Her Covert Protector (Rogue Protectors Book 4)
Her Covert Protector: Prologue

John Garrison was a beast between the sheets.

Though, technically they were not between the sheets.

Currently, he was wrecking Nadia against the couch. He had her back against the armrest, thighs spread, her right foot on the floor while he used his body to keep her left leg pinned against the back of the couch.

He thrust.

He grunted.

He rode her hard.

“Don’t lock me out,” he ordered.

“But it’s so good like this,” Nadia moaned, her legs squirming at the pleasure pulsing below her pelvis, her body arching to meet his hammering hips. His cock slid in and out of her pussy, its girth stretching her inner walls to pleasurable extremes. The throb was so exquisite, it made her a slave to the relentless pounding of the man between her legs.

“I’m not ready to end this,” he groaned. His words triggered a distant alarm in her head, but the heat that flared between them since they crossed that line minutes ago had incinerated all sense of logical thought. John wasn’t a man to let your guard down around. But when he opened the door, and when she saw he was alive, nothing else mattered. Not even her pride. He scoffed at her tears of relief, then turned his back on her, leaving her standing in the foyer. She probably shouldn’t have followed him. It should have been enough to see him alive. But she needed more assurance that he was okay, never thinking it would have gone this far.

That she would surrender herself to his animalistic way of fucking and loving it.

“Gonna come, babe,” he grunted above her, his cock growing impossibly hard as he drove her harder into the couch. “Fuck.”

Babe.

That was the first time he called her that. She was usually Powell to him. Like just moments ago, when he made her see red so soon after feeling relief that he made it out of Mexico in one piece.

“Part of the job, Powell. Don’t get sentimental.”

John climaxed and collapsed on top of her, his weight heavy on her chest, much like the remorse that started pushing itself forward from the back of her mind. He must have felt her stiffen because he raised his head, still breathing hard, a sheen of sweat on his brow.

“You’re still an asshole,” she whispered.

An arrogant brow arched. “An asshole who’s given you an orgasm.”

She pushed against his chest and he exhaled a heavy sigh, pulled out of her and rolled away. He stood and disappeared to the bathroom, presumably to get rid of the condom.

Nadia sat up, glanced around for her panties and spotted them under the coffee table. She picked up the evidence of her momentary lapse in judgment and tucked them into her backpack. She straightened her tight skirt, thankful that John didn’t rip it apart when he shoved it to her waist. Her cheeks burned at how shamelessly she’d submitted to him. It was the guilt, she told herself. The guilt that it was her failure that stranded him and his team in Mexico, running for their lives.

When John returned to the living room, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, board shorts, and flip flops. He was fastening a giant watch on his wrist, a duffel slung on his shoulder.

She rose to her feet on unsteady legs. “Going on vacation?”

The levity of his outfit belied the expression on his face. A stoic mask. “I need to leave. Take all the time you need. Just lock up behind you.”

“You trust me to lock up?”

He shrugged. “I don’t keep anything of importance here. This is just a place to crash.”

Somehow Nadia doubted that, and yet somehow she knew he was also right. If there was something the CIA officer kept here, it would be useless to someone who planned to steal it, because it would be protected by several layers of security.

“So, that’s it?”

His jaw hardened. “This can’t happen again.”

A bitter taste saturated her tongue, before she managed a humorless laugh. “You need to be clearer about that, John. This as in dragging me into your clandestine ops any time you please or this”— she motioned to the couch—“which was a normal reaction to us blowing off steam because of Mexico.”

He regarded her steadily. “So you’re clear, then, that this is just us blowing off steam? A one and done?”

A corkscrew twisted at the center of her chest, making breathing difficult. Obviously, this was just another casual encounter for him. Hell, sex might be his way of coping whenever he’d escaped life-or-death situations. He was still charged with testosterone, and Nadia appeared conveniently for him to unload. She winced at the term. No need to make things awkward, but now knowing how John felt inside her, she wasn’t sure if she could look at him any other way without remembering.

“Yes.” Her chin jutted out.

His gaze narrowed. “Powell, what happened in Mexico could have happened to any comms officer. You need to get over it.”

She gritted her teeth. “See, John, I can’t just get over it because it wasn’t my job. You put me in a situation I wasn’t ready for. You blackmailed me into agreeing.”

He strode past her. “Don’t have time for this. Suck it up.”

“I don’t want to suck it up!” she yelled. “Can you even imagine how I would feel if all of you got captured, or even worse, killed?”

He stopped right at the door. His back to her. He didn’t even turn around, just cocked his head to his side. “Lock up.”

With those two words he left her behind. Nadia didn’t know how long she stared at the door that shut behind him. But when she came back into herself, she made a decision. She slipped out the agency-vetted phone that Garrison had given her. Extracting the chip and without thinking twice, she dropped it to the floor and crushed it with the heel of her boot.

Then she gathered all that was left of her dignity and left the house.