“Yeah. I haven’t been with many women, and never with a whore or a drug-user. And I give blood at the Red Cross, every three months, so I’m tested regularly.” He said it with an earnestness that touched her. Diaz was so sure of himself in every other way; she liked this more human side of him. She sensed that he really had to trust a woman before he’d let down his guard enough to be intimate with her, and even then he probably kept a tight rein on his emotions.
Tonight, she would find out.
She leaned over and kissed him. “Forget the condoms. I’m on birth control.”
He took control of the kiss, and he might not have had a great deal of sexual experience, but he knew what he was doing. He kissed her deeply, a little roughly, and with growing urgency. When he set her back from him, his eyes were narrowed and fierce. Without a word he put the truck in gear, and they roared down the highway toward Boise.
20
The tension between them grew more the closer they got to the hotel, until it was thick and smothering. She tingled from head to foot, her thoughts feverish as she thought about what she was going to do. Against all common sense, she was going to bed with Diaz. This might just be a very human reaction to the danger they’d survived together, she might regret it in the morning, but she was going to do it.
She was so hungry for him that she ached with need, so desperate to feel him inside her that she thought she might climax as soon as he touched her. She wanted to tell him to pull over to the side of the road so she could straddle his lap and get it done, now, before she died from tension. But, like him, she wanted a bed for what was going to happen between them, so she kept silent and gritted her teeth against the sheer lust that gnawed at her.
Finally they were there. He stuffed his feet into his wet boots, left his socks on the floorboard, and got out. Milla wasn’t about to hop out with only fabric and pieces of bark to protect her feet, so she sat there while he came around and opened the door to lift her out. She thought that this time he might let her slide along his body, but he held her at least six inches away and set her gently on her feet. She looked up into his face, expecting the hard, remote expression so natural to him, and finding exactly that. But he tucked her against his side and walked with her into the hotel.
The night desk clerk looked at them with curiosity as they approached, and she knew he didn’t often see a woman with rags wrapped around her feet. At least with the new sweatshirts they didn’t look homeless. If it hadn’t been for that, she suspected the desk clerk might have called security.
On the way up in the elevator, she and Diaz stood side by side, not talking. She could feel every heartbeat; even her fingertips were tingling.
He tried his key card and wonder of wonders it still worked.
He unlocked his door and ushered her inside, turning on the light in the tiny entrance. Suddenly feeling like Little Orphan Annie, Milla sidled toward the open connecting door to her room. “Uh—let me get my feet unwrapped and take a shower, and I’ll—”
“Sit down,” he said.
She blinked at him.
He pulled out a chair and pushed her down into it. After turning on the bedside lamp, he knelt and began untying the knots that held the sleeves around her feet. When her feet were bare, he carefully examined them, looking for scrapes or cuts, but she’d come through the ordeal in good shape.
When he was finished, he stood up and she did likewise, shoving a hand through her unruly hair. “I’ll take a shower,” she said again, trying to step past him, but he curved a hand around her waist and pulled her back to him.
“The shower can wait.”
“My hair—the river water—”
“The water was clean.”
“But I’d rather be fresh.” She didn’t know why she was making excuses now to delay what was going to happen, but she was suddenly nervous. It had been a long time for her, and Diaz wasn’t an ordinary man. Both facts were staring her in the face, and she wanted to slow this down.
He unsnapped her jeans and said, “I want you just like this.” Then he kissed her.
There was nothing romantic about Diaz, no murmured sweet things, no gallant gestures, just this kiss that went on and on, deep and voracious. She’d never been kissed like this before, with an intensity that stripped everything down to the simplest components: male, female. He held her with his hand burrowed into her hair, her skull gripped in his palm, her head tilted back while he fed from her mouth. That was what it felt like, a taking. And yet he gave, too. He gave pleasure. She burned with it, the flames fueled by nothing more than his mouth and tongue.
