Riptide (11 page)

When Bria stroked her tongue along his, his chest vibrated with a low, feral growl. One minute his forearm was a steel band across her back, his fingers tangled in her hair; the next, he said her name in a hoarse whisper.

Not “Princess.” Not that insufferable “Your Highness.” Gabriella.

Twisting her so she was sprawled beneath him, Nick’s arm tightened around her as he pressed his knee unerringly to the wet place between her legs that ached for it.

The ferocity of his unleashed hunger startled her with its intensity, shaking her all the way to her toes. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he commanded the kiss, taking her little experiment from zero to a hundred and fifty in one second flat.

She wanted his kiss more than she’d wanted anything in her life. And she moaned as his tongue swept between her teeth, sleek and hard and searching. She slid her fingers through his dark hair to cup the back of his head, mirroring what he was doing to her.

His mouth fed on hers until she forgot to breathe, couldn’t reason. She went blind and deaf, her entire being focused on where their mouths and bodies were fused together.

The hard length of his erection ground against her hip, and she arched her hips to get more … She started tugging at his shirt. Pulled at her own. She wanted skin, damn it—

Panting as if she’d run the two-minute mile, Bria had to drag in a shuddering breath. She blinked. The cabin was much lighter now than it had been what felt like seconds ago.

“Come back here,” he murmured thickly, capturing her lips again with another drugging kiss.

What was she doing, what was she doing, what the
hell
was she doing? Reason slammed into her like a bolt of lightning, a blinding flash that harshly illuminated her situation.

She yanked her head away, and felt his ragged, uneven breath against her damp lips. “Stop,” she managed. Her heart was beating so fast she could barely tell one hard thump from the next. Her skin was sheened with perspiration, and her lips stung.

If he pressed that knee a little harder, she’d come right then without any further assistance. “Please. D-don’t move.”

This was nothing like the mild pleasure she’d experienced before, hands-on or solo with her vibrator. Those sensations had been easy to walk away from unscathed. Not Nick Cutter’s kiss. The whirlpool of lust she felt—was still feeling—scared the living crap out of her. It was too much. Too explosive.

For a guy who’d given the impression of having zero emotions, hell, barely a frigging
pulse,
Nick’s kiss was nothing short of electrifying. Bria’s girl parts had melted from the combustible heat of his mouth on hers alone.

Potent stuff.

He went predatory still for a moment, then lifted his head. “Stop?” His eyes, his amazing azure eyes, narrowed fractionally on her face. His fingers flexed on her ass.

“I’m sorry.” She was shockingly aroused, her taut nipples rasping against his chest even as she could barely drag in a breath. She was
this
close to a climax and shook, trying to resist the urgent pull of it. “I can’t do this.” Thank God her brain was in charge, because her body was begging for more, more, more. Anyone else, and she would’ve fluttered her eyelashes, smiled, and lightened the situation so she could walk away without a backward glance. Or apologized for leading him on and defused the situation. All the while leaving the guy’s ego intact.

Nick Cutter wasn’t that guy.

“You started this,” he pointed out, his voice was cool, unaffected.

She’d realized the moment their lips touched that she’d made made a tactical error in her attempt to see if he was cold all the way through. But that hadn’t stopped her from kissing him back. That hadn’t stopped her from touching him. Or rubbing against him.

Bria’s heart was knocking uncomfortably. Her body buzzed and throbbed and a strange euphoria racing through her bloodstream made her dizzy. She was wet in places that usually took concerted foreplay to make damp. “I know.” Very slowly, she uncramped her fingers from the back of his head before he got any more confused. Or angry.

She couldn’t make her body move any more than that. Not for a minute. Or ten. “Sorry.” Oh, God, she sounded like some dim-witted Victorian virgin. “But I only met you a few hours ago! I—”

“You don’t go to bed with men you don’t know?”

“N—” She bit her tongue, the tongue he’d been nibbling on with devastating effect a heartbeat before. She didn’t owe him any explanations about her somewhat limited love life. Not only wasn’t it any of his business, it wasn’t the point. She could have told him a version of the truth: For a moment I lost my mind, thinking I might’ve died, and was looking for a little human connection, a little confirmation of life.

