The Gorgeous Naked Man in my Storm Shelter (Erotic Suspense) (6 page)

She cranes her neck
to look past me in the lounge, as if she expects Don to be right
behind me.

I don’t know what to
think or feel. My mind is a maelstrom.

Don – a
political criminal. What does that mean? Is that why his accent is
a little off even though he speaks perfect English?
Where does he come from then? An
Eastern bloc country? I didn’t even know we were still at war with
them.

But he doesn’t seem deranged.
That’s the part that gets me. He seems perfectly normal, in a
manner of speaking, even if he has amnesia and strange abilities.
He doesn’t seem dangerous either. He’s kind and sensitive and
beyond caring.

I’ve already outstayed my wel
come here.

The whole
thing
doesn’t make sense. OK,
maybe it does and I don’t know the whole picture, but Don is
not
psychologically deranged. I’m willing to stake
my life on it.

Can a
previously psychologically deranged person turn
normal
after a traumatic event that gave him generalized
amnesia?

“Ms. Mansfield?”
Agent Sansky is regarding me with suspicion. She puts a foot
forward as if to edge past me.

I swallow. “Yes. Of
course. I’ll show you his room.”

All
m
y instincts are screaming
that this is wrong, wrong, wrong. But then again, I don’t know
what’s happening. All I know is that I have three government agents
at my doorstep and they are going to arrest the criminal I have
been in lust with.

Like
a zombie, I walk up the stairs,
programmed by rote that I must comply with persons in authority. My
heart hammers with each footstep –
wham, wham, wham
. I’m not doing anything wrong, my head says although my gut
tells me otherwise.

I find my voice. “So
how did he escape?”

“Beg pardon?” says
Agent Sansky beside me.

The two male
agents who did not introduce themselves are behind us, shadowing
our footsteps every way. In many ways, they
feel
more dangerous than Don. Although their suits are impeccable
and their hair straight-combed back like an Ivy League preppie, the
guns that surreptitiously outline their jackets are ominous in
their shoulder holsters.

We reach the
guestroom.

With a deep breath,
I rap my knuckles on the door.

“Don? Are you
awake?”

It occurs to
me that it will be
a rude
shock. It’s unfair, really, to do this to him.

Before I can
knock again, Agent Sansky wren
ches the handle and pushes the door open forcefully. It
crashes against the wall with a resounding bang.

“
Wh – ?” I
begin, but stop short as I stare at the empty bed. It’s perfectly
made, with
the coverlet nicely
arranged.

Agent Sansky strides
into the room.

“
Find him,”
she commands as she flings the closet door open. The men rush into
the room. It is as if they have been galvanized into loud action
without any of the niceties they have been trying to deceptively
portray earlier.

The blood
rushes through my head in a torrent.
Sometime during the night, when I was tossing and
turning in my fevered dreams, Don must have left the
house.

Left
me
high and dry without so much as a note.

I don’t know
which is worse. To find out that he is a
wanted political criminal or that the kiss meant
absolutely nothing to him.

He
used me,
comes the awful
clarity in my whirling brain.

But then why, why,
why did he come with me to the police? That is not the act of a
criminal who does not want to be found. Unless something came to
him in the middle of the night – some unbidden memory, perhaps –
and he left without disturbing me.

I don’t know if I
will ever know. All I know is that Don’s warm presence still
invades this room – his gorgeous body sprawled upon the coverlet as
he suppresses his nose bleed. The kiss. The merging of our wet
tongues. His throbbing cock, pushing against the barely contained
fly of the jeans I bought for him.

Finding
nothing, t
he agents are
searching the other rooms and downstairs. I am left standing at the
doorway of the guest room, frozen to the spot.

I struggle to take
hold of my senses as I hear bangs and thuds downstairs. If they so
much as destroy any part of my property . . .

Anger courses
through me. Despair. I run down the stairs, clutching at the
bannister to steady myself lest my wobbly feet betray
me.

Don, Don, Don . . .
why did you – ?

A figure
stands at the
main doorway.
Don stands there, wearing a blue T-shirt that I purchased yesterday
on top his well-cut Gap jeans. His face is flushed. A wet patch of
sweat grazes the chest of his T-shirt.

He has a bunch
of flowers in his hand
.

“
Jean? Who’s
here?”

“Don!”

I want to
shout a warning to him to
run
. Yes, I know
. . . but that is my first instinct. My
gut
instinct.

Too late.
Agent Sansky appears beside me. It’s like she’s seen an
apparition.
Her lips part
slightly and her expression becomes beatific.

Beneath her breath,
I hear the half-whispered word, “Amazing.”

That is not
the reaction I would expect from a government agent who has come
face to face with a psychologically-deranged criminal she must
recapture at all costs.
Unless
I misheard it, of course.

“Don, run!” I
cry.

Agent Sansky
whips
her revolver out from
inside her jacket and aims it at Don, who drops the flowers. The
individual blooms scatter the moment they hit my porch.

“Don’t move,” she
says.

Bewildered, he
raises his arms.
Even in his
tense state, his large figure frames the doorway as perfectly as a
GQ model at a photo shoot.

Agent Sansky jerks
her head at one of her men. “Cuff him.”

Don
says,
“What did I do? Who the
hell are you?”

I search his
features.
He is truly
surprised.

If he is acting, he
is doing a very good job out of it.

Agent Sansky makes
as if to reply, but glances at me and thinks the better of it. One
of the male agents goes to Don, the edge of a handcuff glinting in
his outstretched hand.

“
We’re doing
this for your own good,” Agent Sansky says to Don. She does not
divert her gun from his chest.

