The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (11 page)

Breathe,
she reminded herself, and pressed her thumb, middle finger and ring finger together. Curled next to her chest, her right hand could form a finger mudra, but her left hand was under her cheek.
Half a mudra was better than none
, she imagined her yoga instructor saying. She tried to conjure her teacher’s guiding voice through the static of fear, tried to find that empty room inside her head where she could retreat, but there was no safe space even in her imagination.

Then the floor underneath her shuddered differently from the train rhythm, and she knew the door of the van must have opened a second time.

This was it. The searchers had arrived.

* * *

The van rocked when the sliding door slammed open. Superstitiously, Stig closed his eyes. Centuries of experience told him that the human gaze could be felt almost as easily as a touch by people who were asleep or reading, and he didn’t want to test whether the men searching for them could feel his stare even through the Punjabi band’s giant barrel drum.

Hiding inside a drum was like crouching inside a heart, the motion-induced vibration of the stretched drumhead palpable on his skin. He regretted slicing the ropes tying the bottom of the tribal
dhol
onto the barrel, but he’d had only a moment to access the inside. Music was an art he’d never conquered and a reason he’d admired Wend, but at this moment he yearned to understand rhythm. Perhaps being inside the instrument was the way to learn.

It was certainly the way to distract himself from the utter cock-up his simple auction scheme had become.

The van shuddered again, as if the door had been slammed, and he exhaled. Even the stifling air inside the barrel was invigorating when filtered with success, but he had no time to relish this escape. Since the moment Christina had walked into the auction, he’d been constantly running merely to stay out in front, but the next maneuver would be the trickiest yet. The searchers would undoubtedly continue up the train until they reached the blue car, but what they did after they found it empty was a gamble. These men were thorough enough that they’d checked every vehicle as they came forward, so he hoped they’d continue to the front of the train. Even with the tools in his kit, he might need as much as three minutes with their sedan.

Three minutes could be long or it could be short. He’d stolen a haul of thirty-six separate diamonds in two minutes, so a car should be easy, but this last twenty-four hours had gone so pear-shaped, he wouldn’t assume the ocean was wet until he drowned in it.

The train slowed leaving the tunnel at Calais, the change in rhythm obvious to a man folded inside what functioned as a giant amplifier.

Stig lifted the edge of the barrel enough to slide out, then unzipped Christina.

She stretched and struggled to sit, shaking her arms as if to restore circulation and blinking her huge brown eyes in the light, but she didn’t complain.

“Keep up, we’re going to move fast,” he said.

The final announcement to return to vehicles rattled around the metal train carriages as they stumbled out of the van. “Cheers, mate,” he said to the bandleader. “That name I gave you in Paris. They’ll have great rooms for you, cheap, if you say you met a blond guy afraid of boats and coppers.”

“No problem, mate. Don’t like boats much either, or blokes looking for folk they don’t know. Glad to help.”

Christina stuck close behind as he hustled farther down the train, away from his own car. The estate car with the orange parking sticker was empty, so their followers hadn’t returned despite the directive to prepare to disembark. They must be up front, either still searching the forward train wagons or staking out his vehicle. If they wanted to catch him and Christina, they’d need to be able to start it without keys, because their own ride was on the road to gone.

Without being told, Christina positioned herself to block the view of passengers sitting in the line of cars. The plastic wedge slid smoothly between the window and the rubber scraper, opening a gap, and in three seconds he’d inserted his favorite flexible hook in the door panel. This was the part where he closed his eyes to let muscle memory and his other senses guide his fingers. There was nothing to see when he popped a lock. He had to know when the loop dropped over the button the same way he knew when he touched a woman’s button. A spot felt right, and his instinct pinged
bulls-eye
.

He lifted and the door clicked.

On the ramp ahead cars started to honk as if the line at another exit door wasn’t moving. Christina hustled around the boot to jump in before he could hit the button to unlock the passenger side.

He threw himself in the driver’s seat and tore open his makeup kit to grab the bulky black key programmer.

“Cars are going,” she warned.

“Takes a sec.” He ground his teeth together in lieu of grinding gears that he couldn’t yet touch. The programmer had to reverse engineer the data signal from the ignition immobilizer before the substitute key fob would function. If he turned the ignition too soon, he’d be locked out of the engine, leaving them as kippers in a can.

The car behind them started honking. The beeps reverberated off the metal walls of the train carriage but didn’t make a difference to the decoder box, although his own tension was a different matter. Each honk stretched his nerves until he could testify in a law court that
yes, Your Honour, the police arrested a rubber band for knocking off cars.

