Authors: Amber Bardan
Heat flowed from his palms to my skin.
He poured into me—the clean taste of his tongue—the musky scent of him—the spice of his breath filled my lungs.
All Haithem. Everything Haithem.
Deep, slow plunges of his tongue and soft, consuming drags of his lips. Every movement pulled at my chest. Every stroke seeped a sharp, bitter joy all the way to my bones.
He kissed me forever, overrode every system in my body so my senses only recognized him. Only the wet sounds of our kiss. Only the sight of him when I opened my eyes.
He released me.
I fell back. The sky spun. Haithem touched his mouth with his fingertips. A line creased between his eyebrows. I watched every movement of his features.
I could spend days staring at him.
He dropped his hand and met my gaze.
A weight settled in my throat.
I want you.
I tried to swallow that lump. Pretend I only wanted him between my legs.
“You shouldn’t look at me that way.”
“What way?” I whispered.
But I could feel it—the glossy veil covering my eyes, the droop of my lids.
“Like you’re falling for me.” He cupped my cheek and leaned in. “That would be very bad for you.”
A chill brushed over me.
I wasn’t falling for him. No way. He just gave me clit-tingles.
And maybe some other tingles.
A hopeless ball of insecurity ricocheted through me. Why would it be bad? Wasn’t I enough? Is that why he said that?
“Pfft, you’re the one who needs to be careful,” I said, and grabbed a handful of his T-shirt. “You’re the one falling for me.”
His eyes darkened. “You want that even less,” he said, his voice thick and rough. “It’d be so much worse.”
I let go. “Why?”
He stood, brushing off my question as easily as he brushed the sand of his shorts, then held out his hand to me. “Come on, there’s one more thing I want to do.”
We got back into the speedboat and took off. Haithem stopped not far out from the island.
“What are we doing?” I adjusted my life jacket.
“Catching our dinner.” He looked at me.
I suddenly wanted to offer myself up as main course.
He produced a fishing rod, box and bucket from under a seat. “You fished before?”
“Yeah, sometimes Dad used to let me tag along when he took Josh.”
He attached a lure to the line. “And now?”
“Now he goes with his mates.” I sat down and gazed at the horizon. “It’s boy time or something.” I waved my hand.
“Do you enjoy fishing?”
I glanced back at Haithem. He stood with the fishing rod beside him, looking like a hunter.
“Actually, touching slimy things isn’t my favorite. But I still put in the effort when I went out with them.”
“Want a turn?” He held out the rod. “I won’t make you touch anything slimy.”
He winked. My heart jumped.
“I’m happy to watch.”
Haithem cast the line. His biceps contracted.
Yep, the view was fine.
“What job were you applying for the day I met you?”
For an instant every part of my being went still. “You mean there’s something you don’t know?”
“Let’s just keep that between us,” he said, and the line went tight. Trust Haithem to catch something the moment his hook entered the water.
He reeled the line in. The fish never stood a chance.
He’d been so nice. This felt so nice. But then I bet the lure that fish took looked nice, too. My tongue tasted salty, like maybe I’d swallowed more seawater than I thought before. I’d learned one thing about him today but it was not enough. There was more to Haithem I’d yet to see.
I wouldn’t push to see it now. “Copyediting.”
He dragged a two-foot squid into the boat and dumped it in the bucket, and then he removed the lure.
“Hmm.”
I sat forward. My ribs constricted over my organs. Did he know? “Hmm, what?”
“I would’ve taken you for something more creative.” He cast the line back into the water. “Literature, art, theater studies, something like that.”
My stomach dipped.
Theater studies.
Again, so spot-on. I’d dreamed of playwriting. “My parents encouraged me to do something that would result in gainful employment.”
He wiggled the fishing rod but looked at me over his shoulder. “What did you want?”
I looked out at the water.
So many things.
Haithem
C
ONTROL
. I
NEEDED
it back.
I sat at my desk and poured a whiskey. Drink muddles the mind, and I preferred mine clear. Yet, short of a sledgehammer, it was the closest I could come to numbing the pain.
I wasn’t sure what she’d tell me. But that wasn’t it. How could someone so selfless work for an organization as evil as the one after me?
I downed a gulp of whiskey, and let it singe the lining off my stomach.
But then they usually let recruits think they were something else—black ops intelligence, or some noble shit like that.
She’d have been so vulnerable. So ripe for picking. The vile assholes would have known exactly how to get to her.
I rotated the glass on the desk.
It didn’t matter. I had to shut it down. Couldn’t let her get to me. Had to stop thinking about her face. Her voice. Her body. The way my heart had squeezed when she’d told me her tale. The way my own story started to rush out. Whatever they’d used to get to her, I’d use better—more.
Worse
.
