Aaron's Kiss Series Boxed Set (Books 1 - 7) (67 page)

“You’re going to get yourself killed, is what you’re going to do,” Sara snapped. “And I don’t want you to. I’ve grown quite fond of those little brownies.”

“Like I said, Mrs. MacManus, mind your own business and leave me to mine.”

After another twenty minutes of badgering her for information about the job to no avail, the women left, taking several loaves of the fresh bread and a few of the cookies with them. Then Sam went back to the kitchen to finish up the last of the pretty cakes for the display case and to clean up after herself. She didn’t leave a dirty kitchen.

She felt him, the man, before she knew what she was feeling. A tingle around her neck and a feeling that whatever it was, it was close to her. She jerked around in her chair to see what was giving her the willies. Tucker.

“I know for a fact that I locked that door when the others left.  So, if you don’t mind, on your way out again, make sure it’s turned to the locked position again. It’s sort of tricky, I know, but when I lock the door, that means I don’t want anyone to come in. Bye.” She turned back to the table she was scrubbing down.

“You have my blood, and it calls to me. I want to talk to you.”

That made her jerk back around and look at him. He was closer than she thought. And she didn’t like the feeling of being caged in.

“Tough. I’m all talked out tonight. Mrs. MacManus and…oh, wait! She called you, didn’t she? Nosey busy body. Why she can’t mind her own…look, Mr. James, I have a lot of things to catch up on, so why don’t you do whatever you did to walk through my doors and go out again?” She turned back to the table, hoping he’d take the hint.

“No.” This time when he spoke, she could feel his hot breath on her neck. She nearly moaned at the heat his closeness seared into her back and onto her skin.

“This isn’t…it’s important that you…please stop. You need to back away…oh yes, that feels very good.”

