Authors: Courtney Lane
Somehow, he found the scene smirk-worthy. “Now you won’t have to.”
Dozens of scenarios raced around inside my thoughts. I had an answer to who he was—criminal, more specifically, an assassin.
“Catch.” I used a soft voice to sway him with sugar and grabbed his chin, pulling his face toward mine.
Catch wrapped his slender yet brawny hands around my wrists, and I was sure he was going to push me away, instead he brought me closer.
“Blame it on my nature… I can’t help but feel while you’re helping me, it’s not for anything good. I’m good at reading when people lie to me. Or, at least I think I am, and you have one of those faces that can go either way; bad at lying or scarily good at misdirection. So, tell me which you are. Friend or foe?”
“I’ll have an answer for you after we get out of this hall.” Squeezing my wrists, he tried to guide me to follow his trek down the hall.
My feet were firmly planted. Wiggling my hands from his hold, I quickly put them behind my back, holding the handle of the gun stowed in the waistband of my pants. “I have your gun,” I hissed, “and I’ll shoot you, starting with your cock first, if you don’t answer my question.”
“The cops are convening in the lobby downstairs,” he informed me, steady and undeterred. “I bypassed them on my way here. I give them five minutes before they reach this level.”
I firmed my hold on the gun and hoped I had enough bullets to back up my threat if I needed to run. “Why is it so hard for you to give me a straight damn answer? Do you think I’m desperate and stupid? Newsflash, Catch. I’m not exactly scared of death. It’s life, right? You live, you die. It’s all the fucking same.”
“Am I your friend or your enemy?” he repeated. “I’m neither. If your concern is whether I’ll hurt you, I can only guarantee when you’re with me, I’ll never do anything to your body, physically, that you won’t be able to walk away from.”
“In other words, you’ll hurt me a little bit?” I sighed, fluttering the curly stray hairs around my face. “For some reason, you’re starting to sell me on the idea of taking the job.”
He looked down at his big-faced watch. A smidgen of a smile contorted his cheeks.
I opened my mouth to say more.
“Don’t speak,” he warned, shuffling me down the hall.
He picked a room a few doors down from his previous suite and pulled a funny looking card from his wallet; a wallet-sized motherboard.
He slid it through the door, allowing us inside. He immediately picked up his phone and walked to the window. Holding up his hand, he directed me to stay put. He had a hushed conversation with someone on the other line for too many agonizing minutes.
Long after he finished the phone call, he remained by the door, looking for something or someone.
“If you had that hacking device this whole time, you could’ve pushed me into the room instead of kissing me.”
A brow contracted, revealing more of his blue eyes, tinged in warmth. “This room was unoccupied; the room we were standing in front of wasn’t. I wanted to kiss you, and I didn’t need an excuse.”
“Oh,” I said as though he deflated my balloon. The man was full of surprises. His answer confounded me.
Twenty minutes of pacing the space in front of the door later, a soft knock on the door startled me out of my skin.
“It’s the concierge service, sir.”
Catch approached my position and moved me to the side. He opened the door a crack. Hushed words were exchanged with a woman. He released the door, allowing it to close and returned with a leather duffel bag.
Shoving the duffel bag toward my chest, he forced me to take a hold of it. Unzipping it, he rifled through the contents, withdrawing a few things.
He held up a plastic bag, unfurling it and a plastic packet the size of an envelope. “Take off your clothes.”
“Right here?” I looked around the room skeptically and crossed my arms in front of my chest. “Now?”
He shook his head in a lazy way. “You were naked in front of me last night. Why is it a problem?”
“It’s…different. I’m not modest. I…”
“Don’t give it away for free?”
Dick.
Snarling at him, I set the gun down on the floor, between my feet. I snatched off my clothes and threw them into the empty plastic bag he opened in front of me.
Placing my hands on my hips, I waited for a reaction. He might as well have been a smut peddler who witnessed the most beautiful naked women day in and day out. Or maybe I wasn’t his type. My body did nothing for him and made me question why he would
want
to kiss me in the first place.
He extended the white package. “Wipe your hands and feet.”
I snatched them from his grip and began to do what he said. The strong chemical smell made me retch and burned my skin.
“Thoroughly,” he barked at me.
Muttering, I did it again.
He opened the bag in front of me, nonverbally directing me to throw them in. He stepped toward the bathroom door and opened it for me. I picked up the gun from the ground and sidled inside the bathroom.
He took the gun from me, with his hands covered in a portion of the plastic bag. “Take a shower. There are clothes for you inside the bag.”
I locked the door behind his exit on the tails of a man—introducing himself as a police officer—banging on the door.
In the mirror, I examined myself, looking for any new cuts or bruises. Besides the bump on the back of my head, nothing new alarmed me.
The unanswered questions were the only things keeping my mind busy.
The clothing in the duffel bag fit a woman who took her fashion and tailoring seriously. The quality and fit of the simple white T-shirt and a pair of skinny jeans with nude heels placed it far from the ordinary. In the bottom of the bag, my fingers grazed a small, soft box. Pulling out the blue box, I pushed my thumb at the seam to open it.
Inside was a diamond ring with a blinding amount of carats in a platinum or white gold setting. I fingered it, recalling it had been a long time since I’d touched something so beautiful.
After showering, I put myself together as best as I could. I placed my curly hair up in a twisted bun with the hair supplies provided. I followed what my gut told me to do and slid the diamond ring on my fourth finger, left hand.
