The door to the small bedroom was flung open with force, swinging back to hit the wall with a thud. Alistair and Lee stumbled through, lips locked, arms wrapped around each other, trying to keep as little space between them as possible. Alistair fumbled for the door handle, eventually getting a grip on it, and he flung it shut again with just as much force. The wall was a welcome surface as he pressed Lee back against it, finally able to close the remaining distance between them as his knee insinuated itself between her thighs and his groin found a welcome home nestled into the curve of her hip.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked raggedly, forcing himself to come up for air, but he only had time to gasp in a fresh dose of oxygen before Lee’s mouth was pressed against his own again.
“Yes,” she breathed against his lips, her hands already working their way beneath his coat.
He stripped the item off, still mindful enough of the situation to make sure the small handgun in the inner pocket stayed hidden, then he helped Lee do the same with her jacket. In a daze, he reached out and flicked on the light switch... but a moment later, Lee hastily turned it off again.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, glancing around. The curtains were closed, so there was no risk of anyone seeing them.
“I prefer the dark,” Lee said, but there was something in her tone that seemed off.
“You’re beautiful,” Alistair told her honestly, running a hand through her hair. “I want to look at you.”
Lee kissed him again, backing him away from the wall with the light switch and towards the bed. The edge came up against his knees, and she tried to tumble him backwards onto the soft surface, but he resisted, contemplating pushing the issue. If some man had made Lee feel she wasn’t up to scratch in the looks department, he wanted to do whatever he could to repair her self-confidence. But at the same time, he thought there was something in her tone that he should be paying attention to, something important... but the amount of blood currently rushing away from his brain was making it very difficult to think.
Lee took his hands and lifted them to cup her breasts, and Alistair moaned as he kissed her again. “I mean it, Lee,” he said breathlessly. “You’re stunning. What about just the bedside lamp, if you don’t want the full lights on?”
“No.” There was a distinctly wounded tone to that single word, and she paused, her right hand cupping his backside, her left one on his shoulder. He held his breath, wondering if she was going to pull away, uncertain whether he should just forget the issue and try to distract her, or let this misstep play out.
“I have scars,” Lee said, sounding more angry than hurt. “I was in a car crash as a child, and... I have scars. I don’t want you looking at them.”
“Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to... Okay, if you want the lights off, that’s fine, but your scars aren’t going to bother me. You’re still beautiful. And courageous, and stubborn, and very, very sexy...” What was the point he was making again? A stealthy hand slid down to cup him through his trousers, then Lee suddenly stripped off her t-shirt, revealing in the dim light a plain black bra and a very athletic torso. Holy hell, how had he ever thought he could just let this woman walk away at the end of her trip? He’d thought he would lose interest in her after a few dinners together. His first impression of her was that she was too meek to hold his interest for the long term... but the way she’d thrown him to the ground out there had been totally unexpected, and had presented a challenge that had awakened his canine instincts. She would be more than a match for his wolf side...
Get your fucking head back in the game, he scolded himself sharply, even as he reached around to undo the clasp on her bra. His breath caught in his throat as he got his first real look at her breasts, albeit that the room was lit only by the glimmer of a street lamp beyond the curtains. They were small and firm, high and perky, and god, he just had to taste them. Lee gasped as he did so, letting her head fall back, her hair tumbling over her shoulders, and Alistair slid one arm around her waist, holding her close, while his other one fondled the breast that wasn’t currently in his mouth.
“God, Drew, that’s... keep going. Please, that’s... Mmm, so good...” Her hand was stroking his hair, her encouragement heating his veins. Despite her telling him she’d slept with men before, he’d half-expected her to behave like a shy virgin. This wanton creature who was so confident in her own pleasure was as surprising as she was captivating. “Take your trousers off,” she breathed, and Alistair struggled to remember what he’d been thinking a moment ago. There was something important he had to keep in mind...
