Beautiful Sacrifice (30 page)

The electric change in Lina’s body told Hunter that she was awake.

“Easy, sweetheart,” he murmured against her ear.

He felt her smile beneath his hand, but it was the hot lick of her tongue over his skin as she breathed his name that told Hunter she knew exactly who was in her bed.

“Go back to sleep,” he said softly. “Don’t mind me.”

His erection prodded her hip in bold contradiction.

She would have laughed out loud if his hand hadn’t covered her mouth. As it was, she bit the base of his thumb slowly, deliciously, then sucked one finger into her mouth for a hotter caress, the kind of tasting she wanted to do all over him.

“Is anyone else on this floor?” he asked.

Lina savored the unique flavor of his skin—jungle and salt, a metallic hint of blood and dusty thorns—before she reluctantly gave up teasing his finger to answer.

“Only the night guards, and they’re out making rounds,” she said softly.

“I noticed. Bunch of clubfooted clowns.”

“Their guns are clean and loaded. Carlos checked them before they began their shift.”

“Your
primo
struck me as a demanding sort of employer,” Hunter said, but his lips and teeth tracing her flaring cheekbone said that there were other demands a man could make.

Hungry ones.

“He is. That’s why he’s successful. Celia checked their clothes and fingernails. She won’t abide dirty guards inside the house.”

“Did Abuelita check their ammo?”

Lina’s soft laugh was a rush of warmth over his lips. “She’s asleep in her suite off the kitchen.” Lina’s lips went from the corner of his mouth to the hinge of his jaw. “The suite used to belong to the housekeeper, but when she quit last year, Abuelita took over the job. She even oversees the making of the candles she so loves.” Teeth nipped his ear. “The house has never been so spotless or held so many candles. No one dares displease her.”

“Her husband must have had huevos.” Hunter’s mouth nibbled Lina’s lips in sweet retaliation.

“I don’t remember him. He drank himself to death long before I was born.”

“Huh. Can’t say I blame him.”

Teeth nipped, then sucked on the pulse in Hunter’s neck. “Abuelita’s soft underneath her armor,” Lina said.

Hunter doubted it, but he didn’t doubt Lina’s affection for the old woman. “Did the family give you more grief after I left?” he asked.

Which had been as soon after dinner as was civilly possible.

“They understood you were tired,” Lina breathed against his hair.

“More like they were glad to be rid of me.”

She would have argued, but suddenly didn’t have the breath. Hunter’s warm mouth had found the valley between her breasts at the same moment as his hands had slid around their soft weight. The edge of his teeth on one nipple was sweet lightning ripping a sound of surprise from her.

“Okay?” he whispered, waiting.

In answer she shifted her thighs open. The scent of cinnamon and arousal lifted to him.

“God,” he groaned. “You work on keeping quiet.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ve always wanted to ravish a princess.”

Her breath broke as he sucked on one breast, then the other. Her fingers tightened in his hair and she fought to be silent while his mouth worshipped her. Minutes slid by in a breathless silence that ended when small whimpers broke from her. His mouth alternately tormented and delighted her breasts, sending sharp streaks of lightning from her nipples to her womb.

When she was twisting slowly beneath his mouth and hands, her nipples stiff and quivering, glistening from his tongue, he lifted his head to admire the beauty his slow caresses had created. He kissed one nipple, then the other.

Her eyes opened dark with need, watching him.

“Hunter?” she whispered.

“Shh. Ravisher at work here.”

Her smile became a hiss of indrawn breath when his mouth skimmed down her body, his hands slid beneath her hips to hold and mold her buttocks, and his teeth left a stinging caress on one hip bone and then the other. With a dark, fluid motion he shifted over her, pressing her legs farther apart to make room for his shoulders.

The scent and heat of her filled him like a drug.

He made a rough sound against her thighs as his fingers shifted to her nipples, squeezing and plucking in caresses that would have been painful just moments before. But not now. Now she was lifting into his hands, her body focused on the luxuriant whips of sensation uncoiling through her, arcing her.

Then he bent his head and took her in a way he’d taken no other woman, wanting to drown in her.

