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  And for a hushed moment, mutual rapture held sway, the silence seething with overwrought passion.

  Coming up for air a moment later, overcome with a novel tenderness, Nick dipped his head and gently kissed Zoe.

  For a nanosecond.

  Jerking back, he growled an obscenity and licked away the blood from his lip.

  “You are not coming in me!” she shrieked, struggling to break free, her self-preservation at stake. “Damn, selfish prick!” Writhing and twisting beneath him, she shoved at his chest with all her strength.

  Not that he noticed. He was talking himself out of hitting her and it was taking awhile. The bitch took a piece out of my bottom lip.

  Equally pissed—No way am I taking a chance of getting pregnant—strengthened by fury, Zoe rolled to her right and lunged for something to hit him with.

  Her fingertips had just brushed the rim of the bedside table when she was slammed back onto the bed and Nick’s fingers were hard around her throat. Stunned, her mind racing, she hoped this was some game he was playing, and then she looked up and saw his cold, merciless eyes.

  Oh God! He’s gone psycho!

  Gasping for air, she fought against his stranglehold.

  His grip only tightened as she struggled, the pressure of his fingers curiously delicate as though he knew just how much power was required to extinguish life.

  Unable to breathe, her lungs burning, spots dancing before her eyes, she understood death was fast approaching. Gathering her last remaining strength, she swung her fist wildly upward.

  In her enfeebled state, Nick barely noticed the tap on his cheek. But he did for a split second. Staring at her in that brief, stark moment, he took note of her terror-stricken eyes—saw an honest-to-goodness vulnerability.

  Both characteristics alien to Harry’s hit men.

  Slackening his grip slightly, he shook his head like a swimmer did breaking the surface of the water—his survival instinct yielding for a moment to reason. If she is an assassin why hasn’t she tried to break my hold in any of the routine ways known to a professional?

  He further loosened his grip, his fingers light now on her throat.

  She frantically drew in great gulps of air, all the while focusing her gaze on his face, fearful he might change his mind.

  “What were you reaching for?” His tone was mild, his dark, searching gaze was not.

  “Nothing—anything . . . whatever I could reach—to hit you with and stop you from—coming in me. You—asshole,” she panted, combative and touchy. Ignoring the reasonable part of her brain that was counseling her to be tactful.

  He half smiled at her nerve or temper—he didn’t know which. But the fear had suddenly vanished from her eyes; they were on an equal footing once again. “I thought you were reaching for my handgun.”

  “So I gathered. Not that—your cock—took issue,” she sarcastically murmured, any last doubts obliterated by his familiar smile.

  “My cock isn’t logical. As you see,” he murmured, his erection swelling inside her. There was something about danger that accentuated sensation, magnified lust. Surviving death was an aphrodisiac he’d discovered while living in a war zone.

  “I’m not so sure—my pussy is logical either,” Zoe ruefully noted, as an unmistakable libidinous ripple vibrated through her vagina.

  He grinned. “I felt that.”

  “I can feel you clear up to my throat.”

  His gaze was amused. “So—how do you like it?”

  “If you must know,” she said, breathing normally again, “I like everything about you. Even though you’re occasionally scary as hell and a prick and definitely not coming in me on pain of death.”

  “Gotcha. And I’ll try to be more congenial,” he softly murmured.

  “You could start by taking your hands away from my neck.” He immediately complied. “Sorry. I thought you were here—” He hesitated.

  “To kill you?”

  He shrugged. “Baggage from my past. I apologize.” As though to mitigate further crises, he picked up the Czech handgun from the table and dropped it on the floor.

  “That was sweet.” The rainbow after the storm. As was his apology. Wrapping her arms around his neck, Zoe lifted her hips into his rigid erection and smiled. “So, are you feeling better now?”

  He grinned. “Sane, you mean?”

  “Sure about me I mean.”

  “Absolutely,” he lied.

  “Perfect. Then we can indulge ourselves properly.”

  He grinned. “And how exactly would that be?”