His erection bulged in the crotch of his jeans. It was a rock-hard presence pushing against her stomach, and her loins tightened with need. Frenzied now, she pulled back a little, fought with button and zipper and won, wrenching the damp cloth aside so she could grasp the hard length that thrust outward. She wrapped her fingers around him, delighting in the thickness, the silky slide of his skin. She moved her hand up and down, circling the thick crown of his penis and dragging a deep, raw sound from his throat as he shuddered convulsively.
His arms tightened and he bore her down on the bed and, in twenty tumultuous seconds, had her stripped naked. Another ten had his own clothes on the floor. He put his hands on her knees and pushed them apart, not waiting for her compliance, and moved into place over her. Milla put her hands on his ribs, holding on as he braced his weight on one arm while with his other hand he guided his penis to her and in the same rough motion pushed deep inside.
He froze in place, his breath panting between his parted lips as they stared at each other. She couldn’t move; the feel of him inside her was too sharp, almost painful in its intensity. Their gazes met in the mellow lamplight, and she was mesmerized by the tension in his face, the way his steely muscles were locked as if he didn’t dare move. It built and built, that clawing need, and yet she remained poised on the razor’s edge of something she knew she couldn’t control. His chest suddenly heaved on a convulsive breath, and he moved in a long, deep stroke that took him all the way to the hilt.
She clenched: her vagina, her entire body. She clenched around him and her vision blurred and she began to come, wave after wave of almost blinding pleasure. She had never come like that before, so totally lost in the physical that she had no sense of self, of surroundings, of anything beyond the moment and the ecstasy that spasmed in her belly, down her legs, along her nerve endings. He rode her through it, thrusting hard, demanding his own release and in doing so prolonging hers. He made that raw sound again and arched back, shaking convulsively as his hips jerked and plunged before, long seconds later and trembling in every muscle, he slowly collapsed on top of her.
The aftermath was like a wasteland, desolate and empty. She lay beneath him, too exhausted to move, barely able to breathe, and fought the urge to cry. She had never before been weepy after sex and didn’t know why she should be now, but she felt a haunting need for comfort. She wanted to bury her face against his shoulder and sob like a child.
Because this had been a monumental mistake? Or because it was over?
Even though he lay heavily on her, sucking deep breaths into his lungs, she could still feel a fine, subtle tension running through his every muscle, as if he never quite relaxed—as if he was already thinking of moving on.
What did one say after an experience like this? “Wow” seemed both inadequate and out of place. “Do it again” was what she wanted to say. Right at this moment, she never wanted to be separated from his body again. Sanity would return, she was certain. Maybe in another few minutes. Maybe tomorrow. Until then, she wanted him inside her. She wanted to feel again what she had felt moments before, though she didn’t know if she could muster the energy to try, or survive it if she did.
“Do it again.” She said it anyway, because she couldn’t not say it. She slid her legs up his sides and coiled them around him, clung to him with her arms, tilted her pelvis in an effort to hold his softening penis.
&
nbsp; He laughed, that low, rusty growl of sound, and his breath was warm in her hair. “I’m not sixteen. You’ve gotta give me a few more minutes than this.” He still sounded a bit breathless. But he didn’t withdraw from her; he settled down a bit more heavily, as if he finally relaxed that last little bit, and snuggled in so that as long as they didn’t move, his penis would remain inside her. “I think that lasted about fifteen seconds.”
“I didn’t last that long,” she murmured, closing her eyes and inhaling the warm male scent of his skin.
“Thank God.” He nuzzled her temple, then whispered, “Take a nap,” and he closed his eyes and proceeded to do just that.
This was nothing like the first time he’d told her to do that. This time, the feel of him on top of her was so wonderful she was still fighting tears. How could he expect her to sleep when he weighed a ton and she could barely breathe, when she wanted to cling to him and cry and laugh at the same time? How could she sleep when she was afraid to relax her muscles, lest she lose him? And yet she did, too exhausted to do otherwise.
