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Six

Summerville

Well, she’d asked for it.

Caroline lay under Jack’s heavy weight and tried hard to breathe without wheezing. The man weighed a ton. She tried to quietly expand her lungs and contemplated the etiquette of the situation. She needed oxygen and some space. How could she do this? Would it be okay to push at his shoulders to hint that he should get off her? Would it be rude?

How soon after sex was it okay to cuddle? And of course, the big question—was he a cuddler?

He actually didn’t look like much of a cuddler. He’d been grim and mainly quiet all evening. Most cuddlers were warm and chatty. Maybe he was the kind of man who had sex, rolled off the woman, then got up, the saddest kind of lover there was. The kind who left solitude and melancholy behind in the bed. She’d known a few of those.

What Caroline liked most about sex was the sense of closeness. The feeling that, for this small moment in time, she wasn’t alone. She liked touching and being touched, affectionate words whispered in the ear, even if they were only true for the moment. Even a little human warmth was better than none.

That was basically what she had wanted from Jack, though she knew sex would have to come before. She’d never really enjoyed sex all that much—though the last time she’d slept with a man had been so long ago she almost didn’t remember what it was like. But she did enjoy the afterwards. Quietly lying in the darkness with a man’s arms around her, listening to the comforting thump of another human heart.

Right now, his was thumping triple time. It must have been a doozy of a climax because he’d shaken and groaned and panted, almost as if he were in pain. He was also as hot as a radiator. If nothing else, the quickie sex had rid her of the deep chill she’d felt. Jack Prescott was like a huge, heavy, hairy electric blanket.

Hesitantly, Caroline lifted her hand and placed it on his shoulder, wondering if she’d have the nerve to push at it.

She was instantly distracted by the feel of him under her fingers. There didn’t seem to be any give in him at all. The shoulder muscle was dense, ridged, hard as steel. She stroked the heavy muscle uncertainly, and was surprised when he took her hand off his shoulder and pressed it to his mouth. He kissed her palm first, then the back of her hand, as if they were at a ball instead of lying together, his penis still inside her.

She shifted slightly and—

“You’re still, um…”

“Hard?” he supplied. He was lying with his cheek on her hair, close enough that the hot puffs of breath against her temple ruffled her hair. His mouth was an inch from her ear, and the deep voice, so close it felt as if he were speaking inside her head, sent shivers down her spine. “Yeah. Oh yeah. I haven’t begun to be finished with you.”

He levered himself up on his muscled forearms and looked down at her. His features were blurry in the dim light, the whites of his eyes and his teeth light against his dark skin. His big hands clasped the sides of her head and he bent to kiss her, lightly, mouth moving gently on hers.

He lifted his mouth for a moment and tilted her head slightly so he could kiss her from another angle. Sweet kisses. First-date kisses. A postsex cuddling kiss except it wasn’t post sex. They were still having sex. Sort of.

He was still iron-hard inside her, but he wasn’t moving. The only thing he was moving was his mouth on hers. His kisses were warm, deep, a soft gliding of his mouth on hers. It was easy to lose herself in them, particularly now that she could breathe again.

He lifted his head once more, his gaze piercing in the dimness. “Are you okay?” he whispered, mouth an inch from hers. “Did I hurt you?”

Caroline smiled at that, pushing back a lock of black hair that had fallen over his face. “You seem to think I’m some kind of cream puff.” She shook her head, her hair rasping faintly against the pillowcase. “I can assure you that I’m not.”

He blinked. In an instant his expression changed utterly. The faint lines of kindness and anxiety around his eyes disappeared and his face tightened, nostrils flaring. The heat in his eyes was visible even in the semidarkness. “Oh, but you are.” His voice was husky, pure sex. “You’re a beautiful little cream puff, and I could eat you right up. All over.”

