27. Steam

Mist frosted the bathroom mirror as the hot shower billowed steam into the small bathroom where the four of them stood almost chest-to-chest.

Sarah crossed her arms over her chest and fumed, her skin becoming clammy from the humidity, and her elbow poked the blond traitor-dude in his arm. He didn't seem to notice.

Just a few days ago, those two jerks had been pointing guns at them and narcing to her evil aunt, and now Blaze was trusting them with his plan.

And yep, Blaze was spilling the beans, all the flippin' beans, on his whole fiendish plan.

A lot of it relied too much on his Navy SEAL physicality, which was a problem considering he'd been shot in the leg during that final skirmish with Nemesis in Sarah's kitchen. Even though Blaze had tied a towel around his leg, blood was beginning to dampen his pants again.

And still, the three men schemed about how to take out the Russian bratva boss and her many heavily armed mercenaries by pointing guns at them and relying on Blaze to throw punches.

What could go wrong?

Sarah was about two seconds away from skittering up to the ceiling of the packed bathroom and clinging there, spitting anxiety at them.

She plucked at Blaze's sleeve again. "I really need to tell you about what they were saying on the plane."

Blaze waved her off and kept talking about his elaborate plan that also seemed to rely on Mary Varvara Bell somehow becoming stupid and easily cowed.

Her aunt had lots of bodyguards from the Koch Group in her office, the one that recruited psychopaths with a death wish from prisons. If Micah and Twist pulled guns on Mary Varvara Bell and Logan from behind, those bodyguards would just shoot those two guys dead before she even noticed there was a problem.

This plan seemed stupidly risky, but Sarah was just a little Iowa farm girl who didn't know any better.

And so, no one listened to her.

They didn't even listen to her when she shushed them because they seemed to be speaking awfully loud, even though the shower and sink faucet were pouring water at full blast and they'd all left their phones under a pillow in the bedroom.

She didn't like this at all.

Finally, Blaze shooed the guys back to the living room to await Logan's return. She and Blaze would stay in the bedroom behind the door that was locked from the outside, "pretending" to be Logan's prisoners.

She and Blaze were still going to be locked in the bedroom.

They were still prisoners.

But at least they would have guns in case anything went wrong.

Twist and Micah left them alone in the bedroom, and the external lock thunked into place.

Sarah asked Blaze, "Do you trust them?"

He grimaced and scratched the side of his head. "I think so."

She glanced in the corners of the room where the spy cams would be if Twist hadn't supposedly taken them out.

There might still be microphones. There might still be cameras.

She sashayed up to Blaze and ran her hands from his tight waist over the rock-hard rounds of his pectorals, reaching up to his broad shoulders. "As long as we are locked in this room with nowhere to go—"

One of his eyebrows lifted. "You sure?"

He glanced at the corners of the ceiling, just in case she hadn't figured it out.

Well, Sarah might as well camp this up.

She made her mouth round like an O and looked at the ceiling like she hadn't thought cameras and spy devices might have been installed in the locked prisoner room. "Where can we go?"

Blaze's eyebrow fell, and his tight smile seemed more like sarcasm than glee. "I know a place where they can't see us."

He grabbed her hand, and she followed him to the bathroom, swinging their hands between them as if she were a silly girl who just wanted to get laid.

Sarah wasn't a silly girl.

Blaze flipped on the shower in the bathroom, and within seconds, it was pouring steam into the small room again.

In addition to confusing the microphones, the steam might condense on any camera lenses in there and obscure them, too.

Blaze's huge hands surrounded her waist, and Sarah hardly had a second's notice to jump as he lifted her and set her backside on the cold marble countertop.

"Oh, I meant—"

He parted her knees, shoving himself between them so that she felt his warmth all the way through her jeans, and he jerked her body down to where the sensitive parts between her legs rested on the bulge in his pants.

Her breath rose higher in her chest.

His hands caressed her waist, reaching up and cupping the swells of her breasts as his hot mouth breathed on her pulse up her neck.

Blaze whispered in her ear, "What was it you heard on that airplane?"

Sarah tried to think of what happened on the airplane, but she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pulling him in more tightly for a ferocious kiss.

"No, little kitten," he said against her mouth and backed off, trailing his lips down her throat again. "Something so important happened on the airplane that you have been trying to tell me about it since we landed at Teterboro. What happened on the airplane?"

What freaking airplane?

Sarah grabbed him around the waist with her legs, pulling his body against hers. Blaze groaned, and his fingers twisted in her hair and pulled her head to the side so he could nip and then rake his teeth over the side of her throat, a scrape that shot thrills all the way to her fingertips and toes.

Blaze's hand moved between their bodies and slipped the button of her jeans through its buttonhole. Her waistband relaxed around her middle, and the zip downward was pure torture as she grabbed him, trying to find his throat with her mouth, too.

He was pushing at the denim fabric of her blue jeans, shoving them down around her hips. His hand left her hair, and he cupped her breast again, this time running his thumb over the tight peak.

