Ransom (Benson Security 4)

“Tell me this,” he said, when he’d stopped laughing. ?

?Once you figure out who David is, and you catch him, what then?”

Elle stopped with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. “I honestly don’t know.” And now she was wondering why she hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“Maybe you want to think about that, bonita. David isn’t a man you play with.”

There was a groan from the bed and Ryan’s eyes flickered open. “What happened?” he said.

“Here we go again,” Elle muttered. “I really hope the anaesthetic gets out of his system soon. I’m fed up repeating myself.”

She put the coffee down and went to tell Ryan all over again that he was just out of surgery. It was going to be a long night.

Beast woke to the sound of something large moving around, and he didn’t think it was human. For a start, they were enveloped in absolute blackness and there was no sign of a flashlight. Slowly, he inched his wrist up in front of his face. The faintly illuminated watch dial told him it was one a.m. He’d managed to sleep for a good few hours, which was a miracle in itself.

Sometime, while he’d been asleep, they’d shifted position. Now, instead of Belinda lying curled at his side, she was draped over him. Her knees were either side of his thighs, her arms were tucked in at his sides and her nose was nestled in the crook of his neck. One of his hands was tangled in her hair; the other had been resting in the small of her back—before he’d looked at this watch. Beast couldn’t help but notice that she moulded to his body perfectly. Her soft curves were a foil to his hard muscles, and the little mewing sounds she made when he moved reminded him of a kitten.

As he listened to the creature move around the clearing near their bed, he gently stroked Belinda’s back, soothing her—or maybe himself. Her skin was satin smooth under his touch, and he was deeply aware of the heat coming from between her legs as she straddled him. Against his will, he grew hard. It was a sweet agony lying there, with temptation in his arms, unable to do anything about it.

He shifted his hips slightly, trying to angle them so that his hard length wasn’t pressing against her mound. It was impossible; there was nowhere to move and no way to turn his body without waking Belinda and letting the animal outside their hammock know they were there.

She gave a little moan and shifted against him, rubbing against his painfully hard cock and making him swallow a groan. Reflexively, his hand tightened in her hair and he felt the moment she woke. She sucked in a breath and started to lift her head, ready to move away from him.

He turned towards her and whispered in her ear, “Don’t move—there’s something out there.”

She froze. And now the two of them were painfully aware of the condition he was in. She lifted her hips slightly, trying to put some distance between them. The sensation of her body dragging against his cock was almost too much to bear.

“No! Don’t move.”

They heard a snuffling sound, very close to their bed.

Belinda pressed her lips to his ear and whispered, “What is it?”

He bit back the answer that almost burst from him. She was talking about the animal, not his desperate dick.

“Jaguar?” Belinda whispered.

“Don’t know.”

A large form passed under their hammock, lifting them up and making them rock. Beast pressed Belinda’s face into his neck to stop her from crying out. The animal didn’t seem to notice them; it carried on walking, and they heard it crash through the brush and into the jungle, leaving them to sway in the darkness.

For minutes, they lay there, afraid to move. Eventually, Beast relaxed. The jungle noises were back to normal. Whatever it was had gone.

“I think it was a tapir,” Belinda whispered. “They’re nocturnal. They’re big like that. They’re related to the hippo. It felt like something big and wide under us, didn’t it? Not like the sleek back of a cat. And a cat would have scented us, wouldn’t it? Tapirs are herbivores. It wouldn’t have cared how we smell. Unless it was a jaguar and the smell from the white-lipped peccary is still clinging to us and put him off. What do you think?”

What did he think? He thought the animal, whatever the hell it was, wasn’t the only big and wide thing that wanted to move under her. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried hard to get his mind out of the gutter. It was tough.

“It’s gone now,” was all he could manage to say.

They lay tense against each other, painfully aware of every single thing they could feel.

Belinda cleared her throat. “I should, um, get off.”

“Hollywood, you’re killing me here.”

“I mean get off your body!” She groaned. “Never mind. I’m moving.”

He didn’t object. Having her straddle him was agonising, and he was close to breaking point. With some awkward manoeuvres that made the hammock swing, and a near-miss between her knee and his balls, Belinda ended up where she’d started—curled against his side.