One Wrong Move (13 page)

Her nipples, upon being nominated, were making a spectacle of themselves, poking through jumper and blouse without the benefit of her minimizer bra with its fierce underwires and its modesty cups.

She sucked in her lip, felt herself doing it, noticed him notice.

So much to feel self-conscious about. Worse than being naked. “I don’t—”

“But I know, because I saw it.” His voice was a charm, working on her like an actual physical touch. Like a silk scarf trailing over her naked skin, subtle as a whorl of smoke. “Am I the only one who knows what’s under there? All that bounty? Jesus, is that even possible?”

Nina sucked in air designated for telling him to stop talking trash, but it got trapped in her lungs when he hooked her skirt, and lifted it, exposing her knee. The fabric tickled her legs. She coughed, to shock her voice back into functioning. “You’re messing with my head, Aaro.”

“It messes with mine, that you’ve got no underwear.” His voice was pitched just for her ears. “I never said I was fair. Or smart, because coming on to you is stupid. Like, cutting-my-own-throat stupid.”

His words were offensive, but she couldn’t call him on it, not with her throat quivering like this. He broke eye contact, to look at the street signs. He checked the time on his cell phone. “In this traffic, I estimate we’ll get to the car rental place in fifteen minutes.”

Her toes curled up. “Um . . . meaning?”

“Meaning if you slid down a little bit more, all those folds of tent fabric would come in useful. I could slide my hand up your thigh. . . .” He touched her knee, and her leg jerked nervously.

“Feel your skin as my hand slides up. Just my fingertips, barely touching you. Taking my time. Until the edge of my hand touches the swirl of your muff, right over your clit. That vortex.

Like a cowlick. But I better not even think about licking. Licking’s for later.”

Stop it.
She mouthed the words, but the sound wouldn’t follow, and he wasn’t looking at her face, he was looking at her thigh, part of which was now bare. His big hand closed over her knee.

And her knee felt so warm. Sparkly and strange.

“When my hand got up to the hot stuff, I’d brush the tip of my finger up and down your slit.” His voice was barely audible.

“Until you started to make noise, move against me. Then I’d open you up, play with your clit, until you were slick and juicy.

I’d slide my finger into your pussy, really slow. Feeling inside you, petting and stroking, listening to how you breath, still playing with your clit, ’til I feel what kind of touch makes you wild.

I’ll work it . . . slow and soft, deep and hard, whatever you like.

Show me as we go. Until you come and come and come. As many times as the trip allows.”

“You are outrageous.” The words had no air behind them.

“Yeah. Thinking with the little head. Gets you every time. My mouth is watering.” He lifted his hand, clenched it, flexed it.

“My finger is tingling, just thinking about putting it inside you.”

She dragged her tattered dignity together. “I’m impressed with your altruism.”

He slanted her an ironic look. “Nobody’s ever accused me of altruism before,” he said. “How do you calculate?”

“This erotic scenario. Other than your tingling finger, it’s all for my benefit. Not a single thought for yourself. How gallant, giving all the orgasms to me. Can’t help but make a girl wonder about your agenda.”

“You’re smart to wonder.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “And yeah, there’s an agenda. It’s all about effective time management.”

That took her by surprise. “Excuse me?”

“If we play now, then when I get you to the hotel room, you’ll be ready,” he said. “What I want requires a locked door, a whole lot of girl lube, and ideally, soundproof walls, though that’s probably too much to hope from a mid-range hotel. And after a few hours of what I’ve got in mind, you won’t be accusing me of altruism anymore.”

She blinked at him, intimidated. “Um. That sounds alarm-ing.”

“It’ll be awesome. But it’ll be very mutual. I’m a calculating, selfish dickhead, but I do excel in a few things. One is kicking asses. The other I can demonstrate to you right now. Say the word.”

His hand on her knee was a silent promise. Waves of energy pulsed from it, straight up her thigh, to pool between her legs, a hot, liquid shimmer of terrified anticipation.

The words just popped out of her, the ultimate buzz kill. “And afterward?” she blurted. “What then?”

Tension gripped the air. For a moment, the silence was absolute.

“Like I told you,” he said. “My job is to keep you alive until we hook up with Bruno’s guy. After that, you’re not likely to see me again. I have my own reasons for staying as far from New York City as possible.”