She would have cried out if she could, but he’d stolen her body. She lived only where he touched her, and he touched her everywhere. Without knowing it, she drew her knees up and gave herself to whatever he wanted, because with him she wanted everything. Ecstasy shivered through her, brilliant pulses that exploded like fireworks behind her eyelids, blinding her.

He lifted his head long enough to see her lost in the pleasure he had given her. Then he bent his head and drove her up again, less gently, fingers and teeth and tongue caressing and demanding until she came in a wild, writhing rush that destroyed her.

When she could open her eyes again, he was there, holding her, sealing her soft cries with his mouth. The taste of him, of her, of passion tangled with their tongues. With a long sigh, she separated their mouths and nuzzled the hands that held her face so tenderly.

“Gardenias,” she murmured. “Why do you smell like gardenias? Did you steal Celia’s perfume to fool the guards?”

Hunter smiled despite the driving hunger that made every muscle of his body hard.

“I waited in the bushes,” he said, tracing her mouth with his fingertip. “Watching the guards.”

She blinked slowly, a thick sweep of eyelashes. “That explains it. Were the bougainvillea thorns bad?”

“Wicked. Make it up to me.”

His blunt erection nuzzled at the lips of her sheath.

“Come here,” she whispered. “Deep, Hunter. I want you deep.”

“Then hold your knees high.”

She would have been embarrassed, but she was too caught in their mutual sensuality to care about anything but pleasing him. She opened herself as much as she could, then watched him sink into her, inch by thick inch. Seeing the joining set fire to her all over again. She had never known a lover like Hunter, a man willing and able to enjoy every aspect of making love, not just his own release.

His pleasure in her was as surprising as it was arousing. She breathed his name as he filled her until she overflowed. Her hidden muscles flexed, held, caressed, until his control gave way to powerful, twisting thrusts. He rode her with a strength and power that made the world go black and red and wild until he shuddered above her, unable to hold back anymore.

Then they lay tangled, sated, their sweat mingling, breaths ragged, bodies joined.

W
HEN
L
INA AWOKE AT DAWN, SHE WAS ALONE BUT FOR THE
sunlight turning the mosquito netting to ripples of liquid gold.

She wanted Hunter. Wanted him close to her, holding her, laughing while she kissed each tiny wound inflicted on him by insects and thorns. Then not laughing when she kissed the flesh that had given them both so much pleasure. There had been no more condoms, but she hadn’t cared. She just wanted to worship his body as he had worshipped hers.

And she had.

Smiling, stretching, feeling each sensual ache from Hunter’s tender, demanding lovemaking, Lina pushed through the mosquito netting. She showered and dressed in clothing suitable for jungle hiking, then took her backpack downstairs and tucked into the canvas enough food and water to last until evening. She filled a canteen with strong, rich coffee, left a note for her mother, and slipped out the back door before the maids arrived to begin grinding corn for Abuelita’s breakfast tortillas.

As always, there were guards along the perimeter of the compound. Lina barely registered their presence. She was too impatient to see Hunter.

The door to Casita Cenote opened before she could knock. Hunter’s eyes blazed a silver blue that took her breath. He was dressed, as impatient as she was.

As hungry.

“I’d kiss you,” he said in a deep voice, “but then I’d lose my head and go right to the top of your family’s shit list.”

The way Lina’s eyelids half lowered as she licked her lips told him that she’d awakened with the same thing on her mind.

“You’re killing me,” he said, touching her damp lips with a fingertip.

She smiled, touched the tip of her tongue to his skin, then stepped away. “We’ve got to leave before Celia or Abuelita thinks of a way to keep us apart.”

Hunter peeled the backpack off Lina, lengthened the straps to fit him, and said, “At your service, beautiful.”

She hesitated, smiled. “I never felt beautiful before you.”

“Have I mentioned that you’re killing me?”

“Maybe I like the way you ‘die.’”

The crunch of boots on crushed limestone was all that stopped Hunter from dragging Lina inside and bolting the door.

“Start moving,” he said huskily.

She turned and took a path leading away from the guard, walking quickly. He followed a little more slowly, just far enough back to appreciate the natural motion of her hips.

“You have a seriously fine ass,” Hunter said.

Lina gave him a you-have-got-to-be-kidding look over her shoulder.

He grinned.

“What am I going to do with you?” she asked, laughing.

