“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“The truth? It’s a fairly easy concept . . .”
“I mean the condom.” His hand sliced through the air. “I’m safe, Chay, and you know it just as well as I do. I may have played some games in my life, but I always protected myself.”
“This isn’t about STDs,” she snapped. “I’m not protected, Natches. I went off the agency-sanctioned shots last year when I thought I was resigning and didn’t have time to restart them. You need condoms. I can’t believe you didn’t use one last night.”
Natches stared back at her. From her eyes, to her stomach. Back to her eyes and her stomach again as he swallowed tightly.
She wasn’t protected? He’d filled her more than once with his release the night before, pumping into her, crying her name, feeling her so sleek and hot, milking it from him.
Use a condom now? The first time he’d taken her, there’d been nothing between them either, and he remembered that last mission, wondering about the agency protection she used. Wishing she didn’t. Wishing he could fill her with his baby, to give back to her everything she had lost.
He blinked now, feeling the sweat that gathered on his back, the sense of hunger that suddenly raged through his body. He’d rationalized those thoughts as insanity years before. Her grief had marked him in a way he hadn’t expected, couldn’t have been prepared for, he had told himself.
But now it wasn’t grief. He was staring at her belly, seeing her growing round with his child, and the hunger for it grew.
“Are you okay?” Her eyes narrowed on him as he jerked his gaze back to hers. “I’m safe right now, Natches, but that doesn’t last long. Get the condoms. And stop lying to me. We’ll get along much better that way.”
“No.” He shook his head slowly, barely able to believe that word had slipped past his lips. They were numb, his throat was tight, thick with so many emotions he didn’t know how to make sense of them.
“Why?” She had a death grip on that briefcase and one on his soul. Hell, even he hadn’t known the grip she had on him until now. “Is the truth so damned hard?”
“The truth is easy.” He had to fight to hold himself back, to keep from latching onto her, to keep from devouring her. “I meant, no condoms.”
Chaya went silent. Even her thoughts seemed to stop in shock as she stared back at Natches. He couldn’t have said that. He didn’t just say that.
“I see.” She wet her lips. Had he changed his mind that quickly? Was she misunderstanding something important in this conversation? “If you don’t want to have sex with me, I can understand . . .”
“I want to lay you down and lick every inch of your body. I want to bring you over me and watch you ride me. I want to f**k you so many ways, so many times, that neither of us can find the energy to crawl from the floor let alone the bed. Oh, baby, wanting you is like a sickness with me, and it never f**king goes away.”
“Oh.” Her heart was racing. Each word out of his mouth had her skin sensitizing, her cl*t swelling. “Then what do you mean, no condom?”
He stalked to her then. Slowly. His expression was more savage than she could ever remember seeing it, his eyes bright, his lashes lowered over them. He looked dark. Dangerous. And something in that look terrified her.
“I mean, if you don’t want my baby, then you better get your ass to a clinic and take care of the birth control yourself.” His hand flattened on her stomach as she stared back at him in a shock so deep, so overwhelming, she wondered how she was standing upright. “Because I’m betting I have the fastest, slickest little soldiers in the state of Kentucky. Just a breath of a chance, sweetheart, and you’re pregnant.” His expression, his eyes, grew taut with possessiveness. Possessiveness and lust. “And I could very much get into making damned certain they have every chance.”
Chaya felt herself swaying. She could feel the blood draining from her face, even as it began to thunder in her ears.
She could feel Natches’s hand on her belly, his eyes boring into her soul, as though will alone, and nothing more, could make her conceive.
And it didn’t make sense. She couldn’t understand this. He couldn’t be serious.
“Why?” She forced the word past numb lips. Why would he want to tie himself to her like that?
“Ah, Chay,” he whispered, his expression gentling, just a bit, just enough to force her to trap a sob in her chest rather than give rise to the cry that seemed to echo through her soul. “Sweetheart. Don’t you know I’d give everything I possess to hold you to me? And the thought of giving you my child, of watching that pretty belly grow large with my baby, makes my dick so damned hard I wonder if it’s going to push straight past the zipper of my jeans.”
She felt the briefcase drop from her fingers as she stared back at him, searching his eyes, searching for the lie. There had to be a lie there. But lying didn’t make sense. She knew Natches. Knew he would never, ever risk a child of his so cavalierly. He was so damned protective over family that even Cranston feared him. He would kill for them. He had proven it.
“Chay.” He breathed her name against her lips, and she felt herself weaken. Her knees. Her soul. Something inside her, something she needed for protection, to hold back the dreams and the loss and the years she had run, even from herself, began to crack. “Let me have you like that. Just us. Just the chance that we could dream together like that.”
ELEVEN
Natches could feel himself shaking inside, a need, a hunger he couldn’t control, didn’t want to control, rising inside him.
Chaya. Just her name invoked the power to make his knees weak, to make him hard, to make him want to believe in miracles and to reach for them.
The boy inside him that had once screamed out in the darkened forest, howling in fury at the loneliness, the pain that melded through his body, howled out now in hope.
Because Chaya was here. For such a brief moment in time in a foreign desert, in a hostile land, Natches had known peace. One night, so far away that it felt like a dream, he had held her in his arms and knew she belonged to him. No matter what happened, no matter where life took either of them, he had found the one person that was his alone.
Chaya.
He stared into her eyes. Honey eyes. Eyes that drew him in and promised him life, promised him joy. He could find joy with her. He found joy with her.