Blind Shot (The Sharpshooter Series Book 1) Read online

  I laughed, breathless, squirming against him and not caring when my towel slipped away. It was almost hilarious that a big serious guy like Garrett wanted to give me a hickie as if we were high school kids groping behind the bleachers. The brutal way he pinned me down made my heart beat faster.

  "That's right, whatever you like," I muttered, reaching down between his legs to find him more than half hard already. Tasteless and fast, yeah, but if this was my only chance, I sure as hell was going to make it count.

  I wrapped my hand around his cock, squeezing gently at first and then harder. He was thick and hot in my hand, cut, and when I squeezed, he thrust at me almost involuntarily.

  "God," he growled, and his hands landed on my shoulders, his fingers digging into my arms just right. He pulled me closer to him, and my first guess looking at him was right. He was strong even after everything that had happened to him, and when he got going, I had a feeling he wouldn't stop for anything. Garrett clung to me as I worked his cock, and then I couldn't help myself. I squirmed out of his grasp, moving down his body easily as I pushed him back on the bed. My mouth found his flat nipples under the thin mat of hair, and when I sucked on them, almost as hard as he had on my neck, he actually swore.

  "Dig your nails into my back," I told him hoarsely.

  I didn't need to say please. He had his hands on me just as soon as the words were out of my mouth. He had just enough nail to rake them over me, and I knew he was leaving pink streaks that would be livid even on my dark skin.

  I worked his cock slowly as I devoured him, my mouth taking the long route over his chest and down lower. He hada bit of softness around the waist and belly, but yeah, there was pure muscle underneath that. When I made him tense up with my hand or my mouth, I felt it right through his body. A hot thrill of pride ran through me because I was the one making him do this, I was the one getting him this hot, this needy. My own hard-on was pressed against the sheets, and I couldn't stop myself from writhing a little. I wanted more, but I could wait for at least a little while.

  Finally, finally, I leaned down to close my mouth over his cock, feeling the hot length of it past my lips, against my tongue and the hard roof of my mouth. He froze, and I decided to think that was a good thing. I drew back a little to suck on the tip, my tongue flicking over the hole, and then his hands were on my shoulders again. I thought he was going to pull my face down on his cock, but instead he pulled me away. I drew my teeth back just in time, and then he pushed me down on the bed as he pulled himself away. I looked up to find him standing by the far edge of the bed, nearly shaking and pushing his cock back into his pants. When he looked over at me, there was a kind of fury in his face that I had never seen before. That tiny little voice of self-preservation in my head, the one that never gets all that much play, spoke up.

  "Hey, it doesn't make you queer..." I started, but he cut me off.

  "Jesus, is that what you... No. No. We're not having this conversation. Cortez, once and for all, do you think I give a good goddamn whether I'm gay or not?"

  I stared at him.

  "Then what..."

  "Christ... I'm not going to... you can't seduce me into keeping you!"

  The words splashed over me like a bucket of cold water, especially if the heavy bucket dropped square on the center of my head afterward. I was stunned and then I rose to my feet, ignoring the fact that I was still hard and very naked.

  "Fucking hell," I bit out. "First, pretty hard to seduce a guy who gets a hard-on as soon as I kiss him. Second... Fuck. No. Not doing this."

  I stalked past him, vaguely thinking of the first time I had done this. God, turns out that everyone was right. I was a goddamn idiot.

  "Ryland..."

  "No. You do whatever the fuck you need to do. I don't care."

  Of course I did. I went to lie down in my room. I expected to toss and turn until morning, but somehow, I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.

  My dreams were strange, a combination of fury and frantic sex with Garrett. I wish I could be sorry, but I wasn't. Not at all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Garrett

  Ryland was quiet in the morning, taking the sausage and eggs I had made him with a grunt of thanks. It didn't occur to me until the sausage was sizzling in the pan that it was the same breakfast I had made the first morning he had come to stay with me. I wondered if he noticed, but then I shook it off.

