by Lora Leigh
“He kidnapped me,” she breathed out roughly. “I’m going to kick his ass.”
“Go right ahead,” he murmured. “When he arrives. Until then, I believe it might be time to see if your lips are as soft and as sweet as they appear to be. If they are anywhere as sweet as that hot, luscious little pussy I cannot forget the taste of.”
Her entire body clenched in excitement at the declaration.
Then his head lowered.
Paige felt her lashes drift close, lips remaining parted, breath suspended as his lips brushed against the edge of her face, sending a rush of exquisite pleasure washing through her again.
“You’re trying to distract me,” she accused him roughly. “I’m not going to let you do it. Khalid owes me explanations, Abram.”
He owed her. She owed herself. She couldn’t let him do this to her or once he was gone, there would be nothing left of her.
“He’s protecting you,” he stated, though his voice sounded rougher, more strained as his lips moved to her ear, his breath stroking across the shell as he spoke. “You’re in danger, Paige, you should have guessed that by now.”
In danger of screaming in need. Of begging for his touch. Of whimpering with the painful hunger she couldn’t control.
“Guessed what?” She hoped he didn’t actually expect her to be able to think at the moment, because it wasn’t happening. But she couldn’t imagine a single reason why she would be in danger.
Unless it was in danger of dying of arousal. As of this moment, that was definitely a consideration. In all her adult years she had never felt this way with another man, had never ached or lost her breath, or felt on fire as she did now. And never had she been so certain she may lose herself in another person.
“That you’re in danger.” There was a thread of amusement in his voice now, the knowledge of it sweeping through her with the same force the hunger had swept through her moments before.
Amusement was the last thing she could have felt as he held her, as the thrill of touching him, of being touched by him, held her captivated.
Clenching her teeth she tensed, trying to pull back, to put just a breath between their bodies as she attempted to find her control somewhere in the morass of aching hunger and need assailing her.
Wasn’t it just her luck to be so aroused by a man while his own arousal, his own needs, were so obviously distant, just as they had been before. It was the story of her life where Abram was concerned.
From the time she’d realized she wanted those devilish, sexy lips of his on her, he’d been either furious or amused by her.
“In danger of killing Khalid perhaps,” she forced out. “Would you please let me go now? Get off me, Abram. I’m not in the mood for your games.”
He rubbed his cheek against her hair as though considering her request for long moments.
“Perhaps, I like you fine as you are,” he finally stated. “I like how you feel against me, Paige Eleanora Galbraithe. Do you know how the memory of those very few stolen moments have tormented me?”
“And perhaps I think by now I know better,” she whispered hoarsely. “Stop playing with me.”
“Ahh, Paige, love, this is far beyond playing. This is the reason why I have fought against your touch. Because I can feel my control going straight to hell just from the simple act of holding you against me. How can I convince you how much I enjoy the feel of you against me?” How she felt against him? Or the fact that for the barest few moments, she’d been unable to tell him what an ass he was being?
At the moment, he wasn’t being his normal, mocking self, but she could sense that beast ready to spring forth. And once it did, their confrontations could turn brutal. His mocking, hers loud. They’d been known to rip at each other for hours, like little children poking at each other to gain dominance.
“I can tell,” she said. “You’re on the verge of laughing your ass off, Abram. Let me go.” His grip tightened on her wrists for a second as she felt tension hardening his body further.
Against her lower stomach his cock felt harder, hotter, his body more insistent as he seemed closer, blanketing her like a sensual, muscular beast.
“Not at you.” His voice was suddenly lower, the feel of his heart racing at her breast as he pulled her closer against him with the hand at her hip. “At myself, hellcat. Because no matter how hard I try to pull away from you, I want nothing more than to sink inside you.” The second the words passed his lips they were covering hers. His body shifted, his free hand pulling her farther up his thigh, working it against the swollen folds as her gown pooled around his leg.
The silk of her panties saturating with her juices as she strained closer to him. Her clit heated with a fiery intensity. Her pussy clenched, tightened, the muscles ached with a desperation to be filled and every cell in her body sizzled with the need to be touched.
Pleasure rose fast and hard inside her. Heart racing, blood pounding through her system as her lips parted, her head falling back as he possessed her with his kiss.
Every thought of protest flew out the window. Past angers, conflicts, and confrontations were gone. With her wrists secured to the wall, his thigh pressed between hers, and his lips and tongue caressing and owning every pulse of sensuality, he was drowning her. Paige could feel herself weakening into the promise of the remembered ecstasy.
Dominance swirled from him. It was a wave of heat wrapping around her and sinking into her flesh as his lips rubbed and caressed hers. His tongue licked at hers, dipping in, tasting and caressing until Paige found herself arching up to him, moaning for more.
