Stryker's Desire Read online

  “Give into it, Chelsea,” Johan told her, his voice ragged and hoarse. She shook her head, trying to reject the command, but as his hand slipped down between their bodies, his fingers finding her clit unerringly, she cried out, throwing her head back against the pillows. Wave after wave of pleasure rocked through her, so intense it might have been pain, and Chelsea twisted and arched and writhed, pushing her hips down to meet Johan’s, as sensation washed through her, obliterating any ability to think. She was barely aware of the sound of Johan’s voice as he groaned, foreign words filling her ears meaninglessly; she felt his cock twitching inside of her and then felt the hot, sticky-slick gush of his orgasm flooding deep inside of her. Chelsea had not even finished her climax as darkness rose up, wrapping around her in a warm, buzzing coil.

  ****

  “Chelsea…” She came back to herself at the sound of Johan’s slightly wheedling voice, opening her eyes to blink a few times in confusion. “There you are.” Turning her head slightly, she caught the sight of Johan, propped up on his elbows, watching her intently; he was only inches away from her, blond hair tousled, a smile playing at the corners of his full lips. “Hungry?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes,” Chelsea said, surprised at the fact; her stomach had felt as though someone had twisted it into knots ever since Johan had told her about the plot to eliminate her. She laughed, turning onto her side as she shook her head in amazement. Chelsea could still feel the tenderness between her thighs, the ache in her hips; how long had she been asleep?

  “I got us some food,” Johan said. “If you can make yourself climb out of the bed, it’s in the living room.” Chelsea started to sit up, only to sink back down with a groan. Her body felt deliciously heavy, her legs not quite real.

  “You relaxed me too much,” she protested, turning her head. “I can’t get up.” Johan laughed and she felt his weight shift on the bed. A moment later, his muscled arms slid underneath her, and Chelsea let out a yelp of surprise as he lifted her from the bed, cradling her body against his chest. He carried her out of the room, and the smells of something delicious met her nose as Johan stepped through the door into the living room of the suite. Something tugged at Chelsea’s mind, but she felt too tired—and too satisfied—to pursue it.

  “You were asleep for an hour,” Johan informed her, settling her neatly on the couch. “I thought you’d be hungry finally. Then, of course, once you’re done eating, we can relax you just a little more.” Chelsea stared at Johan for a moment, feeling her body heat up in memory of just how thoroughly he had relaxed her before.

  “I think if I were any more relaxed, I’d be comatose.” Johan chuckled, and Chelsea watched as he strode to the room service cart a few feet away from the couch, lifting the cloche on one of the plates.

  “I have no idea what you like, so this was my best guess.” Even as they ate, Chelsea found that she and Johan could barely keep their hands off each other; the thought of more sex—even though she was thoroughly exhausted—was too tantalizing. She ate more quickly than she ever had before in her life, cutting the filet that Johan had ordered her into small bites and dipping it into the béarnaise sauce quickly. Everything tasted so good, but all Chelsea could think about was the promise of more sex. She put her plate aside, meeting Johan’s gaze as he finished his own meal and smiling. “Unless you want to carry me into the bedroom again, I suggest we stay right here.” Johan chuckled, setting his dishes aside and reaching out for her. He pulled her into his lap in one deft movement, his hands wandering over her body, teasing and exploring.

  “We have to leave tomorrow,” he told her. Johan’s lips brushed against hers, and Chelsea felt his cock against her thigh, rapidly hardening as they began to move together instinctively, rubbing against each other, touching each other everywhere. “They already tossed your apartment. They’ll get our trail eventually—it’s impossible not to leave some kind of trail.” Johan kissed her hungrily, settling Chelsea’s hips against his and rocking up against her, rubbing his heat and hardness against her still-slick folds.

  “Don’t talk about that,” Chelsea said, barely breaking away from his lips. “I don’t even want to think right now.” Johan nodded slightly, shifting her on top of him. He reached down between their bodies and gave her clit a quick, lingering rub before he guided the tip of his cock up against her. Chelsea sank down onto him slowly, inhaling in an almost-gasp at the feeling of Johan’s heat pushing into her body. He felt familiar and strange all at once, and as she took him deeper and deeper, Chelsea thought absently that as long as he wanted her relaxed, she would be happy to follow Johan’s program.

