Lying and Kissing (14 page)

It didn’t make any sense. Guys, if they looked at me at all, just thought I was distant and cold. How could this man—this monster—be the one to see past that?

He reached across me and I felt my seat belt disengage. I shuddered. Just the sound of it hissing back into its reel, that glorious sound that I’d imagined so many times when I was trapped, was enough to fill my eyes with tears.

And then he was shoving one big arm under my legs and another around my back and I was being scooped up again. He lifted me—powerfully, determined but with great care. He didn’t want to hurt me but he was damn well going to cuddle me,
now.

I landed in his lap, but it wasn’t like at the club. This wasn’t about sex. He wrapped his arms around me, leaning forward at the same time and nestling his head into my cheek, and it was as if he was wrapping his whole body around me. His warmth, his life, throbbed into me and I felt the ice inside me break. What had been cold and solid but at least smooth became jagged and vicious. A strangled sob escaped me.

Luka whispered something in my ear. “
Shh, myshka.” Shh, little mouse.

That sent me over the edge. I forgot that it didn’t make any sense, that this couldn’t possibly be Luka Malakov being tender and concerned. I forgot who I was and who I was meant to be. I just remembered being cold,
so cold,
in that car, and no one coming, and, suddenly, I couldn’t stop crying.

The pain rolled down my cheeks in big, hot waves, dripping onto my dress and onto Luka’s muscled arms. My wet hair was soaking his collar and now my tears were soaking his sleeves and I was a disgusting mess but he didn’t seem to care. He just wrapped me tight in his arms, so tight I could feel his heartbeat thumping against my back, and he held me.

I don’t know how long it took us to drive to his apartment. But I know that, eventually, the tears slowed and the memories crawled back to their homes in my chest and the ice re-froze. Thinner than before, though, and with cracks like a spider web.

I sniffed and blinked and took some deep breaths and said, in a small voice, “I’m alright, now.”

He made a disapproving noise, as if to say that
no
, I most definitely wasn’t and he knew it, but that he’d accept it for the time being. He squeezed me and then held me against him until the car pulled up.

His building was a skyscraper whose concrete base looked solid enough to withstand an apocalypse. A doorman dashed to open the doors for him before we were even out of the car and he led me straight inside, his arm around my waist. Both the doorman and the woman behind the reception desk did an incredible job of ignoring my soaked hair and the make-up running down my face.

There was an elevator at the far end of the reception hall. Luka didn’t have to press a button and wait. He just turned a key in a lock and the doors slid open, the elevator already waiting for us. Inside, there was only one button.

I swayed a little in my heels as the floor pressed upward under our feet. A hundred floors sped past. We were going to the penthouse.

There was a short, bare corridor, with a camera pointing right at the elevator door. His front door was a huge slab of polished wood, as strong as it was beautiful. Luka turned another key and heavy bolts clunked back.

We emerged into a huge, two level living room. There was a sort of pit sunk into the floor with cream leather couches on three sides and I caught a glimpse of a kitchen area off to the right. But I barely looked because in front of me was...Moscow.

The walls were floor-to-ceiling windows, with no drapes or blinds. But we had privacy, of a sort, because we were the highest building for miles. The city lay spread out around us like a map, traffic just glowing worms of light far below.

Luka put a hand on my arm and led me gently to a door. Behind it was a wet room finished in dark gray slate. The edges of the room were in darkness, giving the illusion that it went on forever. In the center, recessed spotlights picked out a gleaming metal shower head and the circle of floor beneath it.

“Take your time,” said Luka. “Clean that bitch off you. Dump your clothes outside the door and I’ll have them cleaned.”

I swallowed and looked around for a bathrobe. “Do you have anything else to wear?”

A smile touched his lips. His accent stroked each word, elongating the
E
s, turning them into vibrations that traveled up and down my spine.

“You won’t need anything to wear.”

I closed the door, shutting out Luka and his world of violence and money and isolating myself in the silence of the wet room. I locked the door. Then I leaned my back against it.

You won’t need anything to wear,
he’d said.

This was it. He wanted to have sex. Luka Malakov wanted to have sex
with me.

The fact that it had been in the cards all along didn’t make it any less of a bombshell. He was everything I stood opposed to. He was the literal enemy, the sort of man I’d sworn to protect the US from. And I was going to give myself to him?

Give yourself to him?
A mocking little voice spoke up inside me.
As if it’s the supreme sacrifice?

I felt the heat roll down my body, making my breasts tingle and my belly throb, finishing in a hot ache between my thighs.

If I slept with him because it was my job, because I had to...did that make it okay? Or did that just make me a whore?

All this on top of the fact that even simply having sex—normal sex, with a normal guy—would have been a major event in its own right. It was six months since I’d dated, and that had only lasted a couple of dates. It was just over a year since I’d had sex.

And this wouldn’t just be sex. I remembered Roberta’s warning:
God knows what he’ll want in the bedroom.

What
would
it be like? To be with a man as big and powerful as him? To lie under him, while he…

I squeezed my thighs together.

This is nuts.
I should call the whole thing off. I should tell Adam I needed to bail and fly home to the US and even quit the CIA if I had to.
I can’t have sex with a guy like him!

