She closed her eyes and made her choice.
Dan slowly peeled his body off Maggie’s back, giving them both air and space, but not enough of either one.
“Can’t you just shoot the lock off?” she asked.
Dan put his fingers over her mouth. “Wait.”
They did, silent and still inside the airless metal box, time ticking at the same rate as Maggie’s heartbeat, which he felt pulsing through her.
“I can’t shoot it,” he said when he removed his hand as a signal that she could talk again. “It probably wouldn’t shoot off, anyway, and I’d leave a mess.”
“You’re worried about how it looks?”
The place was black, small, airless, and so sweltering it was almost impossible to think. “I don’t want them to know we’ve found where they hide the shipments. They’ll change their strategy.”
He got down on his knees and started feeling along the bottom, at the crevice where the siding met the metal floor, searching for any place where rust and time could have made the structure vulnerable.
“It’s cheap tin,” he said. “Cuttable.”
He made his way to the back, then up the wall to the vent. The eave was barely six feet, and he couldn’t even stand straight. The back vent was closed tight, the bolts rusted, eliminating any chance of popping it out. He wouldn’t risk the front one; it would be too noticeable.
“We’ll cut our way out,” he said. “A clean slice where the back corners meet that no one will notice and we can slip out of without them ever knowing we’ve been here. I’ll come back and see if I can get a look at what they’re shipping tomorrow.”
“You have a knife that will do that?”
“No, but I’ll call Max, and he’ll come down.” Giving them about forty minutes in a hot box with very little air and space. He crouched down. “Close your eyes.”
“Why? I can’t see a thing anyway.”
“I’m going to flip open my phone, and if you look at the light, it’ll delay how long it takes to get your night vision.”
He closed his own eyes and pressed Max’s speed dial by touch, but she covered his hand with hers, stopping him.
“Wait. He can’t leave Quinn.”
“Quinn’s with Cori, and that place is as secure as Fort Knox.”
Max answered on the first ring, and Dan quickly explained the situation, gave him a location, and put a rescue plan in place.
“What’s Quinn doing?” Maggie whispered.
Dan relayed the question to Max, who chuckled in response.
“He’s teaching Peyton the name of every fish in the tank,” he said. “He’s a great kid, Dan. Smart as a whip and funny. Not bad to have around, for a teenager.”
He had no right to feel the twinge of pride; he hadn’t raised Quinn. But he felt it anyway, and smiled. “I know he is. Be sure he’s inside the whole time you’re gone.”
“Don’t worry, we’ve got him under wraps, and I did the security in this house myself. It’s impenetrable.”
“Then get down here before we spontaneously combust.”
Dan pressed the end button and opened his eyes, still not seeing even a silhouette of Maggie. But he could feel her heat, and he could smell her scent. Salty, spicy, sweet. The scent of Maggie in the shed.
The first bead of sweat trickled down his neck.
“Take off your clothes,” he said, ripping his own T-shirt over his head and wiping his face with it.
“You’re a riot.”
“I’m not joking. We’re both wearing jeans, Maggie. We need air on our skin to keep our temperatures under a hundred. And stay low, because heat rises. In fact, you should lie on the floor and let as much of your skin touch it as possible. It’ll keep your temp down.”
Next to him, he felt her shift position and heard her zipper scrape.
He couldn’t resist. “There’s a sound I’ve heard in here before.”
“Oh, boy.” Her laugh was dry. “That didn’t take long.”
“What? We’re not going to talk about it? Here? In this place where there’s a lot of . . .”
“History,” Maggie said.
“Memories,” he countered.
Down to his boxer briefs, he lay back, the metal slightly cooler than the warm air.
He heard denim slide over her legs, and pictured what was happening less than two feet away. He could roll, reach . . . and feel hot, damp, silky skin.
“Good memories,” he added softly. “I hope you know that.”
“Mmm.” The response was noncommittal. “I guess you want my top off, too?”
Always. “You’ll stay alive longer.” He might die of need, though.
Cotton brushed flesh, and heat pooled around his balls, making them tight and sweaty.
She exhaled and the metal creaked as she lay down, probably an arm’s distance from him. He couldn’t see, but he could imagine. She had a bra on today, he’d noticed earlier. Did she still favor little wisps of panties, all lacy and feminine?
“Can you see yet?” she asked.
He wished to God he could. “No. Nothing. You’re completely safe with me.”
That earned him a soft snort of disbelief.
“I would never touch you now, Maggie. First of all, we’d die of heat stroke. Second . . .” He couldn’t think of a single reason not to touch her except the danger to their internal thermometers. And the bone-deep knowledge that once he did, he wouldn’t stop. “I just won’t.”
He heard her body shift, imagined her turning on her side, sensed her looking at him, even though she couldn’t possibly see him in this complete darkness. But he could feel her breath and the warmth that rolled off her skin. His was damp, sweat prickling his whole body.
“What was it about this place?” she asked softly. “The minute I got in here, I was . . .”
Hot. Excited. Wet. Ready. She was all kinds of things, and thinking about them sent a gallon of blood south.
“Willing to try anything,” she finally said.
