Falling For A Donovan (The Donovans Book 14) Read online

  “Isn’t that enough?” he asked as he looked over his shoulder at her.

  “It would be if I planned to continue sleeping with you whenever the mood struck us both,” she replied honestly. “But that’s no longer enough for me either.”

  Devlin lifted a hand to rub his eyes and then let out the deep breath he’d taken.

  “Kelvin Ricks was married to my mother, Nika Forest. She was a prostitute. Her pimp was my father and he kicked her out the moment he found out she was pregnant. Kelvin was ten years older than my mother, so he took her in and treated her like his servant. She had to cook and clean, wash his clothes and look pretty whenever he brought company to the house. He hated me but he also realized pretty quickly that I was strong and could also do things around the house. I was thirteen when Kelvin lost his job at the steel mill. He drank and smacked my mother around for that entire weekend. Monday night he brought home some friends. Guys that had also been laid off from the mill. Guys that he’d promised a good time to for a price. My mother tearfully slipped back into her old lifestyle. When one of his friends looked at me I broke a bottle of Hennessy over his head and ran out of the house. I spent most of the next four years down at this church helping the pastor keep the school yard clean and doing other odd jobs around the building in exchange for hot meals and clean clothes from the missionary pantry.”

  Bailey knew some of this. She knew about his mother and her husband and that Devlin had eventually started working at a local church. She did not know that his biological father was his mother’s pimp, or that Kelvin Ricks had attempted to pimp a teenage boy out to other grown men. Her stomach twisted at the thought and she bit back the urge to curse a man who was already dead and gone.

  Instead she moved her arm, dragging her hand along Devlin’s leg until she found his hand. She linked her fingers in his and waited for him to continue.

  “I turned eighteen the month before my high school graduation. Two days after my birthday, the police showed up in my classroom. They ushered me out and took me down to the precinct where they had me identify my mother’s body. She’d been beaten badly. Bruises and lumps were all over her frail body, as if someone had used her for a punching bag. I cried for two days. The pastor at the church heard about what happened and he paid for my mother to be cremated. The church congregation—since most of them knew me by that time from always being around—planned a little memorial service and sat with me as I looked at the small black box that now held the woman I knew as my mother.”

  “Oh, Devlin,” Bailey said, unable to hold back the pain she could instantly relate to.

  While her mother hadn’t been a prostitute, she had been killed. She’d been taken away from Bailey way too early and her heart ached because Devlin had experienced the same type of grief. Only he didn’t have a family to support him. He didn’t have the aunts who immediately converged on their house in Houston, cooking and cleaning and directing things for the weeks after the funeral. He had no shoulder to cry on, no ear to listen to him. He had nothing.

  “I tried to keep working, to keep pushing towards graduation. I’d already talked to some recruiters about going into the military. I wanted to get away from Brooklyn and I never wanted to look back. But one day I woke up and I knew. I felt it deep down in my gut that Kelvin was getting away with murder. So I went to the house and found him passed out on old pissy smelling couch. I kicked him until he woke up and then told him to tell me how my mother died. Instead, he decided to tell me how big of a whore my mother was, that she was having an affair with his old boss and that she’d robbed him of several thousand dollars. He said she gave him some disease and that she’d betrayed him. I called him a liar. He took a swing at me. I towered over him by that time and I punched him back. He came after me with a knife. I knocked it out of his hand and began beating him the way I knew he’d beat my mother. He admitted he’d done it then, after his nose was broken and a few of his ribs were cracked. That’s all I’d wanted to hear, so I backed off, intending to go straight to the police station and tell them about his confession. Somehow he got that knife again and he stabbed me in my back.”

  Bailey knew that scar. It was on his left side.

  “He pulled the knife out of me and I stumbled forward. He screamed something about me being the son of a slut and I turned around because I knew he was coming back to finish me off. I was in so much pain but as I saw him lift the knife, I put my arm in the way, trying to deflect him. The knife cut into my face instead of plunging into my chest the way I suspect he’d planned.”

