But the temptation was great.
He really wanted to know who this Jack was.
Of course, Misha had to remind himself, he didn’t know anything about her personal life. He knew how much money she had in certain accounts, he had found most of her property (he thought), and he knew how she made her living. But he had no idea who her friends were, if she even had any friends, and he had no idea how many lovers she’d had (clearly she’d had a few) and how many times she’d been married, if she had ever been.
Or even if she was married now.
He felt a chill despite his clothes. He was barefoot. He wanted to track down his boots, but they were in her comfortable office, and he suspected that was where she was talking to this Jack.
Whom Misha was determined not to be jealous of.
What an interesting emotion. It made him feel a little out of control and crazy, rather like he felt around Rikki herself.
Then Rikki slipped in the bedroom door. Her entire face was lit up, as if something had ignited inside her. Misha had never seen that expression before, he had never seen her look so… happy.
And she did. She looked ecstatic.
After talking with a man named Jack.
Whom she didn’t want Misha to know anything about.
She grinned, then tweaked the collar of his shirt. “You’re dressed.”
“Not quite.” He sounded surly. He felt surly.
“Well, I’m not,” she said and untied her robe. She started to shake it off, but he caught her, put the robe back on her shoulders, and tied it shut.
Tight.
He didn’t want to be distracted.
“Who is Jack?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrows, and then her grin got wider. “You’re jealous.”
“I am not,” he said. “I just want to know who Jack is.”
“You are actually jealous,” she said with a laugh in her voice. “Wow.”
“I am not jealous,” he said, his voice flat. She was making him angry. “I don’t believe in jealousy.”
“A man who kills for a living who doesn’t believe in jealousy. What happens, does the Guild screen all your potential hires? Half of my requests are because of some jealous lover somewhere.”
“And you see that as a sign of love?” Misha asked, crossing his arms.
Her eyes were twinkling. There was no reason for her eyes to twinkle. No reason at all.
“No,” she said. “It’s not love. But it does mean you care.”
He almost denied it. Then he stopped himself. He did care. That was part of the problem. He cared too much.
“I’m going to get us food,” he said.
She put a hand on his arm, stopping him. The smile was gone from her face, although she still looked too happy for his tastes.
“I grew up with Jack,” she said.
“You didn’t have siblings,” Misha said.
Her lips twisted just a little, as if she was holding back a smile. “I didn’t. And it’s amazing you know that.”
“Mother and I had to learn everything about you and your father,” he said primly. God, he sounded like a tight-assed little prick. He wanted to shake the mood, pretend he didn’t care, but he did.
He did.
“And,” she said, her entire expression serious now, “I met Jack after.”
Misha’s gaze met hers.
“He was younger than me. I used to beat up anyone who beat him up, not that you’d believe it if you saw him now.”
Misha waited. Someone she had loved her entire adult life then. Someone called Jack.
“We’re family, Jack and me,” she said softly. “We’re all we’ve ever had. And we’re not lovers.”
Misha’s heart rose as she said that. He didn’t want it to, but it did. He was relieved to hear it, even though he kept his expression calm. (He hoped he kept his expression calm.)
“I didn’t say you were lovers,” he said.
“But you thought it.” Her grin had returned. “And it made you jealous.”
He took a deep breath. He was going to ignore the jealousy thing. “It made me realize how little I know about you.”
“You know all about me,” she said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know if you’re in a relationship, I don’t know if you’ve had children, I don’t know who you associate with or what you’re doing with your life, what your hopes and dreams are, whether or not you’re happy with your work or if you feel you’re not qualified for anything else…”
He made himself stop talking. His face flushed. He had revealed too much of himself already. And maybe he was jealous. Someone had spent years with her, years he could have spent with her.
What would their lives have been like if he had stayed with her in the hospital and refused to go with his mother, refused to go back to the Guild? Who would he have been then?
She was watching his face as if it told her something important.
“To answer your questions,” she said softly, “I’ve never been in a committed relationship. I don’t have children, which I thought you would have figured out given how intimately you know part of me.”
“Women do repair work now,” he said.
She nodded. “Some women,” she said. “I wouldn’t be one of them. If I thought I was suited to having children. Which I am not. Children and this profession do not mix.”
How well he knew that. His mother had no idea what to do with him once she became his guardian. She tried. He had to give her that. She did her very best. But she was cold, shut off, and not that interested in raising a child, particularly a boy who was angry and frightened and more than a little out of control.
“Let’s see,” Rikki said. “Your other questions. Mostly, I keep my own company. I have some friends, but not close ones, except Jack, who is, as I explained, family. Hopes? Dreams? They’re for other people. And I like my work. Not all parts of it. But I feel like I’m doing something important, when I have the right target, someone who needs to go away forever. I’m rather passionate about the work, which takes most of my focus, even if I only take a few jobs per year.”
He studied her face. She sounded like him. She sounded just like him.
“I don’t know your hopes and dreams either, or if you even like the family business,” Rikki said. “I know less about you than you do about me.”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t. You know my history.”
“But not your present,” she said.
