Chapter Nineteen
“Jack.”
Catarina’s neck arched with her moan.
My hips pumped faster. Her sleek, tight wet clutched my cock.
“Jack.”
Her pussy clenched tight.
There it was, my name falling from her lips while she went over the edge.
My mouth slammed over Catarina’s to capture her groan, and I powered in harder. I fucked her through her orgasm. Pulses turned into flutters. I broke the kiss and pulled out.
“Knees.”
It took Catarina a moment to focus on my command, but then she scrambled to do my bidding.
“Cheek to the bed.”
She did that too.
My hands went to her hips, my eyes fell to her perfect ass perched high. On their own accord, my palms slid down over her ass.
“Time for your spanking, baby.”
I saw her cheeks clench, followed by a shiver.
“Whatever you want, Jack.”
The dichotomy of emotions hit me. The need to possess and mark her mixed with overwhelming love and affection. The need to fuck her so hard she’d feel my possession, and the need to slowly caress and make love to her.
“Right now, I want to turn your ass red.” My hands slowly drifted over smooth skin. “I want to see my handprint on your ass while I’m taking you. I want to hear you mindless. I want you to feel me so deep you never forget who you belong to.”
“Then do it.”
My cock jerked, straining to get back inside. I dipped down, found her slick opening, and slammed home. Tight heat welcomed my intrusion.
My hips pulled back. On an inward glide, my palm came down with a smack. Cat’s pussy rippled. Oh yeah, my girl was going to take her spanking and love it. Two more thrusts followed by cracks to her ass had color blooming.
“More?”
“Yes.”
Her groan drowned out the sound of my palm landing on her ass. I rubbed away the sting and drove my hips forward.
“You gonna come for me again, Catarina?”
“You gonna make me?”
Christ, I loved her smart-ass mouth.
I bent over her, brushing her tangled mess of hair off her back and face as I went. With my chest flush to her back, my cock buried as deep as I could get, I gently kissed her temple.
“Baby, I’m gonna make you see stars.”
Then I set about doing just that. This was not fucking.
It wasn’t lovemaking. It was primal instinct.
There was no rhythm to my thrusts as I drove into her.
Pure madness. Raw, savage need to rut. To make her feel the pleasure she was giving me.
To pull the sweet mews from her lips. I didn’t want to claim, I wanted her to surrender—to relinquish herself to me.
“Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me,” I demanded.
“I love you, Jack.”
I unfolded, came up on my knees, grabbed her hip with one hand while the other one snaked around her belly, down, and found her clit.
“Again.”
“Oh my God,” she moaned and bucked her hips.
“Tell. Me,” I commanded.
Her pussy quivered and clutched, bringing me closer to blowing. My finger on her clit pressed harder. Relentless in my pursuit to get what I wanted.
“Now, Catarina. Tell me.”
“I love you.”
On a long groan she flew apart, bucking so hard my hand slid from her hip to her back to hold her down.
“Yeah, baby, you love me. Don’t ever forget it.”
“I . . . God . . . I won’t, Jack.”
My gaze fell to her red ass. All mine. It dropped lower. I watched our connection, my cock tunneling into her, coming out wet with her excitement, driving back in until it became too much, and I exploded with a violent shudder.
I slammed in, stayed planted, and let her pussy drain me dry.
“I love you so much it scares me, baby,” I groaned through my climax.
The tension waned, my muscles relaxed, and I slowly glided in and out, watching myself take her gentle after I’d fucked her rough.
My hand slid over the pink mark on her ass. “This okay?”
“Oh yeah.”
“You sure I didn’t hurt you?”
“Only in the best of ways. That was . . .” She trailed off.
When she didn’t finish, I glanced up at her face. Her pretty face flushed with sex, her eyes clear and soft.
“Animalistic,” she finished.
She wasn’t wrong. The woman turned me into a straight-up animal.
I pulled out. Kissed the mark on her ass, rolled to my side, pulled her with me, and fitted my chest to her back. Catarina snuggled back and tangled our legs together.
“Do we have time to snooze?” she said as she yawned.
“Yeah, baby. We’re not meeting the team for another few hours.”
