Own (Command Force Alpha #1) (5 page)

Now he cursed time and circumstance. He had a mission, and that mission had nothing to do with taking up where he and Katsu had broken off. It was a hard thing to admit. The six weeks he’d spent with her that summer before he left for Special Operations training had been some of the freest, happiest moments of his life. She was joy and light, when he’d known little of either. She was resilience and strength, when he admired both immensely. They’d laughed and they’d burned up the sheets, as hot and heavy for each other as only young, dumb, don’t-look-at-tomorrow kids could be.

He’d never be that young man again. And he’d never have Kat in his life again, not the way he’d dared picture years ago. He hadn’t known what it was like to live undercover, to get used to the idea he was already dead and just didn’t know it yet. It made no sense, but survival was easier that way. Kat had become a sunshine memory, like their brief affair.

That she was back in his life, with no hope of rekindling what had been an easy firestorm to set alight, was the toughest part of his assignment—and the least anticipated. He should’ve known better.

He nodded to the bag. “It’s all shoved in there?”

“Aye-aye, Captain. We wouldn’t want it any other way, now would we?”

The eagle, globe and anchor of the Marine Corps emblem was front and center on the duffle. Any man who wagered the bag hadn’t belonged to her dad was a fool.

“Let’s go.”

She picked up a backpack and sighed. Evan locked the apartment behind her.

“So damn secret squirrel,” she muttered. “But you probably have some special-trained PR type to smooth things over, like how you got a copy of my key.”

“We do. She’s excellent.” But the goal was keeping things muted enough that Katsu wouldn’t have to meet her.

Twenty minutes later, they were back in his car and heading north on I-93, having cut through downtown. They stopped on the outskirts of Charlestown to gather supplies, because Evan kept little other than canned goods and staples at his house. He forced lunch on Kat, against all her protests. That she inhaled two cheeseburgers and a milkshake made him grin inwardly, even if she refused to acknowledge he’d been right.

Then it was back on the highway, away from Boston proper. The farther he drove, the quieter Evan became. Inside and out. He loved leaving the city behind. Fall was his favorite time of year. The leaves still clung to their homes on branches, but they’d begun to lose their bright green color. Orange, yellow and red took over. A flaming canvas as the sun curved westward. He rolled down the window, breathed in the scents of autumn in New England…and kept driving.

“Hey, where do you live? New Hampshire?”

He was calming so thoroughly, just by breathing air that smelled of cool weather, that he actually smiled. “Not quite.”

Katsu kept watching him. He felt her stare like a touch. From some angles, her jawline appeared rounded, but her chin was always pixie sharp. Those dark eyes could clear a man’s head of even the fresh night air and replace it with thoughts that were nowhere near so clean.

Maybe not
any
man. Maybe it was just Evan. Right then it didn’t matter. His calm faded, because he was nearing his house. Only necessary techs had been there, to set up security and surveillance. He didn’t have people over for fun. Not Nicky or Laurie or any of his brief, doomed relationships with women who didn’t understand him. Could never understand him.

What did it say about him that he kept his home so private? Probably as much as Kat’s tornado living room said about her.

They weren’t normal people.

He turned off the main road and guided the Lexus up his three-quarter-mile driveway.

“This isn’t some rescue operation,” she said, her voice somewhat teasing, somewhat awed. She peered through the window, where light bounced from bough to bough. “This is a full-on kidnapping.” She flipped midnight hair behind her ears and angled him a sly look. “I said it from the start. You’re a Neanderthal dragging me back to your cave in the woods.”

“Think what you want.”

“I can and I will. You have a lot to make up for after what you said about Loki and my purple kitchen lights.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Kat. I never said anything against Loki.”

“Maybe you have a shred of taste after all.”

His palms were sweating. She used to love teasing him. “Teasing you back from the ledge,” she’d once called it. That felt especially important now.

First, he had to drive her past the red-painted fences and the custom-built two-paddock barn.

