She finally got her shower, though with him in there with her it was more orgy than shower. He paused once, with the water pouring over them, and touched the patch on her hip. “What’s this?”
“My birth control patch.”
He regarded it with interest. “I’ve never seen one before. What if it comes off?”
“I’ve never had one come off until I take it off. They stick pretty good. But I check it every time I shower, just to make sure.”
He trailed his fingertips over the slope of her breasts, then lightly circled her nipples. His expression was serious. “I’ve never had sex without wearing a condom before.”
“Never?”
He shook his head. He watched his fingers as they moved down her stomach, over the gentle curve of her belly, before curving into the notch between her legs. His two middle fingers slid between her folds and up into her. Milla’s breath hissed between her teeth and she lifted onto her toes, clinging to his shoulders for balance.
“I liked it,” he murmured.
“What?” She had totally lost the thread of their conversation.
“Coming inside you. So don’t lose that patch.”
She had never been into kinky sex; oral was as far as she would go. But Diaz knew no boundaries on her body and she was drunk with physical pleasure; she let him do whatever he wanted. He took her in the shower, on the floor, sitting on the vanity. He put her against the wall and took her standing up. It was sex as she had never known it before, raw and powerful, surprisingly sophisticated in execution but primitive in design and intent. And she kept coming back for more, arousing him with his penis in her mouth, her hands cupping his heavy balls and feeling them tighten, and doing some of the same things to him that he’d done to her, just to hear the thick groans he gave.
By morning, she was raw and sore, and knew walking would be an effort. By morning, she could barely remember what it had been like to not know his body, not to have felt him inside her and held him in her arms and absorbed the power of his thrusts as he came. By morning, she was his.
She woke to see light seeping around the edges of the pulled curtains. He lay behind her, one heavy arm draped over her waist, his breath warm on her shoulder. She felt stupid. She was more than a little shocked at herself, but there it was: she was his, in a way she had never been David’s. The knowledge hurt her. Though until the day Justin was stolen, her marriage had been a happy one, she had remained her own person and David had remained his. He had been absorbed in his work, of course, as he still was, and she had been content to have that small, almost imperceptible distance between them. It had felt good, that sense of autonomy, of controlling her own life.
But David was a civilized man, and Diaz . . . wasn’t. He hadn’t let her maintain that tiny sense of distance.
She knew very well she had bedded down with a predator. He was dangerous, unpredictable, and she had never felt safer than when she was in his arms. He had used her for his pleasure, but he had also let her use him in return. Last night hadn’t been just sex, though she had thought it would be. Instead it had been a . . . claiming, raw and raunchy and unexpected.
How could she have known he wanted that? She could have handled her emotions better if it had been only sex. But he had known what he was doing, and ruthlessly used the physical to cement the emotional. Claimed, and bonded. No matter what, now, they were linked, and not just by memories of what had passed between them. No, there was something else, something primitive and elemental that she couldn’t quite grasp.
Love? She couldn’t call it that. There was a powerful attraction between them that seemed to go all the way down to the cellular level, but it wasn’t love. She was damn certain he didn’t love her. It was almost a case of like calling to like, a sense of ease as if they were two halves fitting into one perfect whole, and that made her even more uneasy than thinking about love. Was she like Diaz? Was she that ruthless? Had she become like him, in her relentless search for Justin?
He stirred and pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “We need to get to the airport,” he said sleepily.
She didn’t want to move. “I have two more days of vacation left.” She should go back to El Paso, she knew. Diaz should renew his search for Pavón, and now that they were fairly certain someone had been misdirecting her all these years, they had another angle to explore. But for ten years she had been battering herself against a blank wall, and she was tired. Yesterday she had nearly died in that river. Would it be so horrible of her if she stole two days just for herself, away from the constant struggle? Two days, that was all she was asking. She had never even considered doing such a thing before.
“What will happen if we go home?”
“I’ll probably go back to work,” she said honestly. Things would be different when she was home. El Paso was the center of it all; she couldn’t be there and not work. Boise was a different world, away from everyone she knew.
He rolled over and picked up the phone. “I’ll cancel our flight reservations.”
21
Arturo Pavón liked to tell everyone that he never forgot an insult. He enjoyed seeing the caution in their faces, the way their gazes skittered away from him. And it was true; he forgot no slight, real or imagined. There was only one who had harmed him and gotten away with it, and the knowledge was a bitter little knot in the pit of his stomach, a knot he lived with every day. But he hadn’t forgotten, hadn’t given up on vengeance. His time was slow in coming, but come it would. One day their paths would cross, and he would make the American bitch regret the very day she was born.