Cherry Adair - T-flac 06 (26 page)

The white cotton pillow looked like coarse hemp against the creamy silk of her breasts. Her nipples were still hard little points of the palest pink, and just tempting him into another taste.

"Do what?" Derek asked, tossing the handful of rubbers onto the tray on the table between the beds.

"Get all this sexual tension out of your system."

"Mine?"

Her face flushed hot. "
Ours
, then."

"One definitely won't do it, sweetheart. But it's a start."

He saw the flicker of apprehension cross her face, which she quickly hid with a flutter of her lashes.

Then she tilted up her chin and met his eyes steadily. "Let's do it." The telltale throbbing pulse at the base of her throat showed how hard she was trying to be nonchalant about sitting on the bed naked with him
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standing over her.

Good.
He
didn't feel the least bit nonchalant. He'd waited for this moment for six years. And God only knew, he was more than ready. But he was damned if he'd be rushed.

"Come on," she shot a little taunt in her words, "let's see what you've got."

Derek watched her face. What was she up to? Why was she in such a damn hurry? Why now? Was sex for Lily merely scratching an itch, as she was trying so damn hard to convince him?

Hell no, it wasn't.

She'd loved Sean, and had made
him
wait for their honeymoon before she'd allowed him to make love to her. God, he thought, trying not to beat his chest and yell from the rooftops. She was, for all intents and purposes, still a virgin. A mere technicality.

He let his gaze drift down to her bee-stung lips, up to her heavy-lidded, feverish eyes. No. She'd been startled when he'd kissed her. He'd felt the electrical buzz of her skin as he touched her, and the way her heart pounded beneath her creamy skin. Lily wasn't impervious to his lovemaking.

Then it dawned on him: she thought sex would be yet another barrier between him and her heart. She believed, bless her misguided and flawed logic, the mechanics of quick, medicinal sex would put him off the hunt and sidetrack him.

He grabbed the shielding pillow from her lap and tossed it on the other bed, his eyes on her face. "Any preference?" he asked graciously.

Her pupils were enormous as she watched him. "N-no."

"No problem." He gave her bare shoulder a gentle shove and had her flat on her back. "I have plenty."

"Plenty of what?"

"Preferences. I'll teach you every one. Then you can teach me yours." He stroked a path from thigh to belly, entranced with the way her skin flushed at his merest touch. "No, never mind. Maybe I'll just try and figure out what yours are. Yeah. I like that idea better. For now."

He sat down beside her and splayed a hand on her stomach, then lowered his head to brush a kiss across her hipbone. Satisfaction blossomed when her muscles contracted beneath his lips. "I like this spot right here." He trailed a string of open-mouthed kisses between the edge of his hand and her silky hair.

"Your skin's as smooth as satin right here." He inhaled the fragrance of her arousal as he let his mouth travel from hipbone to hipbone and resisted going into dangerous territory—by a breath. Lily moved restively beneath the onslaught of his mouth.

He braced one arm on the bed beside her hip for better balance, and trailed the fingers of the other hand up the inside of her right knee. "Let me know if I'm doing anything you don't like," he told her, tasting her skin with the tip of his tongue. Her entire body shuddered, and he smiled a tiger smile against her quivering stomach. "Well?"

"Y-you're doing just fine."

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"Need a book?"

"A bo—What?"

"Apparently you're unfazed by the foreplay part of our program. I wondered if you'd like to read while I do this?"

Lily started laughing. "Very funny." She propped herself up on her elbows. "If I liked it any more I'd be nothing more than a puddle on the sheets."

"Hmm. Is that so?" He trailed his tongue through the silky hair at the apex of her thighs, and followed with his hand. Her skin fluttered, and she dropped back against the mattress and combed her fingers through his hair and held on. He dipped his tongue in for a taste.

She was wet, slick and swollen. His heart tripped and hammered with desire. This was like nothing he'd known before. He'd wanted other women, but not like this. Christ, not like this. The disparity of what he'd had with other women and this here, now, with Lily, made those experiences pale in comparison.

