Covert Agent's Virgin Affair

Unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable.

Why hadn’t she known about this before? But then again, she hadn’t met Jake before now. Grateful. Yes, totally grateful that she’d waited for him, she turned her head to make sure he was all right. His skin was damp, glistening with sweat. And his breathing was as erratic as her own.

“Thank God,” she murmured.

Jake opened his eyes and rolled to look at her. “For what?”

“Thank God you were the first.”

He shifted to one side, pulled her snugly against him and pressed a kiss to her hair. “You could’ve told me.”

She laid a palm on his chest, felt the pulse beat of his heart. “What? That I was a twenty-nine-year-old virgin? And how long would you have stuck around after hearing that?”

His chuckle rumbled up through her hand. “Maybe you’re right. And I would’ve hated missing what just happened here.”

“See? I have a lot of strikes against me. And I wanted you. Badly.”

“I wanted you from the first moment I laid eyes on you.” He kissed the tip of her nose, then raised her hand to his lips and kissed her fingertips. “I saw you in that sparkly orange top and nearly swallowed my tongue.”

“It’s burnt umber, not orange. Red-haired women aren’t supposed to wear orange.” But this red-haired woman was going to wear that top as much as possible from now on.

She started to turn over but winced with the discovery that lots of interesting places on her body ached.

Jake’s mouth pressed into a hard line. “I didn’t even manage to get your bra all the way off. Hell of a way for a first time to go.”

He rolled out of bed, ripped off his own rumpled shirt and then reached back and undid her bra. She started to follow him to her feet, but he put his hand down and held her still.

“Hold on. I know what you need right now.” He slid his hands under her body and lifted her into his arms. “Let me take care of you.”

Feeling like a princess, like her little mermaid, Mary grinned into his shoulder as she threw her arms around his neck and hung on.

He carried her into the bathroom and stepped with her into the bathtub. Then he turned on the shower tap, thankfully warm. The spray covered them in a shower of liquid calm.

Slowly, Jake lowered her down his body to stand on her own shaky legs. “Hang there a second.” He kept one arm tightly around her and reached for the soap. “You’re going to find out that good sex is always messy, Miss Mary Ariel.”

“I like the sound of that. I wish my parents had called me Ariel. Maybe I’ll change my name.” Along with her whole life—starting tonight.

He placed a wet kiss on the mermaid’s face and Mary laughed, feeling careless and coy.

The bar of soap rubbing across her breasts made her nipples tighten. Did he notice? Jake never changed the motion. His knuckles brushed the soft undersides of her breasts. He ran his hands down her spine and around her backside. He seemed intent on smoothing soap bubbles over her skin and she wasn’t sure he was paying attention.

Until…he reached between her legs. His touch was as light as a cloud, and he bent his head to place gentle lips against her wet temple.

An electric buzz rushed through her veins like a warm wind. Desire, close to the surface since their first kiss, kicked off her pulse again. Her heart pounded with the need, the heat.

“Jake.” The word was only a whisper of sound. A plea. A question.

But it didn’t have the desired effect.

He pulled his hand away and stepped back, studying her under the spray. Suddenly she felt more embarrassed than she had in her whole life and raised both palms to cover her breasts. No man had ever seen her stark naked before. It was one thing to have sex in bed—in the dark. It was quite another to be faced with full-frontal nudity under the bathroom’s fluorescent light.

Jake’s eyes clouded over and instead of ice blue, they looked gray and unfocused. “That’s it.” He handed her the soap, turned his back and pushed aside the shower curtain ready to step out of the tub.

“Is it me?” she asked quietly. “Now that you’ve seen me in the light are you regretting what we did?”

He shook his head, then turned back and reached for her. “Maybe I have some guilt. But I’ll never regret one moment of what we did. Don’t ever think that. You are a gorgeous woman. And if I had a choice.”

Pulling her close, he lasered a kiss across her lips. A kiss that spoke of need and desperation. A kiss that spoke of tomorrow.

By the time he let her go, his breathing was coming in hard pants and his erection was poking her in the stomach. “You’re going to be sore for a couple of days. You have lots of time left in your future to experience everything. Let’s take things slow for now.”

She sighed but nodded her acceptance of his decision. It wasn’t her first choice but if he could wait, so could she.

Jake stepped from the tub. “Take your time. When you get out we’ll have breakfast before we each head back to Honey Creek.”

He put a towel over the bar for her to use after the shower. “This is the only dry cloth left in the room, and it’s all yours. I’ll air-dry. Oh, and when you get out of the shower, you might want to make a decision about your clothes.”

“My…?”

He grinned and pointed to the pile by the sink.

“My new silk pants? And my brand-new heels? They look ruined.” The pants would probably be easy to replace, though she regretted the heels.

“Sorry you picked last night to wear your new clothes.”

“All my clothes are new.” Hmm. That sounded a little too sharp and full of self-pity and it wasn’t how she truly felt. “Besides, those clothes were lucky for me.”

“I told you never to call me here.”

At the same time as Mary was stepping from the shower, Truman was making lame excuses.

“But, boss, I’m using a pay phone outside the Bozeman hospital E.R. No one will find out.”

The boss tried to keep sudden anger and frustration from spilling over through the phone. “I’m not paying you to get your nose broken. I wanted you to follow that new guy around for a while and report back on his behavior. What’s the idea of jumping him?”

Groaning, Truman raced to explain, “He looked like he was spying on somebody. I only wanted to scare him off. Make him regret he came to our part of the country.”

“Yeah? And that worked out so well, didn’t it?”

“It’s not my fault.” Truman’s whining voice set nerves to jangling. “He’s gotta be some kind of pro.”

The idea wasn’t a novel one. “I’m beginning to believe you’re right. I thought at first he was a private investigator and I wanted to know who hired him. I’m more convinced now that he’s probably a fed. DEA or FBI maybe. Makes me think I’d better bring in a pro myself.”

Truman issued a laugh, but the sound rang hollow and too loud across the line. “You get him, boss. What do you want me to do next?”

“Go on vacation.”

“But, boss.”