Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

lungs.
    Then again, fear might have had something to do with it.
    “You sure you’re all right?” asked one of the uniformed guards.
    She nodded because she didn’t want to waste breath on words.
    “The police are on their way,” another guard called out.
    She nodded again. “I’m going up to my room. I need . . . a minute.”
    “Sure,” the guard said. “Want me to walk you there?”
    She shook her head.
    Shane’s voice cut through the babble in the casino. “Where is she?”
    “Over here.”
    Risa shot the helpful guard a bleak look. She knew she was going to get the cutting edge of Shane’s tongue for putting everyone in the casino at risk. Even though she had tried to avoid doing just that, it had happened all the same.
    Bloody hell.
    She straightened up, drew a slow breath, and watched Shane come toward her like a thunderstorm looking for a place to break. Without a word he crowded her into the elevator and keyed in the override. The doors shut. The car stayed put.
    “Sorry,” Risa said before Shane could start tearing a strip off her. “I tried not to involve the casino, but someone hit a jackpot and he—”
    “Are you all right?” Shane cut in.
    “Yes.”
    “I’m not.”
    “What—” she began.
    With one hand Shane covered the ceiling camera lens. With the other he grabbed her and stopped her question with a kiss that made her forget that she needed to breathe.
    She had wondered what kissing him would be like. Now she was finding out.
    Hot.
    Urgent.
    Addictive.
    With a husky sound she wrapped her arms around him and gave him back the kiss taste for taste, heat for heat, need for need. He was better than wine, sweeter, wilder. She wanted to be inside his skin, to wrap him around her, to taste all of him, to sink into him until she forgot who she was, where she was, knowing only him until the stars burned out and the universe went black.
    “Risa,” Shane said raggedly. His free hand swept up and down her back in caresses that were more inciting than calming. “Hush, darling, you’re killing me. I want you the same way. ”
    Dazed, she realized that she had been whispering her thoughts aloud while she poured frantic kisses over every part of him she could reach. She leaned her forehead against his chin and fought to breathe without jerking. The slam of passion right on the heels of fear had sucked everything civilized out of her.
    “Sorry,” she said.
    “If you apologize about running through the casino again, you’re going to piss me off.”
    She shook her head. “For jumping you.”
    His laughter stirred the hair at her temple. “I jumped you first.”
    She drew a ragged breath. “Oh, yeah. That’s right. I thought maybe I dreamed that part.”
    “I’d refresh your memory, but the cops are probably arriving about now.”
    “So?”
    “The next time I kiss you, I’m not stopping until we’re naked and I’m so deep in you we don’t know who’s doing what to who until the stars burn out and the universe goes black.”
    She knew she was blushing. “I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean . . .” She stopped before she got in any deeper.
    “You didn’t mean it?”
    A full-body shiver was her only answer.
    He put his hand under her stubborn chin and tilted her face up to his. Her lips were lush, flushed, wet, hungry. He nearly lost it just looking at her. “Did you mean it?”
    The roughness of his voice was like being licked by a cat’s tongue. She wished she could feel it all over. “Yes. Did you?”
    He crowded her against the wall until she could feel every inch of him. “What do you think?”
    Thick with heat and need, he pressed against her, silently proving just how badly he wanted her. The purring, approving noise she made deep in her throat had him reaching for his zipper.
    Then he remembered.
    Shit.
    “If I boost you up, can you smash the camera lens?” he asked.
    She blinked, looked at his hand braced against the ceiling over the grille, then shook her head as though recovering from a bucket of water flung in her face. “Camera. Shit.”
    “My thoughts exactly.”
    He removed his hand from the grille, keyed in a floor, and watched Risa with heavy-lidded eyes. When the doors opened again, he pulled her almost gently into the hallway.
    “This isn’t my floor,” she said.
    “I know.”
    Before she could ask another question, she was inside one of the casino apartments with a locked door behind her back and Shane molded to the length of