They didn't even come close.

Starving, he controlled the raging hunger, taking only the smallest of licks. He ached, but he pushed away the clawing, craving beast of need to gentle her with his lips. He wanted her wild for him. Needed to feel
her
need as well as his own. Wanted to know she was as overwhelmed as he was.

There would never be another first time for them. This had to count.

He shifted her legs farther apart with his shoulders and Lily felt the hot spear of his tongue enter her slick heat. She was so ripe for him that every movement sent a million small electrical shocks ricocheting through her body. The feeling was sudden, and too intense. She fisted her hands in his hair. His mouth on her there was so intimate, so invasive and personal, she felt as though she had been hit by a tidal wave—

Her brain went white, and she was nothing more than sensation. She felt high on him. Giddy with want.

Delirious with need as his mouth ravished her with a hunger that would have astonished her if she'd had any brain cells left. This was torture. Her head tossed from side to side. "I'll confess."

He pressed his thumb against the hard bud to hold his place as he mumbled, " 'Fess what?"

"Anything," Lily panted. "Anything. Everyt—Oh, God—" Her hips arched off the bed as he put his mouth back on her, holding her firmly as he ravished her with lips, teeth and tongue. And that magical thumb seemed to be everywhere at once.

There wasn't enough air in the room, she thought frantically as she tried to suck oxygen into her starving lungs. Her heart pounded deafeningly in her ears.

The roller coaster took her higher. Higher. Higher.

"Derek…" This couldn't be happening. How could she stand it another moment? How could she stand it if he stopped?

"Let go."

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She shook her head, reached for him. "Come into me. Now!"

"Not yet." He tilted her hips, opening more of her to him. She thought she couldn't climb any higher.

He took her to the summit.

And pushed her over the edge.

It took several years of her life for Lily to come back into her body. She felt as limp as an overcooked Chinese noodle. She couldn't move a muscle if she tried.

"How was that for you?" Derek asked thickly, head on her thigh.

Lily tried to lift a hand to touch his face. She was paralyzed.
Hmm. How interesting
. "Pretty damn amazing, thank you." She sounded drunk.

"Yeah, I thought so." He lifted his head, and shifted his large body up between her thighs like Poseidon rising from the sea. He hovered over her. Big and sweaty, muscles and tendons gleaming, mile-wide shoulders limned by the light from the bathroom. A pagan god claiming his woman in a ritual as old as time.

She found a bit of much needed energy, hooked her ankles over the lean muscles of his butt and pulled him closer. The hard, silken length of his penis brushed her damp opening. Lily slid a hand between their bellies and wrapped her fingers around him, feeling the raw strength of him, hot and throbbing in her fingers. "
Mm-mm
good, indeed."

Derek chuckled.

"Come to me."

He reached over and grabbed one of the foil packs beside the bed, then tore into it with his teeth. Lily choked back a laugh at the speed with which he liberated the rubber. She snatched it out of his fingers with her free hand, then squeezed her hands between them to roll it down his impressive length.

He was a large man and, how fabulous for her, had the body parts to match.

She lingered over her assignment—this was a first for her and she wanted to get it
juuuust
right; he squeezed his eyes shut, and every muscle in his body tensed as he held his hips away from hers to give her access. The tendons in his neck stood out in sharp relief as he pushed words out of his mouth with apparent difficulty. "How's the fit?"

Lily slid her hands up his chest, loving the feel of his springy hair over solid muscle. "Snug." She started sliding one hand down the steps of his abs. "But I can always check again—"

He grabbed her hand and threaded his fingers through hers, then anchored it above her head. Eyes hot with anticipation, he lowered himself to his forearms and plunged inside her like a hot knife through butter.

And Lily, greedy for him, held on for the ride of her life.

Later, much, much later, Lily gave passing thought to starting a conversation. Speaking would require
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more strength than her body had managed to recover. Besides, any chitchat would belittle the experience. Words simply couldn't convey the breadth and depth of emotions still churning in her depleted cells. No, this was too special for a verbal play-by-play. It was too special to be merely special and that scared the hell out of her.

