“So do I. I’m not one.”
She yearned to believe him, to let him put his rock-solid arms around her so she could rest her head on his chest and stop worrying. She wanted to trust the man standing in front of her wearing only tattered jeans, but she still didn’t know how to sort his lies from the truth.
“Take me to the airport.” She couldn’t look at him while she announced her decision or she’d waver. “I want to go back to Afghanistan.”
“With Black and Swan looking for us, you’re not safe there.”
“I’m not safe here.” An understatement. “So I might as well be there.”
“I can protect you.” He raised his voice louder than the water pouring into the pool. He’d lost his detached look and instead coiled as if he might spring.
“What the fuck?” She felt like she’d been centrifuged. Everything she knew and believed about herself as a doctor and about the army and its people had been spun on its head today. “I’ve spent years taking care of myself, and I could do it a lot better without getting mixed up in your problems. I’m out of here!”
His nostrils flared. “No.”
“Screw you!” He could keep his lies and mysteries. She flung herself at the door.
His hand shot past her shoulder to slap the wood as she grabbed for the handle. “You’re safer here.”
“Fuck off!” She jerked with both hands, and the door opened a few inches. But when her shoulder blades bumped his chest, his bare chest, she froze. The atmosphere was charged so high she feared any sound would ignite a conflagration. To her right, at eye level, nothing but his fingertips grazed the wood. Although she couldn’t move without brushing his body, if she wanted to leave, all she had to do was pull again.
They both knew he wasn’t to blame if she didn’t.
“You keep using those words. Like screw.” His voice had deepened and gone quieter. She only heard it because he stood close enough for his body to bracket hers. It was the voice he used before he kissed her. “And fuck.”
She fixated on the ancient wood in front of her face. If she twisted, if she shifted one millimeter, her body would connect with his and then she’d be lost.
“You said that word more than once, didn’t you?” He turned her around with hands that seemed to burn through the cotton of her shirt.
Pressing her temple into the wood, she closed her eyes against the penetration of his gaze lest he read how easily he could change her mind. She didn’t move, not when his fingers stroked the side of her neck. Not when she felt him lift her hair from one shoulder. She fought hard to suppress shivers, but she didn’t tremble, not even when he spoke so close to the bare skin at her throat that his breath swept across every nerve.
“Do you like to say fuck? Do you want to say it again, right now? To me?”
Her glutes and inner thighs clenched.
“I think you were trying to give me an order, weren’t you, ma’am?” He drawled the last word like he dared her to contradict him.
She pressed into the door, seeking something to grab that wasn’t him. The croak she made was hardly a word, so she tried again. “This is against the rules.”
“Wasn’t it you who said we’ve broken too many to care?”
She lifted her hands to push him but stopped with her wrists against her own aching breasts. Inches from her fingers, his nipples showed through the golden hair that proclaimed him a man. She had nowhere to look that he didn’t fill. And he was glorious.
“We have to stop,” she whispered in a voice so soft she didn’t recognize it as her own.
“Why?” He preempted her answer by wrapping his thumb and first finger around each wrist and raising her hands above her head.
Because if I don’t leave now, I’ll give in to you and I’ll lose everything I’ve worked for. With her breasts higher and closer to danger, her breathing betrayed her excitement. She couldn’t form the words let go because her mouth had rebelled to join her body.
“I’m only looking.” He transferred both of her wrists to one hand.
“You’re doing more than that.” Each time he shifted, the bulges and ripples of his muscles worked seamlessly to do his bidding. The arm he raised had the contours and definition her imagination had supplied and more. Part of her wanted to pull against his grip so she could watch his body tense and uncoil, but a shred of common sense held her still.
“Order me to stop.” His palm hovered over the spot where fabric stretched across her nipple.
She was the one who moved first, who pushed the pressure receptors in her nipple against the thousands of touch receptors in his palm, and they both knew it. Shock zinged from her breasts through her spine to her trembling knees while her body begged for more friction.
He brushed across her other nipple, the fabric of her shirt too flimsy to contain her breasts’ pilomotor reflex, and she knew she wouldn’t stop him.
“Tell me.” His palm circled harder, drawing her tighter. “It’s your decision.”
“My questions...” She arched from the door deeper into his hand.
“Ask.” His fingers changed the play and rolled her nipple tighter still. “Anything.”
“Are you...” She wanted to touch him, but he kept her hands pinned. She twisted her head on the wood, trying to recall her questions. “Undead?”
“Exactly the opposite.” His breath tickled her neck when he spoke. “I am very alive.”
“Then what?” She wanted him to reach under her shirt as much as she wanted his answer. “What are you?”
“I am a barbarian.” Saying it seemed to release his last restraint. The lust that burned in his eyes and hardened his face was a look her few, carefully chosen lovers had never showed. Something in him broke free, and she sensed it coming for her, stalking her.
She desperately wanted it to catch her.
“A scourge of peace-loving folk.” He inserted his free hand in the neckline of her shirt and kept his gaze enmeshed with hers.
If he hadn’t held her wrists, she might have slid to the floor. Past seductions had always followed the usual couch-and-grope routine, never words and walls and waiting, fully clothed and wobbling, for a touch larger than her imagination.
“A conqueror.” He pulled until her neckline chafed her sensitized skin, then let go of her wrists to use two hands on her shirt fabric.
Leaving her arms extended over her head, she waited. The tearing sound blended with the moan she couldn’t hold back.
“I am a berserker.”
She envisioned him in battle, swift and brutal, as he’d been in the street. Would he drive into her here against the door? The thought called up an Amazon who wanted to fight free and conquer with him, conquer him. Maybe she’d take him here on the floor and damn everything. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Nooo.” Her hunger was too much.
Heat disappeared from her skin as even the rasp of his breath disappeared into silence.
She opened her eyes. His head was thrown back and he dug the heels of his palms into his eye sockets as if struggling. He’d misinterpreted her attempt to stop herself. Not him.
“Kiss me,” she managed to whisper.
Shuddering, he dropped his hands and closed the gap between them until they shared one breath. “Don’t ask me to stop unless you mean it.”
His gaze called to cravings so intense that she shivered, echoing him. “I won’t.”
“Then I will pillage your mouth.” With one finger, he touched her lips, then traced a line from her jaw to her throat. “I will claim your neck and your body.”