There’s no foreplay, only his zipper cutting through the pleasant air, the heavy weight of his erection against my cheek. He nudges my mouth with a cock already leaking at the tip. “Open for me. Give me that sweet mouth or I’ll make you regret it.”
I open my mouth, and he immediately invades me—his crown against my tongue, his masculine scent in my lungs, his green eyes in my sights.
“That’s right,” he says. “You like it, don’t you?”
He plunges deep, and I focus on not gagging. My head jerks back, but I’m on the ground with nowhere to go. He pulls back, and I only have enough time to suck in a breath, to register the salt slick of him, before he plunges in again.
His green eyes are slitted above me. “Such a good little whore.”
“What the fuck is going on here?”
The words pierce my lust haze, and I struggle to look up. From my position I see an upside-down Liam North staring down at us.
Almost as soon as I feel the pressure, it’s gone. Lifted. Elijah stands and pulls me up behind him in one smooth motion. I hear a zipper, and I know he’s covered himself. I cover my mouth with my hand, feeling a rush of humiliation to be caught in this position. It feels like I’m a teenager caught with my boyfriend in the basement. Adrenaline pumps through my heart. I have to remind myself that I’m a grown-up who can do dirty things with other grown-ups.
“What did it look like?” Elijah asks, his voice challenging.
“It looked like you were holding her down and fucking her mouth.”
“Then that’s what I was doing.”
My embarrassment morphs into something more nervous. There’s a strange tension shimmering in the citrus-scented air, a conflict I don’t fully understand.
From around Elijah’s arm I can see Liam’s expression, the usually stoic man now forbidding and outraged. “You don’t get to talk to her that way.”
“Then stop me,” Elijah says, a rare hollowness in his tone.
I force my way past him. “Hey, wait a second. This is embarrassing and everything, but what we were doing wasn’t illegal or even wrong. It was two consenting adults.”
Liam doesn’t take his eyes off his younger brother. “It didn’t look like consent.”
Shock holds me immobile for a moment as I process this. Liam thinks his brother was forcing me to do something. He thinks his brother was using me, violating me.
That’s why he interrupted us. That’s why he’s challenging his brother.
So why didn’t Elijah just tell him that I wanted it?
Then stop me.
“It was consensual.” I stamp my foot, which feels childish but the two men are posturing like fighting bulls and ignoring me completely. “It was, okay? I wanted it like that.”
Liam finally focuses on me, those green eyes intense with emotion, and I suppress a shiver in order to stand up for Elijah. “You wanted him to hold you down and speak to you with disrespect? You wanted him to call you a whore?”
There’s no judgment in his voice, but there is a thread of disbelief. I can understand that. I’m having a hard time understanding my desires, too. Did it spring from the shadows of that French prison? Do I only like this because I was captured? Or was it already part of my being, only awakened when I met Elijah?
The lemon orchard has no answers. “Yes,” I say.
Liam’s voice turns soft. “Are you saying this because you’re afraid of him? I can protect you.”
That decides me. If I had any doubt, it’s vanished, because I’m not afraid of Elijah. Confused, enchanted, turned on. He inspires a myriad of feelings in me, but not fear.
“No,” I say, my cheeks flaming under the sun. Without the storm of desire surrounding me, what we did feels sordid. “I’m not afraid of him.”
Liam studies me. He studies his brother. What does he see? A man made of the same flesh and blood? Or a monster? Finally he gives a curt nod and walks off through the trees.
I turn to Elijah, who’s staring at some place in the blue sky, his expression hard-set. “That was… that was crazy, right?” I say with an awkward little laugh.
He doesn’t laugh or smile. He doesn’t even meet my eyes. “We should get back to the house.”
“Elijah?”
He stalks away, following his brother without answering me.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Elijah
A little market at the base of the mountain sells dimpled grapefruit and homemade pasta and hand-painted pottery. That’s where we leave Liam and Josh. My concession to doing this with Holly is that they’re nearby with an open radio connection.
I drive up the narrow road, my eyes on the trees, wondering how many men Taggart has stationed. One of them pretends to change a tire in his beat-up truck. Another one watches from the porch of a small shack, rocking on a chair with a black cat in his lap. No doubt Taggart knows our precise progress up the mountain to his mansion.
Holly sits in the passenger seat, silently shredding a napkin she found in the center console. The floorboard is covered in white confetti. I know she feels bad about what happened this afternoon. I should say something reassuring, but I don’t feel reassuring. I feel pissed off. I’m angry that Liam broke things up, that he assumed the worst, even while I’m wondering if it was right. Maybe I am becoming my father. Where is the fucking line? I should tell Holly that I care about her, that I’m sorry about earlier, but what I really want to do is tell her to finish the blowjob she started while we drive to this meeting.
“We should talk about what happened,” she says finally.
“Should we?”
“Yes.” A firm answer that’s belied by her nervousness. When she runs out of napkin, she picks up the pieces on her lap and tears them into even smaller pieces. “We should.”
“I don’t know what there is to say. My brother caught us fucking.”
“And you thought you were taking advantage of me.”
“Wasn’t I?”
“No.”
“Right,” I say, a hollow feeling in my chest. “Other girls want roses and dates at nice restaurants. You like to be fucked after I teach you to shoot a gun.”
“Well,” she says, her tone reasonable. “I didn’t really learn how to shoot the gun. I don’t think you should count on being an instructor or anything. It’s not really your strong suit.”
Humor licks at the dark cloud that’s been hanging over me, and I have to fight the quirk of my lips. How does this woman manage to make me laugh when I’m ready to pound a concrete block into dust? “What should my profession be, then?”
“I mean you’re very good at this whole fighting soldier thing, but I guess… I guess you don’t do that anymore? Your work for the government? The whole undercover thing?”
“I was honorably discharged.” In other words, they were forced to release me because I had way too much dirt on the higher-ups. In particular, the lieutenant colonel. It was either let me go peacefully or order a hit. Part of me still looks over my shoulder for an assassin.
“So now you work for your brother?”
The hollow feeling is back. “Sure. Unless he fires me.”