He was kissing her neck, deep, open-mouthed kisses that she felt to her toes and back again, settling in her core between her legs. “Please, I’m…I don’t want you to do that anymore.”

~~~

Tucker turned her around and sat her on the stool she was standing next to. He stepped between her legs and started kissing her jawline and just below her ear. She tasted as good as she smelled, warm and his.

“Yes you do. I can feel your need, Sam. It’s as deep as mine. Feel me, touch me, Sam.”

He took the useless tube of blue icing from her limp hand and cupped her fingers around his hard cock. Her moan of pleasure moved through him, knifing through his body to sharpen his need as well. He kissed her then, his mouth fused to hers as he began leaning her back hard against the table behind her. He devoured her, all of her mouth like it was his last meal and he was going to savor every inch of it, of her.

“Let me in, love; let me taste your mouth.” She parted her lips slightly. Taking that as an invitation, he invaded, conquered, and celebrated. His tongue mated with hers, tasting the confections she had tasted only moments before on her tongue.

Tucker needed...everything. He pulled her closer to his body, marveling at the way they fit, her softness to his hardness. He gripped her hips as he pulled her closer and moved between her legs tighter, closer. She was too low on the stool for him to do what he wanted to her, with her, so he cupped her ass in both of his palms, lifted up, and pressed her heat to his erection. He caught her moan in his mouth, felt it as he rolled through her. Sam wrapped her legs around his hips and hooked her ankles behind him while he continued to lift her up and down his shaft, letting her ride him, spiking both their needs.

“Tucker, please...please, I need.” She was whimpering, pleading with him. She wanted him was all he could think of.

“What do you need, Sam? Tell me, and I swear I’ll give it to you. Just tell me.”

She was driving him closer to the edge as she rode him hard, squeezing him tighter with her legs as he pulled her up and down. Never had he wanted like this, never had he needed a woman this much.

“Wall. Take me to the wall. I want to feel you touch me. I want to feel you inside of me. Please, Tucker, please take me.”

He turned them both around and took the two steps to the wall. He slammed her against it and pressed harder into her core with is cock. If they kept this up, they were going to have their first climax together fully clothed, he thought, and nearly let it happen. And for as much as he wanted her, he wasn’t taking her the first time against the wall.

“Baby, we need to...I can’t take you here. I can’t be inside of you like this and I need to be inside of you. We have to move upstairs to a bed.”

She unhooked her ankles from him, reluctantly, he thought, and moved toward the back doors that lead to what he knew was her apartment. He was behind her, touching and kissing her, pulling her breasts and kneading them, tugging at her nipples from behind. Before they were halfway up the stairs, he had taken her shirt and bra off, throwing them over his shoulder as he went.

The need to touch her bare skin was making him dizzy. She turned toward him and yanked his shirt from his pants, tugging it over his head and throwing it to the floor. When she leaned her mouth in and nipped at his flat, brown nipple, he nearly threw her down on the stair and took her right there.

“Sam, hurry! Christ, we’re not going to make it if we don’t hurry.”

He was right. As soon as she got the lock undone and opened the door, he took them to the floor and stripped off her jeans and panties. He stood up, shucked off his pants and shoes, and stood naked over her. Going commando had its advantages, he thought, as he fisted his cock. He knew that if he dropped back down to her now, he would hurt her, tear her in his haste to make her his.

“Sam, baby, are you a virgin?” He looked down at her in a red haze. “I need you desperately and I don’t want to hurt you. I can feel your lack of experience, but I’m not sure if you’re a virgin.”

“Yes. No.” She turned her head. He could feel her embarrassment.

“Baby, you either are or you’re not.” He thought to ease her out of it. “Have you ever been with a man before?”

He wanted her to say yes, then he could enter her quickly, bury himself in her heat, but he wanted her to say no more than anything he had ever felt. He didn’t want her to have been made love to by another. She was his now and forever.

She didn’t look at him, but simply reached for her pants. When she started to pull them back on, he took them from her, then picked her up and sat down in an easy chair with her in his naked lap. He could feel her crying, her shoulders trembling slightly as she tried to hide from him. When she pulled from him twice more trying to get up, he wrapped her in his arms tightly and leaned back.

“Tell me. Tell me what I did wrong. Sam, I can’t fix this if I don’t know what I’ve done. I won’t hurt you, but neither will I let you go when you’re hurting like this.”

When her cell phone started to ring, he looked up at the clock on the wall. It was two-thirty in the morning. She scrambled off his lap to get it. He was so shocked that he let her go.

“Hello, yes, ¿Hola? Sí, esto es Sam Hunter. Yo…” She was quiet for a very long time, listening to the person speaking on the other end, he presumed. Tucker got up and moved closer to her, not caring if he was being rude or not. “¿Está usted en el hospital ahora?... Sí, estaré allí pronto… Sí. Sí. Saldré ahora. No, no llama a la policía, yo vengo ahora.”

As soon as she hung up the phone, she ran to her bedroom. Tucker reached down to get his pants and was pulling them on when she came out, dressed all in black, her hair pulled back and covered in a black skull cap. She glanced at him then down at the floor again.

“I have to go. There’s an emergency. You can let yourself out. When you leave, just lock up. I have my keys.” She looked at him now. “This can’t happen—”

“No.”

“Okay, then don’t lock up. I’ll call Sally and she can come over and lock up.” She moved toward the door. He stopped her.

“No, I mean no, you’re not leaving here without me.” Tucker had a good enough working knowledge of Spanish to know that someone needed her to come to get them. But not good enough to know the why or the who. “You must let me go with you or I cannot allow you go to.”