He stepped back, unlacing his boots in record time as Lee did the same, then he was stripping off his shirt, unbuckling his belt, and ohhh, bloody hell, she’d just slid her hand down inside her own trousers, the motion of her hand an unmistakable sign that she was pleasuring herself. She is not for you, a sharp voice reminded him, and he forcibly tried to get a grip on his thundering hormones. Don’t fall in love, he told himself urgently. Wild or not, Lee was going to be leaving, and he had no business seeing this as anything other than a brief fling. Enjoy the sex, he counselled himself, and remember that next month, or next year, there’ll be some other young, pretty distraction to wipe away any lingering nostalgia he felt about letting this one slip through the net.
Once he was as naked as the day he was born, he knelt on the bed, holding out a hand. Lee came willingly, pressing him back, straddling him, and then setting up a slow, delicious rhythm as she rocked her hips over his groin. “You’re beautiful,” she said, sounding strangely surprised. “I didn’t think...”
“You didn’t think what?” He slid his hands up her thighs, wishing she’d already taken her trousers off.
“You’re perfect,” she said, sounding almost sorrowful about it. “I didn’t think you would be.”
“Come here,” he said, urging her to lean down over him, kissing her deeply while his hands travelled further south. They paused at her breasts, revisiting familiar territory, then down further, to her waistband, down inside her trousers...
Bloody hell, she wasn’t wearing any underwear. He slid his hand down easily, feeling coarse hair, then moist warmth, two fingers sliding inside her in a way that had her gasping and rocking back onto his hand. “Drew! I... Ohhh, yes...” She spread her legs further and arched her back, and Alistair felt himself throb. By Sirius himself, she was divine...
Exercising a tremendous amount of willpower, he pulled his hand away. “Take your trousers off,” he told her urgently. She swung her leg off him to do just that... but then bent down, engulfing his rock-hard erection with her mouth. “That’s not fair,” he protested, having intended to do a very similar thing to her. As he watched, she shimmied out of her trousers, her mouth never ceasing its erotic exploration, and he had to take a couple of quick, deep breaths to get himself under control. She was kneeling on the bed beside him, and he ran an encouraging hand up one of her thighs, thinking that if she would just move around a little further, he could...
“Do you have a condom?” she asked suddenly, pulling back and gazing at him with half-lidded eyes, and Alistair’s eyes opened wide for a moment. Did he? Had he remembered...?
He lurched off the side of the bed, fumbling around for his trousers in the dark, and felt a rush of relief when he found one in his wallet. On his side of things, of course, he didn’t need one – shifters could neither catch nor carry sexually transmitted diseases, nor could he impregnate anyone – but explaining the complexities of shifter physiology to humans was never an appropriate option, so all the men in the Den were simply resigned to using protection, if and when they were asked to.
He put the sheath on quickly, trying to get his shaking fingers to cooperate, and then lay back again at Lee’s urging. She straddled him, hands on his chest, while he ran incorrigible fingers up her thighs. Then she reached down and guided him inside her... and ohhh fuck, it had been a long time. He moaned, his hips bucking upwards involuntarily even as his head fell back. He was going to be remembering this night for a very long time...
Li Khuli felt oddly disconnected from her own body as she rode Drew. The rhythm was as familiar as breathing – somewhere over the years, she’d lost count of exactly how many men she’d had sex with – and the associated desire to kill, to hurt, to punish rose unbidden. The images in her mind were both arousing and horrifying, sex and violence inextricably linked in the mind of a Khuli. She imagined stabbing him with a thin, sharp knife, strangling him, feeling him struggle beneath her, and hated herself even as she felt herself throb with pleasure. No, she scolded herself sharply. There would be no killing this time...
But killing aside, she was still fucking a wolf, she told herself with a sinister thrill. She had the thick, hard cock of a shape shifter deep up inside her, and she felt a perverse sort of victory in the idea that her master would be outraged at her current behaviour. Sleeping on a bed and drinking beer were negligible misdemeanours in comparison. Drew was losing himself in the pleasure, and she didn’t expect him to last much longer. And a strange, quiet, almost childlike part of her felt an odd sort of pride in the fact. He was enjoying this. Her charming, handsome, confusing, captivating shape shifter was enjoying what she was doing to him.
