Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
He put down his dictionary. He’d forgotten one thing about dangerous women. They hated not being in control. And when they felt their control being threatened, they tended to be extremely obstinate. Their independence both irritated and amused him. It also had the perverse effect of turning him on.
Sleep-deprived. Nursing a leg injury. One could say Elena Rostova had had a pretty active day, from elevator-surfing, to hand-to-hand combat, to running down twelve flights of steps, to being chased by several unknown assailants and being shot with a tranquilizer.
Most of the operatives from the mission were already asleep or relaxing somewhere. None of them had had the same strenuous two days she had had. And what was she doing? She was going to take a swim.
She was being extremely obstinate about something. The look of defiance on her face told him that she suspected that he would be watching her sooner or later. Of course he would, especially once he’d checked her sleeping quarters and found no one there.
He’d wondered how long the serum would stay in her system.
In his opinion, a little too long. She should be in bed, exhausted.
But there she was, larger than life on the screen, peeling off her clothes carelessly.
His eyes narrowed slightly as he caught the brief wince of pain crossing her face as she pulled her pants off.
She was starting to come down. He buzzed Dr. Kirkland’s line.
“Has she called you yet?” he asked.
“No, but I just text-messaged her and she sent back that she’d just taken the painkillers but was feeling fine.”
“Does she even know what time of day it is?”
“I don’t think her body will care, especially if she continues to fight sleep.”
“She has a high tolerance for pain, then,” he remarked, returning his attention to Helen. “When you talked to her, was she emotionally stable?”
“Yes, normal. Why?”
“She wasn’t acting sensitive to light?”
“No, nothing similar to Armando’s symptoms at all. Not yet, anyway.”
“I’ll call you back, Doc. Get some rest. Some of us should.”
He leaned back and sipped on his drink as he watched the screen thoughtfully. She obviously didn’t want to return to her quarters. Why? Was it because she didn’t want Dr. Kirkland to examine her? But she wasn’t hiding the pain, so what was it she didn’t want Dr. Kirkland to know?
Her body gleamed in the soft light reflected by the pool.
She didn’t dive in, like she usually did, but sat at the tiled edge and draped her long legs over the shallow end.
He watched the water slowly covering her body as she lowered herself in, lapping up her thighs, hips, narrow waist, to just below her breasts.
Her eyes were closed as she stood there, not moving deeper.
He waited, his eyes feasting on her naked breasts, so white against the dark water.
She was beautiful, like a water nymph, and he didn’t bother to curb the desire rising hard in him.
She slowly sank deeper and her long sigh sounded lush, sensuous, even through the speakers, reaching out in a secret caress.
He took another sip of water. Elena Rostova might not know who he was, but she knew how to get to him.
He should be irritated. The initial plan was to let her rest, with him sleeping the same hours, letting their brain waves get in sync, and waking her up very early tomorrow and getting in another VR session.
She would be rested but not a hundred percent, and still edgy from the serum in her system.
The second time would be tougher because she would be prepared, so he had to initiate the attack while she was still tired. He would push her until she gave in.
He needed sleep himself. But he couldn’t till she went to bed, too, not if he wanted to prepare for the next VR session.
She sighed again, a catlike purr that had nothing to do with exhaustion.
His eyes narrowed slightly as he studied her.
She sounded like a woman being pleasured.
She wasn’t swimming, just bobbing up and down in the water.
Every time she pushed off the floor of the pool, her breasts teased him, wet and perky, and then they would disappear as her weight brought her back underwater, and she repeated this with her eyes closed, as if that were the most pleasurable thing to do.
His attention was riveted to her face, her sighs, her tantalizing breasts.
She had never done this before. The sight made him want to join her in the pool.
Naked. With her back against the wall, so he could push inside her hard.
With her purrs against his ear as he molded those soft breasts in his hands.
As if she saw his fantasy in her mind, her hands reached up and massaged her nipples. Her low hum of pleasure zapped like an electric rod through him. The woman wasn’t sleepy. Or tired. She was turned on.
She began swimming leisurely. Back and forth. Breaststroke, then backstroke, then breaststroke again. After the third lap, she suddenly stopped. She slapped the water hard with the palm of her hand.
