Seize (St. Martin Family Saga: Emergency Responders) Book 2: Erotic Romance (4 page)

Augie crossed the lobby and took his coffee from her.

“Thanks, Mia.” Still smiling at her sweetly bossy ways, he took a sip.

And he naturally wondered how she’d react to being bossed around.

Hot images of her responding to a dominant man, to
him
, heated him more than his coffee.

Chapter 4

They occupied the
same bed.

Last night he’d slept in a chair, but she’d said there was plenty of room in the king bed.

She’d started out under the covers and that had been a good thing since they had nothing to sleep in. But Mia wasn’t a quiet sleeper, and she’d shifted excessively the last few hours. Augie glanced
again
at the woman currently taking up two-thirds of the mattress, the woman who wore only her underwear. He’d taken off his shirt, but knew better than to remove his jeans. A slender arm landed across his chest. He exhaled loudly, hoping to disturb her enough so she’d reposition herself. She rolled and her thigh slid onto his, but she was still asleep. He’d be changing his name to
Saint
Augustine as soon as he got back to Baton Rouge. His hand went to her hip in an effort to move her, but that was a mistake.

She was warm and smooth and her hips were displayed in a provocative manner that had him going full-on hard. He clicked on the television and the shopping network came blaring to life. She stirred and raised her head from his chest. She eyed him with one eye open and one squinted shut, looking disoriented.

“Were you deliberately trying to wake me up?”

“I don’t know—were you
deliberately
trying to give me a hard-on?”

She pushed herself up, attempting to push away from him, but the bed was shit—soft in the middle and hard on the edge, creating a bowl effect.

“God, do you have to answer using vulgar language and descriptions?” She ran her hand through her hair. “And for the record, I wasn’t aware I was disturbing you. I apologize.”

“Human-body pillow aside, can you at least get under the covers so I’m not in pain?”

From the glow of the television he could see that she turned as red as an apple when she eyed his erection. She quickly pulled back the covers and slid under them.

He turned off the television and rested his eyes. Her warmth seeped through the comforter, but she was safely covered, so at last he could get some sleep. His muscles slowly relaxed.

A blood-curdling scream pierced the room and hit his brain like a two by four. She jumped up and he followed. Eyes wide, they gawked at each other across the bed.

“What the hell?” he demanded.

She was shuddering as she rubbed one leg and pointed with an unsteady hand to the bed.

“Something bit me on the leg. Something huge. Oh God, it was on me.”

Her voice was so high, she squeaked. She shrieked again, and his head pounded.

“Goddamn, woman.” He took a deep breath. Patience wasn’t his strongest character trait. He pulled back the sheets and identified the culprit. A huge beetle. He approached from the back and was closing in on it when Mia screamed again, causing his pulse to hammer in his ear.

“Oh my God, is that what bit me?” She cupped her hands to her mouth.

“
Stop
screaming. Let me get rid of it, and then I’ll look at your leg. Sit in the desk chair.”

She was shaking her head and hugging herself.

“Mia, sit in the desk chair.”

She stopped rubbing and made eye contact with him.

“Sit.”

She slowly lowered herself into the plastic chair.

He scooped up the bug and flushed it. Walking back into the room, he was attacked by warm, soft, sugary woman. She clamped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck.

“Thank you. I can’t believe it bit me.” She shivered. “Do you think it’s poisonous?”

He set her on the bed. “Let me look at it.”

“Oh no!” She clutched her leg. “You do, don’t you?”

“No.”

“But you would have just said no. You hesitated.”

“Well, dammit, some beetles are. Now sit still and let me look at you.”

Shit, the damn thing had left a welt on her smooth skin. He grabbed a towel and some ice from the bucket. The welt was large, about an inch and a half in diameter. When he set the ice pack on her leg, she winced.

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” She pushed the pack away.

“Do you want to scar?”

She looked at the bite, then back to him with pleading eyes. “No.” Her voice was a deflated whisper.

She was so sadly pathetic. He couldn’t take it, so he climbed onto the bed behind her and pulled her to his lap. He delicately set the compress on her leg. She needed a distraction, at least until the ice melted.

