Afterglow (29 page)

He trailed his lips across her belly. Her cool skin warmed to his touch, and he stroked his lips to the tender crease at the top of her legs. She slipped her fingers from his and trailed them up and down his arms as he moved her body where he knew she’d get the most sensation.

This was all for her.

Rand buried his face in the soft thatch of damp gingery curls at the juncture of her thighs, and inhaled the essence of her. The fragrance of her arousal almost made him come. He slid his hand up the inside of her thigh, and with his other, brought her hips higher, like an offering to his marauding mouth. The sharp sting of her nails in his skin hiked the ante.

He pushed her legs wider, opening the folds so he could suckle and tease her. Lapping the swollen bud until she shifted restlessly, Rand ran his hand down her leg, and she brought both up over his shoulders, opening herself for him.

Eagerly, crazed with lust, his dick so hard it was painful, Rand parted her dewy heat with his tongue and sucked on her clit. His name echoed in the vast open hangar, and her nails scored his shoulders as her hips arched off the pallet with a lightning-fast climax.

Dakota’s hands tangled in his hair, a good hard grip that almost—but not quite—lifted his head from his target. He grunted in protest as he speared his tongue inside the slick heat.

She got a tight, stinging grip. “S-stop tormenting me, Rand! Make love to me. I need to feel you inside me—”

“Not yet.” His voice, muffled as it was, was implacable. Too bad he couldn’t taste her and make love to her at the same time.

She tried to shift her legs from his shoulders. “N—” Her order was cut off by a sob of pleasure jerking her body.

He slid two fingers inside her, and she arched again, rising higher in the cup of his hand under her butt. “Better?” He inhaled the sweet and salty of her, dragging as much of her scent into his lungs as he could. Nectar of Dakota. Yeah. Didn’t get much better than this.

“I can’t take any more!”

Rand smiled against her inner thigh. “Now?”

“Do it, you’ve made me crazy!”

In a smooth move, he surged up her body and plunged his throbbing dick inside the pulsing wet heat of her. Her feet crossed in the small of his back as she met each thrust with a countermove that flung him off a cliff. The shudders racked him for what felt like an eternity, and the space of a heartbeat. He collapsed on top of her, their sweating skin glued together as they panted and wheezed against each other’s necks.

She lifted a hand to touch him, then dropped it limply to the side, too spent to move. “I suppose,” she murmured weakly, her internal muscles still clenching around him, “it’s a bit late to mention I have a family pack of condoms in my purse?”

Rand smiled against her sweaty throat. “The night’s young. We both know sleep’s highly overrated.”

MONK’S EYES NARROWED TO
dangerous slits as he enunciated clearly and succinctly, “Both dead.” He didn’t raise his voice, and it was not a question. His hands, relaxed and hanging over the arms of his chair, flexed. No fists. No overt show of anger. But inside he seethed.

Szik’s eyes flickered from the medieval instruments laid out neatly on a chamois to the Cuban smoldering in the Baccarat ashtray on the small inlaid table beside his chair. The man couldn’t get any pastier. He cast his gaze down again and licked his bloodless lips. “An unfortunate accident, Father. One that I deeply regret.”

Deeply regret, you little turd? Deeply REGRET?
All these years of meticulous planning, years of living an exemplary life, had just disintegrated in a puff of smoke, because the people he held accountable, the people he trusted in his own limited way, failed him. He should’ve known that if one wanted a job done well, one did it one’s self. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be in
two
fucking places at once. Monk shifted in his chair.

“Unfortunate
accident
? A high-speed car chase was an unfortunate
accident
? What other outcome could there possibly be when a man is chased by would-be assassins in the dead of night on an open road? If you had thought the scenario through, you would have ensured that Dr. North was secured safely somewhere else.
Before
he was killed.”

“I failed you, Father.”

Failed?
Without Dr. North’s input and expertise, it was impossible to go forward with his well-crafted, carefully thought-out marketing plan. No. Not impossible. Nothing was impossible. Her death made what he wanted to do more … challenging.