“Allow me to me go? The hell I’m not. I don’t answer to you or anyone. Now move.” Tucker moved in front of her door, blocking her only way out of the tiny apartment. He just stood there, arms locked over the chest. He knew she couldn’t hurt him…well, he hoped not, but he was only reasonably sure she couldn’t move him.

“I am going, Sam. And even if you could get around me, which is highly unlikely, I will still follow you.” He grinned when she glared. “You are very beautiful when your temper is up.”

“Yeah and your timing sucks. Fine, whatever. I’m leaving, you follow.” She pulled her gun from her back and put in a clip. With a click of the slide, she had loaded one in the chamber. Then she reached down to her left leg, pulled out the other Glock, and did the same. After holstering the two weapons, she looked up at him. “What?”

“I thought you…never mind.” He stepped aside to let her pass.

He stood beside her as she locked up her apartment, and then followed her out to the garage where she had a small car and a very large van. She got into the van and started it up. The engine was so quiet it almost sounded as if it purred. He went to the passenger side and waited for her to unlock his door. When she didn’t, he knocked on the window. She hit the auto window and looked at him, confused.

“What now? Am I going too fast for you or something? Make up your mind. I’ve got somewhere I have to be.”

“I can’t get in. Will you disengage the lock for me?”

“No, you said you wanted to follow, remember? You said you’d follow and that’s all I agreed to. Now move so I can leave.”

“Open the door,” Tucker growled.

He’d had about enough of her games. He was angry and frustrated. He should have taken her on the table in the kitchen, then they would never had heard the phone ring and he would be still making love to her right now instead of in a garage arguing about a stupid door lock.

~CHAPTER NINE~

She didn’t have time for this crap. So instead of opening the lock, she threw the van into reverse and backed out of the garage, barely missing the toes of the giant who was still screaming at her. She needed to concentrate on what was happening right this moment and he was way too much of a distraction. The man was going to drive her crazy.

Sam pulled in to a parking space about two blocks from the address Maria Schaller, a nurse at the hospital and an underground worker with her, had given her. Sam was set to rescue the family tomorrow night, but it turned into an emergency room situation tonight.

Maria said that the woman, a LaDonna Hermendez had been brought in to the hospital by ambulance about an hour ago badly beaten and bleeding. When she woke up, she started screaming that he, presumably the husband, Juan, would kill the children if left with him. Sam’s job was to go and do a pluck and pull as soon as possible. Lives were at stake and more so than usual.

The house was eerily quiet when she walked along the outside walkway to see if anything was going on. There were no lights on in most of the house, but a glow from a front room. Sam had asked Maria not to call the police for one hour, hoping that she was not too late. Sam made her second pass and things were still quiet so she moved up to the back door to get a feel for the house.

Closing her eyes, she reached mentally into the small house and found all the children were alive and the man was in a drunken stupor in the same room with them. It felt like a living room, there was warmth and a hum that usually meant a television was on. She opened her eyes and nearly screamed.

Tucker clamped his hand over her mouth just as she opened it. Had he not, she was sure the entire neighborhood would have heard her. He leaned in to her ear and whispered, “You said to follow you. You should have told me the address and I would have met you here.”

She could only glare at him because she didn’t trust her voice not to be forty or so octaves louder. Instead, she did something she hadn’t done with another person in years. She spoke to him mentally.

“Can you hear me, asshole?” The look on his face might have been worth it if she wasn’t so pissed at him.

“Yes, but I am no asshole.” He kissed her nose, totally throwing her off. “Why do you persist in calling me names? I have yet to call you anything but Sam. Well, there was just before I was able to ram my cock deep into your wet pussy, I did call you baby. But that was an endearment, not like what you call me.”

“Shut up. I don’t want to talk about what did or didn’t—”

“It definitely didn’t happen. I would remember an occasion such as that.” He touched her cheek now. He did that a lot—touch her. “But we will finish. I want to feel your heat around me, feel you ride me while I take you. Would you like that, Sam, to ride my cock until we are both spent?”

“Don’t do that. I...we aren’t going to do that again. You need to get that into that thick head of—”

He took her mouth again, his tongue invading hers and sliding along it like a caress. She wanted him, and felt herself lean toward him and press against him. When he chuckled, she stepped back. She was going to stake him when this was over, she just knew it.

“You must relax. I can feel your terror as though it is my own. I had hoped to distract you for a moment, but I fear all I did was make me need you more.”

“I hate you right now.” She put out as much anger as she could to make sure he understood she really was. “I don’t have time for this. Stay here. I have to go in and get those kids from the drunken sot on the couch.”

“I’m not staying here. How do you know he is a drunken sot on the couch? He could simply be a man who is napping with a bottle in his hands.” He kept touching her as he talked and it was making her body do weird things. She wasn’t sure if she liked it, but she certainly wasn’t telling him if she did. He was entirely too sure of himself already.

“Relax, love. You can do it.” She knew what he was doing; he was trying to tease her into slowing her heart rate down. She would be dangerous going in strung out like she was. She took a deep breath. It was a mistake. She could smell him. Now her heart rate was up for an entirely different reason. And she hated that he knew that too.

