There were only two things he knew for sure. First, he was determined to figure out why she allowed herself to work for Grafton, to discover precisely what the bastard had on her to keep her under his thumb if it wasn’t her love and loyalty to the jewel thief. Second, along with bringing Grafton/Spider down, he was determined to save Sonya. She didn’t deserve the circumstances she’d found for herself. He believed that with everything inside him.
His thoughts dissolved then because her starved and impatient kisses turned abandoned. She’d lost herself to passion, hungrily devouring his lips and tongue and running her hands over his shoulders, up into his short hair. His mind drifted back to a time when his thick, dark locks had been long enough to curl around her fingers. His cock responded to her wicked seduction by straining against the fly of his jeans, seeking the heat and the soft give of her belly.
She moaned with pleasure.
He moaned for more of her.
When she sucked his tongue into her mouth, laving it and loving it and flicking the tip, it startled him to realize she’d acquired new skills.
As soon as he had the thought, he firmly crushed it in an imaginary fist.
Since he’d been a far cry from a monk, he couldn’t expect her to have lived like a nun. Sonya was too lusty for that, her sex drive too strong. Still, it was best if he didn’t allow his mind to linger on the idea of her in another man’s arms, or he might turn homicidal.
He repaid her for the pleasure she’d given him by sucking her sweet tongue into his mouth. With his tongue and his teeth and wet suction, he showed her how he would tend to her rose-colored nipples and that hot knot of nerves at the top of her sex…the one that grew hard and distended when she got truly warmed up.
“Angel,” she whispered, coming up for air.
The way she said Angel, with such longing and desperation, was perfect. Except it wasn’t his name. Not his real name, anyway. And the fool in him longed to throw caution to the wind and tell her the truth, if only to hear her call him Mark one last time.
Years of unquenched desire rode atop his shoulders. A decade of dirty words fell from his lips as he kissed his way back to her ear.
“Tell me you want me,” he commanded, nipping her earlobe.
The way she groaned captured him. Trapped him. Except the truth was, she’d owned him since the moment she opened her mouth beside his table at that café in Paris and asked if he was Mark Risa in sweetly accented Hebrew. He was hers. Always had been. Always would be.
Instinct was his ruler now. Instinct and the memories of all the things she liked. All the things that made her yelp and purr and beg for more. Cupping her breast through the soft cotton of her T-shirt, he thumbed over her nipple, delighted to discover the peak already ruched tight with desire.
She was as responsive as he remembered. Possibly more so.
“Tell me you want me,” he demanded again, needing to hear it. Needing her to admit it.
“I want you. God help me, I do.”
If he’d only heard the desperation in her voice, he might have kept going. Except…overshadowing that desperation were hard notes of guilt.
Reality check.
He pulled back to discover her eyes were glassy with unshed tears. Everything inside him stilled—his heart, his lungs, his blood. Everything except his mind. It raced toward a conclusion he didn’t want to face.
“Are you still crying for him?” he whispered. “This man from your past?”
“No.” She shook her head. Then shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s just that you remind me of him sometimes. The way you walk. The way you pop your jaw. The way you kiss, except…”
He wanted nothing more than to keep contact with her. But she had withdrawn from him emotionally, and the gentleman in him—a guy he rarely let out to play—demanded he withdraw from her physically. When he stepped back, breaking the connection of their bodies, it felt like everything that was important inside him stayed behind. Stayed with her.
“Except what?”
“Except you’re better at it than he was. I didn’t think that was possible,” she was quick to add. “Because he was the best. The absolute best. And yet it is possible. And I feel so…so…” She swallowed and searched his eyes. “Guilty for admitting it.”
Angel shot a victorious fist in the air. Or, at least, he imagined he did.
Couple of things here… One, good to know that for her, and up until now, he’d been the best. And two, he had learned a thing or two since the tender age of twenty-four. He looked forward to demonstrating each and every new skill.
“Sonya, you are not wrong to want me. Your man is dead.” The lie tasted sour in his mouth. “But you are still living. Still breathing. You have needs.”
She frowned before ducking her chin and staring at her bare feet. He glanced down too and found, much to his delight, her toenails were painted a familiar hot pink.
So there is some of the old Sonya left…