There was no mistaking his meaning. Unbidden, an image shot straight to the most primitive part of Caroline’s brain. She saw herself spread out on a bed, Jack’s dark head between her thighs, big hands holding her thighs apart. The image was unsettling. No, not unsettling—arousing. Unmistakably. Her vagina tightened around his penis at the thought. Immediately, he thickened and lengthened inside her.

Her startled eyes met his. “You like that thought,” he said, voice deep and low. Deep grooves bracketed his mouth. “It turns you on.”

“Yes, well…I–I must like it.” Her voice was breathless. She was completely distracted by what was going on in her body. Each pulse of his penis brought a little tug of her inner muscles tightening around him.

Amazing. That had never happened to her before—that intimate link so intense she could feel the changes in the man’s body inside hers.

Caroline was not only turned on by the thought of Jack Prescott going down on her, she was turned on by him. While her head had whirled with her neurotic, grief-stricken thoughts, and she’d been reticent and hesitant—her body had raced right on ahead without her and become aroused all on its own. There was no question of it. Now that she was really paying attention, and her head had caught up with her body, she realized she was more turned-on than she’d ever been in her entire life.

Jack Prescott might be grim-faced and not the world’s greatest conversationalist, but her body didn’t give a damn because he was perhaps the sexiest man alive. The most…male man she’d ever seen.

Everything about his body was a source of intense, bewildering pleasure. The sheer size of him, the hard muscles, the thick mat of dark, wiry chest hair brushing her nipples with each breath they took, the thick, iron-hard penis buried inside her…

God, just the feel of him…

“I’d love to go down on you, honey,” he said in that dark, smoky voice, “but I’d have to pull out first, and they’d have to hold a gun to my head to make me do that right now.” His big hands slid down her sides to hold her hips as he began moving inside her. Long, slow, deep glides that filled her with heat. “No way,” he whispered. “That’s for later, when I can think of something besides this.” He lunged into her, a heavy thrust that took him even more deeply inside her.

Caroline’s arms had to stretch to hold him. Her hands slid over the sleek hard muscles of his arms without finding a grip. Frustrated, she hooked her hands under his arms, palms flat against his massive deltoids, and held on. She could feel the intense play of muscles as he moved on her, in her.

His long, hard body was one huge erogenous zone, from the hair-roughened legs holding her own legs open to the big hands holding her head still for his kiss. Everything about him was so utterly different from her that every touch, every kiss was new territory.

The kiss deepened, turned biting and hard. She gasped for breath as her vagina fluttered again. He felt it. He felt everything that was happening to her. He knew what was happening to her body almost before she did.

Jack levered himself up on his arms, lifting his upper body away from her completely. His chest was so wide it seemed to fill her entire field of vision, the pectoral muscles sharply delineated. Caroline stared hungrily at the massive biceps, hard and perfect. Her hands itched to touch him—touch all that hard, sculpted muscle. She reached out tentatively to stroke his chest, and his entire long frame shuddered. His eyes burned into hers.

“Look at us, Caroline,” he commanded softly. “Watch what we are together.”

Startled, Caroline looked down at their bodies. The hair rose along the nape of her neck and along her forearms. She’d never seen anything as erotic as their bodies joined together by their sexes. Her hands were clutching his biceps, her skin very pale against his darker skin. She watched the hard muscles of his stomach clench with his long, slow thrusts. Their pubic hairs intermingled at the deepest point of his glide into her, when she felt every inch of him inside her, black hairs intermingling with her pale ones. When he pulled his penis out, it glistened from the semen he’d jetted into her and her own juices.

With each glide into her, Caroline’s arousal increased. She watched them making love, the room silent and hushed, his thrusts slow and regular. Any thought of cold was completely banished from her system. Heat rose from her groin as if she’d stepped in front of a furnace. The heat was intense, inside and out, prickles of heat and arousal running through her system. Her very veins felt incandescent.

Caroline was beginning that long, luscious slide into climax when a drop of sweat fell from his temple onto her chest.

It electrified her.

