She clenched her jaw. Both because he had her pinned and because—dammit—he felt so good against her, sinking his weight onto her, pressing his hips—oh shit—tight against hers. “Never.”
She wrapped both legs around his hips, slid them higher to his waist, hooked her feet together, and squeezed as hard as she could.
“Dammit, Eve . . .” His face contorted in pain. She knew she was hurting him, but she didn’t let up. She squeezed harder, both to get him to back off and because she couldn’t stand being this close to him again. Not after last night. “Gonna make you . . . pay . . .” His grip tightened on her wrists.
She flexed her muscles on her right side, intent on rolling him over. “Try it, you son of a—”
His mouth covered hers.
Synapses misfired. The electrical message from her brain to her muscles shorted out. He dipped his tongue inside her mouth, and she tasted him, like she had last night. Except this wasn’t a drug-induced dream. It wasn’t a hallucination. And it wasn’t the least bit sweet and gentle.
She froze. Thought was replaced by a hazy, thick cloud while he ravished her mouth, while he stroked his tongue against hers again and again and pressed his body down onto hers. Heat brewed in her belly and shot south between her legs where she held him tight, and she realized he was hard. Hard and thick and already rubbing against her in a way that brought every cell in her body to life, making her feel things she hadn’t felt in years.
“Stop fighting me, Eve,” he whispered against her lips. “I’m not your enemy.”
But he was. He always would be. The one person she didn’t want to live without and the one she’d never been able to fully commit to.
He tipped his head to the other side and kissed her again. This time without the insane pressure. This time with long, slow, deep strokes that sent a shiver down her spine. She opened to him, took him in, kissed him back as the muscles in her legs relaxed around his waist, and slid to his hips.
“That’s it, Evie,” he whispered. “Let me in. You have to trust me so we can help each other.”
His words cut through the sexual haze coloring everything, and she suddenly realized what he was doing.
Intimidating her hadn’t worked. Tying her up hadn’t either. So now he was resorting to using her stupid feelings against her so he could run the show and tell her what to do next. Well, she wasn’t going to let him. He thought he could use sex to manipulate her? He didn’t know what was about to hit him.
She tightened her muscles, shifted her weight, and flipped him to his back. Then she pinned his hands above his head, pulled her mouth from his, and stared down at him. “Do you really want me to trust you, Archer?”
Desire filled his dark eyes and flushed his cheeks. A desire she remembered well from Beirut. One she’d dreamt about seeing again on his face. But not like this. “Yeah, I do.”
She leaned forward and brushed her breasts against his bare chest. The movement forced her sex into tighter contact with his erection. Tingles spread all through her lower body. Tingles she wanted to savor but couldn’t. “It takes a lot for me to trust someone. I need to feel something for them.” She did it again, and she knew he felt those tingles too by the way he sucked in a breath. “You made me feel once. I wonder if you could do it again.”
“Eve—”
She flexed her hips, this time intentionally rubbing against his swollen cock. “Do you want me, Archer? Tell me you want me.”
“Eve . . .” His eyes rolled back, and he lifted his hips to meet hers. “Yes, I want you.”
Anger pulsed through her once more. She tightened her grip on his arms and then pushed quickly off him. “Well, tough shit. In this business we never get what we want. And you just proved to me you’re a bigger liar than I am.”
10
Zane’s blood ran hot. Before Eve could get a step away, he grasped her by the ankle and flipped her onto her back on the bed.
“What the—?”
Her surprised gasp met his ears just before he climbed over her on the mattress, straddled her hips, and pinned her arms near her head. “Stop, Eve.”
She thrashed beneath him, but he was stronger than her, even with his injuries, and all her struggling did was shake the bed. “Let me go, you stupid son of a—”
“Bitch. Yeah, I know. God, you don’t know when to quit, do you? I’m not lying to you. I do want to help you, but you’re too goddamn stubborn to see it. And if I didn’t still want you, I wouldn’t have had a hard-on these last twelve hours, and I sure as hell wouldn’t have spent the last year trying to track you down.”
She jerked against his hold but couldn’t break free. “You tracked me down because you wanted to turn me over to the Feds.”
“Partly. But I didn’t, did I?”
“That’s your stupidity, not mine.”
His temper flared. “You’re right, it is. Because I wanted to know if you felt anything for me or if it was all just an act. You cut me when you left me, Eve. Not because of what I thought I’d caught you doing, but because you turned your back on me without a second look. Like none of it mattered. Is that all I was to you? Just a job? Tell me the truth right now and this ends here. You want to go? I’ll let you go. Just tell me the fucking truth.”
She stopped her struggling and stared up at him with wide amber eyes he couldn’t read. Eyes that had haunted him for way too long. Her chest rose and fell with her quick breaths, and the pink hue to her cheeks screamed of arousal—he just couldn’t tell if it was for him or for some stupid job that turned her on more than he ever had.
“I . . .” She blinked several times, and her hands curled into fists against the mattress on each side of her head, but she didn’t try to wriggle free.
“Come on, Eve. You’ve never been speechless before. Tell me the truth. Tell me I never mattered to you and it was all about the job. I’ll walk away and you’ll never have to see me again.”
“The government—”
“Fuck the government.” Why was she stalling? Because she liked torturing him? God, he really was a dumb fuck. For concocting this whole plan, for spending the last year searching for her, for thinking—after she’d finally told him the truth earlier—that she’d done any of it because she cared about him. “I know how to disappear and not be found. I did it this whole last year, and I can do it again. Just tell me the damn truth. Tell me you don’t give a shit about me.”
“You’re a complete jackass,” she whispered.
Zane stilled above her. The air caught in his throat, and his chest drew tight as a drum. Not because of what she’d said, but because of what he saw in her suddenly damp eyes.
Fury—yeah, there was still plenty of that—but behind that, something else. Something vulnerable. Something hot.
“I don’t care about you,” she whispered. “I really don’t. You don’t deserve it. I hate you. I—”
He let go of her wrists, lowered his mouth to hers, and kissed her. But unlike when he’d kissed her before, when he’d been trying to distract her from crushing him to death, this time she kissed him back. Her tongue found his, and she arched up into him while she wrapped her arms around him, opened her legs, and made room for him between her thighs.
The taste of her was something he hadn’t forgotten. Not even in the dead of night when he’d been plotting ways to string her up and torture the truth out of her. Sweet, spicy, so fucking forbidden. Her fingers slid up into his hair and fisted, pulling on the strands until pain shot through his scalp. Kissing her again and again, he tasted her deeper, drew her in even though he knew he shouldn’t. Even though he knew it would only fuck with his mind even more.