  “Nonviolently.”

  “Like this?” Dipping his head, he kissed her gently.

  “Ummm . . . exactly,” she purred, the taste of blood perversely erotic. “Although I’m not against a certain brute strength in other areas from time to time.”

  “How about this?” His ran his hands down her waist, grasped her hips, held her securely, and devoted himself for a lengthy interval to a robust exploration of her vagina—leisurely in and out, side to side, rotating from time to time so as to make contact with every susceptible, quivering nerve and palpitating bit of tissue.

  She melted around him, liquid and increasingly frenzied, impatient finally as was her nature, insisting in no uncertain terms that she wanted to come—now.

  There was something about her wild passions that inflamed him beyond the ordinary. Tantalized and provoked—made sex with her more than a game. In fact, he almost forgot himself and came in her as she climaxed—her piercing screams triggering something primal in his brain and cock and gonads.

  He caught himself just in time, jerked out, and came on her stomach.

  Fuck that was close.

  He apologized. “I didn’t quite wait until you finished. Sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  Languidly raising her eyelids, still in the grip of a delicious torpor, she gazed up at him and smiled. “No need to apologize. It was lovely . . . in every way.”

  Lovely was not ordinarily a word he would use to describe an orgasm, but damned if it didn’t apply this time. Along with awesome.

  Which naturally prompted him, very shortly, to repeat the exercise. And with the sexy Miss Chandler lying in his bed, her hot cunt only inches away, who wouldn’t?

  So he did and she did and they did.

  It was amazing how many times you could come when you were primed, when the lady in your bed was more or less insatiable, when her cunt turned even more velvety soft with each additional fuck.

  Or maybe he was just chalking up pleasure points before everything went to shit. A real possibility with Harry’s hit men on their trail.

  Then again, you couldn’t discount Miss Chandler’s pure, unadulterated sex appeal, not to mention her equally insatiable horniness. If he actually believed in heaven, he might consider their carnal compatibility as a match made there.

  A pleasant conceit until, eventually, inevitably, time constraints did put an end to their amorous fun and games.

  Although it was Nick who called a halt to the festivities.

  “Do we have to?” Zoe pouted.

  He was surprised at his virtuousness. Then again, lives were at stake. Perhaps survival trumped sex in the end. “I could find your dildo for you,” he politely offered, rolling off the bed. “But Alan’s chaffing at the bit by now. I have to go.”

  “But I want you, not a dildo.”

  “Tonight, babe.” He smiled and picked up his shorts. “I promise.”

  “I suppose we have to be sensible,” she grumbled.

  “I’ll make it up to you. Word of honor.” He grinned, zipping up his shorts. “So see that you’re rested up.”

  “Yes, sir,” she whispered. “Whatever you want, sir. Your wish is my command.”

  With a soft groan, he slipped his T-shirt over his head. “You’re makin’ this really tough, sweetheart.” He blew out a breath. “Don’t say another word—uh-uh”—he held up a finger—“or you won’t get any.” If he didn’t leave in the next few s
econds, he was gonna nail her again. And Alan would really be pissed.

  He bolted for the door.

  Twenty-nine

  Nick walked into the library, smiling. “Sorry. It took longer than I thought. Did Ginny have any news?”

  “She said to say hi. I don’t suppose there’s any point in giving you a lecture on personal responsibility.”

  “Go for it,” Nick said with a grin. “For your information, I showed up now because I am noble and pure of heart.”

  “Better late than never, I guess.”

  “We can’t all be prudent all the time.”

  “You’d better start thinking about it.”

  “I am, I will—seriously,” Nick said, suddenly purposeful and solemn. He nodded toward the radio Alan was monitoring. “Have you heard anything?”

  “No intercepts from Harry’s execution squad, but Ginny had some info,” Alan briskly replied, pleased to see that Nick was occupied with their issues once again. “Harry is out of the office today to golf—code for he’s away banging his mistress. He keeps a former Miss Alabama in a house he owns in the hunt country. Ostensibly no one knows. In fact, everyone does, including his wife. But such is the way of the world. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  “It would pay to get the coordinates on that house.”

