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Ice’s brows knitted as he rubbed his jaw and blinked twice like he was seriously considering challenging those clear and undeniable facts. “Those aren’t all facts,” he declared with tight-lipped coolness, his eyes narrowing before quickly flicking down and then up. “My cock wasn’thangingout. It was sticking straight up. I’d like you to respectthatfact, Ma’am.”
Indy shook her head in disbelief. He was gazing dead-on into her eyes, but she wasn’t going to allow him to manipulate her with his on-again-off-again teasing-taunting-flirting-fighting bullshit. She wasn’t going to get played any longer, wasn’t going to melt when he turned warm, wasn’t going to sulk when he turned cold. He could save those tricks for his next target. She was done.
“The only fact is that you’ve been in a position of power so long without facing the consequences that you think you can get away with saying anything and doing anything to get what you want,” she hissed. “But all you’ve proved is that you just want what every power-mad dude with big muscles wants when he thinks he can get away with it. You’re just a pervert pretending to be a protector. Now give me my damn panties and do your fucking job.”
Ice stared in silence, a hush falling over the room, like perhaps there’d been just a bit too much venom in Indy’s words.
Or maybe just enough truth to make it hurt.
Now the coldness crept back into Ice’s eyes. His lips tightened briefly, then curled into that half-sneer. He took a long breath, exhaled slow, then shrugged. “Pervert pretending to be a protector,” he repeated, narrowing his eyes into slits, nodding his head slowly. He took another breath, shrugged once more, then flashed an evil grin at her. “Guilty on all counts. So let me finish the job of being your perverted guinea pig protector. I’ll just run one last test on your panties, then we’re good to go.”
Ice raised his fisted right hand, uncurled his fingers, let her panties dangle down between them.
Indy stared in shocked silence, a tingle snaking up the insides of her thighs as Ice raised his other hand and stretched her panties wide until they were obscenely open at the crotch.
Then Indy gasped when Ice brought the panties to his face, opened his sneering mouth wide, snaked out his python-thick tongue, and dragged it flat and long up along the entire inner crotch-lining of her panties.
“Tastes good enough to me,” he growled, tossing the panties at her and turning away. “Now go get dressed. We leave in ten minutes.”
Indy somehow caught the panties before they hit her in the face. Her body was trembling from the bottom up, shuddering from the inside out, burning inside that bathrobe, boiling under her skin.
She could barely contain the potent mix of rage and arousal long enough to blurt out a response. And even that came out muted, subdued, her entire frame broken by his astounding audacity, his brazen boldness, his perverted punchline.
“Great, now I’ll have to wash them out again,” Indy managed to mutter as she hurriedly gathered her ravaged clothes from the sideboard-display and stormed through the bedroom and stumbled into the bathroom and slammed the broken door hard enough to rattle the fixtures, shake the mirror, shudder the shower-curtain.
Indy tossed the heap of clothes onto the marbled space beside the sink. She trembled with something so visceral that she could barely look at herself for fear of what she’d see in the mirror. She turned on the faucet, ran it hard and hot, took several heaving breaths to bring herself back to earth, back to reality, back from the sickeningly seductive space Ice had dragged her into with that move.
She snatched up her panties, pulled them open to where she could see the diamond-sparkles of Ice’s saliva all along the secret length of the crotch lining. She glanced at the steamy-hot faucet that would wash off his grossness, slough off his saliva, erase his mark.
But then, as the bathroom began to fill with steam once again, the white-hot mist enveloping her in that cocoon, pulling her back to that place where it seemed likethiswas the story,thiswas the mission,thiswas the fight, Indy gazed at herself in the last clear patch of mirror, saw what felt like another woman looking back at her with that wonderful wickedness in her eyes, that wistful warmth in her smile.
She stared as the mirror fogged all the way up, her reflection slowly swallowed by the steam.
Then, barely breathing, Indy turned off the faucet. She undid her bathrobe, stepped into her sticky-shiny panties, pulled them up tight, that shudder going through her again when she felt his wetness press against hers, sensed her little mouth down there open up for a taste, for a sip, for a trip.
A trip down that rabbithole we all know so well.
A trip to that place which could be heaven or hell.
20
“What the hell was that?” Ice almost punched the damn TV, almost ripped the fucking sideboard from the wall, almost picked up the couch and hurled it through the window. “Are youinsane? You’re in the middle of a serious-as-death mission involving the top levels of the CIA and you’re playingthisgame instead?”
Ice paced the floor like a caged lion, clenching and releasing his fists just long enough to smack himself repeatedly on the side of his head. He’d been coming unraveled ever since he strode out of that bathroom to answer the damnphoneinstead of finishing what he’d started, finishing what he now knew wouldneverbe finished.
It was over.
The moment had passed, the fire had changed direction, the flames now turning inwards, turning them against each other because neither of them could face what was said in the steam, what was whispered through the water, what was spoken under the covers of that closed space which felt so far away from the real world that Ice almost wondered if it had really happened.
But of course it had happened. Ice had been in there saying ridiculous things, the kind of crap that Jack bullshitted about all the time when he was gaming one of his party-girls.
Yeah, Jack loved to tell the girls he loved them, would say it with that cocky jackass grin that every girl could see through but somehow still couldn’t resist.
But that was Jack. Ice was different. He’d always been different.
Words likelovewere not part of his vocabulary.
Especially not with a woman who made him feel like this.