“So what you’re suggesting is just a short delay,” she said. “In taking me to this rendezvous, I mean.”

His grin transformed his face. “It would be a long delay,” he said. “A long, juicy, excellent delay. Nothing short about it.”

“And just how would you explain that to Bruno and the guy he—”

“Bruno doesn’t have this number. He can stew in his own juices. I’ll call him when we’re done.”

When we’re done.
So flat, so final. She stared down at his fingers, dark against her thigh, trying to think of something to say that was not either prissy or inane or disgustingly clingy.

She needed to be cool, detached, with a guy like this. She gathered her wits, and opened her mouth. “So this is just multitasking for you, then? Killing time while we’re stuck in traffic?

Getting the tiresome chore of foreplay out of the way in your downtime?”

“Let me do my thing,” he suggested. “Tell me afterward if you think it was tiresome. If it felt like a chore. I know how to make a girl come. And I have grasped the concept of delayed gratification, at least when it comes to sex. That’s all that can be said for my evolutionary development, though. As for the rest of me, we’re talking rudimentary brain stem. The stuff we have in common with crocodiles and sharks. Basic motor function. Making money. Procuring food. Fight and flight.”

“You are so full of shit, Aaro,” she told him.

That devastating grin made his eyes glow. “You’ve found me out.”

The taxi lurched to a halt. Aaro’s gaze fell to her breasts, which jiggled and swayed as they rocked back against the seat.

Her face bloomed hot. “Considering the mortal danger and the mobsters and all that, don’t you think we should be more, um, alert?”

“Nah.” His voice was offhand. “I’m plenty alert. Trust me. If I were any more alert, I’d have a heart attack.”

She choked off the urge to giggle. “So it’s all about living life to the fullest? Seizing the day, in the face of doom?”

“I hadn’t thought about it in those terms,” he said. “I’m not all that deep, to be honest. But what the fuck, right? Let’s seize the day. One excuse is as good as another for me.”

She shook her head at him. “I cannot believe, after what just happened, that I am having this conversation.”

“Me, neither,” he said. “But I saw you before you put that bag over your head. The damage is done. Now my dick wants what it wants.”

“Bag over my head, my ass,” she grumbled.

“Let’s not talk about your ass,” he said. “At least not until you give me an answer. Then we can go into the subject. In great . . .

depth.”

She stared up the length of his long, lean body. Presenting himself to be admired. Arrogant jerk. But she couldn’t stop looking, at his sharp cheekbones, his hawk nose, his intense, brood-ing eyes. His face was starkly handsome, even shadowed with stubble. His brown hair had come loose of its tie to hang around his jaw. And she didn’t even like long hair on men. She thought it looked affected, effeminate.

Not on Aaro. He was gorgeous. He exuded sexual readiness.

She was actually considering it. Imagining him naked, fulfilling all his heated promises. Imagining herself enjoying every shuddering, succulent minute of it. Heart thudding, thighs clenching.

It was only the most colossally bad idea ever conceived in the history of bad ideas. She was already torn apart. No need to jump up and down on the disassembled pieces. That was what sex with Aaro would do to her. He personified everything she avoided in men. He was rude, aggressive. Too big. Damaged, by his own admission. He loathed attachment, avoided intimacy. He just wanted to fuck her, plain and simple, before handing her over and walking off into the sunset. He didn’t try to put any sort of spin on it, he just said it. He seethed with bad attitude, suppressed violence. He was trained to kill easily, without remorse.

Not that she could presume to criticize him for it, considering.

Plus, he smoked.

No, it wouldn’t work. Fear and excitement would cancel each other out and leave her stranded at flat zero, miserable and angry at herself for being so stupid. For doing that to herself, despite the alarms, the warnings. All for a stupid little itch that longed to be scratched.

Not in this lifetime. Subject closed,
ka-chunk,
like a bank vault.

She shook her head. “No.”

Aaro lifted his hand off her leg without a word, but the silence in the taxi sagged,
whump
. As if the air had turned to lead.

She felt bereft, as if he had taken something from her, something she needed. That sparkling energy of . . . well, she couldn’t call it a flirtation. It had been too blunt, too wierdly honest and raw and shocking. Not a flirty vibe at all. But almost, well . . . fun.

And as if she could say no to the man who was keeping her alive. As if she had anything else to offer to convince him to keep on doing it.

