Dark of Night (52 page)

“I'm not,” she tried to tell him, “I'm okay—”

But Dave swung and hit her and the world turned gray and vanished with another of those awful pops.

Decker woke up feeling if not quite refreshed, then pretty damn close.

He'd wrapped himself around Tracy, who was still asleep, breathing slowly and steadily.

His hand was still on her breast. And even though he knew it would probably wake her, he couldn't keep himself from touching her, letting all that smooth, sleek skin slip beneath his fingers, brushing the softness of her nipple against the too-sensitive palm of his hand.

She hadn't understood the significance of what he'd told her, when he'd said that he didn't just want—he wanted
her.

It hadn't been that way with Emily. He'd wanted. Anyone. And she'd walked into the bar, and into his life. He'd loved her because he was with her—not the other way around. And on some level, she'd probably always known that.

And then there was Sophia—another random anybody. Made worse by the fact that he'd known she was desperate when he'd let her unfasten his pants.

And maybe he was lying to himself—he was pretty good at that—but he couldn't imagine having that random kind of sex-for-the-sake-of-sex with anyone, especially not a stranger, no matter how beautiful and alluring, on the desk in his office.

But for Tracy … ?

He'd planned it. He'd done it. And now, after the fact? He wasn't beating himself up about it. In fact, as he lay here on his couch, smiling at the memory, with Tracy's breast in his hand and his incredibly happy dick pressed tightly against her heart-rate-revving posterior, he could imagine—in the very near future—breaking his rule all over again.

Her nipple had tightened and peaked beneath his touch, and she stirred and stretched and pressed herself more fully into his hand. “I like that,” she murmured.

“Mmm, me, too.”

“You know, that's an often neglected erogenous zone,” she told him.

“It won't be with me around,” he told her.

“No.” She laughed and took his hand. “Not me,
you.
This.” She brought his hand to her mouth and kissed him, right on his palm. “You like touching things, don't you? You're into the tactile. You know how I know? I've seen you stop yourself from doing it, from reaching out—like you're afraid it might overload your senses.”

She moved his hand back to her breast, and keeping his fingers open, she drew circles on the center of his palm with the very tip of her taut nipple.

And he went from semi-to fully, painfully aroused—a fact that she couldn't fail to notice, considering their proximity. “Hmm,” she said, laughter in her voice. “That's going to be fun to experiment with.”

Decker laughed, too, as he turned her to face him. “I think,” he said,
“that
has more to do with you than me. We're not going to get the same reaction if, say, a big fat man touched the palm of my hand with a pencil.”

“Hang on,” she said, as she smiled into his eyes, “we can check. Because I think I've got a big fat man in one of my ‘massively huge’ suitcases.”

He laughed again as he kissed her, shifting further so that she was on top of him. “This,” he said as she sat up, straddling him, pushing her hair from her face, her bare breasts full, her soft skin beautiful in the dim glow of the light he'd left burning on his desk, “
I
like.”

She smiled down at him, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she reached between them to unfasten his pants. “Bet I can make you like it even more.”

He shook his head. “It'd be pretty stupid to bet against that.”

She freed him from his jeans and his shorts, her hands soft and cool against his stomach. “This right here is nice,” she said, touching the muscles in his abdomen, “the way it kind of sweeps down and leads the eye right”—she wrapped her fingers around him—“here.”

Decker reached for her, too, to unzip her jeans, but she shifted back.

“ Uh-uh,” she said as she caressed him. “Nope. I'm in charge.” Somehow she managed to hide her smile as she gazed coolly down at him. “No
talking, no touching. I'll tell you what I want you to do, and you'll do it— is that clear? Nod. Once.”

Okay. Moment of truth. There was sex in the office and then there was
sex
in the office. And yet, Deck found himself trapped by her gaze and nodding. Once.

“No smiling,” Tracy said as she continued to stroke him, harder now, and suddenly, it wasn't all that difficult to not smile.

It
was
hard, however, not to touch her. He wanted those jeans off, wanted her breasts in his hands, her mouth on his mouth, his dick buried inside of her.

But she had other plans.