  Johan rocked his hips up against hers, and in moments they found their rhythm; Chelsea rode him steadily, rising and falling, twisting her hips as she took advantage of her position perched on top of him to kiss everywhere her lips could reach, explore every line of Johan’s body with her fingertips. Johan groaned as they moved together, thrusting up harder and faster, his hands trailing over her body but seemingly coming to a stop every time he reached her hips, pushing her down onto him, gripping her tightly.

  It seemed like mere moments before Chelsea felt her pleasure mounting faster and faster, her body heating up, tingling flashes of sensation rushing through her nerves. She buried her face against Johan’s neck, rocking and twisting her hips as the first wave of climax washed through her, blotting out her ability to think once more. She nipped into the sensitive skin of Johan’s neck and he groaned out, clutching her body tightly to his, his cock twitching against Chelsea’s inner walls as he followed her into orgasm.

  ****

  As they loaded their paltry belongings into Johan’s car the next morning, Chelsea found herself smiling and shook her head at herself, utterly aghast at the fact that with her apartment thoroughly ransacked and a price on her head, she was actually grinning—she who even under the best circumstances barely found the enthusiasm to smile at all before nine in the morning. She could still feel the ache in her thighs, the lingering slickness from their morning tryst. “If it will help you relax during the car ride,” Johan had jokingly murmured as he pulled her into her arms only an hour or so before.

  She had no idea where they were going to next; all she knew was that they would be on the road for most of the day, putting distance between themselves and the nameless, faceless criminals who wanted to kill her. For the moment, with the lingering effects of more orgasms than she could count coursing through her system, Chelsea decided that it was enough.

  PART TWO

  Chelsea pulled herself out of a doze as she felt the now-familiar slowing of Johan turning into a parking lot, the shudder through the body of the third car they had been in over the course of as many days. She had no idea where they were—and for a while, anyway, she had been telling herself that it didn’t matter where they were. She had abandoned her job, her home—her entire life.

  The day after Johan had whisked her out of her apartment and into a life on the run, he had told her quite simply that there was no choice but for her to throw away her cell phone. “If you want to smash it first, that would be even better,” he said as they stood at a gas station, waiting for the tank to fill.

  “Why do I have to do that?” she asked him—and two competing ideas filled her mind. If she trusted Johan’s assertion that the CEO of the company she worked for was after her, then her phone was like a big, flashing electronic beacon, charting her movements. But were the thugs that were supposedly after her technologically savvy enough to find a way to track her phone? And if she didn’t trust Johan’s assertion, then throwing away her phone would mean getting rid of one of the last methods she had at her disposal to call the police, to get herself free of him.

  “They may be able to track you with it, Chelsea. I don’t know for sure what their capabilities are.” He held her gaze for a long moment. “They were able to find your apartment and trash it looking for your computer. They may have already found the hotel we stayed at last night. Anything that
can give them an edge is something you don’t want to hold onto.” Chelsea fought down a sense of unease; after all, she had seen the documentation, hadn’t she? She had seen the emails and text messages between Rosen and whomever he had hired to come after the people who might be able to testify against him. But could she trust what she had seen?

  “Okay,” Chelsea said finally, taking her phone out of her purse. Johan nodded solemnly and glanced around the gas station, as if he thought that the people tracking them might appear in a flash to prevent him destroying their ability to follow. He let her phone fall to the ground and then, looking as if he was doing nothing more than crushing an insect, brought his heel down on it. Chelsea grimaced as she heard the crunch and clinking shatter of the screen, the grit of it grinding against the cement. “But what about your phone? If they’re after us, they’d know I’m with you, wouldn’t they?” Johan had smiled slightly, taking his phone out of his pocket and showed it to her; it was strangely different from her own iPhone, sleeker, black and oddly almost dangerous-looking.