Monk was not in the mood to be challenged. He was not in the mood to have his plans thwarted or delayed. Yet here he was. Forced to endure all three.

“Was that irony, my son? Because the word
failed
is a gross understatement.” Rapture labs would have to be established in key markets. That meant more time. More personnel. And more opportunities for people to cheat him. Szik was a necessary evil, and would have to be eliminated when the time was right. That was a task scheduled on his calendar, and one he had to do himself. Clearly, he could trust no one else.

This new development was unacceptable on every level. Sweat beaded his brow as he thought of the ramifications of not having the doctor’s expertise and knowledge for this final, critical phase of the project. Years of grueling work were coming down to a two-week window. Monk had timed this like a precise Swiss watch. Every moving part had been carefully manipulated, and then put into play.

“I instructed that
only
Maguire be eliminated. I instructed that Dr. North be taken directly
to the lab
. Was that order too
complicated
for you, Szik?”

“No, Father. I would have gone—I would have gone myself, but you told me to—”

“It’s my fault you failed? Is that what you’re telling me, my son?”

“No, Father.”

“You confirmed that both the man and Dr. North were inside the incinerated vehicle? That they are both indeed dead?” Monk still held a tiny spark of hope. She would be useful even if in traction. Burn victims were notoriously easy to control. Dead was final. Critically injured was something he could work with.

Szik’s lashes fluttered, and his head bowed even lower. “Of course, Father.”

“And Branah and Raimi?” Driving the vehicle sent to retrieve Dr. North. “What became of them?”

“I had them t-terminated, Father. It was made to look like a head-on collision.”

He thought he was so damned clever. He wasn’t paid to think. He was paid to make things happen.

Monk wanted to kill him. Quickly. He couldn’t stand to look at Szik’s face one more second. But sometimes expediency was not as satisfying as a slow, drawn-out conclusion. Why deprive himself of at least a modicum of pleasure? Slow was much more satisfactory. It would also show his other subordinates that when he gave an order, that order was to be obeyed. Instantly, and to the letter.

THEY LEFT AS SOON
as the manager of the airport showed up the next morning. He bore a fat loaf of crusty bread, cheese, and strong coffee in a thermos. Fortified, they paid cash for the rental, and took off.

“For all he knows, we could be stealing this pretty plane,” Dakota pointed out as they taxied down the runway. It was a perfect flying day, the sun shining, the air clear and still.

“He was reimbursed well,” Rand said, scanning the fields as they passed to check for anything out of the ordinary. They lifted off without incident, and he allowed himself to relax for the duration. “I’ll make sure he gets it back in one piece.”

“Good.” She settled more comfortably in her seat, looking fresh and pretty. She’d covered the abrasions on her cheek with expertly applied makeup and wore large sunglasses to shade her bright eyes.

She was dressed in fashionably wrinkled white cotton pants and an off-the-shoulder, long-sleeved black T-shirt that showed off her pale skin and two angry red scratches near her neck.

Her glorious hair, fiery and so touchable it took everything in Rand not to reach out and run his fingers through it as he’d done the night before, was corralled into a low ponytail. Despite the lack of a hairbrush, she’d managed to tie back the thick wavy length with a black-and-white scarf. She looked like she’d just stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. She had never looked like a chemist.

Dr. Dakota North was a resourceful woman.

“I’d hate to cheat him,” she said, turning her head to give him a smile. “He brought us breakfast.”

“He would’ve gotten an eyeful for his trouble if he’d shown up ten minutes earlier,” Rand said dryly.

“True. This is nice, isn’t it? Peaceful, drama free.”

“Yeah. It’s great.” He wondered how long the détente and the peace would last.

An experienced pilot, Rand directed the rented Cessna toward Umbria’s capital, Perugia, where the prison was located. He enjoyed flying, especially when he had terrific weather and a tailwind. The sky was a crystal-clear pale blue with ten-mile visibility and just a little haze in the distance as they flew over the mountains. He pointed out Mont Blanc and other landmarks on the route. They talked about food, and wine, and Zak and Acadia. Whom, Rand realized, Dakota knew quite well. Better than he did, given that he lived in LA and his friend in the Pacific Northwest.

