Liquid Lies (48 page)

He whistled in a high arc then nodded. “It was the right thing to do.” He reached over and took her hand. “You won’t need it anyway.”

That brought a smile. “Plan to take care of me, do you?”

“Hell no. I’m retired. Figured you’d be the one taking care of me. Get your ass back to work, missy. Someone always needs translators.”

She loved the way he could make her laugh when she least expected it. Whenever he did, she flashed back to the moment they met, and how the man in that dark alley was so very, very opposite from the man sitting next to her now.

He still didn’t make any move to get out of the car. “I was thinking,” he said to the steering wheel, “of going to school.”

Pride swept through her in a warm glow. “To do what?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. Something else.”

She crawled into his lap and pressed her lips to his, slowly tracing his mouth with her tongue, her body coming alive. “That,” she whispered, “is a wonderful idea.”

She figured out where Reed lived before they ever entered the state. Their travel route had taken them up through northern California and Oregon, across Idaho and Wyoming and South Dakota. He’d been as excited as she to see those areas, but when they crossed into Minnesota, she noticed a change in him. A calm like he’d been there before, perhaps often. After a few days in upper and central Wisconsin, that calm transformed into excitement.

They drove leisurely south through Wisconsin, enjoying the autumn color. Reed practically danced in the driver’s seat. They crossed the Illinois border and Reed groaned, “Oh, my God,
yes
.” He veered off the highway and pulled into a flashy diner-style eatery in the heart of bustling suburbia. “Come on. I’ve been dying for an Italian beef with hot peppers. You’ll love it. I promise.”

“Yeah, that’s what you said about ostrich burgers.”

But he was right this time, and she understood the reason behind his food-lust orgasm. The taste of the dripping sandwich made of thin-cut beef danced on her tongue. The mound of hot peppers made her lips sting and tingle. It felt like when he kissed her.

He grinned at her over his second sandwich. “Now this…
this
is Chicago.”

And that was where they ended up.

Reed owned the penthouse apartment in a twenty-story building overlooking Lincoln Park. The park showed off for Gwen, wearing its autumn best. Thanks to the shedding trees, she could see down into the nearby zoo. A still, straight lagoon cut through the park, perpendicular to the expansive, cobalt blue Lake Michigan.

All that water, so close.

No matter the weather, there were always a few souls running or biking along the beachfront path. To the south rose downtown, a sparkling and stunning skyline. She spent a lot of time out on his terrace, memorizing the city that had captivated him. The city he called home.

It was there he found her at sunset on Halloween.

“What are you doing out here? It’s freezing.”

She turned, smiling. “I can’t get over the view. It doesn’t have the same feeling from inside.”

“Don’t expect me to open these doors come February.”

She waved away the ominous words. He’d warned her about the winters here, that her Californian blood wouldn’t be able to handle it, but with him beside her, she could handle anything.

She clapped her hands like a little girl and bounced on the balls of her feet. “So do I get my surprise now? You’ve been gone all day.”

He rewarded her with a flash of dimple, and the sight of it pulled her inside like a tractor beam. He reached for her, crushed her against him. Their tongues stroked and she felt the familiar, delicious pulsing between her legs. On a groan, he pushed her away.

“Please don’t stop now,” she begged.

He raised a falsely innocent eyebrow while adjusting his jeans around his growing erection. “I thought you wanted your surprise.”

“I do, but I’ve decided it can wait.”

He peeled off his shirt, his fierce blue eyes holding hers the whole time. He tossed the shirt onto the stack of college brochures fanned out on the coffee table.

“Mmm,” she purred, her gaze raking over his abs. “I like the delay already.”

Then she saw the white gauze taped over his left shoulder and biceps, and her breath caught in her throat. “What’s that?”

Reed inhaled, deep and long. “Come closer. Let me show you.”

Almost eight weeks they’d been together. Eight weeks to memorize every inch of his massive tattoo. All the leaves, the hidden images, the tiny words. He’d told her most of their meanings. For some he remained tight-lipped, and she was all right with that.

But that spot trailing down his shoulder to his elbow, now covered with gauze, had always been blank.

She eyed him. “It’s not my name, is it? That’s so cheesy.”

“No, I’m not that stupid.”

She punched him in the opposite shoulder. Like a rock, he barely moved, but instead grabbed her around the waist and kissed her again. Heat blazed in his eyes as he leaned back and slowly began to peel off the gauze. She stared at the new black lines, speechless.

A new vine roped down his shoulder and twined around his biceps. At first she thought it a simple branch, lined with the same leaves that decorated his torso, but there was never anything simple about Reed. She leaned closer. The vine was not a solid stalk, but many, many words packed tightly together.

He pointed. “Start here.”

She squinted. “Two million dollars? Is that what it says?”

Reed never took his eyes from her face.

“That what I’m worth?”

“You’re worth more.” The huskiness in his voice reached deep inside, wrapped her heart, and pulled tight. “Keep going.”

She did, reading aloud. “Two million dollars. San Francisco. Lake Tahoe. Oregon. Idaho. Wyoming. South Dakota. Minnesota. Wisconsin. Chicago…” Her voice trailed off to a whisper.

Their story, on his flesh. Forever.

“You like it?” He sounded a little scared.

She kissed his arm, right below the name of the city in which they stood. “I love it.”

