3. Smith
Chapter 3
Smith
C reep doesn’t even begin to describe how I fucking feel right now.
Calista’s stopped struggling but my hands on her feel good, too good to want to stop touching. They make me want to take things further.
Faster.
Harder.
Fuck my life.
“Let me go, you pervert,” she snaps at me in German.
“Not on your fucking life.”
I don’t bother with the German. She’s CIA, so she no doubt has a number of languages under her hat, like me. But while she’s young, she’s fit. I can feel that in the power that she doesn’t bother to try and hold back. She hasn’t learned the knack of going soft and pliant until she launches into fight.
Comes from her fucking desk job.
But that inexperience licks up along my senses and fires into my cock. There’s just something about her. Her fire, her fight, her sass. Maybe all of it. And even though she’s way too young for me, I was drawn in the second I deliberately bumped into her and planted the tracker on her pack.
Maybe it’s the fact she’s pretty, although I’m not the kind of guy who gets dumbstruck by a beautiful face. I’m also not sex deprived, so getting off isn’t the reason why my cock’s in such a twist right now. It’s just her. The way she’s prey with claws and teeth. The way she cased the room and ran from both places, the way she wants to kill me right now.
It’s hot.
It’s pure catnip. Fuck.
She wants to fight me and run, and I want to let her. I want to chase and tackle her down and?—
I deliberately shut down those thoughts before they take hold of my hands and my mouth. “I’m going to check you for weapons,” I growl against her ear.
“I don’t have any, asshole.” This time she speaks English, and the vibration of her muscles warms my skin. “I’m not exactly in combat gear.”
I shift, pressing against her, pushing her into the wall.
Oh fuck, she smells good. Oranges and jasmine, with a hint of spice. It’s an erotic scent that doesn’t seem to belong on her. Or maybe it does. She’s dressed like a punk version of a hooker in schoolgirl cosplay, and now she looks eighteen.
I remind myself I’m not into women below the age of thirty, but this one is shattering that and stirring the fragments into something new and compelling.
“You get your tiny rocks off by doing this? Feeling up young women? Exerting whatever bullshit control you think you have? Does that make you feel like more of a man?”
Shit, her words are poisoned aphrodisiac-dipped syllables. I love the sting of them, and I move, holding her with one hand as I pat down an arm, up along her torso, skimming the underside of soft, full tits .
She hisses air, her ribs fluttering as I deftly switch hands to pat down her other side.
I go lower, skimming along her waist, and then I drop my mouth to her ear. “I’m going to let you go. Try anything and I’ll fucking shoot you. Got that?”
“Not if I shoot you first.”
Laughter bubbles up as I keep a hand on her wrists and step back. She twitches, and I grab my gun, then press it against her temple. “I said I’d shoot.”
“You haven’t yet.”
“You haven’t made an escape.”
“Early days,” she says, her low voice full of the right mix of contempt and challenge that makes me want to tear her panties off with my teeth.
After I’ve tackled her to the ground.
I press the gun firmly against her, but this time she doesn’t even twitch.
The safety’s on, but I have to admire her “fuck you” attitude that could raise boners from the dead.
So I put the weapon away and I slide my hand up her inner thigh.
She gasps.
“Don’t get your panties in a knot,” I murmur. “Just checking for a weapon.”
“I don’t have one there, you jerkoff.”
Slipping my fingers to her outer thigh, I shift up to her hip and then low at the top of her panties. Cotton from the feel.
“You, Miss Price, would be shocked at the places women hide weapons.”
“Unless you’re planning on giving me a pelvic exam, you can trust I’m not carrying.” Her snarl’s ruined by the breathy edge to it.
And now she’s filled my mind with images of sinking into her, seeing if she’s as furnace hot as she seems. Testing the tightness of her, the stretch of her around my cock as I thrust into her.
I want to taste her, bury my nose and tongue in her. Suck on her clit. I want to bite and taunt until she’s an utter mess of pleading offerings.
Fuck.
Slowly, I move to her other hip, trailing my fingers over her ass as I do so. If I was still in the CIA, I’d be fired for this. But I’m not and I don’t give a fuck. She’s warm, and don’t think I didn’t notice how she’s pushed her ass out a little, widened her stance.
It’s the kind of offering that’s as loud as a moan of need.
Calista Price likes it. She’d never admit it in court or to my face, but the fucking little minx, who’s young enough to be my daughter, likes it.
Her response might not even register to herself, but I’m tuned in to her and I let my fingers slide up her inner thigh, up high toward the heat that radiates, the promise of that wet, tight cunt opening for me, beckoning me…
I suck in a breath as she bites off a moan. My fingers pause at the top of her thigh and my knuckles brush the underside of her panties. Her wet fucking panties.
My cock strains against my pants.
“See? I’m not carrying a weapon,” she whispers.
“I’m still checking.”
Knowing that what I’m doing is so wrong barely registers as my hands slide up higher, fingertips dancing a slow waltz over the hot, wet cotton. Back and forth.
She whimpers, pushing into me, and I’m ready to peel off her panties and slip my fingers into her cunt when reality bitch-slaps me.
“Dirty, but no weapons.” I pause. “Or if there are, you’ve shoved them so deep you won’t be able to get them back before I can cause you harm.” I pause a second time. Waiting a beat. “Want to try?”
“You perverted dick.” This time she yanks her arms free and spins out from me.
She slams herself against the wall, much harder than when I did it. And I take a step toward her.
We’re so close, face-to-face, her tits almost brushing my chest as they heave unevenly. I let her go but she doesn’t try and run. “This perverted dick is here to make sure you get back to the States and into the right hands.”
