“You keep popping up with talents like this and I’m gonna have to marry you,” he groaned.
Her hands went still on his back. “I beg your pardon?”
He frowned, trying to recapture what he’d just said. Talents…marriage…
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean anything by that. I was just talking smack. You give a hell of a back rub, Mel.”
Her hands went back to kneading below his left shoulder blade. “Thanks. You just startled me. I don’t think of myself in terms of being marriage material.”
He tried to look over his shoulder and only ended up hurting his neck. “Why the hell not? What man wouldn’t want you? Surely you have to fight guys off with a stick.”
“Not so much anymore.”
He snorted. “Is that pharmaceutical firm you work at a nunnery or something?”
She laughed. “Hardly. More like a shark farm.”
“Ahh. The men come on too strong?”
He felt her shrug through her palms. “They’re mostly traditional Hispanic men. I’m an empowered American woman who happens to want something more than being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. We don’t always see eye-to-eye on how a relationship should go.”
He grinned against his forearm. He’d bet not.
“Roll over,” she ordered. She lifted up, partially off of him, but it was clear that she intended to continue her attentions on his front side-still straddling his hips.
His breath caught in his throat. Okay, then. Give the good doctor high marks for distracting him from little plastic bottles of pills. He complied, rolling onto his back awkwardly. His shoulder blades had barely touched the truck bed before her mouth was on his, her breasts mashing against his through their shirts.
“Touching you like that turns me on,” she mumbled against his mouth. “I hope you don’t mind.”
He laughed in actual, physical pain-but not in his back-his reaction to her was so fast and hard. “Touch me some more,” he mumbled back.
They banged their knees and elbows and got tangled up in shirtsleeves and shoelaces, and ended up laughing in each other’s arms, finally mostly naked. He reached up to cup her breasts, to test their weight and resilience, and she arched her back, throwing her head back on a gasp of pleasure. Man. Talk about responsive. He was willing to go slow, to pleasure her the way she’d already pleasured him by putting her hands all over him. But she was having none of it. Her hair swung forward in a curtain around her face as she fumbled between them, and then she was sliding down over him, all slick heat, a tight glove of exquisite sensation that made his buttocks clench harder than steel beneath her.
She gave a patented Melina hip rock and groaned. He matched the sound, then gritted out between clenched teeth, “Do that again.”
She complied. And shuddered around him. He gaped up at her. She was there already? Ho-ly cow. He moved beneath her, and she moaned again. She matched his motion, and they quickly found a rhythm between them.
A loud squeak sounded and Melina froze above him. “What was that?”
He grinned widely. “That, darlin’, was the Land Rover’s shock absorbers. We’re giving this poor old bucket a worse workout than it got in those gullies.”
She giggled, collapsing on his chest in embarrassment and humor. “I’ve never done it in a car,” she confessed.
He shook his head in mock horror. “What was wrong with the boys in your high school? How could they let down the male half of the species like that?”
She sat up once more. “Look! The windows are fogged over and everything!”
He laughed up at her. “Next time we’ll do it in the front seat. You haven’t lived until you’ve had sex with a gearshift jabbing you in the side. Everyone should experience it at least once before they die.”
It was as if an arctic wind blew through the air. She froze, and all the joy drained out of her like water pouring from a glass.
“What’s wrong, Mel? Talk to me, sweetheart.”
She shook her head violently and her hair spilled down around her face, a veil he couldn’t see past. He reached up to push it back, to look into her eyes, but she moved determinedly, riding him hard and fast with a desperation that bordered on manic. He wanted to stop. To ask her what in the hell had just happened. But the demands of her body pulling at his, sliding up and down his shaft like a jackhammer, battering against him as if the world were about to end, were too much.
He closed his eyes and allowed her to suck him into the moment, to wipe all thought from his mind, to fill him with a lust so bright and pure and hot it seared away everything but sheer sensation. The world narrowed down to her perspiration-slicked body slamming against his, his equally galvanized body shivering beneath hers, arching up, meeting her thrusts with his own, driving into her with every ounce of his strength.
And then the orgasm started, shimmering outward in ever-expanding circles until it consumed his entire being, building into an explosion that convulsed his entire body into a single giant spasm of release, a shout tearing from his throat at the same moment she keened a long, waivering note of her own release.
He shuddered once. Twice. A third time. And finally, finally, the orgasm released its hold on him. He collapsed back against the hard, cold floor, wrung out to the dregs of his existence. Melina collapsed on his chest, breathing like a spent racehorse. He knew the feeling. Sweat lubricated their entire bodies and she slid easily against him when, a few minutes later, she finally pressed up onto her elbows to stare down at him.
He did push her hair back then, determined to see what was in her oh-so-expressive gaze. She might lie to him with her mouth, but her eyes had never lied to him. She didn’t resist this time when he split the curtain of golden silk and tucked her hair behind her neck, holding it there lightly. He stared up at her, and she stared back at him in the darkness.
And what he saw in her unwillingly, painfully honest gaze made his blood run cold.
It wasn’t fear.
Or desperation.
Or even despair.
It was nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.
It might as well have been a mirror into his own soul, for he was staring into the abyss.
Chapter 7
By the time they caught sight of a village late the next morning, Melina felt like a giant bruise from head to foot from sitting in the car so long. Silently, they drove along the floor of a deep valley between towering twin peaks. There’d been utter silence between them since that devastating moment last night when John gazed into the depth of her soul, and finally recoiled from what he saw.
Not that she blamed him. She’d come out here to die, plain and simple, and he’d seen it clear as day in her gaze. Thankfully, he hadn’t belabored the point with pleas to reconsider or lectures about the preciousness of life. She knew all that. Heck, she didn’t
She started when John actually broke the silence, speaking emotionlessly. “That’s where we’re going.”
She looked up at the line of peaks soaring at least a thousand feet above them and gulped. This was the place where she was supposed to rendezvous with Huayar’s men and get further instructions. A long series of switchbacks led from the valley floor up one of the mountains to a village perched at its summit. There it was. The point of no return.
She ventured a glance over at John. As it had been since they made love last night, his jaw was set in lines of stone, and his eyes were…dead.
Under normal circumstances it would have scared the hell out of her. But as it was, she knew exactly how he