Sarah gasped, and her head dropped back. Blaze's mouth was on her throat again, sucking and nipping her tender skin as his body undulated, pushing against her thigh as he tried to get her pants off with one hand.

She slithered off the sink counter, nearly twisting her ankle as one of her bare feet landed on his, but Blaze grabbed handfuls of her jeans and yanked them down her legs, stripping the denim off and throwing it aside.

One hand reached around her backside, and his fingers dug into the softness of her bottom, and a groan escaped him. "What are you wearing, little kitten?"

"Something special," she whispered, her face heating.

On Sarah's twenty-first birthday two years before, Katie had given her a pair of scandalous pale pink lace panties that rode up high on her behind-cheeks, and she'd stuffed them in the back of her underwear drawer so no one would ever see. She'd put them on for the first time that morning when they'd still been at her farm in Iowa a million years ago.

Blaze stepped backward, holding her by the shoulder so she didn't stumble as he moved away, and his gaze raked over her, standing in the tiny bathroom in her panties.

"So fucking hot," he muttered, and he spun her around to bend her over the sink. He grabbed her bottom with his heated palm, massaging it, and then slipping his finger between her legs from behind, chuckled darkly as the zing from his rough finger stroking her clit climbed through her body. "Such a sexy, naughty little kitten. I'm going to fuck you balls-deep until you can't scream anymore."

He stripped the rest of her clothes off her body—shirt, socks, bra—and pressed against her back. "God, you're gorgeous. Let me see those panties again."

He pulled away and spun her around to face him again, his focused gaze ravenous as he looked down.

Self-consciousness shrank Sarah, and she folded her arms to cover her breasts.

He grabbed her hands and pinned her wrists behind her back, which pulled her shoulders back and jutted her boobs forward. "Let me see you. Let me see all of you."

Her head swam, and the steam from the shower condensed on her skin.

"Damn, little kitten. I'm going to take you to Paris and buy you everything in the lingerie shop. It's a good thing I didn't know those were under your clothes all day. I wouldn't have been able to concentrate at all."

He growled so low that Sarah could barely hear him over the violent hiss of the shower.

Blaze dropped to his knees, trailing kisses from her shoulder over her breasts, taking each one of the peaks into his mouth and drawing out the sensation as she gasped.

Her hands swept up to the velvet of his short hair on the back of his head as he suckled her, one arm twined around her waist and trapping her, holding her against the heat of his mouth so she couldn't back away even when the shyness threatened to break through the thrill running through her body.

As she writhed in his grip, he broke his lips' seal on her breast with a pop, and his mouth moved downward, kissing a trail down her stomach to the lacy top of her panties.

"Fuck, you're so beautiful, so feminine in these sexy little panties. How should I punish you for wearing something so naughty, so distracting? Should I turn you over my knee and spank you like the naughty girl you are?"

Yes, she should be punished for wearing such risqué underwear, for not being good like she was raised. She almost said yes, she shouldn't have worn them and it was wrong, but his hands slipped up her body, grabbing her under the arms and tossing her to perch on the edge of the sink countertop again.

He shoved her back with one hand on her sternum so that her shoulders rested against the cold mirror, her skin slipping on the mist from the shower on the glass.

With one finger, he hooked the crotch of the panties and pulled the lace and cotton aside, and then he licked the delicate folds between her legs.

Sensation shot up Sarah's body, bowing her spine as the pleasure was almost too much.

Blaze murmured against her most intimate skin, "No, little kitten. You can't get away. I said you must be punished."

And with that, he laid his whole mouth on her, licking and sucking until she was squirming, her heels kicking off the edge of the sink as his head burrowed between her legs, his tongue slipping inside her with licks that shot ecstasy through her body until she was keening, panting, almost screaming from the torture of it.

Blaze pressed her knees up, practically folding her in half, and he stripped off his shirt and unbuttoned his pants in an instant before she even had time to move, revealing his spidery tattoos lacing over his skin like blue webs, the spines crossing, flattened skulls perched at the intersections.

He slapped open a drawer and grabbed a foil packet from inside, rolling it onto himself, and then he was leaning into her, pressing inside her as her hips shifted to the edge of the countertop.

He took her that way, stroking slowly, then faster as the exquisitely sensitive node down there blossomed, opened with each stroke, and then waves of ecstasy obliterated her sight and destroyed her voice and she heard nothing but the rushing of their blood and the pounding of him inside her until she was gone.

Blaze's fingers gripped her shoulders and her hip, squeezing her flesh and pressing her down as his body jerked inside her, grunting against her shoulder.

"What were you trying to tell me?" he whispered, panting.

Oh, yeah. The airplane."My aunt and the Koch mercenaries are trying to overthrow our government in early January. Vladimir Lvov is in charge and is funding them to do it, and then they're going to kill her and install Logan as head of the White Russian bratva."

"Okay," Blaze said, dropping a kiss on her shoulder between gasps. "Okay, we'll deal with that, too."