The Storm That Is Sterling by Lisa Renee Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

stiffened at the words, despite his approval. They were being taped, watched, and listened to, and her statement was the kind that would get them both killed or thrown into the sex camps.
    She was fired up, angry. “I’m going to destroy—”
    Sterling reacted before she could finish her statement, doing exactly what he knew Adam would expect him to do, but doing it for himself with his own intentions. He closed the distance between himself and Becca, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her to shut her up. No. He kissed her because he had to, because every fiber of his being needed to feel her next to him, to claim her in a way he didn’t try to analyze. His tongue parted her lips, brushing past her teeth, to delve deeper. She moaned and melted into him, sliding her arms around his neck, rising to her toes to taste him.
    “Sterling,” she whispered.
    Possessiveness flared inside him like nothing he’d ever felt before. If anyone tried to touch her—Adam, Tad, or anyone else in this damnable place, he’d kill them. She was his to protect, his to save… his.
    ***
     
    She had cancer. She didn’t have cancer. She was now Adam’s slave, kept alive by ICE. It was all a roller-coaster ride of emotions, and while Becca knew she should resist Sterling, knew she should be cautious about trusting him, she couldn’t make herself. He was alive when she’d been certain he was dead, and she needed to feel him, to convince herself he was real.
    To escape the nightmare of the past day, the past months of her life. And kissing him was good, so good, the escape she had desperately craved for months now, even before he showed up on her doorstep. And she did trust him… on some core level she trusted Sterling .
    It’s why she’d let him in her house, why she was able to lose herself in the mindless bliss of his lips, his tongue, the blessed warmth of his powerful body pressed to hers. There was no cancer, no drug addiction, no monster with grand ideas of ruling the world, and no Tad. There was just this moment in time with Sterling, with his hand sliding over her waist, her hip. Becca moaned as his palm rounded her backside, and he lifted her. Still kissing him, she wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck.
    She barely remembered him walking, carrying her, nor how she found herself sitting on the bathroom sink. Bathroom sink? On some level that was an odd choice of locations, but Sterling’s lips were traveling her jaw, her neck, driving her wild.
    “Cameras and recording devices,” he whispered. She sucked in a breath, tensed at the implications, but his mouth was on hers again. His tongue stroked hers with one last long caress before his hand ran down her hair, and he stepped away, yanking back the shower curtain and turning on the water.
    The absence of his touch left her suddenly cold, the memory of ICE sliding down her throat a vivid, immediate memory. Tension curled in her chest and spread through her body, her fingers closing around the edges of the vanity beneath her. She was addicted to ICE, a drug that might have who knew what side effects on those who used it, even if they were safely weaned off of it.
    Sterling returned to stand in front of her, pressing his hands to the vanity at her side. The other went to her face, his fingers gliding over her cheek, gently drawing her eyes to his. “We’re getting out of here,” he said. “Both of us alive and well.” He tilted his head, near her ear. “They need to believe we are doing something other than talking.” He reached up and turned out the light.
    “What are you doing?” Becca asked, stiffening both from the shock of complete darkness, and the idea that his kisses had been nothing more than a cover story.
    “Letting their imaginations run wild,” he explained. “And I can hear you thinking, Becca. No, I didn’t kiss you just for a cover. I’ve wanted to kiss you since the day I met you in that library fourteen years ago. And now that