Chapter 19
LUKE
I couldn’t stop this if I wanted to.
I’m not sure I could stop even if Zinaida begged me to.
She tastes like fire and feels like sin, and I’m close to mindless with wanting her.
One of my hands is still holding a knife. My other slips under Zinaida’s ass, lifting her against the wall. Her legs wrap around me, swollen heat pressing down onto my hand, her mouth fierce on my own as her hands tangle in my hair.
I’m hard with lust and adrenaline, my cock pounding so savagely it’s painful.
I push her against the wall, groaning as my shaft comes up against her luscious folds.
Her hands drop to my boxers, urgently pushing them down.
Her tongue is in my mouth, her body twining against mine like an acrobat, and I fucking need to be inside her.
I slip the knife blade beneath the edge of her knickers, and she momentarily freezes at the touch of steel on flesh.
I turn the blade upward and slice through the silk.
“Bastard.” Zin’s choked gasp of laughter dies in her throat as she kisses me fiercely, hands clutching at my shoulders, her legs twining about my waist as she writhes against me. Her underwear falls to the floor, followed by the knife dropping silently atop our discarded clothes.
I should stop. There are men out there who want us both dead.
And for some reason I don’t want to examine too closely, the hard edge of danger only makes me want her more.
My hand goes into her hair and she moans, her head falling back as my mouth finds her neck. She smells of savagery, of the perfume that’s been driving me insane for weeks.
Maybe they’re the same thing.
Her mouth under mine is sweet and hot, and I take it over and over, lost in the taste of her, in the fierce hunger I’ve been trying to contain from the moment I saw her.
I lift her higher and slip one hand between us, groaning into her mouth when my fingers find her wet and wanting, her clit so swollen it pulses under my thumb. I slip one finger inside her.
“Oh,” she gasps.
Sweet mother of God.
She’s hot, ribbed, and so tight I wonder if I’ll even be able to get inside her. She reaches for me, and I stifle my groan in her mouth as her hand wraps around my shaft.
This isn’t how it should happen between us, some distant voice of sanity tries to whisper in my ear.
This should be slow.
Savored.
Gentle.
In a bed.
But even as I wrestle with the lingering shreds of my conscience, her slick heat is dripping on my hand, her soft moans becoming a plea I can’t ignore.
“Luke.” The way she sighs my name hits me somewhere inside, her hot mouth against my ear replacing my own internal voice. “Oh . . .”
I put my mouth close to her ear. “I should make you fucking wait.”
She gasps, the breath hitching in her throat, her tiny form tensing around me like a limpet.
I balance her on one hand and tangle the other in her hair, my fingers slipping through the tight coils as I kiss her achingly slowly, until she’s squirming hard on my hand and making soft noises in the back of her throat that drive me insane.
I take my mouth from hers and cradle her head as it drops back against the steel wall. “Look at me.”
I barely mouth the words, but her eyes open fractionally. Even in the darkness I can see the glazed need in their depths, the storm we’ve both been avoiding for weeks now.
“There are men out there who want us both dead.” My thumb traces her swollen mouth, and she opens her lips around it in a way that makes me want to punch the wall.
“Let them try,” she breathes.
For a moment we stare at each other in the darkness, my cock so close to her I can already feel her heat all over me, every cell in my body aching to join with hers.
I put my mouth close to her ear. “Don’t scream, or I’ll kill you myself.”
Then I surge upward.
Fuuuuck!
I cover her mouth with my own to stifle my fucking roar, only to find myself swallowing her scream.
I fill her savagely to the hilt, the fierce adrenaline of war coursing through me in a primal rush I can neither contain nor want to control. She rides me with the same ferocity, legs locked around my hips, mouth devouring mine as she ripples with every stroke, urging me deeper, harder.
There’s no game in this. No subtlety. Just raw fucking need that I’m way past wanting to control, and an answering hunger I can feel in her every feverish touch.
I lift her body slightly to adjust the angle, and her head goes back against the wall, her fingers clutching my hair. I find the place that makes her entire body arch desperately, and my legs almost buckle as her tight heat clasps my cock like it was built for it.
“Oh,” she gasps into my mouth. “Oh, God, Luke . . .”
“Don’t speak.” I surge hard into her, swallowing her sighs, losing myself in her exquisite depths, in the insanity of her body twined with my own.
