Play It Safe (The Safe House Series Book 2) (7 page)

“For once, don’t think so much, Curie,” he said against her mouth.

His hushed plea was like a gift from William Harvey, himself, for at that moment, Samson’s words reimagined everything she knew about circulation. Heart, core, sex—impossibly, they all demanded blood flow at once. She kissed him again, this time schooled by the desires awakening inside her.

A groan played at the back of his throat. Another gift—that someone as inexperienced as she could elicit from him, a beautiful and unattainable man, such a sound.

He ended the encounter as if she was a desert oasis and he feared never drinking again. Of all the ways she should be punished for getting them into this situation, this might be the worst. Feed the starving fantasies of a deprived woman and forevermore, there will be hunger.
His fiery exhales unraveled the nerves along her neck, a sweet node of connection that elicited gooseflesh along her inner thighs. He trailed two soft, drugged kisses against her cheek before he pressed his lips against her ear.

“Don’t let anyone—ever—make you feel undesired. If we weren’t…” His head dropped in defeat at the backlog of words on his tongue. Something close to regret stitched his labored declaration.

“Samson?” To her ears, she sounded fragile, overburdened.

He pressed a finger to his lips and whispered, “I’m sure this place is bugged.”

“What’s happening?” What her response lacked in volume, it more than made up in urgency.

“You have an out. Leave what you have—an imperfect formula that won’t work. We’ll tell him it’s finished and you walk out of here, right now.”

“What about you?”

“I can stop him, Angela, from the inside. He’ll lead me straight to Mike. I can save your brother, but we have to say goodbye, here, now.”

“No.
No
. Absolutely not.”

“This is my training, Angela. This is who I am. You know how many men I’ve extracted from bad situations?”

“And when Julian finds out you betrayed him?”

“He won’t. Not until I have your brother in safe hands.”

“You didn’t tell me you knew Julian.”

“I wasn’t sure until I saw him. We have a shared history.”

“That he’s using to set you up.”

“Maybe, but I’m using him, too. Don’t fight me on this, Angela.”

“I
created
this formula. You
need
me.”

“I need to picture you here, safe, tangled in the sheets of a warm bed.” He tagged a lock of her wild hair behind her ear and kissed her forehead. “Even if it isn’t mine.”

Her heart crashed into v-fib at his insinuation.

“Now, go…before Julian changes his mind. Back the way you came, but head straight at the lab and exit the metal doors. Julian has a car and driver waiting to take you to Damian, another of Rockwell’s agents. He’ll stay with you until this is over.”

“Samson—”

“Go.”

“But—”

“Now, Angela.” He crushed her into one final embrace and backed away, one step then two, reversing the path he had come, his unyielding gaze on hers as if he could hold her that way, in that moment, forever. He turned and disappeared.

His footfalls faded to silence.

And Angela knew a new intimacy to the word
nightmare
.

***

Angela lasted a few miles.

In the back of a vehicle, this time a stretch, luxury SUV with midnight tint and a glass partition separating her from the driver, she watched an isolated mountain in the distance shift position along the windy roads. All this, while Samson boarded a plane bound for South Africa to save her brother.

Her
brother.

The brother who thought nothing of putting his future on hold to raise her. The brother who always told her that life began beyond the edge of one’s comfort zone. The brother who was abducted because of something
she
created.

And here she was, scurrying away.

The Angela who had been orphaned when her parents were killed and holed herself up in countless laboratories while the pursuit of intellect became her security blanket would have been relieved to have an escort back to her safe, predictable life. Hell, the Angela from the King’s Head Tavern days earlier would have been satisfied.

But as hard as it was to fathom, she was no longer that Angela. She had seen too much, experienced too much,
felt
too much, to ever return to the naïve woman she had been. She was a woman whose rediscovered weaponry skills empowered her, a woman who had found the strength within to break ties and forge new, unexpected ones, and who had uncovered a part of herself she hadn’t known existed: latent erogenous desires in the presence of an outrageously sexy SEAL. And though she could never be in a relationship with someone who subsisted on a steady diet of danger and women, Samson had as much genius of the non-book variety left to teach her as she had a craving to learn.

If Julian realized the formula was a fake, Samson was a dead man walking.

In that scenario, only
she
could sacrifice for him the way he had for her.

A plan gathered in her mind. This time, she didn’t create lists or make choices based on all that could go awry. She focused on all that felt right and acted.

Angela knocked on the driver’s partition. The tinted glass slid down a few inches.

“Take me to Julian’s plane. I have to be on that flight.”

Julian Simkins was one loaded motherfucker.

There had been Marianne’s family money—old French money that went back a century and included aristocrats and enough land to form a new nation. And Julian, himself, had built his empire in commercial real estate abroad. His contemporaries were the top one percent—dignitaries, celebrities, tycoons, CEOs of multi-national corporations—and it showed in every gilded fixture, every crystal sconce, every lavishly-appointed living space inside his Gulfstream G-550 jet.