I took a mouthful of whiskey and held it in on my tongue.
I could have everything. Take her heart and her loyalty. Give her what she longed for most. The whiskey numbed my mouth, and I swallowed, then walked to the window and looked out at the deck.
And I’d enjoy every moment of it.
She slept, curled like a kitten in the last of the sunlight.
My abdomen tightened.
The taste of her pussy hadn’t left my mouth since the moment she’d let me between her thighs. Let my tongue in her cunt. I already knew the way she liked her clit stroked. I knew the way her breath sounded just before she was about to come and I knew the noises she made when she did. It wouldn’t be difficult to slip under her defenses, get her where she was soft and weak—where she hurt the most. I wouldn’t even have to lie—just steal from her. Steal that little heart she’d begun to open.
Then I’d be the one getting what
I
wanted.
That was only fair. She’d come to destroy me—but I was the one about to destroy her.
Her secrets were bubbling to the surface, waiting to be plucked. I’d pluck them. I’d give with one hand, even if I had to take with the other. Trust is overrated when you can have devotion.
The phone on the desk beeped. I snatched it up. “Yes?”
“It seems we have a tail,” Karim said.
I dropped a palm flat on the wood desk. My head hammered. A swarm of blood and death clouded my vision. Memories so pure their copper tang blazed on my tongue.
Again
.
It’d all happen again.
This time it’d be my corpse left to rot—and Angelina’s. “You are certain?”
The secrets hidden on board this yacht trumped our lives. No one would take them from me. I’d protect them or die trying.
But I had no fucking intention of dying.
“We changed direction twice to be sure.”
“How the fuck did this happen?” I hunched over the desk. “We were so careful.”
“I have an idea, but you won’t appreciate it.”
My guts went hard. Like I’d swallowed a brick. Or a ton of bricks. Or eaten all the sand on the beach.
No, don’t say it.
I forced myself to stand. To glance behind me at the girl on the deck. The sand concoction filled me like an hourglass, the feeling filtering all the way to my lungs.
“Send Emilio up here.” I never wanted it to go like this. “Tell him to bring his equipment.”
SEVENTEEN
“W
AKE
UP
, A
NGEL
.” The whispered command filtered into my dreams, and oh god—what a dream. I opened my eyes. The sun was orange behind him, and everything about him was warm and gold and beautiful.
I touched his cheek.
His bristles spiked my fingertips and all I wanted in the world was to have that face against my chest. Was to have that mouth on my mouth. I took him by the hair and tugged him closer.
“Wake up,” he said.
Movement crossed the fading sun behind us, and drenched us in shadow. I sat up, the fuzz clearing from my imagination.
One of the guards—one I remembered in a nightmarish flash of needle-stabbing-terror—stood behind him. An itch pricked the hair at my temples and the base of my skull.
Why’s he here?
I scooted back. “What’s wrong?”
“Come with me.” He took my forearm.
I jerked my arm free and glanced between them. “Why?”
“We need to talk inside.” He took my arm again, and all the remnants of longing I’d had for his touch retracted back into my body like a snail’s antennae.
He pulled me up and my body moved of its own accord. Our three sets of footsteps pounded over the deck and I heard each set distinctly.
My heart kept step, pounding in perfect military synchronization.
Why were we going inside? He’d touched me intimately out on deck. He’d said no one would see us on deck. Why’d we need to go inside now?
What’s more private than my vagina?
The guard followed us through the doors and all the way to where Haithem released me. I stumbled against the bed, then caught myself and faced him.
“Who do you work for?”
The guard stood behind him. Not speaking. Not part of this conversation. A suitcase dangled from his left hand.
Why did Haithem need backup?
“Why is he here?”
“This is Emilio.” Haithem didn’t look back or gesture to the other man. He just stared at me. Stared at me in a way that had the back of my knees bumping into the mattress.
“I’d like Emilio to leave.” He stepped in, and then the bed was a push against the back of my knees. There was nowhere to go. Not an inch of room with which to breathe or to flee.
“
You
want Emilio to leave.”
I glanced over his shoulder at the guard. “Right then, sounds like you can go now.”
“He doesn’t speak English. I told you that.”
Only Haithem could instruct Emilio to leave. He wanted me to know that. Why’d I need to know that? My hand flew out and gripped Haithem’s arm. As if he were a safe thing to hold on to.
I squeezed the cotton under his elbow. “What are you doing?”
He glanced down at my grip. “I need to know who you work for.”
I held on to his shirt so hard the fabric burned my fingers. Was this about the article? Had they found out I’d interviewed for
Poise
? Blood rushed through my body, even to the white of my fingertips squeezed tight. What would happen if I told?
My gaze darted to Emilio. He watched me but even though I stared him in the face our gazes never met.
