Too Hard to Handle (Black Knights Inc. #8)(97)

“Please,” Penni said, obviously feeling the indecision in the man holding her hostage even if she couldn’t see the fear and tears in his eyes like Dan could. “Please, I’m begging you. Don’t hurt me.” And then she looked at Dan, anguish in her eyes and something…something he couldn’t quite put a name to. She finished with a whispered, “I-I’m pregnant.”

Dan blinked, thinking he hadn’t heard her correctly.

Hat Guy stilled, a flash of horror crossing his panicked face. “Pregnant?” he demanded.

So Dan had heard her correctly. Despite the cataclysmic situation, and despite the sudden sensation of having pins and needles prickling every inch of his skin, his mind was ripped back to the bathroom in the basement of the hotel in Malaysia. To Penni having reached her wit’s end. To the grief and horror of her colleagues’ deaths having finally overcome her. To her asking him to help her forget it all, escape from it all, for just a little while…

“Make love to me,” she whispered against his neck between a string of hot, hungry kisses. She lifted a leg, hooking her heel behind his knee and rubbing herself against the raging hard-on that strained the fly of his jeans. He could feel her heat even through her trousers, feel the sultry moistness reaching out to him, surrounding him, tempting him.

“Brooklyn…Jesus,” he groaned, flattening his palms against the bathroom door beside her head. And when she bit his earlobe, his cock throbbed so hard it was a wonder it didn’t rip the seams of his jeans.

This is crazy! he thought. And it was. Crazy hot. Crazy fast. He knew he should stop. A part of him wanted to stop. Now wasn’t the time. Not when she was beside herself with grief. And worry and self-reproach. Not when she wasn’t thinking straight.

But then she reached between them to attack the buttons at his fly, ripping them open until the two halves gaped wide. When she shoved her hand inside, past the waistband of his boxer briefs and wrapped her fist around him, squeezing, stroking, he knew stopping her wasn’t going to be an option. He didn’t have the wherewithal or the willpower. His brain was fried. His synapses firing out one and only one message. Now, now, now!

The skin on her palm was both unbearably soft and slightly callused. He was hugely swollen, so sensitive that her caresses caused both pleasure and pain.

“We shouldn’t,” he gasped, his head falling back on his shoulders. “Holy shit, that feels good.”

“Mmm,” she hummed, keeping one hand inside his pants, pulling, petting, stroking, as she used the other to undo the button on her trousers. Her zipper made a soft scriiiitching sound that was barely audible above their heavy, gasping breaths. Lowering her leg, she toed out of her shoes. She released him to slide her pants and panties down her thighs.

“Make love to me,” she said again, stepping out of the puddle of her clothing and wrapping her arms around his shoulders, going up on tiptoe to realign their bodies. “Make me forget just for a little while.”

“Brooklyn, I want to,” he groaned, his lungs working like bellows, his heart racing, his cock thrusting unapologetically from the vee of his fly. “But I don’t have a condom.”

She shook her head. “Forget about it.” When she shoved his jeans and boxers down under his ass, his erection sprang forward. She grabbed it, wrapped her leg around his hips, and angled it toward her entrance. “I don’t care…”

And then she impaled herself.

Everything after that was a little sketchy. Dan hadn’t had many faculties working. But he remembered tight, hot, unbearable wetness closing around his shaft. He remembered their frenzied breaths as they screwed like teenagers up against the door of that bathroom. And he remembered it’d been over very quickly. Because her orgasm had hit her almost immediately, triggering his. And together they’d crashed into ecstasy. Ecstasy that was cut short when a fist pounded on the door, calling them back into action, back into the mission.

And suddenly everything made sense. Penni quitting the Secret Service—no way she could be required to put herself between her protectee and a bullet if she was carrying a child. Penni coming to Chicago to talk to him and then agreeing to fly all the way to Peru when she found out it was possible he could remain on his mission for months to come. Penni’s strange expression of fear and indecision when he asked her to help finish the assignment…

She’s pregnant. With my child. He knew it as surely as he knew the stars would all someday fall from the sky, as surely as he knew up from down and east from west, as surely as he knew he loved her. And now he wasn’t just terrified to lose her to this madman, he was terrified to lose their child too. Terrified to lose everything that meant anything at all.

“Penni?” Her name was a prayer, a cry, a question all rolled into one. Something hot and wet slipped down his face and dripped from his chin. With a start, he realized it was tears. His heart was aching with love and joy, his soul shaking with fear and dread.

“Yes,” she said, her own tears rolling freely. She choked on a sob. And that’s when Hat Guy shoved her away from him, straight into Dan’s outstretched arms.

He cried out when he felt her skin next to his, felt her arms go around her neck. Squeezing her tight, he reveled in the hot wash of her breath when she tucked her face into his shoulder. But never, not once, did he take his eyes off Hat Guy. He did, however, choke on his relief and gratitude when he said, “Th-thank you. Thank you. Now let us help you f—”