Chapter 4
Diana
THE SUV ROLLS through the other side of Halo City. I don’t need a map to know where we are. The group of teenagers sitting on the hood of a car that hasn’t moved in weeks, judging by the sun-bleached parking ticket plastered to the windshield, does a lot of the explaining.
I don’t say anything about it.
There’s nothing to say. I grew up in a place not much different from this one.
Kai parks the SUV at the curb and kills the engine.
I let him drive my car. He hasn’t spoken much since we left the HQ.
His jaw is set, his eyes forward, and I know he’s been replaying what happened.
I smile in my head. I want it replaying.
His cum on my hand, the look on his face when his body folded before he gave it permission.
I want it on a loop in his head so he understands the terrain we’re walking on now.
He gestures to the three-story red brick building. His apartment. It’s no different from every other one on the block. A laundromat occupies the ground floor, and next to it, a narrow door leads upstairs.
“Vance mentioned you were in the military,” I say, not looking at him. My eyes follow a woman pushing a supermarket trolley down the sidewalk. “Is that right?”
“Yes. Five years.” He opens his door and then mine.
“Where were you before this?”
He walks half a step ahead of me, scanning the street. “Albury Creek, mainly. I came here a few weeks ago for this job.”
He moved here for this assignment. That tells me he’s either ambitious or desperate. Or both. Something is pushing him, I can sense it, and I’d bet good money it isn’t the cost of rent in Albury Creek.
A row of metal mailboxes welcomes us, crammed with spam flyers, but half of them are on the floor where someone stepped on them and kept walking. He heads for the stairwell covered in wrinkly blue carpet and I follow.
Second floor. He stops at a door on the second floor and turns to me. “I’m sorry.”
For what? But I don’t say it with words. I say it with my eyes.
He holds the look a second longer, and the blue-gray of his eyes goes flatter. Then he unlocks the door, steps inside, and pulls it shut behind him, while I’m left standing in the hallway. Kai is apologizing for what I’m about to see.
I hear him moving around inside. Paper being folded or crumpled. A drawer opening and closing. Voices from the door next to his. Then the door opens.
“Come in,” he says, and I don’t waste time stepping in.
The apartment is a studio. A king single with one pillow is pushed to the wall. There’s a bedside table with a lamp. A kitchenette. The window faces the brick wall of the building next door, close enough to touch if you leaned out.
There is nothing personal anywhere. The room is a holding cell that an ex-soldier tidies out of habit. But it’s clean. I don’t see anything worth apologizing.
“You can sit on the bed,” he says, because there isn’t anywhere else to sit other than the floor. He pulls a black duffel bag from the closet. “I’ll be quick.”
I don’t sit. I lie down.
I stretch across the mattress and lace my fingers behind my head, behind the small pillow.
The bed smells clean but lived-in. Detergent, mostly.
But underneath that, him. His sweat. Not the gym kind, but the low, warm musk of a body that runs hot.
It’s on the pillow, the sheets. The whole bed is full of him, and I turn my face into the pillow and breathe him in without pretending I’m not.
The zipper on his duffel bag stops, and I turn to look at him.
He’s crouched on the floor, a folded shirt in one hand, and he’s staring.
Not in my face. At the full picture of me stretched across his bed, my arms open, the cap I’ve been wearing now tossed beside his pillow.
The loose sweatpants riding low on my hips.
His hand, with the shirt, has gone still in midair.
I smile, but only in my head. Maybe I can seduce my hot bodyguard after all. My little performance at the office rattled him. Kai’s disciplined; it’s obvious. But even the most rigid discipline has cracks, and I found one, and I’m going to keep finding more.
I roll onto my side when he turns back to his packing, reaching for the bedside table. There’s a wallet, and I pick it up.
“Kai Romero,” I read aloud, studying the ID. The photo is unsmiling. The blue-gray eyes flat and guarded. “Romero. That’s Spanish?”
“My mother.” He doesn’t look up.
“You look nothing like it.”
“Everyone says that.”
I study the birthdate. Do the math I’ve already done countless times before. “Twenty-five. So young.”
He doesn’t respond, so I set the wallet back on the table and roll onto my back again. The ceiling has a hairline crack running from the light fixture to the corner.
“Are you good at separating business and leisure, Kai?”
The packing stops again. “Yes.”
