Standing in the Shadows (24 page)

Every instinct screamed to just let go, fill her with his come.

He wrenched out at the last possible instant and spurted across her damp, trembling body.

God, that had been close. More intense every goddamn time.

He sank down to trembling knees and pressed his face against the amazingly soft skin of her inner thigh. The warm, rich sea smell of her sex was intoxicating. He trailed his fingers over her cleft, caressing the soft fuzz of damp ringlets. She was still shaking. Her fingers were tangled in his hair, stroking him. He could lose himself exploring her body, and never get tired of it. He could eat her again right now. Just bury his face in her beautiful, juicy cunt and worship it.

Then it hit him, what was waiting for him, behind that door in his mind. The phone call. He'd been better off in the drugged haze of sex.

He stood up. She started to follow, and he pushed her back down onto the bed. "Stay there," he said.

"But I have to—"

"I'll wash you," he told her. "I just need a minute alone. Please."

He stumbled into the bathroom and winced at the mirror. His eyes looked crazed. He looked like a guy who heard impossible voices in the night, who mixed up dreams with reality. A guy who would kidnap a vulnerable girl, drag her off to a secluded hotel room and fuck her all night long. How many times—nah, no point in counting. One just blended into the next. It was one long fuck session, interrupted by conversation and the odd nap. And the occasional death threat from a homicidal maniac, of course. Just to liven things up.

He choked on his own bitter laughter, and hunched over the sink. He washed his cock and splashed water on his face, then took a deep breath, and put his hand on the doorknob.

He stopped, running over that goddamn phone call in his mind. It was improbable, ridiculous, to think that Novak could have found them here. No one had known. He had only decided himself at the last moment. But the alternative was even scarier—at least to him. That what he'd heard wasn't real. He turned on the water and splashed his face again. He was afraid to go out and face her. Ashamed that she might think that he was…

No
. He turned his back on the unthinkable. He couldn't afford to doubt himself. He shook it off, a fierce, angry shudder of refusal.

He had promised to wash her. He ran hot water over one of the washcloths hanging on the rack, and shoved the door open.

Erin was perched on the bed, knees drawn up to her chest. He knelt in front of her and sponged every trace of his come off her belly, her breasts. She stretched and smiled, opening to his touch. He wanted to sponge her between her legs, too, but the washcloth was sticky. He flung it aside. His tongue was warm and wet, and would do just as well.

She gasped as he pushed her legs open and put his mouth to her again. "Connor! For God's sake—"

"Let me." God, she was juicy and sweet.

Erin sagged back onto the bed. She was tugging at his hair, saying something urgent, pleading, but it degenerated into shocked gasps of pleasure soon enough. He owed her an orgasm after his latest caveman performance. It was a matter of pride.

He laved her with his mouth, every precious pink fold, every delicate detail. He fastened his lips and tongue around her clit, and the taut, swollen nub thrummed against his mouth. He suckled and nibbled and insisted until she came, right against his face.

He slid up into her arms and hid his face against her breasts. She pulled the blankets over them, murmuring sweet words that almost untangled the knot of fear in his chest.

The world was getting weirder by the minute, but this, at least, was amazing and sweet. He would take all the comfort he could from it.

He waited until she was fast asleep, and gently untangled himself from her slender limbs. He propped his back against the headboard and stared with hot, suspicious eyes into the ominous shadows. Sleep was a million miles away. His gun was inches from his hand. He monitored the soft rise and fall of her breath with his other hand.

He had come down here to guard her, so by God, he would do it.

Tamara stretched her perfect body, well aware of the effect she made in the rumpled sheets. She smiled through her lashes at the man lying beside her. He was playing with a strand of her fiery hair, his face relaxed and calm, but that could change in an instant. A raised eyebrow, a smile that struck him as false, and the world could explode.

She was well used to living in several different realities at once, but this was the finest line she had ever walked.

She channeled the emotional energy of that rush of fear into a sensual wiggle and a satisfied smile, and struggled to remember why she had decided to do this, why it had seemed so incredibly important at the time. Usually she loved risk, even craved it. But as the days with Novak crawled by, she was loving it less and less.

