Forsaken by Sarah Ballance

problem: she hadn’t a clue who he’d become.
    “Gage?” She pulled from his kiss and found herself off the floor, legs wrapped around his waist, her need pressed against the bulging denim of his jeans.
    He dragged his lips from her ear to her collarbone. “Yes?” He nuzzled under her chin, tender kisses working in delicious tandem with the light stubble on his jaw, sending her world swirling.
    “I want to know what this is about. What are you mixed up in?”
    Gage pulled away just enough to give her a full view of his face. Breathing hard, still cradling her thighs against his hips in an intimate embrace, he looked her in the eye. “I’m a bodyguard for Maverick’s agency. His clients are mostly high-profile and in deep trouble. By the time he gets a case, someone is trying to make good on a death threat. That’s why he’s got this setup—and many more like it—and why he won’t let me drive a piece of shit truck.”
    A bodyguard? “Isn’t that dangerous?”
    “Could be,” he said. “You’ve got to be willing to die for it.”
    She stiffened. She didn’t mean to, but the words penetrated a part of her she’d long since closed off and it all landed in a jumble in her gut. “You’re willing to die?”
    He buried his lips against her neck, somehow managing to hit the lights and walk the small distance to the bed in the dark without a hitch. When she landed on the soft coverlet, his hands drifted lower. She shivered when a finger trailed down her side to stroke her inner thighs, a feather-light touch that left her arching against him in unspoken surrender. His mouth closed on hers in a sweltering kiss—sweet, deep, and profoundly intimate.
    “Riley,” he whispered against her lips. “Until about five minutes ago, I was already gone.”
    The words left her reeling, caught in a surge of emotion, but she didn’t have time to examine what they meant to her. Not with his fingers nestled between her legs, curling rhythmically, coaxing her to the edge, and daring her to go there.
    With him.
    Breathing hard, she fumbled for his zipper. “I want to feel you inside of me.”
    “Hey,” he said, dragging his mouth from her skin. “Can’t do that. I don’t have any protection.”
    “You don’t need it. I’m on birth control. As long as you’re—”
    He pulled away and climbed out of his jeans. “There hasn’t been anyone else.”
    He didn’t give her time to process this information or what it meant, because in the next second he’d crawled over her. Her breath caught, and she was rewarded with the sensation of him nudging inside her, slowly, almost hesitantly. She trembled at the feel of him filling her, causing her breath to come in short, hard gasps.
    His hair fell forward, tickling her nose, and she gave in to the urge to rake it from his face. His head in her hands, she pulled him into a kiss, hooking her ankles over his legs and laughing when her foot tangled in the pants he’d left caught on one foot. “Impatient much?”
    He caught one of her nipples between his thumb and forefinger and twisted, a small laugh tickling her ear. “For you? Always.”
    Then he made a slow, teasing retreat. Riley groaned her objection as he slid out of her. He grinned at her protests, evading all of the squirming she did in an attempt to keep him buried between her legs.
    Riley lingered, caught between the bliss and the hell of it—a growing awareness of this being exactly where she needed to be and the fear it wouldn’t translate out of this dark, confusing world she’d been tossed into when he’d pointed his revolver at her head and accused her of murder. But her heart wouldn’t hear of logic, and any attempts at rationalizing things melted into liquid desire when he finally gave in and plunged deep inside of her, unleashing a shockwave of pleasure. And this time he didn’t tease, and he didn’t linger. He drove into her again and again, leaving her unable to do more than hang on, her fingers