She couldn’t remember a time when she’d felt so damned pleased with herself.
She sat up straighter, feeling him rub against her inner walls in a way that managed to distract her from even her own dark thoughts for a moment. She rode the wave of pleasure willingly, head thrown back, eyes closed, hips rocking hard until that glorious wave broke over her, blocking out everything but the raw, visceral feel of her own orgasm.
She was dimly aware of Drew letting out a heartfelt groan, his hips bucking beneath her, hands guiding her hips to just keep going... and then it was over, Drew collapsing back on the bed, breathing hard, Lee falling forward over him, catching herself on her hands as the last tremors worked their way out of her body.
Sex, her instructors had told her again and again, was not about pleasure, but about control. Controlling another person, distracting them, making them vulnerable. Gaining their trust, only to turn around and stab them in the back.
Fuck them, Lee thought to herself, as she felt her pounding heart begin to slow. Tired but happy, she slid sideways off Drew and waited while he disposed of the condom. There was no risk of her becoming pregnant, of course. Every Khuli female who reached puberty underwent surgery to remove the possibility that they could ever bear a child, and though she didn’t know for certain, she suspected that shifters weren’t able to produce children either. But since Drew didn’t know what she was, and she wasn’t supposed to know what he was, there was a certain prudence in behaving in a manner appropriate for a young woman of childbearing age who was having a temporary fling with a foreigner.
Carefully, Lee lay down on the bed, making sure to keep her back to the wall. In the darkness, there was little chance that Drew would see the tattoo that sat over her right shoulder, the mark that all Khuli bore somewhere on their bodies, but there was no point tempting fate. As a member of the wolf clan, he would undoubtedly recognise the symbol if he saw it, and then both their worlds would change irrevocably.
Even so, her lie about the car accident had not been an idle one. Her body was, indeed, riddled with scars, some more obvious than others, but they had been created through an endless series of battles, a never-ending nightmare, rather than one brutal, sweeping disaster.
Drew climbed back into bed, kissing her eagerly, then settling down on his side, gentle fingers tracing lines over her lips, her eyebrows, her nose.
“Are you okay?” he asked her softly. “You seemed pretty upset earlier.”
Lee smiled into the darkness. “I’m fine,” she told him firmly. “I’m tougher than I look. I’m not happy with my father, but I’ll find a way to work through it. I always do.”
Satisfied with her response, Drew leaned over to press a gentle kiss to her forehead, then lay back, his breathing slow and even. He wasn’t asleep, Lee knew, but he was comfortably relaxed, and she tried to remember if she’d ever just laid in bed with a man like this before. She couldn’t remember a single time. A bittersweet smile tugged the corner of her lips.
And despite her placatory words, she knew her difficulties with her present situation were only just beginning. She’d fallen in love with Drew, she reluctantly acknowledged to herself. She had two targets to kill, both of whom were part of his canine family, and she had a duty to report the location of his home to the British division of the Noturatii, who would promptly raze the estate to the ground. Plus she had well and truly broken just about every protocol she could think of, getting emotionally involved in an assignment, questioning her master’s orders and allowing her enemy the chance to not only see her vulnerabilities, but to take full advantage of them.
There was no way forward, and no possible way to go back.
What the hell was she supposed to do now?
It was getting on towards midnight when Thando led Kathy up the stairs and into the house’s modest living room. After her rather intriguing outburst, he’d sent Liam upstairs to get dinner for her, and once she was adequately fed and watered, they’d invited her to begin writing down what she knew about some of the international offices.
“Where do you want me to start?” she’d asked.
“Germany,” Thando replied without hesitation. Always Germany. That had been three hours ago, and now they were in possession of a long list of staff names and positions, diagrams of the main science building, the locations of all major security points and an overview of the science projects Kathy had been working on while she was there. There was plenty more she still knew, but it would take days, if not weeks for her to explain it all. The information would all be carefully checked, of course, as far as such things were possible with a facility as tightly guarded as the German Noturatii base, but it was a promising start.