“I see them, they’re coming!” Her voice rose. “Two men running down the ramp!”

“Lock the doors.” He didn’t lift his eyes from the light on the black box. In a dark car park alone it never took this long.

Green!
With the code cracked, the machine simulated the electronic signature of a real key as he turned his bump key. The sedan purred exactly like a car on the sales lot.

To reach their designated exit, he had to drive straight at the two men barreling through the empty compartment ahead, coats flapping and arms waving. Stig floored the accelerator, hoping to turn before they reached him, because he sure as hell couldn’t hit them and keep driving or they’d have every police officer in France looking for them too.

Christina braced a hand on the dash and whimpered, but he didn’t have a reassurance to spare at this particular instant. The man in the tan coat was close enough that Stig could see the sloppy knot on his red tie as he charged the car.

Stig twisted the steering and angled toward the open door without braking. They were going to make it. The undercarriage scraped the metal exit ramp, but they were off the train, free. Their pursuers were stuck staring at the rear lights of their own car. The road led straight toward the E40 motorway, not a single gate to slow their escape.

“That’s sorted.” He sank into the seat as the muscles from his neck through his spine released and loosened, but he didn’t let up on the wheel. The rails along the road blurred past the window, mimicking the rush of stimuli into his wide-open brain. Hunger, thirst, desire, laughter, tears, the entirety of the human condition flooded through him.

He loved a success. He glanced to his left.

Christina was grinning at him, a smile so uncomplicated by worry or calculation that he laughed with joy. They were a damned fine team.

He stuck a finger under his wig and scratched. “That calls for a celebration, don’t you agree?”

Chapter Twelve

Twenty minutes after their escape from the car train, Christina stared at Stig across the black duffel bag he’d taken from the car. They stood in an alley behind a row of homes several blocks from the parking lot where they’d abandoned the sedan. Stig hadn’t needed to tell her a second time that new cars could be tracked remotely by the manufacturer, even disabled, if they were reported stolen.

“I’m starving, but a nice restaurant?” She dropped her eyes to his stocking-clad legs. “You look like a Broadway chorus line on human growth hormone, and I look like an eighties music video. Nowhere decent would serve us. Not to mention the two guys we just escaped.”

“So little faith in my plan.” He opened the bag. “The car’s close enough to the local station—we arrived on the separate high-speed line—that they should conclude we moved on.” He handed her a plain white T-shirt and pulled a blue oxford wrapped in cleaner’s plastic out of the duffel. “Glad our friends were planning an overnight, but they certainly received the better set of clothing out of my car. This lot’s boring. We’ll turn into a rather dull-looking couple and catch the bus to Calais’s scenic
centre-ville.
”

She clutched the tee to her chest and looked at the backs of the tight-packed red-roofed houses bordering the alley. “You want me to change here?”

“Ditch the sweatshirt, and belt that with my scarf.” He unwrapped the green print length of silk from his neck. “You’ll look casual chic, or perhaps a little dotty, but not like the person on the train. Here, take my jewelry too.”

As she altered her outfit, he yanked his stockings down and swapped them for black pants from the duffel. Her fingers struggled to manipulate the clasp on the back of the necklace—it kept tangling in her hair—while Stig untied the front of the dress in order to zip and button the borrowed pants. They sagged on his lean hips and hung low enough to reveal the top of the tight underwear he’d worn beneath his dress.

In different circumstances, she might have found those tiny briefs disconcerting, but here they merely revealed exactly how flat and hard his stomach was.

Then he shed the wrap dress completely and folded it neatly into the duffel. “Too bad you’re not six inches taller, but I think you’d swim in this.”

She wasn’t looking at the purple fabric in his hand. No one would. Underneath he wore a spectacular seamless padded bra, black with a twinkling bow of fake black gems where the cups connected. She’d like a version of that bra herself, in a thirty-two instead of whatever size it took to span his chest and back. The casual familiarity of his ability to reach behind and unhook it with his arms in a chicken-wing position fascinated her. She wasn’t nearly as adept at maneuvering under her shirt to unhook and remove the compression wrap binding her breasts.

Her eyes were unreliable. Tiredness or perhaps the intimacy of their situation blurred the tan stone walls on either side, until it felt as if the two of them were in a different place. In her imagination, the dressing morphed into undressing. Instead of raising his zipper or buttoning the blue shirt, her mind played tricks that showed Stig unbuttoning his shirt and lowering his zipper, actions she’d already watched in the secret tunnel room.

It only took him minutes to transfer everything from the makeup case he’d brought into the stolen black duffel. “Ready?”

“You still have on—” She touched her own cheek, aware that his skin was rough and stimulating where her skin was smooth and vulnerable.

