between her nipple and her clit.
Oh…wow. This guy was good.
He moved his mouth to her other nipple, and let his teeth gently scrape her flesh. The connection between her nipple and parts south only increased. She shifted restlessly. So he wasn’t just good, but really good.
Then he shocked her with a long, strong sucking of the nipple. She didn’t want to respond to Thorn; he was a stranger in the dark, sweetly tormenting her for information she didn’t have. She had nothing to give him, either in 411 or in orgasm. But logic wasn’t stopping her body from arching to give more of herself and get closer to this man.
He lifted his hand from her sex and wrapped his left arm around her, securing his strapping forearm in the arch of her back to keep her lifted to his mouth. The hot, bare flesh of his chest and abdomen licked fire across the skin of her torso. Being closer to him was somehow more exciting than having his fingers on her clit. It felt more…personal. He felt more like a lover. A dangerous sensation, but Thorn was so solid all around her. Unlike all the guys in high school, his touch told her he was committed to giving her orgasm, not getting a ten-minute lay at a drunken party.
When he lifted his mouth from her nipple and moved it up her body, he nuzzled her neck, his hot breaths skittering across her sensitive skin. Goose pimples broke out. He nipped at her lobe and she gasped, but he quickly swallowed that sound with a demanding kiss.
He drove deep past her lips, sweeping inside as if he couldn’t wait another minute to taste all of her mouth. Immediately, he proved that he hadn’t had a drop of alcohol, unlike the guys in her past. All she tasted was spicy, aroused male.
Brenna didn’t have to ask what he wanted, his desire to conquer her was all there in his groan, in his kiss. He challenged her with every thrust of his tongue, every frenzied sweep of his lips over hers. He was like a race car, built for speed and flash. If she let this go on, he’d dominate and do whatever necessary to ensure her compliance. Oh damn. The thought aroused her.
No, no, no!
He’d broken into Curtis’ bungalow either to coerce information out of her or get laid. Neither motives were particularly sterling. She needed to tell him to get lost, go to hell and never come back.
Then he climbed up on the bed, between her legs, tore his vest off, and with a whispered, “Fuck, yeah,” leaned over her body.
He fit his mouth right over her sex, his tongue swiping across her clit, providing maximum devastation.
Her cry filled the room as he swooped in for seconds, then thirds, then got really comfortable, as if he planned to stay for a while.
Without thinking, Brenna tried to raise her hands to tangle in that long golden mane. The cuffs stopped her short.
“Feel those cuffs,” he whispered against her slick flesh. “I’ve got you just where I need you. God, you taste sweet. And those cuffs are going to keep you there until I’ve tasted every drop of cream this sweet pussy has to offer.”
“This is insane.” Her voice shook both with lingering fear and rising passion.
“This is hot.”
He pushed her thighs a little wider, urging her to bend her knees and flare them out. The ties around her ankles stopped her eventually, but he opened her enough to dive deeper into her…and make her feel even more vulnerable than before.
Thorn didn’t waste time getting back down to it. He struck quick and fast, with destructive results. Her resistance began to melt under the onslaught of his determined mouth. A swipe of his tongue before he sucked her whole clit into his mouth. Then—oh, God—he plunged a pair of fingers into her.
Her hips lifted, and she offered herself to him like a sacrifice.
Without hesitation, he took it.
The burn between her legs shimmered and grew, streaking up her belly, down her thighs. She began to tremble. And Thorn showed no mercy—and no sign of letting up anytime soon.
But eventually he would let up. He would leave her. Every man did. Then…what? She would have given a part of herself to a man who didn’t know her, wouldn’t be there for her in the future. Did he even know her name? Could she pick him out in a crowd?
The thoughts ripped through her, leaving ugly shock in their wake. She was naked with and responding to a man who knew absolutely nothing about her and cared even less.
The fact she couldn’t feel him anywhere on her body except between the legs all but shouted that she was just a pussy to him. She’d almost been more aroused by feeling his bare chest against hers, heart to heart, his mouth demanding a response from her. Without that…well, his touch felt more like a sensual attack than a shared pleasure.
Brenna sank back to the mattress, tensing, doing everything to close her legs against his determined mouth.
Thorn lifted his head to glare at her. “What the hell? Relax.”
She shook her head. “I don’t relax with men.”
He quirked a golden brow. “With women?”
“Oh my…no!”
“Just checking. You one of those women who needs cock to get off?” He sat up and unsnapped the waistband of his leather pants. Then he reached for the zipper.