  As a senior agent and expert handler at an agency with arms all over the world, I had helped topple old regimes and set up new ones, and I had saved lives all over the world. I was...

  Possibly in love with my asset.

  Some part of me wanted to dismiss it as chemicals. It had been a long time since I had gotten laid. Ryland is good-looking, seductive as hell. He paid attention to me, and the month we’ve spent together reinforces our bond, allowing us to work easily together, to nearly read each other's minds.

  Of course that would make for an intense bond that felt like love. I had seen other handlers fall for it before. The results weren't always fatal, but they could be.

  The problem was that I knew myself far too well. I had been in love a few times in my life. There was a woman when I first signed on with the agency, one of my trainers. There was a violinist in Minsk who had no idea what I did; she thought I was actually in organized crime.

  I knew what love felt like, and this was it. I could tell from the way there was always a part of my mind on Ryland, the way my eyes followed him whenever he was in the room. When he twisted a certain way at the training facility, his body was pure beauty, tough, elegant and graceful, and it woke a hunger in me that I had never felt before.

  Despite what I had told him the night before, it was a little uneasy to be feeling these intense emotions for another man, but it wasn't off-putting. I cared about him, I wanted him. When we finished breakfast, I turned to him.

  "I'm not giving you up," I said. "I didn't want to wait to tell you and Farris at the same time. We're giving this another shot."

  The yellow in his eyes was pronounced that morning. He looked at me with an utterly blank expression, almost cat-like.

  "It means that if I fuck up again, your ass is out too," he said flatly.

  "Then don't fuck up," I said lightly. "Come on. We're leaving for the agency in twenty."

  We made the drive in silence, but there was something softer about his posture in the car. He gazed out the window, eyes skimming for vantage points the way so many snipers did, but he looked a little less fraught, a little less likely to shatter at a single word.

  ***

  Farris was waiting for us, and I didn't mince words.

  "I'm keeping Special Agent Cortez," I said firmly. "I understand and accept your terms. If we have another altercation, I understand that I'll be ousted for my poor judgment."

  Farris looked at me for a long moment. I couldn't tell if he was surprised. He nodded.

  "Well, you've made your decision. Here."

  He passed a thick file over to me, and I looked at him in surprise.

  "Notification came down last night. Human traffickers are going to be operating in Bucharest. Our best guess puts them on the scene in 72 hours."

  I scowled.

  "The Romanian division..."

  "Is still completely gutted after the Moscow incident, yes. Since you've decided that you're keeping Cortez and you're both still active duty, you'll be heading out there as soon as possible. You can brief yourself on the plane.”

  In the hallway, I surprised Ryland by pulling him into an empty conference room. He blinked at me and then looked wary.

  "Are you ready for this?" I asked. I wasn't sure what I could do if the answer was no. This was work that needed to be done, and we had to be the ones who did it.

  He smiled slightly. It wasn't his smirk or his sneer. Instead, there was something genuine about it, even eager.

  "Of course."

  ***


  He didn't sleep on the long flight to Bucharest. I saw him watching me as I went over the situation. It was simple enough. It wasn't a hand-off this time, so at least we would be spared the chance of having innocent civilians involved at some place we couldn't reach.

  Instead, someone had stumbled on a cell of traffickers in their hideout. This particular group had been elusive, evading capture over the last few years. They had a history that was dark even by the agency's standards, and the orders were clear. Capture as we could, but under no circumstances was the cell going to be allowed to continue.

  It was going to be a challenge, but it was entirely within Ryland's capabilities. We were on cleanup, sniping off any members of the cell who made it out of the initial shut down. We wouldn't get Ryland's dossier until we hit the ground in Bucharest, but he would have clear and photographic evidence of who he was meant to target. I was feeling cautiously hopeful about the entire thing. We wouldn't be running into the same problems we had in Marseilles. He- we- were being given every chance to excel and to turn it around.

