View All Titles by Allie K. Adams

HOT EXCERPTS

Charis hid behind the large palm tree and leaned just enough to catch a peek at her target. Tall, dark, and carved, his slightly shaggy yet oh-so-sexy hair lightened from the Hawaii sun, his skin bronzed from head to toe. She pulled her sunglasses down to get a better view as the ex-field ops agent turned beach bum came jogging out of the surf like one of the lifeguards from an episode of Baywatch. David Hasselhoff nothing. David Snyder held her attention, sending surges of sexual current straight to the folds of her pussy.

His year off certainly did him good. His legs, long cords of hard muscle beneath tight, tan flesh, flexed and released as he moved out of the water. Her heart pounded in rhythm to the pounding of each of his feet against the sand.

Warmth slowly spread throughout her body, centering deep in her belly. Despite the heat of the Hawaiian sun, her nipples puckered. Painfully. The thin material of her suit wouldn't have a fighting chance at covering her obvious arousal. Pulling the oversized shirt closed in front of her, she brought her eyes back up to gaze at the man she'd been sent to bring home.

She felt her thighs quiver, the ache between them growing with every passing second she watched the sexy ex-agent. Oh God, no. This is work. Do not let him excite you. Do not enjoy the way your labia is swelling and softening from the sight of him. Closing her knees, she squeezed her muscles to force her body back in check. It didn't work. No, in fact it resulted in the exact opposite affect. The friction of her suit against her throbbing clit had her damp, her juices increasing the more she thought about it.

Why did he have to be better looking than she remembered? He lifted his arm, showing off a perfectly sculpted bicep leading up to an even more perfectly sculpted shoulder. He brushed his hand through his mocha-colored hair, forcing the water out. She watched breathlessly as the tantalizing ex-agent stretched out his well-defined muscles.

Oh wow. The sparks heating her inner core grew into electric jolts spiraling around her ever slickening channel. She dared not squeeze her legs together again, knowing it may just melt her into a puddle right here next to the tree.

The gorgeous, hard muscles of his chest glistened with little licks of water. Sucking in her lower lip to bite down, she watched as he twisted to stretch his back, flexing his flat stomach and rippling pectorals. Yummy.

The afternoon sun shined bright overhead in the cloudless blue sky, its rays catching in the water droplets still clinging to his skin. Oh double wow. She'd never felt such a rapid and crushing, overpowering attraction to anyone. Letting out a shaky breath, she licked her lips.

Love at first sight? Maybe. In all her twenty-eight years she'd never been in love, so she really had no basis of comparison. Whatever that feeling growing deep inside her, sending her heart racing and her flesh humming, she liked it. It gave her a sense of bravado, like fate had suddenly given her a nod of approval.

No wonder they say love is a drug. What a high. She felt delirious and dizzy. Aroused and breathless. Only one other time had she even come close to this feeling. In the hospital, the first time she'd met David Snyder.

She closed her eyes and still saw him in that hospital bed, fighting for his life. She'd stayed through the nights with him, holding his hand, comforting him as his body fought off the Ricin poison threatening to take his life. It didn't seem all that long ago when she'd been the one in the hospital bed, those wires and tubes connecting her to beeping machines and blinking monitors.

Charis shook off the feeling and glanced back to David Snyder now. The scar on his shoulder had healed to a puckered pale white. The sight of it sent a slight shiver through her. A single gunshot and he'd almost died. She knew how close he'd come to death. The human body damaged so easily. It made her feel so helpless, so vulnerable. Scared she'd lose him. Lose him before she ever had the chance to know him.

She couldn't explain it. She'd just met the man, and yet something about him fascinated her, excited her. As he lay there in that hospital bed, she must have spent twenty hours a day by his side. She hated hospitals ever since living in one for almost two months while she went through surgery after surgery. But for him, she ignored the bitter memories of waking up scared and alone in a dark room.

The endless nights of watching him sleep, all the while fighting off her own need for slumber, were all for his sake. No one deserved to wake up alone in a strange room.

Her visible scars had long since faded. The scars buried deep in her psyche still made it hard to sleep. She'd hate for him to have those same scars. For some crazy reason, she just knew if he opened his eyes and saw her there, she'd save him from the nightmares.

She'd talked to him, told him about her hopes and dreams, desperately wanting to hear his. She told him anything and everything, knowing her secrets were safe. It made her feel close to him, intimate. Like lovers.