She muscled the stab of panic down. She wasn’t going to start trading sex. Not for anything. Now or ever. She had enough problems.

Then it occurred to her. After all the terror she’d gone through, she hadn’t given her attackers a thought for the past fifteen minutes.

Aaro’s indecent proposition had wiped it all right out of her mind.

Dmitri Arbatov climbed off the motor scooter he’d taken from some terrified teenager, circling the shot-up mess of a Lincoln Navigator that Nina Christie and her protector had escaped in.

He’d happened across the car by chance, in their last, desperate attempt to pick up the scent, but he was a short-range telepath, not a tracker like Roy.

Even Roy was in trouble now. They’d gotten out of range while they were grounded with the trashed Audi. No way to pick up the trail of their prey.

His thigh throbbed where the bullet had grazed it. His pants were soaked, one of his shoes filling with blood. Mikhail’s and Ivan’s corpses had been left in Nina Christie’s house for the cops to comb over, and he was defying orders from Oleg at this very moment. He was supposed to be lurking outside Aunt Tonya’s hospice, waiting for Sasha to show up.

He was going to catch hell for this.

The thought of the impending conversation with his uncle made him physically sick, but being dry of psi-max for eight weeks was worse. Roy was so fucking stingy with the tabs. When Roy had called, he’d leaped at the bait. Six tabs, ten mg’s apiece up front. When they got the girl, another ten. Oh, yeah. He was all over that deal.

Now the girl was gone, and the dose he’d taken for the job was wearing off, leaving him blank, blinded. When he came down from psi-max, he got so thin. Flat, like a piece of paper. He hated that shrinking feeling. Like a hard-on gone south at the worst possible moment.

He craved that rush, when his inner eyes and ears suddenly opened, and he could see the gears crunch and spin in people’s heads as if they were made of glass. He knew what moved them, what scared them, what they craved. He owned them. He saw what people thought of him, too, but what the fuck, he was used to being hated.

But he needed a steady supply. Unacceptable, for Roy to own his ass like this. Ever since that night down in SoHo, a year ago.

Roy had been calling him for extra guns, false identities, or the services of Oleg’s elite computer hackers. Roy had been drunk, expansive. He’d passed Dmitri a little red tab.
Take this. See what
happens. Go on. Trust me.

He didn’t, of course, trust Roy. Not at all. But he was curious, so he tried it. And he’d spent the rest of the night in the parking lot, reading every person who walked by. Discovering the man he had been meant to be. The man with the amazing secret weapon, who could not be fucked with, or sneaked up upon. Not when he was using.

Fury seethed and bubbled in his guts when he thought of Nina Christie. Sneaky little cunt. Tiptoeing around him somehow. He didn’t understand how she’d blocked him for so long.

No one else ever had.

He’d gotten a glimpse of her with his actual eyes before they opened fire. He hadn’t been impressed. A mouse of a girl: pale, wispy, shapeless. Big glasses, baggy dress, bad hair. But Dmitri didn’t need for them to be raving beauties. Like he’d told her, all women were pretty with duct tape on their mouths. That frantic look in their eyes, the muffled grunts and whimpers, that was what got him off.

He’d seen what went down on the street with her that morning with Kasyanov, through the tattered veil of Yuri’s memories.

That pathetic fuck had been so easy to read, the torture hadn’t even been strictly necessary, but he had to make it look good.

The scenario was that Yuri was a dealer and thief, gone into business for himself. There could be no mercy for such a man.

Through Yuri’s memories, he knew that Helga had said that there were two doses of this Psi-Max 48 left. Then Kasyanov had shot up Nina Christie with one dose before she spazzed out. This left one dose unaccounted for. They’d searched Christie’s house and found nothing. He had to find Nina before Roy killed her.

Because that dose was his.

He wasn’t satisfied with these pissant ten-mg tabs. He wanted the real deal. The new stuff. Permanent change, that was what Kasyanov had promised them. Rebirth, as his true self. His best self.

Dmitri circled the fucked-up Lincoln. He wrenched the door open. He’d need a tab tonight to deal with Oleg. That evil old goat was so good at mind-fucking, he didn’t even need psi-max to help him do it. He knew what he would see in Oleg’s head, though.
Sasha.
The long-lost, perfect son who’d had the good sense to disappear twenty years ago.