He was holding back for me, and the knowledge that he was keeping his own pleasure in check in order to satisfy me was that much more erotic.
“Faster,” I whispered. “Harder.”
He didn’t hesitate, thrusting hard inside me as my body clenched tight around him, as if determined to keep him with me forever. His hands were on my hips, and we were moving together in a joint rhythm that seemed both calm and frenzied even as it grew and grew until finally I couldn’t take it any longer and I cried out his name even as the world seemed to shatter around me.
I was dissolving—I wasn’t anything but sensation—and yet he was still able to hold me, and he thrust inside, deeper and harder until I felt him explode, his orgasm shadowing mine, twining with it to draw us both together as our bodies, sensitive and primed, shook and convulsed and drew every last drop of pleasure out of this moment that we shared.
I gasped, finally falling back down to earth, safe now in the arms of this man. This dangerous man who had made love to me so wildly and yet so tenderly. “Evan,” I murmured.
“What?” he asked, and I opened my eyes to see him smiling down at me.
“I was just thinking how safe you make me feel. It’s a little ironic under the circumstances.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, his expression more serious than I’d ever seen it. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe, Lina. You need to know that.”
“I do,” I said, then rose up to brush my lips over his. I settled back. “I’m so happy it feels almost criminal.”
He rolled his eyes, and I laughed out loud.
“You never told me the second thing,” I said, suddenly remembering.
“The what?”
“You said there were two things you had to extricate yourself from. Before your criminal present could become your criminal past. You told me about the stuff still going on at Destiny, but you didn’t tell me the other.”
“No, I guess I didn’t.”
“So what is it?”
“There’s just this one job that we thought was over and done with, but something’s come up lately. Something that could come back and bite us on the ass.”
“Can you fix it?” I asked, suddenly worried.
“I’ve been trying. I keep getting stymied.”
“Why?” I asked, and the simple answer hit me with the force of a slap.
“You.”
twenty
“You want to explain to me what the hell you’re talking about?” I was off the bed and reaching for my shirt.
Evan was sitting up, still naked, and at the moment I wasn’t happy about the distraction. “Baby, calm down.”
“Calm down? You just said that I’m the reason you can’t go completely clean. This is as calm as it gets.”
He stared at me, and I felt my adrenaline drop down a notch.
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I’m a little calmer.” I crammed my arms though my sleeves and dropped back onto the bed. “I’m listening.”
“The Creature Notebook.”
I cocked a brow. “If you tell me that you only fucked me to try to get your hands on that thing, we are going to have a serious problem, Evan Black.”
“I’m tempted to say that just because I think you’d be damn fun to fuck when you’re all riled up. But no. The fact is that even though I should have figured a way to screw you out of the notebook or to romance it away from you or to just flat-out steal it, I couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s you. And because Jahn gave it to you. And because it means so much to you.”
I frowned, trying to stay one step ahead of him. “But the fact that you didn’t take it from me is causing you a problem.”
“Pretty much.”
“Explain,” I demanded.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“Then simplify it.”
“Fine,” he said. “Your uncle wanted the Creature Notebook. Neely got it instead. So Jahn had Cole create a forgery.”
“Cole?” I repeated.
“Do you want to let me finish?”
I held my hands up in surrender.
“We switched the original with the forgery. Which means that the original is in your living room, and Neely’s about to donate a forgery to a museum in Belgium.”
“Cole seriously created a forgery? The quality of that work must be exceptional.” I was legitimately impressed. I mean, I’d spent some time studying forgeries, and that was no small feat.
“Focus for me, babe,” Evan said. “This was no big deal while Neely kept the notebook in his private gallery. But it’s about to go to a museum. It’s going to be poked and prodded and analyzed. And while I think Cole is pretty damn talented, the odds are good that the forgery will be discovered. And if it is—”
“—then it will come back to Cole,” I finished. “Yeah, I get it.”
“No, you don’t,” Evan said. “Because it won’t just come back to Cole. It’ll come back to Jahn. It will ruin his business, his reputation, and the foundation. Not to mention biting me and Tyler on the ass, too.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“We want your notebook,” he said simply. “And then we’ll just switch them back.”
“All right,” I said. “How can I help?”
He shook his head. “I told you. By giving us the notebook.”
“And then?”
“No,” he said. “No way. That is exactly the kind of thing that your uncle didn’t want you to do. That is exactly the kind of shit he wanted you away from.”