She wanted to say what she'd started to say, but the way he was looking at her suddenly made it impossible for her to draw enough air into her lungs to speak. She swallowed, tried again.

"Is this you trying to say 'when'?" he asked carefully. His hands tightened on her waist. His face had gone absolutely still. No expression, no emotion at all, except for the dark gleam in his eyes.

She shook her head. She might be making a bad mistake here. In fact, she probably was making a bad mistake here. Bottom line, she didn't care. However this whole thing worked out, she would have at best a night or two with him. She would take them, take him.

Her nails dug into his shoulders. Her knees threatened to give way.

She said, "This is me trying to say, make love to me."

- CHAPTER -

TWENTY-SIX.

Finn looked at her for a moment longer, his hard face inscrutable, nothing at all to read in it except the blaze of desire in his eyes. He didn't say a word. Instead he bent his head and kissed her.

It was a deep, slow, hungry kiss that was so hot it practically steamed up the air around them. Eyes closing, she kissed him back pa.s.sionately, all pent-up longing and urgent physical need. She was so intoxicated by the lush demand of his mouth on hers, by the warmth and firm resilience of his bare chest pressing against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, by the satiny smoothness of his heavy shoulders as she clung to them, that she almost missed the tiny sound of a zipper being lowered.

Then her dress dropped the rest of the way, all the way to the carpet, where it puddled around her feet. She realized that while he'd been kissing her he had unzipped the small zipper at her waist that held up the rest of her dress, which allowed her skirt to slide down her legs to the floor, which left her standing there in nothing but a pair of tiny nude-colored silk-and-lace panties.

He broke off the kiss to hold her a little away from him. The carnal gleam in his eyes was so erotic that she practically melted where she stood as he looked over every nearly naked inch of her. After an immobilized-by-l.u.s.t moment, she took advantage of his superheated inattention to anything except her body to lean in, press her lips to his wide, warm chest, and reach for his belt.

His abdomen was ridged with muscle. As her mouth opened on his chest, as her fingers brushed the firm flesh around his belly b.u.t.ton while she grappled with his buckle, he sucked in air and his already taut stomach tightened even more.

"d.a.m.n," he muttered, his focus finally back on her face as the buckle surrendered. She couldn't resist the urge to stroke his ripped belly, but she didn't have a chance to go for bigger game. He caught her hands, his eyes blazing at her. "You're killing me here."

Before she could reply or do anything else, he scooped her up as easily as if she weighed nothing at all, kissed her like he was starving for the taste of her mouth, and carried her the few steps to his bed. His hold on her turned briefly precarious as he yanked the covers down. Settling her into the middle of the mattress, he straightened, pulled his shirt the rest of the way off, then unzipped his pants and shucked them and a pair of, she observed with interest, blue boxers at the same time.

He'd deposited her on her back. She propped herself up on her elbows to watch him strip. Besides the bathroom light, which she'd left on, the twin lamps between the beds were the room's sole source of illumination. With them behind him, he looked almost formidably big and tough. His front was in shadow, but not so much so that she couldn't see vital details. She had just a second to admire the buff body he bared. Heavily muscled shoulders and chest. Corded arms. Six-pack abdomen with a puckered scar below the navel that she vowed to ask him about later. Narrow hips. Long, athletic-looking legs. A nice amount of dark body hair.

As his pants. .h.i.t the floor, she looked at the long, thick erection that she could finally see, and sucked in her breath.

She'd been able to tell from the first time she'd felt it pressing against her, so it wasn't like it was a surprise or anything: the man was seriously hung.

"Nice," she said, as nonchalantly as if her heart wasn't pounding and she wasn't breathing way too fast and her nails weren't digging into the mattress and her body wasn't burning and quaking inside with antic.i.p.ation, when she felt his eyes on her and glanced up to find that he was looking at her looking at him.

