Overture (North Security, #1)

I couldn’t wait to become an adult so that I could make my own decisions. Now that I’m here, I realize something was missing in my dreams of adulthood. I can make my own choices; I can choose Liam, but I can’t make him choose me. The sky is full of wind and storm; my wings only take me so far.

That’s how I find myself playing the Lady Tennant, my own composition of loss and heartbreak. It makes me think of biting cold and lonely nights. I thought I wanted to graduate from high school, to turn eighteen, to play on a tour—when all I really wanted was not to be left behind.

That’s what’s happening, even if I’m the one walking out the door.

We’re not going to be pen pals. I may be an adult now, but Liam still makes the rules. I can’t make him write or call or visit me. And I definitely can’t make him love me.

The composition ends abruptly, written only in my head.

It felt wrong to give it one last sorrowful note.

It felt final.

Now the true end comes to me, a silvery line that flutters, uncertain. It darts this way and that, caught on some uplifting wind.

The notes rise higher, ending on the auspice of hope.

Only a few months ago, my bow fell still in the middle of a song. Now it comes to a graceful close at the end of one I wrote myself. Instead of waiting for Liam to react to the silence, I stand and cross the threshold.

He sits at his office, not making any pretense of work. His large flat-screen monitor is dark. The black leather blotter on his desk is empty. The lamp is off.

“Did you like it?” I ask.

“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”

A window behind him provides the only illumination. Moonlight limns his broad shoulders and fair hair. I think more than anything that’s happened, this is what marks adulthood. Fighting for the life I want.

Fighting for the man I love.

Circling his desk, I come to stand in front of him. His chair is turned slightly so that I can kneel down almost in front of him. The way he did to me a thousand times, a light touch on my knee, looking me in the eyes like I was important to him.

The deep green of his eyes is only a suggestion in the shadows.

I touch my palms to his knees. “You don’t want to hear me play in concert?”

“I want it more than life,” he says, his voice rough—even rougher when my hands skate on top of his thighs. I already fought for him with music. Now there’s a different kind of battle to be waged. “More than I should.”

“More than writing letters,” I say, a small mocking note.

“We’re not—” A sharp indrawn breath as I feel his hardness through his slacks. “We’re not going to be pen pals.”

I shake my head slowly. “That’s not what I want from you anyway.”

He moves as if to push me away, only to fall still when I touch the head of his cock. That’s when he goes completely still, hissing out a breath. “What you want is impossible.”

“Explain it to me,” I say, tracing a ridge that circles him. Everything about this is new and exciting. I would enjoy it if there weren’t so much on the line.

“I’m not—Oh God, sweetheart. I’m not made for that. All I do is hurt people, all I do is trap them. Starve them. Make them close their eyes and go to sleep.”

His words don’t make sense on the surface, but they do on a deep level. I feel them resonate on the same level as my bone-deep certainties. That I’ll always be left by a man who doesn’t love me. And he’s so worried about trapping me that he’s determined to leave. We make quite a pair.

“You don’t have to protect me anymore,” I whisper. “I’m grown-up now.”

“You won’t ever be old enough, understand? It’s not about your age. It’s about the fact that I’m responsible for you. I can’t let you die.”

Maybe it should scare me—that word. I can’t let you die. Except this is a man who has lived with death as his shadow for so long. I see what it costs him to send men and women into danger. What it costs him to risk his own brothers with every mission.

I find the button to his slacks and work them, clumsy in the dark. And then his zipper. At any moment he might stop me. His breathing saws in and out, audible even though he can run twelve miles a morning barely breaking a sweat. This is what’s straining him, the hardness of his cock in my hand. It feels softer than I expected. The salt tang of him comes to me in the dark, and I nudge toward him, in search of his desire. My nose bumps his cock first, and a shudder runs through him.

“Samantha,” he says on a helpless chant. “Samantha. Samantha.”

Blindly I search for him in the dark, my lips landing on some velvet-burn place on him. I send my tongue to feel him, to trace a raised vein. Then I pull back, toward the tip, finding that ridge again, exploring it with my mouth while he pants and groans above me, a benediction in the night.

“Is this okay?” I say, pausing uncertainly.

His hand lands on top of my head, falling down to stroke my hair, to grab it in unruly fistfuls. “It’s more than okay. It’s incredible. I can’t take it. I’m dying.”

I might not know what he means except that he did the same thing to me while I played Beethoven’s “5 Secrets.” Which means I know that dying means he’s close—but not there yet. So I lick him again, remembering the rhythm he used between my legs.

His hips push forward in small thrusts, uncontrolled, almost as if he can’t stop them. His cock moves through the circle of my fist, the same way he did in the shower.

My lips feel swollen as I pull back, sliding against the soft head of his cock as I speak. “You were angry at me that I kept the Coach Price thing a secret, but how many secrets are you keeping from me?”

“It’s my job to keep those secrets.”

“Bullshit,” I say, punctuating the word with a pump of my fist. The velvet skin moves apart from the hard muscle beneath. “I’m not talking about any of your classified government contracts. I’m talking about you and me and how I came to be in your custody.”

He makes a sound of protest—and I don’t want to hear him give me more lies, more platitudes. More attempts to soothe his own guilt by telling himself that’s what I need from him.

So I press a kiss to the head of his cock, to where the wetness pools into a salty drop. I lick it away from him. And lick again, to find that another one has formed. It’s a sensual feast, doing this in the dark, hearing his shuddery breaths.

“You have to stop,” he says, his hips pushing harder and harder.

I make my fist tighter around him, working him, making love to him with my hand—it isn’t impersonal at all. This is the way I make music with my bow and violin. Every twitch of my fingers, every slight pressure. His ragged breathing and low groans are the music I make.

Heat gathers between my legs, but I force myself to ignore that. There are more important things at stake than my arousal, the dampness in my sex. The ache in my clit.

“Don’t you know how it takes away my power, not to know what happened to my own father, what happened to me? I can’t even remember that night. Only that when I woke up, my father was dead and there was a stranger who would take care of me. Don’t you see how it’s hurting me?”

A low animal sound of pain fills the air, making the hair on the back of my neck rise. He does see it, he does, but he can’t do anything except succumb to the physical release. I close my mouth around his cock, catching his climax on my tongue. I swallow, greedy, knowing this might be my only taste. I lave him gently, kiss him, kiss him, soothing him as he comes down in jerks and pants.

Without warning or ceremony, he drags me onto his lap, fingers working quickly at my jeans, finding their way inside to the slick center. I jerk at the intrusion. Too much friction, too fast. “Wait,” I whisper.

“Now,” he says, unbending.

I try to clamp my legs shut, but it only makes the pressure more intense. “Tell me we can have more than this. Tell me you’ll see me on the tour. Tell me you’ll wait for me to come back.”