Smart and Sexy (12 page)

“Bailey?”

“The house.” She closed her eyes. “I’d fallen asleep on the couch, and when I woke up—” She’d been petrified to find herself facing three men, two of them huge and menacing and armed, one standing at either end of the couch. The third man had been Stephen. He’d sat on her coffee table at her shoulder as if he’d been invited in. And he had, many many times, by Alan. He was polished, elegant, and utterly, terrifyingly, smoothly dangerous. He’d said hello politely, while turning a very wicked looking knife in his fingers.

“They were just there,” she said now to Noah. “They wanted—” Money, of course. “They wanted to warn me. If I didn’t do what they said, they’d come back.”

“And kill you.”

If that was all it’d been, it wouldn’t be so difficult. But when she’d shaken her head, saying she didn’t have the money, didn’t know where to find it, he’d nodded, then stood and said that he hoped she’d said good-bye to Kenny.

And her second graders.

Because, he’d said, she wouldn’t be seeing them ever again, since his men would be killing them.

One by one.

Then he’d leaned over her and said that he’d be in touch, and she’d better hope he didn’t find out she was holding out on him. He’d nodded to the two other men, one of whom held her down while the other had crawled up on top of her, between her legs, wrapping his fingers around her throat, squeezing until she’d blacked out.

When she’d come to, she’d been alone.

She’d been on the run ever since. She’d gotten a hotel room, hadn’t gone back to the house or to work, and now she’d gotten Noah involved. “They’d kill anyone I cared about.”

“So you have to do what they want. You have to find something.” Turning his head, he kissed her other inner thigh.

With his mouth on her, she could hardly breathe, much less talk. “Hence the whole hijack-the-pilot thing.”

“Yeah.” He stroked his thumb lightly over her skin, his voice a sleepy, sexy whisper. “So why me?”

She wished he’d turned off the light, or that he’d stop talking and start kissing her again. “Your plane was there, ready to go.”

“So was Brody’s,” he reminded her.

“Yes, but…”

He kissed her again, lightly, softly, sweetly, and yet nothing in her reaction felt sweet. A new tension had gripped her body, one that had nothing to do with fear, and she found herself arching up into him, her fingers digging into the comforter at her sides.

Noah lifted his head, waiting for an answer.

“I wanted it to be you,” she admitted.

“Because I’m an easy mark?”

“No. God, no.” She closed her eyes. A hiding habit, she knew, an especially silly one since she was as exposed as she could get, but she needed a minute for this one. Because if she couldn’t give him the truth about what she had to do, she was going to give him the truth about this.

Needed to give him the truth about this.

But then he stroked her again, his touch still light and easy, and once again she lost her grasp on her thought process. “You are not an easy mark,” she managed.

She had no trouble reading his expression when he lifted his head, no trouble seeing that his features had softened, heated. His fingers were still on her thighs, his thumb gently stroking, and her body, with a mind of its own, twitched, letting her legs fall farther open.

Crazy, she thought. She was crazy wild to expose herself this way, letting him see…

Everything.

His gaze dipped, looking directly at what she’d revealed, and then an almost unbearably sexy sound left his throat as he slowly…dipped…his head…and touched his lips to the groove at the very top of her thigh.

“I—I wanted it to be you,” she managed. “Because I felt like I knew you, like we had a connection.”

He shifted his lips along her hip, her belly, to her other hip.

While she didn’t so much as breathe.

“We’ve never talked about anything other than the weather and the route you wanted me to fly,” he said directly against her skin. “Which begs the question…why me?”

“I…” His mouth was working for her, it really was. “I felt it.” God, had she felt it. She wanted to pull him up so that she could think, so that she could make some sense. Instead, she continued to fist her hands in the down comforter at her sides and let him drive her to the very edge. “I kn—knew you’d help me.”

“Yeah.” He let out a short breath and touched his forehead to her belly, his lips tantalizingly close to ground zero. “Do you know why?” he asked.

“Um—”

He slid his fingers beneath her bottom, cupping her, then lifted his head and leveled her with those melting eyes. “Do you know why?” he repeated.

“No.”

“Because I had a crush on you.”

“You—”
He had a crush on me.
“Noah—”

“A big, fat crush.”

Whenever she’d seen him at Sky High, he’d been courteous, professional, distant.

And sexy as hell.

“You never gave me the time of day,” she said.

“No, Princess, that was you. You were always dressed to the hilt, looking hot enough to melt butter right off your skin, and yet you never seemed to know it. You’d smile, but rarely speak to me.”

“I liked you.”

His laugh was soft, and self-deprecatory. “Yeah, well, I fantasized about it being more than like. I wanted to kiss you. I wanted…” He tugged, and his face was right there, between her legs.

“This,” he said. “I wanted this.” With characteristic bluntness, he looked at her. Looked for a long, breathless beat with his hair brushing her belly, his breath warming her skin.

She knew what he saw. A woman’s body, up close and personal, complete with flaws.