“I can feel him. The children are in there with him.” She pulled the gun out and gripped it in both hands. “My job is to save them, yours is to stay out of my way. Got it?” Sam started to move away.

“Wait. I can disable the man from here and we can get the children out. But we do this together, understand?” Tucker whispered through her mind. “There is no reason for anyone to be harmed tonight.”

It wouldn’t have been so bad, his idea, if he hadn’t acted so superior about it.

“I should just shoot you and be done with it. At least in the leg. If I didn’t have to carry you to safety if I did, I would, too. And the only reason I’m not is because I don’t have time for that. And no, you are not going in there to ‘disable’ anyone. I am a professional and I’m good at it. So stay here.”

“We are going to have to set some ground rules, you and me. I don’t like you giving me orders any more than you like to hear them. You will desist this now. It is in my make-up to protect you and that is very difficult to do if you do things that are a danger to you.”

She nearly burst out laughing at his arrogance. If she didn’t have so many people depending on her right now, she would have shot him. Instead, she decided to give him a piece of her mind.

“Look, fang-boy, you can take your fucking protective DNA and shove then up that tight ass of yours. I will not be your little puppy. I’ll bite your fucking ass.”

“Now that sounds promising. Do you promise to bite me hard?”

She just stared at him with her mouth wide open and her mind completely blank. Turning on her heel, Sam moved into the house, gently unlocking the door with her mind as she did so.

Sam hadn’t lied to Lizzy when she said she was an empath, but she had many other names and abilities as well, telepath, telekinesis, clairsentience and psychometric. She had a very talented mind, too bad she hated it so much.

“We are so going to talk about this,” he said to her. She could feel that he was close behind her.

She knew she was revealing a lot of herself, and she knew that she would regret it later. But right now, she needed to do this. They had wasted enough time already. People were waiting for the children to take them to safety.

When they reached the room where they all were, Sam looked at the children. They were huddled in a corner of the little room. The television was blaring out a Spanish sitcom or something. Sam smiled at them and nodded.

“Su madre me envió, yo le necesito para venir conmigo ahora, por favor.” She let them know that their mother had sent her, hoping that would calm them down. The smallest of about four was beginning to cry softly. The oldest, the one with a large cast covering her arm, put her good hand over his mouth, much in the same way Tucker had done outside. “Prisa, nosotros debemos darnos prisa. Hurry.”

When Juan, the man in the chair, shifted his considerable weight on the couch where he was snoring, the gun in his hand shifted as well. He didn’t lose his grip on the Smith & Wesson, but actually pointed it toward his kids. Everyone froze. Tucker walked around Sam without a word and moved to the man. Once Tucker touched Juan’s forehead and commanded him to sleep, they all got going again. When Sam had the children out the door and out of harm’s way, she watched as Tucker took Juan’s gun from him and slipped it into his back pocket.

By the time Tucker came outside, Sam was halfway to the van, carrying one child on her hip and another was hanging around her neck on her back. He flashed himself to her and took the one from her back and picked up another that was lagging behind. Once they were loaded, she gave them each a box filled with a sandwich, bottled water, and some cookies. She was glad now that that part was ready and she’d put them in the fridge in the garage earlier that day. For the baby, she produced a smaller box filled with small, round container of cereal that he could eat and not choke, and a Sippy cup filled with milk. When she seemed satisfied with the arrangement, she got into the driver’s seat. But before she could close the door, Tucker was there.

“I’m going with you. You will need to let me in, Sam, please. I sincerely want to help you with this.” At her nod, he reached inside the van and opened the automatic locks for the other door. Quickly moving to the other side, he slipped into the van and closed the door. With a quick look back at the children, she took off.

They were silent for about ten minutes when she suddenly needed to pull over. She wasn’t surprised by this. She had to do it every time she did one of these removals.

“Stay with them, I have to…stay here.” She jerked open the door and ran into the street, narrowly missing an oncoming car. She heard him curse then tell someone to keep everyone in the van until he returned. Sam hoped the kids understood, but kept moving.

He was at her side when she reached the alleyway. She was sick, retching and gagging behind a building just off the street. He walked slowly up behind her and touched her back as she knelt down in the dirt and grime.
No way, did he have to witness this too?
she moaned to herself.

“Don’t touch me. Go back to the car,” she said between tossing up her dinner. “I want to be alone.”

“No, they’re fine. Are you all right?”

Stupid question, she was sick. “Yes, I’m just dandy. Go away.” He touched her back when she answered him.

“I’m staying here with you, and you are in no position to argue with me.”

She didn’t answer him. What was the point? Her belly was sicking up the stress of the assignment, just like it always did. She was always worried she would get someone hurt, or worse, killed, and it weighed heavily on her until it was over. After a couple more minutes of nothing else coming up, she stood and leaned against the building. Then turned and made her way back toward the van. Before she was halfway there, he grabbed her arm and jerked her around to him.

“Why do you do this if it makes you ill? Does your life mean so very little to you?” Anger colored his voice and she could just see his fangs.

“My life means absolutely nothing to me. Nothing! If he had shot me, I would have…” Pulling her arm free of his grip, she went to the van and got in.

She didn’t wait for him. She wasn’t sure what she would have said to him at any rate. He’d been right to come with her. He’d been right about the man too. But it was the look in his eye when she’d told him her life meant nothing. He’d looked…shocked.