“Hand me a wipe from the bag.”

The cleansing wipes he’d brought were cool and moist, their fresh scent strong enough to smell in the alley. Without thinking, she reached up and he ducked and then she was running the wet fabric over his cheek, the tan pancake coming off in streaks filling the tissue. His head bent closer so she didn’t have to stretch, and he closed his eyes. As if he found it pleasurable.

She had never washed someone’s face before. Concentrating so hard on a man’s features, the crease from his nose to the corner of his mouth, the spot where his cheekbone blended into his sideburns, all of that acted on her as surely as grapes attracted yeast into beautiful symbiosis.

The only makeup left was his eye shadow and mascara. “I don’t want to sting your eyes.”

“Any pain won’t last.” His voice was low and scratchy instead of his usual polished tone. “It never does.”

She didn’t understand him, but nodded as if she did. The sparkles easily came off the bone under his eyebrow, revealing the tiniest of veins crisscrossing his skin. She extended her first finger and smoothed a few stray brow hairs, darker blond than the rest of his hair, to match the natural direction of his eyebrows.

The short hairs were silkier than their thickness suggested. Under the tip of her finger, his skin was warm. The hair lay flat, but she checked once more, her finger tracing the arc from the bridge of his nose toward his temple.

He didn’t make any audible sounds. Said nothing. Didn’t even seem to shift his weight where he stood leaning slightly toward her, but she sensed his pleasure as if he was a large cat under her hand.

By the time she dropped her arm, his eyelids and lashes looked like him again, and they stood close enough that the heat of his body reached her. The March afternoon was chilly in northern France, and a shiver flickered along her spine. One little step would bring her close enough to feel his warmth.

At this distance she noticed how dark his pupils had grown. His lips parted a fraction that signaled an invitation. Kissing him first felt natural, like the most uncomplicated decision she’d made in days. His lips were as warm and firm as she’d imagined, but softer too. Men’s mouths were a contradiction as complex as finding a bold and elegant wine combination, and as worthy of exploration.

She raised herself to him while he concentrated on her bottom lip, pulling with the tiniest sucks and running his tongue across it, nowhere else. His kisses expanded, radiating sensation from the spot where his tongue traced the edge of her lip through her entire body. Then he sucked, and nipped, until his care replaced the day’s fear with desire. He unlocked her as surely as his other tricks worked on cars.

She opened her mouth, but he didn’t thrust inside, didn’t overtake her. No, he left the pace to her.

His restraint was a greater aphrodisiac. She wanted more from his kiss, and if he wasn’t going to push, she’d have to take. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him to bend deeper toward her.

He understood her wants, and his gentleness fell aside as he finally took her mouth. Her toes barely touched the street. He held her so tightly that he imprinted on her, his thighs forming a wall, the bulge of his erection pushing where she couldn’t miss its signal and his chest flattening her unbound breasts. Only one element eluded her. Clothes separated her skin from the heat of his, a problem to be solved if she wanted to be closer.

Her feet didn’t have enough contact with the ground to wiggle her body and find the stimulation she craved, but she was strong enough to raise her legs with her abdominal muscles, like a move on the uneven bars.

He understood, and his hands went underneath her thighs as she wrapped her legs around his hips. Heaven. With the support of his hold, she let her head fall to the side while his lips traced the line of her neck.

“We’re not doing this here.” When he spoke, his diaphragm vibrated against her, the tiniest of sensations, but ones that shot straight to her core. Through her thighs she felt his legs spread to steady himself while his hands squeezed and shaped the junction of her thighs and butt. “Later.”

“Right.” Her one-word agreement sighed into the air. “Later.” If he kept talking, she could experience the movement of each word, the full-body understanding of sound. She arched as much as she could while held off the ground, and it was enough to match her need with the bulge below his waist, but not enough to relieve the tension clamoring inside. “When?”

“Don’t know.” His kisses returned to her jaw, her mouth, her throat, any bit of her revealed by the T-shirt. All his early restraint disappeared as he learned every inch of her skin. The skin he hadn’t found tightened with anticipation. Between her thighs, his pelvis rotated as if his lower body sought hers, but their clothes obstructed what he wanted as much as they blocked the contact she craved. “Can’t think.”

Neither could she. Not about anything except how his tongue was drawing a line along the spot where her neck met her shoulder, and that was good, but she wanted his mouth to explore other places on her body, places that begged for attention. Her breastbone, and the flat space where it led to the valley of her breasts. Her nipples at least had the stimulation of clothing-impaired friction, and her neck had the attention of his lips, but the nerves crisscrossing the untouched skin between begged for notice.