“Hands behind your head,” she ordered. “Like this…” She let go of him to show him, putting her arms up, elbows bent, hands clasped.

He wanted to ask her to stay that way so he could get his camera because Jesus. Instead, he silently did the same, and if his injured arm hurt, he didn't feel it. It was inconsequential, a mere inconvenience. He was hyper-aware, though, that he was already breathing hard, his bare chest rising and falling with each breath he took.

She nodded her approval, taking hold of him again, but loosely, with only one hand this time, as she reached out with her other and—lightly— ran her fingers down the smooth underside of his upraised arm, where the nature of his position made his bicep bulge. “Very nice.” She ran her fingers back up the other way. “
I
like this.”

It took everything he had in him not to move because what she was doing felt unbelievably, erotically good. Try as he might, he couldn't keep his hips from tightening, couldn't stop himself from pushing himself more fully into her hand.

She held his gaze as she tightened her grip on him, but then, again, she let him go.

She leaned forward, whispering, “Don't move,” and then she kissed him, her lips gentle against his mouth.

He had to fight not to respond as she licked him, her tongue warm and sweet—and gone way too soon.

She kissed his chin, his neck, his chest—swiftly licking the nipple above his pounding heart. But then she went back up to his arm and kissed the same expanse that she'd touched so lightly—“Mmm”—humming her approval.

She moved back to his other nipple, then trailed kisses down his stomach. He knew what was coming, he
knew
it with a certainty that redefined his faith in God, and yet it
still
damn near killed him when her mouth landed on him, when she kissed him and licked him and sucked him— but he couldn't touch her, couldn't speak, couldn't move.

All he could do was watch. She knew his vantage point was a particularly good one, because she made sure to give him plenty of eye contact. Or maybe she was just policing him. Either way, it worked for him. Completely.

All of his muscles were tight and tense as he held himself still, as she used her hand to add to the pleasure she was giving him with her mouth. He could feel her laughing, the vibration adding to the sensation of her lips, her tongue, and he had to close his eyes, because it was too much, too good, no, it was too fucking
great—
and he was going to …

“Don't move,” she said again.
“Don't. Move.”

Jesus, he had to … He needed … Colors flashed behind his eyelids as he clenched every muscle in his body even more tightly, as he gritted his teeth and tried to silence the moan, the
growl
that he could feel building in the back of his throat.

“Don't move,” she ordered him again. “Just come.
Now.
”

And Decker let go.

He let go, and all that there was, was
yes.

It roared through him, consumed him, incinerated him. He was everything and nothing, light and darkness. The world ended and kept turning. Time stopped and rushed forward. Life had meaning and he was both here and gone. Exploding, cartwheeling, shattering, obliterating, for the first time in an eternity, Decker truly, completely, totally let himself go.

He didn't know how long it was that he hung, suspended, in that place of sheer pleasure. He didn't know how long it was that he lay there, gasping, still not moving, his hands still up behind his head—he was nothing if not a rule follower. But he slowly became aware of his surroundings, of Tracy's hair fanned out across his chest, the weight of her head on his stomach as she, too, caught her breath.

He wanted to slow it all down, to hold on to it, to make it last, because it was sex to the nth—sex unlike any sex he'd ever had, ever. But it was already over. Already done.

And he recognized, immediately, that part of what had made it so
great was that he'd stopped thinking. He hadn't brought anything with him—no baggage, no analysis, no sense of what he should or shouldn't be feeling.

It was just him and Tracy. And pleasure the likes of which he would never have believed possible.

And he already, absolutely, couldn't wait until they did it again.

She lifted her head then, her hair sliding across his stomach as she sat back up, still straddling him, still bare-breasted, still breathtakingly beautiful.

And in love with him.

She'd told him so.

“You have my permission to smile,” she said now, still in that stern voice.

He did just that, laughing a little, as he held her gaze. “What I really want,” he whispered, “is permission to do that to you.”

The look on her face was beautiful, but as she opened her mouth to answer him, someone knocked on his door.

She froze, and Decker quickly sat up, covering her with the blanket, just in case the lock didn't hold.