It didn’t take long for Cat’s breaths to even out and her body to go lax.
I wasn’t the type to lie in bed and cuddle. When I was awake, I was up. I had better things to do than laze around. But I couldn’t get myself to let her go.
This was not the first morning I’d woken up to Catarina wrapped around me. But it was the first we’d woken up together in our bed, with no bad guys lurking. No immediate threat of danger.
Yet, there would be soon.
We’d be leaving for Mexico, on a favor for a shady CIA officer who I didn’t trust. Catarina would be back in the field, in the line of fire.
That scared the fuck out of me.
I thought back to our conversation on the drive home from the airport.
We were talking about having babies. Then I went to the conversation in the bathroom before our shower—long term, our future.
I wanted that—all of it. Marriage, children, the whole thing.
I just needed her to be with me to have it.
I blew out a breath.
Catarina was well trained, skilled, smart. But that didn’t mean that reckless streak had dissolved.
Fuck.
I kissed the back of Cat’s head and rolled out of bed.
I needed a workout and to make a call, not in that order. I grabbed a clean pair of sweats out of my dresser, went into the bathroom, cleaned up, tagged my phone off the nightstand, and made my way downstairs, scrolling through my contacts until I found the one I needed.
“It’s early,” Lincoln Parker answered.
I couldn’t call the man a close friend, but he was a friend. He also had married a woman who was arguably more badass than Catarina, and that argument would be flimsy. Both women were insanely tough.
“If you’re not busy, I need some advice.”
“Whatcha got.”
“It’s personal,” I warned.
I heard him chuckle.
“A woman’s got you tied in knots,” he rightly surmised.
“Catarina Keys.”
Linc whistled before he said, “Damn, brother. Jasmin met with her a few months back, tried to get her to come work with us at Z Corps. Cat turned my wife down. To say she was bummed would be an understatement. She’s wanted Catarina Keys on our team for a long time.
Jasmin’s of the mind they’re twins born a few years apart by different mothers. ”
I knew Jasmin had approached Cat after our mission in Las Vegas.
It had been an excruciating debriefing with Wilson McCray as we wrapped up our final report on the mission.
At the time, I was doing everything I could to stop myself from calling Cat.
Unfortunately, it was a battle I’d won, and I lost time with her.
“How do you do it?” I cut to it.
“Do what?”
“Not lose your mind every time Jasmin goes out on a mission?”
“Who the hell says I don’t? Brother, you think watching her strap a vest on is easy? That I haven’t had to stop myself from ripping the damn thing off her body and cuffing her to the desk to keep her ass in the office? Every. Damn. Time.”
They’d been together years, had twin boys, and by the sound of it, he still struggled.
“So you’re telling me it doesn’t get any better?”
“Oh, it gets better. As the months slip into years and I get to wake up every morning with my wife at my side and my boys causing mayhem and chaos, it keeps getting better. But does seeing my wife put herself in danger get easier? Fuck no.”
I opened the cupboard to pull out the coffee canister and noted, “This isn’t making me feel any better.”
“Well, shit, Jack, I didn’t know you wanted me to lie.”
I stared at the counter, feeling the burn in my chest getting hotter.
“I can’t fuck this up,” I mumbled.
“Then don’t.”
Easier said than done when I had an anvil sitting in my gut and we were close to going back out.
“It goes against the grain,” he started.
“We’re the protectors. We provide the shield.
It’s hard for men like us to fathom it any other way.
But, Jack, you hooked up with a woman who is exactly like you.
She’s the protector. She’s the shield. Now ask yourself: The man you are, would you have it any other way? ”
I didn’t need to search my feelings. I didn’t need to think about my response. Unreservedly, the answer was no. I’d always known I’d need a strong woman at my side. I’d need someone to push back and keep me in check. I needed a partner.
“It’s a double-edged sword, Jack,” he went on.
“Both edges slice—yours and hers. Dulling her side doesn’t make yours sharper, it weakens the sword.
She will be your greatest asset and your greatest weakness in battle.
It doesn’t get easier, but none of it is.