  “This is not commonly available on the market,” he told her, unlocking the screen in a series of movements her eyes couldn’t quite follow. “It’s encrypted. It’s specifically designed to be as difficult to hack as humanly possible—though, of course, with enough time and effort anything can be hacked.”

  Johan slipped the phone into his pocket as the gas pump stopped. He extracted the nozzle from the tank and hung it up on the stand, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “It also has an interesting feature: a non-static phone number. Every time I get a notification about what’s going on, it comes to me through a different contact number—which makes it that much harder for the people coming after you to track us down.” Chelsea had had to accept this idea, as strange and science fiction-like as it seemed. After all, presumably Johan was in contact with someone; she had heard the tail end of conversations he had with his contact—whoever it was—apprising him or her in a series of short, terse sentences about their progress. But who was he in contact with? She couldn’t quite fight down the lingering suspicion that she might have let herself into an enormous trap.

  But then, Chelsea thought as she looked around her in the car, if Johan was trying to take her to people who would go on to murder her, why would he keep the ruse going up for days? “If I didn’t know that the CEO of my company was trying to kill me,” she said, stretching against the back of the passenger seat, “I would almost feel guilty for missing so much work without much notice.” Johan had decided that it was pointless to keep up the ruse of being home sick shortly after she’d let him destroy her phone. After all, if the thugs pursuing her had trashed her apartment, it was easy to believe that her boss was either in on the situation, or had been told that she wouldn’t be in the office anymore.

  “You’ve always been somewhat of a good girl, haven’t you?” Johan asked her with a slightly leering smile. “Always at work on time, staying late when you have to, carrying your weight?” Chelsea raised an eyebrow at him, frowning.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest as defensive irritation crept through her body. Johan laughed, shutting off the ignition and lightly jiggled the keys in his palm.

  “I think deep down you’re different,” he told her. “There’s another Chelsea—one you don’t let out often, and you probably should.” Chelsea’s eyebrows knit together as she stared at him in confusion. “I can see it in you when you get irritated with me,” Johan explained. “There’s a hellcat in you that you keep on a really tight leash. A woman who could shoot a man if she thought she had to. Or beat the shit out of him.”

  “And yet you’re not the slightest bit afraid of me,” Chelsea observed, tightening her arms across her chest. In fact, she thought wryly, Johan had—over the course of their few days together—demonstrated just how little he was afraid of her, just how powerful he was, picking her up and carrying her, pinning her to the bed, lifting her into his arms and holding her tightly.

  “You have yourself under tight control,” Johan said, shrugging. “It’s when you finally give into that—that Valkyrie you’ve got buried inside of you—that’s when I’ll be afraid.” Chelsea laughed, shaking her head at the image of herself as a Valkyrie.

  “Let’s check in, already,” she said, glancing around the parking lot of yet another hotel. “I feel nervous out here in the open.” Johan nodded and opened the driver’s side door, unfolding himself from the seat as Chelsea unbuckled her seat belt and climbed out of her side. As they walked towards the ornate, opulent entrance of the third—or was it the fourth—hotel that they would be staying at, it occurred to her to wonder at the fact that they had yet to spend the night at a Motel 6, or a Howard Johnson—not even a Hilton. All of their overnight stays had been in impossibly luxurious hotels, in suites that would have boggled her mind if she had ever given serious consideration to places to stay before her life on the run.

  Where was Johan getting the money for the expensive hotels? How was it that he managed to have access to a different, beautiful car whenever they needed to change vehicles? If she had ever imagined what life would be like on the run, Chelsea would have pictured dingy, dirty hotel rooms close to the interstate, places where the front desk clerk didn’t look up as he took the money and handed over the key. Certainly, she would never have imagined a plush, comfortable suite at a hotel that had a spa on the ground floor and a menu of exotic choices, an entrance flanked with burbling, whispering fountains and lush, meticulously-cared-for plantings.

  Chelsea stood back as Johan conducted the business of checking them in, giving a fake name to the desk clerk. She glanced around the lobby, taking in the marble floors, the cedar-lined walls, the real leather of the furniture nestled in cozy, conversational clusters. She had no idea if they were even still in her home state; she had no idea what the name of the city they were in was. “Sweetie,” Johan said calling her attention back to the present. “Did you want to go right up to the room, or browse some of the shops?” Chelsea shrugged.