  They had booked us into a small apartment not far from where the action was meant to go down. It was a startlingly nice place, most often used for vacationers, I figured. A courier delivered Ryland's dossier, and as I worked on getting us settled, he took it to the breakfast nook to go over. As he worked, I couldn't help glancing at him from time to time. He was never more attractive than when something had his full attention. He was like a falcon, streamlined by man and nature for one purpose. It could take my breath away if I wasn't careful, and of course he noticed.

  "You're looking at me," he said finally, setting the dossier aside. "You still pissed about last night?"

  I didn't know how to answer that, and finally I shrugged.

  "Angry, maybe a little. I thought you knew me better than to think that I'd be swayed by head and a grope. I want you to trust me, and you showed me you didn't."

  "Jesus Christ, for God's gift to the agency, you sure are thick, aren't you?" he snorted. "I wasn't trying to bribe you, Garrett. If I was, I would have, I don't know, gotten you a nice girlfriend type hooker, maybe."

  "I believe they prefer the term sex worker these days," I said blandly, making Ryland laugh.

  "Fine, sex worker then. I know I can't bribe you. I was just thinking that it was probably the last night we were going to spend together, and..."

  He shrugged. I knew that I should have let it go. The smart money would have been to back off and get a little space before the op began. We would take some time in our corners, and when we got back, it would be like it was before. There must have been something about Ryland's recklessness that had infected me, because that was the last thing I wanted to do.

  'And what, Ryland?" I asked. When he shrugged and started to turn away, I covered the ground between us. He looked down, avoiding my gaze, but I tipped his face up with a finger on his chin.

  "And what?"

  "Shit, I don't know. I didn't want our last significant interaction to be getting chewed out by the director? I wanted a distraction from getting sent back to prison?"

  "Is that all?" I was challenging him now, and Ryland's eyes narrowed. He surged to his feet, pushing me back with both hands against my chest. I stumbled a little, caught myself, but he had started after me, refusing to let me put any space between us at all.

  "I wanted to touch you," he growled. "I wanted to see what you felt like when we kissed, when you were hard. I wanted to get my mouth on your cock, and to maybe fuck your face and touch you and..."

  He went quiet when I pressed forward and kissed him. He tasted just as good as he had in my bed, and I could feel his muscles tense when I pressed my hand against the small of his back. Kissing him wasn't like kissing a woman, but I had a feeling that it wouldn't be like kissing a man either. It was like kissing something wild and not human, something strong and fierce and terribly dangerous.

  I took my time with the kiss, because it had been so fast and desperate before. I wanted to taste him, to feel him, and to explore this wild electricity that was running between us. In my arms, he was smaller than he looked. We could see eye-to-eye, but there was a kind of narrowness to him, especially his hips, which felt almost sharp in my hands.

  He was the one who pulled back first, and in the fading light of the Bucharest afternoon, he studied me. There was a feral grace to it, something that made me want to shiver. It was the look of a wild animal that was deciding whether it wanted to stay where it was or if it wanted to gut me, and I waited.

  "What is this?" he asked.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I loved him, but I pulled it back. Even though I knew it was true, I could see how he would read it. He would see it as a sad closet case's defense, something to make this touching all right.

  "It's what I want," I said roughly. "For a while now. I don't... I can't put you at risk. I can't have it on my conscience if it makes me slow or makes me hesitate... but I want you."

  A reckless glint glowed in Ryland's eyes.

  "All right," he said. "That's good. That's real good."

  His hands swarmed me as he leaned in for another kiss. It made me think of him field stripping a weapon, every touch measured and planned, fast and savage. He kissed me with a kind of demanding insistence that made something in me light up.

  "Fuck," I growled, and reached down to scoop him up.

  "Garrett!" The sound of his surprise was oddly sweet to me. I didn't think that many men surprised Ryland Cortez. I started carrying him to the master bedroom.

  "I've wanted this for too long," I told him, my voice gravelly in my own ears. "I'm not going to let you make me come in my pants like I'm some kind of kid at school."

