He looked at her and said, “Everything. That’s what I want. But I can’t have it.”
She quivered, and tears welled in her eyes. “You know you can have anything you want. All you have to do is reach out and take it.”
Slowly he walked up to her and put his hand on her shoulder, sliding his fingers under the strap of her nightgown and stroking his rough fingertips over her warm, satiny skin. “At the risk of your life?” he asked in a low voice. “No. I couldn’t live with that.”
“You make it sound like a concrete fact that anyone close to you is a target. Other agents—”
“Other agents aren’t me,” he interrupted quietly, his black eyes level on hers. “There are several renegade governments and terrorist groups that have a bounty on my head. Do you think I’d ask any woman to share that sort of life with me?”
She managed to smile through her tears. “Don’t try to tell me you live like a monk. I know there have been women—”
“No one close. No one special. No one who could be used or threatened in an attempt to get at me. I’ve tried it, honey. I was married, years ago before it got as bad as it is now. She was wounded in an attempt on my life. Being a smart woman, she got the hell away from me as fast as she could.”
Not so smart, Rachel thought. She knew that she never would have let that drive her away from him. Her throat was so tight that she was almost choking on her words as she stared up at him, the tears finally overflowing and rolling down her cheeks. “It would be worth it, to be with you,” she whispered. “I’d take the chance.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I won’t let you. I won’t take the chance, not with your life.” With one thumb he rubbed away the tears tracking her face.
“Isn’t that my decision to make?”
He moved both his hands up to cup her face, sliding his fingers into her thick straight hair and tilting her face closer to his. “Not when you don’t have any real idea of the danger involved. You pulled a little stint as an investigative reporter, and you notice more than is good for you, but you’re as innocent as a baby when it comes to knowing what my work is really like. There are agents who live fairly normal lives, but I’m not one of them. I’m one of a very small minority. My existence isn’t even admitted publicly.”
She had gone pale, her face very still. “I know more about the risks involved than you think.”
“No. You know the movie versions, the cleaned up, romanticized, glamorized crap.”
Rachel suddenly jerked her head away from his touch, her hands clenched into fists. “You think so?” she rasped, her voice rough with pain. “My husband was killed by a car bomb meant for me. There was nothing cleaned up, romanticized, or glamorous about that. He died in my place! Ask me what I know about someone else paying the price for a risk I chose to take!” Tears began falling again, and she dashed them away, glaring fiercely at him. “Damn you, Kell Sabin! Do you think I want to love you? But at least I’m willing to take the chance, rather than run away from it the way you do!”
CHAPTER TEN
SHE WAS CRYING, and it was like taking a punch in the gut to watch her. Rachel simply wasn’t a weepy person, and she was trying hard not to cry, but the tears kept rolling down her face as she faced him, and she kept angrily dashing them away. Slowly Kell reached out and brushed her hair away from her damp face, then eased her into his arms and pressed her head against his uninjured shoulder. “Whatever happens, I can’t risk you,” he said in a low, tortured voice.
Hearing the finality in his voice, she knew that there was no convincing him otherwise. He would go, and when he did it would be forever. Desperately she clung to him, inhaling deeply to draw the scent of him into her body, her hands trying to memorize the way it felt to touch him. All she had was this.
He tilted her chin up and bent his head then slanted his mouth over hers, the pressure hard and hungry, even a little angry, because they had so little time when forever wouldn’t suffice. She sighed and opened her mouth to his probing tongue, her fingers flexing on his muscular back, and as always there was that strong, immediate response to him that tightened her breasts and sent twinges of pleasure through her loins. He sensed it, cupping her bottom in his rough hands and lifting her into grinding contact with his own throbbing flesh while his mouth continued to take hers.
He wanted to wipe out the pain he’d seen in her eyes; he wanted to savor her, take his time with her, as he’d been unable to do that afternoon. Sabin could
n’t remember ever before losing control like that, not even when he’d been a young boy on the prowl, driven by a rapacious sexuality. But with Rachel his responses were so extreme that he’d exploded only moments after entering her; she had reached her peak, too, but he knew that he’d rushed her, hurt her with his too-powerful penetration. She was so tight that accommodating him hadn’t been easy for her. He wasn’t going to let it be that way again; he was going to take his time with her, until she was truly ready for him and trembling on the brink.
She was trembling in his arms, the salty taste of her tears on his tongue. Silently he led her to the bed, leaving the light on because he wanted to see every nuance of her expression while he made love to her. He paused to push his jeans off, and Rachel watched him, her hands automatically lifting to her nightgown.
Quickly he stayed them. “No, leave your gown on for now.” Perhaps it would be easier for him if he couldn’t see her stretched out naked and waiting for him. He was caught in his own delicious dilemma, wanting to watch her as he made love to her, as he made her ready to receive him, yet knowing that the sight of her naked body would push him closer to the edge than he wanted to be right now. Just thinking about her was torture enough. His loins were heavy and throbbing, his all-too-accurate memory reminding him just how it had felt to be sheathed inside her.
“Why?” Rachel asked huskily when they were lying on the bed and he was leaning over her with an expression on his face that would have frightened her if she hadn’t trusted him completely.
He smoothed his hand over her breasts, the motion deliberately slow as the thin cotton slid across her nipples, bringing them to tingling prominence. “Why the gown?” he clarified.
It was hard to talk when her breath kept catching. “Yes.”
“Because I’m inciting myself to riot.”
No, it was she who was being incited, tantalized. Everywhere his lightly trailing fingers went they left behind a delicious tingle as her aroused nerve endings pleaded for more. Sometimes he merely brushed her with his fingertips, while at others he stroked her with the flat of his palm, the contact almost hard. And he kissed her: her mouth, her ears, the line of her jaw, the arch of her throat, the exquisitely tender hollow above her collarbones. Finally her breasts knew the warm, moist pressure of his mouth and the probing of his tongue. It was all the more maddening because he didn’t remove her gown; even when his mouth closed hotly on her extended nipple and sucked at it with a strength that made her cry out, it was with the thin barrier of cotton between his mouth and her flesh. In frustration she tried to unbutton the two buttons that closed the top of the gown, to give him access to her bareness, but he stopped her and captured her hands, pinning them to the pillow above her head and anchoring them there with his strong right hand.
“Kell!” she protested, writhing to escape, but he was incredibly strong, despite his half-healed wounds, and she couldn’t wrest herself free. “You’ve got a cruel streak in you!”
“No,” he murmured against her breast, licking her nipple through the wet fabric. “I only want to make you feel good. Don’t you like this?”
There was no way she could deny it; he could easily read the signs of arousal in her body. “Yes,” she admitted, panting. “But I want to touch you, too. Let me—”