This slow, controlled lovemaking was exacting a price. His stomach muscles were so tight she could see each ridge of muscle. Caroline slid a hand from his biceps—held so tautly the sinews were visible—to his back and felt his control even there, in the hard, tightly clenched muscles. He looked as if he were a statue carved of dark marble rather than a man of flesh and bone.

The knowledge of how tightly he was hanging on to his self-control pushed her right over the edge. With a sharp cry, Caroline erupted into contractions, clenching tightly around him, shaking with the force of her climax.

“God,” he muttered, as a shudder went through him. He lowered himself to her with a groan, dropping his hands to her thighs. He lifted them high and pushed them wide apart, so she was completely open to him and began thrusting hard and fast. His movements kept her on that knife’s edge of climax way longer than was normal for her as pulses of red-hot pleasure coursed through her system. She was holding on to him as tightly as a person lost in a storm holds on to a tree trunk. Just as her climax was winding down, and she could breathe again, he turned his head on the pillow, moving his lips to her ear.

“More,” he whispered. “I want more, Caroline.” Goose bumps rose along her flesh as he inserted his hand into the small of her back and lifted her even more into his thrusts. He changed the angle of his movements, and somehow the base of his penis was rubbing directly against her clitoris. Electric shocks ran through her system as waves of intense pleasure almost too great to be borne coursed through her.

For the first time in her life, Caroline became a purely physical being, all her senses turned inward to the pleasurable tumult happening inside her body.

It seemed as if she came with her entire body, not just her sex. All her limbs shook as she held on to him, feeling with her thighs and arms the dense play of muscles as he moved inside her. Eyes closed, head tilted back, she rode out the waves of pleasure until there was no more left. There was nothing left in her, not even the strength to hold on to Jack.

Her arms and legs fell open, and her breathing slowed.

Jack stopped. “Caroline?”

Oh God, he was still iron-hard inside her, but there was no way she could participate. Every single muscle had gone limp. It was even hard to keep her eyes open.

Dimly, she realized he’d pulled out of her. He turned with her in his arms, and using his hard shoulder as a pillow, she dropped into a dreamless sleep.

Air France Flight 1240

Mid-Atlantic en route to Kennedy

Axel’s VISA was good for a first-class flight across the Atlantic with Air France. L’Espace Premiere. The name alone was classy.

Deaver relaxed in the comfortable extralarge seat that tipped back into a bed and sipped a flute of excellent chilled dry champagne. The real thing, not the warm carbonated piss served back in cattle class.

Good old Axel. His credit card and name would fly to Atlanta, where he would disappear from the face of the earth. Deaver lifted his glass in a salute. Here’s to you, old boy.

Deaver looked around the first-class cabin, with its plush carpeting and jewel-like colors. It was the first time he’d ever flown first class, but by God it wouldn’t be the last.

For the first time since Obuja, Deaver relaxed and started planning the next few days. His head was clear, and he could see what had to be done with unusual clarity.

He was spectacularly comfortable, well fed, a soft pure new wool blanket spread over his knees. The first-class cabin was like a little sanctuary of soft colors, soft voices, pretty women. Even the air smelled of luxury. No stench of diesel and unwashed carpet that he’d always associated with flying. In the air was the expensive colognes of the other passengers, the heady smell of the boeuf en croute they’d had for dinner, the Burgundy and lemon tart, topped off by the Napoleon brandy served in crystal snifters.

No wonder the rich made all the smart moves. Who couldn’t think smart with pretty stewardesses vying to serve you fabulous food and wine, slipping perfumed pillows under your head, wrapping you in the softest of blankets? Even the noise of the engines was muted up here in first class.

Deaver had flown the world, mainly in cargo planes, which was as far from first class as it gets. He remembered being airlifted from Ramstein to Jakarta. Fifteen bone-breaking, freezing hours strapped into metal benches against the bulkhead, pissing into jars.

Never again. Fuck no.

Deaver drained the flute.

“Encore du champagne, monsieur?” A stewardess appeared immediately and topped his flute again with a wink and a smile. She was tall, blonde, with uptilted brown eyes. He was on a mission, but when he got his diamonds back, he’d follow up the next time he got a smile like that.