  A tear rolled down Bailey’s cheek as she rested her head on Devlin’s arm. That scar on his face had come from his bastard of a stepfather. How awful.

  “I wrestled the knife from him then and stabbed him sixteen times. I couldn’t stop,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t stop. Even when his body had gone still and I knew he was dead, something inside of me said I needed to keep going. To make sure this was over for my mother. I needed to do that for her. I hadn’t been there to protect her but I had to make sure he wouldn’t get away with it. I had to.” His voice cracked then and Bailey wept.

  “I know you did,” she told him. “I know you did what you had to do.”

  “I killed him,” Devlin continued. “I murdered a man in cold blood. My mother was already dead so I really wasn’t defending her. I just killed him.”

  “You were defending both of you, Devlin. He’d abused your mother and tried to abuse you. Sure, your defense came unfortunately too late for your mother, but it was what you had to do to survive.”

  “I could have left him alone. I didn’t have to go to that house.”

  “And then you would not have become the man you are now. You would not be the man, the protector and the loyal friend that I know and admire.”

  He sat back on the couch, lifting his arm to wrap around her as she snuggled close to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said and kissed the top of her head. “I shouldn’t have involved you.”

  “How were you going to stop involving me?” Bailey asked him. “Because I tried, Devlin. Whenever we weren’t together I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter. That we shouldn’t be together anyway. But each time the need arose, I made the decision to sleep with you whenever I got the itch. It was crazy.”

  “Beyond crazy,” he admitted. “We’ve been doing this for more than a year now.”

  “And here we are again, in our third hotel in just about two weeks’ time. This past year you’ve turned up wherever I was. We met secretly, we made love frequently. I don’t think that’s a mistake.”

  “As strange as all this sounds. I don’t either,” he said. “So what do we do now?”

  Bailey looked up at him then. She smiled through her tears as she said, “We do what we do best.”

  Before they’d left her house Bailey had pulled on a pair of sturdy snow boots, over the tight pants with the pink pigs on them. Dev grinned as he pulled those boots off her feet. She was sitting on the side of the bed looking just as sexy in this outfit as she did in anything else Dev had ever seen her wear.

  “So this is all we’re good at?” he asked as he reached up to her waist and began pulling the pants down her legs.

  She shook her head. Her hair had been pulled back into a ponytail and she’d put a t-shirt on over the tank top she’d been wearing when Dev first arrived at her house.

  “We make a pretty good criminal catching team,” she said. “And I think we’ve both proven we can do background checks. Hey, maybe we can open our own security business.”

  Dev paused seconds after pulling the pants free of her legs.

  “We already have jobs,” he told her. “Yours is here in Connecticut and mines is…”

  She arched a brow as he stared up at her. Then she lifted the hem of that t-shirt, pulling it up and over her head. She tossed it to the floor and did the same with her tank top. When she sat there in only her panties, she smiled and asked, “Are you sure you want to continue trav
eling all over the world fighting bad guys when you know I could be waiting for you in a lovely home every night, just like this?”

  In a flash, like a movie trailer, in his mind, Dev could see just that. Him coming in from a long day’s work and Bailey waiting for him. No, she didn’t have to be naked—not every day—her smile and companionship would be enough. He would look forward to this moment daily. He would pull her into his arms and hug her tightly, giving thanks for every second he had to be with her, because he knew he didn’t deserve it.

  Is that what he really wanted?

  “No reply?” she asked and lifted a hand to cup his cheek.

  The scar that had marred his face for more than twenty years now warmed at her touch. She’d often rubbed her hand over his scars when they made love, but Dev had trained his mind to forget his body’s response to said touch. Tonight, his shields were down and possibly destroyed by her candid understanding of his past and her quick thinking that may have saved his future. Dev turned his face so that instead of her hand touching his scar now, his lips kissed her palm.

