She laughs. “I know. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to get you excited when I can’t do anything about it.” She puts her lips to my ear, voice dropping even further. “When this is all over, I’m going to tie you to our bed and suck you off so many times you’ll beg me to fuck you. And when I do fuck you, finally, it’s going to be bare and I’ll be off birth control. I missed my dose, you know. So when I fuck you, you’re going to put a baby inside me. I want to be barefoot and pregnant when you make me your wife. Call me crazy or backwards or whatever, but that’s all I can think about.” She flicks her tongue in my ear. “I’m still dripping your cum from the last time, you know.”
I groan, head dropping, chest aching with love and my cock throbbing with need. “Rin, fuck—stop. Please, I beg you, have mercy on me. You can’t talk to me like that when I’ve got nowhere to take you.”
She bites my earlobe, letting it go. “Just giving you incentive to make sure you make it through this operation.”
“Spending the rest of my life making you happy and learning to be a good enough man to deserve the incredible woman that you are, Corinna? That’s incentive enough.” I laugh, a growling huff. “But knowing I’m putting our child in your womb…my god. That’s enough to turn me into a rabid monster.”
She giggles. “Save the rabid monster, my love. Keep him bottled up for me.” She pats my cock where it swells against the zipper. “And when we’re finallyhome—alone? Let him out and give it to me.”
I grip her wrist and pull it away. “Corinna, if you touch me again, you’ll embarrass me.”
She makes a show of looking around. “There’s really nowhere we could sneak off to, is there? Dammit.”
I laugh. “Save it, Corinna. Let’s get this over with, and then we can lock ourselves in our penthouse and not come out for a week.”
She rolls away from me and stands up. “A week? I’ll be just getting started on you after a week, Apollo. You don’t even know.”
I remain seated, trying to will my erection away. “I know you have always had a rather active libido, but this seems like…a lot…even for you.”
She yanks her hair of the messy bun and finger combs it. “I know. It’s something about this whole thing. The adrenaline is making me horny, for one thing. But it’s way more than that.” She turns to face me, head angled down with her eyes unfocused as she braids her hair. “You telling me you love me. You proposing to me. You talking about our future—I know you didn’t say it in so many words, but when you were talking about Yelena and how bonding with her made you think, I sort of assumed you meant it made you think about us having kids of our own.” She finishes braiding her hair, twists the long, thick braid into a tightly coiled knot and ties it off. “And the thought of us having a baby together makes meespeciallyhorny. So adrenaline horny plus I-want-to-have-your-babies horny plus we usually have sex every day or very nearly and I’m just not getting enough of your cock and I’m going through some kind of withdrawal…it all equals a ridiculous, out of control level of horniness.”
I finally have something like control over my dick, and I stand up, take her arms in my hands. “Corinna, my one true love…when this is over and we can go home, I swear to you, I will spend every waking moment sating your needs.” I pull her closer, gazing down at her with promise in my eyes. “I will make you come so many times you’ll beg me to stop. I’ll lay down and put myself at your mercy for as long as you need, and I’ll let you do anything you want, for as long as you want. I’ll fuck you and I’ll make love to you, and I’ll put our child inside you.”
Puck walks up as I’m saying this, and his eyes go wide. “Well, I sure walked up at the wrong moment of this conversation.” He scratches his nose with that stump of his forefinger. “Time to dust off, kids. It’s a long-ass flight to Baku.”
“Baku?” Corinna and I ask in unison.
“Yep, Baku. Capital of Azerbaijan. It’s right on the Caspian Sea, and conveniently for us, only two hundred and seventy-some miles across the Caspian from our target. Harris has people meeting us there with helos. We’ll load out into helos in Baku, coordinate our timing, and hit Spaulding all at once from a dozen different directions. I guess when Harris put out word that we were going after Spaulding, a bunch of nasty characters volunteered for the assault. Our guy’s got enemies.” He pulls the plug of cigar from his teeth, regards the chewed-up end of it, peels a piece of tobacco from his lip, and replaces the cigar between his teeth. “And while these dudes may otherwise be the kind of people we’d avoid at least, if not go after, in this case they’re the enemy of our enemy, which makes them temporary friends. Also, money talks.”
Alexei, standing on the ramp of the cargo plane, whistles sharply, rotating his hand in the air over his head—the last SUV is rumbling up the ramp past him.
Puck turns away. “Come on, kids. That’s our cue.”
“What are the Hummers for?” I ask.
Puck chuckles. “Humvee, you mean,” he corrects. “A hummer is either a civilian knock-off, or something nice your girl does for you when you make her happy.That—” he points at the vehicle. “Is a Humvee.”
I snort. “Fine. Humvee, then.”
“They’re for support,” Puck answers. “Harris isn’t taking any chances. He hired out a few Chinooks for this. We’re going in loaded for bear. That fucker won’t know what hit him.”
“What if he escapes like he did at the fortress?” Rin asks.
Puck’s grin is wicked. “Aww, c’mon now, Rinna. You know damn well your uncle Harry can field fighter jets, and so can our buddy Johnny Raze. Trust me, escape by air won’t be possible either.”
“Why don’t the fighters just hit the stronghold with rockets or missiles or something, in that case?” I ask.
Puck stomps up the ramp. “Because when you’ve got an enemy like Spaulding, you need to see the body. You put the bullet in his fuckin’ skull yourself.”
The interior of the cargo plane is full, now. Men buckle into the jump seats along the walls, and we take our seats near Mr. Roth and Duke.
“I know all of us want to put a bullet in his head,” I say. “But if we can pick, I’d like first shot.”
Duke, on my right, clutches the straps of the five-point belt, eyes closed. “First priority is the kill shot, no matter who takes it.” He opens his eyes briefly and looks at me. “But we all know what you went through, what our girl Rinny went through. And so yeah, if we can secure the kill shot for one of you two, we’ll make it happen.”
I sigh, nodding. “As long as I can look at his dead, sightless eyes and know he’s dead, at the end of the day, I suppose it does not matter whose finger pulls the trigger.”
“Attaboy,” Duke says, eyes closed once more. “Eyes on the prize.”
