Assassins in Love (5 page)

“What’s that?” Her voice was husky and it sent a wave of desire through him. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought someone slipped an aphrodisiac into his food in the last twenty-four hours.

But even the most powerful aphrodisiac wouldn’t have done this. Oh, he’d have screwed her and she’d have responded, but by morning, they would have repelled each other. That was the first and best sign of outside-induced lust. First the incredible attraction, and then the almost sickening moment when they looked at each other and realized they loathed each other. They wouldn’t have done either normally, but it seemed that aphrodisiacs created two reactions: first the lust, then the loathing.

He felt no loathing. In fact, he wanted her again, even though his body was spent. He doubted he could do anything right now.

Even though he had doubted that about twenty minutes ago, and then he had responded to that thumb gently caressing him as if he were nineteen years old and able to rebound with a single thought.

Which he was doing now. He could feel himself hardening, again.

Fortunately, she hadn’t noticed. She was still looking at his hand. He wanted to take that clothes package and put it in front of him, hiding his growing arousal.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he said, “Clothes for you.”

He was amazed he could sound so calm. He sounded disinterested. If he was dressed, he could have convinced her of his disinterest, although he had tried that before and it hadn’t worked.

“My clothes are over there,” she said, waving her hand toward the window.

He shook his head. “I sent them into the ship’s disposal. Your pants were stained.”

He didn’t add,
It
looked
like
blood
, even though it did.

“So?” she said.

“So, no need to incriminate yourself.”

“I’m not,” she snapped, grabbing the package from his hand. “It seems like you’re doing a good enough job for me.”

Then she got up, and walked to the bathroom. He watched her. Not a roll of fat on her. Her body was all muscle, but not like his. Feminine muscle, covered by firm flesh that had felt so good under his hands.

She slammed the bathroom door shut, and then he heard the shower turn on. She didn’t say a word about the water, although he half-expected her to. Only luxury suites had unlimited water for bathing.

He wanted to go in there and get in the shower with her, to slide soap over that perfectly formed body—

He shook his head. He wasn’t going to do that. Instead, he grabbed a different set of clothes for himself, and walked to the other side of the suite to the other bathroom. He pulled off his shirt and its rich scent of her, and dropped it on the floor. He turned on the second shower, knowing he would be charged double water usage, and not caring. He stepped inside the heat, and scrubbed her off him as best he could.

It was just an attraction, combined with too much to drink, and the fact that she was more energetic than he expected. He had expected her to fight him, not jump him. If she had fought him—

He still would have found it arousing.

He leaned his forehead against the tiled shower wall and let the water fall on his back. He hadn’t planned for this. He was good because he was calm and he wasn’t vulnerable and he was always in control.

You
have
passion
, his mother used to say.
If
you
harness
it, you can use it. If you let it consume you, it will destroy you.

He shook that thought from his mind. His mother, cold and frightening, often looked at him like he was some subspecies of bug. His mother, who had trained him, registered him, and somehow kept him alive in all those early years.

She would have laughed at this. She would have said,
How
like
your
father
you
are. He had passion as well.
But she wouldn’t have said that with affection or even a momentary pang of loss. She would have said it as the fact it was, and nothing more.

Misha got out of the shower and stood on the drying platform, letting the hot air touch him where Rikki had touched him not half an hour ago. He hadn’t expected her to be so beautiful. Or so passionate.

Or so right.

He had noticed her beauty when he had noticed her, that first night as the ship left port. She wore a slight black dress that clung to her large breasts and narrow waist. He could have done without the chestnut hair and the emerald green eyes, although he knew why she changed them. He preferred the light brown hair she had had as a girl, and the way that her brown eyes matched exactly.

He had noticed that much about her back then, thinking she would be a striking woman someday, in that idle way that people did when they observed something from afar. She had been too young to notice as anything but a particularly pretty child. He had been twenty, obsessed with girls his own age and women much older. She had been twelve and serious and so damaged that it made his heart break, even then. He hadn’t even thought then that she would someday become a woman, let alone a woman who could make him lose his precious control with a single touch.

He had to stop thinking like that. He made himself take a deep breath and clear his mind, using old techniques, things he had learned in his teens when his passions, as his mother called them, threatened to destroy them both. She had found him training so that he could learn control, because she had realized early on that she couldn’t give him that herself.

Some of his passion had been directed at his mother. He had grown to hate her within a few short weeks of their meeting, and the hatred had become a live thing. Misha had hated his mother more than anyone else ever—except, of course, for the man who had murdered his father. That man had been the first person Misha had ever killed, and the only death that had actually felt good.

Justified.

Misha pulled on his clothes, willing them to be his armor against the woman in his suite. He had to think of her as the problem she was, not as the first person who had ever made him crave her.

And the only way he could do that was to forbid those thoughts.

He felt like he had a bit of control as he pulled open the bathroom door. He walked down the stairs to the suite’s main living area with its two couches, three entertainment units, full dining table, and comfortable chairs. Then he saw her, sneaking to the front door.