As the male
agent reaches for Don’s raised right wrist,
Don suddenly grabs the agent’s outstretched arm with
a motion that resembles a blur. The agent gives a shrill cry as Don
pivots him around and twists his arm behind his back.

Don holds him as a
shield in the path of Agent Sansky’s gun.

He says, “I
don’t know who you are and why you’re doing this, but I’m not going
to be chained like a slave at an auction. And I’m certainly not
going to come with you.”

Agent Sansky’s
eyes narrow. Besid
e her, the
other agent has also taken out his handgun and cocked it. Two black
muzzles are now pointed at Don’s head.

“Let him go,” Agent
Sansky says.

“
Not until you
tell me what this is about.”

“
You’re a
psychopath. You’re dangerous and you need to come with us. We can
help you get better.”

Don’s
beautiful
face twitches for a
moment, and then hardens. “I don’t believe you.”

“
You
don’
t know you’re a psychopath
because your mind has been jolted out of its cushion. But you’re
sick. You’ve been sick for a long, long while. We found you when
you crossed our borders and we tried to help you.” Agent Sansky’s
expression turns cunning. “You don’t remember anything. But all of
it is true.”

Cross our
borders. This means Don is foreign. That much I have guessed. I
look back and forth from Don to Agent Sansky, aggrieved that this
is happening in my own home . . . and to Don, who looks genuinely
baffled. I don’t blame him. Whatever he has been in the past, he
has no clue of it now. He’s like a newborn trying to find his way
around, only to be told that his new life is over before he can
begin it.

The flowers
lie on the porch. Was he going to bring them to
me
?

“I need more than
what you’re giving me,” Don says. “I need evidence.”

“You are in no
position to bargain.”

“Nor are you.” Don
increases his grip on the agent.

Everything
happens so fast that I almost fail to register it. The agent who is
being imprisoned in Don’s arms elbows Don in the midriff. Instead
of crumpling with an ‘oof’, Don scissors the agent’s arm in a sharp
crack.

The agent
screams
as he falls to the
ground.

As do I.

I clap my
hands to my ears, expecting the guns to go off and the bullets to
hit Don. But neither revolver does. I’m not sure if they are
refusing to shoot at him for fear of hurting him (but why,
especially since he’s such a dangerous political criminal?) or if
they genuinely underestimated his speed.

In a series of
kinetic actions that belie their fluid grace, Don ends up in my
lounge. He wrenches the gun off the male agent, dispatches him with
a sharp blow to the jaw that tumbles the man to the floor and
swiftly kicks Agent Sansky’s revolver from her hand. Before the
revolver can drop to the ground, Don catches it with a deft flick
of his wrist.

He now points the
gun at Agent Sansky. He glances at me worriedly. I’m crouched upon
my carpet, still holding my head in my palms.

“
Je
an, are you all
right?”

I’m trembling
too much to answer. But his concern touches me in some part of my
brain that is not shell-shocked.

He says to
Agent Sansky, “I don’t know who you are, but I don’t take kindly to
a gun being shoved at my face.”

Her
reaction takes me aback. Instead of
spitting claws out, her eyes glaze over with admiration.

“
My God,” she
says in an almost breathless tone, “you
are
amazing.”

So I didn’t imagine
her saying it the first time.

But why, why,
why?

Don motions with the
gun. “On the ground with the rest.”

The two men are
already rolling in pain on my floor. The first male agent clearly
has his arm broken in several places, because he’s cradling it. But
that doesn’t stop him from reaching inside his suit to withdraw his
gun.

“Don, look out!” I
shriek.

“
No, don’t
shoot him!” Agent Sansky cries. I’m not sure if she’s calling out
to Don or the agent, but from the angle her face is averted, I
reckon it’s to the latter.

But Don
doesn’t need either of us for warning. He expertly fires a bullet
into the wooden frame of my doorway. I get the impression that he
has aimed it precisely where he wants it and he has no intention of
hurting the agent.

“Hands up where I
can see them,” Don commands. “Go on. You know I can fire this
faster you can take that thing out.”

The agent
complies by raising his one good hand. Don lopes over to relieve
him of his gun, which he sticks into the back of his jeans. He pats
the man down with one hand to ascertain he is not carrying other
weapons. From the agent’s back pocket, he retrieves a
key.

“
If you don’t
mind, I’ll be borrowing your vehicle.” He directs this to Agent
Sansky.
He moves to the other
man’s gun, which has fallen onto the carpet and pockets that as
well. Then he turns to me. His eyes are anxious. “Jean, I’m not
sure if it’s safe for you here. Would you like to come with
me?”

My tongue is frozen
to the roof of my mouth.

He is not a
criminal, my mind says. Criminals are not spoken of in hushed tones
and described as
amazing
by government
agents.

“Yes,” I say.

“
Don’t be
a
fool!” Agent Sansky’s eyes
blaze.

My voice is
shaking as I say, “You know, I didn’t believe you when you said he
was a dangerous political criminal.”

“
You don’t
know what he is.
”

“I don’t think you
do either.”

I hope I’m not
making a mistake.

Together,
we
handcuff or tie the agents
to chairs with duct tape. I’m a little worried about the man with
the broken arm, but Don says, “They’ll be up and running in no
time.”

Shit.

I’ve just
become an accessory to assaulting three government agents. If they
are who they claim they are.

Agent Sansky
says in a low dangerous voice, “
You do realize that you’ve now become a criminal
yourself.”

My hands are
trembling. For answer, I duct-tape her mouth
shut. Her eyes shoot me a look that could have slain
dragons.