Authors: Linda Howard
He did a one-shoulder shrug. “To take you to lunch. Nothing more.”
Like she believed that for a single minute. “Yeah, right. You probably don’t breathe without an ulterior motive.”
“Staying alive is all.” He lifted his head, sniffing the air. “Is the coffee fresh?”
“Fairly.” She checked the time. She’d napped longer than she’d thought. “It’s about an hour old, so it should still be good.” She could use more coffee herself, so she got up and went into the kitchen, taking her cup with her. “How do you take yours?” she called as she opened the cabinet door and reached for another cup, raising her voice so he could hear her in the living room.
“Black,” he said right behind her, and she jumped, almost dropping the cup. He reached out to catch it, his hand closing around hers to steady her grip. Immediately, she pulled out of his grasp and lifted the coffeepot from the warmer, filling both their cups.
“Make some noise when you walk,” she finally said flatly.
“I could whistle.”
“Whatever. Just don’t sneak up on me.” She was more unnerved than she wanted him to see, because the moment had reminded her vividly of when he came up behind her on the penthouse balcony and had sex with her right there, not even turning her around to kiss her. At the time, he couldn’t have made it plainer that she was nothing but a piece of ass to him, yet she’d let herself be seduced by sheer pleasure, and over the course of the afternoon built it up in her mind until she thought he would actually take her with him. She still felt scalded by the humiliation of his rejection.
She set down the cup and took a slow, steadying breath. “I think you should leave,” she said baldly. “I need you to leave.”
“Because I kissed you last night?” His gaze was shrewd as he studied her.
“Because you are who you are and I am who I am. I know what I was before, but since the wreck I’ve been alone—” Hell, he knew that; he’d been keeping tabs on her all this time. “And I think being alone is what’s best for me. I don’t make good decisions when it comes to men. Sad, but true.”
“I’m not asking you to make any decision. You have to eat, don’t you? Let’s go to lunch. Or breakfast. We can always go to a pancake restaurant.” His tone was mild and undemanding, and if she hadn’t been on her guard she might have been lulled into a false sense of safety. How dangerous could a pancake restaurant be? The problem was, there was no such thing as being safe with this man, at least not from him, and the reason for that lay as much within herself as it did with him.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to go anywhere with you.”
“If you do, I’ll answer any question you ask.”
She froze, furious with herself because the offer was too tempting to resist, and he knew it. Intellectually she knew she should stay far, far away from him, but let him dangle the opportunity to find out anything she wanted about him and she was all over it like a hawk on a bunny rabbit. He watched her with amusement glittering in his eyes and quirking the corners of his mouth, and he was so damned attractive like that, his guard down and his normally blank expression banished, that she actually quivered from the strength of his pull. Still, she tried to hold the line. “I don’t want to know anything about you.”
“Sure you do, like how I got the tattoo on my ass.”
“You don’t have a tattoo on your ass!” she snapped, glaring at him. She’d seen his ass, and as fine as it was she hadn’t been struck blind; she’d have noticed a tattoo.
He began unbuckling his belt.
“Don’t do that!” she said, alarmed. “You don’t have to—”
His lean fingers grasped the tab of his zipper, pulled it down.
Andie lost the thread of what she was saying.
He turned around, hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans, and worked them down. His shirttail drooped over the round, muscled curves; he reached behind himself to pull up his shirt and there it was, high on the right cheek, some sort of abstract design that looked like a weird, curly maze. Her fingers twitched from a sudden, intense need to reach out and touch him, not because of the tattoo but because she wanted to feel the shape and coolness of his ass under her hands again.
She clenched her hands into fists and tried to sound unperturbed. “Strange design. What does it mean?”
He pulled up his pants and tucked his shirttail inside, turning back to face her as he zipped and buckled, his gaze amused. “I’ll tell you over food.”
“Damn it,” she snarled, whirling on her heel, and she went to the bedroom to get ready.
She was out in ten minutes, having done nothing more than brush her teeth and hair and exchange her pajamas for jeans and a pullover shirt with only one button left open at her throat because she didn’t do low-cut anything now, the scar on her chest a constant reminder that things were different. She didn’t bother with even minimum makeup, because she wasn’t trying to impress him or anyone else. Shoving her feet into a pair of flip-flops, she looked down at her unpainted toenails and gave a little snort. Her appearance was the polar opposite from the way she’d looked when Rafael gave her to him, but if he didn’t like it, then he could kiss her ass and leave.
He smiled when he saw her, actually honest-to-God smiled. “You’re so damn pretty,” he said.
The compliment was so unexpected, so at odds with what she’d just been thinking, that she skidded to a stop, her mouth falling open in shock. “I, uh, thank you. But…are you blind?”
“No, I’m not,” he answered as seriously as if the question hadn’t been rhetorical. He reached out and touched her hair. “I kind of miss the curls, but I like the color. You’re not as flashy now, not as brittle. That’s good. Your mouth still…never mind.”
“Never mind, what?” He was playing her like a hooked fish. She knew it, but that didn’t make any difference. What about her mouth? She shouldn’t ask because the answer had to be sexual and she didn’t want to go there, but…what about her mouth?
“I’ll tell you over food,” he said.
