Power: Special Tactical Units Division (In Wilde Country Book 3) (17 page)

She said his name over and over as he did wicked, wonderful things to her with his tongue, his teeth, his fingers. He watched her. Saw her begin to tremble, saw her toss her head from side to side.

It almost drove him over the edge.

Hang on
, he told himself,
dammit, hang on
.

She screamed. He felt the power of her orgasm as it swept her away, and the earth tilted.

“Now,” he growled and he pulled her into his arms and they tumbled back on the bed together. He rose above her, clasped her hands, raised them high over her head and entered her on one deep, driving thrust and she came again, weeping, sobbing, sobbing his name.

“Tanner,” she sobbed.

He let go, gave himself up to the whirlwind that had seized them both and as he exploded deep inside her, he leaned down and kissed her and whispered a word in the language of his people.

“Wastelakapi
.

It meant
beloved
.

He had never said it before, not in his entire life.

CHAPTER TEN

They fell asleep
in each other’s arms, Tanner on his back, Alessandra in the curve of his arm, her head on his strong shoulder and her hand spread over his heart.

Her sleep was deep and dreamless, but she came awake in a rush of adrenaline, bewildered by the strange surroundings.

The big bed that wasn’t hers.

The rain beating against the now unshuttered skylight overhead.

The sound of the wind, prowling outside the house.

Her heart raced.

And then it all came back.

The struggle to get down the river. The exhausting march through the swamp. The perfect house, seen through the mangroves as if it were a mirage.

And Tanner.

Tanner, she thought, and the memory of him making love with her in the hall, in the shower, in this bed sent a rush of warmth through her blood.

She rolled over, needing the sight of her lover…

But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere in the room.

The bathroom door stood open and she could see that he wasn’t in there, either.

She sat up.

Where was he? Had he gone outside into the storm? The rain was still heavy. The wind still prowled the house like an angry wraith. If he’d gone out alone…

Alessandra shot from the bed. Her clothes. Dammit, where were her…?

“Try the closet,” a deep voice said.

She spun around.

Her heart almost stopped beating.

He stood in the open doorway, hipshot, arms folded over his chest.

He was barefoot, shirtless, wearing only a faded pair of jeans that clung to his lean hips and long legs in a way that surely would have reminded any woman lucky enough to see him why they liked seeing guys wear jeans.

Guys who looked like this, anyway.

Guys with muscled shoulders and washboard abs, the kind that came of necessity instead of vanity. The scars she’d noticed last night, the little ones on his pectorals, the puckered flesh in his shoulder, made her want to put her mouth to them and soothe them with her kiss. She wanted to kiss the other scars, too, the ones she’d only glimpsed. The thin red line low on his belly. The angry-looking one on his calf.

She wanted to kiss them, too, even if it was crazy. You couldn’t heal wounds with kisses…

But you could try.

He was beautiful All of him. The short dark hair. The stubble on his jaw that felt so incredible against her nipples and between her thighs. His smile, the kind that promised things women dreamed about.

And his eyes.

Those gorgeous eyes.

They were moving over her now, hot with appreciation, dark with promise, and for the first time, she realized she’d been so caught up in looking at him that she’d forgotten she was naked.

Automatically, she swept one arm over her breasts. Silly, of course, because the rest of her was still bare.

Besides, after the night they’d shared, nothing, absolutely nothing about her body was unknown territory.

But, oh, the way he was looking at her. As if he’d never wanted a woman the way he wanted her. As if she were…

“Beautiful,” he said as he stood straight and then came slowly towards her.

“Lieutenant,” she whispered, and he laughed softly as he gathered her into his arms.

“Such formality, Bellini.” He bent his head, kissed her throat. “Do you need a reminder of why you don’t have to call me lieutenant anymore?”

She smiled as she ran her hands up his arms to his shoulders.

“I have another name for you, too, remember?”

He looked up and laughed. “I remember, but I don’t think I’d do much for blue tights and a red cape.”

“Mmm.” She looped her arms around his waist. “But those little red shorts…”

“Better than camos?”

She stood on her toes and pressed a kiss to his chin.

“Different, anyway.”

“The guys in my unit would agree to that.” He brushed his lips over hers. “I hate to disappoint you, honey, but I am far from being anybody’s idea of Superman.”

“That’s your opinion. Besides, I didn’t think of you as Superman only because you’re strong and brave.”

“And good-looking,” he said, laughing. “Don’t leave that out.”