“When I was in the marines, we had to do these drills. We’d go out in the field and stay for two to four weeks, learn to survive off the land and stuff. One of the gigs was in western Texas, dry and hot. One morning this guy we called
Nuts
—he had a pair of the hugest balls any of us had ever seen—well, the crazy fucker took out an Iraqi FROG in Fallujah all by himself. Later that morning he used one of the field toilets, basically a Port-O-Pot. Now would you think a two-hundred-twenty-pound, six-foot-four marine named Nuts could scream like a girl getting sand thrown in her eyes on a playground?”

She was laughing so hard tears leaked from her eyes. He thought it was the cutest sound he’d ever heard.

“Your scream, Miss Brown, was manlier than his. Seriously, his screech woke up the entire company and had us scrambling. We thought a woman was being murdered. It sounded like a cross between a seal and a hyena captured in a jaw-tooth trap. When we got to him he was rolling in the dirt in front of the toilets, his pants around his knees. Sand was stuck in the tear tracks on his face. The enormous marine had been brought down by a teeny spider bite to the ass.

“To be fair, it wasn’t your average house spider. It was a goddamn tarantula. Poor bastard had to let his ass air out for two weeks. He carried a donut around to sit on.”

Mia’s laughter eventually evened out and, given her proximity, they shared a way-too-intimate look. Her shy sweetness was playing tricks on his libido. He lifted the bag from her leg and lightly traced the swelling tissue. She turned in his lap and straddled him, leaning her head against his shoulder like she was going to drift off.

“Did you check the bed for any more beetles?” Her soft voice in his ear made his cock twitch. Her head lifted, and sincere lavender eyes met his.

“I did. We’re safe.”

“You’re a real-life hero.” Her lips feathered a kiss to his cheek and then to the busted skin at his temple and jaw. “My hero.” She pulled away slowly, her eyes hooded. She held up two fingers, “That’s twice you’ve rescued me now.”

She was so close, her breath heated his skin. Wanting to taste her rosy lips, he closed the gap between them. And he tasted. Her warm, soft mouth vibrated with sounds of pleasure.

He pulled away to keep from getting carried away. He caught her gaze before she stared down in a shy gesture—gray laced with lavender. Spectacular. She snuggled into him and sighed.

Great, a moral dilemma. The warm female on top of him was as sweet as Louisiana iced tea, and her soft groans had him as hard as oak. He’d rescued her from two life-threatening situations—though the beetle hardly counted. Still, he wasn’t one to quibble over details. He wondered if he was taking advantage of this bashful but passionate, honeyed woman.

Thank God he still had his jeans on, because with the way she was straddling him, he surely would have come like a teenage boy without them. With her in just her white cotton panties and a bra with tiny black polka dots, Augie could see the perkiness of her small breasts and the way the hard peaks poked against the thin fabric. She was fresh, too fresh, and innocent to boot—he felt it in his gut. She seemed much younger than twenty-five, with the kind of innocence that came from inexperience. He wanted to take her youthful inexperience and incinerate it. Wanted her to be a woman who knew the score so they could share some hot sex without him having to even
think
about worrying about it. Without worrying about her.

From what he’d read in the file he had on her, she’d been caring for her mother for years. She’d lived at the same address, in that small town, her entire life. She didn’t have the moves to impress, so she was simply herself—pure and honest. When was the last time he’d had a woman like that? He couldn’t remember. He thought he liked sophisticated and aggressive—the kind of woman he didn’t have to teach for her to know what he liked. But the thought of teaching Mia had him so close to coming that he squeezed his eyes shut and thought about Afghanistan.

Then his thoughts shifted to Nicolas Claude Renaud. The bastard he’d hired had had his hands around Mia’s neck when he’d intervened. Yet despite her situation—being attacked by Renaud’s goons and then being pulled away from her home by
him
—she remained upbeat and constantly put others before herself. What would it be like to have a woman like that? Augie still couldn’t believe they’d spent an hour getting Russell situated with his mixer. An
hour
. And then she’d helped that family in the lobby, expecting nothing in return. She did it just for the joy of giving to someone in need. Most of the women he knew were egocentric, thinking only of their hair, their lipstick, their nails, but she didn’t seem to care about any of those things.

