“Abalisah knows all the darkness in this hotel. Yours. Mine. Everyone’s,” Sanay whispered, pressing closer to him. Her other hand glided over Lyons’s hip and she explored his body in the darkness.
She was barefoot and she rose to the tips of her toes, lips barely able to press against his collarbone, brushing lightly, tongue darting out to taste his skin.
Lyons hooked his arm under hers, and he flexed, lifting her higher. He was able to hold her up with only one arm, bring her mouth to his, lips so soft and inviting that Lyons could easily forget himself as he carried her toward the bed. Sanay helped Lyons, bracing her thighs against his hips, her slender arms draped around his neck.
The Able Team commander still couldn’t get rid of a knot of dread in his stomach, even as he joined with Sanay, exploring her wonderful caramel skin, her dark, firm nipples, velvety soft lips and warm, tender tongue in her mouth.
* * *
THE LIGHT OF dawn would not pour through Lyons’s westward-facing balcony, but he did notice the graying skies as sunrise approached.
He lay still, Sanay, the exotic, beautiful woman entangled around him, a trickle of wet drool having dried and crusted on his chest. He couldn’t see her; his eyes were mere slits, only open enough to register the increasing light of day.
Lyons could feel her moving, stirring from his chest and crawling off him. He continued breathing deeply, as if asleep.
Maybe the women were sent to these rooms as spies.
Sanay quietly moved to the nightstand, where he’d placed his pistol the night before, and lifted the revolver. When Lyons heard her check to see if the weapon was loaded, he acted without thinking. He clamped his hand down hard over hers, pinning her finger inside the trigger guard. He heard the ugly pop of her index finger, but even as that happened, he drove the heel of his palm against her jaw in a Shotokan karate stroke.
The blow knocked her to the hardwood floor with a sharp crack. The revolver was locked now in Lyons’s left fist, and he watched as a trickle of blood seeped from her cheek onto the rug. Even as he looked down at the grisly damage he’d wrought in the space of a few moments, he noticed something else on the rug at his feet.
Sanay had removed the rounds from the revolver, rendering it useless even before she’d pointed it at him.
Lyons did a press check; the weapon’s barrel was empty. She’d made it seem as if she were about to attack him, but it had been a ruse. Once more, he had an uneasy feeling wash over him. The tattoos on his flesh seemed to come alive, their hints and promises of intolerance and rot audible in their gnawing on his soul.
“Why’d you let me almost kill you?” Lyons growled, taking her by the wrist and pulling her into a sitting position. His cold blue eyes must have flashed with lightning-bright anger because she winced, recoiling at his touch.
“Because...Jinan would not believe your story...” Sanay whispered. Blood now stained the side of her neck; there was a gash down one cheek. Her big brown eyes were glimmering with tears. “He would kill you.”
Lyons loosened his iron grasp on her wrist.
“No...don’t stop. He’ll kill you,” she whispered.
Lyons sat on the mattress. Karl Long was a rapist. He wouldn’t make gentle love to the kind of women he’d been in prison for violating. The Able Team commander had stumbled dead into a trap, dropping evidence that he was not the sexual predator, the destroying creature, whose identity he’d assumed.
Too many years on the LAPD had taught him that rape had very little to do with sex, with sensuality, with lovemaking. And yet, that tiny bit of information had failed him as he’d given in to his body’s normal, human sexual desires, bonding with Sanay, tending to her tender little form the way she’d explored his hard physique. Already, the lips of the laceration on her cheek puffed up, darkening. Her jaw was also deepening its hue, red and raw from where he’d punched her.
“I needed you to do that,” Sanay repeated softly. “He’ll kill you if you don’t.”
Lyons cupped the tip of her chin, looking into her eyes. “Why would you do this?”
“Because you’re kind. You’re a good man,” Sanay answered. She lowered her head, scrunching her shoulders up around her neck. “A man like that doesn’t deserve to be treated like...”
Lyons bit his lower lip. At once, he was ashamed of his violent reflexes, but at the same time, they’d intervened and protected him despite himself. The girl had leveled a gun at him.
“You took a damn chance,” Lyons growled. He helped her up, a hand under each armpit, then sat her beside him on the mattress. “What if I’d shot you? What if I beat you to death?”
“Then this would be over,” Sanay answered.
In the ever-growing light, Lyons could see that Sanay’s skin wore her years with nearly as much character as he’d earned in his years of battle. Cigarette burns, healed cuts and freckles were now visible as the concealer makeup she’d worn had been scrubbed away by their vigorous lovemaking. Her whole life was a wrought tale carved into her flesh, hidden by that caramel coating.
And Lyons hated himself for having gone full karate on her. He knew that his palm-heel stroke would leave hairline fractures along Sanay’s mandible, and she was still in pain right now. It would stay with her as a constant, sharp ache for months, acting up every time she bit down hard. He just knew that she’d be taking an extra painkiller or two to numb herself further against the lifetime of punishment she’d received.
Lyons gently dabbed the blood from her cheek, careful not to apply pressure to the swollen edges of her laceration. Sanay’s welling tears didn’t fill her eyes quite enough to trickle down her face, but Lyons could see into her dark, soulful eyes, spotting a small spark. A tint of hope gleamed in them. He could see that he was the first in a long time who had treated her like a human.
“Don’t,” Lyons told her, his deep voice having a slight crack in it. He’d been here before, with brave women, those who knew how to fight and survive.
“Don’t what?” Sanay asked.
“Don’t risk yourself for me,” Lyons ordered.
“Jinan said to expect to be raped, to be hurt, to be destroyed,” Sanay whispered. “But he said that if I made it, he would give me all the opium I needed. Enough to ride away into eternity.”
She looked down at herself, sinking her upper teeth into her soft, cushiony lower lip. “This...this isn’t enough. You’ll—”
A knock at the door cut her off. Sanay froze, her sadness-brimming eyes finally bursting like a dam as she shot a glance at the door. Lyons moved with the speed of a cobra, scooping up his Colt Python and readying it for action.
Still standing at the jamb, using it as a shield, he tore open the door. “What the hell do you want?”
Lyons was eye to eye with a man who looked too wide to even step through the hotel doorway. He could see brawny muscles rippling in the newcomer’s neck, shoulders, upper arms and chest. However the farther down he looked on the ever-broadening form, those muscles ebbed, slipping under a layer of fat that, at a distance, would have most fools
