Nautier and Wilder (13 page)

Salty, male.

The explosion of taste had a moan tearing from her throat, vibrating against his dick
and sending Jed’s senses into overdrive.

Damn her, she was destroying him, and he couldn’t stop her. She was sucking his control
straight from him by the simple act of sucking his dick as though it were a favored
treat.

With her tongue lashing at his cock and her lips tightening around it, her wicked,
seductive fingers cupping his balls in one hand as the other stroked the heavy width
of it was nearly more than he could bear.

“God, Piper, I’m going to come, babe.” He groaned with a desperation he swore he’d
never felt before this woman.

Her tongue rubbed at the head of his cock. It probed at the oversensitive nerve endings
just beneath the head, then sucked the engorged heat with such pleasure he swore he
was going to lose control and spill his release into her suckling mouth.

He had to tighten his fingers, had to grip her hair and try to force her head back
from the shaft.

Her eyes darkened.

Seeing her staring up at him with the light green of her eyes darkening imperceptibly
was nearly too much for the tenuous control he was barely holding on to.

Yet he couldn’t stop.

His hips moved even as he told himself he’d hold still.

He watched the head of his cock pull back, sink inside. Watched as he fucked her mouth
and those pert, pretty lips reddened.

He watched until he couldn’t take it any longer.

Pulling free despite her protesting moan, Jed moved back, and before she could react,
he managed to turn her to her stomach, his hands gripping her hips and lifting them
before him.

“Damn, your ass is so pretty.” Sliding his hands back to the rounded globes as he
positioned his cock at the slick, heated opening of her little pussy, he couldn’t
help but marvel at the pleasure slicing through his senses. “I love this pretty ass,
Piper.”

“You’re killing me,” she cried out desperately.

“Then we’ll go together.” He groaned as he pushed the head of his cock into the fiery
heat of her juice-laden cunt and had to clench his teeth to fight back the release
building in his balls. “God, Piper, we’ll go together, baby, because I never knew
pleasure could be this fucking good.”

He couldn’t hold back.

He couldn’t hold on.

Gripping her hips firmly, Jed pulled his cock back, then in one fierce thrust buried
the eager erection halfway inside the gripping, lush little pussy he was certain would
steal his sanity.

Pure, unadulterated ecstasy began building in his senses.

Blood pounded in his veins, and on the second thrust, nothing else began to matter
but the pure, mindless race to shattering rapture.

Piper tried to scream.

As the fierce, pleasure-pain sensations began whipping through her pussy, attacking
her clit and racing through her senses, she swore she would never survive the cataclysmic
pleasure building through her flesh.

She couldn’t struggle against it; hell, she didn’t want to.

She gave herself over to it, reaching ever harder for it, poised on the edge of an
abyss she wanted nothing more than to fly into.

“Jed, please.” She forced the cry past her lips. “Harder. Please. Please fuck me harder.”

She wanted that release.

She wanted it now.

God, if she had to wait she might not survive it.

Fingers curling into the sheets beneath her, she held on tightly. She thrust back
to him, panting for air, as flames burned through her system, licking across her flesh
and attacking the rapidly rising sensitivity of her clit and the aching depths of
her overstretched vagina.

As she fought to break the bonds holding her to reality and to jump headlong into
the flames, she felt Jed above her. His lips were at her neck, stinging nips and heated
kisses attacking the bend of her shoulder a second before he caught the tender flesh
between his lips and delivered a heated kiss that became a catalyst to pure ecstasy.

The explosion tore through her.

Rapture ripped her from her place in reality and threw her headlong into the cataclysm
of flames awaiting her. Destructive, the tidal wave of pure ecstasy overwhelmed her;
as she flew through that place of searing sensation, she found the man who had taken
her there.

Piper felt him inside her, covering her, not just taking her body, but sinking inside
her soul.

His groan echoed around her.

His cock buried deep one last time, pulsed and throbbed; then her muscles clenched
around him further as he found his own release.

Crying out his name, locked in a world of blinding color and overwhelming rapture,
she could do nothing but trust him to hold her, to keep her secure as the pleasure
pounded through her, tore past the deepest reaches of her heart and invaded the very
depths of her soul.

