Caleb pressed me against one of the flimsy walls of the paintball sanctuary, pinning me in place with his hips, his rock hard cock grinding against me through our oh-so-sexy jumpsuits. My hands slipped from his hair to grasp his tense shoulders to help keep my balance. He broke away from our kiss with an almost pained groan and cupped my face with one hand to bring our eyes level.
“Shit, you drive me crazy,” he muttered in a gruff voice, all signs of my familiar, joking friend totally gone. His serious tone and the intense way he had captured my gaze made my breath catch. My heart seemed to be galloping halfway out of my chest, but before I could respond, he had recaptured my mouth once more, sending tingling shivers through me from every touch of his lips on mine. One of his hands tangled in my long hair, and the other grasped the zipper of my jumpsuit, sliding it down to expose my low-cut, black V-neck and the striped flag tucked into my cleavage. He paused as his hand brushed the bunched up fabric and pulled back from my lips to see what it was.
“Well, well, what have we here?” he purred with an evil looking smirk, extracting the fabric from between my breasts with excruciating slowness. “You do realize this means you’ve lost?”
“Fuck paintball. Trust me, I haven’t lost.” I panted, grabbing his face for another searing hot kiss like some sort of addict. He groaned low in his throat, reciprocating with equal enthusiasm before suddenly breaking away with a heavy sigh and stepping back, dropping me to my feet.
“What’s going on?” I asked, puzzled, my heart thundering and my breath coming in short gasps. He backed up a few more steps, a disconcertingly smug look on his face. His predatory gaze ran over me, pausing briefly at my lowered zipper then on my lips as he fingered the striped fabric of our team’s flag.
“Sorry about this… Kitty Kat…” He smirked, reaching behind him for his paintball gun, which was still slung across his back. Without a moment’s hesitation, he popped off three shots at my midsection, knocking the wind out of me and causing me to double over.
By the time I caught my breath and looked up, he was nowhere to be seen.
“Son of a bitch!” I exclaimed, hardly believing what Caleb had just done to me. Even if that had all been a ruse to get our flag, was it really necessary to shoot me as well?
I glanced down at the wet paint splattered across the front of my jumpsuit and froze.
It was red.
Without a flag left to defend, there was really no point in staying in our base. I slid down the short ladder and started back towards the starting point to find Cole and River while desperately trying not to think about the fact that I’d just thrown myself at Austin.
How the hell had I confused him for Caleb? In hindsight, all the signs were there. I had just given way too much control over to my newly reawakened libido, and it had blinded me to the obvious. As insane as it sounded, though, I could have sworn he had been just as into that as I was. Surely you can’t fake heat like that? Not to mention the physical evidence of his arousal. My head hurt thinking about it all.
Ugh, he was so infuriating!
I stomped my way through the snow-covered field, lost in my thoughts, and barely noticed when someone stepped out from behind an obstacle, directly into my path.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, pulling up short and narrowly avoiding running into the stocky figure. “Sorry, I didn’t see…” I trailed off as I recognized the rough, bearded man in front of me.
His beady eyes raked a slow path over my body, pausing for an uncomfortably long time on my lowered zipper and my exposed cleavage before he smiled a cruel, victorious smile.
“Hello, Emily,” Sergei's heavy accent crowed, and a thick cloth was clamped over my face from behind. A strong, sickly sweet chemical smell engulfed my airways as I reflexively inhaled, and my whole world faded to black.
2
WESLEY
I could see Austin stalking towards me down the obstacle field, clutching the other team’s flag, and sighed in disappointment. Damn it. Looks like I missed all the action!
I had been really looking forward to this game. It had been ages since we last paintballed, but it was really the only time I ever got to use the practical skills we had learned during our Omega training. Being a mostly behind-the-scenes agent, I never got to use those skills in a real life situation, so paintballing was a huge source of fun for me.
“Already?” I called out to Austin as he came closer. I could tell it was him and not Caleb because he was the one who had gone after the other team’s flag. It was common knowledge in our group that Austin always defended the base, so I had suggested we switch him and Caleb for this game in the hopes of taking the other team by surprise. Evidently it had worked.
He just scowled at me, his eyebrows drawn down low and his jaw clenching, but didn’t respond, which gave me a bad feeling. He would normally be on a victory high and rubbing it in everyone’s faces.
“Aus, dude. What’s going on? You look majorly pissed right now.” I prodded him in the shoulder playfully to try and refocus his attention. “Did Kit put up a better fight than you anticipated or something?”
He made a strangled noise, his eyes widening as he stared at me. “What? Why would you say that?”
“Uh, because she is a pretty badass marksman now and you look super ticked off?” Wasn’t it obvious that’s what I’d meant? Maybe I do need to get out more. I spent so much time with my computers and tech that even I could admit I was somewhat lacking in people skills. It was why I always seemed like a blushing, stuttering mess around Kit.
“Oh.” He looked startled and confused for a second, which was not a look I was used to seeing on Austin, but quickly reverted to scowling anger. “Piece of cake. Told you this would be a quick game.”
I grinned; he had been pretty confident when we started. “Yeah, you did. I bet she didn’t even know what hit her, huh? I hope you were at least nice enough not to shoot her at too close of range, though? You know how much these suckers hurt.”
Weirdly, his face flushed red as though he was embarrassed, and he just muttered something under his breath before walking with me back to our team’s base, where we were most likely to find the rest of our friends.
“So where is she anyway?” I asked him, looking back the way he had come to see if she was on her way.
“What do you mean?” he snapped, with an edge of defensiveness. What the hell was his problem today?
“Kit. Where is she? You told her the game was over, right?” I rolled my eyes at him. The way he had been acting around her, I wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t told her the game was over and just left her out there in the snow.
“Of course she knows the game is over. She’s probably just sulking about losing,” he sneered but avoided eye contact with me. Austin rarely, if ever, avoided eye contact.