“Or the wrong ones.” She puts her hands on my chest, and I fucking swear my skin sizzles at her touch.
I’m on edge for so many fucking reasons right now, but being jet-lagged and sleep-deprived pales in comparison to the effect this girl has on me.
Goddammit, this isn’t my job.
Feeling her up isn’t my job, either, yet here I fucking am. I hold my ground. She’s unarmed, but I don’t know her skill set. And she looks too young, way too young, even though she’s more than of age to do serious damage.
Her lips are red, parted, and I recognize the rush of color in her cheeks from excitement, from the right buttons pushed, the right switches flicked.
I throb with need.
Calista Price wants to gut me, fuck me, and she looks as confused by that as I feel. My gaze flickers to her window, the thunder outside a low rumble.
Three cars pull up to the curb.
No lights.
Fuck.
“How ready are you to go?”
“I’m not?— ”
“How ready?”
“Before or after I kill you?” Her eyes narrow but I’ve shoved my libido back in its box.
I can’t hear the car doors close or footsteps along the pavement, which means it’s not a raid. No, these people aren’t cops, they’re intelligence.
Or worse, hired killers.
“Kill me later,” I say as I step away from her and head back out to where her computer is in the backpack.
“Shit.” Calista doesn’t look out the window, doesn’t make a move to it, but she’s watching me, reading me like I’m code. “Pull the flower patch off the front of the backpack.”
She doesn’t wait. In the soft half-light she moves quickly, unscrewing an air duct and pulling out a waterproof sealed envelope that I’m betting contains cash, papers, and her passport. Then she grabs some hardware from the stove and under the sink. She’s about to open the freezer when I sling the pack over my shoulder, flick off the safety, and say, “I’ve got your gun.”
“Fucking government grunt.”
“The same government you work for.”
“Bringing it down from the inside,” she snarls.
I can hear the sarcasm lacing her words, but if I were an actual grunt, she’d be slapped so hard with treason she wouldn’t see the sun or freedom again until well after her three-hundredth birthday.
“Watch your fucking tongue.”
“Why? You’ve already judged me.”
“Move it. Now.” I gesture to the door with the gun. “If you don’t, you’ll have much bigger problems than me judging you. Problems that will make you wish you were dead… long before you’re actually killed.”
Getting away from Mitte, the center of Berlin, was anticlimactic. By the time we slid out through the basement where the trash and recycling go, we were in the next building.
From there, darting through the streets was easy. A hot-wired car and a short drive later, we’re at a building that I own in Charlottenburg.
She sits in the kitchen of my apartment, quiet and brooding, her glass of scotch untouched.
Calista’s drowned rat demeanor should be a total dick deflator, but it’s not. I take a swallow of scotch and turn the glass in my hands. We’re both dripping wet, but there’s no way I’m getting changed until I’m sure she’s not going to try to make a run for it.
She’s soaked to the bone, but rats are smart. They fight. And they have a nasty bite.
What’s her bite like?
But honestly, there’s nothing rattish about her; it just makes me feel more in control thinking that way.
“At least the rain washed that makeup off.” Her eyeliner and mascara ran down her face in streaked puddles of black, but she used a tea towel to wipe her face clean. She looks older now for some reason. No longer the little girl pretending to be grown up.
“Hooray for me.” Her gaze flickers from me to her glass, then she takes a swallow, grimacing. “So when are your superiors coming for me?”
I cross over to her and crouch down, boxing her in. “What the fuck are they after and where’s your agent?”
There’s a flicker of something that crosses her face. I’m tempted to say it’s a chink in her armor, but I don’t think so. This is more like… honesty .
“I don’t know what the CIA wants. Or where Johnny is. All I know is he went missing and…” She stops, then drags in a breath. “I took too long to report it.”
Something’s missing from her story but it’s not my business. All that matters is getting her to focus, to trust me enough so I can get her back to the States, and pick up the paycheck Enver doesn’t want.
“Who pulled up outside that Mitte hellhole you were staying in?”
“I don’t know.”
“CIA? BND? FSB?”
She doesn’t look happy with those options, but who the hell would in her position?
I continue to throw out names of government agencies, of big criminal groups. Then I swerve. “What about MI6?” Her eyes roll. “Or maybe the Bolivian Front?”
She jerks, a spasm that’s beyond her control. It wouldn’t be the Front. As a political group or intel collection agency, they’re as efficient as soaked bread.
But I know there are groups in Bolivia being watched. Groups up to unsavory things, just like the ones I took out in that Scottish castle.
I cast my mind over everything big and small and eye her carefully for any telltale signs that I might have hit on something. “Bolivia.” I pause, thinking of information that’s trickled my way. “You’ve been reading the chatter about weapons. Some new type, I’m betting.”
“That’s classified.”
Rising, I put a hand on the table and one on the chair and lean right in close. “I don’t give a fuck about classified. I want to know what I’m dealing with.”
It’s like a light goes off. She sits up straight, looking up at me, her mouth close. Too close. Not close enough .
“You’re not CIA.”
My drowned rat of a jailbait throwback moves. And fast.
She slams her glass into my temple, sending me staggering backward. More from surprise than anything else. Then she runs, darting past me.
“Fuck.”
I bolt after her, ignoring the streak of fire, of desire that surges through me.
Before she can make it to the door, I grab her and she turns, tugging my shirt, pulling me in, and kissing me.
Calista’s lips brush mine, and I twist my hand into her wet hair, some of the strands cascading down over her undercut and I grip. Hard.
“You want to play, little doll? Because this is a big girl game and I’m not sure that you are up for the challenge.”