The Darkest Corner (Gravediggers #1)(76)

"Jesus, Tess," he gasped.

And then he drew back and plunged into her with a force so great the bed creaked beneath them. He couldn't stop himself. He felt like an animal in rutting season. The urge to mate with her was stronger than his self-control.

Her body arched against him, met him thrust for thrust, and he took her mouth in a primal kiss. He felt the texture of her walls change, felt the increase in moisture and heat, and then she moaned, low and long, as she climaxed, pulsing and squeezing around him.

The feel was too much for him to hold back any longer. His hand tightened in her hair and he buried his face in her neck. And then he drove himself into her over and over again. The climax ripped from him, and his back arched as he came with a forcefulness that stole his breath. Tess wasn't letting go. She screamed as she came again, and he felt the earth shake as he collapsed on top of her.

He didn't know how much time had passed. Seconds or hours. But his heart was still pounding and his breath still came in gasps. He tried rolling to the side, but it took some effort. He was too weak.

"Wow," she said, her voice hoarse. "I've always read that sex can be an earth-moving experience, but I always thought it was a figure of speech."

"Don't you see how the bed is tilted?" he asked. "We fucked right through the floor. I told you it needed to be replaced. We're lucky we didn't end up in slumber room one."

She froze against him, but he just pulled her tighter in his arms. "What should we do?"

"We should probably move very carefully and get the hell out of here." She was snuggled up warm against him, though, and he wasn't too inclined to ruin the moment.

"Why do I have a feeling you're not going anywhere?" she asked, narrowing her eyes at him.

He flipped her on the bed, making her squeak as a board creaked beneath them. "We just had a near-death experience. We've got to do something with all that adrenaline. Besides, I've been wanting to taste you again since the first time."



       
         
       
        

"Oh," she said as he kissed his way between her thighs. She moaned and her head dropped back as he suckled her clit. "I suppose we can be less vigorous this time."

"How much do you want to bet?" he asked.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN




Two days later, Tess was fully entrenched in a world she'd only seen on the big screen.

When Deacon had told her they could use her, she wasn't really sure she believed him. They'd shown her the control room underground, and then promptly sat her at a computer. According to Deacon, they'd been looking for communication between the four men-three now-who were coordinating the attack. They'd finally found it.

They'd done some of the work for her. The dialects shared common words. But there were large patches of blank space where they hadn't known what the words were. So for a full day and a good part of the night, she'd been translating the words and short phrases into English. The only problem was the words and phrases didn't make any sense and seemed to be in no discernible order.

"It's code," Dante said. "See here, the word mat, or 'mother' once translated, is used several times throughout each of these paragraphs. It's more than likely a substitute for and or the."

"Oh, cool," she said, seeing the pattern of several words now that she knew what to look for.

"It's a different form, but still similar to the coding used during World War II," Deacon said. "I doubt they were worried about the simplicity of the code. It was more than likely used as a secondary barrier of communication to the intended recipients. The first barrier is the hardest to break, and that's the language. None of these words," he said, pointing out several in the documents, "are words that are traditionally used in the Russian language. It's almost like a slang. It's as much of a difference as there is between Ukrainian and Russian. Only those deeply rooted in the Russian Mafiya would be able to translate the passages enough to decipher the code."

"I'll start running it through a deciphering program and see what we come up with," Dante said. "It shouldn't take too long. It looks like a fairly straightforward pattern."

"They're bouncing a false location through satellite," Colin said. He sat behind a large radar screen on the wall and used touch screen to zero in on the coordinates. "That's how we pulled their communication. They had it bouncing all over the place before we pinned it down. They're doing the same thing with location. Or at least trying to, but I chased it down. That tanker is more than fifty miles north of where they're supposed to be. They've hovering just on the edge of U.S. waters, ready to move when they're given the orders. If we'd HALO jumped with the coordinates we got from the satellite imaging, we'd have ended up in the middle of the Bering Sea. Even with neoprene suits we would've been fighting hypothermia by the time the Zodiac found us."