It wasn’t until they were sitting in a booth in one of the area IHOPs, menus in hand and coffee steaming in front of them, that she realized he’d said he would answer any question, but not that he’d answer honestly. Annoyed with herself for not thinking of that catch earlier, she slapped the menu down on the table and gave him a frustrated glare. “Answering any question is one thing, but will you tell the truth?”
“Of course,” he said easily, so easily that she knew she’d been had.
“You’re lying.”
He put his own menu down. “Andie, think about it. What do I have to hide from you? Or you from me?”
“How would I know? If I knew everything about you, then I wouldn’t need to ask any questions, now would I?”
“Good point.”
He smiled at her. She wished he would stop doing that. When he smiled, she forgot he was a hired killer, forgot that ice water ran in his veins, and that by walking away from her he’d hurt her more than any man ever did. But thinking about him walking away also made her think about the tattoo on his ass, and how she could possibly have missed it.
“So, what does the design of your tattoo mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s a temporary kid’s tattoo. I put it on this morning.”
She was in the middle of taking a sip of coffee and she choked, clapping her hand over her mouth and nose and trying not to spray coffee all over the table. As soon as she managed to swallow, she began laughing at how adroitly he’d baited her into doing what he wanted. “That’s cheating, and I fell for it. I knew you didn’t have a tattoo.”
The waitress sailed up, pad and pen ready. “You guys decide what you want?”
Andie ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, and Simon went for the same thing except with added hash browns. As soon as they were alone again, she set her cup down so she wouldn’t embarrass herself by snorting coffee if he had any other surprises tucked up his sleeve, or in his pants.
There were a lot of questions she wanted to ask him, but some she didn’t dare because she wasn’t certain she wanted to hear the answers. Now that she thought about it, being given the power to ask any question she wanted, and get an answer, was a bit daunting. It would be daunting with anyone, but with this man she felt as if she were poking a tiger with a stick, which, even with the tiger’s permission, could be a dangerous activity.
She started with the easy stuff, for her own sake. “How old are you?”
His brows lifted a little in surprise at her choice of question. “Thirty-five.”
“Your birthday?”
“November first.”
She fell silent. She wanted to know his real last name, but maybe that was something she was better off leaving alone. His secrets were darker than hers, the boundaries that defined him more violent and starkly drawn.
“That’s it?” he asked, when no further questions came at him. “You wanted to know how old I am and when I was born?”
“No, that isn’t it. This is harder than I expected.”
“Do you want to know how old I was the first time I killed someone?”
“No.” She hastily looked around to see if anyone had overheard him, but his voice was too low to carry and no one was giving them horrified looks.
“Seventeen,” he continued relentlessly. “I discovered I have a natural talent for wet work. I gave it up last year, though, after sitting in a hospital chapel and crying because I had just stood outside your hospital room and listened to you talking to your nurse, and I knew you were not only alive but somehow whole. I haven’t taken a job since.”
DAMN HIM, DAMN HIM, DAMN HIM.
Andie cursed him for the next two days, not only because she didn’t see him at all even though somehow she knew he was still there, keeping watch, but because, sitting in that booth at the IHOP and listening to him expose his soul, she’d fallen in love with him. Of all the ill-advised things she’d done in her life, falling in love with a hit man, even a retired one, had to top the scale. If she had ever needed verification that she should stay far, far away from any romantic relationship because she was incapable of making a good decision when it came to picking out a man, there it was, proof positive.
She hadn’t cried, though she’d wanted to. He’d made his heartbreaking confession so calmly, in such a matter-of-fact tone, that he’d enabled her to keep her composure, and after a while she’d been able to ask more questions, such as where he was from (he was born on an army base in Germany) and if he had any family (he was an only child, and both his parents were dead). Even if he’d had any close family, she thought, he would still have chosen to be alone. She’d sailed alone herself, so she knew what it was to confide in no one, to trust no one. She still didn’t trust, at least not very much. She had made no close friends since settling here in K.C., which was really pitiful, but on this level she completely understood him.
He was atypical in a lot of ways. He didn’t care for professional sports of any kind, which also made sense; team sports wouldn’t appeal to a loner. He didn’t have a favorite color, and he didn’t like pie. Maybe he saw preferences as weaknesses that could be used against him and he’d deliberately disassociated himself from many of the likes and dislikes that people used to define themselves and their boundaries; maybe he had always had that distance between himself and everyone else.
Yet he had reached out to her, more than once. On the afternoon they’d shared, he’d seen how frightened she was, and he’d reassured her with tenderness, seduced her with pleasure. He’d made love to her, though at the time neither of them had seen it that way. When she’d had the accident, he had stayed with her as she died, watched over her until someone else could come.
She never dreamed about the accident, seldom visited her vague memories of dying. First came that incredible light, somehow both pure and vivid, and then she’d been in that wonderful place. Her recall of both was detailed down to scents and textures, but what came between those two happenings was sketchy and out of focus. Maybe it was because she was sitting across from him, staring at his face and making memories, that abruptly she saw the scene as clearly as if it were taking place in front of her eyes. In her mind she heard him whisper “God, sweetheart,” and saw him touch her hair. She watched him wait with her. Looking directly at her own body was nearly impossible, as if there were some sort of shield around her, but she could see him oh so clearly. She could see the anguish he struggled to control, the pain he could barely acknowledge.
Like a bolt once more going through her chest, she knew why he’d looked up the newspaper accounts of her accident. He had wanted to find out where she was buried, so he could put flowers on her grave.