She woke to long, slow strokes that went deep into her, to his hard hands gripping her bottom as he tilted her up and ground her clitoris against his pubic bone. He might not have had vast experience, but he knew what he was doing, knew all the hot spots and pleasure points of her body, and he used that knowledge to push her high and keep her there, without letting her go over the edge. This time was as prolonged as the first time had been brief. After a while she began struggling with him for supremacy, fighting him for her release, but he was too strong and controlled her until he was ready. Then he rode her hard and fast and hurled them both into orgasm.
She finally got her shower, though with him in there with her it was more orgy than shower. He paused once, with the water pouring over them, and touched the patch on her hip. “What’s this?”
“My birth control patch.”
He regarded it with interest. “I’ve never seen one before. What if it comes off?”
“I’ve never had one come off until I take it off. They stick pretty good. But I check it every time I shower, just to make sure.”
He trailed his fingertips over the slope of her breasts, then lightly circled her nipples. His expression was serious. “I’ve never had sex without wearing a condom before.”
“Never?”
He shook his head. He watched his fingers as they moved down her stomach, over the gentle curve of her belly, before curving into the notch between her legs. His two middle fingers slid between her folds and up into her. Milla’s breath hissed between her teeth and she lifted onto her toes, clinging to his shoulders for balance.
“I liked it,” he murmured.
“What?” She had totally lost the thread of their conversation.
“Coming inside you. So don’t lose that patch.”
She had never been into kinky sex; oral was as far as she would go. But Diaz knew no boundaries on her body and she was drunk with physical pleasure; she let him do whatever he wanted. He took her in the shower, on the floor, sitting on the vanity. He put her against the wall and took her standing up. It was sex as she had never known it before, raw and powerful, surprisingly sophisticated in execution but primitive in design and intent. And she kept coming back for more, arousing him with his penis in her mouth, her hands cupping his heavy balls and feeling them tighten, and doing some of the same things to him that he’d done to her, just to hear the thick groans he gave.
By morning, she was raw and sore, and knew walking would be an effort. By morning, she could barely remember what it had been like to not know his body, not to have felt him inside her and held him in her arms and absorbed the power of his thrusts as he came. By morning, she was his.
She woke to see light seeping around the edges of the pulled curtains. He lay behind her, one heavy arm draped over her waist, his breath warm on her shoulder. She felt stupid. She was more than a little shocked at herself, but there it was: she was his, in a way she had never been David’s. The knowledge hurt her. Though until the day Justin was stolen, her marriage had been a happy one, she had remained her own person and David had remained his. He had been absorbed in his work, of course, as he still was, and she had been content to have that small, almost imperceptible distance between them. It had felt good, that sense of autonomy, of controlling her own life.
But David was a civilized man, and Diaz . . . wasn’t. He hadn’t let her maintain that tiny sense of distance.
She knew very well she had bedded down with a predator. He was dangerous, unpredictable, and she had never felt safer than when she was in his arms. He had used her for his pleasure, but he had also let her use him in return. Last night hadn’t been just sex, though she had thought it would be. Instead it had been a . . . claiming, raw and raunchy and unexpected.
How could she have known he wanted that? She could have handled her emotions better if it had been only sex. But he had known what he was doing, and ruthlessly used the physical to cement the emotional. Claimed, and bonded. No matter what, now, they were linked, and not just by memories of what had passed between them. No, there was something else, something primitive and elemental that she couldn’t quite grasp.
Love? She couldn’t call it that. There was a powerful attraction between them that seemed to go all the way down to the cellular level, but it wasn’t love. She was damn certain he didn’t love her. It was almost a case of like calling to like, a sense of ease as if they were two halves fitting into one perfect whole, and that made her even more uneasy than thinking about love. Was she like Diaz? Was she that ruthless? Had she become like him, in her relentless search for Justin?
He stirred and pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “We need to get to the airport,” he said sleepily.
