“Then my heart is aching to move.” He rocked his hips, relishing the connection. Grinding harder, he circled his pelvis, feeling her everywhere, and worked into a furious tempo.
She cupped his jaw and arched a brow. “Again?”
“As long as you’ll have me.”
Her legs and arms hooked around him, and she rolled them. With his back against the mattress, she straddled him, folding her arms behind her head. “My turn.”
What a glorious vision. With her body bared before him and a gleam in her eyes, she rotated her hips, breasts swaying, waves of dark brown hair cascading around her. “You gave me a gift, Joshua Carter. I’m keeping it. Always.”
He gripped the curves of her butt, holding her to him, lifting his hips, and sliding deeper. “Good. Because I’m yours. Always.”
When she came, she took him with her, milking him, crying his name. He would never forget that moment. The merging of their passion, peaking together. Two parts of a whole, lost together.
They curled up in silence, her back to his chest. She laced their fingers and brought them to her mouth, kissing the cuts on his knuckles.
A few moments later, her musical laugh tiptoed through the room. “You’re hard?”
He bit her shoulder, stroked his erection along the crease of her butt. “I’ll never get enough of you, Liv.”
She angled her hips, reached between her legs, and guided him inside. He was home.
Hours passed. Outside, the sun would’ve been climbing the sky, but he didn’t care. He had so much light in his arms, it was easy to pretend nothing else mattered. Just for a little longer. They made love incessantly and intensely, slow and fast, hard and soft. He was lost in her body. Lost in her.
Eventually, exhaustion pulled him under with her curves against his, limbs entwined.
When he woke, it was with a head full of sexy dreams and blood swelling him to a full hard-on. Never enough. He grinned and reached a hand over the mattress, searching for her. Not finding her.
He lurched to his knees. The mattress was bare. The room empty of life. His heart went wild, his thoughts crazed. Maybe she was checking on Kate. Or making lunch. He climbed to his feet, and something crinkled beneath his toes. A white piece of paper with scrawled handwriting. Beside it, a car key.
He dropped to his knees and a picked up the letter with shaking fingers.
Joshua,
Van called with the buyer’s pickup location. Meet me at the Sleepy Inn on 35. If I don’t make it there by morning, go home. Go home to your family.
The code is 0054. The key belongs to the black Honda parked out front.
Liv
The letter wadded in his clenching fists, a fog of red clouding his vision. All business. Nothing from the woman he’d spent the day in bed with. She might as well have signed it Deliverer.
He spun to the trunk and found his clothes inside. Hers were gone. She wasn’t coming back. He shoved his hands through his hair.
The code is 0054. Number fifty-four. She was freeing him. What would happen to her Mom and daughter?
His heart collapsed, spilling panic through his blood. What the hell was she planning?
Chapter 33
Liv drove the van out of Temple, with Kate strapped to the floor in the back and headed west on 190 to make her seventh and final delivery. Darkness descended over the horizon. Street lights flickered on. Her pulse beat a frenzied vibration in her ears.
Josh would be awake now, driving to the motel that would never be one of her destinations. If he obeyed her instructions, and hopefully, without revealing his identity to the motel clerk. God, she needed him to just wait somewhere safe and hidden until morning. By then, everything would be done. Surely, he wouldn’t go to the authorities before going to the motel?
Fuck, it was a risk, made more excruciating after spending the previous seventeen hours in his arms. She’d tried to keep him at a cold distance when they’d first returned from the meeting. She’d been fighting through her uncertainty about Mom and Mattie’s future and trying to come to terms with what she had to do. She needed to protect him from her, refused to endanger him with the details. But most of all, her plan would’ve devastated him.
When they became entangled, they brought with them all their convictions, pursuits, and pains. Whether it was scriptures from religious study, record-breaking interceptions, or delivery deadlines with sex traffickers, he’d taught her that one’s purpose in life had no sway on who the heart latched onto. And while she’d managed to keep her plan hidden, he exposed the rest of her with a fierce loyalty behind his gorgeous green eyes and a blaze of determination burning in his touch.
She yanked the seat belt pinching her chest, strangled and trapped by the tragedy of her miserable fucking life. She loved him, goddammit, but she had to let him go. She covered her mouth, smothering a sob between trembling fingers. Fuck, it hurt so damned much.
Focus. Breathe. Don’t fuck this up. Gripping the wheel with two hands, she glanced at the passenger seat. A mask, change of clothes, the LC9 pistol Van left for her, the pen knife he didn’t know about, the phone Mr. E would be tracking her with, and her letter to Van. What was she missing?
Josh. His absence was a bleeding fucking hole inside her, the stitches around her heart unraveling and ripping. She inhaled deeply. Gasped noisily. Fuck. Keep it together.
A glance over her shoulder revealed Kate’s heaving chest beneath the restraints on the floorboard. Liv’s throat burned, stinging pinpricks of pain through her head. She wiped at her nose and eyes, hands trembling.
A few miles later, a gas station emerged, the lot half-full with customers. The first stop.
She pulled off and parked at a pump beside a minivan. Bright lights fringed the canopy over the pump islands, flickering with winged insects and bleaching the starless sky. A woman leaned inside the minivan’s sliding door and hollered at the wailing kids within.
Liv approached her with her thumbs hooked in the front pockets of her jeans. “Excuse me, miss?”
The woman turned her head and blew a wayward hair away from her face.
She shaped her mouth into a friendly smile. “Sorry to bother you. Is there any way I can borrow your phone for a minute? Mine’s out of juice, and I really need to check on my dad.”
The woman shifted to face her, and her eyes widened, fixed on Liv’s scar. She looked away quickly. “Uh, yeah. Let me grab it.”
Funny, Liv never really thought about her fucked up face until she ventured into public. Her internal damage had always been much more distracting to her.
“Here you go.” The woman offered the phone, the pity in her eyes negating her smile.
“Thanks. I’ll just be a minute.” She stepped away from both vehicles until she was out of hearing distance and dialed the number she knew from memory. It was the sixth time she’d called it, and it’d been eight months since the last call.
“Who is this?” Camila’s sultry voice, though always straight to the point, had a way of warming Liv every damned time.
“It’s me.”
“Where?”
The reason for her calls was always the same. “Brady Reservoir.” She gave Camila the GPS coordinates Van had sent. “10:00 PM.”
“Shit. We’re three hours away.” A muffled noise scratched down the line. Then Camila’s voice came back. “We’ll make it. How many?”
“At least one extra man. Maybe two.”
“Stall them. We’ll be there.” The line disconnected.
Stall them? Buyers and their bodyguards did not stall, and it was eight fucking o’clock. Camila would have to make up a full hour. She sighed, rubbed her eyes. It wouldn’t be the first time Camila overextended.