Charis focused in on his scar. She knew the pattern by heart, like a lion's mane. For some odd reason, her fingers tingled at the thought of tracing it, feeling its silky-roughness beneath her touch. She felt connected to him, as if her scars somehow meant they'd shared some grave experience. In a way they had.

They'd both stared death in the proverbial face and lived to tell the tale.

She brought her attention back to David. From the way he moved now, he didn't appear to have lost any mobility as they originally thought he would. He stretched his exquisite arms high over his head and bent over, touching his toes. It gave her a great view of his derriere. Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm. Mobility seemed fine to her.

Pushing her sunglasses back up, she tried to relax and stepped out into the open, the small beach bag containing her tanning oil, wallet, and cell phone swinging in her hand. The men's oversized white dress shirt hung loosely against her skin, opened in the front to reveal a poor excuse of a floral swimsuit. At least she didn't have on the poor excuse of a swimsuit NASSD had chosen for her. A bikini? Obviously someone in NASSD's wardrobe department had a sense of humor.

Her twin brother Chris had been accepted into the folds of the highly coveted counter-terrorist agency six months ago. She wouldn't put it past him to have a hand in this. He'd been lecturing her to get out from behind her computer screen.

She glanced down at her appearance and gave an involuntary shiver. The last time she'd been this naked in public she'd just taken her first breath, twenty-eight years ago.

She'd argued with wardrobe for over an hour before refusing the assignment if she had to sport a string bikini. Ah but wardrobe, along with the rest of the action-crazed NASSD agents, were all tucked safely back on the mainland. Or Pakistan. Or Indonesia. Among other countries. They'd never know she now wore her own suit instead of the meager attempt at coverage.

Pulling her shirt closed in front of her, she drew in a deep breath. At least the suit covered most of the scarring on her stomach. The doctors used skin graph after skin graph from her torso to repair the damage after the explosion had peeled most of the skin off her right leg. She'd been lucky. If she had actually stepped on the landmine instead of tripping the wire, it would have taken her leg clean off. Probably would have killed her. She shuddered at the memory.

Her dad had flown in the best plastic surgeons in the world to repair the damage done by that bomb. The scars, now pale and silvery in color, were barely noticeable.

But they were noticeable. And exposing her scars to perfect strangers, let alone the agent she'd been sent to retrieve, didn't qualify as part of the mission.

NASSD had everything here in Maui waiting for her when she arrived. Thank God no other agents joined her to monitor her. She frowned. At least she didn't think so. Shrugging, she let it go. If anyone had followed her to Hawaii, they'd see her wearing a bathing suit she'd gone out and purchased right after she'd taken the little two-piece fishing line with postage stamps and accidentally left it on the beach buried under six inches of sand. Oh well.

She didn't even like parading around in the bathing suit she had on. It didn't have nearly enough to it and it took her hours to find one with this much material. It was too high cut. And too low cut. This was so outside her comfort level.

But duty called. If she had her way, she would have sent him an email, or maybe given him a call, asking him to return to Seattle. She would have been fine with that. Anonymity was her middle name. It had to be in the work she did.

Sure, those within ICE knew her codename, and with that her true identity. Those outside the agency did not.

She thought about that day back in the hospital when he'd called her by her codename. She still didn't know how he'd been able to ID her. Half expecting him to contact her after the hospital confrontation, demanding some sort of payment or other form of blackmail in exchange for him to keep her ID secret, she waited. And waited. And waited.

When he never made contact, she felt ironically disappointed, even though she should have been ecstatic. She longed to hear his voice again, to see those deep charming brown eyes dance when he smiled. He had the cutest little dimple below his right eye when he flashed his handsome grin.

Charis sighed and relished the memory of his smile. That familiar stirring of emotions swirled in her core, settling as a throb at the base of her sex. Her folds swelled slightly, tingling her into a giggle. She pictured him smile down at her as he lifted her legs, separated them for his entry.

Her juices flowed, moistening her, exciting her. She could stay here all day and just think about him, and felt half tempted to do just that. But she knew she needed to follow through with what she came to do. Tucking her lust back in, she took a step and stopped. Maybe she should think about this.

Okay. Enough of the mental procrastination. She needed to get this over with. Why she agreed to this she'd never know. No, that was a lie. She knew. The idea of seeing David Snyder again had her trembling in anticipation.