“You did real good last night…and then some. Now change the subject or I’ll be walking bent over.”

Her dark eyebrows rose. “So it’s all my fault?”

“Every little bit.”

“There was nothing little about last night. Bitty either. You may be used to your whacking great equipment, but I’m walking funny today.”

Hunter laughed even as red burned along his cheekbones.

Smiling, she resumed her “funny” walk to the parking area of the compound. He took a long breath and followed her, wishing every step of the way that he had the right to drag her back to his bed for another up-close-and-personal loving from said equipment.

The Bronco was waiting where they had left it, limestone dust dimming its deep green paint. She held out her hand for the keys he had reclaimed yesterday. He dropped them in her palm. They were still warm from his pocket. She started to say something about how hot he was, then told herself to stop teasing the jaguar.

But it’s such fun.

Beneath the scraped-back hair and jungle wear, Lina felt more female than she ever had in her life.

“Where are we going?” Hunter asked as she unlocked the Bronco.

“First, the Cenote de Balam, or Jaguar Cenote, as Philip calls it,” she said. “Then to a very special place I’ve never taken anyone.”

“Breakfast along the way?” Hunter asked hopefully.

“In my backpack. The canteen clipped to the bottom is coffee. I ate while I was throwing stuff together.”

“Beautiful, sexy, intelligent, and understanding,” Hunter said, smiling wolfishly as he released and opened the canteen.

“I’ll remind you of that when I irritate you.”

Hunter was too busy swigging coffee to answer. But he winked.

“There’s a good limestone-paved walkway to the cenote from the compound,” Lina said, “but I don’t want to meet anyone. The villagers and workers use that path.”

He grunted something agreeable around a mouthful of pork, chiles, and hard-boiled eggs wrapped in yesterday’s corn tortillas. Four more fat bundles just like it waited for him in the backpack. He was hungry enough to eat every one.

“What about your cousin’s artifacts?” Hunter asked between bites.

“Gorgeous. Echoes of Kawa’il. Nothing close to what we’re looking for.”

“Did he say anything useful?”

“Not to me.”

On either side of the long estate driveway, elegantly spaced and manicured gardens flowed by. Before Hunter finished his second tortilla, she turned the Bronco onto what looked like a maintenance road. Moments later they were deep in the jungle. Untamed, unmanaged, raw with life. The jungle had a different kind of allure than the estate, the beauty of single moments framed in every shade of green—a bird flashing through a shaft of sunlight, a butterfly resting with blue incandescence on a white flower, the sudden rush and screech of howler monkeys passing overhead.

The sun filtered through the intertwined growth of the canopy, enclosing the Bronco in a living green world. As the trees grew bigger, the spaces between them increased, though the sunlight didn’t. Despite the overwhelming shade, the inside of the vehicle got hot, then hotter.

Hunter barely noticed. He expected heat in the Yucatan, even in December. It was the cool days that surprised people. But here, as in Texas, winter was being real slow about chasing summer from the land.

“Does the estate get its water from the cenote?” he asked as he swallowed the last bite of breakfast. “Or from cisterns during the wet?”

“Cisterns. Nearly all of Quintana Roo sits on a limestone shelf. Water flows through it, rather than being held back or pushed to the surface by denser, less water-soluble rock. During the wet season, rain fills the underground cisterns we’ve built. In the old days, the dry season was difficult, especially after the Maya fell and the ancient cisterns and canals fell apart.”

“So you don’t use the cenote at all?”

She shook her head. “Not anymore. We just drill down into the limestone ‘sponge’ to reach freshwater stored in stone from rainfall. You don’t drill too far, though. Close to the sea, freshwater floats on top of saltwater. It’s easy to punch right through to undrinkable stuff.”

“And if you don’t have a well?” Hunter asked. He enjoyed watching the relaxation and anticipation that spread through Lina with every minute away from the estate.

“Then you go to the nearest cenote, dip out water, and carry it back up the path. You’ll see signs of the old trail worn into solid limestone around Cenote de Balam. The trail is older than local memories, far older than Bishop Landa and his soldiers.” She downshifted deftly and whipped around a washout. “The actual word isn’t ‘cenote.’ It’s
dznot
. The Spanish mangled the Mayan word.”