She lifted the shirt over her head and let it fall to the floor.
He didn’t move, didn’t blink, but his taut inhale sounded like a whip cracking beside her ear. “Now the panties.”
Her breath hitched. No underwear meant no more physical boundaries. She squeezed her eyes shut, breaking the spell.
A breeze from the ceiling fan brushed across her bare breasts, hardening her nipples. He’d seen it all before, most recently on the plane, but now that he’d declared his intent to claim her, exposing her pussy would feel more vulnerable, more significant.
She stole a glance at the ruined microchip on the table. She was just one girl, raised on a poor Texas farm. Completely out of her league.
But how many Restrepo enemies had made it this far? Did the FBI, DEA, or Colombian Police even know how to find this place? No es probable. Yet she stood within the walls of the cartel’s lair, unrestrained and still breathing.
Steeling her spine, she resolved to see this through. For her survival. For the innocent lives they bought and sold.
She hooked her thumbs under the elastic at her hips, shoved the panties to the floor, and kicked them. The urge to curl inward and cover herself made her fingers tremble, but she fought it, adjusting her stance into one that had been beaten into muscle memory. Legs wide, hands behind her neck, back straight, tits out, eyes on him.
The heat of his gaze seared her pussy, and his fingers twitched against the armrests. She wished she hadn’t waxed off all her pubic hair. She felt so damn bare and unprotected.
“I miss your soft curls here.” He stroked the back of a knuckle across her mound. “No more waxing.”
She shivered. She couldn’t help it. It was the thick intonation of his voice, a subtle trace of Colombia. When she was sixteen, she’d clung to the gravely rumble of his timbre. And now, fuck, he still had the ability to make her wet with his voice alone.
He leaned forward, his lips a kiss away from her chest, warm breath on her nipples. She stifled a gasp as fingertips grazed her hipbones and roamed over her ribs, his hands shaking.
Shaking? She reared her head back. “Are you nervous?”
His expression hardened. He stood abruptly, snatched her wrist from behind her neck, and pulled her after him. Inside, through a sitting room, and down an enclosed hallway, they went.
“Do you know why I’m here?” She quickened her strides to keep her arm attached to her shoulder.
“Because I want you here.”
“No, I mean do you know why I showed up with the man in the Mustang?”
“Van Quiso?” He slammed to a halt, causing her to crash into his chest as he whirled on her. “The hueputa who tortured you for a year?”
Cords pulled taut in his neck. Muscles and veins strained against the skin on his forearms, and the fingers around her hand cinched so tightly it felt like he was seconds from snapping bones.
She’d obviously hit an overprotective nerve, which was hypocritical as fuck seeing how she’d spent the last however many hours in his restraints.
“Don’t hurt him.” There was no love lost between her and Van, but she’d been making progress with the man.
“Give me a reason not to,” he spat and turned away, yanking her into a massive bedroom.
“He’s not worth your time, he loves his wife, and he doesn’t give a shit about me. That’s three.” She glimpsed white walls, white bedding, and white woodwork before she was shoved into an all-white bathroom the size of her bedroom at home.
Oval glass tiles glittered like diamonds around the vanity on the wall to the left. Sunlight warmed her right side, spilling in through the floor-to-ceiling pane of glass that ran the length of the room. In the distance, a pair of blue and yellow macaws soared above the trees and perched in the leafy canopy. She stood there for a moment, contemplating the surrealistic beauty that enveloped her nightmare.
She was in Colombia, her parents’ birthplace, with the boy she’d loved and lost—the man who’d become her enemy. The scenery shouldn’t have been this awe-inspiring.
The white travertine floors cooled her bare feet as she stepped forward and followed him to the shower at the far end. But as she passed the separate toilet room, her bladder pinched.
He glanced at her face and waved a hand at the toilet. “Go.”
A year without privacy in Van’s attic made it easy to sit down and pee under Matias’ watchful gaze.
“You haven’t answered my question.” She tore off a wad of toilet paper.
“Do I know why you tortured Larry McGregor for information? Why you killed him and pretended to be his delivery?” He twisted the shower faucet on and spun back toward her with fire in his eyes. “I know everything about you, mi vida.”
How? A chill raced down her back. That meant Nico probably knew her plans, as well. Unless Matias was bluffing. Maybe he didn’t know everything.
She wiped, flushed, and walked toward him, fingers twitching at her sides. “Who took my virginity?”