“Umm. And occasionally pigheaded.”

“ Me?” he said. The word oozed righteous indignation, but it was tempered by the gleam in his eyes.

“You, my Caped Crusader.”

“You’re getting your superheroes mixed. Supe’s the guy with the handy-dandy phone booth. Batman’s the Caped Crusader.” He kissed her again, a little longer, a little deeper. “And I am not pigheaded.”

“Okay. Not pigheaded. Just the strong, silent, I-do-not-need-or-want-anyone’s-help type.”

Tanner sighed. “Okay. The thing is, I just wanted to get you to safety. And then keep you safe. Maybe I got a little, you know, overfocused…”

Alessandra leaned back in his arms.

“You can overfocus on me all you like,” she said softly.

The look in her eyes. The curve of her mouth. All at once, his dick reminded him of what his brain seemed to have forgotten.

She was naked in his arms.

“You’re asking for trouble, lady.”

She started to tell him he was right when, with the worse possible timing, her stomach gave a loud growl.

He laughed.

“Your belly’s asking for trouble, too,” he said. “It’s threatening rebellion unless we get some food into it.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “And I just happen to have something interesting going in the kitchen.”

The mention of
something interesting
in the kitchen was enough to make her belly give another snarl. Tanner laughed again and she scowled and punched him lightly in those six-pack abs.

“Don’t you dare laugh at me, Lieutenant.” Her scowl morphed into a supersweet smile. “What do you have in the kitchen?”

He kissed her mouth. Her throat. Then he cupped her bottom and lifted her into him.

“Sustenance,” he said in a low voice. “Because you’re going to have to keep up your strength.”

Suddenly, it was difficult to breathe.

He dipped his head. Kissed her, hard. Then, even though it took everything in him to do it, he turned her towards the closet that stretched the length of the wall.

“Find something that fits and get into it before I forget about ever letting you out of that bed, Bellini. You understand?”

She knew he was trying to ease the hot tension between them, but the hoarseness in his voice made her knees weak.

Still, what he’d said was true. They did have to eat. It felt as if they were in a glorious world of their own creation, but they weren’t. Reality was just outside the door. Anything might happen to them at any moment, and you didn’t have to be a military operative to know that full bellies were better than empty ones.

“Go on,” he said gently. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

She did as he’d asked and went to the closet.

Men’s clothing hung to the right, women’s to the left. The women’s section of the rack held a couple of pairs of crisply laundered jeans. A handful of shirts. Sandals, flip-flops and a pair of worn hiking boots stood on the floor.

It wasn’t a lot, but it was more than enough.

There was no underwear, not in the closet or in any of the dresser drawers. She’d have to go commando under the jeans and shirt she chose at random.

A tremor danced through her.

She shut her eyes and imagined Tanner finding out that nothing separated his hands, his mouth, his body from hers except a thin layer of cloth.

The thought excited her.

Every thought about him excited her.

She paused with a shirt and a pair of jeans draped over her arm.

It wasn’t as if she never had sex before. Okay. She hadn’t had a lot of it. And it had never, ever been like this.

Once, during a sort of Girls’ Weekend at El Sueño, the Wilde ranch, the talk had turned to sex. Actually, it had turned to SEX, all caps, and the Wilde sisters, all of them happily married, had agreed that they Wouldn’t Really Talk about Their Husbands and Sex…but, one of them, maybe Emily, had said sex with her man was…

Incredible. Fantastic. Amazing. Wonderful. Indescribable.

All the words applied, depending on which sister you’d listened to.

Bianca, single the same as Alessandra, had taken on that little air of Shrink in Attendance that drove Alessandra crazy, looked at her fingernails and said, yes, of course, sex was one of life’s great pleasures.

“A tiny bit overrated, perhaps, but still something very special.”

Actually, what she’d said was that sex was a bit overrated but transformational nevertheless.

Transformational? Well, why not? Bianca had a habit of talking in Shrinkese.

Everybody had looked at Alessandra.
Say something,
she’d told herself, and what she’d finally come up with was that sex was nice.

And it was.

You met a man, somebody who wore a serious suit and had a serious job, he took you to serous places. Dinner at a restaurant where it took months to get a reservation unless, of course, you were him A Broadway show where he had orchestra seats, first row center. Or perhaps a by-invitation-only showing at a Soho gallery.

You dated for a while and then you might have sex.

Might
was the operative word.