“Stop! I’m not the kind of woman to get off for a total stranger. Can we have a little light here? The dark is too…intimate, and I barely know you.”
“I had my mouth on your pussy. If that’s not getting to know you, what is?”
“A hit and run.”
“Fuck,” he muttered, then reached across her body to the lamp on the nightstand. Quickly, he flicked it on then leaned over her body again.
Brenna took one look, and sucked in a stunned breath. Gorgeous, almost exotic in a Norse kind of way. He looked like she imagined a Scandinavian god would—but with leather and tats. Sun-kissed skin only accentuated the harsh slashes of cheekbone dominating each side of his face. And his ice-blue eyes left her speechless. Beautiful…and emotionally lifeless. He could be a seducer or a killer without much deliberation or remorse.
She began to shake.
“I’m sure you can find plenty of women who get into anonymous sex. I’m not one of them. I swear I’ve told you everything I know about Curtis Lawton. I don’t know him well. I’ve seen him a handful of times in my whole life,” she said truthfully. “Just…go.”
Thorn said nothing for long moment. But those stunning eyes, they told her he was thinking hard and fast. She suspected very little got past this man.
“Curtis fuck you?”
“No. Never.”
He paused again, then finally said, “You frigid?”
Brenna winced. God, she hated that word. It implied that a woman was somehow irreparably broken.
Well, aren’t you?
“That’s none of your business.”
He stabbed his fists on his hips. “Since I’m the man in bed with you, baby, I beg to differ.”
“My name is not baby!” Brenna bucked against her bonds. “Or honey or babe or—”
“Whatever. Does it matter? It’s just a figure to speech.”
She wanted to slap the man. “No, it’s something you say when you don’t know or can’t remember a woman’s name, isn’t it?”
He didn’t reply for a long moment. He didn’t avoid her stare or look contrite—he was too full of macho bullshit for that—but something told her she was right.
“You might be gorgeous and have the oral prowess of a god, but you’ve got the sensitivity of a doorknob.”
Thorn smiled. “An oral god, huh?”
“You are totally missing the point. A woman can’t relax for a man who doesn’t know her name and doesn’t care that he doesn’t know. She wants to be cared for, cared about, feel that she—”
“Some women just want the orgasm, baby. I find plenty who are more than willing to forego the touchy-feely shit in favor of a really good fuck. So all your little speech tells me is that you’re Cinderella waiting for Prince Charming.” He rolled his eyes. “This ain’t my department.”
Before Brenna could question what
that meant, Thorn climbed off the bed, grabbed the cell phone at his waist and stalked out of the bedroom.
* * * * *
Fuck.
“That went fabulously,” Thorn muttered to himself, stabbing numbers into the keypad of his cell phone.
He was hard as hell and in over his head. Normally, a woman with her problems, suggesting he learn to be sensitive? He’d be gone—in a hurry. But this one…no. Not yet, anyway. She’d challenged him, and he planned to deliver.
The way she smelled aroused the fuck out of him. That lily-fair skin contrasted with her honey-brown hair. It fell in waves to her waist and framed her small, curved body. The effect made her look like a some kind of fairy, fragile, sensual, mysterious. Not his usual type—he liked women who looked like they loved sex. The loud, obvious ones. But this woman had great tits and hips, both of which he adored. The taste of her bare pussy on his tongue drove him wild. The thought of fucking her sent his hormones into overdrive. He had to, at least once. But it was clear he was going to need reinforcements to do that.
On the fourth ring, he heard a froggy-groggy, “Hello?”
Thorn paused. “You sleeping or fucking?”
“Thorn?”
“No, it’s the Tooth Fairy.”
“Whaddya want. I’m sleeping.”
“Get your ass over here.”
“It’s…” Thorn heard some scrambling on the other end of the phone, “one fifty-four in the morning. What’s up?”
“I need your help.”
Cameron sighed. “Where are you?”
“Curtis’ bungalow in the Foothills.”
“You’re there with Brenna?”
Brenna. So that was her name. It was pretty, like her. It fit. When he came deep inside her, it would roll off his tongue.
“Yeah.”
“Do I want to know why you’re there with her in the middle of the night?”
“Probably not, since I tied her down to the bed and stripped her bare against her will. So you’d better come stop me, Detective.”
With a chuckle, Thorn hung up. That would get Saint Cameron over here in a hurry. And since he already lived on the north side of town, he’d be here quick.