His gaze flew to her pussy, and his hand shot out and clutched the towel rack on the wall beside him. A second later, the brackets ripped from the woodwork, and metal hurtled through the room and crashed near the doorway.
She jumped, pulse hammering in her throat.
“Get in the shower.” He thrust a finger at the walk-in enclosure.
The tiled space was large enough to wash a harem of women. She tried not to dwell on that as she stepped beneath the warm spray of multiple shower heads.
He tackled the laces on his boots, toed them off, then moved to his socks, shirt, fatigues, and…sweet God in heaven, he wasn’t wearing underwear.
Maybe the steam was distorting her vision, but his cock looked so much longer, thicker, harder than she remembered. Where his body used to be tall, slender, and a little awkward, it was now broad, vascular, and stacked with brawn and power. Every inch of him was pure, raw testosterone.
Her knees loosened, and her skin flushed. Was it possible to sweat in water?
“Why did you tell me the GPS tracker was removed?” She gave him her back and grabbed the shampoo. “You could’ve let me go on thinking I had help coming.”
His footsteps squeaked on the wet floor, closing in. She held her breath.
“The sooner you accept your future with me,” he said, his mouth at her ear, “the easier this will be for you. Turn around.”
She inwardly growled, shaking with the impulse to tell him what he could do with his orders. But she needed to pick her battles.
If she turned around, though, her brain would get all scrambled under the force of his eyes. And his cock, good God, it would be standing proud and right there between them.
Just don’t look at it.
With a tight throat, she pivoted to face him.
WARM WATER RAINED DOWN from the array of shower heads, heating Camila’s skin. Or was it anxiety making her hot and itchy? Keeping her focus above Matias’ waist as she angled her face out of the spray, her gaze landed on another tattoo.
At first glance, it looked like black veins forking over his shoulder. She felt him watching her as he turned to the side, allowing her to see the full image.
The outline of a tree trunk etched across his upper back and spread into leafless branches. The piece was twice the size of her hand and crawled over his shoulder. An orange tree. She’d recognize the rounded, symmetrical shape anywhere.
A closer inspection revealed two images in one, an optical illusion of limbs curving into the figure of a woman with hourglass hips and flowing black hair. Branches formed her slender neck, the bends of her arms behind her, the dip of her waist, all of which stemmed from the V at the apex of her thighs. It was eerily beautiful, unique, and really fucking sexy.
But an orange tree? A woman with long, black hair? Surely, it wasn’t…
“Me??
? She looked up and froze in the prison of his eyes.
He gave a terse nod, lifted the shampoo from her hand, and stepped behind her.
She stared at her toes in the swirl of water. He’d tattooed an image of her on his body.
That should’ve ignited her with outrage and confusion and sparked all kinds of questions. But dammit, her nerves were frayed, her body too tired to care. Way too tired to stop him from washing her hair, making her sigh with his distracting fingers, and massaging her scalp as the scent of citrus and lavender wafted around her.
After all these years, she still knew the feel of his strong hands, the muscles that thickened his palms, and the surety of his grip. She’d known how his mouth tasted after a long day in the sun, the way he’d moaned when she kissed that spot beneath his ear, and the intensity of his eye contact as he’d chased his orgasm.
“Tell me his name.” He shifted around to her front, his hands lathered in soap.
“Who?”
“The one who took your virginity.” His voice was soft, at odds with the teeth-breaking set of his jaw.
“Um…” She blinked through the deluge of water. “Oscar.”
“Oscar?” He scowled, nostrils flaring. “That’s not a name. It’s processed meat.”
“It is a name.” She was pretty sure Oscar had been a manwhore, so maybe processed meat was more fitting.
“Did he make it good for you?” His tone was incisive, guttural.
“Two pumps and done.”
His entire demeanor darkened. She knew what he was thinking. It should’ve been him.
He lathered her body, his hands sluicing soapy water from her neck to her toes and everywhere between. Fingers curved around her breasts, stroking, molding. She twitched away and raised her head, her gaze entangling with the luminous gold of his eyes.
Her breathing shortened, and his touch slid lower, down her sides, around her waist, stopping to palm her ass and squeeze her flesh.
“Matias, don’t.” She gripped his wrists, tried to push him away.
It only made him clench harder, putting enough pressure against the muscles on her backside that pain twinged through her nerve endings. Weightless energy charged through her—an intense kind of energy that buzzed like an angry vibrator in her pussy.