The guy had enough money to conceive and fund a private but untouchable vendetta.

As the plane ascended to cruising altitude, Samson leaned his head back against the plump Italian-leather headrest in the empty executive cabin and tried to remember why the hell he thought this plan was a good idea. The absolute last thing he wanted was to let Angela go, but it was the only way he knew how to protect everyone—Angela, Mike, Manny, the innocents of his homeland. Even if it came down to the very real possibility that he was sealing his fate. Permanently.

Six years ago, it wouldn’t have mattered. He’d have given anything to follow Riley into death. Almost had. But time had a way of rounding the jagged edges. Rockwell gave him renewed purpose, his combat brothers gave him new memories to replace the old, and he learned the best remedy for pain came when he sank himself into the willing flesh of a beautiful woman.

Progressively, that had no longer been enough.

He wanted a family—something real that grounded him and curbed his impulsiveness. And when he tired of the fight, someone waiting for him with a passionate heart and an unyielding devotion. He had that, once, but it was an illusion. Never again. The pain of loss next time would be insurmountable.

Samson shuffled his feet. His heels hugged the hard-sided case containing four vials of serum, as if the liquid had the capacity to devastate. In his private world, it did.

The cabin bulbs dimmed. Soft orbs of light from executive lamps pooled around clusters of furniture and tables. He had yet to see anyone from the four-person crew since takeoff; he supposed discretion and sight-unseen was how Julian preferred doing business. Samson lolled his head toward the closest portal windows. The dusky clouds below looked like confections, dipped in sugar and glazed orange from the setting sun. His eyelids grew leaden.

He couldn’t say how long he dozed. By the rays still visible on the horizon, it couldn’t have been long. He shifted in his seat. His gaze snagged an argyle-patterned sticky note, affixed to the table beside him:
What ifs…

His stomach did a perfectly-executed parachute drop in the span of one breath. The paper was familiar, the handwriting more so.
No.
He glanced around.

On a lamp shade behind him and diagonal, another note.

Samson picked up the case at his feet, charged the second note and read:
aren’t an option…

No.

A third, attached to a bottle of French wine chilling on ice:
for me, either…

Fuck, no.

A fourth note on the frame of an abstract painting took him nearly to the rear of the jet:
Please don’t be mad.

Beside him, a wood-grained pocket door slid open. Angela stood at an arm’s reach beyond, same clothes as the marketplace, same uncomfortable-in-her-skin demeanor that had her fidgeting six directions, same pink and brown glasses dipped low on her adorable nose because her ears were low, with one notable exception: her eyes were round, vulnerable.

His chest felt like a flash burn. From anger or relief, he couldn’t say.

“Say something,” she urged.

He didn’t trust himself to speak.

“I’m not sorry I came. I won’t apologize. My whole life has been one long pre-meditated thought. I can’t eat without obsessing over food labels or get in the car and drive somewhere without three ways to track where I am and where I’m going. I haven’t done a single spontaneous thing in my life, not since that spontaneity cost my parents theirs, so before you send me back to my solitary, listless existence, give me this one moment without judgment.”

His throat burned. The case handle slid in his grasp. He was mad as fucking hell, but she looked so fragile, he didn’t want to say the wrong thing.

“Say something,” she pressed again.

“That’s the last time I ask you not to think so much.”

Her lips stretched into a smile. A nervous laugh lifted from somewhere deep inside her, deep enough to sprout a glistening film of moisture in her eyes.  He mirrored her smile, and the pressure in his body cavity eased.

“You’ve been hiding back here all this time?”

His gaze trickled to the space behind her—a private executive suite with a desk, a mounted flat screen, circular windows packed with stars, and a bed. The front stitching of his jeans grew tight at the thought of taking Angela, here, again and again on an excruciatingly long flight, but he talked himself back from that precipice. She was probably a virgin—one who had Jeopardy-level knowledge of the Kama Sutra as it related to women’s rights during some ancient dynasty, but had never actually put anything into practice past the fantasies her ringtone incited. Still, a tempting contradiction.

Christ, Caine
,
rein it in. She deserves more than you will ever give away. Don’t take advantage.

“I was afraid you’d ask the pilot to turn around if we were still over the west coast.”

“You shouldn’t be here, Angela. This isn’t some theory you can work through. These men are willing to kill or be killed for their agenda.”

“I couldn’t stand the thought of you killed. For Mike. For me. I can’t continue to place the people I care about in danger because I’m afraid to live.
Really
live.”

“
Really
living is overrated.” He meant it as a joke, but her response was anything but.

“Is that how you view making love to those seventeen women? Overrated?”

“Angela…” He infused every note of warning he could muster.

She retreated to the bed and sat on her hands. That simple, innocent gesture nearly pushed him over the cliff of want. Her first time should be fumbling in the dark and sensitive and significant—all the things he was not.

“I’m not a virgin.”

The flight hit a pocket of turbulence. Samson jostled a bit on his feet, nothing compared to what her revelation did to his sense of Angela. It was the shooting exercise all over again. The woman was a vast ocean of untapped surprises.