He pictured her bare legs, long, lean, tanned, crossed at the ankles. The way her breasts sloped down when she rested on her side. The deep tips of her nipples. The glint in her eyes when she wanted to try something . . . different.
“It wasn’t the shed,” he whispered. “It was us.”
“You always brought out a risk-taking side of me,” she said, a smile in her voice.
“It was mutual,” he agreed.
“It was . . . fun.” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “Scary sometimes, but thrilling. I’ve never done anything like it since.”
“Good.” The burn of possession mixed with arousal.
“Good?” she scoffed at the word. “I suppose you haven’t been with another woman since.”
“I’ve been with plenty,” he admitted. “But none… like that.”
“Like what?”
Man, he didn’t need this. Didn’t need to think about what they’d done in here. How they’d done it.
“Stop talking about it, Maggie.”
He stood suddenly, placing his hands flat on the back wall, bracing his legs wide.
“What are you doing?”
The equivalent of reciting the alphabet backward. Anything to stop thinking about Maggie in the shed.
“I want to work on this vent some more.” He tried the nut again, but even with a tool it wouldn’t have loosened. “If I can open the slats, we’d have a little light and air.” He stuck his fingers in, but it was sealed with rust. The front vent let in more air, but its slats were at an upward angle, letting no appreciable light in.
Perspiration ran down his sides, and heat waves rolled through his body. He returned to the floor, engulfed in blackness and humidity. Forty minutes until Max got there. Anything could happen in forty minutes. And everything.
He laid his gun inches from his fingertips and closed his eyes, hoping the old trick would help his vision adjust faster when he opened them.
Maggie shifted again, moving her arms up with a
frustrated, uncomfortable sigh. He pictured her lifting her hair, cooling her neck. She was sweating, too. He could smell the salt on her skin, and feel the heat shimmer around her. So close he could imagine the taste of her.
“Do you think the chance of getting caught made it more exciting?” she asked.
Was she doing this to torture him, or was she just as turned on as he was?
“Everything made it more exciting.”
“It was always so . . . desperate,” she barely whispered.
Desperate. Frantic. Furious. The rush to get in her made him all of those things.
“But I guess that was all an act to get me to tell you everything.”
“No,” he said simply. “It was genuine desperation.”
He could have sworn she moved closer. If he just brushed his right hand a little along the floor, he’d touch her. Again.
Against his will, his cock stiffened. He bent his knees slowly, quietly, widened his legs, and took a slow breath.
“Remember the time I stripped by candlelight?”
“Jesus, Maggie, are you trying to kill me?” Blood hummed in his head as he remembered Maggie unbuttoning a cotton blouse, with nothing underneath. Maggie bending over and dragging jeans over her round, sweet ass. Maggie on the floor, under him. On top of him. On her knees in front of him. Teasing and taunting and taking him into her tight, slick body.
A sound escaped his lips as a droplet of moisture formed on the head of his cock.
“Why didn’t we get heat stroke back then?” she asked.
“We did. We just called it something else.” Mindblowing sex.
“Yeah.” Her voice was wistful; then she was quiet for a long time. Breathing softly, not moving. With each passing second, his balls pinched with need and his cock beat with a blood rush, and his brain exploded with images of her body and the sounds of her orgasms and the flavor of her velvet skin.
“I need to ask you a question.” Her voice was low, soft, and way too sexy.
“Anything.” He turned just a little, ready for—anything.
“What are you thinking about right now?”
Your mouth. Your breasts. Your sweet… “Viejo. And what these guys are doing.”
A finger jabbed his shoulder. “That was a test, Dan Gallagher.”
He squinted into the dark, wishing that his damn night vision worked better. “What kind of a test?”
“Lie detector. And you . . .” The sudden touch of her hand on his hard cock shocked him. “. . . failed.” She gave it the slightest squeeze, branding him. “Now I recognize you, Michael Scott.”
“Very funny. Okay, you win. I lied.” It took every ounce of self-control not to slide against her fingers. “But if you don’t move your hand, it’s gonna be real obvious, real soon.”
She released him, leaving him aching. “You’re thinking about things we did in this shed.”
“And things we still might.”
She inhaled softly but sharply. “You wouldn’t.”
“No, I wouldn’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t think about it when I’m undressed, in the dark, six inches from a woman I think is the sexiest on earth.” God, he wanted her to touch him again. Just put her palm right… there . . .
He slid his own hand down, unable to stop, unable to resist replacing hers for one maddening second. He managed not to move, except to cringe with need, and take a slow breath.
“You okay?” she asked.
“What do you think?”
She shifted next to him again, the sound of her palms grazing her own skin, the image of her touching herself suddenly vivid behind his closed eyes. Clenching his jaw, he stroked his shaft again, squeezing for the fierce pleasure and pain of it, then letting go.
Sweating profusely, his throat bone dry, he fisted himself to fight the urgency of his erection. Next to him, Maggie moved some air, fanning herself.
“You know what night I remember the most?” Her question cut through the airless silence.
“They were all pretty sweet.”
“I remember the time you found me here asleep at four in the morning.”
“That was stupid,” he said, more gruffly than he meant to. “You could’ve gotten caught, waiting for me like that.”
