“About an hour.” His mouth quirked and his eyes glinted with humor. “You don’t snore, and I didn’t see you drool, but I can’t rule that out.”
“Everyone drools,” she replied comfortably and took a deep drink of water. “Do you snore?” She stretched to get Tricks’s water bowl and poured some water into it because Tricks had raised her head at Bo’s voice, signaling that her nap was at an end too. Tricks immediately got to her feet and came over for a drink.
“Depends.” He ran his hand down Tricks’s back. “If I’m on a mission, no, probably because I never go into really deep sleep. But when I get home after crossing so many time zones that I don’t know what day it is, I definitely snore.”
“Huh. I guess snoring could be dangerous when you’re on a mission.” She’d never thought of snoring in those terms before; how odd and disturbing and a little sad that something so human could, under the conditions he considered normal, be a threat to his life.
“Depends on where we are. Sometimes we’re in a safe house in a city, so snoring isn’t a big deal.”
“Can you tell me what you do?”
“Some of it. Most of it is classified.” He squinted at the lake as if considering what to say, how much he could say. “I’m the leader of a GO-Team. GO stands for global offensive; we get sent wherever we’re needed, whether it’s legal or not, which is the main reason it’s classified. Maybe we have to defuse a developing situation, take a power player out of action, things like that. Don’t ever Google anything I’m telling you or it could land you-and me-in a world of shit. But mostly you.”
“Promise.” She didn’t ask what taking someone “out of action” entailed, but she had a good guess, and Googling anything about the GO-Teams would be an act of idiocy.
That was what his life was like, where the least thing could trigger extreme action and reaction. She couldn’t imagine the pressure and stress, though probably every person who was in that line of work was an adrenaline junkie, which meant the man beside her likely was too. To test that theory she asked, “Do you jump out of planes?”
“If I have to. Not my favorite thing.”
That was kind of reassuring; she’d always wondered what brain fart drove people to parachute for pleasure.
She thought of something else. “Set explosives?”
“Got an expert who does that, but I know how.”
“Ride motorcycles?”
“Hell no! Those fuckers’ll kill you.”
His vehemence made her burst out laughing. “And those other things won’t? And, uh, are you forgetting why you’re here in the first place?”
He scratched his nose. “I guess it depends on what you’re used to.” Shrewdly he added, “If you’re trying to find out if I like the action, the answer is: to some extent. It can be a hell of a lot of fun, kicking ass and blowing shit up. Mostly I like knowing that what I do makes a difference, but I like a lot of things about being stateside too. Plumbing that works. The food. We have the best junk food, you know that?”
He was definitely a connoisseur of junk food; his fondness for it approached fervor. “Speaking of junk food, we have Oreos.”
“Bring ’em on.”
Alerted by the rustling of the package, Tricks ran over to check out the cookies, but they were a no-no for her. Bo distracted her with a doggy treat, a nice edible chew bone. Tricks snatched the bone and returned to her towel to devote herself to its destruction. Morgan wolfed down a couple of cookies and chased them with a beer, then said, “We need to talk.”
His tone, his expression, both made her uneasy. She looked down at her cookie to hide her foreboding. Experience told her conversations that began this way were never good; that was how her ex-husband had begun his explanation of how he needed more than she could provide, how a stepfather or two had said good-bye, how her mother had announced her first remarriage. Was now when Morgan told her not to get too attached, that anything they had was temporary and he’d be going back to his exciting job when the time came? She knew that; he didn’t have to spell it out. And knowing it was one thing, but she didn’t want to hear it, she didn’t want him to say, “We’ll have a good time, baby, but then it’s adios.”
“No, we don’t,” she said briskly. “I get it.”
“Trust me,” he growled. “You don’t.”
She rolled her eyes. “So this isn’t the part where you tell me you’ll be leaving-”
“I want to-”
“-and that’s good because I really don’t want to hear it!” she ended, the words clipped off hard and flat.
“Bo. Shut up.”
At his hard tone she looked up, her eyes flashing with temper, but he seized her by the back of the neck and kissed her, his mouth hungry and fierce. For a second she held herself stiff, not responding, but he wasn’t having any of that and dragged her across him so her butt was on the quilt between his thighs and her legs were draped over his. He tilted her head back and kissed her until she softened a bit; she still didn’t kiss him back, but she was accepting his mouth. His hand delved under her shirt and closed over her breast, deftly pinching her nipple until it formed a tight bud, the sensation sharp but not quite painful. Pleasure arrowed straight down between her legs, making her tighten and clench as if he were inside her, damn him.
She didn’t want to flash back to how all of that had felt, but she couldn’t stop the memory or her response. She had wanted him all day-not a gnawing need but a constant low heat. She had wanted to touch him, to feel his weight pressing her down, the heavy sensation of him pushing between her legs and into her. She hadn’t indulged because waiting was its own sort of perverse pleasure, feeling the craving slowly grow. She liked the anticipation, the knowledge that when they finally came together again the pleasure would be more intense for the waiting.
And the way he was kissing her now… She began to think that perhaps the “This is temporary” talk hadn’t been on his mind after all. His mouth was too hungry, his touch too… possessive? She’d never had anyone feel possessive of her before, so she wasn’t certain.
She bit his lip and murmured, “Don’t tell me to shut up,” mainly because she didn’t want him thinking he could get away with it.
He drew back a little to look down at her, his eyelids heavy and color deepening the sun bronze on his cheeks. “If I do, will you bite me again?” he asked, and bent to nuzzle her temple.
“You bet.”
“Shut up.”
The air between them changed and sizzled. She laughed and bit him, and ended up flat on her back with her shirt jerked up and his mouth clamped over her nipple. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, sinking and floating in the sharp, prickling sensation that pulled at her. He slid his hand between her legs and cupped her through her jeans, rubbing the heel of his palm against her clitoris. Bo’s eyes flared open and she stared up at the bits of blue sky she could see through the gently swaying tree limbs. Her gaze was unfocused because all of her attention was focused inward, on her body and what he was doing. I’m going to come, she thought dimly, then she said it, and then she did it.
He fought her out of her jeans while she was mostly comatose, unable to help him because her body was limp and heavy and still faintly pulsing. He didn’t get her shirt off, but it was shoved up under her arms anyway. He hooked his hands under her thighs and pulled her legs up and apart, settling solidly between them. The light breeze briefly cooled her hot damp flesh, then he was there, reaching between them to set the thick head of his penis against her opening and stretching her as he slowly pushed inside. He made a rough sound deep in his throat as he lifted her legs once more so he could seat himself as deeply as possible. Bo roused enough to wind her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his back, and held on as he began thrusting.