The authoritative voice and the footsteps of a cop echoed on the other side of the bathroom door. Giving myself one more glance over and straightening my clothes, I waltzed out of the bathroom, cutting through the bedroom to meet Catch and the police officer in the sitting room.
“I’m so sorry, miss,” apologized the uniformed cop. He shielded his eyes when he caught me shoving the length of the T-shirt down to settle naturally at my hips. “We received phone calls about an incident on this floor, and as I was telling your fiancé, we are questioning everyone to determine if guests of the hotel had heard or seen anything.”
I sauntered over to Catch, keeping my posture pageant-straight, and hooked my arm around his waist. “We were so loud last night, I think the entire floor heard us.”
“You were the one screaming at the top of your lungs, sweetheart,” Catch played along and draped an arm over my shoulders bringing me closer.
“Oh, come on,
baby
.” I rested my hand on his chest. His pecs tensed under my grip. The expression on his face held mischief. “You know how loud you are at times. You tend to lose your senses when you’re fucking me.” A broad grin spread across my lips. I patted his chest with my left hand harder than necessary for two reasons: to hurt Catch and to show off the ring to the officer.
“Ma’am.” The look on the cop's face when his eyes settled onto my busted lip, on the tail end of healing, said it all. I didn’t envy the look he cast at Catch. “Can we speak privately for a moment?”
“Oh, you want to talk about this?” I gestured toward my lip. “My soon-to-be-husband had a wife. She didn’t take the news too well that there was going to be a new Mrs…” I racked my brain for a name to throw out “…Kelly.”
“I hope he’s worth it,” the cop muttered.
“She only got to hit me once. She lost the fight, and I won the man. I’ll find out soon if he’s worth every bit of the punch I took for him. Anyway, officer, as I’m sure my fiancé told you, we didn’t hear anything last night. Can you say anything about what happened?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t, ma’am.” With a nod, he headed toward the door. He left a card on the table on his way out. “In case you think of anything else, or…” He looked at Catch, studying his hands. Finding no evidence on Catch’s knuckles to prove he abused me, the cop relaxed, and headed out of the door.
“Catch Kelly?” His forehead lifted in amusement.
“I had to think on the spot. I knew you’d never tell him your real last name, since you won’t tell me the first name on your birth certificate.” I slipped away from him and carried my body to the bed. “Catch, what happens when they go through the records and find out we were in that room, or see us on the cameras?”
A slow-forming grin should’ve brought me comfort, it was full of enough devilry to steal it immediately away from me. “The only thing they will find is that we checked into this room last night and checked out this morning.”
“How did you manage that?”
“I have friends in low places.” He stepped toward me, and with the softest touch, lifted my chin to scan my busted lip. Grabbing the hem of my shirt, he moved it up my torso to examine the bruise Temple left on my stomach. If I hadn’t studied him as hard as he studied me, I would’ve missed the tinge of anger flickering in his eyes and the slight shake of his head.
“Why did you do that to them?” I kept my voice low.
He leaned forward, his face a hairsbreadth from mine with his fists balled, denting the bed on either side of my legs. “I would have to be something close to a superhero to murder all those people.”
“Or a super assassin,” I mumbled. “Why can’t you ever give me a simple answer? Are you trying to fuck my head?”
A darkness clouded his eyes. “If I was, you wouldn’t need to question it. You’ll feel every inch of me when I fully penetrate your mind.”
I crossed and uncrossed my legs. My mind and body fell out of sync and stood on two separate sides.
“Is there a valid excuse for why you didn’t listen to me and made more work for my associates?”
I jolted to my feet, bumping into him as I did. “You didn’t exactly give me directions on what to do other than to wait for you.”
“I never thought there was a need to explain.” He crossed one arm over his brawny chest and thumbed his chin.
I wagged my finger at him. “You can stop dancing in my head now. You were my superhero. You saved me…again. Go ahead and claim your cape.”
“I’m not much of a showboater.” He slid his hands into the pockets of his denims.
“Really, Catch?” I arched a brow, my lips tensing into a mocking grin.
“Let me rephrase; I’m not comfortable with dramatic arrogance.” He leaned into me, the back of his hand stroked my palm, evoking the odd sensation I couldn’t name again. “You’ve been given another chance to think about my offer.”
“Fate is a fickle bitch. Fuck fate. She screws me without the lube often and at the wrong times. This is a situation with two choices; worse and worser.”
“We all have choices. It’s whether or not we want to face the consequences of our choices.” His eyes flickered as they darted around the carpet. “I’m not your hero. I’ll never be one for you.”
I shook my head as if trying to shake myself free of his umpteenth attempt to muddle my mind. “If…I go with you, are you going to protect me?”
Without blinking. Without a single solitary doubt draping his face, he said, “Whatever needs to be done to protect you, it will be done. That’s a promise, and I never make empty promises. I take very particular care of the things that belong to me as long as they treat me with respect.”
The discontent swirled inside my stomach and threatened to make me fold. “Taking care of me and protecting me would make you my hero.” The sullenness in my words was unexpected and uncontrolled. I gave him hints to the nature of my life without intending to.
“A hero does things for selfless reasons.” He picked up my hand and gave it a soft kiss.
I cursed the man for being incredibly skilled at the way he moved me.
“Nothing concerning the things I do to and for you will ever be altruistic.”
I appreciated his honesty, and took it on faith that because he admitted to the bad, he wasn’t the worst option I had. Unfortunately, when the weekend was over, my time in an alternate world, while dressing in the personality of an alternate woman, would come to a cutting end.
I slid my hand from his grip and sidestepped his emotionally suffocating presence.