"I would have said, gorgeous. s.e.xy. Perfect." His voice was hoa.r.s.e. His face was flushed with pa.s.sion, and his eyes were dark with it, and his mouth was hard with it. From the way he was looking at her, she knew he was talking about her. He put a knee on the mattress and then came down on the bed beside her, his weight enough to roll her toward him. Even as, trembling now, she reached for him, he gathered her in his arms and kissed her with a controlled ferocity that told her he was done playing. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she kissed him back, arching up against him, reveling in the feel of his naked body against hers, wanting him so much that she was dizzy with it.

His hand slid between her legs to touch her through her panties. Scorching heat shot through her as he found just the right spot, and she gasped into his mouth. Then his hand was inside her panties and he was stroking the delicate cleft without any barrier at all and somewhere along the way she lost every last inhibition she had. The steely strength of his body against the softness of hers drove her wild.

Clinging to him, kissing him like she'd die if she didn't, she squirmed and moaned in response to those long, knowing fingers, roused to a fever pitch by a man who clearly knew what he was doing, knew his way around a woman's body.

"Finn," she gasped as his mouth left hers to kiss her neck and b.r.e.a.s.t.s while his hand still played between her legs. She was on fire, burning up, moving restlessly against his hand, against him, kissing his ear and his bristly jawline and his throat and his broad shoulder. The salty taste of his skin inspired her to lick him, tiny sensuous licks along his shoulder, and then nibble at the firm flesh beneath her mouth. He made a sound and shifted his shoulder and pushed his fingers deeply inside her in s.e.xy retaliation, and that was it: she couldn't stand it anymore. She moaned and reached for that part of him that she could feel lying hot and hard against her thigh. At the same time, he muttered something under his breath and stopped with the petting of her and started yanking her panties down her legs.

Then her hand closed around him.

"Riley." Sounding like he was being strangled, he stiffened and went totally still. She could hear the harsh rasp of his breathing, feel him shuddering against her as he fought to retain control, feel the urgency of his need that rolled off him in waves.

His shaft was hot and smooth and hard and enormous and pulsing in her hand. She squeezed it, then slowly slid her hand up and down.

"I want you," she said, as if what she was doing to him hadn't been enough to make her meaning crystal clear. "Now."

"Jesus G.o.d." The savagery of his answering growl made her clench inside. It made her heart pound. It made her shiver and pant.

Then her panties came off and she was on her back and he was covering her body with his and shoving himself inside her, all so fast that all she could do was grab his shoulders and hang on and cry out at the sheer, unbelievable pleasure of it. As he kissed her, as he filled her to bursting and pulled back and did it again, she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and moaned into his mouth. He felt huge and hard and hot inside her, and he thrust into her with a controlled ferocity that had her crying out at the wonder of it and arching her back and moving with him. His strokes were deep and fast, and he drove into her over and over again until she was mindless with pa.s.sion, shaking with it, throbbing and melting with it.

At last she came with an intensity she had never dreamed she was capable of, and as he drove into her fiercely one last time to find his own release she saw a thousand exploding stars and cried out his name.

"Finn. Oh, Finn."

RILEY FELT boneless. She felt like all her muscles had turned to water. She felt warm, and sleepy, and absolutely, positively sated. She also felt like she had glimpsed something, been somewhere, that was totally unknown to her.

Chemistry: that was all she could attribute it to. This big, hard, tough-looking guy had just officially shown her a whole new s.e.xual world.

Finn. Even mentally saying his name made her shiver. It made her insides tighten. It made her toes curl.

Okay, enough already. She could drool over him and what had just happened between them later. Right now, he needed to move.

He was sprawled on top of her, spent, his head buried in the curve of her shoulder and neck, and he weighed a ton.