The only place his hands touched her were at her wrists, and again at her hip. The rest of his body stroked her though. His hard chest against her breasts, his thigh pressed between hers.
Each flex of his leg stroked the hard muscle against her pussy, her clit, sending incredible pleasure racing through each nerve ending as she arched to be closer.
She had to get closer to him.
The need for the heat, for the pleasure was rushing through her like a tornado. She was dying for more of him. For another taste of him. His kiss was like an aphrodisiac, spicy and addictive as his lips slanted over hers and he kissed her with a pure, sensual hunger that she couldn’t have dreamed existed.
The restraint at her wrists should have made her nervous. No man had ever restrained her. She would have never allowed it until now.
Until Abram.
Until the feel of him against her, until his hands restrained her and his kiss made her like it.
But that didn’t mean she was submitting easily. Even amidst the incredible starbursts of pleasure. On a primitive, primal level, Paige could sense the battle that could brew between them. The one that had been shaping for years now.
How dominant he could be.
How submissive she would never allow herself to be.
She nipped at his tongue as he licked over hers again, causing his head to jerk back, his gaze to narrow in the darkness.
“You’re playing with fire.” There was a growl in his voice that sent a shiver racing up her spine.
“And what are you playing with?” It was all she could do to keep the tremors from her voice, from her fingers as he held them above her head. “I didn’t start this, Abram, you did.”
“You started this eight years ago, Paige,” he rasped. “Eight years and the taste of the sweetest pussy I’ve had touched my tongue to. You torment me. And now, there is no choice but to anger you in our attempt to ensure your security.”
“Do you think you and Khalid can just kidnap me and get the hell away with it? That you can kiss good enough to make up for it?”
She had to force herself not to let a shiver of pleasure race through her body as his fingers moved over her hip before inching closer to her thigh. To where the silk of her gown fell away from her flesh at the point that her knee had bent, lifting to clasp his thigh, to rub herself against him.
She had t
o fight to maintain her senses, to control the need to sink back into his kiss, to allow him to sink into her, however she could convince him to do it.
But she knew this man. Dominant. Powerful. A force to be reckoned with in a world so different from her own that it may as well be an alien planet.
“Kidnapped you? I?” Amazement filled his voice, and perhaps just a hint of anger. “Had I kidnapped you, hellcat, you would well know it,” he finally scoffed, and the anger was readily apparent just as his accent became stronger.
Thankfully, his fingers relaxed. He stepped back slowly before reaching to the side and flipping the lights on as he released her.
For a second, she was blinded. Her eyes snapped closed and when she opened them again a second later, he was halfway across the room and heading for the bar.
For a drink. She was tempted to join him.
He moved like a predator.
Paige watched as he stalked almost lazily across the expensive, pearlesent carpeting to the bar on the other side of the room.
Without turning back, he poured a whiskey from the looks of it, and if she wasn’t mistaken, it was Khalid’s finest.
His head tilted back as he took a hard drink. Thick, heavy black hair fell nearly to his shoulders, the blue-black strands silky and glistening in the bright overhead light.
“Get out of here before I insult Khalid by fucking you in his bed,” he snapped.
“Talk about a mood change.” Her eyes rolled as he shot her a hard, half angry look from the corner of his eyes.
“Not nearly enough of a change to keep from fucking my brother’s sister.” Paige blinked back at him. “Damn, that sounded almost depraved, Abram. Would you like to rephrase?”
He turned. Male grace and predatory strength. And pulsing, blazing, male lust.
She could feel her pussy creaming, saturating her panties further and sensitizing her clit to the point of painful need.
Just the sight of him was enough to make her ache, to make her crave with a strength and a power that made her knees weak.
He was tall, broad, and muscular. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on his six-four frame, or beneath the exceptionally soft white shirt and well-worn jeans.
Finishing the whiskey he sat the glass on the bar behind him, his gaze never leaving hers. She could feel that look through every inch of her body. Sensitized and aching for his touch, her skin felt too tight, constricting as she tried to still the rapid rise and fall of her breasts.
“Rephrasing isn’t the only thing I’d like to do, or may attempt to do.” The heavy warning in his voice was followed by a heavy-lidded glance along her body.
Hell, she may as well have been naked. Unfortunately, there was a part of her that wished she was naked.
Paige didn’t have to look down to see that her nipples were trying to burrow their way through the silk of her gown.
She didn’t bother to tug the robe over the swollen curves or even pretend a shame she didn’t feel. And it wasn’t the first time she’d been forced to face Abram as an independent woman rather than the submissive child he often expected her to portray.
Unfortunately, he was rarely shocked by her anymore.