  Ryland laughed, the sound a puff of air against my cheek.

  "Fuck, that'd be hot," he whispered. "Would you let me do that some time though? Would you let me palm you off while you're wearing your pretty suit, make you squirm and come right in your clothes? Promise, I'd clean you up real nice after I did, but first I want to see you just... fucking... lose it..."

  His voice would have been enough. If he kept hissing those crude words in my ear, he wouldn't have needed to touch me at all. I set him down, more like threw him on the bed, and he rolled over on his back to look at me. The only light in the room came from between the blinds on the small window. Ryland looked as if he was painted in shades of gray; the only color in him came from his eyes.

  As I watched, my lips slightly parted, Ryland lazily unzipped his pants, drawing out his cock. I suppose a part of me wondered what would happen if we ever got to this point, if the sight of a cock instead of what I was used to would be the point I couldn't cross. When I saw his cock, dark with blood, his hand passing over it and making it harder, though, I knew that there wasn't going to be a problem at all.

  "You like it?" he asked huskily, and I nodded.

  "You must know I do."

  "I know. I want to hear you say it, though. Talk to me Garrett, tell me how much you want me."

  I wanted to protest that I had never done this before, that I didn't know the words to use, that I would sound like a goddamn idiot, but when I opened my mouth, a plea came out instead.

  "I want you. I want to touch you, I want your mouth on me, and I want to see how you look when you come. I want to taste every fucking inch of you. I need you, I want you, Ryland..."

  He tensed at my words, his mouth falling open.

  "Get in this fucking bed," he growled.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ryland

  In my fantasies, Garrett was the ultimate alpha top; assured, kind of brutal, and utterly commanding. In real life, he was so much fucking better. I saw him watching me of course, but I thought I was nice about never getting mean about it.

  Turning the straight dude is only a good game the first four or five times you do it. After that, you get pretty damn sick of the recriminations, the head cases, the clinginess, and the blubbering
confessions.

  This didn't feel like turning a straight guy, though. This felt like getting Garrett to give in to something that he had never known he wanted before he met me. Garrett wanted me, not some actor on TV, not some good looking guy on the corner, me. He knew me and he still wanted me, and fuck, that was enough to put me on my knees. He was the same in bed as he was out of it.

  He came towards me totally focused. It was so hot I wanted to give it up right there. Instead, I let him strip my T-shirt over my head and set his mouth to my collarbone, lapping along it as if I was the tastiest thing he ever had. His hair was so goddamn short, but I still managed to get a grip on it, dragging him closer to me so I could feel his entire fucking body pressed against mine. There was something I've always liked about rubbing up against people who still had their clothes on, something that felt ridiculous quick, and dirty. When I managed to bring his body flush against mine, I dragged myself up him, making sure that he felt how hard I was. When my thigh brushed his cock through his pants, he growled, and I could feel it run all the way through him.

  "Do you even know what you want?" I asked him. He drew back to look at me.

  "Does it matter?" he asked. "You're going to give it to me, aren't you?"

  That made me laugh—Special Agent Garrett with that rough cockiness that went right to the very core of me. I didn't say yes, but I knew he was right. I think I might have done a lot for Garrett from the beginning just so I could look of him. But now, yeah, there probably wasn't anything I would deny him.

  With one hand on my shoulder, pinning me down to the bed, Garrett kissed me as if he had all the time in the world. He took his time with my mouth, learning all about how I tasted, practically counting my molars with his tongue. It felt good, so insanely good it was hard to concentrate on his mouth while his hand was moving down my belly and over my chest.and down my belly. Sometimes he reached up to tweak a nipple, and he knew how to do it right too. There was just enough force to make me jump, not enough to really make him want to stop. Finally with a growl, I grabbed his hand and shoved it down between my legs. I could feel a moment of hesitation before he cupped my cock in his big hand. He was gentle at first, almost like he had no idea what to do with it despite owning one himself for some forty odd years. In a few minutes, though, he sure as heck figured it out.