He didn’t say a word.

And she couldn’t take it, she just couldn’t, so she wriggled up to reach the light and turned it off.

With a low laugh against her skin, he surged up and flicked it on again.

Oh, God. She tried to relax, but she just couldn’t, and knowing it, she reached up and flicked it back off.

Silence reigned.

And then it grew, and grew some more, until it was like another person in the room. Realizing she was holding her breath, she let it out.

And Noah sighed. “Hiding again.”

“No, I…” Okay, yes. Yes, she was.

But he left the light off, and she breathed some more, her entire body quivering with anticipation.

“After all we’ve been through, you don’t have to hide, not from me.” Dipping his head, he stroked his thumb unerringly over her, just where she needed it, and then—oh, God, and then—his tongue.

He did it again, and then again, just a little harder, a little faster, and she gasped and arched up, right into his mouth.

“Ah, yeah. That’s perfect. You’re perfect.” And holding her open, he proceeded to drive her out of her own mind and straight into another mind-blowing orgasm.

While she was still shuddering, he crawled up her body, nudging at her center with a most impressive erection.

“Tell me the rest, Bailey.”

Was he kidding? She couldn’t even put a thought together, much less a sentence.

“What else are you hiding?” he wondered with another nudge that made her want to wrap her legs around his waist and draw him inside. “Bailey?”

“Nothing.”

Liar.

He didn’t say it, but the word danced around them in the dark as if he had.

“I need to know,” he said. “To keep us safe and happy.”

And then reaching out, he once again flicked on the light. Settling between her legs, he looked deep into her eyes. “And I want to keep us very, very safe and happy.”

B
ailey arched up, helplessly opening for him, but he held back, damn him.

“I guess the next question,” he said in a thick voice, pressing his lips to her throat, “is are you going to help me keep us safe and happy?”

“Noah—”

But he pushed inside of her and all thought capacity shrank to the pinnacle of sensations running through her.

Their twin sighs of pleasure comingled in the air.

“What else, Bailey?” he managed. “What else are you hiding?”

“Nothing,” she gasped. Everything.

Then he rocked deeper and she could scarcely breathe because he felt so good filling her, so right.
Right
. She’d never felt anything like it. He was inside her, thick and full and heavy.
Perfect
. She had to abandon all thought, abort all reason, because there wasn’t room for anything with what he was making her feel, which was alive, gloriously alive.

“It’s just you and me,” he ground out as he moved within her. “Just us. You can tell me.”

She clutched at him, needing him to move again. Then he did just that, his thrust scooting her up on the bed. She might have hit her head on the headboard if he hadn’t slapped his hands against it, bracing them as he slid in and out of her. Even as she lost her mind, she shook her head. Surely it couldn’t really be like this, this good, this amazing. They were two virtual strangers, and yet…and yet she’d never felt so in tune with anyone in her life.

Somehow he knew her, knew her body, knew what she needed, when she needed it, and how to give it to her. He filled her senses, had her writhing, arching, begging.
Begging
in some wordless, gasping voice she hardly recognized as hers, all while he brought her to the very edge and then, damn him, held her there, a panting, dewy, sweaty mass of nerve endings, reduced to total dependency…

“Come,” he demanded in a rough, low voice, and stroked a thumb over where they were joined.

She saw stars, and when he did it again, with slightly more pressure, she went off like a bottle rocket, coming, going…coming again. Or still…

Vaguely she realized he had stopped moving, except for the trembling of his arms where he held himself rigid above her, and she opened her eyes.

His expression was one of fierce concentration, his brow damp, his jaw bunched. “I can’t believe I nearly forgot—”

She looked at him blankly, on sensory overload with the feeling of him stretching her so deliciously.

“Condom.”

She closed her eyes. This. See,
this
is what happened when one went too long without sex. Severe brain cell loss. “I’m on the pill,” she whispered.

“Pregnancy isn’t the only reason for a condom.”

She wished the light was off again. “I’m…safe.”

When he didn’t say anything, she admitted to yet another truth. “I told you it’d been a long time. Almost two years long,” she admitted softly. “And I’ve been checked since then.”

He lowered his weight to his forearms, his fingers gliding into her hair, his face close to hers. He kissed her jaw, her ear, her mouth. “It’s been over six months for me,” he said softly. “And I’m safe, too.”

A long time for a man who probably had women throwing themselves at him, but she set that thought aside because her brain simply didn’t have room for it, not with him filling her so completely that she had to feel him move again.

Had to.

She glanced toward the lamp, but he shook his head. “On.”

“But off would be so much better.”

He didn’t say anything to that, instead began a set of hot, wet, open-mouthed kisses along her neck to just beneath her ear. She’d never thought of herself as a particularly sensual creature. Sex was very nice when done right, but it wasn’t always done right, and truthfully? In most cases, she’d found better release from a battery operated toy than a man.

But not tonight.