Even lifting a hand was an effort, but she trailed her fingers down his side. It must have tickled, because he flinched. Then his head came up, and she found herself looking into his eyes. Unlike the last time she'd gotten a glimpse of them, they were once again their usual calm blue-gray. She realized that the lamps were still on, that she could see him perfectly, from the black bristles on his square jaw to the slight frown that was contracting his brows to the heavily muscled shoulders that loomed above her. She realized, too, that he could see her equally well, and had been able to the whole time.

Good thing she wasn't shy.

"Hey." He dropped a kiss on her mouth, then rolled onto his back, taking her with him so that she ended up half lying on his chest, half sprawled at his side.

"Hey." She pressed a forearm down on his chest and lifted up a little so that she was now looming above him, and could look down into his face. His expression was absolutely unreadable-surprise-but he looked so s.e.xy with his head propped up by a pair of pillows and one arm bent behind it-the other was wrapped around her, with his hand splayed just north of her a.s.s-that she started melting all over again. The feel of his warm, solid body against her, the freedom to be naked with him and squirm all over him and basically do whatever she liked, was intoxicating.

Gravely she told him, "Best. s.e.x. Ever," and felt a tingle of delight as she watched his inscrutable expression vanish, watched his eyes widen slightly with surprise.

Then he smiled, not that little uptick of his, but his second real smile of the night. This time it actually widened into a full-blown grin. "Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah."

The grin was still there as he pulled her head down and kissed her. Then rolled with her. Then proceeded to give her a demonstration of his techniques for the Best s.e.x Ever all over again.

SHE MUST have fallen asleep after that second round of mind-blowing s.e.x, because she dreamed of Emma. It was a scary, mixed-up replay of her kidnapping and the horrors she might now be suffering, and it got worse as somehow dream Emma morphed into Lorna and died.

Sobbing in her dream, Riley woke up gasping for air to find herself flat on her back with the dark, shadowy head and shoulders of a man propped above her, silhouetted against the faint light coming in around the curtains.

For a moment she blinked at him, still lost in sorrow.

"Riley?"

That gravelly voice, the outline of the broad shoulders, the fact that he was in her bed and she was naked and he was naked, gave her his ident.i.ty in a flash.

"Finn." She said it on a shuddery intake of breath. Reality descended, and she instantly knew everything, where they were, what was happening. They were both under the covers. The air-conditioning hummed, a constant background noise. At some point, he'd turned off the lights.

"Oh, G.o.d, it was a bad dream." She closed her eyes, which as far as blocking out any kind of mental distress was concerned didn't work worth a dime.

He kissed her gently, lay back down, and pulled her into his arms. Her head lay on his shoulder. Her arm slanted across his chest. One leg curved over his. She could feel the naked length of him all down her body, s.e.xy as h.e.l.l, but now it was comforting, too.

"You were calling out for Lorna," he said.

The pain that came only rarely now went through her, sharp and bittersweet.

"My sister," she said, forgetting briefly that, thanks to the background check, he was bound to already know that. Anyway, right at that moment it didn't seem to even matter. "I was dreaming about Emma, and then Emma turned into Lorna, and Lorna died."

His arm tightened around her. "Emma's not going to die."

"You promise?" Her voice was fierce. She tilted her head to look up at him.

"I promise."

If she'd been in any state to notice, she would have realized that it said oceans about the change their relationship had undergone that she was willing to trust him on that. She let out a slow breath of relief.

"Tell me about Lorna." He smoothed her hair back from her face.

"She was my sister. She died." The words were abrupt. Her fingers had been lying flat on his chest. They curled into a fist.

"Riley."

He was asking for more. She could hear it in his tone. So she closed her eyes and gave up and told him about the little sister who had been born with a congenital heart condition, who they'd always known would one day need a heart transplant, who after hanging on valiantly for years, after surviving the death of their mother and everything else life had thrown her way, had finally gotten sick enough to get onto the transplant list, and had then caught a virus and died. Nothing anyone could do, gone in two days.

Riley had lived with it for so long, she didn't even cry. But by the time she finished telling him, her heart was shredded.

