Hell for Leather (Black Knights Inc. #6)(78)



“How is it possible?” he demanded. “How could they have tracked us?”

“I do not know,” Haroun admitted. “Perhaps our papers were not as well-forged as we thought. Perhaps we were caught on camera somewhere and facial recognition software—”

“Enough,” Qasim cut him off. He knew the Americans had ways, unimaginable ways of tracing people, of protecting their precious borders. Now, the question was how Qasim and Haroun should proceed? In this arena, he relied on his second-in-command. Haroun usually knew when the risks outweighed the rewards. “What do you propose we do?”

“Nothing has changed,” Haroun assured him. “I was able to steal a truck from the barn of an old farm. I followed the signal of the cellular phone to a motel. Miss Fairchild is being held inside, guarded by the bikers and two additional men I can only assume are agents. I am hidden in a tree line behind the place. Watching. When the time is right, I will sneak up on the man positioned outside her back window. He is not very attentive. In the last two hours, he has barely glanced up from his phone. Before he knows what has befallen him, I will slit his ugly throat. And then I will climb into Miss Fairchild’s room and take her.”

It seemed dangerous. Too dangerous. Qasim told Haroun as much.

“No, habibi,” Haroun insisted. “This is our chance, our moment. The one we have been waiting for. We must grab it with both hands. I will come to you soon with the woman. Wait for me. And trust in Allah.”

Qasim couldn’t argue with such staunch bravery, such formidable belief. “Very well.”

***

Mac was, without a doubt, the sexiest man alive.

His smell, that uniquely Mac smell, was a constant in her nose as she fought to catch her breath. Mac and sex. It was decadent. And as he lay beside her, propped up on one elbow, the breadth of his shoulders overwhelmed her. The hair on his chest delighted her. And the angry red thrust of his once more fully erect penis sent a frisson of awareness zinging across her nerve endings.

She’d just had two unbelievably hard orgasms. But looking at him—at his corrugated stomach muscles, at his long, long legs, at the sweat making the dark hair near his temples curl boyishly—she knew two wasn’t going to be enough. Not nearly enough. Hell, two hundred wouldn’t be enough. Not when it came to this man. The man she…loved…

Her thoughts stopped on a dime. She fancied she could hear the errrrtttt of squealing tires inside her head.

Loved him? She loved him? Was that true?

She searched inside herself, inside her heart, and saw that it was.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What in the world had she been thinking? Had she really believed that once she had him, she’d stop wanting him? Had she really believed that her heart wasn’t already involved?

She was a fool. A goddamned self-deluding fool! And, oh, holy shit, this was going to hurt.

“What is it?” Mac asked as he ran his thumb along the ridge of her collarbone, gently, studiously, as if he’d never touched a woman there before.

She forcibly smoothed the frown from her brow, swallowed the tears burning at the back of her throat. It was either that or ruin everything. And she wouldn’t do that. If she only had this day, this one brief moment in time to hold the man she loved in her arms, then she was going to revel in it, luxuriate in the opportunity to take pleasure from him and to give pleasure in return. She’d lost too many people she cared about not to treasure each moment for what it was, not to rejoice in those precious, few instances that brought her sheer happiness. Like now.

“Nothing,” she assured him, smiling, loving the play of light in his eyes when his gaze searched her face. Loving…him. “Just ready for round two.”

A sexy little smile curved those wickedly skilled lips of his. “Good,” he rumbled, bending forward to lick her nipples, pulling back to blow air over them.

Oh, for Heaven’s sake… The tips of her breasts tightened until the sensation was just this side of pain. But he didn’t stop there. He continued to pluck and suck, to lick and flick the tips with his tongue until she was writhing, nearly coming from that alone.

“Not yet,” he growled when her mewling and squirming alerted him to the fact that she was close to the edge. “The next time you come, it’s gonna be in my mouth.”

And if that wasn’t the sexiest, naughtiest, most delicious thing a man ever said to a woman, she didn’t know what was.

“Mac. Oh, God, that feels good.” She speared her fingers into his hair as he slowly kissed his way down her body, stopping to swirl his hot tongue into the hollow of her bellybutton. And she’d never noticed it, never seen it on any of her biology class diagrams, but there was obviously a nerve that ran from the navel straight to the clitoris. Her toes curled into the sheets, her hips lifted from the mattress.

She wanted his mouth on her, his tongue in her. She wanted to feel his beard stubble rasp against her most private parts. In the simplest terms, she wanted sex. All of it. Every which way. Until she couldn’t think. Until she couldn’t lament that this time, this one time, would be all she had…

“I love the way you smell,” he told her, kneeling between her legs, his broad shoulders forcing her thighs wide. “I love the way you look.” His eyes were on her. Drinking her in. “And,” he said, palming the globes of her ass in his warm, rough hands, lifting her hips, pressing one all-too-brief kiss to her heated core, “I love the way you taste.”

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