The things we see, the things we do, none of that is easy. ”
He wasn’t wrong. Nothing about the jobs we did was easy. Each time we went out, we came home with new marks on our souls.
“But I can tell you this, watching my woman do her thing—kick ass, be that shield, rescue hostages, protect those who need her protection, whatever the mission calls for—the one thing I always feel is pride. Here’s this badass, tough warrior princess, and she chose me.
She doesn’t need me to keep her safe. She’s saved my ass many times, she’s been my shield more times than I can count.
“Here’s the trick, Jack. What you need to remember is, you’re strong with her at your back. Together, you make the sword. Two shields cover front and back. Learn to use her strength in battle and the two of you become unstoppable.”
Fuck.
There it was.
What I needed.
“Thanks, brother.”
“You get what you needed?”
I leaned my hip against the counter and looked out the window. The morning sun shone over the ocean. And not for the first time, it hit me. I indeed had everything I needed, only now I was armed with Lincoln’s wisdom.
“Yeah, brother, I appreciate you taking the time to give that to me.”
“Anytime.”
The topic changed to his boys and their antics, what was going on in Maryland, and the new case they were working on. Linc’s brother Zane wasn’t fond of the CIA; he worked with them when it suited him and benefited his company. But if the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, he told them to kick rocks.
“You ever heard of CIA Officer Tom Washington?”
“No, but I can ask around about him.”
“We’ve got Shep on it, but if you wouldn’t mind asking your team, it wouldn’t go unappreciated.”
“Something in particular you’re after?”
I filled him in on our last mission—Catarina being tagged and her phones being tracked—and Tom’s excuse for plausible deniability and Calista being wanted for murder.
“I have heard about Calista Ventura,” he informed me. “She’s wanted for questioning in the deaths of three men. One of them is Victor Stone.”
“Do you know anything about that?”
“Victor was a congressional aide. The other two were lawyers, lived in Virginia, worked in DC, and they were found dead in the home of a White House staffer. Haven’t heard anything on motive. Though Stone’s got a reputation of being a monumental asshole.”
“What kind of asshole?”
“The kind who thinks buying a woman dinner means he’s owed something in return. No formal complaints had been filed, but word was he didn’t like being denied what he thought he paid for.”
Monumental asshole didn’t begin to cover the special kind of fuckwad Stone was.
Hopefully, Shep would have more for us by the time we got up the mountain.
“Something feels off,” I told Linc.
“Something’s always off with the CIA.”
No truer words.
“Part of me gets why Tom would want to meet off US soil. I also get why he’d tag and track his asset. But the timing of it with the president’s wife and kids being part of the target package is the coincidence I’m struggling with.”
“You said Tom’s helped Berta in the past; could be that he really did want the use of her network to help Calista?
Though, it’d be a win-win for him to have the whereabouts of the president’s family in his back pocket, should he need it in the future.
But if Berta’s smart, and I know her reputation so I know she is, the wife and kids will be shuffled around until they’re lost, never to be found. ”
I hoped that was the case.
“But,” Linc continued, “I’ve been dealing with the CIA for a long time, and I’ve never known one who wasn’t an opportunist, and that includes the former case officers who work for us.” There was humor in his tone. “Thankfully, they’re now on our side, and we get the benefit of their manipulation.”
“Good to know those skills didn’t go to waste.”
I heard footfalls padding through the living room.
I turned, and my breath arrested.
She’d pulled on the T-shirt I’d tossed on the floor last night when I got home.
“Cat’s up, gotta go.”
“I bet you do.”
I watched her walk into the dining area and stop by the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Thanks again.”
“Anytime. I’ll hit you back when I know something.”
Linc disconnected. I tossed my phone on the counter and made my way to Cat.
“You were right about this deck. The view is amazing.”
She wasn’t wrong about the view, but I wasn’t looking at the beach.
Pride hit fast and furious.
Catarina had chosen me.
I could lie to myself and say I claimed her, but the truth was, Catarina did the claiming. She was a high-value woman, and there was no way she’d settle for anything less than what she thought was the best. She’d claim her mate, the strongest of the pack, her partner.
Lincoln Parker was one smart son of a bitch.