No freaking way was I telling. They couldn’t prove anything. Exactly zero good would come from this truth. I sensed that in the same way you sense lightning’s arrival—that electric current in the air warning you to get your ass under cover.
I looked back at Haithem. His eyes were already trained on me. It took every bead of my concentration to meet them. “I don’t work for anyone.”
“You’re hurting me. I’m letting you know that.” His features tightened. He’d caught my lie before I’d told it. “But it’s not going to make any difference that it hurts me to do this.”
My heart shuddered against my ribs.
His head jerked toward the guard. Emilio set the suitcase on the bed. I didn’t wait to find out what was inside it—I threw myself into Haithem’s chest and shoved past him.
He seized me midlunge. One arm crossed my collarbone and hauled me against his chest.
“No,” I shouted, straining the lower half of my body from side to side. “What’s he doing?”
“Angelina, if there’s anything on this boat that can be tracked, I need to know now.”
It was weird he said my name like that, and often. Like he knew me. Like he knew me intimately. Like he knew me in the way of a man who’d licked me from clit to asshole and he still did this.
“No. I don’t know.” I struggled harder.
He held me tighter, his forearm my prison. “If you tell me now I’ll forgive you.”
I heard him as though through a wall of water, muddy and distorted. A sound like a piston—jerking breaths—shrieked through my eardrums.
“I swear to god, I don’t know.”
The suitcase popped open, and I felt the reverberation in the marrow of my bones.
“Is there anything on or in your person that can be tracked?”
“No, there’s not. I swear there’s not.”
He held me tighter yet also softer, his other arm draping over my middle in a kind of absurd cuddle. “Sorry, Angel, I’m afraid I don’t believe you.”
Emilio pulled the device out of the suitcase. A plastic paddle with a light and a switch. My head swam. The entire room moved in a wave. They were going to electrocute me.
“Lift up your arms.”
I couldn’t do it. There wasn’t the capacity in my limbs to keep me upright. Emilio approached and raised the paddle. Haithem caught my wrists and raised my arms up. My eyes clenched tight.
No!
The thing never touched me. A robot-alien noise filled the room. I opened my eyes. Emilio ran the scanner over my body, down my arms, across my armpits.
The torture I’d imagined turned out to be in the form of humiliation.
I floated in a place of suspended reality where everything seemed distant. They scanned the backs of knees, my feet, ass and between my shoulders. Haithem turned me around and lifted my hair. They scanned the back of my neck and my scalp.
I buried my face in Haithem’s shoulder and even though they inspected every inch of me as they would an animal, as though I were a stray cat, or a pig, or a sheep, this seemed like the safest place to rest my head.
I’d gone properly mental.
They finished, and I stayed right where I was in Haithem’s arms. The intercom beeped. Emilio answered it, then spoke to Haithem in Spanish.
“The yacht has been swept. There’s nothing here,” Haithem whispered. He stroked my back as though we were friends again. As though we could go back to our question games. He took me by the chin and lifted my face. “It’s time, Angel. You see there’s nothing you can keep from me.”
Fuck you.
“Say you understand.”
I understood. He wasn’t someone to be trusted. Not for all the orgasms and pastries in the world.
“I understand.”
He leaned closer. “What do you understand?”
My lungs stung, bruised from holding my breath, but I’d play his stupid games. Maybe I’d win one.
“There’s nothing I can keep from you.” That move required no lie—all I concealed, everything fortified in my heart and mind, eventually he’d have it all.
But not yet.
Not without a fight.
He kissed me—hard and consuming but without tongue or the majesty of his full passion. I held on to his biceps. He pulled back, leaving me midsway, then left the room with Emilio.
My ass fell back onto the bed.
I needed to find a way off this goddamn fucking yacht.
* * *
I
WOKE
BUT
didn’t rise. What I’d just gone through couldn’t really be called sleep. More like an aggressive fluctuation in and out of consciousness. The idea that I would actually get to go home in two weeks seemed like a unicorn dream.
Unless I convinced Haithem we were friends.
That I was on his side.
That I would play by his rules. I’d do whatever it took to get home. To convince him I’d keep my mouth shut.
I’d bargain with whatever I could. Except there was literally only one thing I had that he wanted.
He wanted me.
I rolled out of bed, went to the bathroom and took the quickest shower of my life, then slipped on a dress. I glanced at the clock as I put on shoes.
Midday
.
He hadn’t brought me breakfast the way he always did. I went to the deck. The ocean lay flat and smooth, dark water wobbling like blueberry jelly. Pale clouds blotted out most of the sky, but the breeze warmed my skin.
I took the stairs to the lower deck, missing the last one. My foot slammed into the ground, jolting my knee. I winced and waved my hand to one of the guards, who turned toward me. He nodded, and I walked past him to Haithem’s room.