“And what makes now any different from the past years? There was a time when I would have welcomed your touch, Abram, but now I can’t help but be suspicious. What the hell is going on?”
“Besides your determination to acquire that spanking I keep promising you with?” He spoke as though he were serious.
“Promises, promises. My ass stopped tingling in anticipation years ago.” She waved the comment away. “That doesn’t change the fact that unless you tell Khalid’s goons out there to get out of my face and let me go home, I’m going to have every one of you brought up on charges. That wouldn’t please your daddy, Abram. Last I heard old man Azir was already pissed because you were refusing to remarry for the sake of a child.”
Her ass had stopped tingling in anticipation? Abram nearly came in his damned jeans with that comment. His cock hardened to pure iron, the head throbbed, and if there wasn’t pre-cum in his jeans, then he wasn’t iron hard.
Paige watched his black eyes flare with renewed lust. A perfectly arched, perfectly male black brow rose lazily. “Are the phones in the house not working?” He all but smirked as he ignored her last comment.
Her lips thinned. “I’m trying to be nice about this, Abram. Don’t make me call the authorities.” He waved his hand toward the phone on a nearby desk in invitation. “I didn’t kidnap you, Paige.
Daniel Conover and his security team did so, at your brother’s orders and with FBI Director Zachary Jennings’s approval. Would you like to call the authorities now, hellcat?” She glared back at him irritably. “Stop calling me that.… And it would likely do just as much good to call the cops now as it would to call Khalid,” she snapped. “Get me out of here, Abram.” She was desperate. If she had to stay locked up even one day longer she was going to go crazy.
There was nothing to do here. No way to focus her energy or to stop fantasizing about this man who seemed intent on dancing through her mind at all hours of the day and night.
If she didn’t find a way to return home, to get back to her job—knowing now that Abram was the one slipping into the house at night—then she might end up making the biggest mistake of her life.…
begging him to take her to his bed and to finish what he had started eight years before.
“Take me home.” She crossed her arms over her breast and stared back at him firmly.
“I can’t do that.” He shook his head, his expression suddenly somber. “Relax, Paige. Enjoy a nice vacation for a few more weeks—”
“Weeks!” Her eyes widened as amazed disbelief flashed through her and rejection instantly snapped through her mind. “Hell no!” Her hands went to her hips as she confronted him furiously now.
“I have a job, Abram. I have a life…”
“Not if you leave here.” His tone was suddenly ominous, his expression hardening as though he knew the danger she would face, whatever it may be.
She was damned glad someone knew what was going on, because she sure didn’t.
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
She could feel a premonition of danger then, even stronger than what she had felt in the past ten days.
Khalid wouldn’t just kidnap her without a reason. A part of her had known that whatever was going on was more than simply a suspicion of danger. It was more than a threat against Khalid and Abram.
Abram moved back to her slowly, his expression flashing with frustration, irritation, before slowly smoothing out to an icy calm that sent a chill of dread racing up her spine.
“Why can’t I leave, Abram?” she whispered as she fought the edge of fear threatening to spread through her now. She knew her brother had been having some problems with his and Abram’s two younger half-brothers, but surely those problems didn’t extend to a threat to her? Besides, weren’t they dead now?
“Because your name was found among papers of a certain terrorist, Paige. Until we learn why—” His voice lowered, his expression becoming heavy, sensual, and filled with hunger. “Until we know for certain, you are too precious to risk.”
Something flashed in his eyes, something dark and dangerous as his hand lifted, his fingers sliding beneath the shoulder of her robe, the calloused, heated pads of his fingers caressing beneath the silken material.
“Abram.” Too precious to risk? He’d said it as though he meant it, as though she were actually precious to him.
And she couldn’t let herself believe that. She and Abram had had far too many confrontations over the years to ever believe she was anything more than an irritant, and for the moment, perhaps, a desire.
Focusing on the intimate touch, on the pleasure, was something she eagerly embraced now as she fought to distance herself from the information he had just given her. The knowledge that a terrorist had somehow focu
sed on her.
The question of why raged in the back of her mind as she deliberately forced herself to focus on the desire instead.
She didn’t think she wanted to know why. Not yet. Not until she could still the horrible foreboding, the fear threatening to overtake her.
Throughout the years she had teased, irritated, and deliberately provoked him. She winked at him when he was somber, blew kisses at him when he was angry, and that was just when she had been little more than a child and he an eighteen-year-old man of the world in her eyes. And now, he was the man she couldn’t get out of her dreams, or out of her fantasies.
Paige stood still, silent, as Abram’s fingers caressed from her shoulder to her neck, stroking her flesh as though he enjoyed the feel of it. His gaze locked with hers, his eyes somber, intent, and a flash of fiery hunger filled them as he pushed his fingers into her hair.