Kissing My Killer (2 page)

Her face was all flowing lines and sweeping curves, from the arched brows and big, hazel eyes to the elegant nose and broad, full lips. I wanted to sweep my palms over the soft skin of her cheeks, my thumbs sliding over the satiny skin, and lean down and explore those lips.

It wasn’t an attraction. It was something far more than that.

I knew, in that second, that I’d glimpsed the perfect face. I could see ten thousand more and I’d never see one like hers again. I wanted her in a way I’d never wanted a woman before. I wanted to kiss her and lose myself completely in her softness.

And then I realized my coffee cup had tipped forward when we almost collided and that I was about to spill scalding coffee all down her front. I tilted it back, instead, dumping a good portion of it onto my shoes. We both looked down.

But she was shorter than me. That meant I was looking down at her body, at the twin swells of her pale breasts as they pushed out the front of her tank top. They were the most gorgeous breasts I’d ever seen, full and yet pert, bouncing just a little as she moved. Her whole outfit was black, throwing her pale skin into sharp relief and making her body into one perfect, smooth silhouette. Her waist was slender but her hips and ass flared in a way that made me want to growl aloud. Her legs were long and the lines of them drew my eyes all the way down her thighs to her shapely calves and then back up. The mood in my head shifted in an instant. I’d been getting all fucking poetic about her beauty and softness. Now, I wanted to scoop up that gloriously soft body and do very bad things to it.

I wanted to fill my hands with her breasts and squeeze them together into one sweet valley and lick my way up it. I wanted to press her down over one of the tables and jerk her leggings down over her creamy-white ass, rip away her panties and—

She looked up, right at the second I looked up, and we locked eyes. Everyone I meet, in my line of work, has the same eyes: tired and suspicious, bitterly cold. Hers were so innocent, so untouched by all the horrors of the world. It was like finding one perfect flower in the rubble of a building. I almost felt guilty at what I’d been imagining. Almost. On another level, her innocence just made me want to do it more.

She started to move back and my reaction was instinctual. I grabbed her wrist because I couldn’t let something so incredible get away.

Gabriella

I looked down at his hand on my wrist. Warm and soft and yet iron-hard in its grip, no give there at all, and his hand was so
big.
The heat of him throbbed into me, sending prickles up my arm. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out. God, he was so gorgeous...and he was looking down at me with an intensity that blasted straight through to the very center of me, making me catch my breath. It rolled down through me, changing to heat that soaked downwards….

I lifted my arm and his grip didn’t falter, his arm lifting too. He didn’t exactly resist my movement—he didn’t have to. He was so big that just trying to lift the muscled mass of his arm was an effort. If he actually wanted to hold me in place, I realized, he’d have no trouble at all. He could probably hold me against the wall, or down on the floor, with just one of those big hands—

Another, unexpected wave of heat, starting somewhere deep inside and twisting between my thighs.

I glanced around. People were starting to look at us and I wasn’t used to that. No one ever looks at me. It’s not just that I’m unremarkable, it’s that I’m not normally around people. I was suddenly very aware of what a complete mess I must look—leggings and tank top, sneakers...I’d just run into the hottest guy I’d ever seen in my life and I looked like—

Well, like a girl who never goes out.

I swallowed. “Um.” The first thing I’d managed to say to him and it wasn’t even a word. I waggled my wrist.

He looked at his hand as if seeing it for the first time and slowly, reluctantly, released me. My wrist immediately felt cold: I missed his touch. I started to say something but he cut me off.

“Who are you?” His accent sounded like icebergs crashing together in the blackest night. The
who
was a bitterly chill wind and the
r
was like the grind of ice on ice. He snapped it out, a demand, but it somehow didn’t sound rude. It sounded more like he just
had to know
, right now, and there wasn’t time for pleasantries.

I tried to answer but the first thing on my tongue, the honest answer, was:
no one
and I was sure that wasn’t what he wanted. And his accent was doing something to me, vibrating through my body and making my chest go light and fluttery, my toes dancing inside my sneakers. I hadn’t heard anything like it before. I’d known a guy who was Polish, once, but his accent had been like a faded photocopy of this one. I tried to gauge his age. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight? About five years older than me.

He seemed to realize that he’d been abrupt because he frowned and said, “Sorry. What is your name?” The
is
sounded like
izzz.