  “I already have them. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Oh, yeah. Provided we survive this assault.”

  Alan grinned. “With our firepower? Don’t sweat it. Pull up a chair. I’ll show you how this early warning system works.”

  Ten minutes later, Nick leaned back in his chair. “What a sweet deal. We should have plenty of time to get into position.” He smiled faintly. “Christ, this baby practically tells you how many minutes you’ve got before the first shots are fired.”

  “They’ll come in on choppers. We have to hit them before they launch their missiles.”

  “Preemptive strike—sounds good to me, healthy.”

  “If we’re lucky they’ll be using some of the local choppers. Old, and slow, no high-tech gunnery.”

  “I’m not so sure. Harry always goes for overkill.”

  “You’re not thinking Apaches?”

  “I doubt there are any around. Everything’s in Iraq. On the other hand, if he’s been planning this operation for awhile— it’s a possibility we have to consider.”

  “Crap. If that’s the case, we have to hit them first. They could take out this whole lakeshore with a couple missiles. But, let’s think happy thoughts instead.” Alan grinned. “Like, will you be needing a copilot on your trip out east—once this is over?”

  “Again, if Ginny doesn’t mind, sure.” I can look at the bright side, too, and ridding the world of Harry Miller is definitely a happy thought. “But if Harry sees his mistress with any regularity, he should be an easy hit even for a one-man operation.”

  “But two’s better. Don’t think you’re gonna have the privilege of taking Harry out all by yourself. Not when I have an account to settle with him, too. He sent our squad into a fucking ambush that first winter in Kosovo. And he knew it, the prick.”

  “So we’d be doing the universe a favor.”

  “You’d better believe it,” Alan muttered, taking a last look at the radar screen. “What say we get to work and set up our defenses? Can you keep your dick in your pants for a few hours?”

  Nick grinned. “I’ll try. I can’t guarantee it though. She keeps me stoked—what can I say?”

  “You might want to think about keeping your mind on business for the duration. When Harry gets back to Washington tomorrow, it’s countdown time for the confirmation hearing. And for us, my friend.”

  “I know, I know. Consider me a monk from now on.”

  “You’d better tell her.”

  “Well, a monk in the daytime at least. What? Okay, I know, night shift starting today—three hours on, three off.” Nick grinned. “So I’ll have to settle for a quickie on my hours off.”

  Alan smiled. “Worst case—you’ll die a happy man.”

  “No joke. I am happy.”

  “I can tell.”

  “And I never thought I’d say that again.”

  “I’m glad for you. There’s nothing like the love of a good woman.”

  “Whoa.” Nick raised his hands. “I wouldn’t go that far. We still don’t know for sure if she’s for real or not”—he grinned— “the hot sex notwithstanding, which is definitely real. But ‘live for the moment’ is my mantra. Speaking of which, we’d better get the planes and boats out of target range. They’ll want to blast them out of the water.”

  “Sounds like a plan. I’ll follow you.”

  In the next few hours, Nick and Alan taxied their planes into a cove two miles northwest of the cabin, camouflaged them, and repeated the drill with two of the boats. Nick left his fastest boat in the boathouse in the event they needed it. Then he and Alan set up the antiaircraft guns in commanding positions on the hill behind the cabin and stocked each gun emplacement with enough ammunition to blow anything that came at them out of the sky.

  Satisfied at last that they could ride out just about any attack, the men rested on the dock and shared a single malt. “We’re as ready as we can be,” Nick murmured. Taking a swig out of the bottle he kept in the boathouse, Nick handed it over to Alan.

  “Bring ’em on, as those in charge of our body politic say,” Alan said with a sardonic grin, lifting the bottle to his mouth.

  “We’d better be more successful than those jack-offs,” Nick muttered.

  “That should be easy enough.” Alan handed the bottle back. “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

  “And hit a moving target from seven hundred feet.”

