Chapter 84

**Emilia POV**

All clear.
I return from my perimeter check around the motel. You can never be too safe. I jog up a flight of stairs and I enter the third room down. My steps stutter in the doorway when I see Calum shirtless on one of the double beds with his hair slick from‌ a recent shower, darkening his blonde strands. His eyes are locked on the laptop that’s perched on his thighs. His eyes spring to me and impulse shoves me inside before I close the door behind me.
“I can always put back on a shirt. Can’t afford to have my bodyguard distracted.” He sends me a quick wink before he looks away again. “Whilst you were on sentry duty. I found her.”
“What?”
I hurry over to his side, unholstering my pistol before I deposit the gun, silver cuffs, and the keys on his bedside table. I’m familiar with computer science on a rudimentary level, but what I’m seeing is just a complex pattern of line coding or something. And he casually gestures to the screen like I’m an expert.
“Hadassah and I initiated this protocol after a…incident.” A flash of pain in his eyes, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “It was a last line of defense kind of strategy because it would require her having access to an internet connection. And when you’re a kidnapped victim, that’s kind of an uncommon commodity. Except for her case, where she won over the trust and affection of her captor.”
I arc a brow. “Before you made it sound like that trust went both ways.”
“Would you ever trust a man that sanctioned your kidnapping?” he retorts.
“That was to protect her from Gaza,” I rebuttal.
“No, that was to protect his own interests,” he counters with a winning smile tinged with a sly curve. “Torin wanted the book from the jump. Hadassah was his way to it.”
“But he kept her alive even after?”
“Because of me,” he says, his eyes darting as if he’s just linking the pieces together. “He needs me to decipher the cryptic data. Once again, Hadassah is his path to what he wants. Which is why I decrypted what I already encoded so no other hacker or cryptographer could resume where I left off.”
He points at the screen again.
“Which is why we have only one chance to extract her. She’s given us the exact location of where the book is or just the location where it should be—because that’s where they will be.”
“And that is?”
“Spetses, an island in Attica, Greece.”
My brows nearly touch my hairline. “So that means we have to get new papers. Fast.”
“You said you had a contact who could come to us?”
I nod nervously. “I just hope he gets to us in time. A secure route, since we will soon feel the full force of the CIA upon us.”
“Very encouraging,” he says flatly.
I make a dismissive gesture, shooing the laptop. “Okay, move the screen.”
His brows clench in stubborn confusion. “No? I’m busy. What I’m doing here is the difference between us traveling economy versus first class. And I’m claustrophobic.”
“I have to check your wounds. Move it,” I say, voice stern and uncompromising.
He yields and carefully places it on the bedside table alongside the other assortment. He sinks down, so he’s reclining on the bed. He makes a welcoming gesture and I move closer peer over at the wounds, making sure there’s no sign of injection. For a better angle, I hoist myself up so I can straddle him—he bristles, almost stunned speechless. My fingers trace idly over the scarred tissues, wounds healing nicely. Calum moves both hands behind his head, his lips tipped in a smug slant.
“You don’t need an excuse to touch me.”
I settle down on his groin, and he makes a strained sound, his eyes sliding down to my crotch as I grind slowly as I speak.
“Let’s get something very clear, computer boy.” Tantalized by the growing bulge beneath me. “There is nothing between us and there will be. So you pick up the laptop because that’s the only thing you know how to touch.”
I smile wickedly as I watch his own wither. I lift my leg to undo the straddle and before I can to rise to full height. He swivels swiftly to sit upright, so he’s right under me. With shocking force, he grabs my hips and slams me back onto his lap. And with the artistry of a skilled thief, he swipes the cuffs and locks my wrists together. My head whips to the side to glare at him whilst he smirks back at me before he plants a lingering kiss on the back of my shoulder that ignites a throbbing between my inner thighs.
“That’s everyone’s mistake,” he breathes into my skin. “Thinking I’m just the incapable computer guy.”
“Not much more is there?”
With a lightning-quick maneuver, he drapes me over his legs so my head and bound wrists dangle, hanging upside down. And that is when I realize it was the wrong day to wear a high-waisted skirt. And he exploits my mistake excitedly. My torso jolts up and he shoves me back and spanks me. Hard.
“Ow!”
“Who said you could get up?”
“Calum, seriously—”
“Mr Taylor,” he corrects with a playful chide. “I thought you English were meant to be models for good manners? So you can apologize and accept your punishment like a good girl. Or don’t.”
I lift my head to be level with my torso. “I’m not apologizing—”
His hands slip under my skirt. And a sharp gasp escapes me as he pulls down my underwear with a fast flourish.
“What was that?”
“Calum, I swear.”
I squeak as he inserts his finger into my butthole brazenly.
“Calum!” I shriek as terror and a thrill surges through me.
He slips it out only to add three more fingers inside me with mind-numbing penetration as his fingers pump slowly, but with a steady gradation of intensity makes my mind melt into a wet moosh. I even fall forward, succumbing as my words dissolve into muffled moans, trying to stifle every sound as I fail miserably as he goes faster and faster. And I can’t take it anymore.
“Calum!” I shout breathlessly, but I don’t tell him to stop.
I even forget that I’m tactically trained to get out restraints. I raise my bound hands to pluck out a hairpin—he stabs his fingers back inside with a vigorous drive that jolts me and I fumble the pin.
“Tsk, tsk,” he chides again. “Bad girl.”
He releases me, and I struggle to rise from his lap, my underwear halfway down. He yanks it right to my ankles and launches to his feet to rotate us around so my back connects with the bed. And my fettered wrists are pinned above my head. His lithesome form expands over me. Teasingly, his nose grazes against my own before his lips capture mine in a blazing kiss, desire, unbidden, forbidding and forbidden condensing into a scorching moment. He breaks away, seeking silent permission, which I give with a desperate nod, ogling how the dim and orangey light shifts with his every moment, illuminating every lithe muscle in his body as he strips below the waist until he’s naked. And he peels off my skirt and, with the slow-mo tread of a panther, he looms over me and before I know it… the hard length of him is inside me. His hips back against me, creating a steady rhythm, slow and sensual at first, but gaining speed with each thrust and I feel every inch of writing with my body, setting my nerve ends on fire.
The sound of strangled screams overpowers his grunting as my fingers dig into his back, feeling his taut muscles flex, his whole body hard at work. The pressure inside of me claws to escape as I ache, long, melting with him. The searing sensations intensify, recede, and crest only to swell to staggering heights I haven’t been to before, making me eat my former comments as uncontrollable pleasure radiates throughout my body and I let out a cry at the climax, echoing his name.