Ricochet (24 page)

He’d never felt as content with any other woman as he had in that moment. And all that he’d learned about her since only verified she was everything he’d already sensed at soul level. Everything he’d never believed he’d ever find...or even want. And she definitely deserved a better man than his ragged, fucked up ass.

But... He let his gaze drop to her mouth. Let his hand slide that direction, his thumb glide over her lower lip, and realized he didn’t just want her anymore, he
needed
her. He needed her to get his head right, and keep it right until she shipped him back to the guys who needed him most.

Ryker slipped his hand around the back of her head and drew her in. The mere feel of her lips sent a wash of relief through his entire body. She was better than any drug. Better than bottles of vodka. Better than mindless sex with any bar chick.

Everything about her was instantly familiar, yet amplified by his need. The silky feel of her hair, the way her breasts pushed against his chest, the hug of her belly to his erection. Her soft lips gave, and she opened to him, taking his tongue in the same way she parted her legs to take his cock.

He loved the feel of her melted against him, like he was equally hard to resist. Loved the way she wrapped her arms around his neck and made that delicious purr at the back of her throat. Loved the way her tongue stroked his, slowly, like there was nothing she’d rather do than taste him.

Ryker slid one hand down her back, over her hips, and grabbed her ass, pulling her up and in until she straddled his thigh, barely touching the ground. Her back arched, pulling her out of the kiss.

“Nath—”

He kissed her again, before she said what he knew she was going to say—that stupid we-can’t mantra. Turned his head and slanted his mouth over hers, taking more, teasing more. Her body was warm and damp and moving against his and…goddamned sonofabitch, he’d never felt anything so good.

Her tongue licked into his mouth, as hungry as his. Her hand fisted his hair, creating a burn along his scalp. The other clung tight to his shoulder, digging in as if she wanted to climb his body, the same way she had the other night.

Ryker’s mind went white with pleasure. He couldn’t think, couldn’t plan, couldn’t stop to talk, to reason, or make any deals. He just needed her. And she wanted him. And…yes.

Just…
yes
.

His hands slid over the damp, warm flesh of her back, and he moaned, teasing her lower lip with the little bite he knew turned her on. He didn’t know how his hands found bare skin. Didn’t know what he was going to do now that they were there while he and Rachel were in the middle of nowhere, but hell if he cared. He was going to drown in one beautiful moment at a time.

She pulled out of the kiss, her warm eyes hazed with that familiar look of lust that turned Ryker inside out with need. She clung to him, dropped her forehead to his shoulder, and rocked it side to side.

He raked his fingers through her hair, closed his eyes and breathed in the floral scent of her shampoo. An excruciatingly sweet sensation tightened at the center of his chest until it felt as if it were cutting him in half, pushing his mind toward random, foreign thoughts that threatened to drive him insane. Was this what the married guys felt like when they went home to their wives? How did they live without it when they were in Afghanistan? And why did this feeling make him want to dig his heels in and stay instead of scare him into running?

“Nathan…” she said against his shoulder. “This is…just… I can’t think rationally when you kiss me. God, we have to stop doing that.”

“Baby, I can’t seem to think
at all
unless I
am
kissing you. We have to do that
a lot
more.” He cupped her face and tilted it up toward his and kissed her again.

His phone rang.

He ignored it.

Rachel pushed away and held him back with a hand at his chest. “Answer,” she said, breathless. “It’s probably Jax this time.”

Ryker growled and jerked the phone from his pocket. This time the screen displayed Jax’s name.

“Goddammit.” Now he was all revved up with nowhere to go. He dropped his head back and pushed Rachel to arms’ length. On the third ring he answered, still breathing hard. “Hey. Caught me in the middle of a climb.”

“We’re here,” Jax said. “How long do you think you’ll be?”

Ryker checked to make sure Rachel was steady, then released her arm and looked down at his crotch, scowled back at Rachel, gesturing with a look-what-you-did expression. She twisted her mouth into the cutest little grin that made Ryker’s chest feel like a roller coaster, and looked away.

He refocused on the call and planted his hand on his hip. “We? Who’s we?”

“I brought as many people as I could grab,” Jax said, sounding proud of himself. “A couple of girls to help Rachel get the office together and the supplies put away. I grabbed Charlie from his other job a day early, and snagged a couple of the construction guys you hired too. And we brought a couple more truckloads of supplies. That should at least get you started until the rest get here.”

Frustration and disappointment dragged Ryker’s shoulders down. Yes, he was glad for the help. Yes, he wanted to get a jump-start on this project. But now he wouldn’t even be able to steal some time with Rachel when they got back down the hill.

Maybe tonight, after—

“Oh,” Jax said. “And Marx is here too. When you get back, you, me, Charlie, and Marx will drive to the top of the bridge and walk it. Talk logistics.”

All the air exited Ryker’s lungs. His teeth clenched.

“So how long do you think?” Jax asked again.

“About an hour.” He said good-bye, disconnected, stuffed his phone back into his pocket, and reached for Rachel. He gripped her waist and lifted her off the ground.

She gasped in surprise. “Nathan—”

“We need to talk.” He shifted his hands down to her ass, and she parted her thighs, wrapping her legs around his hips and positioning his erection perfectly to the heat between her legs.

He carried her to a rock outcropping a few feet away, where he sat and took a little too much time positioning her just right on his…lap. Now, talking was the very last thing on his mind. Especially when she had that lusty look of hunger in her eyes and her fingers fisted in his shirt.

Ryker wrapped one hand under her hair and around the back of her neck. “I’m not going to make a big deal out of this. It’s simple. Straightforward. I want you. You want me. If you’ll agree to ride this out until the end of the project, I’ll agree to keep it secret.”

She was looking at him like he was talking Pashto, and he mentally checked his language. Still speaking English.

