Page 309 of Wild Mustang Security Firm

If he saw Aliya in the morning, he was going to strangle her.

Or put her back across his knee, blistering her backside before taking his belt off and welting her sexy ass.

No, what would be best would be to turn around and walk the other way. She was the single most dangerous thing he’d ever encountered. Even more so now that he knew, best intentions aside, he couldn’t keep his hands off her. The minute he’d touched her tonight, every lick of sense and ounce of self-preservation he’d ever possessed had fled the scene, and his cock had done all the thinking.

Now, he was hard again. He’d barely softened after he’d come, and his dick was now fully erect, throbbing, and knew exactly what it wanted, pounding in the heated, tight-balled way that had nothing to do with the agony of getting kneed.

Well, he knew better than to grab her like that again, that was for sure. Next time, he’d immobilize her first, then paddleher backside until she finally got it through her stupid, stubborn, beautiful, irresistible, little head, she was not a goddamn spy, and this wasn’t a game.

Regardless of what that NATO operative had told her, she needed to leave everything Fariq-related to those whose job it was to stop the man—like him.

If only he had a way to sneak a message to her, so she didn’t have to worry about someone finding that ridiculous note. No way he could get into the hall unnoticed or sneak past Fariq’s door and his guards to slip a note beneath her door. He was as sure of that as he was that his time under Fariq’s employ had a deadline locked-in, ticking down the seconds. No other agent had remained hidden in Fariq’s employ even half the time Christian had been here. No one had done half as much damage to Fariq’s infrastructure, yet the man was undefeatable. As fast as Christian hacked into his personal information or leaked information to his NATO handlers, Fariq changed it. He wasn’t doing any good here, and sometimes, he wondered if anything he’d done had been worth the blackness that had rubbed off Fariq onto his very soul.

He needed to get out.

Aliya needed to get out.Before her soul turned black, too.

Aliya was her NATO handler’s problem, not his, he tried to tell himself, but he already knew that wasn’t true. Aliya was—God help him—innocent. Actually innocent of everything associated with Fariq, not that anyone in NATO was inclined to either believe that or care. That much was obvious from the fact they would try to recruit her to turn on her brother.

Jesus, she was the wrong person for the job. What had they done, given her a three-month crash course on ‘how to spy?’ For fuck’s sake, she didn’t have the slightest clue how to go about it without exposing herself.

Now that she knew about him, it really was too dangerous for him to remain here—especially if he couldn’t keep his hands to himself. It only took one time to get caught doing what he’d done to her in her brother’s office—his face in her hair, breathing in the faintly floral shampoo scent so intoxicatingly tangled in her hair, her soft, small body pinned to the wall beneath his bigger one… better yet, pinned beneath him as he thrust in and out of her sweet pussy. God, he wanted that—days and days just fucking her with nothing more to worry about than what to order from room service.

She really was going to get them both killed.

He needed to stop this now. He needed to go back to his room, get some sleep, and get his head out of her panties and back into the game before he made a mistake that locked him permanently into Fariq’s unyielding sights.

He needed to forget about Aliya.

That’s what he had to do… for everyone’s sake.

Far, far easier said than done. He made it back to his room unseen—he hoped—but much like he started the night, he ended it, lying flat on his back in his bunk, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about the soft, small, innocent woman lying in her own bed, two floors above him. She might as well have been miles out of his reach, but he could still feel the heat that had so thoroughly beguiled him as he’d held her, grinding the bulge of his painfully contained cock into the valley of her ass cheeks before fucking her mouth and emptying himself into her belly.

The ass he would give anything to have bouncing on his hips right now.

He really needed to stop thinking about that. He was never going to get to sleep at this rate.

Except somehow, he did. One minute he was half-heartedly considering venturing another deck down to knock on the door of one of the women Fariq employed to keep the mercenarieshappy in their off-hours, and in the next, a shuddering explosion hit the yacht, knocking Christian clean out of his bunk. He hit the wall, then the floor, rolling sideways with the sudden listing of the super yacht, and finally came to a startled stillness, staring up at the gray light of pre-dawn. The sun hadn’t risen above the ocean horizon, but that didn’t mean anything when the warning alarms began to blare.

Another explosion rocked them, and the yacht listed hard back the other way—the dangerous roll of instability that came as they began to take on water at a terrifying rate.

Was this a nightmare, or were they really sinking?

The room tilted as the nose of the yacht rose, and the stern sank.

No, not a nightmare, Christian suddenly realized as everything in his room that wasn’t nailed down began to slide straight at him. He scrambled out of the way and didn’t even bother with his shoes. Bolting from his room, he ducked and dodged between those among Fariq’s crew of mercenaries who were as quick to respond to the danger. Others were slower. Slow could easily mean going down with the yacht. The cooks, the servants, the ladies whose job it was to look pretty by day and keep the mercenaries happy by night—everyone hired not because they had experience holding a gun but to keep life aboard this ship as normal and comfortable as possible for those who did—all of them were going to end up trapped in these halls as the ship slipped under the waves. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about that.

Already, he could hear the ratta-tat-tat of rapid-fire weapons being fired and returned on the upper decks as he took the stairs in his bare feet two at a time. One guy made it to the door ahead of him, and Christian almost knocked him down when the other ducked behind the door to get a look at the fire-fight outside.Everybody died at some time or another, and God knows, most of those on board this ship deserved to die—all but one.

He knocked the mercenary out of his way, ducking to keep his head down as he charged out into the exchanging gunfire. He didn’t have his guns, and there wasn’t time to get them. The stern was only above water by only six feet, and they were losing inches fast. Smoke billowed from the lower floor windows, and he could hear shouting and the desperate high-pitched shouts and screams of people trapped in the graveyard the below-decks were about to become.

Aliya.

Blocking out the sound, Christian ran for the stairs leading up to the next level. Storage was in the front, and Fariq’s lavish rooms and Aliya’s elegant prison were to the back, protected by reinforced steel in the walls and bullet-proof glass on the windows. He was almost there when Fariq came bursting out of the ship, his gun in one hand, Aliya, wide-eyed, sleep tussled, dressed in only the thinnest slip of a pink silk nightgown and terrified in his other, both barefoot.

“Go, go!” Fariq told him, and Christian took point, running just ahead of them, a living shield for the bullet Fariq preferred not to take himself, toward the stairs leading to the highest level, where the helio-pad and helicopter were… until the ship gave out a shuddering groan of steel frames bent and metal ground on metal. The nose of the yacht lifted sharply, spilling all three of them rolling to the floor.

Aliya screamed, but they were already sliding backward, coming up hard against the railing as the nose of the ship rose until it was almost standing out of the water. Christian grabbed for the railing. So did Fariq, dropping his gun to grab it, never letting go of his sister.

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