She smiled against his lips but quickly sobered. “I didn’t mean to startle him,” she said, watching Tazz closely.
“You said the right thing, Ky. Don’t fret,” he told her, then to Tazz he yelled, “Hey, man, buck up. There’s no harm in getting Ky to help you out. Sober the hell up and stop with the drug.”
Tazz turned then, and gave them both a look Dare didn’t like. He looked desperate, almost near a panic.
“Shit,” Dare muttered. “You can’t quit, can you?”
Tazz shook his head firmly. “Not without someone doing some major fucking surgery, or knocking me the fuck out for a week. But that’s not the worry now. Ky is. She is going to be skating some thin ice here, with more monsters under it than any horror show you can think up. And unless you want her in protective custody…?”
“Fuck that,” Dare growled, drawing her even closer to his side.
“Then you have to take out the trash, and quick.”
“Take out the trash?” Ky murmured.
“That means we need to dangle a bit of bait, and find out how many of these yahoos want your dad’s shit, and you, Ky, are the bait,” Tazz said.
Dare took a step toward him, but stopped when Ky hugged him tight and murmured for him to calm down.
“Tazz, what the hell have—?”
“It’s okay, Daren. I’ve always known, I mean.” She put a hand on his chest and looked at him with such earnestness his heart clenched, “I mean, since you arrived on that street, that there was more going on than exchanging my father for his research. More people after it. You were both right. How could he be alive? If he were, they could force him to create a new line of the medications for them. But with me, if they had the files, the proof and me to work out the science, they wouldn’t need him. And vice-versa. So they must need me.”
Tazz grunted, rubbed both hands over his face and dropped them to his hips with a frustrated sigh. “Right. But the thing is, your dad
is
alive. Or he was two hours ago, when Monroe spoke to him. So that means your dad is somehow involved—”
Ky turned from mild mannered, sweet girl to ninja tigress in the space it took Tazz to open his big Texan mouth on his next word.
“If you so much as breathe a word that my father is somehow behind this, I will not tolerate your being in my presence one more second. If you’re taking the drug, use it and think! If you can’t, Daren will kick your butt.”
Tazz blinked, glanced once at him then when he got nothing but a stare—Dare wasn’t going against Ky on this—he smiled at Ky.
“All right, don’t get all pissy on me, little lady, I can see you aren’t going to let that one simmer while you think on it, so we’ll go back to plan one and two. Sleep, then get the files when you’re more alert. Tired soldiers make mistakes.”
“I am not a soldier,” Ky muttered, clearly still miffed at Tazz.
It made Dare’s grin grow when Tazz gave him a baffled look.
“Besides,” Ky continued, sounding so strong he wanted to marry her on the spot. “You go with us to the lab. Once there, I can help you. No matter what you think, it is curable, and there’s no surgery involved. But if you keep on,” she reached out, and grabbed Tazz by the hand when he would have moved away, “if you do that, you will be unable to live a normal life. Ever again. You’ll be unable to remember who you are, let alone what you once were.”
She stopped there and dropped his hand, but Dare could tell she had more to say.
Tazz seemed to feel the same. He stared at Ky with a look that bordered on desperate. How had he hidden that panic so well? “Do what she says, man. We can get both done. Ky safe and you on the right track.”
Tazz gave him a quick nod, and reached out to squeeze his shoulder. “Watch your six and take care of what you found man. Life doesn’t throw out second chances often.”
Chapter Fifteen
They drove in silence for a while, but Daren made sure Kylie knew he was there in little ways that melted her heart. He’d said he loved her. He’d also nearly ripped Eric’s head off, and she knew it wasn’t because the jerk was in on her father’s abduction, but because he’d somehow known she’d once dated the man.
Rationally she should not feel thrilled about that, but she was, and maybe, just maybe, she liked him discovering she’d had past relationships too. She knew, without even being told, that Daren Scott was a lady’s man. It was in his smile, the way he easily put on the look of appreciating a woman. She also guessed with her, it was different. He’d been honest with her, painfully at times. If she had to bet, she’d bet he wasn’t with other women.