And, be honest, it was a foolish experiment.

Except this wasn’t the time for that kind of brutal honesty. The man was a stranger.

The orgasm started to ebb unfulfilled. It was a night for that. Her brain screamed get away from the man for God’s sake! But her body, her traitorous sex-starved body couldn’t comply, because moving right then would set off a domino effect.

“I don’t usually have people trying to strangle and kill me. I don’t— Never mind. I just don’t.”

There was no excuse. She couldn’t even lie to herself. She’d needed warmth to hold the flutters of fear at bay. She’d wanted to see if she could elicit a spark of … something. A little heat, anything to staunch the cold feeling inside. And what she’d done was set a match to a forest of dry kindling.

When Nick Cutter warmed up, it was overwhelming. She needed a moment to regroup.

Chapter 6

Nick rolled onto his back, lifting his hands in surrender. As if. She already knew him better than that. He did nothing to hide the erection straining at his zipper as he cupped the back of his head and watched her with hooded eyes and a stern mouth.

Tingling, throbbing,
pulsing,
Bria swung her legs off the mattress, then sat there, back to him while she tried to calm her manic heartbeat and slow her breathing. She fought the urge to bury her face in her hands.

His voice cracked the silence. “Are you a virgin?”

She couldn’t help laughing. If her lips weren’t swollen, and her heart racing, she would’ve sworn from his tone that he hadn’t kissed her senseless three seconds before. “A woman asks you to stop, and you presume she’s frigid?”

“A woman crawls all over me, and I presume she wants to be fucked. Did you take the edge off before I got here, Princess?”

She thought she had. She hadn’t. She glanced over her shoulder to stare narrowed-eyed at him. “Wow. That was unnecessarily cold, even for you.”

“I don’t do warm and fuzzy.”

“You don’t even do tepid and downy,” she retorted, mimicking his cool tones. She slid to the edge of the mattress and dropped the foot necessary to get off the high bed and stand. She combed her fingers through her tangled hair, readjusted her clothing, and called it good. If she didn’t blow-dry her hair, it returned to its curly state, which was why she kept it long and slicked back. From Nick’s expression—if a tic in his jaw could be called an expression—he was not impressed by the Wild Woman of Borneo look.

What a shame. He wasn’t worth spending an hour blow-drying her hair for. “Is it too early to call the helicopter company? If it’s all the same with you, I’ll just use the phone in your office and see how long it’ll take someone to get out here.”

“Called them before I came in.” He stacked his hands behind his head. Long, lean, and confident of his sex appeal. And why not? “They’re having some mechanical issues,” he continued, smooth as silk while she was trying to keep her skin from catching fire from being in the same freaking room. Unfair. “They’ll call when they have a chopper certified for flight.”

Oh, no, no, no. She had to leave.

Now.

He was way out of her league. He’d eat her for breakfast and use her bones as toothpicks if she allowed this to go any further.

She had to put a stop to it.

“How long do they think that’ll be?” she asked, hoping the desperation wasn’t evident in her voice. She looked around for her sandals, trying to hide how freaked out she really was.
I’m good with people
, she told herself silently as she found one shoe near the chair and the other under the bedside table.

Nick Cutter wasn’t people.

She presumed he wasn’t enjoying the view of her bottom wiggling out from under there. Rising, she pressed her fingertips on the mirrored surface for balance as she slipped her shoes on.

“A day.” His expression—big surprise—was inscrutable. “Two at the most. I told you I’d take you.”

“Now?”

“Maybe later today.”

“What time?” she demanded desperately, shoving her untucked T-shirt back into her waistband. God. Even the brush of her own fingers on her skin set little licks of flame dancing across her nerve endings.

“When it’s convenient for me to leave my ship and my dive team.”

The only option—other than wild monkey sex right then—was to run. About ten miles should dissipate the worst of her unfulfilled arousal. She headed for the door.

“Where are you going?”

Anywhere! “I’m hungry,” she lied. “I’d like breakfast.” The fact that what she really, really wanted right then was hard, driving, mind-blowing sex was out of the question. Apparently cold fusion was alive and well inside Mr. Ice Cold. If one short make-out session affected her this way, Bria was damned sure anything more would leave her in ashes on the sheets.

