Authors: Jade Allen
They fell into a
rhythm together, touching each other everywhere, their hips meeting as they
moved, and Rachel for a moment couldn’t believe that she had ever doubted that
there was something between them—something more than just the relationship
between a bodyguard and his charge, something more than convenience. As they
kissed each other wherever their lips could reach, and Rachel felt the pleasure
building up inside of her again, tension mounting and mounting to an inevitable
climax, she ceased to think about all of her misgivings about Dylan, about
Brock, about her benefactor; all she could think about was how good she felt.
She clung to him as
the first wave of sensation washed through her, muffling her moans against the
side of his neck. Rachel felt Dylan tensing against her, felt his cock
twitching inside of her, and he followed her into orgasm, shuddering slightly
as the pleasure gripped them both.
Rachel was ripped out
of her reverie by the sound of her phone vibrating again. She glanced at her cigarette;
it had burned down to the filter while she had been woolgathering. Once more,
she glanced at the screen and saw an unrecognizable number, a message. Rachel
glanced around; no one seemed to be near, no one was paying any attention to
her—all of the other terrace inhabitants were locked in their own
conversations. She reached into her purse in the chair next to her and withdrew
a pair of ear buds and plugged them into her headphone jack, taking a final sip
of her coffee and lighting another cigarette.
The message started
with throbbing, heartbeat-steady drums, with a winding, wandering guitar coming
in over, bass weaving in between. Unmistakably sensual, Rachel shuddered; it
was the sonic embodiment of slow, lazy lovemaking—she could almost feel Dylan’s
hands on her.
“Have you got color in your cheeks/ D’you ever get that fear
that you can’t shift like summat in your teeth/ Are there some aces up your
sleeve/ have you no idea that you’re in deep, I dreamt about you nearly every
night this week/ How many secrets can you keep? ‘Cause there’s this tune I
found that makes me think of you somehow and I play it on repeat…”
Rachel
gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, breathing in slowly. She exhaled,
feeling a mixture of intense desire and dread.
“Been wondering if your
heart’s still open and if so I wanna know what time it shuts…”
She opened her eyes
and picked up her phone, clenching her teeth as she ruthlessly tapped the icon
to delete the message. Rachel swallowed against the lump forming in her throat and
took her sunglasses off, looking around for a server. She wanted another shot,
she wanted another coffee, and she wanted, more than anything, to forget that
the last two weeks had happened.
It had been after the
sex, when her mind was finally clearing from the haze of multiple orgasms, that
Rachel had remembered her misgivings. She had sat up in their shared bed and
pinned Dylan down with a scowl. “I told you,” she had said, pulling away from
him, moving out of easy range of his caressing hands, “I wasn’t going to be
distracted forever. You’re going to tell me what the hell is going on and how
you figure in all of this.”
“We have to get ready
to get out of town,” Dylan had said.
“Oh, but we had time
for you to fuck my brains out? You keep telling me I’m in danger—but…” She
remembered Brock’s words. How did she know that the guy who’d been at her
apartment had really been one of his henchmen? How did she know that her
apartment building had been torched at Brock’s orders? Dylan had shown up so
conveniently after she’d gotten the first threatening phone call.
“I told you,” Dylan
said, sitting up in the bed with her, reaching out to pull her back to him.
“I’ll explain everything when we get out of here—it’s not safe.”
“Tell me one thing,”
Rachel had said, pushing him away and slipping out from underneath the
blankets. She had looked around for her clothes in irritation, feeling
vulnerable and somehow like prey in her naked, sexed-up state. “Are you…” she
had taken a deep breath, both needing to know the answer to her question and
dreading it. “Are you having sex with me because you want to, because it’s
convenient, or because… because it makes me—it keeps me complacent?” Dylan had
looked at her for a long moment in silence, and Rachel had clenched her teeth and
gathered up her clothes.
“Love, it’s not as
simple as that,” he had protested.
“Really? Because from
where I’m standing it seems pretty damn simple. Why are you having sex with me?
I mean it’s not like it keeps happening accidentally.” She had dressed quickly
and began grabbing things from around the room almost at random, her eyes
blurring with tears.
“You came onto me the
first time,” Dylan pointed out. “You practically threw yourself at me, Love.”
“So tell me the
truth!” Rachel had shouted. “Are you just screwing me because it’s a way to
pass the time, or—or…” her heart had pounded in her chest. “You know what? Fuck
it. I don’t even want to know.” She had found her purse, grabbed it quickly,
and ran out of the bedroom, out of the apartment, as quickly as she could; she
had barely heard Dylan’s shouted protest over the sound of her own blood
roaring in her ears.