“Dammit, dammit!” she murmured. “I’m too tired to swim any faster.”
He cocked his head. Why was she avoiding sleep then? He watched as she pulled herself out of the pool and without picking up the towel nearby, she walked over to the hot tub.
“Very hot water,” she said as she slipped in slowly, like she was in some pain with that leg.
She turned on the jets. She propped the injured leg against the jet and groaned.
Ah, that felt good to her. Her body was coming back to normal and she was, for some reason, fighting it and yet enjoying it at the same time. He had to get her alone so he could find out why for himself.
It wasn’t going away. She could feel exhaustion knocking at her consciousness, and still she couldn’t relax.
She must be going nuts. She was fantasizing about a virtual reality man.
He wasn’t real, girl. Stop thinking about him.
But it was tough not to in her strangely sensitized state.
Every small sensation ran across her skin like a rush of heat and air.
Every movement made her squirm, left her a little breathless.
It reminded her too much of how she felt when Hades had touched her during the RV session. The more she thought of it, the more her gut tightened, as if her mind was deliberately feeding off her own feelings.
Her reaction to Armando’s kiss had frightened her a little. That strange heat had charged through her system, overwhelmed her with a need for…
She shook her head. For sex? She shook her head again. She didn’t want Armando, not in her head. His kiss and touch had somehow evoked the same intense desire she’d felt with Hades. But that was Hades manipulating her with pleasure. So what was manipulating her now?
Helen sighed. She couldn’t even explain it to herself, so how was she going to do that with Dr. Kirkland? This Jacuzzi was perfect—she didn’t have to move too much, and that racing currentlike feeling inside her had slowed down to a manageable crawl.
She could sleep here. And wake up a prune.
The jet of water hitting the side of her calf felt wonderful, in a pleasure-pain sort of way.
The whirling hot water was a different kind of pleasure—slow and lulling, giving her body a gentle all-over massage.
But it wasn’t enough. She was still edgy inside.
She knew the moment she stopped the whirlpool, that sensation would return.
“Mind if I join you?” A voice mixed in with the noise from the hot tub jets.
Helen opened her eyes. It was Heath, in swimming trunks. Didn’t these commandos go to sleep? And why did they all have to look so damn good? In her current state, that was so not helping.
She shrugged. What could she say? Go away, I don’t want anyone near me? Besides, the guy had saved her life today. Or yesterday. She frowned; she couldn’t tell anymore.
Heath lowered himself into the tub. “Usually this place is empty when I come here,” he said.
“I don’t even know what time it is,” Helen told him. “So am I interrupting your swim time?”
Those brown eyes, she noted, were back to that melt-me expression again, but she couldn’t help remembering the other look she had seen recently, the one he’d used on the prisoner. Layers, these guys all had layers.
“No,” he said. His eyes traveled to the water swirling around her shoulders. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Why? Is there a schedule that marks this place closed at this hour?” she asked with a smile. “Besides, I just told you I don’t even know the time.”
His smile was slow, his teeth very white in the shadows. “You shouldn’t be here naked then,” he amended.
There was that. “You see, we could ignore that part and just have a nice conversation about what time it is,” she mocked, “but no, you have to say the obvious. Besides, if you were a gentleman, you wouldn’t have joined me. You would have said, ‘I’ll come back later.’”
Helen leaned back against her tub, trying to be comfortable again. Maybe if she kept talking, she would distract herself. “Tell me, Heath, do you come here for your downtime after work? You were working, weren’t you? Or you would be off resting with all the others.”
“There’s work and there’s work,” he said, his eyes steady.
“Just like there’s touching and there’s touching?” she asked, arching her eyebrows, reminding him of their earlier banter. “You sure have a way with words.”
He leaned back, too, and surveyed her lazily for a few moments.
The spray from the moving water had dampened his hair into dark tendrils.
A thin gold chain with a small pendant gleamed against his wet chest. The pendant had an unusual shape and color, but she couldn’t really make out what it looked like.
“We could talk, but what are you going to do when you have to leave?” he asked.
She looked at him seriously. “What if you have to leave first?”
His lips curved again. “I’m a very patient man.”