Own (Command Force Alpha #1) (11 page)

“James Deen?”

She rolled her eyes. “Trust you to get stuck on the part about the porn star.”

“I’m more stuck on the fact that you’ve only saved half a dozen. That man’s done thousands.”

She laughed, half from his unexpected joke and half as a release of this god-awful tension when he holstered his pistol. It was a silent reiteration of his
all clear
.

“Who needs more than a few? With a dick like his and the way he fucks…” She let her words trail off, intentionally baiting Evan.

“I’ve warned you about that language.” His voice was menacing. It was a growl that promised lots and withheld more.

“And yet nothing’s happened to correct it. Huh.”

Jesus, what was wrong with her? Her apartment had been broken into, but she was
flirting
. More than flirting. She was begging for trouble. For punishment. Practically gagging for it.

Maybe that was the answer. If Evan punished her, she wouldn’t need to think about the scary stuff, about how completely out of control this situation was becoming. She shivered, a whole-body thing that took her by the neck and shook her like a rag doll.

Someone had broken into her apartment. Into her bedroom. Into
this room
. He’d taken what he’d wanted and left, but that was no guarantee of safety.

Evan. He was her guarantee.

“Now what?”

He looked at her dead-on. His expression was fierce, as if he could see all the way through her to her fears and her hopes and her wishes. “Was there anything in this apartment that would in any way violate the security of CFA or another critical operation? Don’t give details, just yes or no.”

She was somewhat humiliated that he’d have to ask, but damn, she
had
opened herself to that suspicion. Heat delved down the front of her throat. “No. Nothing.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded. “I looked in places I wasn’t supposed to, yeah, but I never took anything. I’ve never written it down. I haven’t breathed a word to anyone, not even my best friends Wendy and Marianne.” She stepped closer, so that she could look up at his eyes and make sure he believed her. “I’d never intentionally put you or anyone else in danger.”

“Then it’s a damn shame we seem to have put you in danger.”

“Why would they want my laptop?”

“If they broke Laurie and know your father’s identity now, there are a number of reasons. Maybe they think you’re CFA too, or have access to our information. More likely is they want the ordinary details of your life, including credit cards and other ways to track you.” He cracked a knuckle. “You’re valuable property, Kat. For bribery, blackmail, bait. Whatever. That laptop is a potential goldmine for anyone who’s looking.”

He cut off any further questions by instructing her to pack another bag, this one from scratch since they wouldn’t be returning to his house. Considering the break-in, he couldn’t take the risk that someone was already watching them. If the intruders had found Katsu, they could find Evan too with a little more persistence. It was time to go underground.

Kat worked more neatly this time, but fast enough that they were out within ten minutes. “I grabbed next month’s pack of birth control, but I’ll have to buy my toiletries all over again. Shampoo and stuff like that.”

“Doesn’t matter. Easily replaced.” Those short, clipped phrases were the words of a man in action mode. His features looked hawklike, with his nose tighter and his mouth pressed flat. The sharp edge of his jaw squared off on its way up to his ear, practically vibrating with tension.

Once out of the building, they walked away from where they’d parked the Lexus. She thought about protesting, but this was Evan. He more than knew what he was doing. A block south and two blocks west, he stopped in front of a Pontiac.

Kat watched with wide eyes, with her back against an alley wall and her hands curled into fists in the front pockets of her leather jacket. He brought out the same slim green case he’d used on Laurie’s duplex. Moments later the door popped open with a quiet
whoomp
.

“Get in,” he said tersely.

He held the driver’s door open, and that’s how she entered, just scrambling over the console. The interior smelled like old French fries and stale hamburgers. When she put her feet down in the well, she crunched uncountable paper bags. “You couldn’t boost us a Mercedes?”

“In this neighborhood? You know better.” Without looking, he cut one wire under the steering column and then twisted a few others. “Besides, a Mercedes would have an onboard computer and tracking and all that bullshit. I’m not disabling all that for a little jaunt across town.”

“Jaunt? You’re calling this a jaunt?” She twisted higher and higher, something she didn’t seem able to control. She clutched her bag across her lap. It was all she had. She was leaving her home behind. Who would defend it? A life-sized version of Loki? “This is bullshit, Evan. Please. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“You’re going to have to trust me.” If there was anything in the world that could make her shut up, that was it. Danger was crawling down her back. She couldn’t trust Evan with her heart, but would forever trust him with her safety.

She kept quiet as they rolled around town, doubling back, stopping at several seedy locations. One was a dive bar where Evan slipped the bartender a fifty. The man pulled a bag from the back room. The next was a YMCA where she nervously waited outside the men’s locker room until he emerged with another, larger bag. Then she stood on the curb as lookout when he switched the Pontiac out for an Oldsmobile.

By that point, she almost hurled all over her knee-high brown leather boots. “Evan, I need a break. I need… I can’t…”

He stopped then, standing away from what he was doing to the door of the copper-painted coupe. “Come here.”

Kat obeyed as if her feet could understand language better than her brain. She stood beside him and waited.

Make this right. Please.

Evan brushed his finger along the sensitive skin beneath her jaw. “I know, Kat. It’s about time we both had a break.”

Chapter Ten

Evan had boosted two cars in as many hours, but that didn’t faze him. What
did
faze him was his outburst at Kat. Threatening to spank her by the side of the highway? What the good goddamn had he been thinking? No, that was the wrong question. He’d been thinking about it because that want was near constant now. It wasn’t the spanking, per se. It was getting her sharp mouth and probing questions and damn perceptive eyes to leave him the hell alone for two minutes. He was trying to figure out what was going on and save both their asses without blowing the whole operation wide open.

Kat was making that way more difficult than it should’ve been. He could cover his tracks and sniff out trouble with one leg and no nose. But with Katsu Stafford?