I started to say
Gabriella
but, at that second, the person behind me in the line got tired of waiting and asked me, “Are you going to order?”

And suddenly the whole reality of it came back to me. Echoes and brightness and polished floors and stifling, air-conditioned air. I was in the coffee shop, which is just borderline manageable for me on a good day, and I was surrounded by people and I didn’t remember the room being this big or the doors being that far away and I didn’t have his hand on my wrist anymore so I felt like there was nothing solid, nothing to hang onto and and—

I bolted. I threaded between the tables, hauled open the door to the lobby and sprinted into the elevator, thumped the button for my floor and panic-breathed all the way up to apartment 1006. I slammed the door behind me and locked it. Then I sat and panted with my back against the door.

As I calmed down, the shame took over, hot and all-consuming. I’d met someone and it had felt important—something that might never happen again. And I’d fucked it up because I was a pathetic, panicking freak.

He’s probably still there. Go back down there.

I almost laughed at that thought. Now that I was panicking, the corridor outside my apartment might as well have been black, airless vacuum, completely impassable. I’d never see him again.

The part of my mind that made me panic, the part that kept me shut up in the apartment, whispered that my mistake had been going downstairs in the first place. I would have been okay if I’d just stayed put.

I wouldn’t go to the coffee shop again.

Alexei

I stood there for a moment, trying to process what had just happened. She’d been
there
and then she was
gone.
It had happened so fast I could still smell the scent of her.

I’d seen something in her eyes just before she ran, a sort of realization. She’d woken up to something and been deathly afraid of it. I would have understood if she’d been afraid of me, but she hadn’t known what I was. Something else, then. Something that lived inside her.

It hit me that I had no way to find her again. I didn’t know if she even lived in this apartment building.

The guy who’d been behind her in line was shaking his head as if to say,
some people.
He stepped forward to take her place.

I’d never see her again. And it was his fault.

I put my hand on his chest and pushed. The guy staggered backward and knocked over a table, winding up in a heap on the floor. A couple of people screamed.

In the silence that followed, I realized I was panting. I was angry, and I never get angry.

I stalked out into the lobby, got in the elevator and hit the button for the tenth floor. What the hell had I been thinking? Hitting that guy would attract attention. I’d never even contemplate doing that normally, even if he’d been up in my face. And he hadn’t been. He’d just scared her away.

Her.
Those hazel eyes and that pale skin. She’d made me completely lose reason.

And she’d made me forget who I was...
what
I was. I’d seen an angel but I’d forgotten that angels are out of reach of mortal men...let alone devils.

For a second there, I’d seen a different world—a world of warmth and comfort and laughter. That wasn’t my world and it never would be. Doing what I do means living outside that world, in a place that’s cold and unforgiving. The harshness of it is what makes me keep my edge. If I lose that edge, I’m nothing.

I’d lost it just then, just for a second, when I’d hit that guy. No, before that—when I’d asked who she was. I should have just walked away.

I shouldn’t have been interested in her in the first place.
Oh, sure, I love to fuck. I’ll take a blonde from a bar home for the night. Some of those women have a thing for gangsters—they soak their panties, right there in the bar, because it’s so
dangerous
and
wrong
to fuck us. I take those women home and show them exactly what it’s like to be pounded by a bad boy. I give them every sweaty, gasping orgasm they can manage and more and it feels good, for a few hours. But in the morning it’s over. I never see them again and I don’t care.

Her, though...I’d barely met her and yet the idea of not seeing her again made me crazy.

Get yourself together!

I straightened my tie and stepped out onto the tenth floor. All I wanted to do was to get the layout of the place. I walked down the hallway, counting rooms and figuring out which window it would be. One, two, three, four, five, six.

I stopped outside 1006. That’s all Nikolai had given me—Apartment 1006. I didn’t even have the name of the guy.

It was almost tempting to knock on the door right now and get it done. But I’ve survived this job so long because I do things carefully, step by step. The guy could have five men in there with him, or a girlfriend or even a kid. I’d check it out first through the window.

Then I’d kill him.

Gabriella

When my breathing had slowed, I walked through to my office and sat down at my desk. Working would make me feel better...and stop me thinking about what had just happened downstairs. Lilywhite and Yolanda were waiting for me in the little chat window we keep running in the corner of our screens.