Now Thando gestured for Kathy to take a seat on the sofa and rearranged her cuffs so that her hands were in front of her and secured to a chain on the wall. Her feet were free, but that was as far as the liberties were going to go for the time being. Once she was secure, he pulled out his phone and dialled Analisa, who was still watching Gianna upstairs in the bedroom.
“Phase two,” he said simply, then hung up.
A minute or two later, the door opened, and Gianna walked in, her hands still cuffed, looking around in confusion. They’d just dragged her out of bed, after all. But the moment she saw who had arrived, all signs of tiredness vanished.
“Kathy! Oh, thank god. Are you okay?” She rushed forward, Kathy looking no less surprised, and the pair of them embraced each other as well as was possible given the handcuffs.
“You’re here?” Kathy said, too stunned to quite realise what was going on. “You’re alive! Why are you... how did...?”
Gianna glanced over to where the three assassins were waiting patiently by the door, and her confusion turned into a mild glare. “You didn’t tell her? For goodness sake, didn’t you even explain what was going on?”
“If we knew what was going on, that would be a good start,” Thando said drily. “While we don’t intend you any immediate harm, neither of you are safe, by any means. If the Noturatii get wind of the fact that you’re still alive, they’ll do their best to recover you both – with some very unpleasant consequences – and the powers that be in our organisation are still debating the best way to move forward. The future is uncertain, and I’m not inclined to make any promises I can’t keep.”
“Wait a minute, just let me get this clear in my head,” Kathy interrupted. “So you’re the good guys? Gianna is helping you? You’re not going to torture me? Or threaten my family?”
“You don’t have any family to speak of,” Thando reminded her, having already done his research on that side of things. “But for what it’s worth, no, we do not torture our captives. But for the foreseeable future, you will be subject to mild methods of restraint,” – he indicated the handcuffs – “and while you will be well cared for, you are most definitely to be considered our prisoner.”
Kathy glanced at Gianna, who shrugged in a way that seemed to say, ‘It’s not the worst it could be.’ “I can work with that, I suppose,” she agreed.
“Glad to hear it. Jane,” Thando said, turning to Analisa. As far as Gianna and Kathy had been told, Thando’s name was John, Liam’s was Jim and Analisa was Jane. Standard, common, unremarkable names that wouldn’t get any of them into trouble, should everything go pear-shaped for any reason. “It’s getting late. Could you take Kathy up to the second bedroom and get her settled, then Jim will come and relieve you. You’re due for a break. I’ll take Gianna back to bed and we’ll regroup in the morning.” While keeping the two women in separate bedrooms would create more work in keeping an eye on them both, it also eliminated the opportunity for them to conspire together, just in case any of this turned out to be something other than what it seemed.
Liam headed off to the office to report to the Council on their second successful acquisition, and Thando waited while Analisa led Kathy up the stairs, then followed a minute later with Gianna.
Once in her bedroom, she stood cooperatively by the rail that had been built into the wall while Thando adjusted her cuffs. During the night, one of her hands would be free, while the other was attached to a ring that slid along the rail. The arrangement was set up to allow her to lie comfortably in bed, or, by following the railing along the wall, she could access the ensuite bathroom adjacent to her room. It was secure enough for low risk prisoners, and it saved the assassins a lot of fussing about locking and unlocking cuffs every time someone wanted to use the bathroom. Even so, neither woman was ever left alone for more than a minute or two – hence sending Analisa to put Kathy to bed. They’d acquired a set of pyjamas for her, but given how little they really knew about her, they were not about to leave her alone to get changed.
“Thank you,” Gianna said, a wealth of emotion in those two short words. “You’ll have realised by now that Kathy knows a surprising amount for someone in her position, and I hope that’s of use to you. But she’s also a good friend. It’s difficult to find allies in an organisation like the Noturatii. I’m not sure where all this is going to end up, but even having got this far means the world to me.”