Goody, the night was just getting started.
Chapter Four
Cameron pounded on the door to Curtis’ love shack. The unseasonably crisp fall wind whipped under the shirt he hadn’t bothered to button and around the bare toes he’d shoved into sandals as he’d grabbed his keys and run out the door.
What the hell was Thorn up to?
After a long minute, the door opened. Cameron fought the wind to shove his hair out of his face and behind his neck. He really meant to have it cut and kept forgetting.
There stood Thorn with a tight smile, an impatient tapping of his palm against his thigh…and a hard-on that strained his leathers.
So Brenna had the same effect on Thorn. Cameron didn’t know whether to laugh or pity the poor bastard.
“What do you mean you tied her up and stripped her down against her will?” he asked, barging his way inside.
“Just what I said. We made a deal—if I could make her come, she would tell me everything she knows.”
Not knowing Brenna well, Cameron couldn’t say for sure that Thorn was lying, but it sounded fishy.
“If you couldn’t?”
“I’d leave her alone. But we both know I can’t do that until we have some info on Curtis. We have to run the bastard down, and Brenna is our only lead.”
With the trial in five days? Yeah, he was feeling the heat. Curtis had skipped town and knew a thousand scumbags who would provide him a million places to hide. He didn’t want to play hardball with Brenna. Playing Thorn’s game, whatever it was, might cost him his badge. But when he looked into the faces of the slavers’ victims—old men and women forced to labor in fields or over sewing machines until they dropped, or young boys and girls stripped of their innocence in cruel brothels catering to the depraved—he was determined to give this case his all. Husbands and wives, parents and children, had all been separated, their lives forever changed. The American dream shattered because of greedy pricks like Lawton and his boss, Julio Marco.
Lawton had agreed to turn evidence for the state. The Feds wouldn’t comment on the condition of their case, so Cam wasn’t about to leave any stone unturned, just in case they had a big bag of nothing. His job was to make sure the state’s case stuck like Superglue. That meant hunting down Lawton. Brenna was his only hope at this point.
It sucked when his job played hell with his ethics.
“Agreed,” Cam told Thorn reluctantly. “What do you have so far?”
“Shit. Nothing about Lawton. She keeps swearing she knows nothing.”
“You’re not buying it?”
“Why would Lawton let some woman he barely knows and wasn’t fucking stay in his little mountain hideaway?”
“He wouldn’t.” Cameron sighed. “Anything else?”
“About her body, plenty. She’s a hot little piece with a bare pussy that tastes like ambrosia. But something’s wrong, man. She doesn’t just come when stimulated like other women. She’s looking for someone sensitive. That’s where you come in.”
Cameron frowned as a picture of Thorn’s head between Brenna’s slender thighs popped into his head. He wished he could say it disturbed him, but damn it, no. It aroused him. He’d never been the voyeur type and was never sexually fixated during cases. It had to stop.
“You think I’m going to arouse information out of her?” he asked.
“Yeah, do that sensitive shit you do best, she’ll fold like a lawn chair and start singing like a good churchgoer on Sunday.”
“Did you try straightforward questioning, without the fondling?”
Thorn nodded. “I wasn’t getting anything out of her. Then I got…distracted. Besides, interrogation isn’t my thing. I cuff ‘em and bring ‘em in. I leave all that evidence and confession stuff to you cop types.”
Cameron shook his head. Yes, Thorn’s ADD impatience would be an impediment to good investigation. His insistence on living his life through his dick would be a real issue when it came to questioning beautiful women like Brenna.
“All right, let me see her. I’m not touching her to get information out of her, Thorn. Sex isn’t a bet or a game or a deal. It’s people sharing their bodies and emotions, being close to each other—”
“Oh, vomit. You two are going to get along great.”
Thorn stomped off, deeper into the dark house. At least he’d had the foresight not to flip on lights, just in case one of Julio Marco’s hit men was looking for an easy target.
Down an adobe-tiled path that bisected the kitchen and family room area, Cameron followed Thorn. A wall signaled a dead end, then Thorn turned left and opened the door.
Soft yellow light glowed in every corner of the room, falling over Brenna’s bound, naked body, exposing every inch he’d been imagining since meeting her. Immediately, the nagging erection he’d been trying to shake for the last fifteen hours returned with a vengeance.
Damn. He had to get his mind off his cock, and what he’d love to do with it to Brenna.
“Too much light in here. If our friend Julio has one of his