"I'm sorry, Angel. So d.a.m.ned sorry."

His arms closed around her. He gathered her close and rocked her against him. She felt his lips in her hair. He soothed her, talked to her, pulled her thoughts away from Lorna and Emma and all things scary and bad by telling her stories about himself, about what it was like growing up in Seattle with three little sisters, about playing football in high school, things like that. She asked him about the scar on his abdomen and he told her he got shot, and then when she wanted him to elaborate he kissed her instead. Riley was just realizing that she was allowing herself to be well and truly distracted one more time when his mouth slid down to her breast. She looked at his dark head nuzzling her, and felt the hot pull of his mouth on her nipples, and promptly forgot about everything except the way he was making her feel.

FINN COULDN'T help it. He knew he was digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole that he might find it impossible to climb out of. He knew she was lying to him, hiding something from him. He knew that when this whole thing finally shook itself out there was liable to be h.e.l.l to pay. He knew he was facing a b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a long day, and he and Riley both needed rest.

He knew all that, and he went ahead and made love to her most of the night anyway. h.e.l.l, he'd probably still be making love to her at that very moment if she hadn't, after that last steamy session, fallen into an exhausted sleep.

It had been, he told himself as he carefully disentangled their bodies and slid out of bed, one of those things where you've already so completely f.u.c.ked up (literally) that you can't make the situation any worse than it already is, so you might as well enjoy it.

He should never have given in to temptation and slept with her.

Too late now.

In retrospect, he could see that sleeping with her had been all but inevitable from the moment he'd decided that they had to share a hotel room. But he didn't see that he'd had a choice about that: putting her in her own hotel room would have been like tethering a goat in the path of a jungle full of hungry tigers. One of them would have gotten to her. Kidnapping was the least of what might have happened to her. She could just as easily have been tortured and killed with him sound asleep in the room next door.

So he'd kept her with him. He'd told himself that he was a professional, that he had himself well under control. And he did have himself under control. Until she kissed him. That had almost been a temptation too far, right there.

But he still could have saved it. He still could have kept the situation from going completely to h.e.l.l. He'd observed that she had a problem with masculine aggression, and even knew the reason for it: the background check had revealed her mother's penchant for abusive boyfriends. It had been up to young Riley to protect the woman who should have been protecting her, time after time.

So when he'd seen that she hadn't liked being backed up against the wall, hadn't liked being reminded that he was bigger and she was smaller and sometimes size does matter, and seen that she was starting to panic a little at the thought that she couldn't get away from him, he could have gone with that. It wouldn't have taken much to have scared her off him for good and all, but he hadn't been able to do it. Scaring women wasn't something he did, and scaring Riley wasn't something he was prepared to do. Instead he had gentled her, letting her call the shots until she'd ended up in his bed.

Now he had to live with the consequences, while, not incidentally, keeping her safe and getting the job he'd been a.s.signed to do done.

It didn't help, he thought as he took a moment to look her over to make sure she was still soundly asleep before he tucked the covers around her, that she really was, as he'd told her, just about the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life. The room was dark, but not so dark that he couldn't see the curve of her lashes resting on her cheeks, and her softly parted lips, and the sweetly unconscious curve of her body.

Best s.e.x ever. She'd surprised him with that. She'd surprised him with a lot of things.

Maybe the s.e.x wouldn't prove to be such a disaster after all, he reflected as, having pulled on his pants and shirt, and picked up his gun, he quietly headed out into the hall for one more predawn conference with Bax. Women being what they were, there was a fair chance that she'd be feeling more trusting of him in the aftermath of having been well and truly f.u.c.ked.

He hoped so, for both their sakes.

Bax, wearing plaid pajamas this time, came to his door blinking and yawning. The TV was silent but on in the background.

"You get everything set up?" Finn asked.

"Yeah." Bax let loose with a giant yawn, covered his mouth with his hand, and blinked at him. "Sorry. Uh-where is she?"