“Where?” The sound of the word was thickened and clipped as he turned slowly in the street.

The view through her almost-closed eyes changed from wall to parked cars to garbage cans to wall, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to take this thing happening between them and explore it the way it needed to be studied, with privacy and beds and leisure for hands and kisses and words. “Not here.”

“Right.” His mouth left her body, and he threw his head back. The motion pushed his chest harder against hers, but she knew he was struggling to stop. Now wasn’t the place or the time to unleash this heat and craziness. “Right.”

Releasing her legs from his hips was easy, but sliding through his hands to the ground was final. The interlude was...over.

He spoke first, his glazed eyes focusing on her face. “I’m afraid my lipstick transferred again,” he said.

Ridiculous, she knew, to behave like a teenager a decade after escaping that phase. Half her loopiness could be blamed on exhaustion, and the other half on a combination of adrenalin and watching an attractive man change clothes, but physical involvement with Stig was not in her best interests, not at all.

“Your nails.” She pointed at his red acrylic tips.

He looked from his hands to her. “If you’ll check the end of the alleyway, I’ll pop them off. You don’t want to watch.”

She didn’t think removal would be as easy as he made it sound, but he caught up to her before she could decide whether to ditch him or stay.

He seemed to understand not to read more into her kiss as he straightened the collar of the stolen shirt and slung the duffel from his shoulder. His fingers were free of polish, glue or any remains of the nails.

“How’d you take those off so quickly?”

“If you must know, I used a key to rip my fingernails off.”

Breaking off the tips with a key should have left a ragged mess. “But—”

“Shall we find a restaurant?” With a hand lightly guiding the small of her back, he steered her across the street to stand by a metal post with a bus logo. “My hospitality has been atrocious. I’ve offered you plastic sandwiches from a pharmacy and cold eggs.”

“And bacon.” She patted the bag she’d carried since the first tunnel. “And one bottle of 1947 Perlus.”

“I promised we’d drink it in France.”

No arguments on that. “Promise we won’t skip on the bill.”

He threw his hand over his heart as a white bus with rainbow-colored markings pulled up to the curb. “I would never stiff a working stiff.”

“What exactly am I?” She waited for an elderly woman carrying a plastic sack to descend. “I have a small business I built on my own, the definition of ‘working stiff.’” Bantering with him, or perhaps the lingering satisfaction of escaping the men on the train, made her realize she wouldn’t give up on Morrison and Mancini without a fight. “If you kill off Geoffrey Morrison, maybe I can blame the mess on him and reinvent myself as Mancini Fine Wines.”

“It’s a deal. Geoffrey’s offed as soon as we’ve finished with Ivar.” He motioned Christina to precede him on the bus stairs. “I suppose you expect me to pay for the bus ticket.”

“You’re the one who keeps choosing, let’s call them
unusual
transportation methods.”

Fifteen minutes later they stepped off the bus in front of a restaurant with the name L’Histoire Française painted in gold-and-red script on the window. Striped bistro curtains concealed the interior, but the flower tubs by the front door beckoned with the cheerful profusion of daffodils and purple pansies identical to the ones she’d potted at the front door of her shop.

At this point, if the food was anywhere on the dial between raw and carbon, she’d be happy, so realizing that Stig had brought her to a restaurant worthy of the bottle was a bonus. He spoke quickly to the maître d’ in excellent French, and they were led to a small table in a side alcove near the back. Heavy curtains hung from the sides of the arch, not completely enclosing the space but giving the illusion of a secret chamber. The host set two long leather folders in front of Stig, one in front of her. Women rarely received the wine list. Perhaps she should host a restaurateur education seminar on the topic of upselling wine to women.

The server who approached the table wore the classic uniform of white shirt, black pants and long white apron tied at his waist. In English, he asked what she would like to order.

She replied carefully and precisely in French by requesting a first course of the fava beans and a main course of the tiny lamb chops with asparagus.

“And to drink? May I recommend a carafe of the house red?”

Stig slid the leather-bound wine list to the end of the table. “The mademoiselle has a bottle. Perhaps the sommelier will provide a decanter?”

Christina set her prize on the table. The dust had long since been wiped off by the cloth she’d wrapped around it, and the copperplate script on the cream-colored label announced itself as a vintage that eschewed decoration or design, needing nothing more than a year and a name to make its way in the world.

“Mademoiselle?” The waiter’s voice rose on the last syllable, as if taking a wine order from a woman was akin to being handed chewing gum. Chewed.

She smiled from her seat. Watching his retreating back, she muttered to Stig, “Sommelier, four minutes.”