“When we get down there,” he said, “I’ll show you just how good I am at treating you like I’m
not
counting the seconds until I can get you naked again. Like I’m
not
thinking about tasting every inch of your skin. Like I’m
not
obsessed with the idea of diving between your legs and staying there for—”

She pressed her hand to his mouth and closed her eyes. “Stop.”

He took her face in both hands and dragged her in for a kiss. A long, slow, deep, wet kiss he felt all the way to the pit of his stomach.

He forced himself to break the kiss and look her in the eyes. They were languid and unguarded, the color of warm whiskey. “I’m offering you exactly what you want. No-strings, no-shame, no-limits, no-complications, wicked-good sex. Complete with an agreed-upon end date, a vow of secrecy, and an eight-thousand-mile anti-stalking guarantee when it’s over.”

Emotions flashed through her eyes, so many and so fast, he wasn’t sure he’d figured one out before the next came. But she pushed off his chest and squirmed back on his thighs. Ryker caught her waist and held her there. “This isn’t… I can’t…” Panic—that was the emotion burning in her eyes now. “I don’t know how to do this…this…whatever this is.”

“Well, I suggest we both damn well figure it out.” He ran a hand over her hair and pressed his lips to her forehead, then stood and set her feet on the ground. “Because I can guarantee we’re going to end up in bed together again, Rachel. If we don’t work out the logistics first, we’ll find ourselves there without any ground rules. And I don’t think that will work well for either of us.”

Rachel’s knees stung from the burn of industrial carpet beneath the desk where she plugged in the last computer monitor and tightened the screws.

The ranch was made up of multiple small buildings, all vintage Old West ranch style, but clean and well maintained. This building was positioned closest to the ranch entrance, and the largest room already housed two desks and a filing cabinet, so Rachel had spent the early evening setting it up as the main office.

Since the woman who Rachel had wanted to hire as her assistant couldn’t make it in the new, shorter time frame, Jax had grabbed two others from the set to help. Unfortunately, they hadn’t turned out to be much help at all. Katie and Kelly Darling weren’t exactly darling, but they were curvy, blonde, twin twenty-year-old speed bunnies with a reputation for being up for anything. They were also nice girls and handled the simple office work well enough.

And their big blue eyes had latched on to Ryker the moment he’d entered the office to meet Jax, Charlie, and Josh, and hadn’t let go until the guys left to walk the surface of the bridge.

Rachel made the last turn of the screw and rolled to her butt with a sigh. Beneath the desk, she leaned against the side and wrapped her arms around her shins. She glanced at her knees and found them rug-burned and scraped from her day.

“Attractive,” she murmured, rubbing the sting.

She laid her head back and closed her eyes, exhausted. Yet, evidently not too exhausted to conjure Nathan’s sexy voice saying,
“No-strings, no-shame, no-limits, no-complications, wicked-good sex.”

And her body screamed,
“Yes!”

Then she heard the rest.
“Complete with an agreed-upon end date, a vow of secrecy, and an eight-thousand-mile anti-stalking guarantee when it’s over.”

And her heart…or her conscience…or her soul…or something screamed,
“What the hell?”

What kind of person started a relationship with a projected end date picked out? How could she go into anything other than one night hiding it from everyone who mattered to her? And what was it about that eight-thousand-mile anti-stalking guarantee that both relieved her and broke a tiny piece of her heart?

The whole situation went against everything she’d been raised to believe, against the core values her parents had spent almost three decades instilling. Yet, now the very people who’d placed such high value on those ethics for so long simply ignored them when it made their life difficult. Which left Rachel in tangled confusion over the validity of beliefs she’d shaped her life around. And at a loss when it came to incorporating the new ideas she’d developed for her life. Especially since they weren’t working out all that well.

And as if she needed one more issue to cloud her mind, she thought back to what she’d dug up on the Army Rangers on the Internet the night after the barbecue at Jax’s house.

Rangers are more than just physically strong, Rangers are smart, tough, courageous, and disciplined. Rangers proudly display the qualities that make the 75th Ranger Regiment one of the most recognized and esteemed units in the world.

She’d gone on to read about recent Ranger missions in Afghanistan, riveted to the stories of Rangers being trapped under heavy gunfire, outnumbered by insurgents, maimed, killed. But there were also countless stories of bravery during rescues, village Taliban attacks, bombings.

And a lot of accounts of Rangers killing the enemy.

Nathan had been a Ranger for eight years. Overseas for sixteen. She knew the chances were that he’d killed people.

And the thought swamped her with more emotions than she could handle.

She rubbed at the pain in her temples, whispering, “I’m so screwed up.”

The sound of a heavy engine touched Rachel’s ears through the open window. The guys were back, and she needed to get off her ass and into the shower. Since they didn’t have a cook yet, she’d ordered dinner from the closest restaurant that would deliver.

“Oooo,” Katie said from the other room with too much feminine glee in her voice. “They’re back.”

“Rachel?” Kelly called.

“Yeah.” She couldn’t bring herself to crawl out.

“You’re sure you don’t have a thing for Ryker?”

“I already told you,” Katie scolded her sister, “Rachel doesn’t do Renegades.”

Rachel closed her eyes and smiled. She should tell Jax to change the policy wording from “date” to “do.”

“I’m just making sure,” Kelly snapped back. “Because
I
don’t steal guys.”

“Don’t start with that again,” Katie said, annoyance deepening her voice. “Take a freaking minute to look up
threesome
in the dictionary, Miss Valedictorian. It’s a game played or performed by three people. So how could one person be stolen when all three—”

“There’s nothing between me and Ryker.” Rachel cut into the sisters’ argument to halt images of these two bombshells getting into a threesome with Nathan. “Kelly?” she said, sure she’d heard wrong. “You were valedictorian?”