Chapter 5
Kade
She grabs her coat and gets out of the car half asleep, standing in the cold night air of a late fall Wisconsin night, hugging her coat to her. I grab her purse and my belongings from the back seat and come around to meet her. “Over there,” I tell her, pointing to the white SUV. “That’s our ride.”
Her eyes narrow at me. “I’m not going to be part of stealing. I’ve worked my ass off trying to stay on the right side of the law while growing up with a brother that’s in the middle of anything criminal that comes along.”
I put my hand on her lower back. “Not stolen. I have some friends that left it for me. I texted them before we left Chicago. The tolls have cameras and if anyone traces you to me, they can find out what type of car I have and it doesn’t take much to find it these days with all the technology, especially if you know someone that can hack into the highway cameras. ”
“I see. Don’t have to go to the bathroom yet. I fell asleep before I could drink my coffee.”
I open the passenger door, and she jumps in. “Now, we go off the grid. No electronics on you, in your purse, nothing, right?”
“You tossed the guts of my cell before we left.”
I close my door as she pulls the seat belt around her and then uses her coat for a blanket.
I reach around in the back and grab one of the blankets on the seat, place it around her, and then turn on the heat.
“You’ll be warm in no time,” I tell her.
Her scent fills my senses and when I look at her, those deep brown eyes are hazy, still half asleep, and I can’t help but wonder what I was doing in her dream, because I know my name when I hear it, especially when it’s said on a moan.
“Much better. Thank you, Kade.”
The way she says my name, even awake, makes my dick throb.
I strap into my seat belt, pull the vehicle out of the road stop and make my way to the highway.
She isn’t the assignment. It would serve us both well for me to keep my eyes on the job and not on her delectable little body, but that’s going to prove harder than fuck.
Ava turns the station on the radio a gazillion times and gives up in frustration. She just can’t seem to sit still. I push a button to engage the satellite station. “There. Now you can surf to your heart’s content.”
“So, where are we really going?”
“A cabin in the woods, where no one but the black bears and deer will know where we’re at.
We’ll lay low. If those men after your brother have half the smarts I think they do, they already know we’re in Wisconsin.
They’ll just be looking for my vehicle and right now it’s headed back through the tolls and on its way back to my place.
That should have them chasing their tails for a little bit and give their leaders a chance to cool off and me a chance to get back into the city and see what’s going on. ”
“You think they’ve killed my brother?”
“No, I don’t. I think they want your brother to give them information. My guess is this project you were talking about is something their enemies want a piece of, and they’re going to buy in any way they can if the deal is as lucrative as you made it sound.”
“And if they get me, they know they can force my brother’s hand?”
“Yes, you or your mother.”
Her eyes go wide. “I need to call her. I know Paulie said his friends had it covered, but if it’s their rivals they probably know every place they’ve gone.”
“No, it’s been taken care of. I called a few friends while you slept and your mom’s on her way to Wisconsin as we speak.”
She sits up. “What? How did you swing that?”
I grin. “Friends in all the right places. I would have picked her up, but it’s not advisable for you both to be in the same place, at least until this thing is resolved.”
“In case they find one of us, they don’t find us both.”
Ava’s got a good head on her shoulders, and she knows it’s the best thing for both of them, whether she wants to be with her mom or not.
“I don’t know where you came from or why you were sent,” she says as she crosses her heart, “but thank you. Seriously, thank you. That woman means the absolute world to me.”
I swallow down the emotion bubbling in my chest. One lie after another, every new one creating the need to tell another one in order to cover my tracks.
I glance at the time on the dash and put my foot to the accelerator a little more to make the next meet in time.
As soon as I pass another road stop, I watch for a car parked on the side of the road with the lights flashing.
About two miles up I see it. No highway cams out in the middle of nowhere.
I slow to a crawl before pulling off onto the shoulder behind the sleek silver sports car. “Stay here,” I tell her.
I get out and walk up to the driver’s side of the car. Damian rolls the window down. “Back seat.” I open the door and grab the duffel bags. “Thanks, Damian. Is this it?”
“Nope, there’s some stuff in the trunk too.”
“I appreciate you doing this. Were you able to get everything on the list?”
“We got everything on the list. Look, no one expected the situation to get this deep for you. We all respect the way you’re taking care of the girl.”
“Jay, too?” I ask, knowing he’s got most of the influence with this elite team of ex-military, street runners, and badasses who walk a fine line between right and wrong and work to protect some of the wealthiest men on earth and notorious too.
He wasn’t thrilled when Damian asked to bring me on board as a favor to my sister.
“Even Jay. In fact, he just called. He said your place got raided, ransacked to shit were the words he used actually, and your car’s busted up pretty bad too, my friend.
Windows, tires, and the body are all beat to hell. They wanted to leave you a message.”
“Yeah, message received. They won’t be happy when they get the return message.
Lousy fuckers. This was definitely not an expected turn of events, but I’m glad I was in a position to step in and help Ava.
We’ll still be able to get the information we need about the shipment as long as they don’t off Paulie. Him and the mom, both okay?”
“They are. Actually, things couldn’t be better. After all this is done, you come out smelling like a rose. You save both the mom and the sister, Paulie’s going to trust you for sure. No matter how you get there. Earning his trust, that was the plan, right?”
“Gotta get back and get her tucked away.”
“Here’s a couple more burners. You didn’t use your own phone to call us, right?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Ex FBI, years undercover, not a fucking chance.”
I get back in the car after piling all the groceries, fire starter, and necessities for the cabin into the back. “Surely we could have stopped for that stuff. No one’s going to recognize us in the area, right?” Ava says.
“Exactly, and if they don’t recognize you, that means you’re not local and you don’t belong. You stand out like a sore thumb, easy to remember if someone comes asking around, right?”