“You… You have a
barn
? I hope all you keep is feral cats.”

“Yes. I have a barn. I also have a woodshed and a private stream. Any other questions before you level more sarcasm at me?”

“Defensive much? I was just asking. It’s an odd choice for a guy who might be gone by 2:37 in the morning.”

“I’ll be wherever you are until any possible threat has passed and you can go back to your life.”

He put the car in park and got Katsu’s bag and backpack out of the trunk. She emerged, chin tilted up, gaze taking in the redwood exterior. Barn and house and paddock and fencing blended so completely with the fall-burnished surroundings. Evan liked that it looked old. Seriously old, as if it’d been here since colonial times and had persevered over centuries. He couldn’t have that permanency, but he could live somewhere that wrapped him in that feeling.

“This is beautiful,” she said softly. She aimed those dark, perceptive eyes at him and shook her head a little. Her precisely angled bob skimmed her round cheeks. “Never would’ve thought it of you.”

“Is that a good or bad thing?” Suddenly it meant a great deal to him, though he couldn’t give two damns why.

“Just…different.” She turned and walked up the shallow front porch steps. With her jeans that tight, Evan zoomed right back to thoughts of her amazing ass. He didn’t think she was doing it on purpose, like Marilyn Monroe giving a natural extra swish of sex appeal to every step. If Katsu meant it, he’d know—probably after it was too late.

Time to get ahold of himself, and of her. He didn’t need to keep hauling her out of various buildings. He only had to keep her in this one. The remoteness worked in his favor. The remoteness also meant he’d be locked up with Katsu for the next few days. Just how was he supposed to keep his hands off her, when he ached to clutch her ass and squeeze?
Hard.
He wanted that ass in the air when he turned her over the arm of his couch and stripped those tight, tight jeans. Then he’d make her suck him—
that mouth
. And ride him—
those tits
.

“Coming?”

Goddamn.

Evan jerked free of his fantasy only to find its origin standing by his front door with her arms crossed. Now she
was
doing it on purpose. The pose intentionally plumped her breasts. Swells of gorgeous flesh decorated with red lace lifted and lowered with every breath. The pace of those breaths increased as he devoured her with his eyes. His other four senses were completely wasted.

Not for much longer.

As Evan advanced—striding, with tense purpose—her scant, teasing smile dropped along with her arms. She backed against the wood siding, eyes wide. He kept her backpack slung over one shoulder but shrugged from under her duffle. It landed with a hollow thump on the porch. In the distance, a flock of Canadian geese took flight, honking their displeasure. He didn’t care. Instead he leaned near enough to inhale the fresh, lavender scent of her hair. His nose brushed against the silky strands. He could hear her breath now. That meant four out of five senses. Much better.

He’d taste her before morning. He had hours to make it happen.

Evan cursed himself and found the house key. After grabbing the luggage, he shoved inside without ceremony. Had Katsu not caught the screen door, it would’ve smacked closed behind him. He didn’t care and he really,
really
cared. None of what he felt had a place during the days to come, but he didn’t seem to have a choice. Those feelings—feelings he’d thought manageable, if not gone—were back in force.

There was only one cure for moments when he began losing control. He took that control back.

He didn’t slam her bags onto the floor, but that was because he had excellent mastery of his muscles. He wanted to slam. He wanted to take. Days since Minsk. Nine months since beginning the search. And an entire year since last seeing Laurie Madigan. The tension was beginning to strip Evan of his civilian manners. He was as tense as if he’d never escaped that mission, as if he still knelt over his fallen mentor, waiting for their rescue chopper to get them the fuck out of Belarus.

He kept his gaze dead square on Katsu. “Unpack,” he said, his jaw tight. “All of it.”

“Since when do you—?”

“You forget, I saw the suitcase you packed for Harvard. It was so neat that the edges of each shirt barely touched. I bet that,” he said, nodding to the vintage Marine Corps duffle, “is a wreck.”