Stultifying tedium looked very attractive to her right now.

"You were inspired tonight," she murmured. Her voice was throaty and relaxed. Whore's talk had always come easily to her.

"Perhaps Nigel's report inspired me." His lips curved in a dimpled, deceptively sweet smile. "He could hear McCloud halfway down the corridor. Like a wild boar in rut. Poor Erin."

She chuckled. "Surprising. I would have thought that your phone call would put a damper on things."

"Not at all. He reacted just as I would have expected. Fear and anger leads directly to the desire to conquer and punish and control." He wrapped the lock of hair around his finger and tugged it. She winced, and cried out. She had learned, to her cost, that hiding pain was a big mistake. "I studied him, you know," he went on. "I profiled him, just as he has profiled me. We have a great deal in common."

"Really? What?"

He let go of her hair, to her relief, and stared up at the ceiling. "Unusual childhoods, for one thing. We both suffered the traumatic loss of our mothers at an early age, for instance."

She made a soft, distressed sound, but he was not trolling for sympathy. His eyes were remote. "We both had mentally unbalanced fathers. We both have physical defects. His were inflicted by me, and mine, indirectly, by him." He held up his maimed hand, and passed it over the puckered bullet scar that marred his pale thigh.

"Fascinating," she murmured. "I never thought of the symmetry. The matching injuries. Hand and thigh." She leaned over, ran her hand over the scar on his thigh, and took a calculated risk. She drew his hand to her lips and kissed each scarred stump.

He smiled his appreciation of the gesture, and she shuddered with her relief. "What else?" she urged.

"Intensity," he mused. "Inability to compromise. He is a good enemy. I will be sorry to lose him. It will be almost like losing a friend."

Like he knew what it meant to have a friend.

The dangerous thought flitted through her mind before she could suppress it, and fear followed in its wake. She could not afford to let such things float to the surface of her conscious mind. He was supernaturally acute, sniffing out every slightest scent of treachery.

His eyes focused on her with unnerving intensity. "I have always been good at sensing fault lines, exploiting them," he said. "So was Victor. He actually had the gall to try it on me. Remember?"

"Yes," she said quietly. "That was why you killed him."

"I found his weak point, and then tap, tap, crack, and he came apart. That is how I will destroy them all. Tap, tap, Tamara. That's all it takes, and they will fall over their own feet to destroy themselves."

She hoped her smile was not shaking. "Brilliant," she said.

"Erin will be the hardest, but I think I have the key to her now."

"Her weakness is Connor McCloud, obviously," Tamara said.

"Look deeper than the obvious," he snapped. "Erin likes order. Chaos makes her frantic. Her father's disgrace, what happened at Crystal Mountain, it shook her to her foundations. When the rest of her world falls to pieces, we will see what she is really made of."

"Brilliant." Her voice sounded mechanical to her own ears.

"This is moving fast," he said. "We must accelerate things, to keep up with McCloud's and Erin's immoderate lust."

"I spoke to our operative in Marseilles earlier, right before you came to me," she told him.

He seized a lock of her hair and tugged it again, cruelly hard. "You should have told me immediately."

She forced herself to whimper and cringe. Her own nature would have dictated stoic silence, but she did not want to challenge him. Oh, no, no, no. Even she knew when to bend. "I'm sorry," she said. "You were so passionate… it drove it right out of my mind. Please…"

He let go of her hair and backhanded her across the face. "What did he say?"

She touched her throbbing cheek. Another bruise. She was brilliant with paints and powders, but there were limits even to her genius. "Martin Olivier is ready to play his part," she said. "They've coached him carefully. He will be captured by the police, and confess to seeing you and Georg at the rendezvous point outside Marseilles. Whenever you want him to."

"Call them," he said slowly. "It must happen the day after tomorrow. That gives Ingrid and Matthieu time to arrange poor Claude's transport to Marseilles."

"Isn't it dangerous to move a man in a coma?" she asked timidly.