She nods. “Gotcha. You’re pretty smart.”
It takes a while to navigate the back roads with the snow that’s starting to accumulate the farther north we go.
We get to the cabin, and I park as close to the door as I can so we can unload the stuff, but the cabin hasn’t been used for a while and is cold saturated.
Even starting a fire in the fireplace in the living room doesn’t begin to take the chill from the room right away.
Ava is shivering and wraps one of the blankets around the coat she already has on.
I take Ava’s hand and bring her closer to the fireplace with me.
“Come here, let me warm you up.” I sit on the floor with her, pulling her back against me, wrapping the blanket around the two of us, rubbing her shoulders and letting the warmth of my chest permeate her back until the fire begins to blaze and she’s not shivering anymore.
She turns and raises her face to me, and her hair dances in the firelight, her eyes all aglow beneath that beautiful frame of lashes.
“Kade?”
“Yes?”
The pulse on the side of her neck beats faster and as her face gets closer my hands automatically cradle her neck, mesmerized by the expression on her face.
Her eyes close and I kiss the lush, soft lips I’ve been thinking about for miles and miles, even before I heard my name spill from them in sleep.
She purrs her pleasure as I deepen our kiss, turning so that she can snuggle closer.
And when she looks up at me this time, her eyes are hazy, bedroom eyes that make me feel like the deceitful heel I really am.
Especially after what she told me about the struggle it took for her to make a new life for herself.
I stroke her cheek. “You really should steer clear of me. I’m not the man you think I am. Lots of skeletons in my closet.”
She smiles up at me and runs her pink painted nail tip across my lip.
“Lots of skeletons in my closet too. Terrible, terrible things that I did when I was younger. I was just lucky that I woke up before it was too late to get my shit together. Let’s face it, my brother wasn’t exactly a good influence.
The people he hung out with even worse.”
“But you got out,” I tell her, “and look at the woman you are today.”
She smiles. “My mom had to work long hours to keep a roof over our heads. It was always going to end up that way for me, and it did. One close call passing a bag of dope to someone was enough to make me wake up and get my act together. I left and made a new life for myself, and I’ve never regretted it for a minute.
I love my brother and my mother, but I really only came back to Chicago for her.
He’s not going to change, and I can’t bear to see Paulie self-destruct. ”
Ava leans back in my arms and turns, exposing the long creamy neck that leads to her peach-sized breasts molded under her skintight shirt.
I lean down and kiss her, drawing her to me, listening to her breathe and feeling her heart beat in time with my own, forgetting every good intention that I had.
She rubs her breasts against me, and in one swift movement, I roll her, pulling the layers of blanket and coat from between us so that I’m lying beside her on the bearskin rug.
“You’re going back home with your virtue intact. As much as I want you, it’s not happening like this,” I tell her, stroking her cheek and kissing her glossy lips.
She pouts, and my dick throbs.
I tap her on the nose. “No.” It’s not a good idea to get involved with a woman I may never see again after this job is over, for so many reasons, including the job that I may lose if I don’t keep my head in the game.
Ava pouts again and pushes her mound into my groin.
I smirk and roll on top of her. “What did I say?”
She grins. “I got an F in listening skills. It’s as though whatever I don’t want to hear just floats in one ear and out the other. Seriously,” she tells me, nodding for emphasis.
“So you didn’t just hear me tell you no.”
She shakes her head. “Nope.”
I cage her with my body, keeping most of my weight on my elbows, closing off any more conversation, capturing her lips, good intentions be damned.
Her body heats just as quickly as mine, her hands crawl along the side of my neck, letting her fingers run through my hair as my lips trail down the side of her neck, kissing the sensitive area between her collarbone and neck, a spot that makes her moan with pleasure.
She likes it harder. The more pressure I apply, the more responsive she is.
I slide her shirt up and over her head, kissing from her navel up to the edge of her lacy bra before removing it altogether, taking a nipple into my mouth and caressing the other peach-sized breast with my hand, listening to her moan and feeling her hips raise to meet my hardness.
“Still, let the pleasure build,” I tell her, restraining her hands with one of mine as I suck harder, and unzipping her pants with the other.
Her soft little pants are coming faster and faster. “Still baby,” I tell her, sliding her jeans down and off and taking her lacy panties with them. “Now I can see all of you.”
I pull my shirt over my head, stand to get a condom out of my wallet, and shuck out of my pants before lying next to her again.
“Now we start all over. Where were we?” I ask, teasing one nipple with my finger as I make my way lower, kissing along the hollow of her stomach and over her baby soft mound, dipping my tongue into the slick folds below.
Her hips arch, but I grasp them with my hands, holding her still, forcing her to accept the pleasure and grasp the bearskin rug with her hands to stave off her cries of desire.
The light of the fire flickers over her body as her head tilts with pleasure, lolling first from one side to the other as I stroke from the center to over the top of the little bud that causes her to writhe under my tongue. “So good, please, please.”
“You beg so sweetly, baby,” I tell her, sliding a finger, then two, into her channel deep, as I continue to lick the juice from her folds.
“Kade,” she cries softly, but I keep her on edge, and do it again, and then again until she can no longer bear the wait.
“Come for me, now.”
Ava’s entire body trembles and shakes as I kneel, aligning myself to her entrance, dipping the end of my cock into the creamy center before plunging straight to her center, never letting her climax really end, just extending the waves until new ones build, the pleasure getting more and more intense until she’s right back on the edge again and only when she’s calling my name over and over again, do I drive faster, and then faster, her voice getting louder and louder as I pummel us both over the edge, and don’t stop until she’s fully sated and the waves have subsided.
I roll her with me, still joined as one, kissing her lips, pushing her hair back from her face. “I warned you to stay clear of me. Now there’s no escaping.”