...however much I want to.

I reddened guiltily.

Except that, because it’s my job, I don’t have to feel guilty.

Guilt-free sex with a truly evil man I knew I shouldn’t get involved with but couldn’t resist. Perfect. Except for the part where, if he suspected for an instant that I was CIA, he’d break my neck.

I closed my eyes and leaned back against the door.
What would Nancy do?
Probably somersault backwards through the air, firing a gun in each hand.
Not all that helpful.

A shower. I’d take a shower and hope that cleared my head. Except that meant taking off my clothes, and there was nowhere to put them in the wet room where they wouldn’t get soaked. I could dump them outside the door like Luka had said to, but if he really did take them to be cleaned, I’d be trapped there...naked. Taking a shower
was
making a decision.

I took a deep breath and stopped thinking. Instead, I felt. I remembered the feel of his hands all over me, at the party in New York and his foot between my thighs at lunch. But that wasn’t what decided me. It was when I remembered the warmth of his chest against my back in the car and the tenderness of his gaze, those few times he’d let his defenses slip.
There was more to him than the raw evil I’d been told about. And yet, worryingly, I was aware that the evil—and the
fuck you
attitude, the not caring what anyone thought—turned me on as much as the tenderness. I wanted his cold strength as well as his hidden, blazing center.

I unzipped my dress, still damp from the toilet water, and peeled it off. I stripped off my bra, panties and heels and then stood there, naked, biting my lip, the bundle of clothes in my arms.

All at once, I unlocked the door and pulled it open, half expecting Luka to be standing right there. But there was no one in sight. I laid the bundle down outside the door together with my purse and closed and relocked the door, then stepped quickly towards the shower before I could change my mind.

The slate tiles were warm underfoot—the place must have underfloor heating. There didn’t seem to be any controls for the shower but, as I stepped under it, the spray came on, strong and just the right side of scalding. The shower head was as big as a car’s wheel with about a million holes for the water. Standing under it was like being immersed rather than showered and the sensation left me gasping. But I could feel the jets pounding the heat into my body like hammers, forcing back the Moscow chill. And that took me back to a different sort of cold.

What exactly had happened in Luka’s car? I hadn’t had a full-on flashback like that in a long time and the intensity of it scared me. And yet, at the same time, it had felt as if something important had changed inside me. I was still frozen inside but I’d definitely felt things crack and move before they’d hardened again.

On the few occasions when the memories had hit me at full strength like that, I’d just had to endure it, the pain turning back in on itself again and again, like a beam of light in a hall of mirrors. But with Luka there, I’d actually been able to vent some of it. A little of the pain had escaped and it had felt...incredible.

Had he
healed me,
in some way? That made no sense. He killed people and sold things that killed people. What did he know about healing?

He’d called me
Little Mouse.
That wasn’t how I’d expected him to react, faced with a woman ugly-crying in his car. I would have expected him to kick me out and pick up a couple of Russian escorts, instead.

When the water had sluiced the dried tears from my face and the toilet water from my skin, I rummaged around on the shelves by the shower, looking for shampoo. Translating the Russian wasn’t a problem. Reading the labels in the moodily-lit bathroom was.
Who does he think he is: Batman?

The bottles all looked like men’s products—black, silver, and blue bottles. They had a quality feel but they didn’t look trendy. That didn’t surprise me. I couldn’t imagine Luka reading up on which hair products would make his hair softer and more manageable. I was surprised he didn’t wash it in coal tar and engine grease.

Right at the back of the shelf, I found a half-empty bottle with a definite feminine feel. Something Elena or one of the others had left there. I washed my hair like I’ve never washed it before, until all traces of the fight in the club bathroom were gone. I gently felt my face. My cheek still throbbed a little where the woman had slapped it, but there didn’t seem to be a bruise. My forehead was tender but hadn’t swollen up and my lip had stopped bleeding. I’d been lucky.

I found a bottle of what I hoped was shower gel. As soon as I opened it, I recognized the scent from being around Luka—it was the one he used, citrusy and with a hint of cold, stormy skies. I soaped myself down until I felt completely clean, suds trickling down over my breasts and stomach. I don’t know how much time passed but, by the time I finished, the attack felt as if it had happened to someone else.

I shut off the water and then took a look at myself in the mirror. Without make-up remover, I’d had to just scrub at my ruined make-up as best I could. It was pretty much all gone, which looked a hell of a lot better than a clown face. But now I was completely bare.

What I needed was my purse, so I could at least apply a little lipstick. It had been a long time since I dated, but I hadn’t completely lost touch with my feminine instincts. I looked around for a towel...and then realized there weren’t any.

I poked my head out of the door. My clothes, as Luka had promised, had gone. So had my purse. I was now stranded, naked, and dripping wet. I swallowed. “Um. Hello?”

Nothing. But, if I strained my ears, I could hear something coming from the open-plan living area. A crackling sound. The penthouse seemed to be mainly in darkness, with only the occasional spotlight and the moonlight coming in through the windows to light my way.

I took a deep breath...and stepped out, naked, to find him.