  He came to his feet then, removing his shirt and undoing his belt. He reached into his back pocket to pull out his wallet and took out a condom packet. She was watching him intently and on instinct, Dev tossed the packet to her. Bailey smiled as she reached up and caught it. He smiled as he continued to get undressed. His heart pounded a little faster than usual at the thought of what was coming, or at least that’s the reason Dev figured his heart was pounding.

  “If you wait for me every night like this,” Dev said as he took a step closer to her and the bed. He was between her legs once more, kneeling down on the floor in front of her. Twisting his fingers in rim of her panties, Dev began pulling them down her legs “Then I’ll just have to reward you by doing this.”

  Once her panties were off, Dev spread her legs wide. He didn’t waste a second before dipping his head between her thighs and taking one long lick between the tender folds of her center. She moaned instantly. He was on his knees now, his fingers gripping her thighs as he held them up high and apart. Dev licked her again and again, loving the softness of her skin against his tongue and the sweet taste of her nectar.

  Bailey had lay back on the bed by this time, flattening her hands against his bald head and guiding him to every spot where she apparently craved his attention.

  “Yes,” she sighed. “Yes. I definitely want to come home to this every day.”

  His tongue slid over her moistness once more and then he sucked the tight bud of her clit.

  “Every. Damn. Day,” Bailey said.

  There was that voice again. The husky timbre that always came out when they were making love. Dev loved it. Every word she said in that tone succeeded in pushing him closer to climax. She was lifting her hips off the bed now, meeting the thrusts of his tongue with excited pumps. Dev was hard and he was ready. He sank his tongue into her entrance and had the pleasure of feeling her shiver beneath him. Then he was licking her up and down once more, flattening his tongue over her clit and applying pressure before trailing down to sink into her entrance again.

  She was thrashing about on the bed, her hands moving from his head to grip the sheets, pulling them up off the bed. She was intoxicating. Everything about her from her scent, to her taste, to her sound was driving him mad. Dev came to his feet then, licking his lips as he stared down at her.

  “Cover me,” he told her.

  She blinked, looking up at him dreamily as he used his hand to pump his rigid erection. He moved his hand slowly, rubbing his sensitive tip, then sliding down to his base. When she caught sight of the movement Bailey began to sit up on the bed. She opened the condom wrapper, removed the latex and then reached for him.

  “We can reward each other,” she whispered as she leaned in to lick his tip, moaning the second her tongue also touched his finger.

  Dev groaned. He immediately cupped her face, thrusting toward her as a way of encouraging her mouth over him. “The best kind of reward,” he mumbled and she sighed and she licked him again.

  He watched as she opened her mouth and took him in deep. He loved watching her do this, loved seeing her mouth close over him, loved feeling as if he were somehow special enough to deserve this tremendous pleasure from her.

  When she pulled back slowly and began to roll the condom down his length, Dev thought he might just explode. And not only with his release. There was something happening to him. That heaviness in his chest, the pounding he’d felt only seconds ago was now a spreading warmth. After she’d sheathed him she’d looked up at him with those gorgeous hazel eyes.

  Dev used both hands this time to cup her face, tilting her up so that he could continue to stare into her eyes.

  “I don’t know what this is,” he admitted. “How we got here or where we go from this moment on.”

  “I know,” she told him and she lay back on the bed once more.

  “First,” she said while lifting one leg and planting her foot on the bed, “we go slow.”

  Dev swallowed.

  Bailey lifted the other leg, putting that foot on the mattress in the same fashion and letting her thighs fall to the side. “Then, we go fast.”

  He watched her opening before him like a splendid flower and swallowed once more, harder this time.

  “And then what?” Dev asked her, really needing to know how this was going to play out.

  He was used to having a plan. Bailey had never been part of one in his mind, and yet here she was.

  “Come to me, Devlin,” she whispered and lifted her arms.