Now that he’d met Eric, he might have thought she’d let Eric do things—whatever Daren could think up in that sexy head of his—but in reality she never had. It made her want to smile. He was jealous of a man that made her skin crawl
Maybe, if he got too worried about it, she would tell him that Eric’s phobia of germs didn’t stop with his lab work, but continued into the bedroom.
Or, maybe she’d tell him there was no comparing the two of them. Not at all.
Eric had made her sick to her stomach, and she’d rather die than let him within two miles of her if he had any intention of touching her.
Daren made love to her with a single-mindedness that she never wanted to live without.
What would she do if he left, if after they saved her father, he had to go on, do more of his work for this agency he had yet to name, and she never saw him again. Just thinking of Daren leaving set off a painful tearing feeling in her chest. He was American. Truly a man who was used to having what he wanted, when he wanted it. As if sensing her emotions were going wild, Daren drew her hand to his lips and brushed a kiss to her knuckles. He also watched her, the road, the rear-view mirror, everywhere, all while making her feel as if she were the center of his world.
“Your mom died, did she?” he asked after they’d merged onto an overpass.
The question came out of the blue, and shocked her into shaking her head. She avoided his eyes by watching a passing motorcycle speed by going way too fast.
“Ky? Sorry, baby, if it’s too hard to talk about—”
“No, it’s just complicated. My mom was from the Caribbean. My dad met her in the states when he studied medicine at Stanford. They fell in love, my dad said, but when he graduated and took a job as a researcher back in Korea, she didn’t want to join him,” she said, pausing after to think how to explain it to him. There was no real easy way to. “By then I was born. She went home, he took me.”
Dare glanced at her quickly, and frowned. “Your mom left when you were little?”
“Yes, she had a modeling career for a short while, but died a few years into it from a drug overdose.”
“And your dad raised you?”
“Yes, and nannys or we call them I.Es, elders that watch our young. My grandfather was there as well,” she added at Daren’s frown. “It’s very common, and my dad was very busy. I went to the university right after school, studied at the same college he went to because my father wanted me to be successful. I worked with him until recently,” she murmured, reliving a bit of her life explaining it to Daren.
“When you told him science wasn’t what you wanted.”
She smiled sadly over at Dare for his teasing. “Yes, I explained that science, what he was doing with it, wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted more,” she said. “More than that.”
He grinned at her with a lift to his dark eyebrows. “And what is it you want to do?”
She’d been certain he wouldn’t understand, but after the last few days with him, she wondered. He’d done more for her in the short time they’d been together than her father had ever done in her life. His honesty, the way he spoke to her, touched her, looked at her, all of it were real, so real maybe she had a hard time believing it.
“I have enough saved that I don’t have to work for a while,” she began, not sure how to say her dream was to marry and have children, raise them with someone who loved them as much as she did, and live her life surrounded by her family, doing whatever they decided was best. Did he want that sort of thing? He seemed so perfect in his role now, what would he think of not always hiding and running, chasing and fighting men that wanted to harm others?
Dare didn’t let her finish, though, and she sighed in relief, but she’d almost worked up enough nerve to tell him.
“So your dad was good with that? After he sent you to school, and decided what you should study, he was good with you saying you didn’t think it was for you?”
“Well, not exactly. We were working on it, and I know he loves me, even if he’s so busy we never see each other.”
She could sense Dare’s tension, but he didn’t say anything, then he did the oddest thing—he grinned and winked at her. “Well, that means less people to share you with, huh?”
The question made her smile grow into a grin. She settled deeper into the seat next to him and held his big hand between hers. “This is true.”
“Good, I like that. I think you fit me, Kylie Chung,” he murmured at the next street light.
Maybe he did believe in yin and yang, she thought, smiling at his grin.
He threaded their fingers together gently and gave her his big smile. She knew a second before he spoke, he was going to try to make her laugh.
“We still have to find out for certain, but I was counting on finding out tonight, what do you say?”
She grinned, and leaned closer to whisper, “I thought we just found out we fit perfectly.”
If looks could make her melt, the one he gave her had her in a puddle in her seat.
“Oh ho, baby, you do not want me to pull this car over, do you? Now, behave and help me think of something besides finding out how sweet you taste between those gorgeous legs,” he grumbled.
