“Isittooearly to resort to cannibalism?”
Agent Reyes kept his shaded eyes in front of him as we trudged through fierce sun and grazing weeds. “It’s been less than twenty-four hours since you’ve eaten. You’re nowhere near the point of cannibalism.”
“I don’t know,” I mused. “Your bicep is starting to look a hell of a lot like a turkey leg.”
He shook his head, but a cautious smile graced his mouth.
“That’s disgusting.”
“Are you saying you wouldn’t eat me, James?”
The suggestive timbre of my voice snagged a coy smile on my lips as I watched his expression harden. It was getting easier and easier to fluster him, and he was becoming less and less subtle in hiding the evidence of it.
James swiveled his attention to me, appraising me behind his sunglasses with a slow shake of his head.
“How are you your father’s daughter?”
“I fell reaaaally far from the tree.”
He turned his dark-eyed concentration back to the endless brush of land, murmuring under his breath, “Isn’t that the truth.”
“Are you saying you’d rather me be a tight-ass taint like him?”
Irritation hummed in James’ throat as restraint waned thin in his deep voice. “I’m saying I’d rather you quiet that filthy fucking mouth of yours.”
“Well, you’re shit out of luck there, buddy. This ‘filthy fucking mouth of mine’, as you put so eloquently with your own pure as angels mouth, has gotta keep going to distract me from how hungry I am.”
We’d been walking in aimless circles for what felt like hours. James nudged me awake at the same time the glimpse of sun was beginning to crest over the horizon. The forest around us rose with a soft swell of light the higher the sun went, washing its warmth over earth and skin and taking away my only reason to stay in James’ arms.
I slept well—surprisingly well—but I’d woken up with a hollow ache in the pit of my stomach that just got worse and worse the more we walked.
“There are lots of ways I want to die, but I’ve officially decided that starvation is not one of them. It’s a pain even I don’t like.”
The sun was right over us now, spotlighting our trek through meandering forest and blurry-lined conversations.
“So you’re saying you like pain?” He almost sounded like he was asking to confirm.
“Are you saying you don’t? Because I have a few handprints on my neck and ass that would prove otherwise.”
The lowered tilt of James’ head allowed the light honey of his eyes to peek over the bridge of his glasses, giving him away as he searched across my naked neck for marks.
There weren’t any, and he’d never grabbed me hard enough to leave one, but his checking to make sure told me it wouldn’t be the first time he’d left his sinful mark on a woman.
Satisfied when he didn’t find a single bruise on the surface of my skin, he pushed his shades back in place.
“I don’t like pain.”
“But you like to give it.”
To that, he didn’t answer. Just kept his head forward and lips sealed. Dots from previous conversations started connecting themselves in my brain as I pieced together all I knew about James Reyes.
“Because if you’re not the one giving it, then you’re not in control of the pain,” I stated, my understanding of this man slow-forming through my words.
Languid breath filled out his chest, and he exhaled a deep, “Correct.”
Interesting.
My hot-headed agent was more and more interesting with every shared second. He needed to give pain to feel in control, and I needed to receive it to lose myself in the mist of black and blue. I needed it to paint my skin in dustings of proof that the pain was as much on the outside as it was on the inside, and James preferred to be the one holding the brush.