That had been the pattern of her life since she’d been curious enough to lose her virginity to Aldo Vincenzi in the backseat of his father’s Alfa Romeo on her seventeenth birthday.

But what had just happened…

Sex had never been like this. Hot. Exciting. Sex that turned you on just remembering it.

Sex that made you come.

What would her lieutenant say if he knew she’d never come before?

Her breath hitched.

Sex with a gorgeous bad boy. The kind of sex, the kind of lover most women only dreamed about.

Except, Tanner was so much more than that.

She loved talking to him. Bantering with him. Lying in his arms and doing nothing more adventuresome than listening to the thud-thud of his heart.

She loved…

The jeans and shirt fell from her arms.

Ridiculous. Impossible. This wasn’t a romance novel. You didn’t fall crazy in love with a man in just in a couple of days, especially if he was pretty much a stranger.

Of course you didn’t.

* * *

Superman’s “something interesting” in the kitchen was a feast.

A bowl of fruit. Okay, the fruit was from a can, but no bowl of fruit had ever looked better or tasted more delicious. Big, fluffy pancakes with maple syrup. And just in case the pancakes weren’t enough, toasted bagels from what tuned out to be a working freezer.

He’d topped the bagel halves with blueberry jam.

“If you were a New Yorker,” Alessandra said primly as she popped the last bit of a jam-smothered bagel into her mouth, “you’d know that you never put jam on bagels.”

“Says the lady born in… What part of Italy was it?”

“A village in Sicily nobody ever heard of.”

She licked a drop of jam off her thumb.

Tanner reached across the table, snagged her hand and brought it to his lips.

“Lieutenant Akecheta at your service, ma’am,” he said, letting his tongue take the place of hers.

“And such excellent service it is, Lieutenant,” she said, while her heart skipped a beat.

He grinned. Oh, what a gorgeous grin he had.

“We aim to please, ma’am.”

She laughed. So did he. Amazing, she thought, that acts of terror and brutality had brought her to a moment of such incredible joy.

“You know, Lieutenant, I think it’s time I made a confession.”

Tanner sat back, his arms folded over his chest. “Go for it, Bellini. I’m ready.”

“When you didn’t realize that FURever was about protecting wildlife?” She sighed. “It was the name. Not you. I’d tried to tell them that the name was, you know, cute, but maybe misleading…What?”

“Nice try, honey, but it was definitely me. I had this stereotype in my head. Beautiful woman. Spoiled silly…”

“You’re the one who’s spoiling me. And I have to admit, I love it.” She smiled as he leaned forward and reached for her hand. “Your turn,” she said.

“My turn for what?”

“To tell me where you’re from, for starters.”

Tanner let go of her hand, from the table, got the coffeepot from the counter, took two blue mugs from a shelf, and filled them.

“There’s no cream. Sorry.”

“That’s fine. It’s coffee. Real coffee.” She leaned into the steaming mug that he handed her, took a deep sniff and sighed. “Smells delicious. So, where are you from?”

“South Dakota.”

“Except for Texas,” Alessandra said, “I’ve never been in any state except New York and California. What’s South Dakota like?”

He sat down, raised his mug to his lips and blew lightly on the steaming coffee.

“Big. Wild. Beautiful. The Badlands. The Black Hills. Endless stretches of prairie. And ranches.”

“Ah.” She smiled over the rim of her mug. “Cowboys.”

“And Indians.” He grinned at her. “Them’s my people, Ms. Bellini.”

“Sioux.”

He shrugged and sat back in his chair, his big hands wrapped around the mug.

“What’s left of us. What’s pretty much the last of the Sioux nation lives in the Dakotas.”

“Did you grow up on a ranch?”

“More or less.”

She could almost see him shutting down. She knew she should back off, but she was hungry to know more about him, so she decided to ignore the warning signs and press on.

“Which was it? More? Or less?”

Tanner sighed, got up, grabbed the coffee pot and refilled both their mugs before sitting down again.

“My father had a small spread. Just enough land to keep a few horses. I guess you could be generous and call it a ranch.”

“And your mother?”

“She left us.”

Alessandra stared at him. “She left?”

“Yeah. It was a hard life. She liked pretty things…” His words trailed away. He raised his mug and drank more coffee. “My old man didn’t do too well after that. He took to drinking. Well, he’d always been into whiskey, but once she was gone he drank more and then, you know, the predictable happened.”

“He died,” she said softly.