He nodded once, took her hand, and cupped it in his. “One serious relationship when I was too young to know better. It ended badly a decade ago. No children. I don’t want them. If I tried to raise them, I’d be worse at it than my mother. And as hard as she tried, she sucked at parenting.”
Rikki’s gaze held his. The look of fascination in her dark eyes was mesmerizing.
“Hopes, dreams,” he said, “I don’t believe in them.”
“Like you don’t believe in jealousy?” she asked.
He shrugged. “But I love my work. And I love the Guild. It’s my home, and my family. And I’m offended that it’s being threatened.”
“Only your leader is being threatened.”
“If your Jack was being threatened, wouldn’t you see that as a threat against you too?”
She frowned just a little as she considered this.
“Yes,” she said simply, and in that moment, he knew just how deadly she could be. He could tell, just from the tone, that if someone harmed her good friend, she would hunt that person down and kill him brutally, with no remorse.
“So,” he said. “That’s me. That’s all I am.”
“And so much more,” she said and leaned into him. “Except every time I come across you, you’re wearing clothes.”
She unbuttoned his shirt and slid it off his shoulders. Then she untied her robe. It fell open. She undid his pants, slowly, and took his already hard penis in her hand.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she said, “except with me.”
Then she used his penis as if it were a leash, and led him back to bed.
“You make me crazy,” he said softly as he took off his pants. Her hand still held him. She lay back, spread her legs, and pulled him—gently—inside her.
Then she grinned at him. “You make me crazy too,” she said and proceeded to prove just how crazy she could get.
Misha was in the shower when the next ping occurred. Rikki was putting the finishing touches on lunch. She looked at a nearby tablet, thinking Jack was contacting her again. The conversation had ended badly, and he probably wanted to touch base.
But it wasn’t Jack. The contact came from the client. She picked up the tablet and leaned on the counter, looking at the information the client had sent.
The information made her stomach turn—and would have, even if she hadn’t known who the target was. On her own, without knowledge, Rikki would have turned this case down.
The client was too eager.
And she knew that because of only one thing:
The client didn’t ask her why she had turned down the job. The client had presumed to know the reason. And the client had offered her five times the original fee.
She sighed. Jobs she had taken in the past that offered more than the original fee—without prompting by her—always caused trouble. And more than once would have gotten her in trouble with the laws of the various places she worked, if she hadn’t been more cautious than usual with those jobs.
Her fingers itched. She wanted to turn this thing down.
But she set down the tablet and waited for Misha.
Even though she knew what he was going to say. He was going to tell her to take the job so that they could track the client.
She set the tablet down. The question was one of ethics. Hers. Did she take a contract she had no intention of fulfilling? Did she help the Guild when she wasn’t even sure if Misha was telling her the truth about this potential target?
But when had he lied to her? He hadn’t. He hadn’t been lying to her at all. Damn. This trust thing was hard. No. It was nearly impossible. She had never done it before and she didn’t know how to do it now.
She turned back to the food prep. She had made a fruit salad and taken some of the freshly baked bread that one of the robots had brought back from the market. She carried plates into the dining room, and then brought in some iced tea.
By then, she heard the shower shut off.
She wished that ping had never come back. Because this would be a test of this fledgling relationship. She didn’t want to hand control of her business over to anyone and yet if she went through with finding this client, she would lose control, at least in the short term.
Not that she needed another job. She had turned two of the others down as well, and told the other two to contact her again in six months if they hadn’t found someone else to do the job. None of those jobs had looked interesting, and the two she had turned down had been—irony of ironies—jealousy-based relationship assassinations, something she always stayed far away from.
“You look thoughtful,” Misha said.
She turned. He was standing in the doorway behind her. He was barefoot and his hair was still damp. He wore loose trousers and an open shirt. The unfinished look made him seem much younger, and very vulnerable.
“The client came back,” she said.
“That was fast,” he said. “Did he want to know why you had turned the job down?”
She shook her head. “He offered five times the original fee.”
Misha straightened just a little. But that movement was enough to add years and professionalism to him. He no longer seemed young and vulnerable. Now he looked like a man no one ever messed with, a man no one got near when he got angry.
“How do you read that?” he asked in a tone that told her he already had an answer to his own question.
“If I were on my own, I wouldn’t take the job,” she said.
His eyes became steely. “Did you turn it down?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t respond at all.”
“Good,” he said. “How long do you think you can string the client along?”
“Not long,” she said. “It took him less than twenty-four hours to get back to me.”
Misha nodded. He hadn’t moved from his spot near the door. She was beginning to understand him. He kept his distance when they talked business so he could maintain his concentration.
He was as distracted by her as she was by him.
“You know what I’m going to ask, don’t you?” he said.
Two days ago, she would have thought his tone cold. But it wasn’t. It was cautious, as devoid of his personality as he could make it.
And she actually appreciated the professionalism. She wanted to keep the distance too right now.
(Actually, she wanted to strip off his clothes, and take him back to bed. But she forced that thought out of her mind. They could only make love so much. Right?)
“Rikki?” he asked.
She blinked, realizing that despite her best intentions, she was thinking about how she loved to run her hand along the muscles in his back, and made herself focus.
“You’re going to ask me to take the job,” she said, keeping her tone neutral as well.