“I just wanted to-” She sent a longing look back at the bottle she hadn’t managed to grab fast enough, but Noah didn’t wait, and then she saw why.
One of the baddies had come to the edge of the beach, between the sand and the parking lot, and was surveying the crowd intently, his hand in his pocket.
Looking for them.
Oh, God. She kicked it back into a high gear, and they ran through another cantina, and then a mini swap-meet of some kind, slipping between two aisles filled with wooden donkey statues, leather purses, woven ponchos, and sombreros. Noah stopped so abruptly, Bailey plowed right into the back of him.
Reaching behind him to steady her, he spoke in rapid-fire Spanish to the tiny, old woman sitting on a stool watching them. The next thing Bailey knew, she was standing in a dressing room-nothing more than a bright red shower curtain wrapped around a stand-with Noah crowding his way in, arms full.
“Strip,” he commanded.
“Uh-”
He dropped his booty at his feet and began to strip her himself. “Lift up,” he said, and yanked her sweater up to her forehead before he let go, leaving her arms caught straight up.
“You get that,” he told her. Then without so much as glancing at her breasts, he bent his head and unzipped her skirt.
She fought with her sweater, but he hadn’t undone that zipper. Worse, her hair had caught in the metal catch, threatening to rip out a good chunk by the roots. “Hey.”
“Hang on.” His long hair brushed her belly, and unbelievably given the circumstances, it quivered.
Then he shoved down her skirt.
Her panties accidentally went with it, and she was left standing there with her hands over her head, the zipper caught on her ponytail, wearing only her bra because her panties and skirt had twisted around her thighs, leaving her hanging out in the wind.
Literally.
Oblivious, Noah was fighting with her strappy sandals. “Lift up,” he instructed, trying to get her skirt off without removing the heels.
She could have told him it wasn’t going to happen, but it was hard to talk with her panties down and no foreplay involved. She struggled to free her hands and hair of her sweater, to no avail. “Noah-”
Sitting back on his heels, he glanced up, his hair brushing at her upper thighs as he did, and for the first time since he’d shoved her in there, he went absolutely still. In the charged silence, he took in the sights right at his eye level.
Her sights.
His eyes darkened, and he dragged his teeth over his lower lip. “Good Christ,” he whispered.
All around them, on just the other side of the curtain, in fact, were people everywhere; talking, bartering, going on with their day-and yet just in here, alone, together, she felt as if-there was no one else on earth except Noah. An incredibly sexy Noah, whose mouth quirked.
“Don’t you dare laugh,” she warned him.
Slowly he shook his head, still not lifting a finger to help her. “Not feeling like laughing,” he said silkily.
Oh, God, she knew that voice. It was his aroused voice. It was the voice he used right before he took her out of herself, every single time, and while being taken out of herself right this minute would be a good thing, she was absolutely not going to have sex in a makeshift dressing room in Baja, with guns looking for them.
She wasn’t. “Noah-” Again she struggled to free her arms, the movement jiggling her breasts.
Noah watched, and let out a low groan that she sensed more than heard. “Hold still,” he commanded.
But then instead of freeing her, he ran a callused finger over the pushed-up curve of first one breast, then the other, making her let out a sound that shocked her in its neediness.
“You should see yourself,” he whispered, and that finger snaked in beneath the lace and rasped over her bare nipple, eliciting another gasp from her.
“Noah-” This got choked off when his other hand slid down her belly, then lower, gently gliding right over ground zero.
“Ohmigod,” she gasped. “Stop that-”
But he didn’t. Of course he didn’t, and with the intimate knowledge he had of her body, he knew exactly what to stroke and how hard to stroke it and oh, good Lord, the man pressed his mouth to her hip as he played with her, nibbling his way across her low belly to her other hip, all the while keeping his fingers very, very busy, taking her right to the edge of an orgasm, something she would have bet her own life would be impossible at this moment. “Noah-please.”
“I will most definitely please,” he promised hoarsely, and tugged on her.
“Ack,” she said as she fell.
He caught her. She had a feeling he would always catch her, and as he did so now, he maneuvered her so that she was sprawled in his lap. With her skirt trapping her at the knees, and her sweater trapping her arms, there was little she could do to save herself.
Not that she tried.
Nope.
Not with his head bent and his mouth seeking out her breast, and then, oh, God, her nipple, sucking it into his mouth, his fingers still between her legs…
Beneath her, pressing into her bottom, he was hard, gloriously so. It would take nothing, she knew, for him to unzip and push inside her, and as far gone as she already felt, she knew it would take less than a minute for them both to go off.
But though he gripped her hips and rocked once against her, eyes closed, his face a mask of desire and pleasure, he then set his forehead to hers and just breathed.
Finally he lifted his head. Heat and desire had darkened his eyes to two black pools of lust, but there was also regret, and after one more rock of his hips and a low groan, he sighed and reached up to untangle her hair from the grasp of her sweater.
And then he helped her stand, handing her a Mexican white sundress, and then a poncho. When she had the dress on, he placed the hood of the poncho up over her head himself, and then pulled a poncho over his own leather jacket as well.
Together they left the sanctity of the dressing room, and after a quick exchange with the old woman, during which Noah slipped her some cash, they stepped out of the booth and back into the main aisle of the swap meet.
She could hardly walk, she was still so turned on that her legs were rubbery. But Noah pulled her along the maze of aisles as if the past few minutes had never happened, as if he knew exactly where he was going, holding on to her with one hand, speaking into his cell phone with the other. And then suddenly they were out in a parking lot a good quarter mile down from their Blazer, and a cabby was waiting for them.
“How did you-” she started in sheer amazement as he hurried her into it.
“Maddie is a goddess,” he said, and then switched to Spanish to direct the cab driver.
While she just stared at him. “What are you saying?”
“That we want to be driven back via the main drag, so I can see if our favorite goons are still there.” He switched back to his cell phone, speaking English again, and she realized he was talking to Brody, who she gathered was in contact with Shayne, who in turn was on his way.
They’d beaten the odds again, and better yet, were still alive. She knew it wasn’t her who had kept them that way, but Noah and his unique ability to twist any situation to his advantage.
It wasn’t that she kept underestimating him, but that she was continuously surprised at the depths of his resourcefulness, not to mention his ability to fit in anywhere, doing anything.
He was a chameleon, and possessed skills she could only dream of having. “You’re amazing.”
He’d been watching in front of them, behind them, on all sides of them, but at her words, he glanced at her in surprise.
“You are,” she said.