Night Rescuer

She sat bolt upright. Her suspicion had been correct. It was a muscular, and very male, shoulder. And it belonged to John Hollister. It hadn’t been a dream. A wonderful, incredible, spectacular dream. A perfect night.

Well, at least she’d managed one perfect night before she checked out of the ol’ mortal coil. She supposed that was something to be pleased about. John shifted beside her and she glanced down. She was startled to see gray eyes gazing steadily back at her, clear and fully alert. No hangover for him, no sir.

“How’re you feeling this morning?” he asked with a distinct note of caution in his voice.

She smiled down at him. “A little dehydration headache, but nothing a couple aspirin and some water won’t take care of.”

“I have some good painkillers if the aspirin doesn’t work,” he mentioned as he sat up, pooling the sheet in his lap. My, my, my. The man had acres of muscles her anatomy textbooks couldn’t have rendered any better.

She shrugged. “I never do anything stronger than aspirin.”

“Lucky you. In my line of work, I end up taking all kinds of stuff to keep going. Or at least I used to.”

And what line of work would that be, exactly? It occurred to her that he’d drawn quite a bit of information out of her last night but had failed to reciprocate with even the sketchiest details of his life. The sum total of what she knew about him was that he worked for a private courier company, he knew where to pick up a weapon in Peru, and he was positively unbelievable in bed. She’d never been with a man even remotely like him. He made the rest of them seem like adolescent boys fumbling their way through the act.

He swung his feet out of the bed and strolled, gloriously and unconcernedly naked, into the bathroom. Now that was a view a girl could get used to.

“Wanna shower first?” he called out to her.

A slow smile spread across her face. In for a penny, in for a pound. She got out of bed and strolled equally as naked to the bathroom. “How ’bout we share the hot water?”

As she rounded the corner, he looked up from a handful of pills, startled. “Uhh, okay. Lemme get these down.”

She stepped forward, curious. “What are those?”

“Carisoprodol.”

“A high-powered muscle relaxant? For what?” she asked.

Now, he looked really surprised. “How do you know what carisoprodol does?”

“I work for a pharmaceutical firm, remember?”

“Doing what?”

“Research, mostly.”

“What kind of research?”

The kind she emphatically didn’t want to talk about. She replied lightly, “The medical kind, mostly.” She stepped over to the shower’s water spigot. “Do you like it cool or screaming hot?”

He stepped up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He murmured in her ear, “The more screaming, the better, darlin’.”

Laughing she stepped into the shower with him and forgot all about carisoprodol. That was until she moved around behind him to soap up his back. The circular, puckered scar just to the left of his L-4 lumbar vertebra was impossible to miss. Still red, the scar was obviously less than a year old. And was just as obviously a bullet wound.

“Your last girlfriend shot you, huh?” she remarked as she sudsed up the scar.

He started like he’d forgotten it was back there. His back muscles bunched into rock hard ridges of…of what? Embarrassment? Stress? Denial? She couldn’t read him at all. A need to comfort him surprised her. She wasn’t usually the maternal kind, and John didn’t strike her as the kind of man who needed or appreciated being mothered. He was an adult in charge of his own life all the way.

The least she could do was distract him from his scar since she was the one who brought it up. She slid around in front of him, rubbing her slippery, soapy body against his as she went. “Mmm. Nice,” she murmured, smiling up at him.

“You’re a beautiful woman, Melina Montez,” he murmured back. He slicked her hair back from her face, studying her seriously. “Not that many women look this good with their hair wet and no makeup.”

“You obviously are blinded by the soap in your eyes,” she replied, laughing.

“I may be blinded, baby, but it isn’t soap doing the job.”

How could a girl resist a compliment like that? She melted against him, savoring the unbearably sensual slide of soapy skin on skin. She stood on tiptoe and wrapped her right leg around his hips in blatant invitation. With the hot water pounding down on them both, he stared down at her, abruptly serious.

“I don’t deserve you,” he said.

She barely heard him over the sound of the water. “You don’t deserve me?” she echoed. “I think you’ve got that backward. I don’t deserve you.”

“Ahh, honey, you have no idea. The things I’ve done—”

The back of her calf rubbed against that telltale scar on his back as she blinked up at him through the shower’s spray. “We’re both adults. Everyone who hasn’t lived in a cocoon has baggage of some kind. I won’t hold the skeletons in your closet against you if you won’t hold mine against me.”

Doubt flickered in his gaze and his eyes glazed with distant thoughts. Was he skeptical of her past or his?

She leaned into him, forcing him to acknowledge her presence. “We’re here together now. No past. No future. Just this moment.”

He didn’t quite come back to her, his eyes were still dark and haunted.

“Come back to me, John,” she murmured. She reached down with her hand to guide him into her throbbing heat. Oh, yeah. That did it. Awareness of her roared back into his eyes, and he aggressively took charge of the moment. Wrapping one arm around her waist, he picked her up and backed her against the cool, tile wall of the shower. With his other hand braced by her head, he drove into her until all thought fled her mind. There was nothing at all except the moment and the two of them, the pounding water and steam, and the rhythm of their bodies slapping into one another as they drove away their demons.

They ordered room service and ate in, lazily watching the morning fog burn off the city skyline below. As hard as she tried to ignore it, the moment came when she could no longer delay the inevitable. She had to make that phone call. So much for her fantasy tryst before she handed herself over to the jackals. Her mouth set grimly, she dug in her purse and fished out the piece of paper with the phone number she’d been given to call when she got here. She reached for the telephone.

A big hand landed gently on top of hers, stopping her from lifting the handset. “I’ll make the call, Melina.”

“They won’t talk to you. They’re expecting me!”

His gaze narrowed far too intelligently. “Who’s they?”

“The people I’m supposed to call,” she replied with desperate calm. He mustn’t mess this up! Her family’s lives rode on it. Huayar had been clear. Any deviation at all from her instructions, and her family would be tortured and possibly killed.

“I’m sorry, honey. I need you to be more specific than that.”

“John, let me make the call. Please just stay out of this.”

He turned at that, capturing both of her hands in his and drawing her away from the phone entirely. He led her across the room and gently forced her down into one of the armchairs. Alarmingly, he continued to stand, looming over her with his arms crossed.

“With all due respect, sweetheart, what the hell’s going on? I already told you that you can tell me anything. And I meant it. But I need to know what I’m up against, here.”

“You’re not up against anything. I hired you to deliver me and nothing more.”

He replied dryly, “As I recall, you fired me last night.”

She glanced up at him, startled. Humor danced in his silver gaze. “That’s not fighting fair to throw that in my face now.”