Something Sinful This Way Comes [McQueen Was My Valley 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) by Karen Mercury

nerd in front of Xandra. Nathan had tried to tell Julian they could take turns staying awake—that Julian could nap now. Overseas, there had always been stories about Nathan eating only one meal and running ten miles a day. People he had never met before in the business whispered that he worked seventeen hours a day, exercised two, and slept five. The truth wasn’t so far from that, and Nathan certainly wanted to protect Xandra, so he told the exhausted warden to take a snooze now.
    But Julian had stayed rooted to his chair, maybe doing some Zen sort of meditation. Nathan knew after mind-numbing hours, days, weeks of surveillance overseas, achieving that Zen state was an art form. Julian had agreed to shower but had returned right to the living room, now with half-closed eyes hidden under his warden’s ball cap.
    Xandra said, “You’re not a regular beat cop, are you?”
    Nathan sighed. He had turned off everything in the room except a CD player that crooned some country-and-western music that was putting even him to sleep. The light from the player flattered Xandra’s delightful features, her long lashes framing her steely gray eyes. Her thigh clad in a tight jean skirt rubbed against his.
    “No. I’m not.”
    “Are you even from Abilene? You’ve got the accent.”
    “Yes. I was stationed in Abilene in the army after graduating West Point.”
    “West Point.” Xandra’s eyes were round and moist. Nathan really wanted nothing more than to take her in his arms again. It wouldn’t be that hard to force Julian to go to bed and lay her back on the couch. Nathan was so hot to go he’d shoot within seconds of entering her. “So you’re…FBI? CIA? Something like that?”
    Nathan grinned wearily. “Something like that.”
    Damn, she was persistent. “A Navy SEAL? Special ops?”
    Nathan put a hand on her thigh to get her to stop bouncing her leg up and down. “Something like that.” Julian must’ve been asleep, his ball cap slouched down over his eyes. If he’d been awake, Nathan knew he’d have something to say about this.
    Twisting her torso so that her nipples touched his chest, Xandra tugged on Nathan’s sleeve. Her voice became even more whispery, purry even. “Oh, Nathan,” she breathed. “You can tell me. Who’m I going to tell? What are you? Where do you work?”
    Her wiles weren’t going to work on him. Of course, the best way to shut her up was to kiss her, and he didn’t want to do that, either. He’d been under much more brutal interrogation in his life, to be sure, than this syrup-voiced belle from Charleston. But for some reason, with Xandra he felt as though his options were more limited. With a goon from the Lord’s Resistance Army he could enact any number of self-defense moves. With Xandra McQueen, he could…hope for a tornado to hit?
    Instead, he murmured, “I work for a private military contractor.” He was quiet in case his own cabin had been bugged. “Listen, you should go to sleep. You need to deal with that tournament tomorrow.”
    But Xandra wouldn’t be deterred from her line of questioning. “So, you do IT stuff for this contractor? That’s how you got that information so fast? But why would an IT guy run around armed?”
    “I do everything,” Nathan admitted. He couldn’t resist lifting a hand to stroke the side of her face, she looked so starry-eyed and innocent. “Black ops, almost entirely in Central Africa. Fighting the bad guys.”
    “Then what are you doing in Utah?”
    “On vacation,” he murmured. When he touched her bottom lip with his thumb, her eyes shimmered. Nathan spent so much time in Africa, he had rarely seen the effect the mention of his job had on women. But Xandra was so slack-jawed with awe she seemed to be sleeping with her eyes open.
    She whispered, “You’re not really entered in this tournament, are you?”
    “No,” he admitted. “But I do like the idea of fishing for a few months.” Then he kissed her.
    She instantly flung her