There were only five other passengers in first class, all businessmen, and they were finally settling in for the night. The sky outside the portholes had long ago turned dark, then black. They’d been wined and dined, and now they put away their laptops, folded their newspapers, took their shoes off and, one by one, converted the seats into beds.

Deaver waited until the lights dimmed, the stewardesses retired behind the curtains and his fellow passengers were asleep.

Only then did he take out of his pocket three sheets of paper—photocopies of a smudged photograph, a wrinkled press clipping and a digital photograph. The first two had been folded and unfolded thousands of times, and the images weren’t clear, but still they gave Deaver all the information he needed.

He looked first at the digital photograph, taken by one of his men, Sam Dupont, in Freetown. Sam had stayed behind in the capital to stock up on ammo, and was just ready to get back to their base camp when he saw Jack Prescott, making the rounds, asking about them. He took Prescott’s photo and headed out to Obuja, where Deaver and the rest of the team were waiting for him. Prescott in Sierra Leone was bad news, and Deaver had pushed the raid on the village forward. He hadn’t been expecting Prescott to make it inland as fast as he had.

His fists clenched around the crystal glass of Glenfiddich. Damn! If Prescott hadn’t found a way to get upriver so fast, he’d have come across smoking ruins in Obuja, and Deaver’s men would still be alive and rich.

Deaver touched the smooth sheet, circling Prescott’s head with the tip of his forefinger, letting the hatred and rage run through his system. Prescott had taken what was Deaver’s, and he was going to pay. But first, Deaver had to find him.

He opened the other two sheets of paper and smoothed them out. The photocopy on the right was a press clipping, the paper yellowed with age. It had been cut so that only the photograph and a portion of the caption showed. The only indication of the newspaper’s name was…ville Gazette. The date was October 12, 1995.

The photo showed a young girl at the piano in a concert hall. The caption read: CAROLINE LAKE GAVE A PIANO RECITAL AT WILLIAMS HALL THURSDAY EVENING.

The other was a standard high-school portrait. There were millions of photos like this floating around the U.S. The girl was the same as the girl in the news photo.

She was a looker, that was for sure. The clipping showed a profile almost hidden by long pale hair. It could have been anyone. But the high-school picture was full-face, and you had to blink to make sure she was real.

Red-gold hair, gorgeous. A younger, softer Nicole Kidman.

That was in 1995. Twelve years ago. Of course in twelve years the girl could have gained fifty pounds, lost her hair, lost her teeth. Died of cancer. Had a kid a year. Started turning tricks. A lot of stuff could happen in twelve years.

Deaver didn’t care one way or another. But that fucker Prescott cared. Oh yeah, he cared. It was the first thing he brought out to look at in the morning and the last thing he looked at before turning in. You don’t do that for anything less than an obsession.

Deaver had watched women trip in and out of Prescott’s bed and leave nothing behind. Prescott sure didn’t keep their photographs as a keepsake. Didn’t keep anything, as far as Deaver could see.

He was careful not to get caught staring at the photographs, but Deaver knew how to wire a webcam as well as anyone else. He’d even caught Prescott jerking off twice, one hand holding a photograph, the other beating his dick.

Photocopying the two photographs had been insurance. Deaver had had a sixth sense that one day he’d need something to hold over Prescott, and as usual, his hunch was right.

Prescott had his diamonds, and Deaver wanted them back. They were his. He’d fought for them, he’d bled for them, they were fucking his.

He was perfectly willing to put the knife to Prescott to find out where he’d stashed them. But Prescott, like all Special Forces soldiers, had been inoculated against torture. Not only that—he was a tough son of a bitch. It was entirely possible his heart would give out first.

But everyone has a weak spot, and Deaver was holding Jack’s. A man who jerked off to a woman’s photograph for twelve years probably had feelings for that woman. And might be willing to exchange $20 million in diamonds for her.


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