  “We can come back down later,” she said, giving him a warmer smile than she felt. The clerk handed over the keys—real keys, not just a key card, Chelsea noticed—and went back to whatever he had been doing before they walked in.

  Johan took her hand, giving it a light squeeze, and led her to the elevators. “I told the guy at the desk that since we were only here overnight, we didn’t bring anything in the way of luggage,” he said quietly. “We can go get our things later when the shift changes.” Chelsea nodded, still mulling over the opulence of their surroundings, confused at the strange level of comfort that had come along with her life on the lam. She stepped onto the elevator, not quite able to ignore the lingering touch that Johan’s hand left at her hip as he steered her forward. One thing that she could very easily believe was the amount of time they had spent having sex, over and over again, over the few days she had been away from her daily routine. It was—as Johan had pointed out their first night together—both an excellent form of stress relief and a good way to kill time. And it serves the added bonus of making me compliant, she thought wryly. The possibility that Johan was using sex to keep her in a state of ready belief for whatever he chose to tell her about her predicament had crossed her mind more than once. It was difficult not to believe that someone had your best interests at heart when they could make love to you like a house on fire.

  The elevator chimed, announcing their arrival at the floor that Johan selected, and he took Chelsea’s hand once more, steering her off of the car and down the hallway. “I’ve been looking forward to this all day,” Johan told her lowly, his hand on the small of her back, giving Chelsea a very clear picture of just what he had been thinking about specifically. She smiled in spite of herself, feeling her heartbeat quickening in her chest, her body beginning to heat up. Questions about their lavish lifestyle started to trickle out of her mind as Johan unlocked the door to their suite, leading her through it in qui
ck steps and closing it firmly behind them. Chelsea took just a moment to appreciate the sight of hardwood floors, a small gas-powered fireplace, deep and comfortable living room furniture; she hoped that she would never quite lose the pleased shock she felt at the splendor of the rooms they had at their disposal, even if she questioned the source.

  ****

  Chelsea didn’t quite suppress the yelp of surprise that came out of her lips as Johan reached out for her, pulling her towards him with a strong hand. He brushed his lips against hers, his arms coiling around her waist, lifting Chelsea up off her feet slightly to press against him all over. “Did you know,” he murmured, his lips tickling hers as he spoke, his hot breath tracing against her skin, “that you look absolutely adorable when you’re curled up asleep?” Chelsea smiled, her skin tingling as Johan’s hands slipped and slid along the curves of her body, caressing and teasing her.

  “Have I ever seen you asleep?” she asked; the question seemed distant—there were so many other, more important things to think about somehow. Johan chuckled lowly, sliding his hands underneath the hem of her blouse, making Chelsea shiver as he tickled her ribs. Chelsea draped her arms around Johan’s broad, strong shoulders, arching into him, pressing her body against his.

  “I’m not nearly as cute as you,” Johan told her. His hands moved up to cup her breasts through the fabric of her bra, and Chelsea moaned softly as he gave the mounds of flesh a careful squeeze. Her nipples hardened, straining against the thin, lacy fabric. It was all too easy for Chelsea to remember what Johan looked like naked, the sight of his muscular chest, the flat ridges of his abdomen, deep creases at his hips and the delicious—irresistible—look of his hard cock standing proudly erect.

  “Who—are you—kidding?” Chelsea asked, gasping as Johan’s lips left hers, moving down to the column of her throat. He kissed and nipped at her skin playfully, teeth grazing a spot just underneath her jaw where her pulse fluttered. She trembled, shivering as if she had been plunged into ice water, although Chelsea’s body was only getting hotter and hotter as Johan’s fingers twisted and rolled her nipples, sending jolts of sensation directly to her already-wet pussy. Johan’s tongue swept against her skin, and Chelsea’s breath caught in her throat as she tilted her head back, giving him free and ready access to her sensitive skin.