Shit.

The better question was, why had he lost control? Why that outburst? She didn’t have to know what was going on in his head, not beyond how they were going to scrape through this mess. That was on a need-to-know basis. His strengthening sexual fantasies about her had been off-limits, even to himself. Now it was more than sex.

Control.

Be honest, asshole.

He wanted to control her. If that meant spanking her by the side of the road or making her fold her clothes
just so
, it didn’t matter. He was a man used to being in control, and she would turn a saint into a potential serial killer. Maybe she didn’t affect other men the same way. They simply thought she was sexy, watching her ass in tight jeans and her perfect, full tits in snug shirts when she bent over to pot the eight ball.

But did those men want to make her kneel for anything but a quickie face fuck? Evan wanted that too, but…after.

After he had dominated everything about her. It wasn’t about
sex
. Had it been that simple, they could’ve started up where they left off four years ago—hot, fast, intense. They’d matched each other in drive and enthusiasm, and he’d gotten off so hard on his size over her petite vulnerability.

Perhaps that’s where it had started. She had been vulnerable and barely grown. What kind of sicko fuck had he been to relish her naiveté, and how powerful her delicate femininity had made him feel? Well, the sicko part wasn’t past tense. He wanted that again, so much that he nearly missed his turn.

“Worcester? Seriously?” Kat arrowed him a pointed look. Her nose crinkled in distaste. He enjoyed watching her sharp, mercurial expressions, and how easily she whisked from one to the next. He liked the challenge they presented. “Why couldn’t we stay in Boston? What happened to the one on Youngman?”

“Worcester is practically the west edge of Boston lately.” And Evan wanted to get her out of the city. “Besides, the towels are too nice.”

“You’re using that against me?”

“Yes.” He pulled into a tiny parking area behind a row of businesses. “First of all, everyone knows the Youngman safe house is the nicest in Southie. Getting out of the neighborhood seemed safest. And second…” he threw the car into park and killed the ignition, “…you won’t be wearing a towel tonight. By the time you strip for me, you won’t be wearing anything until morning.”

“Is that right?” she said, her voice dripping with forced sarcasm.

“That’s right. And the more shit you give me about it, the worse it gets for you.”

“Worse?”

He snapped his hand out and grabbed her chin. Slowly then, he slid his fingertips down the front of her throat. “I am going to tell you what to do tonight, and you’re going to do it. Everything. To the letter.”

Rather than contradict him, the sparking anger in her eyes dimmed, then flared to life on a shot of pure, crippling lust. If not for the support of the driver’s seat, Evan would’ve been the one to drop to his knees. Christ, she was so responsive.

She could be astonishing.

She could give him what he’d never taken from another woman—the gift of pure submission.

Or was he just thinking with his fantasies again? He’d had four years to develop them, never realizing until that moment that Katsu was at the heart of each impulse. When he told a woman to undress, when he took the presumptive liberty of ordering dinner for a date—practically daring her to contradict—he’d done so in the hopes of their total acquiescence. Never happened.

Kat had given him more than six weeks of smokin’-hot, very dangerous sex. God, had the colonel found out about Evan’s urges to control Katsu in deeper, more intimate ways, the man would’ve personally seen Evan garroted and dumped in a Colombian drug kingpin’s lair, never to be found.

Evan suppressed those urges, as he did with every woman. No one could depend on a wannabe Master when Evan disappeared like a puff of smoke.

But Kat… She’d given him her entire self, body and soul. What eighteen-year-old wouldn’t? First love. First lover. She’d looked at him then the way she was looking at him now, willing to hand over whatever he wanted. He was dizzy on power.

She pulled against his crimped fingers, but he didn’t let go. “And if I don’t obey? What kind of ‘worse’ will I get?”

“This place has two bedrooms. You’d sleep alone. No covers. No nightgown. You’d get nothing from me all night, not even a word. Can you handle that, Katsu? Tonight? Can you stand the idea of being so near me and unable to curl into my lap?”

“You’re being cruel,” she said with a hitch.

“I can be. Neither of us wants that.”

Disarmingly, she used both hands to remove his fingers from her chin…then kissed his knuckles. “You think you know what I want. Why do you keep assuming that?” She sounded perturbed but also genuinely curious.

He swept his hand behind her head and pulled her in for a swift, soft, promising kiss. She tasted of deep sweetness that hit him as a straight shot of visceral memory. They were breathless when he backed away. He dropped his hand. Withdrew contact. The way she leaned so slightly into his space was a dead giveaway. God, did she realize how she responded to him, or how he responded to her?

Four years hadn’t changed a thing. They were still detonator meets plastique.

“When I look into your eyes, I see need.” He was glad they weren’t touching, because a fine trembling had overtaken his hands. Christ, he’d need to be a lot more restrained if he was going to make her obey. “I see needs that dovetail with mine. You want order. I know you do. Tell me the truth. Some days that apartment of yours bugs the ever-lovin’ fuck out of you.”

A sheen covered her magnetic eyes. She barely nodded.

“Then why not do something about it?”

“I can’t. It’s…it’s overwhelming.” She shook her head and stared through the windowpane. Since when had she taken hold of the door handle? “I don’t know where to start. And there’s no one there… Shit. Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

“I will not, Katsu. Finish that sentence.”

The shiver that rippled across her shoulders shouldn’t have turned him on, but it did. His words affected her. His voice and his commands. Goddamn that was sexy.

“And there’s no one there to tell me I did a good job. It’s fucked up. I should be able to live the way I want to. But I can’t. Mom, so perfectly composed. Dad, Mr. Marine Corps poster boy. The quest for perfection at boarding school, with all its precise rules. Who the fuck gives a damn now?”