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His hands were flexing on her flesh, his fingers kneading her as if he were barely able to restrain himself from doing more. His face was rock hard as he stared down at her, his voice raw when he spoke. “I let you back away in the kitchen. By God, I don’t think I can do it again. Not now.”
Rachel’s breath left her lungs at the look in his midnight eyes, the hard, almost cruel look of savage arousal. The skin was pulled tight over his high, prominent cheekbones, and his jaw and mouth were set. Her heart gave a sudden leap as she realized that he meant exactly what he’d said, and fear and excitement rushed through her veins in a dizzying mixture. Control was impossible for him now, and the primitive force of his hunger was burning in his eyes.
Her hands trembled on his chest as her entire body began quivering in reaction to the fiercely male intent that was plain on his face, the look of a predator who had scented female. Heat. Heat was rising in her body, melting her insides, turning them liquid. His hand at her back clenched the towel and pulled it free from the tuck at her bosom. It dropped to the floor in a damp heap. Naked, Rachel stood in his grasp, shaking and yearning and gasping for breath that wouldn’t seem to go deep enough.
He looked down at her, and a low rumbling sound started in his chest, working up to the back of his throat. Rachel’s thighs turned to water, and she swayed, her throat tight, her heart pounding. Slowly he lifted his hand and touched her breasts, high and round, soft, with small, tight brown n
ipples, filling his palm with her to discover anew the warm, velvety texture of her flesh. Then, just as slowly, his hand drifted downward, smoothing over the sleek delta of her stomach and the slope of her lower abdomen, his fingers at last sliding into the dark curls of her womanhood. She hung there, shaking wildly and unable to move, paralyzed by the hot river of pleasure that followed his questing touch. One finger made a bolder foray. Her body jerked wildly, and she whimpered as he touched and teased and explored.
His gaze lifted from the gut-wrenching contrast of his hard, sinewy hand cupping the soft, exquisitely female mound and drifted back up to her pretty breasts, then to her face. Her eyes were half closed, glazed with desire; her lips were moist and parted, her breath rushing in and out in gasps. She was a woman on the verge of complete satisfaction, and her look of sweet carnality exploded the slim hold he still had on himself. With a wild, deep sound he bent and hoisted her over his right shoulder, the blood pounding so wildly in his ears that he didn’t hear her startled cry.
He made it to the bed in five long steps and dropped her across it, following her down, spreading her thighs and kneeling between them before she had recovered. Rachel reached for him, almost sobbing with need. He tore off his shirt and tossed it to the floor, then jerked at his pants until they were open, and he lowered himself onto her.
Her body arched in shock as he thrust into her, and she cried out at both the moment of pinching discomfort and the jolt to her senses and flesh as he filled her. He was… oh…
“Take it all,” he groaned, demanded, pleaded. He hung over her, his face shiny with sweat, his expression at once tortured and ecstatic. “All of me. Please.” His voice was hoarse with need. “Let yourself relax—yes. Like that. More. Please. Rachel. Rachel! You’re mine you’re mine you’re mine….”
The rawly primitive chant washed over her, and she cried out again as he moved in and out of her, powerfully, their bodies writhing together. It had never been like this for her, so painfully intense that it was unbearable. She had never loved like this, knowing that the breath would still in her lungs and her heart stop beating in her chest if anything ever happened to him. If this was all he wanted of her, then she would give herself to him freely and fervently, branding him with the sweet burning of her own passion.
He rolled his hips against her with a heavy surge, and it was abruptly too much for her to bear, making her senses crest and shatter. She gasped and cried out, writhing beneath him in a shimmer of pure heat that went on and on until it caught him, too. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, could only feel. She felt the heavy pounding of his thrusts as he drove himself into her, then the convulsive heaving of his body in her arms. His hoarse wild cries filled her ears, then became rough moans. Slowly he stilled, became silent. His body relaxed, and his heavy weight bore down on her, but she cradled him gladly, her hands still clutching his back.
Concern began to nudge her as sanity returned, bringing remembrance of the way he had lifted her onto his shoulder and the unrestrained wildness of his lovemaking. His head lay on her shoulder, and she twined her fingers into his coal-black hair, managing only a husky murmur as she said, “Kell? Your shoulder…are you okay?”
He levered himself onto his right elbow and looked down at her. Her clear gray eyes were dark with concern—for him, after he’d taken her with all the care and finesse of a bull in rut! There were her soft, trembling lips, but he hadn’t kissed them, nor had he caressed her pretty breasts and sucked them as he’d done in his dreams. Love was in those eyes, love so pure and shining that it knotted his insides with pain and shattered a wall somewhere deep in his mind and soul, leaving him vulnerable in a way he’d never been before.
Now he knew what hell was. Hell was seeing heaven, bright and tender, but being on the outside of the gates, unable to enter them without risking the destruction of what you most treasured.
CHAPTER NINE
“JUST WHO IS this woman Ellis has gone so mad over?” Charles asked calmly, his pale-blue eyes never wavering as he watched Lowell. As always, Charles’s manner was detached, but Lowell knew that he missed nothing.
“She lives in a little house close to the beach. Deserted area, nothing around for miles. We questioned her when we first started looking for Sabin.”
“And?” The voice was almost gentle.
Lowell shrugged. “And nothing. She hadn’t seen anything.”
“She must be out of the ordinary to capture Ellis’s attention.”
After considering it a minute Lowell shook his head. “She’s good-looking, but that’s all. Nothing fancy. No makeup. Outdoorsy type. But Ellis hasn’t stopped talking about her.”
“It seems our friend Ellis doesn’t have his mind completely on the job at hand.” The comment was deceptively casual.
Again Lowell shrugged. “He thinks Sabin died when the boat blew up, so he’s not putting a lot of effort into hunting him.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s a possibility. We haven’t found any trace of him. He was wounded. Even if by a miracle he’d made it to shore, he’d have needed help.”
Charles nodded, his eyes thoughtful as he waved Lowell away. He had worked with Lowell for many years now and knew him as a steady and competent, if uninspired, agent. He had to be competent to have survived. Lowell was no more convinced of Sabin’s survival than Ellis was, and Charles wondered if he had allowed Sabin’s reputation to override his own common sense. Common sense would certainly seem to indicate that Sabin had died in the explosion or immediately thereafter, drowning in the warm turquoise waters to become food for the denizens of the sea. No one should have survived that, but Sabin…Sabin was one of a kind, except for that blond devil with the golden eyes, who had disappeared and was rumored to be dead, despite the disquieting talk that had floated out of Costa Rica the year before. Sabin was more shadow than substance, instinctively cunning and damnably lucky. No, not lucky, Charles corrected himself. Skilled. To call Sabin “lucky” was to underestimate him, a fatal mistake too many of his colleagues had made.
“Noelle, come here,” he called, barely raising his voice, but he didn’t need to. Noelle was never far from him. It gave him pleasure to look at her, not because she was extraordinarily beautiful, though she was, but because he enjoyed the incongruity of such lethal skill housed in such a lovely woman. Her job was twofold: to protect Charles and to kill Sabin.
Noelle came into the room, walking with the grace of a model, her eyes sleepy and soft. “Yes?”
He waved his thin, elegant hand to indicate a chair. “Sit, please. I have been discussing Sabin with Lowell.”
She sat, crossing her legs to best display them. The gestures that attracted unsuspecting males came naturally to her; she had studied and practiced too long for them to be anything else by now. She smiled. “Ah, Agent Lowell. Sturdy, dependable, if a little shortsighted.”