The door was open, the bed made.
I glanced down the hallway. This deck was three times the size of the top deck, yet I’d seen none of it. I wandered down the hall.
More cabins.
Lots of closed doors.
The hallway ended at a room of mammoth proportions and exquisite style.
Parquetry. High-shine wood finishes. Emerald, gold and burgundy textiles. Rich leathery scents. Like a parlor from the
Titanic
or something.
A man cave.
And at the end of the cave, the man I sought lounged on a chesterfield sofa. I walked toward him. His fingers tapped the rounded arm of the sofa. Karim sat opposite him on another matching couch.
Haithem’s voice wafted through the room.
Not the regular voice he used to speak to me. His foreign one. His native tongue, the one he would’ve used to speak to his mother and father.
The parents he’d lost—his parents who’d been killed.
I reached the sitting area, pausing at the edge. Karim glanced at me, but Haithem continued speaking.
The muscles in my forehead tightened. This could’ve been a movie set, it seemed so surreal. This was another world, with me standing on the outside.
Even on his yacht, Haithem was dressed in suit pants, starched shirt, his feet pressed to the floor, his shoes polished to an inky gloss.
Karim flicked another look my way.
Haithem ran a hand over the side of his head. His hair didn’t move; he’d groomed it so it lay perfectly, shining black.
I waited for the flash. The cameras, the film crew, the giant microphone.
The subtitles.
They didn’t come.
Somehow, this was real life, and here I was, out of place and possibly out of time.
Haithem finally turned to me. I smiled, shaking off the strange vibe.
“Yes, Angelina?”
I halted my smile midway.
Yes, Angelina?
What kind of a greeting was that? Hardly “I had chocolate croissants baked for you this morning.” Could he still seriously suspect me as some kind of spy? Hadn’t last night’s incident proved I’d done nothing wrong? He should be hard at work writing my freaking apology letter right now.
Not that I’d be forgiving, but groveling would be nice to watch.
“I missed breakfast.”
Haithem turned back to Karim. “Perhaps you could show Angelina the way to the kitchen?”
Karim nodded and rocked himself out of his seat.
I stared at Haithem, and nothing on earth could’ve stopped my frown.
Not that he saw it.
“This way,” Karim said.
I followed him into the hallway, looking back over my shoulder. Haithem hadn’t moved. Just continued to stare straight ahead at the empty sofa across from him.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
Karim’s gaze flicked to me. “Of course.”
Of course.
Or, more accurately,
of course I can’t expect answers from Karim
.
We turned a corner and went down a set of internal stairs to a floor where the air-conditioning was turned up way too high. I rubbed my arms and followed Karim down a white hallway at odds with the luxury of the rest of the yacht.
We came to large doors with portholes and entered an industrial-sized kitchen. A man in a pristine chef’s jacket wiped down a stainless-steel bench.
“Bonjour...” Karim spoke to the chef in French.
French
.
Freaking French. Just how many languages did these people speak? Ridiculous. I’d bet Karim was just as fluent in Spanish as Haithem was, and I’d bet even more that Haithem could out-French Karim. He wouldn’t have the chef on his yacht, otherwise. Wouldn’t have one soul he couldn’t trust...
I shivered and glanced between Karim and the chef.
I might not be able to pull languages out my backside, but I had a master’s degree in French as it applied to requesting pastries.
“Bonjour, puis-je avoir un croissant, s’il vous plaît?”
Karim’s gaze flicked to me. He said nothing, but adjusted his tie.
I grinned.
He needn’t know that therein lay the entirety of the grade-six French vocabulary I’d retained. The chef beamed, threw his hands up in the air and spoke one long string of meaningless words.
I caught cheese in there somewhere and went with it.
“Fromage, s’il vous plaît.”
The chef made me a plain croissant with cheese.
I raised my brow at Karim, who continued to watch me. I’m sure my smugness could only have been exceeded if I’d known how to say
tomato
in French. Then I’d have me a cheese and tomato croissant and the added joy of keeping Karim guessing.
I accepted the plate from the chef.
“Merci.”
Karim opened his mouth, but I brushed past him.
“I’ll just take this upstairs.” I winked at him and pushed open the doors with my back.
* * *
I
PICKED
FLAKES
off my croissant. Haithem might just be busy. Something was probably going wrong with his business. He’d come up and talk to me, eventually. My heart seemed to sit high in my chest. He wasn’t avoiding me.
Wasn’t sitting down there plotting ways to break the stowaway spy...
I pushed the plate away and circled the room.
Made the bed.
Tidied up.
Wiped invisible dust.
I walked the perimeter of the room then stopped in front of the locked door. I reached out and twisted the handle. It turned halfway and jammed.