He reached her as she grabbed the lock. His fingers closed around her wrist, and he wanted to pull her against him again, kiss her until she was senseless.

Instead, he clutched that wrist against his chest in a hold that if he put a slightly different amount of torque on it, might actually break a bone.

It didn’t hurt her, but she knew what he was doing. She looked up at him with those beautifully shaped eyes. The green was too bright. He wanted to tell her to remove it, to look like she used to.

Hell, he wanted to feather her face with kisses, make her moan the way she had made him moan.

Instead, he said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to get us breakfast,” she lied.

He nodded, deciding to play along. “No need. I ordered some a while ago.”

Her face shifted. He couldn’t tell if she knew he was playing her or not. He kept a hand on her wrist, but loosened his grip, and led her to the large table.

When he got there, he tapped the top. The food he had ordered before she woke up slid through the system into the release window beneath the table. The smell of coffee and fresh baked bread filled the room.

Using just her wrist, he eased her into an upholstered chair. She looked gorgeous in the clothes he had gotten for her. The pale pink blouse was open, showing just a little cleavage. The tan pants fit snugly, leaving nothing to his imagination—not that he needed to imagine.

His heart started racing. He made himself focus on the food instead.

He grabbed it out of the automatic delivery tray, and set plate after plate on the table. Then he lifted off the covers, revealing steaming eggs and real bacon, and fruit so fresh that it made his mouth water. The entire platter of pastries alone could have fed the two of them for a week.

She was staring at the pastries as if she had never seen anything like them. Maybe she hadn’t. She seemed to be doing everything on the cheap and apparently had for some time.

“You think of everything,” she said. “Clothes, food…”

Her voice trailed off, but they both knew what she had left off.

“The clothes look good.” He had ordered those as well through the ship’s boutiques, and had them sent through the same system that sent the food. At the luxury level, he paid for any kind of service he wanted. He didn’t have to leave the suite for the entire trip if that suited him, which it did not. But he was taking advantage of that this morning.

She ran her hands along the blouse. She stopped at her breasts, again, knowing that aroused him. She was trying to distract him so—what? she could bolt out that door?—and it was working. Indeed, the slight movement made him think that the color of her nipples matched the blouse. He wondered if that was what made him order it.

He made himself look away.

“We made it clear last night that we were going to spend the next twenty-four hours with each other,” he said. “It hasn’t been sixteen yet.”

She shrugged. “People get sick of each other. I’m sure the staff here knows that.”

He moved to the other side of the table. “I’m sure they do. But we have to keep up our little charade just a bit longer, so they don’t notice what you did last night.”

She raised her eyes to him. Her hands fell to the table top. Her expression was flat now. “If they notice, it’ll be because of you. I set the cameras so that they looped. No one would have realized I even opened the airlock if you had given me just a few more minutes.”

He shook his head. This was why she was getting into trouble. She thought short-term, not long-term.

“They would notice,” he said. “Not on the trip, but shortly thereafter. You didn’t think this through—”

“The schematics were different—”

“Not that,” he said. “The consequences.”

“No consequences,” she said. “I would be gone before they realized he was missing.”

“That’s not how it’s done,” he said.

She frowned. “Not how what’s done?”

“The job,” he said. “The key isn’t to let them slowly realize that something had gone wrong. The key is to make the death seem natural.”

She looked at him. “Who
are
you?”

He had already told her, but he did so again. “My name is Misha.”

He paused for just a moment, wondering why it was so important she know his real name, why he hoped she remembered him. Before she woke up, he had planned to tell her the name he traveled under in this sector, but when her eyes opened, he had blurted his real name. His heart name. The name only people who cared for him used.

She hadn’t understood him, which should have given him a reprieve, but some part of him wanted to hear that husky voice of hers murmur his name as if it meant something to her.

“Misha,” she said, frowning. Was she trying to place the name or had she finally figured out who he was? “You said that when I woke up.”

He felt an odd surge of disappointment. “Yes, I did.”

“And you know who I am,” she said.

“Of course I do,” he said. “Since I’m the one who hired you.”

“You what?” she asked. Whatever she had expected him to say, it hadn’t been that. Her hands fell to her sides, and she felt cold even though the suite’s environmental controls were set slightly warm.

“I hired you,” he repeated, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

For
what?
she wanted to ask, but stopped herself just in time. She wasn’t sure she wanted the answer. The room, the clothes, the food, everything made more for a seduction than for a murder.

But he had helped her with Testrial, so he wasn’t talking about the sex. Not that she hired out for sex. She hired out for assassination, but never sex.

“What did you have against Elio Testrial?” she asked.

Misha’s smile was cool, faint, the smile of the man she had met in the corridor, not the man she had touched with such abandon a half an hour before. “He was a bad guy.”

“So you knew him?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Then why the hell did you want me to kill him?” she asked.

Misha leaned back slightly. He rested one elbow on the back of the chair. From this angle, she could see his muscular torso, the power in his body. He didn’t look slender now. He looked like a man who built for speed and danger, a man who could move across the table, grabbing a butter knife as he did so, and plunge it into the vulnerable base of her neck without a single thought.