Katsu Stafford was a short woman. She didn’t act like one. She stared up at him, arms crossed again, daring him to take his eyes from her stubborn, gorgeous face. He knew what tempting feast she was luring him to indulge. Her cleavage probably looked so good that he’d be hard in seconds. He couldn’t afford to get dizzy that quick, not standing toe-to-toe with an opponent like Kat.

“You’re thinking about…” she drew out each word and even traced a red-lacquered nail along his forearm’s most prominent muscle, “…bras tangled with itty-bitty lace thongs. You’re thinking about how I shoved my nightgown between two pairs of jeans. That pretty silk…all wrinkled. Little round pack of birth control pills buried in there somewhere.”

Evan stepped away from her. Just one step. He took up the duffle and backpack, grabbing her wrist. Upstairs to the half-loft and down the hallway, he flipped on the light to the guestroom where she’d spend the night. He let her go, unzipped the duffle and toppled all the contents onto the floor. Had it not been for the large wool area rug, bottles of makeup and perfume might have shattered. Some rolled under the queen-sized bed. The unmistakable shell pink of the birth control prescription she’d mentioned fetched up against the bottom of the dresser. He dropped the backpack on the bed, aware it probably contained her computer.

She gasped. Her scowl was epic. “What the hell? You made a joke, and then I made a joke. You don’t have to go all Captain Bullshit on me.”

“I wasn’t joking. You will get down on your knees
this instant
and pick up that mess.”

Another gasp. Her lush lips parted. The two front teeth of her slight overbite were driving him insane. “You are a pig. You have no right!”

This was either going to help them both, or it would turn his house into an insane asylum for the next few days. Because Evan…Evan had a hunch. She needed this as much as he did.

Giving her every chance to refuse, he placed his hands on her shoulders. Slowly, resolutely, he pushed her to the floor. The look she angled up at him was confusion and sex and anger and…pleading. She swallowed audibly. She made no move to push off her knees.

“This isn’t a joke, Katsu. Untangle your bras and your panties. Smooth out your nightgown. Put them in the dresser drawers, and organize your cosmetics by the vanity mirror.” He settled onto the bed she’d sleep in, mere hours from now. “I’m staying here to make sure you do it right.”

Chapter Five

Kat reached for a shirt. Worn and thin, she’d meant the T-shirt for wearing to bed. It had once been blue, but a thousand washings had turned it something closer to the color of the sky before snow. She balled it up slowly. Held it to her stomach.

Her head was bowed. Not a lot. Her hair created a black curtain around her face. She could think behind that curtain. She’d always found a way to keep it inside, there in boarding school when missing her mother and father had been so hard. The tears were for later.

She wasn’t anywhere near tears this time.

She could hardly make sense of what was going on inside her. There was shock, of course, supercharging her blood. And there were discordant threads of something uncomfortably close to arousal, in the way her jeans suddenly felt super tight over her hot sex. She shouldn’t be hot for it, hot for
anything
. Evan had rammed into her life once more, and her dad was in the hospital.

But she was…centered. Ordered. Calm.

The whirlwind in her head had gone quiet at his touch—not when he’d held her hands in his, but when he’d
pushed
. He’d forced her down onto her knees. His orders had dropped like stones into a crystal-clear pond, leaving ripples behind, yet still perfectly visible.

“I didn’t make the mess,” she said, but her voice was less forceful than it should have been. She wasn’t filled with
piss
and
fuck off
and
get away
. She was quiet as a bird’s wing.

“You did when you shoved it into your bag,” he said, completely implacable. “I only exposed the disaster.”

She licked her bottom lip and drew it between her teeth. “Evan…”

He didn’t respond. Normally, in conversation, one’s name drew forth an answer. Perhaps a “Yes?” or a “What?” Not this time. Not from Evan. He didn’t move from his spot on the bed. He was as steady as a rock. As unwavering as a mountain. He watched her like he had nowhere else in the world to be.