Taste?
Images of him doing just that filled her mind to overflowing until she had to wiggle in the seat. “I want to taste you, too,” she finally offered, feeling her face heat from what she’d said.
“You want to see a grown man cry, don’t you?” he asked, dragging her hand down to his hard groin. “Put those lips right here and I’m all yours for as long as you want to taste me. Hell, I might make that a daily request.”
She laughed, caught off guard again by how funny he could be. He laughed too, so easy-going and full of simple fun, she hugged his arm just to get closer to him.
“You like that, do you?”
“I do like that, when you talk like that,” she told him, trailing her hand lightly over the bulge in his pants. “And I like this, do you like this?” She found the head of his cock under the tented fabric and cupped her palm over it, massaging it gently. His face darkened.
“Yeah,” he breathed, opening his thighs wider for her. “I like that a bit too much though,” he said with a grimace.
With a smile, she unsnapped his BDUs before he could say a word. When he gave a husky groan, though, she knew what he wanted.
“Not going to last, so pull up when I say,” he told her, placing a hand on her head to urge her down.
She didn’t need the urging. She wanted to taste him so badly, her mouth watered. Daren seemed just as hot. He shoved the material away from his erection and sighed as his freed cock seemed to stretch and grow thicker and longer.
“Oh, you are so beautiful, Daren.”
He sounded like he choked on a laugh, but she couldn’t look away from her hand on his warm flesh. She rubbed her palm over the mushroomed head and down past the flared ridge to the base, while she bent and closed the space between them to lick along the velvety skin. He made a rough male sound of appreciation and widened his legs farther for her.
The first taste was amazing, musky, warm and all male. His scent was stronger here, clean, a bit of pine scent maybe from his soap, but manly. He wanted this daily? She fit the rounded head in her mouth and sucked lightly. She would
demand
this daily. If she could.
“Oh, goddamn, yeah.” His voice had deepened already, becoming that sexy, rough purr she loved.
Encouraged, she slipped her mouth down and her hand upward to meet it. When he clenched his hand in her hair, she did it again and again, building a slow, firm rhythm.
“Ky, baby, that feels so damn good, slow like that, use your hand, just like that,” he said, ending on a heavy groan when she did.
She flicked her tongue under the ridged flesh on her next upward pass, and Daren’s hold on her hair grew firmer. She took that as the cue to do it repeatedly until he began to get breathless and made a needy sound in his throat.
She eased back and leaned up to kiss his lips. He latched on to her like he needed her mouth on his more than where she’d been, but she knew what he really wanted and broke off the kiss to examine his face. He glanced away only for a second to the road, then back to her. He was tense, so tense he looked almost ready to press her back down.
“I want to make this wonderful for you, but I’ve never—” She paused and shrugged, suddenly feeling shy. “Never done this, so tell me, like you did before, okay?”
His eyes darkened and he focused on her to the exclusion of all else. Even the road. A sudden car horn brought him back to the road, but he cupped a hand around her neck and eased her gently forward to kiss her again. “Baby, you do what you want, I’m going to love every second, and believe me, after telling me that, I’m going to be on a hair trigger.”
She blinked at his words, then slowly smiled. He liked that she’d not been with another man this way. “Good, but tell me what you like, too, please.”
He groaned again, and suddenly reached down to grip her ass. “I like this, and I’m going to love that mouth, so bend down and blow me away, baby.”
With that encouragement, she bent over his erection again and, using her fingers, she stroked him once, then twice while she circled the head of his cock with her tongue.
“Ah, Ky, baby,” he growled, and shoved the seat backward to give her more room. He also cupped his hand over her butt, rubbing her hard enough that she grew wet with need.
“Use your hands, tighter like that, while you suck up and down, baby.”
She wrapped her hands around him and took him down as far as she could. She loved it. His flesh was warm, smooth and firm. She traced the veins and muscles with her mouth and fingers, amazed by every inch of him. She knew science, and she knew mass. Daren had mass. And he had length. She was estimating ten inches, easily. The thought of the hot shaft she stroked deep inside her, filling her pussy, created little bursts of heat along her spine that tingled all the way down to her ass and deeper, to her pussy.