Larger Than Life by Alison Kent (read the beginning after the end novel .txt) 📕

"It doesn't matter." All that mattered was that she wanted to smile for absolutely no reason.

"It matters to me." He pulled one hand from beneath hers, reached up and drew the backs of his fingers along her hairline. "I've been involved in a lot of things no one could ever prove I knew a bloody thing about. Like I said, I'm not a very nice man. But that doesn't mean I'm an unfeeling ass."

"Ass." She paused, continued to fight the smile. "Is this that horse-size thing again, because—"

He cut her off with a kiss. He cupped the back of her head, pulled her forward, and kissed her. For a minute, it didn't even occur to her to close her eyes. She watched his lashes flutter, felt the press of his tongue to the seam of her lips. She didn't give it another thought. She simply opened her mouth.

He tasted like the sandwich she'd made him, like she wanted him when she shouldn't, like a little bit more would never be enough, like he was hers. Hardly fair that he'd give her that after telling her that he wasn't a very nice man. She'd known her share of those, yet none of them had come close to offering her this.

His tongue slid over hers, tangled with hers, boldly stroked in and out of her mouth. She gripped his fingers tighter and slanted her head, giving him back the same. Oh, how she wanted this. How right it felt, he felt. How perfectly he kissed. How perfectly he fit. How soft were his lips. How strong his tongue.

Never in her life had she felt the pull of a man from a contact that was so simple while being so goddamn complex. And then he was gone. He abandoned her mouth, nuzzled his nose to hers, his breath warm as he sighed and said, "Go to bed, Neva. I'll clean up here."

His offer was so sweetly made and so welcome that she accepted. She left the kitchen, took his kiss with her to bed, and slept like she was somebody's baby.

Eight

There wasn't a doubt in Mick's mind that the boy involved with Liberty Mitchell had run into a spate of bad luck at the hands of Spectra IT. He wasn't sure he could do anything toward finding Jase Bremmer without giving himself away. But he knew exactly who to call.

He cleaned up the kitchen as promised. It wasn't hard, it didn't take long, and it shouldn't have, considering he knew what he was doing. After all, he'd spent plenty of time on kitchen detail, working his way around the world so as not to appear he was living on Uncle Sam's dime. Taxpayers wouldn't like the idea that they financed murder along with Medicare.

The undeniable thing of it was that there were individuals in need of elimination, and the government called on men trained at their expense by their military to perform these tasks for the greater good. Somewhere along the line, however, what was good for the goose, the gander, and the world as a whole ended up turning the man into a monster.

That's where Mick had been, growing horns and fangs, claws and scales, when Hank Smithson had found him and saved him from an abominably ugly fate that would've been worse than death. Since then, Mick had leaned on the SG-5 team anytime he felt himself sinking into that same bloody pit, drowning, dying, losing everything that had once made him human, that reminded him there was a value to life.

At the moment, however, his imperative need to get to Hank or to one of his partners wasn't about the muck rising up and threatening to suck him back down. Right now what he needed was to relay what he suspected about Spectra's money train pulling out, and to do so without sharing information on what he'd been through, where he was staying, or the woman who'd so selflessly taken him in.

He didn't have time to examine why keeping Neva's existence to himself was so vital. He only knew that it was. Knew that since meeting her, since knowing her, since spending the night on her porch talking about fudge, since kissing her sweet coffee-cake-flavored mouth, the muck hadn't stirred once beneath his feet. He felt warm and safe and cared for, none of which he understood, all of which he was enjoying way too bloody much for his own bloody good.

After a stop in the guest room for his blue jeans and boots and to pop another pill, and a half second taken to listen for her Footsteps in the room above, he headed out the back door of Neva's kitchen and around the side of the house where earlier he'd parked his Rover next to her truck. FM, who'd been dozing under the vehicle's front fender, got to his feet, shook off loose fur and dust, and the rest of his sleep.

"We're not going anywhere, dog," Mick said in a low voice, using the bright light of the full moon to navigate by. "So don't be smiling and tripping over yourself like you think we are." FM's only response was to smile wider, trip over himself even more, at which Mick couldn't help but grin and murmur, "Stupid mutt."

After digging into his pocket for his key fob, he hit the remote lock, opened the rear cargo door, and pulled back a square of carpet—a square custom-fitted to cover the panel hiding his electronically secured storage space. He punched the code into the miniature keypad, and the lock released with a soft vacuum whoosh.

Losing his satellite phone to the Spectra goons had been a pain in the ass, though not the end of the world. The equipment inside the Rover's compartment would also put him in contact with the ops center. Unfortunately, he mused, locking the hinges of the panel to view the monitor on the underside, he was a whole lot better at talking