“Deck?” It was Lindsey out there. She knocked again. “I'm really sorry to wake you, sir, but there's been a clusterfuck of some magnitude, and we need you out here, right away.”

Decker was furious. Tracy could tell because he got very,
very
quiet. “Why wasn't I told about this?”

His T-shirt was also on inside out. She hoped for his sake that no one else had noticed that, but… No such luck. Jo Heissman was sitting at the conference table, looking from Decker to Tracy and back, with a curiously bland expression on her face.

Lindsey, meanwhile, stood her ground against Deck's wrath, chin out. “Because Tom was handling it. He
is
still the boss here. And he told me I should let you sleep.”

Complications had developed from the knife wound Dave had gotten in Boston. Apparently, an infection had set in, and he'd passed out at the hotel while Tom Paoletti was bringing his family here to the office, for safety.

It made Tracy want to look beneath Deck's bandage, to check that bullet wound in his arm.

To be honest, she hadn't even known Kelly and Charlie Paoletti were here—they must've arrived while she and Deck were sleeping, et cetera. Apparently, they'd already left, rushing over to the hospital to be with Tom.

Who had been shot at by a sniper on the street outside the hotel—at about the same time SEAL Chief Ken Karmody had taken two bullets to the chest, and one to the leg in the elevator, which had stopped on the eighth floor.

Tom had leaned over to pick up his sat phone from the floor of his car, and a bullet that otherwise would have killed him instantly merely left a two-inch furrow just behind his left ear. It hadn't knocked him unconscious—not quite. But it had bled heavily and created quite a scene as he'd staggered into the hotel, weapon drawn.

The elevator in the lobby had opened to reveal Karmody, critically wounded. Sophia had been in that elevator, too, unwounded but unconscious.

Dave Malkoff was nowhere to be found.

“Where's Sophia now?” Decker asked tersely.

“Lopez and Cosmo are bringing her back from the hospital,” Lindsey reported.

“They're bringing her here,” Decker clarified.

“Yes, sir. They should arrive soon. They drove Kelly and Charlie over there to be with Tom. The FBI has already arranged for guards to be placed on both the chief and Tom. Everyone agreed that it would be best if Cosmo and Lopez got Sophia here immediately.”

Ken was currently in surgery, as doctors raced to repair the damage done by bullets at close range. No one had said as much, but Tracy knew from the extent of his injuries that it would be a miracle if he survived. His wife, Savannah von Hopf,
of the
van Hopfs, had chartered a jet out of New York and was flying in.

Tracy had always been jealous of Savannah, who worked as a high-powered attorney despite having bushels of inherited money, but she didn't even remotely envy the other woman now.

Tom, meanwhile, was in the hospital, because an X-ray had revealed a hairline skull fracture. Such injuries could result in bleeding in the
brain, and he was undergoing the first of what would no doubt be a night of observation and cat scans.

Tracy made a note in the office calendar to send flowers to the nurses who were going to have to live through
that.
Knowing Tom, he was going to be pissed and insisting he get back to work. Kelly was going to have to get out the whips and chains, and okay. Suddenly that seemingly casual expression held a whole new meaning.

“Alyssa's on her way,” Lindsey reported to Decker. She looked at her watch. “ETA ten minutes.”

Decker nodded. When Alyssa arrived, as company XO, she'd be in charge. Until then, he was in command. “I need Commander Koehl on the line, and I need him now.”

Tracy stood up. “I can do that.”

Deck shook his head. “No,” he said. “This is going to need finessing. Lindsey …”

“I'm on it.” Lindsey vanished down the hall.

He realized how negative his words had sounded. “I didn't mean—”

“I know,” Tracy reassured him. Lindsey's husband Mark was on Koehl's SEAL team. “She'll get through to him before I will. Jo and I'll go to the lobby and wait for Sophia. I'll let you know as soon as she arrives.”

He nodded. And beneath his layers of grim, beneath his anger, Tracy could see an echo of all the intimacies they'd shared over the past few days. And beneath that, she could see his fear for Dave.

“We'll find him,” she told him quietly. “We'll get him back.”

He nodded as he looked into her eyes, but then he glanced at Jo Heiss-man, who was sitting there, pretending not to listen.