She was his.

There was no denying it. There was no fighting it.

She belonged to him.

But as she felt him sinking inside the abyss with her, Piper knew he belonged to her
as well.

He was hers.

There was no denying her, just as she knew there was no longer any chance of denying
him.

For the first time in her life, she knew exactly what it meant to belong.

Now if she could just live long enough to enjoy it.

TWELVE

“W
hat now?” With a towel wrapped around her, her damp hair lying along her shoulders,
Piper stepped from the bathroom after showering, the reality of the danger facing
her threatening to overwhelm her optimism.

The chest-tightening panic was returning, waiting, preparing her for Jed to walk away. . . .

Like her father had walked away and left her, her mother, and her sisters unprotected
and alone. Just as she was afraid Tim and Dawg would walk away.

Was that why everything inside her shut down whenever she and Dawg moved toward a
confrontation? To prepare her heart, to steel herself against the abandonment?

“We wait and see,” he answered, the towel he’d wrapped around his waist earlier still
in place.

He hadn’t dressed.

Heated need for his touch was threatening to weaken her need for answers as she watched
him toss their dirty clothes into the hamper next to the bathroom door.

“Since when do you sit around and wait on anyone or anything, Jed?” she asked, frowning
at the feeling that there was much more going on than simply waiting. “What are you
and my brother up to?”

Tightening in response to some imperceptible feeling of dread, her heart began to
beat at a sluggish pace.

The impending panic was a result of the look on his face, the darkening of his navy
gaze that made his eyes appear almost black.

“We’re not just waiting; we’re watching,” he finally stated, his expression hardening
just enough to warn her that she was going to hear something she didn’t want to hear.

“What are you watching?”

“Your room.” Jed paced to the television, retrieved the remote, and hit the power
button.

Watching the screen, she was surprised as he reached behind the unit, and a second
later, the split view of the screen showed both her bedroom as well as her sitting
room.

“Brogan had the cameras installed just after he started sleeping with Eve,” he revealed.
“He was afraid his or Dawg’s enemies would attempt to strike out at her, or take her
from him. There were cameras in her room, and GPS on her car and her cell phone.”

The cameras had been there since before Brogan and Eve moved from the inn? And they
were still there?

“I was supposed to move them,” he told her. “And I was going to until I learned you
were taking her room after she moved in with Brogan.”

“So you’ve watched me when I didn’t know you were?”

Controlling her? Maneuvering her?

Was he so much different than she had begun to believe he was?

“Only once or twice.” Broad shoulders shrugged as he watched her carefully. “The night
you were packing to leave for New York.”

Holding the towel close to her breasts, she sat up, watching the view on the television,
wondering what she should feel.

Was the need to deny that he would do such a thing to control her normal? Was she
simply trying to make excuses for him?

“Why?” she whispered. “Why were you watching me?”

He rubbed at the back of his neck, frustration tightening his face. “I worried about
you. I wanted to see you. Hell, Piper, you’ve made me fucking crazy since I’ve moved
in here, as you’ve tempted me, then run from me. There were days I wasn’t certain
I could keep from playing the caveman I knew you were waiting for me to reveal lurking
inside me.”

Biting her lip, she glanced to the screen again.

“So why show me now?”

“Because I don’t want any secrets at all between us any longer,” he stated. “Not secrets
like this.” Flipping his hand toward the screen, he moved to the dresser and pulled
his clothes from the chair next to the bed as she watched, then began dressing angrily.

“I don’t want to take your fucking freedom,” he growled at her as he shoved the white-and-gray-striped
shirt into the waistband of his jeans and quickly buckled his belt. “I don’t want
to control what you think or feel or what you do.” Glaring at her, he sat down in
the chair next to the bed and pulled on dark leather boots. “I just want you.”

He just wanted her?

“And now you’ve had me,” she said, feeling kind of hollow inside. “Did you change
your mind about wanting to control me and my life?”

Had she made a mistake? The one mistake she had sworn she would never make—had she
fallen in love with a man unable to resist the urge to completely take her life over?

The look he shot her was one of such scorn that anger immediately flared inside her.