“He was a teaching assistant my sophomore year in college. Chemistry.” A caustic laugh erupted from her lips. Her gaze drifted out to the visible moon at the edge of the world. “We were doing a lab about potentiometric titration and my data was all over the place. I couldn’t calibrate the pH and my titration curve looked like a deflated helix. He offered to stay after class with me. I thought he was just being nice.”

Oh, fuck.
Samson gut turned inside-out. Dark imaginings came on like a toxin in his blood stream. As sure as he knew Marianne’s details before Julian shared them, he knew what was coming. He slid the pocket door closed and set the case at his feet. Feet that refused to move for fear they would make a misstep.

  “He touched my breasts. Told me if we had sex that he would make sure I passed the class. I had struggled that semester with anxiety, and I needed that final lab grade to keep my merit scholarship.”

“Angela, you don’t have to—”

“It wasn’t like that. Not what you’re thinking. He was gentle. And I wanted to. I was curious. He kept his word, and here I am, a chemist who created a monster. I just wish my first time hadn’t been in a filthy storage closet.”

“Why are you telling me this, Angela?” He knew. Fuck in all heaven, he knew. But he had to hear it from her lips.

“If there’s a chance Julian might not let us go, that this might be it, I want to know everything. How it
should
be. I trust you, and that’s crazy because I don’t trust anyone. Ever.” A solitary tear sprinted down her soft cheeks.

Samson turned into a ghost, already long gone.

“And because you know nothing about potentiometric titration.”

He waited for her coy smile then allowed a tight, restrained chuckle. It wasn’t funny. None of this was funny, but he had never been so goddamned nervous around a woman. Angela was the most bewildering, grade-A risk of an intimate encounter as he had ever known. That she trusted him above all others made him feel worthy of her. That she was looking for someone to replace darker memories made him the last person who should oblige. He couldn’t wrestle his own demons into submission.

“If you don’t want to, I understand.” She swiped at her cheek. In the wake of her hand, her eyeglasses slipped low.

He crossed the distance between them and lowered himself to the bed, close enough to let her down gently, at a good enough distance to keep himself in check. He straightened her glasses. “It’s not that. I want to. Very much.”

Her gaze—electric, surprised—flashed to his.

“It should be with someone special. Someone who isn’t just part of your life for a season.”

“You couldn’t have had seventeen seasons.”

Samson smiled, despite his resolve not to. There was no sense worming his way out with logic. She would best him in that department every time.

“What if a season is all we ever get?” She reached for the button at her throat. Her plain, nimble fingers unfastened the collar.

He froze, his senses attuned. The sweet, innocent taste of their remembered kiss whetted his tongue. She smelled clean, cottony, untouched. His memory flashed to the moment in the truck—his words he longed to bite back—
why do you keep so buttoned up?
She did it to protect herself, no different than his arsenal and his remote house and seventeen faceless women whose names he couldn’t recall, just so he could keep the real thing at a distance.

Her fingers slipped lower. Another button, unfastened.

At the thought of being the one to teach Angela about her sexuality, a fierce surge of desire, coupled with a drive to protect her spirit, her emotions, to know exactly what she needed in this exposed moment, brought heat to his extremities, turned him rock-hard, and threatened his control.

What if he was the perfect person to show her that ethereal connection between body and mind? What if she turned out to be unforgettable? What if he let her in and lost her the way he had Riley?

But Samson didn’t do what-ifs. He was a man of action. He glanced down at the sticky notes still attached to his fingers:
What ifs…aren’t an option…for me, either…Please…

He crumbled the paper to the floor and brought a hand up to stop her unbuttoning progress. A slight, pale rise of breast peeked at him through the slit of her shirt.

His dick lurched from the preview.

Christ
, how was he going to restrain himself if one tantalizing morsel of flesh made him want to skip straight to the moment when he sank balls-deep into her and her lust-filled cries of pleasure alerted the cockpit?

Her eyes widened. No doubt, she thought she had done something wrong.

“Rules?” she whispered.

The game was afoot, much like the one on the shooting range, only he had all the advantage. Angela McAllister operated best within the safety of parameters. He squeezed her hand, still inside in his grasp, kissed her soft knuckles then smiled to reassure her.

“You first.” He unbuttoned her sleeve cuff and kissed the soft skin of her inner forearm.

One reedy intake of breath sounded close to his ear. Her pulse staged an uprising against his lips.

“Clean shot.” Her voice was strained, thick. “Nothing left.”

Damn
, if she thought this was good, what sugary treasures must await. He pushed her sleeve higher and kissed the hollow at her elbow. “Opponent chooses everything.”

“Rubber duck.”

Samson smiled against her skin. His protection would extend far past the reaches of her bliss-soaked climax. Given a choice, his protection of Angela McAllister would extend indefinitely.

“Agreed.”

“And
your
choice?”

That Angela McAllister should discover her own body before she ever thought to please another. “Spread. Thighs.”