She didn’t want to move. “I have two more days of vacation left.” She should go back to El Paso, she knew. Diaz should renew his search for Pavón, and now that they were fairly certain someone had been misdirecting her all these years, they had another angle to explore. But for ten years she had been battering herself against a blank wall, and she was tired. Yesterday she had nearly died in that river. Would it be so horrible of her if she stole two days just for herself, away from the constant struggle? Two days, that was all she was asking. She had never even considered doing such a thing before.
“What will happen if we go home?”
“I’ll probably go back to work,” she said honestly. Things would be different when she was home. El Paso was the center of it all; she couldn’t be there and not work. Boise was a different world, away from everyone she knew.
He rolled over and picked up the phone. “I’ll cancel our flight reservations.”
21
Arturo Pavón liked to tell everyone that he never forgot an insult. He enjoyed seeing the caution in their faces, the way their gazes skittered away from him. And it was true; he forgot no slight, real or imagined. There was only one who had harmed him and gotten away with it, and the knowledge was a bitter little knot in the pit of his stomach, a knot he lived with every day. But he hadn’t forgotten, hadn’t given up on vengeance. His time was slow in coming, but come it would. One day their paths would cross, and he would make the American bitch regret the very day she was born.
For ten years he had waited to make her pay for the loss of his eye.
He could have had her any number of times, the way she constantly came into his country with her silly questions, her prying. But Gallagher had said no, she was too visible, if she disappeared that would raise too many questions and would, at the least, cost them a great deal of money to ensure certain officials looked the other way; at worst, they would end their days in either an American or Mexican jail, depending on where they were caught. If it came to that, Pavón very much wished for an American jail, where they had air-conditioning, cigarettes, and color television.
Gallagher. Pavón didn’t trust him, but only because he trusted no one. Their association was a long and profitable one. Gallagher let noth
ing get between him and money. He’d been dirt poor when Pavón first met him, but full of fire and nerve and ideas, powered by an absolute lack of scruples. Gallagher knew how to make money; if he couldn’t make it, he would steal it, and he didn’t care how many people he trampled into the dust in the process. A man like that would go far.
Pavón had known it would be better to ally himself with such as Gallagher than to go his own way and perhaps become a rival that had to be eliminated, so he had made himself indispensable. If Gallagher needed someone to disappear, Pavón handled it. If he needed something stolen, Pavón stole it. If someone needed to be taught a lesson, Pavón took great pleasure in making certain this person never forgot it wasn’t wise to cross Señor Gallagher.
Things had gone well for Arturo, until ten years ago. The assignment was so simple: take the blond baby from the young gringa who visited a small village marketplace at least three mornings of the week. So he and Lorenzo had gone to the village, and waited, and they were lucky: the very first morning, she had been there.
It would be easy, they thought. The only problem was that she carried the baby in a sling across her chest, rather than in her arms or in a basket. But Lorenzo always had his knife, and the plan was that they would flank the gringa; Lorenzo would slice the strap of the sling, Pavón would grab the baby, and they would run. Some rich Americans had agreed to pay a lot of money for a blond baby to adopt, and this one was an easy target. The young gringa was distracted by her shopping, and she was a typical American, soft and unprepared for danger.
They had underestimated her. Instead of becoming hysterical and helplessly screaming, as they had expected, the woman had fought with unexpected fierceness. He still woke from nightmares, feeling her fingers clawing at his eye, reeling from the bursting pain and horror, his entire face feeling as if it were on fire. Lorenzo had stabbed the bitch in the back and they had escaped, but unfortunately she had lived. He himself had spent many days recovering, cursing her and swearing vengeance. Where his eye had once been was now a scarred pit; his cheek was permanently furrowed from her claws. When he had recovered enough to begin moving around again, he’d found that his depth perception was altered, that he could no longer shoot so well. And he could no longer blend into a crowd without being noticed; people stared at his ruined face.