She bent and kissed him innocently on the mouth before lightly running her fingertips down his neck.

He wanted her. And couldn’t believe he’d thought her plain at first glance. She was anything but. Granted, she was a far cry from the forced perfection he was used to in the South, but he loved her dewy freshness. Her hair was a natural light brown with sun-kissed blond threads running through it. She didn’t flatten it into an unimaginable slickness, nor was it artificially curled. It was just her hair and it suited her. He didn’t think she wore any make-up, but she didn’t need to—her skin was as smooth as porcelain.

But something had changed.

Her eyes were darker now, the color more intense, hazy and sleepy. He wanted to know what had caused them to change.

Could it be their bodies pressed so close together?

Her hand landed on his jaw as her lips nuzzled near his ear. She rubbed her body against him, and it took all his discipline to not roll her beneath him and pump away into her tight heat.

There was that smell again from his childhood, fruity and sweet.
Runts.
Her scent. It had him off balance.

Shit, he had to put a stop to this. He’d never been out of control when it came to women, but she held his mind in a fogbank.

But maybe just a minute more …

She squeezed his cock through his jeans and licked her top lip. Groaning, he palmed her core, and the moisture he felt on her panties made him lose his tight control. He frantically unhooked her bra, her small tits hardening as he slid the material down her arms. She unbuttoned his jeans as he hooked his thumbs in her underwear and removed them. He lifted his ass from the mattress and she pulled his jeans down with his boxers and then they were skin on skin. Their heated bodies gave off so much heat that they were covered in a light sheen of sweat, silk and satin rubbing against one another, and it felt so right. God, it felt good.

Rolling her beneath him, he ran his cock through her wetness. Shit! Condom. Hovering over her, he grabbed his wallet from the nightstand. She raked her hands up and down his chest as he fiddled with the package, then rolled the latex over his erection. He fisted himself and aligned with her, but there was no easy passage. She was small, so he positioned her better to take him by putting a pillow beneath her ass. He tried to push in again, but thought he might hurt her if he forced himself. Yet he needed to be inside of her. Now.

“Fuck, how long has it been for you?”

She inhaled sharply, panting against his skin.

“Um, I haven’t ever actually had sex.”

She writhed beneath him, her hands squeezing his ass.

No. She didn’t just say …

“Are you fucking kidding me?” He rose to his knees, threading both hands through his hair. He jumped off the bed, so wound up he couldn’t hold still. Hell, he needed
some
kind of release. The water bottle from the nightstand took the brunt of his wrath as he hurled it against the wall. It splintered and water rained down.

Mia sat up on the bed, her hands behind her for support.

“So you’re some twenty-five-year-old virgin? How’s that even possible?”

“Not because I was saving myself. I just haven’t met anyone in the small corner of the globe where I live. But I want to have sex with you.”

Their eyes met for the shortest of seconds, and then she bit at her lip.

“I can’t take your innocence.”

“My innocence? I’ve never had sex, but I’m not innocent. I know what’s involved.”

“Your virginity. I can’t take your virginity.”

“But I don’t want to be a virgin, and I’d like to have sex with you right now. Can we please try again?”

He looked at her offering herself to him in the sweetest, most primal way as she leaned back naked and exposed. Her taut breasts and stomach, down to her bare cleft, were calling to him and he wanted to devour her. His dick was so hard he’d explode if she were to reach out and touch him.

“I want you so badly I’m in pain, but I can’t give you all the expectations that
should
accompany your first time.” Shit. He didn’t know how to talk to her about the loss of her virginity. He’d never met a virgin before. Far from it. All the women he’d been with came highly experienced and skilled, and he liked it that way. Or he had until now. He still wanted her. He was dying to taste her, and he was curious about the noises she made when she was aroused. Curious about what she looked like when she came.