“I don’t know how you live with this sustained cloak-and-dagger stuff day in and day out,” she said, peering down at what appeared to be a toy train cutting through brilliant green fields. “It’s exhausting.”

He smiled. “Hardly. This isn’t how my jobs go normally. My team and I show up, we do our jobs without any drama or fanfare, and then we take a nice chunk of change home at the end of the day. In all the years since I started the security business, I’ve never once drawn my weapon. Never needed to.”

“Good,” she said emphatically.

“Just so you know, I’m determined to find whoever’s behind this. For a dozen reasons, not the least of which is this might very well be the person who burgled your house, put incriminating shit on your iPad, and tried to run us down yesterday. The list is fucking growing by leaps and bounds.”

“We’re in this together.” Dakota swiveled her head to face him, her eyes masked by large dark glasses.

“Yeah. We are.” But the truth of the matter was that yesterday’s high-speed chase had hit dangerously close to home. They could’ve been killed.
She
could’ve been killed.

He hoped like hell his father could provide some answers.

He rotated his shoulders to ease the tension, a product of anticipating seeing Paul again. His father wasn’t an easy man—an understatement. He was a sanctimonious asshole, and a bully. Rand preferred keeping their face-to-face contact to a minimum.

Paul’s assets had been frozen by his wife’s Seattle lawyers until the charges against him were either dropped, or he was imprisoned.

It was Rand who paid the astronomical prices for the team of defense lawyers. That, and being civil, was the best he could manage.

Strapped in beside him, Dakota was holding the case that had contained the vials loosely on her lap, keeping track of where the second bad guy was. Currently, the GPS coordinates put the guy in northern Italy.

He didn’t know what the guy was doing there, Rand thought, mildly annoyed, because he hadn’t had contact with his men since the day before. But that could be for many reasons. He didn’t want to believe they’d lost their quarry and weren’t responding because they had fuck-all to tell him.

He regarded her thoughtfully. There was no sign of her being a white-knuckle flyer now. Stretched out as best she could manage in the confined space, Dakota looked as perfectly relaxed as a cat napping in the sunshine. As usual, she had her shoes kicked off. The shoes were sky-high black heels, which, like everything else they both wore, had been in her voluminous bag.

They had a tacit agreement to keep the personal from seeping into the already explosive situation, and when she wasn’t making calculations on the handheld GPS, she spent the trip looking out the window or dozing.

Which was fine. Talking to Dakota was a minefield, and for the duration he’d like to bask in the warmth of the postcoital glow, and leave it at that.

Sex with her had been inevitable. The chemistry between them had never been an issue. That hadn’t changed. At least she couldn’t lie with her body; he knew that too well to be fooled by fake passion. Although he acknowledged to himself that a lot of men believed the same fucking thing. Still, he did know her body. Her mind was another matter altogether.

He checked the coordinates and landmarks. They were a hundred miles from the airport.

Umbria evoked the Middle Ages, with its mountains and hills, streams and valleys. The countryside was lush, the rolling green hills punctuated with the dusty gray of endless olive groves, emerald-green terraced vineyards, and orchards. The rustic landscape was dotted with historic hill towns of pinkish gray rock, set like semiprecious stones in nooks and crannies of vegetation.

He checked his airspeed for the descent. “We’ll be landing in about ten minutes.”

Dakota slipped her heels on. “How far is it to the prison?”

“Only about seven miles out of town.”

She checked around her seat to make sure she had everything stuffed back in her tote. “When were you here last?”

“I had to come early to set up security for the wedding, and made a quick trip here first.” Paul hadn’t been that pleased to see him. It wasn’t like the old man had a social life—he was with the other inmates for an hour a day, with an hour outside, and had unlimited access to his legal team. One would think he’d be starved for any form of social interaction. Apparently not.

“How’s your father doing?” Dakota shoved her sunglasses on top of her head, making the diamond studs in her ears sparkle in the sunlight streaming through the windows. “It must be hard for such an active man to be—”