“But you did come.”
“A few times as I recall.” The first, in her mouth.
“Ha-ha. Very funny. Do you remember how you woke me up?”
She really was trying to kill him. And succeeding. “Sort of.”
“You do remember.”
“Maggie, I remember everything. That’s why I was so good at undercover. I have a photographic memory.” And the photos she made for his mental album were well worn from many nights of remembering.
“So you remember exactly what we did that night?”
Of course he did. Did she want him to say it? Right here in the dark, is that what she wanted? She’d worn a denim skirt with nothing underneath, and he spread her legs, put his mouth on her and . . . “I licked you.”
This time, her breath sounded unsteady. Maybe she was just as gone as he was.
That thought was enough to make him lose the battle not to touch himself again. His back bowed with the next secret, silent swipe of his palm against his swollen dick.
“Yes, you did.” She sighed ever so slightly, but he still saw nothing but blackness and his fertile, full-color imagination. “Right between the legs.”
One more time. Up. Down. Up. Around the head. Needing . . . tight . . . flesh.
She was beautiful down there, delicious and responsive. He could see her glistening, taste the moisture, feel the soft tuft of hair against his mouth. He wanted to be there right now. All he had to do was turn, and touch, and taste.
“You never said a word.” Against his arm, he felt her breathe the words. So close. So, so close. “You just turned me upside down.”
And she’d put him in her mouth while he had her in his. That was the moment their illicit affair went from crazy lust to . . . intimacy. Maybe even more than that.
“There’s a number for that move, you know.” He had to keep this light.
“I’d never done anything like that before.” She exhaled softly, so close and warm he had to roll his palm again, squeezing his dick between his fingers. Wishing it were Maggie. With his hand wet with his own juice, he glided down the shaft, reaching his rock-hard balls, burning for that hand to be hers.
Just one touch. A fingertip. A pinch. A single stroke from her soft palm, and he’d have release. He opened his mouth, ready to say her name, ready to—
“And I’ve never done it since. Only with you.”
Everything scorched. His brain. His hand. His stiff cock as he stroked again, soundless, stealthy, responding to the image of her legs around his head, her lips on him at the same time, the fierceness of their climax as he shot into her mouth and she came in his at the same moment.
“Sometimes I think about that.” Her voice cracked with the admission. Maybe she was doing what he was doing: touching herself, pretending it was real. Stroking, stroking, stroking without making a sound. The pressure built up to the point of pain.
“Actually,” she whispered. “I think about it a lot.”
He came, shooting one violent spurt in his hand, then another, then another. He fought not to move, not to jerk with the release. He clenched his teeth so hard he could crack his jaw, but he never made a sound as relief rocked him.
Except for his heart, which pounded his ribs relentlessly.
“Did you hear that?” She sat up.
Oh, man.
“I heard someone out there.”
He couldn’t hear anything but the blood rushing in his head. Then a single tap on the back wall of the shed.
“Max?”
“To the rescue.”
Maggie shot up and Dan blinked, hearing her dressing. He did the same, surreptitiously wiping his hand on his boxers. Once his jeans were on, he watched the first sliver of light as Max’s knife sliced
through the corner of the shed.
“Make it clean,” Dan said. “And easy for us to get back in.”
Max didn’t answer, but the sound of the knife screeched louder as it moved along the floor, making an L-shaped metal flap for them to climb through.
Just as Dan popped his head into his T-shirt, sunlight illuminated the shed, momentarily blinding him.
Maggie was already on her knees, ready to crawl through.
Max reached in and gave her a hand. “Careful, the metal edge is sharp.”
She eased through the opening, disappearing into the light.
Dan took another slow breath before following. “No sign of anyone in the house?”
“It looks vacant, but I stayed way clear of it.”
“We’ll come back at night,” Dan said as he kneeled down to follow Maggie out. “And figure out what the hell’s going on here.”
“Bet it was hot in there,” Max said as he emerged.
“Hot as hell, and dark as night,” Dan said.
“He has lousy night vision,” Max told Maggie.
Dan turned to bend the metal back into place. Did the bastard have to reveal all his shortcomings?
“He must,” she said. “Because after a few minutes, I could see everything.”
Dan just closed his eyes and swore.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MAGGIE’S HEAD WAS spinning from hours of brainstorming, conference calls with a former national security adviser cryptographer, and the residual buzz she still felt from the heat that had melted her in the shed.
And it wasn’t caused by the sun.
If her body betrayed her with one more crackle of desire, she’d scream. How could she forget who Dan was and what he’d done? How could she steal glances at him and fantasize? How could she let his loss of self-control in the shed twist her into one big knot of need?
At ten o’clock, she used Quinn as an excuse to slip away from the guesthouse living room they’d turned into a “war room,” pausing to watch Cori on a second-floor balcony, walking with her baby in her arms.
It made her ache for her own son, and remember why they were here: for his protection.
Quinn and Maggie had rooms on the first floor, in one of multiple wings shooting off from the Architectural Digest–worthy home. At Quinn’s room, she tapped softly, then pushed the door open. Goose ambled over for a sniff and rub, then jumped back to an overstuffed chair across from the foot of the bed.