  Dev put a knee on the bed and then another as he moved between her legs, lifting them up to rest her ankles on his shoulders. He was rubbing up and down their length, her skin so soft and sensuous.

  “Come to me,” she beckoned again and Dev leaned over her until she was able to wrap her arms around his neck.

  “We go forward from here,” she said looking into his eyes. “You and me, together. We don’t overthink it and we don’t run from it. We simply go with every emotion that we’ve been holding back over the last year. We let the physical that we’ve already mastered guide the emotional that has been brimming at the edge. We do this together.”

  Dev nodded. He’d absorbed every word she’d said, letting it settle in his mind like information he’d researched for a mission. Only this time, that information filled him with such warmth and comfort that he almost couldn’t speak.

  “Together,” he managed to mumble as he moved his hips and let his thick erection find her waiting center.

  Bailey moaned as he entered her. “Yeeesssss, baby. Together.”

  Dev moved in and out of her, more slowly than he ever had before. It was a delicious sensation, her warm essence covering his length and coated walls gripping him like a vice. Her arms remained wrapped around his neck and Dev pushed his behind her back, gathering her up close to him. He buried his face in her neck, kissing her there and whispering her name.

  “Bailey. Bailey.”

  It was all about her. Everything he’d done since that moment at Savian’s wedding. Every thought, every trip, every dream had been all about her. She was absolutely right, they’d already mastered the physical, now it was the emotional that was taking center stage.

  It was the emotional that drove his hips in measured movements, stroking them both slowly, yet most assuredly, toward a blissful release.

  She was flexible, her ankles still propped on his shoulders, even as he’d leaned closer to her. This position had her open for him, accepting him undoubtedly. She whispered his name reminding him that this was what she wanted.

  “Every night,” she said on a sigh. “Say it, Devlin. Say you want me every night and every day.”

  Dev pulled back from her then. He moved one of her legs so that now it was flat against the bed, keeping the other one stretched upward. He pulled out of her and thrust back in so slowly she had to catch her breath. Her tongue snaked out, licking over her bottom lip as she panted
.

  “I want you now,” Dev told her. He pulled out and sank in slow and deep once more. “I want you tomorrow.”

  She hissed and held tightly onto the sheets.

  Dev moved a little faster this time as he pulled out, sank back in.

  “I want you every day.”

  He moved faster thrusting so hard in and out of her, Bailey’s breasts bobbed with the motion. Her eyes opened wide and her head thrashed from side to side.

  “Every. Damn. Day,” Dev said as his muscles began to tense. “Every. Damn. Night.”

  She trembled beneath him, his name ripping from her in a sated sigh. Dev tumbled right behind her, his release pounding into the condom as he nestled deep inside of her, holding still to keep from breaking any of his bones that were now completely tense.

  “Every. Damn. Day,” she sighed after a few seconds.

  Dev let her leg down and pulled out of her slowly. He rolled onto his back, wrapping an arm around her waist and bringing her over him as he went.

  “And every, damn, night,” he said once more and brought her down for a kiss.

  Chapter 16

  One Week Later

  “So this is an official thing now?” Trent asked.

  Dev held the phone closer to his ear as if that motion was going to make this conversation any easier.

  “Yeah, it is,” he replied.

  “Is that why you didn’t tell me you were going to visit Dane? Or about the team members being killed. Because you didn’t want me to question you about being with Bailey.”

  “I didn’t tell you any of that because your mind needed to be on your wife and your family. I brought Bailey along with me to visit Dane because I couldn’t stand not being with her after those weeks she’d been captive.”

  Trent was quiet.

  Dev ran a hand down the back of his head. He was standing in Bailey’s living room. Her silly bird was flying around like this was a jungle instead of a house. He hated to admit he was getting used to the sound of those wings whooshing past him at any given moment. But he’d been at Bailey’s house for a week. Going to bed with her at night, waking with her in the morning. Yes, this was definitely a thing now, and he didn’t give a damn if Trent disapproved.