Ten men could burst through the door, and still I don’t know that I could stop.
The edge is too close, the momentum of this too long coming, and I can feel the desperation of her own need matching my own in her every hitched breath and taut movement.
In the vague distance, I hear dogs barking.
I put my mouth to her ear again. “They’re coming for us.”
She makes a small, savage noise. “You’d kill them first.”
I take her mouth, thrusting all the way home, and she stiffens, rising against me.
I hold her in place as she rides the head of my cock in a series of panting, bucking gasps until I feel the insane grip of her first spasms. I fill her to the hilt as she seizes around me, heading toward my own climax in a mind-bending rush.
It’s fast, hard, and utterly unstoppable, a storm that explodes with an almost unbearable intensity into a shaking, shattering release that wipes everything else from my senses.
It’s a timeless, pulsing force that rushes between us in the darkness, an ocean tide made entirely of physical sensation, and while I’m there, the whole world could go to hell.
Then the dogs bark again, and the world settles slowly back into place around us.
Zinaida, eyes closed and face back against the steel wall of the container, her mouth still swollen and her body limp as a kitten in my hands.
Our bodies still wet with blood, water, and the scent of death.
Men outside who are still trying to kill us.
“Zinaida.” My lips move against her temple, inhaling her scent.
Her eyelids flutter open. The dark storm still raging in the cobalt depths makes my cock pulse. I press my mouth to her ear. “We need to get out of here.”
And yet I still don’t move. I’m half hard inside her, still wanting more, and when she moves against me I almost throw caution to the winds and throw her down on the floor.
She pulses around me, then her eyes widen with a shock of self-awareness as reality hits her, too.
I slide from her reluctantly, and she turns her head away.
I want to pull her face back, take her mouth again, pull us both back into the ocean and to hell with whatever is waiting for us outside the container.
Instead I turn away and pull on my clothes, hearing the soft rustle as she does the same.
I pack everything away, focusing on the task, allowing the methodical job of survival to take precedence over the turbulence surging between us.
Whatever this is, now isn’t the time to make sense of it.
I ease the door open a crack. Distant flashing lights are still turning the night to a carnival, but the men are nowhere close, and the dogs have yet to discern our scent from the jumble of blood and fury.
When I finally turn back, Zinaida is dressed in the set of Charlie’s sweats I threw in on a hunch we might need them.
Some fucking hunch, Luke.
They’re far too large for her, which somehow serves to make me want to tear them right off again. Zin is staring at me, her wide eyes and glistening lips nearly completely undoing whatever common sense I have left.
Get it together. Fast.
Putting a finger to my lips, I tilt my head to the door. She nods.
We exit the container silently, Zin dropping the last six feet into my waiting arms. I take her hand and move her swiftly through the containers to where the fence meets a gate, leaving just enough room for Zin to slip through.
I scale the gate, then lead her through the streetlight shadows to a small alleyway where I’ve hidden my Ducati.
I throw our soiled clothes into the dumpster behind which the bike is hidden, then wheel the bike through the alley to the back of a nearby service station.
I hand Zin a helmet and my leather bike jacket.
She puts on both, climbing on the bike behind me without asking questions.
Luckily.
I’m in no fucking mood to answer them.
I wait until a truck is approaching, then under cover of its roar kick the bike into life and pull onto the motorway behind it.
As we leave Avonmouth a helicopter flies overhead, spotlighting the storage yard beside us, and sirens fly past us to the entrance in a steady stream.
The motorway is mercifully traffic free.
I stick to the speed limit, hoping like fuck we don’t get pulled over, given the amount of weaponry stashed in the carriers.
Zin’s slim body pressed against my own is a constant reminder of how close I just came to losing her completely—and of how comprehensively I’ve just broken every rule in my own fucking book.
I’m no stranger to the adrenaline-filled aftermath of combat.
There’s a reason trainers constantly push recruits to the very edge of endurance, then allow them to feel the euphoria that results from surviving.
It’s an addiction, one the army hands out like a dealer handing out fucking candy, until operators start to crave it.
By the time a professional soldier hits open combat, they want blood so fucking badly they can taste it.
The resulting edge, and the high afterward, are an aphrodisiac that no pill can ever match.