Her card and her
rudimentary French skills had gotten her a ticket to Paris; an hour later she
got off of the train at Gare Saint Lazare, her head still spinning. She lost
herself in the crowds for a while, going outside for a cigarette and watching
all around her in defensive anxiety.
A series of impulsive
decisions sent her to Lyon, and then quickly to Geneva on the TGV and a
reserved first class seat on a commuter rail. The pristine alpine city with its
churlish people had palled on her after two days, and the urge to keep
moving—to get away from both Dylan and Brock—sent her back into France, to the
Haute Savoie region close to the border; close to a major city but buried at
the same time in rural splendor. It was between seasons, and while the pickings
were slim, Rachel managed to find a house for rent on a per-month basis, and
set about navigating a new town.
She knew Dylan was
looking for her; she knew that if Brock’s henchmen were able to track her
movements in Rouen, they would certainly have known that she had fled the city.
What Rachel did not know was whether Brock had taken that as a sign that she
hadn’t believed him. She had received no more messages from the man who had
been painted as her enemy, who had treated her with a mixture of condescension
and courtesy when they met, but Rachel was wise enough to realize that the lack
of messages didn’t mean much of anything at all. Her skin crawled with the
sensation she felt of being constantly watched. She knew she should get rid of
her phone; if Dylan was still reaching out to her that way, then she could be
tracked by it.
What she wanted, more
than anything, was to know what to think. She wanted to know how to react, what
to do, whom to believe. She wanted to be able to sleep a full night without
waking up three or five times wondering if it was a noise that had stirred her
out of her dreams, and whether that sound was something she could react to or
just the regular noises of a wood-and-stone house shifting in the night.
A waitress appeared at
the table, and Rachel summoned up her best polite smile. “Un autre café, et un
autre myrtille, s’il vous plait,” she said. The waitress gave her a much more
genuine smile than Rachel could bring herself to exchange, quietly collecting
up her dirty cups and nodding her agreement to the order before walking briskly
away. Within a few moments, another tiny, steaming cup of dark coffee, another
clear jigger of liquor, and a paper-wrapped cube of sugar was in front of
Rachel once more, and she took a deep breath. She had to think; she had to
figure out what her next moves were. She peeled the paper from around the sugar
cube and dropped it into her coffee, sitting back and opening up her music
library on her phone. She knew she was being a glutton for punishment, but she
didn’t care as she flipped through the songs she had filled the phone with and
found “Everlong.” The gloomy, glittery sound filled her ears, and Rachel
knocked back her shot, setting the glass down and picking up the coffee spoon
to stir the dissolving sugar into her coffee.
“Breathe out, so I can breathe
you in/ hold you in/ And now, I know you’ve always been/ out of your head, out
of my head I sang…”
****
Rachel was making her
way back to the tiny house she had rented, weaving slightly from the eau-de-vie
burning through her veins, when she felt the sensation of being watched. She
cussed softly to herself; she had been stupid to drink a third shot. She felt a
flicker of genuine regret for leaving Dylan—even if she couldn’t trust him, at
least she had felt safe, protected around him. At least he was alert when she
was incapable of it, even if the people he was alert to were apparently not necessarily
her enemies. Rachel stumbled, reaching out blindly to grab onto something to
steady her on the unevenly paved road, looking around in the early evening
gloom to try and find the source of her sudden presentiment.
“Rachel, please, let
me steady you,” someone said, and she felt a firm hand on her shoulder doing
just that. The voice was unfamiliar—and the fact that the voice was speaking
English, when she had become accustomed to a constant gabble of too-fast French
and weird Swiss German, sent a thrill of fear through Rachel that made her try
and lurch away from the hand holding her up. “I’m not here to hurt you, Rachel;
calm down.”
“Who are you?” Rachel
asked, turning her head. She caught a vaguely familiar face; a middle-aged man,
around the age of fifty or maybe sixty on the outside, impeccably groomed and
clean-shaven.
“I don’t blame you for
not remembering me,” the man said with the faintest glimmer of a smile. “Why
don’t we talk at your place? That seems much more comfortable than out here on
the road—these Alpine drivers play fast and loose with speed for people would
could careen off the side of a mountain at any moment.”
“I’m not leading you
back to my house until you tell me who you are and why I shouldn’t start
screaming right now,” Rachel said.