What the hell did he expect her to think?

Stomping to the end of the bed, where he’d laid the clothes he’d collected from her
room earlier, Piper pulled on her own jeans, soft cotton tank camisole, socks, and
sneakers.

“Maybe I should just return to my room.” She felt a bit hollow inside now, as though
some part of her had just been cruelly ripped from her chest.

He wasn’t saying he loved her. He wasn’t mentioning caring for her. There was no hint
of commitment or anything other than the fact that he had been watching her and she
had driven him crazy.

“What the hell do you want from me?” she asked as she finished dressing and turned
back to him, aching inside with the knowledge that she could be losing what she hadn’t
even known she’d so desperately needed.

“I want you to stop being frightened of me, to start with,” he demanded.

“Then don’t pull this crap on me.” Turning on him fully, her arms propped on her hips,
Piper confronted him as she had never confronted her brother. “For God’s sake, Jed,
I never knew what the hell you’ve wanted from me. You flirted, you smiled, yet you
never asked me out or gave me so much as a hint that you wanted more than a one-night
stand. Or is that all you wanted?”

Heated anger was brewing inside her, rising to the surface and threatening to break
free of the shield she normally kept surrounding it.

“What do you think I wanted?” Dark emotion filled his expression and his eyes, warning
her of the thin ice she might be stepping onto.

She’d never heeded the warnings from Jed, though, so why start now?

Why should she even attempt to make excuses to herself, let alone to him, Dawg, or
anyone else? she thought furiously as she watched him hit the remote, turning the
television off before throwing the remote to the bed.

“You think I’ve driven myself insane trying to hold back, trying to ensure you have
the space you need to deal with your brother and decide what you want with me, just
to stop with a fucking one-night stand?” Jed growled.

He moved so fast there was no avoiding him.

His hands were on her shoulders first, jerking her to him before one arm wrapped around
her waist to hold her against his hard body while his free hand slid into her hair,
clenched, and pulled her head back.

“You make me feel like a fucking caveman,” he rasped. Power, hunger, and something
much deeper echoed in his voice and gleamed in his eyes. “Son of a bitch, Piper, you
make me feel things I’ve never felt before, and I have no idea how to fucking deal
with them.”

Her eyes widened.

“What do I make you feel, Jed?”

His lips parted, but what he would have said, she didn’t know.

“How very sweet.”

That voice.

Grating. Harsh.

She knew it. It echoed in her head and slammed through her memories with the force
of a sledgehammer.

Jed’s eyes narrowed as he released her, turning as he used one arm to keep her behind
him.

It was the nightmare she’d had nightly since the attack in New York. The face she
could never remember. The vision of horror and pain she hadn’t been able to escape.

The man was pockmarked, a scar running through the left side of his upper lip and
bisecting a weak chin. Thinning dark brown hair and muscular shoulders combined with
mean, cold hazel eyes and a gun leveled at Jed’s chest.

“You’re a stupid man.” Jed seemed to sigh, but she could feel the dangerous fury building
in his body.

“How do you figure that?” Thin lips curled into a sneer as bulky shoulders shifted
beneath a light jacket that strained across them. “I slipped in on you, didn’t I?”

“Did you?” Was that amusement in Jed’s voice?

The other man chuckled. “Why don’t you just move away from the little girlie there,”
he suggested. “She can run over to the next room and collect all those jewels she
got in New York and bring them back to me. I might let you live if she hurries. And
if she brings them all.”

Jed was slowly shaking his head. Piper gripped his waist with one hand as the other
balled into a fist and pressed against his back. Fear rose inside her and threatened
to steal her breath. An ugly flash of life without Jed slammed through her imagination
and left her fighting back tears.

“How do I know you don’t have someone waiting in her room?” Jed asked, as though he
hadn’t just been watching the complete emptiness of her suite.

“Doesn’t matter; we’ll both want the same thing,” the man stated, his voice harsh
as he advanced another step. “Now, does she go after those jewels or do I kill you?
Then her.” A smile twisted his lips as the mocking question passed them. “Or I could
just hurt you a little bit to show her I mean business.” He aimed the gun at Jed’s
kneecap.

