Troublemaker Read online

  His tone, his expression, both made her uneasy. She looked down at her cookie to hide her foreboding. Experience told her conversations that began this way were never good; that was how her ex-husband had begun his explanation of how he needed more than she could provide, how a stepfather or two had said good-bye, how her mother had announced her first remarriage. Was now when Morgan told her not to get too attached, that anything they had was temporary and he’d be going back to his exciting job when the time came? She knew that; he didn’t have to spell it out. And knowing it was one thing, but she didn’t want to hear it, she didn’t want him to say, “We’ll have a good time, baby, but then it’s adios.”

  “No, we don’t,” she said briskly. “I get it.”

  “Trust me,” he growled. “You don’t.”

  She rolled her eyes. “So this isn’t the part where you tell me you’ll be leaving—”

  “I want to—”

  “—and that’s good because I really don’t want to hear it!” she ended, the words clipped off hard and flat.

  “Bo. Shut up.”

  At his hard tone she looked up, her eyes flashing with temper, but he seized her by the back of the neck and kissed her, his mouth hungry and fierce. For a second she held herself stiff, not responding, but he wasn’t having any of that and dragged her across him so her butt was on the quilt between his thighs and her legs were draped over his. He tilted her head back and kissed her until she softened a bit; she still didn’t kiss him back, but she was accepting his mouth. His hand delved under her shirt and closed over her breast, deftly pinching her nipple until it formed a tight bud, the sensation sharp but not quite painful. Pleasure arrowed straight down between her legs, making her tighten and clench as if he were inside her, damn him.

  She didn’t want to flash back to how all of that had felt, but she couldn’t stop the memory or her response. She had wanted him all day—not a gnawing need but a constant low heat. She had wanted to touch him, to feel his weight pressing her down, the heavy sensation of him pushing between her legs and into her. She hadn’t indulged because waiting was its own sort of perverse pleasure, feeling the craving slowly grow. She liked the anticipation, the knowledge that when they finally came together again the pleasure would be more intense for the waiting.

  And the way he was kissing her now . . . She began to think that perhaps the “This is temporary” talk hadn’t been on his mind after all. His mouth was too hungry, his touch too . . . possessive? She’d never had anyone feel possessive of her before, so she wasn’t certain.

  She bit his lip and murmured, “Don’t tell me to shut up,” mainly because she didn’t want him thinking he could get away with it.

  He drew back a little to look down at her, his eyelids heavy and color deepening the sun bronze on his cheeks. “If I do, will you bite me again?” he asked, and bent to nuzzle her temple.

  “You bet.”

  “Shut up.”

  The air between them changed and sizzled. She laughed and bit him, and ended up flat on her back with her shirt jerked up and his mouth clamped over her nipple. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, sinking and floating in the sharp, prickling sensation that pulled at her. He slid his hand between her legs and cupped her through her jeans, rubbing the heel of his palm against her clitoris. Bo’s eyes flared open and she stared up at the bits of blue sky she could see through the gently swaying tree limbs. Her gaze was unfocused because all of her attention was focused inward, on her body and what he was doing. I’m going to come, she thought dimly, then she said it, and then she did it.

  He fought her out of her jeans while she was mostly comatose, unable to help him because her body was limp and heavy and still faintly pulsing. He didn’t get her shirt off, but it was shoved up under her arms anyway. He hooked his hands under her thighs and pulled her legs up and apart, settling solidly between them. The light breeze briefly cooled her hot damp flesh, then he was there, reaching between them to set the thick head of his penis against her opening and stretching her as he slowly pushed inside. He made a rough sound deep in his throat as he lifted her legs once more so he could seat himself as deeply as possible. Bo roused enough to wind her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his back, and held on as he began thrusting.

  He didn’t take long, about a minute, but it was a tumultuous minute. The heavy push and drag of his shaft inside her just did it for her, so fast and so hard that within that minute she was feeling the coil of desire again. His orgasm hit and he bucked and shuddered through it, then slowly sank down on her until she was bearing his entire weight. Almost immediately he struggled up onto his forearms so she could breathe, but his head hung down so his forehead rested against hers. “You kill me,” he muttered almost soundlessly. “Bo.”

  Was that good? she wondered woozily, because he made her feel drunk, drunk on pleasure, on him. She smoothed her hands up and down his sweaty back, either to soothe him or to satisfy her own need to touch him. Maybe the two were mixed together; maybe somewhere along the line her needs and his had stopped being so defined and separate.

  When they could manage the effort, silently they pulled apart and cleaned up with the napkins she’d brought, and some of the water. Morgan gave a low growl of laughter because Tricks had turned her back on them while she finished off her chew bone. When they were dressed again—halfway, at least; she had on her shirt and underwear, and he had on his jeans—he pulled her to sit between his drawn-up legs and wrapped his arms around her. “Now,” he said. “We talk. I have something serious to tell you, about me being here.”

  She thought about that a minute. “Will I like it?”

  “Probably not. But if you and I are going to do this thing we’ve got going, then I’m going to be straight with you. You might kick my ass to the curb, but that’s a chance I have to take.”

  Okay, so it definitely wasn’t a don’t-get-serious-because-I-have-one-foot-out-the-door talk. Bo leaned her head back against his shoulder, laid her arms on top of his where they wrapped around her stomach. Her mind raced, trying to think what could be so dicey about his situation here, which led her immediately to Axel. “Damn it!” she said irritably. “I knew I should have been more suspicious of Axel. He’s behind this, right?”

  “Mostly right. I have my share of responsibility. The deal is this: what he told you was correct, as far as it goes—”

  “But, because he’s Axel, he didn’t travel too far down the truth road, did he?” She felt like growling. Any time Axel was involved, her irritation level shot through the roof. She didn’t like him, didn’t trust him, and so far her instincts had been dead on the money.

  Morgan grunted. “He has other priorities, and they’re damn important priorities. Likely he chose to send me to you partly out of spite, because that’s Axel. But he had other criteria for choosing you, such as the relative isolation of the town, the small population that would make it easy to spot strangers, the relatively short distance to D.C. He was setting a trap.”

  Bo absorbed that, rapidly sorting through and discarding scenarios. She wasn’t schooled in subterfuge, but she was intelligent and observant, and this additional information clicked in a way Axel’s original argument hadn’t. Oh, she’d been swayed—by Morgan’s condition, by the money Axel had offered, by the surface logic of what he’d said. The logic even went deeper than one layer because of the probability that their organization had been compromised from the inside. And yet . . . she should have been more suspicious.

  She asked the most important question first: “Is it possible anyone in town could be in danger or hurt?” That had been one of her original concerns, and she’d been fool enough to believe Axel when he’d denied it. The town and the people in it were her responsibility; more than that, the people were her friends. If anything happened to any one of them—she didn’t know if she’d be able to get past that. On the one hand she appreciated that Morgan was telling her the truth, but on the other hand this was so potentially big that she