Even five hours later, for Derek, it was as though those few precious hours had never happened. "You're not out of my system yet, my sweet little hedgehog," Derek had told Lily with a satisfied smile as he looked down at her sleeping face moments after they'd made love for the third time, while she'd slept like an exhausted puppy cuddled against his side. "Guess you'll just have to try harder."

The thought made him smile now, but hell, he'd lost the post-coital glow hours ago. It was no wonder many of the contestants hallucinated along the trail, Derek thought, listening intently to a barely there noise as his sled swooshed across the snow.

A full moon played cat and mouse with low, heavy, scudding snow clouds. The landscape went from brilliant, blinding white to inky black in undulating waves that made visibility damn difficult. Fortunately, the dogs could follow the trail markers with no difficulty, and Derek didn't bother turning on his headlamp. He'd enjoyed the dark and the quiet, enjoyed the soft rasp of Lily's breathing in his ear for the past several hours. But now he was on full alert.

Danger hovered just out of sight.

Someone was out there in the darkness. Tracking him.

Dog teams could use trails high-speed snow machines couldn't, but he'd heard the low throb of a powerful engine for several hours up in the higher elevations. Following him? Keeping pace just out of sight?

Part of the Iditarod support team or the mysterious sniper?

Sound was distorted between the mountains and thick trees, but the vehicle appeared to be several miles away, not yet attempting to close the gap.
Not yet
.

He'd change that.

He didn't enjoy being the mouse in the game. Time to turn the tables.

He smiled a tiger smile. He was ready.

He'd weighed the risks of being separated from Lily. But since it was him they were after, if he put himself directly in the assassin's path, he'd be an easy target. And Lily would be miles ahead and safe.

He wanted Lily as far the hell away from him as possible, no matter that he wanted to hold her tightly in the shelter of his arms to keep her safe. But being with him right now was the most dangerous place for her to be.

The sat phone vibrated. He clicked channels so Lily couldn't hear him. "Talk to me." It was Dare. Derek filled him in on the avalanche.

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"Could've been triggered by the movement of your sled, or the dogs barking—"

"I heard the detonation a few seconds before it blew," Derek said harshly. "It was just bad timing that I'd moved ahead faster than they anticipated, otherwise I'd've been the one buried." Just thinking about Lily under all that snow made his gut clench. "It's one thing for those sons of bitches to target me, quite another to harm Lily. Find out who the hell knows I'm here."

They talked a few more minutes, both baffled by the way this was playing out.

"Perhaps Pekovic is sending his grandkid in as a training exercise?" Dare suggested.

"God only knows it's low-scale enough to be someone without a whole hell of a lot of experience. Still, even a screw-up can kill. Look at what our guy did to Croft. This person knows his way around a knife.

Several of those cuts were postmortem. Not only was the son of a bitch enjoying himself, he wasn't afraid that I'd be there any minute and find him. He lingered.

"I'm not taking chances with Lily on this. Feed in what data we have and give me a face."

"I'll do what I can. W-ch -ou -k. Int—"

Derek frowned as Dare faded out, but he kept the line open.

Who the hell
was
after him? And why? His T-FLAC cover was airtight, had been for twelve years.

Nobody but family and fellow operatives knew he was anything other than a rancher. How the hell had this intel leaked? And who had it?

The reality of the situation was, it didn't matter the who or why. He had to cut Lily loose to keep her safe. Damn it to hell, he didn't want to believe that he couldn't keep her safe. But the avalanche had changed all that. It chapped his hide that he couldn't protect her in this. The wilderness was just too vast, filled with just too many natural hazards and hiding places.

His problem was twofold. He was sure the sniper and Oslukivati weren't connected. Hell. He had to be more than sure. He'd have Dare check out the possibility of a connection.

Would Lily be safe apart from him right now? The possibility that they'd try to get to her to get to him gave him pause.