Chapter 14 Sadie
SADIE
Idrove for over an hour while Emil tried to get his map to work. Nothing came up on the screen, and we both agreed that it would be best to navigate the rough, winding road without any guidance and stop where it seemed safe.
“What about your watch?” He glanced at it.
I shook my head. “It’s been dead for over a day now.”
He frowned, looking out the window to scan the surroundings.
The silence wasn’t tense, not like I expected it to be.
We’d survived, as a team. We weren’t supposed to be on the same team, but facing danger, we joined together.
And… I liked it, having backup for once, backup I could rely on when it mattered.
But he broke the silence too soon for me to embrace the quiet.
“Do you have some kind of psychic sense of voodoo?” he asked as we stopped at a strip of houses tucked into a quiet village. They looked unoccupied, perhaps like rental units for an extreme vacation option. “You claim to feel when someone is near.”
“No.” I smiled. “I’m just a light sleeper and I feel that sensation of being watched.”
He took my hand as we got out of the Jeep. It wasn’t a controlling hold on me to make sure I stuck with him. It was more like he just wanted to touch me and comfort himself that I was with him.
And I liked it. Dating wasn’t really possible with my career. It wasn’t like I could date the target I was supposed to bring in. But still, for the rest of the night, I wouldn’t overthink it.
I’m only human. It’s been too long since I felt this good. One night of being selfish like this won’t ruin me.
Once we walked away from the Jeep that was hidden under the canopy of low-lying tree branches, we scoped the area for the safest house to break into. He chose the one at the end of another lane, and I looked forward to sleeping in.
It was all I could do as I decided to be selfish and live in the moment with him. I wasn’t betraying my duties. I wasn’t caving to my kidnapper. I was… recalibrating.
Inside, we fell into bed again. It was more like he fell onto me, pinning me in place to fuck me once more. I felt his muscles. I saw how fit he was. But damn, this kind of stamina was going to exhaust me.
In the morning, I woke up in this hideout to the sight of him watching me.
I blinked, a little unsettled by being so exposed and vulnerable to a lethal killer like him. In all my years of dealing with mobsters and criminals, I never imagined cozying up with one like this.
But I had.
And I didn’t want to regret it—yet.
“Sadie Langer.”
Like a mic drop, the warmth of waking up with a rugged lover was gone. It evaporated. Regret snuck in.
All he had to do was say my name, my full name, not the alias on the ID he had to have looked through.
I let my lips tug down as I watched him.
No anger carried in his tone. No malice or annoyance showed from his dark-blue eyes. Stroking my hair from my face as he studied me, he seemed… curious more than anything. But that didn’t make sense. He’d clearly gotten intel from someone overnight.
“One of the Dubinin hackers sent me your file.”
I furrowed my brow. “You had a file on me, specifically?”
He shook his head, caressing my cheek now as he rubbed his thumb over my skin there, like I was a precious find he wanted to take care of and pamper, not preview a file on. “We do now.”
I sighed.
“FBI, huh?”
I nodded.
“Enlisted right out of college.”
“I’m your regular go-getter,” I joked dryly.
“Sounds like it.” He dragged his hand lower to caress my side. With each run of his hand over my hips and then back up near my ribs, I wanted to shiver until the soothing touch. “Because you’re a people pleaser?”
I frowned, not liking the fact that he somehow learned who I was at heart.
“A people pleaser because you were orphaned and then hopped around from one home to another.”
Dammit. Whoever the Dubinin employed as a hacker, they were good.
“My parents were killed when I was young.”
He pressed a gentle kiss to my brow. “Caught in gunfire between two factions of the Cartel in Chicago.”
I exhaled a long, hard breath before nodding.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, almost convincing me to believe it. How could he be sorry that my parents were killed by Cartel thugs when he could be categorized as the same thing?
“Thanks, but you know what?” I sat up, hating that I could be getting this acquainted with the man I still had to figure out how to handle. How to end this magic and bring him in. “I hate this invasion of my privacy.”
Not letting me move away, he tugged me back down. Startled by his possessive grip, I let out a soft grunt when I draped him, held flush to his slightly hairy rock-wall of a chest.
Feeling his erection wouldn’t distract me this time.
Not after he’d helped himself to details about me.
“You don’t know me,” I warned, hating how I was giving away how defensive and hurt I was.
I needed to aim more for a teasing, sarcastic approach, but I was too bothered with his beating me even with one step.
“I do know you,” he countered playfully, as if he noticed the turmoil in my eyes and wanted to go back to that lighter sense of a connection we were exploiting.
“No, you don’t.” Dammit, I was totally pouting now.
With that slow grin that charmed me, he tugged me over until I was fully on top of him.
“I know how to please you,” he said as I sat up, straddling him.
He was impossible.
Insatiable.
Wild for me.
And I wished I could make that part of what we shared permanent.
“Oh, you do?” I taunted, relieved to steer him away from what he’d learned about who I was.
I doubted that his hacker found anything about my current and biggest case, researching the Obsidian Eye alliance and stopping its formation.
If he was aware of that focus of mine, he could assume I was getting close to him to ask about his father.
No matter how much we were enjoying each other physically, I had to remind myself that he was a son loyal to his father, a spy and killer committed to his family.
But right now, as he cupped my breasts and rubbed his thumbs over my nipples, he was just mine.
He nodded. “Yeah.” Moving too fast for me to track, he slid his hands over my sides until he held me and rolled us. I landed on my back and closed my eyes as he started a slow trail of hot kisses over my body. “Yeah, I do,” he said belatedly, brushing his lips over my pussy.
I shivered at the friction of his beard against my sensitive skin there.
It felt so good, but I wanted his mouth on mine.
Tugging on his hair earned me a wince from him.
I didn’t stop, urging him to come up until I could kiss him deeply.
As he moaned in agreement, he lined up to thrust into me with an agonizing slowness that drove me wild.
Hooking my legs around his waist, I sighed at the perfection of that delicious stretch. At the pressure against my clit. The fullness of him in me and the security of his arms around me.
“Yeah,” I agreed as he drove into me steadily, pushing me closer to come. “You do,” I said, repeating his claim. Fast and hard or slow and gentle, he knew how to make me come. I was sore, so very raw from having more sex in two days than I’d had in many years.
But for now, until we had to figure out the next step, I’d take advantage of every second of this that I could.
Shouts sounded from outside the house, and we both went still.
He stared at me, scowling. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
I frowned as well.
More Cartel thugs were near, pounding on the doors of every house in the area from the sound of it.
“You don’t have a tracker on you, do you?”
He smirked at me.
I shrugged.
“I know you don’t. You don’t have anything on you. Not even your phone.”
I smiled, wondering how daring we could be this time. I squeezed around him, then using my legs around his waist, I thrust up toward him.
He gave me one of those slow, sexy smiles as he resumed fucking me, hurrying until we both came together. Just in time to get dressed and rush out of there, on the run again.