Novak shrugged. "Claude has never disobliged me in his life. He would not dare to die before it is convenient for me. Yes, Tuesday morning would be best. That will also give Erin and McCloud time to generate some titillating X-rated video footage for us when they get back to Seattle. I need it for the grand finale. Speaking of which, Rolf Hauer is in place to take care of Claude? That has to happen shortly after Martin's confession. Preferably the same day."

"He is in Marseilles, awaiting orders," she assured him. "All the pieces are in place. Your choreography is absolutely brilliant."

He stared at her for a long, uncomfortable moment. "You flatter me, Tamara," he said slowly. "I hope very much that you don't ever presume to manipulate me with flattery. I dislike that."

The white-hot glow in his eyes terrified her. "God, no. Really, I—"

"You know, of course, that your knowledge of all these details binds you to me for life. And beyond."

She forced herself to relax against him and smile up into his eyes through her lashes. "Yes," she said softly. "I am honored by your trust."

He parted her legs and thrust his hand inside her. She reminded herself, as she moved sinuously against him, that this couldn't last much longer. And he would pay for every insult to her body, in blood.

He lost interest in touching her very quickly, thank God, and flopped onto his back. "I wish I could have watched them tonight."

"You'll have your chance," she said. "This is just the beginning."

"I've developed quite a taste for video voyeurism. I imagine you did, too, during your time with Victor, hmm? It was his passion."

She covered up her shiver at the mention of Victor's name with a rippling laugh. "Oh, I humored him."

"Did you, my beautiful whore? How? Tell me everything."

She gathered her ragged acting skills together. She'd never felt so alive as during that brief time she had spent in Victor Lazar's bed. He had seen past all her tricks and accepted her for what she was.

And he had wanted her, too, with a searing passion that had shocked emotions to life inside her that she had thought were safely dead. One of the few things she absolutely could not bear would be for her current employer to paw through her memories of Victor.

But then again—her anger and her fear reminded her of why she was doing this in the first place. That was very good. That helped.

"There's not much to tell," she said lightly. "He was more dull and straightforward in bed than one would have thought, to know him. Far less fascinating and challenging than you, for instance."

He kissed her, his long tongue thrusting like a snake into her mouth, and sank his sharp teeth into her lower lip, holding it fast. They sank deeper, almost breaking skin. She went rigid with terror.

He laughed, and released her. "I think you are lying to me."

She rolled onto her back and shook her head. Smiling, smiling, smiling. Like a dog who showed its throat to the head of the pack in hopes of not being ripped to shreds. "I wish that I were," she said. "You know how I hate to be bored. I would make up some kinky stories for you if I didn't know that you prefer the truth, boss. Even if it's less interesting than a juicy lie."

She looked directly into his eyes, projecting with all her considerable strength. Warm, glowing. Oh, so disarmingly sincere.

He stroked her cheek, nodded and smiled. He bought it.

She was so relieved, she had to do something with the rush of emotion, so she rolled up onto her elbow and kissed him, trailing her fingers down the front of his wiry, cruelly strong body. She found him already hard. Good. It was easier for her to cover while fucking than while talking. Men were so much more stupid when they were fucking. Her hand tightened, moving in a swirling, expert caress.

He murmured with pleasure. "What a mysterious creature you are, Tamara," he said. "Intriguing. Full of secrets."

"Not to you," she assured him.

"So strong and fearless. A person's greatest strengths and her greatest weaknesses are one and the same, did you know that?"

"Are they really?" She shimmied down his body and replaced her hand with her skillful mouth.

"Yes. I will exploit both your strength and your weakness."

He was quiet for a few minutes, his fingernails digging painfully into her scalp as she did her best to distract him from this dangerous train of thought. She was skillful enough to do it on total autopilot, and lucky for her, because she couldn't control her thoughts. Her thoughts were thinking her. Crazy thoughts, out of place in this room, with this deadly man. Thoughts of love, of all things. She wondered, inside that barricaded part of herself, if what she had felt for Victor was love. She would kill to avenge him. If that wasn't love, what was?

It didn't matter. It was closer to love than she had ever hoped or wished to come. It had been scary. It had hurt. It had made her feel weak and vulnerable, and then he had died, at Novak's hand. She had been so angry, she'd wanted to lob a nuclear bomb at someone.