“No need to go that far,” Jed drawled, as though it were all a game. “She can just
do as you ask.”

She knew Jed’s voice. She knew the passion-rich sound of hunger in it as well as the
icy slide of a warning. And the warning in his tone was unmistakable.

“I thought that might be the case.” The intruder’s smile was a terrifying grimace
as he glanced to Jed’s side to peek around at her.

He chuckled with a grating rasp. “It’s nice to see you’ve healed from our last meeting.
I’ve always thought it a rather wasted effort to add more damage before the old bruises
have healed.”

And he appeared to enjoy the thought of adding those bruises.

He had every intention of killing them. Piper could see it in the pure anticipation
in his gaze. Cruelty was inherent in the man’s face, and in her memory of his heavy
blows landing against her undefended body.

“Go on, Ms. Mackay,” he ordered her softly, waving the gun toward the door between
Jed’s room and her own. “Collect all the jewels now. Miss any and he’ll die.”

“How would I know?” Licking her dry lips, she didn’t have to pretend pure terror;
it was there, slapping her in the face. “They’re mixed in with the rest of the stones.”

Evil hazel eyes narrowed. “What do you mean? Mixed in with the other stones?”

“The stones I bought at the craft store.” Forcing the words past her lips, she tried
to hold back the quaver in her voice. “I thought they were the fake stones I’d bought.”

For the briefest second surprised disbelief filled the man’s gaze before a cackle
of laughter left his lips.

“Son of a bitch.” The laughter was almost a wheeze. “Why am I even surprised? You
look about that stupid, bitch.”

Stupid?

The gun still aimed at Jed’s knee was all that kept her mouth shut as she stared back
at him.

He might think she was stupid, but she knew he was fucking ugly. She could fake smart
if that were true, but there was no way in hell he could fake pretty, she thought
mockingly, fighting to hold back her fear.

She wasn’t stupid, though. What she was, was doing everything she could to buy enough
time for Jed to figure their way out of this one.

“Well, I suggest you learn how to identify the real stuff and separate it from the
fakes really fast,” he suggested, his voice lowering and echoing with cruelty. “You
have about four minutes to get that cute little ass back in here before I start putting
holes in your man.” He waved the gun at Jed’s knee before lifting it to Jed’s heart
and smiling back at her.

Everything inside her was shaking, trembling in fear now, while Jed’s complete stillness
had wariness growing inside her.

He was up to something; she could feel it.

She knew Jed. He wasn’t moving; nor was he taunting.

“I’ll just get them all.”

“Make sure you turn the lights out,” Jed suddenly advised her.

Piper paused.

“What fucking lights?” Fury echoed in the gunman’s voice. The lights went out and
the darkness exploded around her.

Piper found herself thrown to the floor a breath before the explosive report of a
weapon echoed through the room.

Riding close on the sound of the gun’s discharge, shattering glass from the mirror
above the dresser began raining down on her, biting sharply against the bare flesh
of her arms.

She covered her head until the stinging storm ceased, then scrambled across the room
on her hands and knees, glass pricking into her palms and knees as the sound of an
enraged fight could be heard ahead of her.

She had to find Jed.

“Stay in place, Piper,” Jed yelled out a second before a hard grunt was heard. “Stay
where you are, dammit.”

She pushed herself against the wall as she glared into the darkness, her hand pressing
against a large shard of the glass on the floor. Curling her fingers around it, she
lifted it, holding it against her just in case she might need it.

A second later a shadow hurled itself toward her as though propelled by some unseen
force.

Or Jed’s fist.

The wide body of her assailant—or her would-be killer—slammed into the wall beside
her.

Fury surged through Piper at the knowledge of who it was bouncing against the wall.
Gripping the glass tighter in her hand, she struck out and buried the arrowed point
of the glass into the brute’s back. Or maybe it was his shoulder?

She wasn’t certain which.

The second she slammed it home she tried to move out of his way. The fist was faster
than her self-preservation instincts, though. A hard fist in her direction slammed
into her shoulder, throwing her off balance and sending her pitching to the floor,
her hands scraping against the glass that covered the carpet.