Free The Mercenary by Katherine Garbera

didn’t know what it stemmed from.
    “Just calling it like I see it,” he said. He walked back over to her and tipped her head up toward his. “I don’t want you to regret anything, Olivia.”
    There it was again—the way he touched her. “I can live with the consequences of my actions.”
    “Can you?”
    “Yes,” she said. Then to prove that she could, she went up on tiptoe and kissed him.
     
    Kirk pulled Olivia more fully into his arms, tilting his head to the side and opening his mouth over hers. She held on to his shoulders as he kissed her.
    He had wanted to do this since the moment he’d looked into those big wide blue eyes of hers. And now that he had her in his arms, he wasn’t in a hurry to let her go or to rush this kiss.
    She was a woman to be savored, and that was exactly what he did. He swept his hands over her delicate shoulders and down her shoulder blades, simply enjoying the womanly feel of her in his arms.
    His meditation had been for hell. All he’d concentrated on was her. She was a distraction and that was the one thing he couldn’t afford. Distracted men were dead, and Kirk hadn’t survived as long as he had by doing stupid things like picturing her in the shower naked. Imagining her soapy hands moving slowly over her body. He had been half tempted to go up the stairs and wait for her in her bedroom, but he’d resisted.
    Ha! Barely. And now here he was with her mouth under his and her silky body pressed close to his, but not close enough. The layers of clothing separating their bodies frustrated him.
    He slid his hand under the hem of her blouse just at her waist and felt her skin. It was what he’d wanted and she shifted in his arms, saying his name on a sigh. He kissed her again, sucking her lower lip into his mouth to taste her.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Stopping.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I’m on duty right now. And keeping you safe is more important than…anything else.”
    She nodded. “Thank you. I think I’m afraid of being alone.”
    “I’m here.”
    She bit her lower lip and then looked up at him. “Promise?”
    “Yes. Now where is the stuff you took from Lambert’s desk?”
    She bent over and picked up the papers and files off the floor. “Here it is. It might be nothing, but he had it locked up and hid the key so I think it must be important to him.”
    “I’d reckon it is. I’m not going to pretend I know what any of this stuff is, but we have a guy on our team who can put everything in the computer and make sense of it.”
    “That’s great. I think I can help with this,” she said, pulling a small leather wallet from the pile.
    “What is it?”
    “An account book for a Swiss bank account. I didn’t know he had a Swiss accountant,” she said.
    “There seems to be a lot about that man you didn’t know.”
    “You’re right. The hard part is adjusting to the fact that the man I was about to marry could betray me so deeply.”
    “Don’t take it personally,” Kirk said. Olivia didn’t strike him as the kind of woman that a man would betray. Not normally, so he could only suspect that Ray Lambert had always led two lives and he had asked Olivia to marry him to legitimatize his second life.
    “I guess so. I mean I didn’t know much about him beyond what he told me. I’m sorry about kissing you the way I did when I came downstairs,” she said. “I needed to forget and…”
    “Don’t worry about it,” he said, sifting through the papers on the table.
    A sheen of tears appeared in her eyes. “I just don’t feel safe anymore. I’ve always had this innate belief that things were going to work out and now that’s gone and I don’t know how to cope. It’s not fair of me to lean on you this way, but I don’t know what else to do.”
    “Trust me,” he said.
    She was shaking and on the verge of losing it again. If it had been anyone else he would have walked away and let her deal with it on her own, but this woman was different.
    He pulled