“Changing sides in this war is no small thing,” Thando told her as he checked everything was secure. “And despite your dislike of the Noturatii, you may have your share of doubts as we go along. Our methods are not always so different from theirs. Lives will still be lost, just on the other side of the battlelines. You may find a time comes when you want nothing more than to be done with the lot of us.”
“Hence the security measures?” Gianna said wryly, tugging at her cuffed wrist. “I was never foolish enough to think I’d be able to just walk away. You could have just killed me when you first saw me. But you’ve given me the chance to set some of this right.” Looking uncertain about it, she reached up and placed her hand on his chest. The tips of her fingers gave a tentative stroke. “Perhaps you might... I was wondering if you would let me express my gratitude.”
Gently, slowly, Thando reached up and took her hand, removing it from his chest. “I am an assassin,” he told her calmly. “I have dedicated my life to protecting my people, and I answer to my master’s call whenever and wherever they wish to send me. I cannot allow myself to be distracted by emotional entanglements.”
Gianna blushed, but didn’t back down. “I’m not asking you for a long-term commitment. But even assassins must have desires.”
Thando shook his head, his tone never wavering from a soft, peaceful timbre. “Although you were held in a situation against your will, you nonetheless tortured and experimented on one of my brethren. I do not now, nor will I ever entertain the idea of anything but a strictly professional relationship with you.” He stepped back and switched off the light, retreating to the pad on the floor where he would spend the night. “We’re going to have a lot of work to do tomorrow. I suggest you get some sleep.”
Drifting comfortably, his mind fuzzy, Alistair sighed at the niggling reminder that he couldn’t just go to sleep here. There was a constant risk that he might inadvertently shift in his sleep, and so spending the entire night with a woman was never, ever an option.
“How much longer will you be in England?” he asked, as much to keep himself awake as because he wanted to know.
“At least a week,” Lee said. “Maybe two. I’d like to see you again before I go.” The words sounded hesitant, almost wistful, as if she was worried Alistair would say no.
“I’d love to,” he told her, leaning over to kiss her again. “I have to go away for a couple of days, I’m afraid. I have a work meeting in London, but I’ll be back after that.”
They lay quietly, listening to the soft rasp of each other’s breathing, and Alistair considered his next words carefully. He’d told himself right at the start that he wasn’t going to interfere in Lee’s life, that at the end of her visit to England, he would let her walk away. Saying what he wanted to say next broke all his self-imposed rules. And yet...
“Lee?” he asked, breaking the peaceful silence around them. “If you hate what your father does so much, then why are you going back? Why don’t you leave and find somewhere else to live, or find another job?”
Lee let out a sharp hiss and sat up abruptly. “And I suppose you think walking away from your entire life is so simple? He is a man of great importance, of great power. Where would I live? You say to just find a job as if this is an easy thing. You want me to stay in England? Without a visa? Do you think he would not find me? Where would I get money? This is just...” She leapt out of bed in consternation, throwing on a robe. Alistair jumped up after her, not bothering with clothes.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said hastily. He should have known better than to say anything. “I know it’s not that simple.” What had he thought was going to happen? That he would take her back to the Den and Baron would just agree to help her start a new life here? Il Trosa had extremely strict rules about who was recruited and who was allowed into their inner circle, and Lee most definitely did not fit the criteria. He came up behind her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. She was tense and didn’t soften in the slightest at his embrace.
“You barely know me, Drew. You know nothing of what I had to go through to get this far, and even less about what I will have to do to finish my current assignment. Don’t tempt me with fanciful dreams when we both know they will not come to anything.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. Fuck, he should have listened to his own instincts in the first place. “I’m sorry. I just... I want to help you.”
She turned to face him, her eyes glittering in the darkness, and he couldn’t quite decide whether or not the brightness was due to tears. “You can’t help me. My life is set on a track that is far beyond either of our control.”