Tonight she had Noah, who knew his way around her body better than she did. How else to explain why just a kiss made her ache for more, or why her body felt fluid in his arms, or how mind-blowing it was to have him move within her, in a perfect rhythm that she never wanted to end?

He would never hurt her. He would never disappoint her. How she knew these things about him, she had no idea, but she did.

She knew them as certainly as she knew he’d give her his last breath.

He slid his hands down to the backs of her bare thighs, spreading them wider, allowing for a deeper penetration, which wrenched a groan from him and a matching one from her. No one had ever been so deep inside her before; no one had ever made her thoughts dissolve into mindless sensation and need, such desperate, clawing need.

He whispered her name and the sound alone had her body going taut again, her breath coming in pants as she heated, slickened.

Still on his forearms, his hands in her hair, his eyes locked on hers, he let her see everything he felt as he slid in and out of her, in and out in that mindless rhythm that brought her right back to the very edge.

And then he dipped his head and took her breast into his mouth, and she fell right off that edge back into the abyss, and this time, he followed her over, rocking into her, pumping hard and deep, her name on his lips, his body rigid as his release poured out of him, and somehow she knew…that dependence she’d been reduced to…he’d felt the same.

It united them, and if her heart hadn’t caught before, it was snagged hard now as she drifted back to earth locked tight in his arms.

“Jesus,” he breathed when he finally relaxed and rolled to his side, taking her with him.

She had her face pressed against his chest. She could feel the erratic beat of his heart, and a little dazed, she shook her head. “That was…”

“Defies words, doesn’t it?”

Defied logic, too. Or maybe in her mixed-up world, this at least, out of everything, made sense.

“Know what I think?”

She didn’t know, but hoped it was that they should do this again.

He pulled her over the top of him, his hands running up the backs of her legs, urging them to straddle him as his mouth cruised down her collarbone.

“That’s what I was thinking,” she gasped.

He let out a soft laugh. “I should be thanking my lucky stars I happened to be on the tarmac yesterday.”

“I was waiting for you,” she murmured, eyes closed, body already humming, or still humming—

He’d gone still, so utterly still. Why? When she opened her eyes, she found his locked on her.

“What did you say?”

Oh, God, what had she said? The sensual haze began to dissipate. “Um—”

“You said you were waiting for me.”

“Yes.”

“But before, you said you didn’t know it would be me.”

“Right, but—”

He rolled her off of him, then slid off the bed. “But you did know, didn’t you?”

And here was a prime example of why sex shouldn’t be mixed in with deep conversation. She didn’t have enough blood in her body to work her brain and her other parts at the same time.

“You waited for me,” he said slowly. “
That’s
why you kept canceling those other flights. I didn’t show up. And you picked me because…because Brody or Shayne would have turned you in.”

“Yes. No.
Damn it,”
she said when those green eyes froze to ice. “Noah, I picked you because—”

“No. Don’t say it. Don’t come up with yet another lie, or omission, or whatever the hell you do.” Unselfconsciously naked, and looking like a Greek god while he was at it, he grabbed his jeans. “Time to roll, Princess. If you want a shower, now’s your chance.”

“Noah—”

“Hurry up. It’s dawn.”

Stomach jangling, she looked out the window and saw the purple and pink streaks across the sky. She couldn’t believe it, but she’d survived the night.

All thanks to the six feet of sexy masculinity standing next to the bed, staring down at her, still and tense and gorgeous.

“Where to next?” he asked.

“Noah—”

He shook his head. “Forget it. No doubt it’ll just be some Bailey mixture of the truth anyway.” He tossed her clothes at her. “Let’s get a move on.”

She hugged her clothes close, aware of the irony that she’d been so terrified of their close intimacy, and yet now she feared its loss. “I won’t go back. I can’t—”

He whipped back, eyes furious. “You think I’d take you back and turn you in now? Knowing you’d face—
flattering,
Bailey.” He scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “Look, I’m not taking you back. I’m taking you on your mysterious scavenger hunt.”

Relief rushed through her so fast she felt faint as he went to the bedroom door and yanked it open.

Relief, and a regret so big and strong and overwhelming it nearly choked her. She stared at his back, her vision blurred by the tears she refused to shed. “I can’t believe you’re still going to help me.”

He shoved his fingers through his hair, holding it off his face, making quite the picture as he did, arms raised, body hard and practically shimmering with tension. “Yeah, I’m going to help you. And I know exactly how big of an idiot that makes me, so you’d better hurry the hell up before I change my mind.”

She wanted him to look at her all soft and sweet again. She wanted him to hold her, stroke away her fears.

Touch her. Kiss her…

But to get those things again, she had to trust him, really trust him, and tell him everything.

She knew this. Do it, she told herself. Try him. “Noah—”

“Don’t.” He shook his head. “Don’t look at me like that, with your heart in your eyes. Too late. Just get ready so I can help you, and then get you the hell out of my life.”

And with that, he walked out of the room.