature with two PhDs, one in political science and one in physics. Ferociously ambitious, biding her time on a Senator’s staff before she joined some hotshot think tank for ten times the salary.

She’d disliked Montez on sight and it had been mutual.

“I think I can safely speak for the Senator here,” she said finally. “There has been some…adverse publicity lately with regard to your personnel. This is not a good time for the Senator to be linking his name to yours. At least until all the ambiguities have been cleared up. Good day.”

A click.

She’d hung up on him. Montez stared at the dead handset. The bitch had hung up on him.

He knew exactly what she was referring to. The media storm surrounding the shooting deaths of three of his employees in San Diego had shaken the company to its foundations.

He had sent three of his best operatives to pick up one woman. One small woman. It hadn’t even occurred to him that they should go in without ID because it hadn’t occurred to him that they could fail.

But they had. Spectacularly. Three men shot dead on the streets of San Diego. Three men with Bearclaw ID on them. There had been nothing Montez could do about it because the police got there before he could wipe the identities clean.

Three good men, former soldiers, crack shots all of them—and a lone woman had defeated them. Which was insane, of course. Especially when that woman was Ellen.

Montez had offered countless times to teach her to shoot. Lots of women got off on guns and, even better, got off on men who were good with guns. Not Ellen. She’d rejected his offer to give her lessons with barely masked horror, as if he were offering to teach her to kiss cobras. And she wasn’t turned on by gunmen, either. Otherwise she’d have been in his bed long ago and this whole fucking mess would never have happened.

So it sure wasn’t Ellen who’d gotten the drop on his men. Men who’d been mission-ready, primed to grab her. No one could ever get the drop on his men, Montez would swear to that.