typical Alex fashion, he continued to stare down at her, letting her frustration and desperation build until she thought she might die.
“Will you beg me to stop, too?” he growled.
“Never.”
He made a skeptical sound. Cynical mood he was in tonight.
He waited until she all but sobbed with need. The pleasure she knew he could give her hovered just out of reach like a tantalizing piece of candy dangling on a string. Why did he insist on playing these wicked games with her? He knew how he made her feel. He knew how deeply she lusted after him. And still, he made her wait. And suffer. As if he was punishing her for making him feel the same way she did.
She knew why he did it, of course. He hated love. But it didn’t make this cruel game of his any easier to bear.
Her entire body throbbed with unfulfilled desire for the sex that was right there. So close, and yet so totally out of her control. If she could only get him to actually make love to her, his emotional barriers would crumble the way they always did. But for now, he fought it. So hard, he struggled to hold himself apart from her. From everyone.
Tonight his fight was worse than ever. His features pulled into a macabre rictus of suffering half-lost in shadows. It was hard for her to look at. What had they done to him?
She put her hands on either side of his face and tried silently to reach past the suffering to the man beneath. But he was lost. His eyes were black hollows. All she saw in them was pain, and more pain.
“Come back to me, Alex,” she whispered.
His hands went around her neck. They were big and capable and strong. He could snap her neck quickly or choke her to death slowly if he so chose. Soul-chilling terror flashed through her, along with instinctive knowing.
They’d turned him into a killer.
She spoke slowly and clearly into the hush while he debated ending her life. “Do it, Alex. If it will heal your soul, do it.”
“Gah!” He flung her back against the pillows and grabbed her hips, shoving her thighs wide. If he’d thought to scare her, he failed. She’d decided long ago that she trusted him with her life. Giving him her body was kid stuff by comparison. She arched her chest up toward him in invitation.
The fight played itself out on the beautiful, dark features of his face above her. He hated her for how she made him feel, and yet he craved those feelings with every ounce of his being. He wanted with his entire soul not to give in to her, to what she represented. Enough that he’d seriously considered killing her. He was physically shaking with the effort of withholding himself from her.
She truly wished love didn’t hurt him so much. But she also knew he needed it. Needed this. He’d been gone a year. That was a long time not to feel anything nor to let down his emotional walls. If she knew the CIA, his training had only reinforced his belief that feelings equaled weakness.
He plunged into her without warning, hard and deep, his capitulation not quite painful as her body stretched to accommodate him. It had been a year for her, too, and he was not a small man. Oh, how he wanted to hurt her. It was right there in his eyes. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it, and she trusted him not to.
He might hate the fact that he had feelings for another human being, but he did have them for her. Dawn and her—his Achilles’ heels and greatest weaknesses. The two of them had snuck past his guard and forced him to join the human race, like it or not. Most of the time, he did not like.
Tonight, he definitely did not like. Rage and self-loathing flashed across his face. Someone who knew him less well might not have seen them. But she’d greedily memorized every nuance of him in their brief time together last year. And she hadn’t forgotten anything. Sadness washed over her for the lonely child who had grown into this isolated, injured man.
He withdrew most of the way from her body. She braced herself, and sure enough, he slammed into her again. But this time, a faint shudder passed through him. Thank God. He was starting to crack. She opened her body and soul completely to him, allowing him to take whatever he needed. Offering herself up on the altar of his hatred and love.
He groaned his surrender and the terrible tension left his body. She exhaled in relief. One of these times, his walls would not break down. What then? She didn’t want to be around when that happened. She suspected his capacity for love would be exceeded only by his capacity for cruelty.
She wrapped her arms and heart around him, drawing him into her as his arms collapsed. His weight crushed her the way she’d wished for, and he pounded into her with all the desperation she could have hoped for. She locked her legs around his hips and rode the storm, meeting it with abandon, glorying in the power of it as the two of them flung themselves into the maelstrom and were swept away.
The sex was hot and slippery, with heavy breathing and hair stuck in the sweat on her face, and bite marks on her neck and scratches on his back, bodies straining urgently toward each other until where she stopped and he began blurred and disappeared. And through it all, he poured his soul into her and she refilled the empty places in his heart with her unconditional love.
Gradually, gradually, the sex changed. Grew more languid. Sensual. Personal. He propped himself on his elbows and pushed her hair back from her face. He found a slow, gliding stroke that her body matched with easy undulations born of exhaustion and relief. It was sultry and sexy and made her breath catch in her throat. He wasn’t entirely gone, after all, her Alex. The killer hadn’t quite won out. Not yet.
Finally, at long last, the massive, emotional orgasm that had been clawing for escape inside her broke free, ripping her apart with its power as she lurched up against Alex and cried out wordlessly. With a drawn-out groan of his own, he found his release, and she fell back to the bed panting.
His forehead rested on hers, and she lazily counted his heartbeats pulsing against her breast. He might win when it came to sneaking up on her in the dark, but she always won this battle of wills.
So far.
Normally she slept like a baby after making love with Alex. He demanded everything she had to give physically and emotionally, usually leaving her drained, but peaceful. Tonight, though, she found herself lying awake, staring at the flickering shadows on the ceiling from the swimming pool outside, worrying about him. About them.
He was fundamentally different than before. Changed.
What had they done to him? Was she an idiot to trust him? She knew in the depths of her soul that he would never do anything intentionally to hurt Dawn. But at the end of the day, could she say the same thing about herself? There’d been a moment there when she thought he’d slipped away from her into a very dark and violent place.
It was all well and good for him to insist that she and Dawn stay here with him and play house. But she didn’t kid herself that he was in an emotional place to let go of his past. If anything, the past year of training had driven him deeper into that locked-down part of himself. Sex with him—heck, life with him—had the potential to be very scary if she ever failed to break through his rage.
If only there was a way to exorcise the demons from his past. The biggest one of all being the one he never spoke of.
His mother. The woman who’d left when he was an infant, never to be seen or heard from again. She’d abandoned him with his father—a Russian spy who used Alex