“James Whitley,” the
man said. “I’ve been looking for you ever since you dropped out of Dylan’s
care. You’re in a great deal of trouble, my dear.” Rachel stared at the man in
shock; this was her mysterious benefactor? He looked like someone’s father-in-law.
He looked like someone she might have seen at a bistro in Rouen. He didn’t look
like an unstable billionaire CEO who knew the kinds of people who could procure
a fake passport that had fooled four different countries. “We have a lot to
talk about, Rachel.”
“Yeah, I suppose we
do,” she said, sighing. There was obviously no getting away from him now; his
arm was around her shoulder, and even if she wasn’t just shy of drunk, Rachel
didn’t think that she could have managed the steep road up to where her rented
house stood at a run. “Okay. I’m guessing you probably already know where I
live, if you managed to accost me on the way there.”
“I had a good idea of
the neighborhood,” James said with another quick smile. “Let’s get you up this
last hill and then we can have a nice, long conversation about what’s going on
in your life.”
“My life?” Rachel
began to walk slowly, following the road, leaning against James slightly. “My
life is shit right now, thanks to you; that’s what’s going on in it.”
“There are quite a few
people who would find your life pretty romantic,” James pointed out. “But I can
sympathize; you’re not wandering around Europe by choice, and you’re under
constant threat. I promise you there are a lot of reasons for the things I have
done—I’m not out to torture you. But I think that part of the conversation is
best saved for home, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Rachel said,
stumbling slightly and catching herself. “I don’t seem to have a hell of a lot
of choice in anything that’s been going on for the past two months, I might as
well just go along with your plan.”
****
Dylan worried at his
bottom lip as he watched the scenery flash past the windows of the train. It
had been over a week since he had seen Rachel; over a week since she had asked
him why he was having sex with her—a question that, in his stunned mind, had
nothing to do with the real issue at hand—and then ran out of the apartment. He
had been so baffled by her question that it had taken him a few minutes to get
his clothes on and follow her; and she had taken advantage of that head start
to lose herself somewhere in Rouen, and then leave the city altogether.
He knew that she had
left, but he didn’t know where she had gone. Dylan shifted in his seat, taking
a slow breath.
This is why you don’t get involved with the target, you
dumbass,
he thought to himself. It had been much easier to track her
before; he had been able to remain objective, he had been able to think clearly
about where a woman like Rachel would go, what she would do. When Whitley had
called him to give him the details on their arrangements—the planned escape
from Rouen that he and Rachel would have made if she hadn’t left—Dylan had felt
ethically bound to tell his client that he had lost the girl.
“What the hell did you
do, Dylan?” Whitley had asked him after a moment’s silence.
“We got into a fight
and she ran off.” Another moment of ominous silence.
“When I told you to
stay with her at all times, I didn’t mean to stay in her bed,” Whitley told him
slowly. “You could have just as easily watched her without sleeping with her.”
“I don’t take my job
quite that seriously,” Dylan had remarked caustically. “Look; from what I can
gather she hopped a train, probably to Paris. That’s the only place she could
really go to get the hell out of dodge from. I’ll see if I can pick up the
trail there.”
“Do what you can,”
Whitley had replied. “I’m going to take other measures. Do you think Jeffrey
knows?”
“If he doesn’t now, he
will soon,” Dylan said grimly. “We have to get to her first.”
“One of us does,
anyway. Do what you have to do; send me the expenses later on.” With that,
Whitley had ended the call, and Dylan had been left to his own devices to
attempt to track a woman he thought he might never fully know across the
country—and perhaps out of it—without having any idea of what she might do.
It had taken him a few
days in Paris and a few persuasive questions to find someone who remembered the
woman he described; slowly, Dylan began to trace the path that Rachel had
taken, the trains across the country, out of it and into Geneva. He knew that
if he was able to do it, Brock with his superior resources would be just as
capable—if not more so.
Dylan worried at his
bottom lip as he watched the French countryside pass by the window of the TGV.
He picked up his phone and flipped through his music library; he had sent
Rachel a few messages, a last-ditch effort to get her to reach out to him—but
he had gotten no response.
She may have ditched the phone,
he thought
grimly.
For all I know I’m sending these messages to some confused French
girl who has no idea why she keeps getting songs in her voicemail.
As he
picked another song from his collection to send to her—not knowing whether she
would get it, whether she would understand—the lyrics filtered through his
mind.
“This indecision’s got me climbing up the wall…How did this come over
me, thought I was above it all…Give me some rope I’m coming lose, I’m hanging
on you…”