At first she'd begged to e-track him, knowing she'd react to him exactly as she reacted to him right now. She'd been in love with the stubborn man since spending day and night next to him in the hospital. No way would she be able to resist him now that he stood upright.

But no. NASSD wanted her to retrieve him in person. Damn that conflict-craving agency. As the bullies of all the government agencies, they were also the one every man, woman, and child wanted to get into.

She didn't get it. Why would anyone want to risk their life, their very existence, for an agency that would kick them to the curb as soon as they suffered a hangnail?

And why send her across the Pacific Ocean to retrieve one of their own? She was ICE, for crying out loud. She didn't know undercover from underwear. The one-hour crash course she'd received from JT Weber over the phone on the way to the airport didn't do much more than rattle her to the point of actually buying a cocktail on the plane to soothe her nerves.

"How am I supposed to pull this off?" she'd asked JT. "I'm not NASSD. Can't I just track him, have NASSD follow up and bring him in?"

"Sorry," she'd responded. "You know the rules."

Oh yes, Charis knew the rules. She'd practically memorized the rulebook of every agency she'd ever dealt with. It came in handy when she needed to deflate an agent.

"But how?" Charis had sputtered into the phone.

"Appeal to his more passionate side," JT finally said after what felt like a yearlong pause. She wouldn't elaborate, no matter how much Charis begged. After scanning the closet full of clothes when she arrived in Maui almost a week ago, she had a pretty good idea what JT had meant. The clothes wardrobe had picked out for her bordered on obscene.

She glanced down at her indecent suit. At least it looked better than the one now buried on the beach. When she'd eyed that thing hanging there next to the sock NASSD mislabeled as a dress, she freaked. After the burial, she hurried out and bought the new one-piece suit and biggest men's dress shirt she could find. She should have picked up that sarong. The blue in the material matched her eyes perfectly.

Even without the sarong she didn't feel stark ass naked, at least not how she would have felt had she ended up wearing the bikini. When she eyed herself in the mirror before coming down to the beachside pool, she didn't think she'd go through with it. Now, as she glanced nervously around her, she just wanted to go back to her room.

A sea of swimsuit models surrounded the pool. It looked like a Playboy convention. Women with ample breasts and tiny waists bounced in the pool, lounged in the sun. Some lounged next to men. Most didn't. Tall women. Short women. The one thing they all had in common—they looked like they candidates for the next cover of their choice in magazines.

No way. She'd never be able to compete against them for David's attention. Charis' breasts were a solid 'B' cup at best, and didn't bounce or even qualify as ample. Her dark curls frizzed in this humidity and were completely untamable, and she liked them that way. She had an athletic build and her five foot nine inch frame carried her weight well, but compared to these women she looked like she'd just swallowed a truck. Not just any truck. A semi. She didn't have a lick of makeup on aside from ChapStick, which made her feel extremely out of place in this crowd of painted beauties. As some of the buxom bombshells eyed her, giving her a once over in obvious disapproval, she grasped the shirt in front of her, closing it. The heat of embarrassment slammed into her cheeks.

Some eyed her leg and made faces as if her scars gaped open, oozing pus and blood. Others gave her one look and quickly looked away to avoid eye contact, hiding their mouth yet openly commenting to one another. And the rest simply stared in obvious curiosity and disbelief someone who looked like Charis dare intermingle with the rest of them. She clearly heard the snickers, as she knew the women had meant for her to hear. The pang of humiliation crept up her neck. She wouldn't be able to retreat fast enough.

Forget it. She'd wait until tonight to approach him. She'd buy her own dress. Something that covered more than what would get her arrested anywhere but the beaches of Maui. The plane left in the morning. She still had plenty of time.

Maybe one last look. Charis offered a sideways glance in David's direction, hoping to catch one last tantalizing peek before she cowered off in defeat.

He glanced over her way at the same time and their gaze crashed into each other, the powerful connection causing heat to slap her cheeks, but for an entirely different reason. He tensed, and she froze. Her heart refused to beat. Her lungs refused to work. His face then lost all expression as his hands rested to his side. She clearly read his lips.

Holy shit.

ANOTHER EXCERPT

They'd made a pact this time. She wanted them to come at the exact same time. Exact. He was more than happy to oblige. "Are you close?"

"You have no i-idea."

He had a feeling he did. He felt her channel fisting him, squeezing him with spasmodic quivers. "I'm not going to last much longer."

"Me, neither."