  “At twelve hundred rounds a minute.”

  “In a rainstorm with nightscopes.”

  Alan grinned. “That was some fireworks blowout over Macedonia.”

  “Impressive, I agree. And good cover for our retreat.”

  “We lived to drink another day.”

  “Amen.” Nick held out the bottle. “Are you drinking or what?”

  But neither overimbibed with Harry’s operational threat imminent.

  Instead, after a few shots, they made use of the sauna as though purifying themselves before battle. Or at least, that’s what Alan did, devotee that he was of a Zen warrior code.

  Nick and Zoe took the opportunity instead to engage in some leisured and not so leisured sex. Afterward, Nick was lying on the top bench waiting for his pulse rate to subside to somewhere in the normal range. Zoe had climbed down to open the window and was pouring water over herself to cool off. Each time she bent over to scoop water out of the large washtub Nick’s cock recorded the event with a lustful jolt.

  “Better not do that, babe,” he murmured.

  “What?” Bent over, she glanced at him over her shoulder with a studiously innocent look.

  “You know what. When you’re bending over like that your pussy is damned enticing.”

  “Like this you mean?” She gave him an even more tantalizing view.

  He came down off the top bench so quickly, she squealed and dropped the dipper. Grabbing her from behind, he shoved her head down, lifted her bottom high, and slid his rampant cock deep inside her alluring, bewitching pussy. “Cock teaser,” he muttered, thrusting and plunging, engulfed by her silken warmth and ardent eagerness. “What do you have to say now?”

  “Thank—you—ever so . . . much,” she panted, turning to smile at him. “From the bottom of my heart.”

  “And from the bottom of your sweet cunt,” he whispered, driving deep into her welcoming body, equally gratified, perhaps as avaricious as she. Certainly as willing to see if quenchless sexual appetites could indeed be quenched.

  He reached up and shoved the window wide open after a time so they wouldn’t die of heatstroke. But it was another kind of heat—voracious and flame-hot—that ultimately brought them prostrate to the floor.

  Once he was
no longer gasping for air, he turned his head toward Zoe and couldn’t help but smile. Her body was shiny with sweat, her hair a mass of curls, her face turned to him and graced with the sweetest of smiles. “Alan’s going to be wondering what happened to us,” Nick murmured. “You look wonderful,” he added apropos of nothing but unreasoning impulse.

  “We probably should go, although I sure don’t want to,” Zoe said, more willing than him to reveal her feelings.

  Reaching over, he gently brushed her cheek. “Thank you Miss Chandler, for a mind-blowing experience—several in fact,” he added with a grin. Then he pushed himself up on his knees, stood, and helped her to her feet.

  He politely rinsed her off first, then himself, opening the door into the changing room afterward and waving her in. They dressed in a companionable, or perhaps lassitude-induced, silence. And with the sun low in the sky, the scent of pine in the air, they walked back to the cabin hand in hand.

  Dinner that evening was subdued—initially from sauna-induced lethargy, but as the meal progressed, the gravity of the coming assault could not be ignored. While Nick hadn’t openly commented on their operation, Zoe was well aware their defensive arrangements were not without cause.

  She wasn’t surprised when Nick said after dessert, “Let me show you the escape tunnel in the event it’s needed. Al and I will be taking turns with sentry duty tonight. Not that we have any definitive information,” he interposed at the apprehension in Zoe’s eyes, “but we’re erring on the side of caution. Should we come under attack, I want you to take cover away from the cabin.” He didn’t say the cabin would be the most obvious target because he didn’t plan on letting Harry’s crew get the drop on them. Zoe should have time to exit the premises.

  “I know you’re anticipating these people coming soon. You needn’t parse the truth. You’ve been getting ready all afternoon.”

  Nick scrutinized her face, wanting her to be genuine. “It’s highly likely they’re on their way. Harry Miller’s confirmation hearing is next week. He needs me gone before the hearing starts.”