He took her face in his hand, thumb brushing her lips, fingers digging deep into her hair in a gesture she’d come to know as both possessive and adoring. “There’s room for more.”

She touched his warm chest. His nipples hardened and she trailed her nails down his stomach to the snap of his jeans.

“You know,” she said, “someone once told me that you love me.”

He didn’t go pale this time. Didn’t retreat. He bent closer. “Whoever that was is a damn smart bastard.”

“So it’s true?” Absolutely nothing else existed in the world outside of that apartment.

“I’m so in love with you,” he said, “I just may stamp your name across my scalp.”

She reached up and ran a hand over his smooth head. At the same time, she snagged moisture droplets from the air and slammed them together to create thin rivulets. She used them to swirl glistening, tantalizing lines over his scalp and neck, down his pecs, and around his ribs. They were like extensions of her own nerves, these liquid teases. She could feel more of his skin at once and it was exquisite.

A rumble rose up from deep within his chest. “Oh, God. You know I love that.”

She dried him off, curled her fingers inside his jeans, and pulled open the fly. His breath hitched.

“And I love you,” she said against his mouth.

They were completely and utterly alone. No one to fear hearing them from the next room or the floor below. No more worrying about maids wanting to clean their room. No more burying their orgasms against their arms or in pillows.

“Reed.” She smiled wickedly. “Make me scream.”

Turn the page for a preview of
Hanna Martine’s next Elementals book

A TASTE OF ICE

Coming soon from Berkley Sensation!

The first morning of the Turnkorner Film Festival and already
you could throw a rock and hit a celebrity. For two weeks each winter, that’s exactly what Xavier wanted to do.

He hadn’t moved to White Clover Creek, Colorado five years ago for the swarms of film lovers and demanding Hollywood types, but for the other fifty weeks of the year when the insular world of the nineteenth-century mountain town helped him forget what needed to be forgotten.

Today, strangers hogged the ice- and salt-covered sidewalks, jostling him from all sides. He ducked his head, hunched his shoulders, soldiered on. He hated the crowds but he loved the cold: that stinging cloud of air sucked deep into his lungs, the hurt of freezing toes. Anything to remind him he lived free.

Just one more block up Waterleaf Avenue. Just fifty more yards and then he could hide himself in Shed’s restaurant kitchen. He’d tie back his hair, grip his knives with an intense sigh of relief, and then spend the next fourteen hours thinking only about the three-by-three-foot station in front of him.

Except that about a thousand people mingled between where he stood in front of the Tea Shoppe and where he longed to be…and more than half of them were women.

A hole in the crowd opened up and he pushed into it. On the steps of the Tea Shoppe to his left, two girls in puffy jackets sipped from steaming paper cups. He could smell the pungent Earl Grey, and just underneath it, the scents of their skin and their flowery shampoo.

His body reacted to them as it had been trained. Every muscle, no matter how small, tightened with expectation. Every blood cell raced faster. He
wanted
.

One of the girls slapped the other on the arm and pointed to Xavier. “Hey, check him out.”

He’d never get used to this, to the bold women of the outside world who lusted on their own terms and displayed that lust for all to see. Before,
inside
, he’d been the one with the desires. His captors, the Ofarians, had done a damn fine job of creating that monster, and he was still trying to exorcise it.

Three seconds. That’s the maximum amount of time he let himself look at any woman.

You could learn a lot about someone in three seconds. For instance, the two on the steps were here for the scene. And to be seen. They stared at Xavier because he just happened to have walked by. In another minute or so, their attention would drift elsewhere. Though his eyes saw their beauty was plastic—made, not born—his body didn’t know the difference. It didn’t care.

Three seconds came to an end. He looked away.

Man, he was messed up. He was still learning about this world and about himself, but that much was pretty clear. Normal Primary guys didn’t sprint the other way when a woman showed interest. Normal Primary guys didn’t spend half their days obsessing over cooking and the other half pounding the ever-loving shit out of a boxing bag just to avoid getting naked with someone.

But then, he wasn’t a Primary. He wasn’t human.

And even though he wanted nothing more than to be “normal,” he certainly wasn’t that either.

“Excuse me. Pardon me. Excuse me.”

Xavier recognized the reedy voice and sought it out—a note of familiarity in the chaos. He searched the crowd for the source, thankful, for once, that he was just about the tallest person on the street. A crooked little man, silver hair partially covered by a tweed cap, slid along the brick front of the Tea Shoppe, trying to reach the stairs. Mr. Elias Traeger, as much a fixture in White Clover Creek as the bronze statue of the work-hardened miners in the middle of the garden square. The old man had worked at the Tea Shoppe for twenty years and would probably totter from local job to local job until his life gave out. Crazy, but that’s what Xavier dreamed of.

The crowd shifted. A tourist with a cell phone plastered to his ear shoved hard into Traeger’s shoulder and the elderly man tipped to one side. His eyes went wide, his thin arms scrambling for purchase on the smooth brick.

Five years ago, Xavier would’ve let Traeger go down and then walked on without a second thought. But Xavier wasn’t that man anymore. At least there was that.

Xavier lunged forward and caught Traeger under his arms before his brittle kneecaps could hit the ice. Traeger found his feet, and Xavier helped him right himself. Traeger blinked up into the sunshine.