She liked being in charge in the bedroom. Nick clearly wasn’t the kind of guy who’d lie back and enjoy the ride.

He studied her through half-lidded eyes, barely a glint of blue in the ambient light leaking through the glass ceiling. “Ring for Khoi,” he told her. “Tell him what you want.”

She half turned, her fingers on the door handle. “I’d rather go and eat with the others.”

Was it her imagination, or did that gleam in his eyes intensify? Was he laughing at her? No way. The man didn’t know what humor was.

“Then feel free to invite them here,” he said. “You’re not leaving this cabin until I find Halkias.”

That stopped her in her tracks. Her hand dropped from the door handle and she turned slowly to face him. Twenty feet of floor wasn’t enough distance. “Find him? Find—” She swallowed before her voice rose another octave. “I thought Jonah had him locked up somewhere!”

He shrugged. “He managed to escape. Don’t worry. We’ll get him. Just hang tight.” His calm nonchalant tone alone pissed her off.

“Hang tight,” she repeated, acid and—damn it—fear rising in her throat and obliterating—thank God—the last vestiges of lust from her overstimulated girl parts. “With an attempted murderer wandering around out there?” Bria rubbed the sudden goose bumps on her upper arms. “I wish I had a gun.”

He got off the other side of the bed. Standing, he unzipped his jeans, oblivious to the massive erection tenting the front of his black boxers. For a moment Bria’s eyes were riveted on the wedge between the open teeth of his zipper. Her already manic heartbeat accelerated, and a film of perspiration sheened her skin. Her fingers actually twitched with the need to touch him.
There
. Hot, silk-covered steel. Everything female inside her responded to that blatant show of maleness.

Gimme!

Fire, she reminded herself. Fire. God help me.
Fire!

Apparently fear
didn’t
make a dent in how her body reacted to his.

Nick’s jeans dropped to the floor. He kicked them, caught them in one hand, and tossed them on the chair by the window. “You’d shoot yourself in the foot,” he said, as if unaware of her gaze fixed to the black swath of material covering his crotch.

She blinked, jerking her eyes up to his face. “That’s insulting on so many levels,” she snapped. “I lived with a professional bodyguard for twelve years. There isn’t a gun I can’t load, clean, or fieldstrip.” She let that sink in for a moment before asking pointedly, “Do you have one I can borrow?” Living with a paranoid, ever-vigilant bodyguard gave a girl some kick-butt skills.

Of course, no one had tried to kill her in, oh, twenty years. Not until she’d come on board the
Scorp
—

God. Now he was pulling his khaki T-shirt over his head.

Nick tossed it—without looking—onto the chair with his pants. He had the body of an athlete, a swimmer. Satiny bronze skin stretched over long lean muscles. The dark hair on his chest arrowed down to his shorts.

Bria’s mouth went dry. She suddenly felt faint. Lust poisoning.

Unfazed, Nick gave her that maddening bland look that made her blood pressure spike for a whole other reason. “There’s no need to have a loaded weapon on a ship.”

“There are a
hundred
reasons to have a gun on board.” She told him tartly. “What if pirates attack?”

“They’d want treasure. Or money. Which you don’t have.”

True. “I could defend myself in my own cabin if I had a weapon,” she pointed out. Early morning sunlight, weak and more gray than golden, limned his body. It outlined his broad shoulders, the curve of his waist, and highlighted the hair on his long legs.

She tried to avert her gaze, she really did. But it was impossible not to notice that he was large and … robust, for want of better words. She could barely think them, let alone say anything with her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth to prevent her from doing something incredibly stupid.

Like pull those black boxers off him. With her teeth.

She had to get away from Nick before she leapt across the room to tackle him into bed. God, her nipples ached. She could just imagine his broad hands covering them, kneading her flesh, shaping them for his mouth—

Fire.

“And risk you damaging the ship with a wayward bullet? I think not, Princess.” He held up a hand and pierced her with his cool, assessing gaze. “You’re staying in this cabin. With me. And if you don’t want to finish what you started,” he gestured downward, drawing her gaze toward the flash of skin showing in the front of his boxers, “then I’m going to hit the shower.”