“Good. Good.” I keep my eyes on the ceiling. My voice is even, measured. “My job is intense. It doesn’t shut off when I leave the office. I go home with the stress, the adrenaline. I need an outlet. I imagine yours is the same. All the danger, the hypervigilance.”
I pause. Let him fill in the blanks.
“We help each other. Stress relief.” I turn my head to look at him.
He’s looking at me now like he can’t quite believe what I’m saying, but in a guarded, filtered way.
I know because I’m good at reading people, although with Kai, I only get the bare bones of what’s inside his beautiful head.
“As long as you remember who I am, and who you are. That lines don’t blur. Are you interested?”
His shoulders pull back a fraction of an inch. “Yes.”
Just like that? I wonder what he thinks of me.
But then I stop wondering because I already know.
He’s a man, and a woman just offered him sex with no strings.
Every man I’ve ever known would take that deal.
Some would pretend or play hard to get. Some would ask clarifying questions.
But in the end, they’re all the same animal.
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“I should have asked that before the indecent proposal.” I laugh. “Why no girlfriend, though? You’re young. You’ve got that whole brooding-soldier energy women lose their minds over.”
“I have better things to do.”
“Fair enough.”
And it is. Most men I know treat relationships the same way. A distraction from whatever they’ve decided matters more. Work, ambition, whatever fuel they’re running on. Kai’s fuel is something I haven’t figured out yet, but it burns hot, even if he never lets it out of his chest.
“Do you have a lot of sex?” I ask.
“I don’t go looking for it.”
“Anything particular you’re into?”
“Not really.”
I nod and push myself up onto my elbows so I can see his face clearly when I say the next part.
“I’ll tell you mine, then. So there are no surprises.” I keep my voice flat. “I like rough. I don’t want gentle or slow. I want it from behind, front or back, you choose. I want my hands tied. And I want to be gagged. That’s the only way I get off.”
The bus passes just outside, and Kai hasn’t blinked since I started talking.
It’s impossible to read this man fully. I really want to know what he’s thinking right now.
I fall back onto the bed and let my knees fall open. The sweatpants are loose and unflattering, but the gesture speaks for itself.
Before I can blink, he’s already there, hands on the small of my back, looking straight into my eyes.
Then he flips me fast and hard. A jolt punches straight through my gut and lands between my thighs.
My cheek smashes into the pillow, heat flooding my face.
My fingers are already clawing at the waistband of my sweatpants, but he’s faster.
He rips the fabric down my legs in one rough tug, and I hear it hit the floor.
The cool air barely touches my skin before his palms clamp back onto my hips and he yanks them up, folding me onto my knees so my ass is high and my face is buried in the pillow.
My sweatshirt gives in to gravity, sliding down, bunching around my breasts.
“Tied and gagged,” he says, low and rough.
“Your belt,” I pant, already pushing my wrists together behind me. “Use your belt.”
He’s gone for no more than three seconds.
When he comes back, the belt is already in his hand.
He winds it around both wrists, threads the tongue through the buckle, and pulls.
Tight. No slipping out of this one. The leather bites deep, and I pull a sharp breath through my nose. Yes. This. The version I choose.
Then there’s the fabric—a hanky, underwear, a tie, I don’t know—pressed against my mouth.
“Open.”
Less than an hour ago, he came into my hand in record time. Now, he’s ordering me. A fast learner.
He shoves it past my teeth, and I bite down hard.
It smells like him. My mouth is stuffed full of him, my wrists are bound, and my knees are spread.
But not for long. His hands close around my upper thighs and yank my lower half up, up, until my weight tips forward.
Only my cheek and one shoulder stay on the mattress.
I twist to look back at him, but the angle is impossible.
My legs are straight, draped over his shoulders, one on each side of his head.
He’s sitting on the mattress, and I can feel the position we’re in.
My ass and my open wet pussy right in front of his face.
My clit is swollen and hanging, a bell waiting to be rung.
I planned this. I wanted this. But what he’s seeing from his angle is out of my hands, and that alone makes my pussy quiver in anticipation.
He must know exactly what I’m seeing in my head, what I need, because his forehead presses into the cleft of my ass and his tongue comes out, stretches to graze the tip of my clit.
Ah, shit. One hot flick. That’s all he gives me, but it zaps straight up my spine. My core clenches, trying to grip his tongue. My whole body is humming. One graze, one brush on my clit, and my pussy gasps.