by Bethany-Kris
“Waste of time, anyway,” Penny interjected. “They’ll find me when they want to.”
And that was the simple fact of the matter. Not that she would explain why or how to Luca—the guy didn’t need more fodder to his fire when it came to tracking her down. A chip in her upper left arm, about the size of a grain of rice, assured that when the coast was clear and her handlers were comfortable, they would come.
Without issue.
“The shower is open if you want it,” Luca said.
She should. Two days without a bath or shower was just about her limit, honestly.
Penny lifted her head, ready to agree, and thank him for the information but the words caught in her throat at the sight of Luca standing in the doorway to their tiny room with nothing more than a towel hanging around his waist. He was tall—lean, but not lanky. Golden skin dusted with dark hair glimmered under the dim light in the room, and the droplets of water that still clung to his black hair said he’d barely even used that towel before coming back to their room.
No ink marred his skin.
A couple scars on his chest only added to the chiseled planes that made up a muscular torso. The bands of his arms, threaded with veins she wanted to trace with her fingertips, flexed when he tossed the pile of clothes to the foot of the bed. It had been easier to focus on ignoring her attraction when he had been doing nothing more than coming and going from their room, bringing back food, a pillow, and even a book when she asked for it. All clothed.
Now, she was going to have this image of him burned into the back of her eyeballs. No doubt, that wouldn’t help her at all.
Why?
Why was he so beautiful?
It was unfair, really.
“You okay?” Luca asked when she remained silent.
No.
Not at all.
“Fine,” Penny managed to utter. “I’m just gonna—”
“You know, if you wanted to show me your ass, you could have just done that. You didn’t need to climb up there and wait for me to come back.”
Penny blinked, her mouth falling open audibly. “What?”
That was not that she did.
Luca laughed, grabbing his shirt from the bed and tossing her a wink as he flipped open the fabric. “I’m kidding, Penny. Lighten up.”
She was in control at all times. It was one of the few things her training at The League had afforded her that she was most grateful for. And yet, when it came to this man, it seemed like her control didn’t exist at all.
“I gotta go,” Penny said, walking past a confused looking Luca to head for the doorway. “I need a shower.”
Maybe a drink, too.
“Penny, hey—”
“I’ll be back.”
When she felt like it.
Luca’s sigh rang out behind her before he called, “Don’t leave the building.”
Right.
Even if she wanted to, she didn’t have a choice but to stay. That was ninety percent of the damn problem. She couldn’t get away from him, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. This couldn’t possibly lead her to anywhere good.
THE SHOWER DID nothing for Penny. It certainly didn’t help with her growing problem despite the fact that she couldn’t even get the water to a bearably warm temperature. Cold showers were a joke even when it was unintentional. She did manage to snag a black tank top someone had left hanging from a makeshift clothesline in the hallway to throw on and with the skin-tight slip she wore under her dress to help conceal any weapons, it was like a whole new outfit.
Mostly.
She might return the top.
If she felt like it.
Penny found the bar Luca had mentioned on their first day after wandering a maze of halls for what felt like an hour. Attached to a kitchen where she was positive Luca had been getting their food from during their stay, the bar wasn’t much to look at. But neither was the rest of the place, either. Mismatched tables, booths, and chairs were set up haphazardly to face a small platform where a singer was currently crooning into a microphone through a haze of smoke.
This place wasn’t legal by any stretch of the imagination. That much was clear. It also served a purpose because she didn’t think she had ever seen such a melting pot of people as the ones that lingered in the bar and kitchen.
She also found what served as the entrance. Not that it appeared that way. More like a nondescript door between two others where a man stood with a weapon at his hip, deciding who could and could not come inside which led directly into the bar.
Despite the strange atmosphere of the place, no one paid her any mind when she found a seat at a table near the back of the bar. With only the tank top and slip to cover her skin, her patchwork of scars was on clear display.
No one even looked her way.
They didn’t care.
It made it easier for her to forget that she wasn’t trying to blend in when she really didn’t have to in the first place. How long had it been since she just ... was?
Too long.
Maybe that was the general rule of the place. Don’t ask, don’t tell. If no one caused a problem, then someone wouldn’t cause a problem with them. Penny liked that just fine.
Luca finally came to find—and join her at the table—when Penny was six drinks deep. Vodka soda wasn’t her favorite alcohol to drink, but the place wasn’t exactly equipped for the kinds of martinis she preferred. Simple would have to do.
She didn’t even glance Luca’s way when he slipped into the chair next to hers. At the other side of the room, the female singer crooned her way through a rendition of Lana Del Rey’s Heroin. The song was decades old but the tune certainly fit the vibe of the place. And maybe even Penny’s current mood.
Luca said nothing, but Penny couldn’t help but fill the silence between them.
“I like this place,” she admitted. “It’s ... different.”
“Not the social standard?”
She shrugged. “Different.”
His head turned a bit in the corner of her vision, telling her that he was now looking right at her and trying to decipher what she meant. He was free to do that all he wanted; she wasn’t giving away the thoughts she kept locked up tight.
“Like you,” he said, not even posing it as a question. “I’m sure you feel different, too. Maybe like you don’t fit in with the typical crowd ... it’s not a place where you belong. Instead, you spend your time living in the undergrounds where people play at a new level of rules and only occasionally come out to blend in with the rest of the world when needed.”
Christ.
Why did he have to be right?
“Yeah, well—”
He interrupted her mutter with a quiet, “I get it.”
She did look at him, then, angling her body in the chair just enough that she could observe him from the side. He’d lost the leather jacket and hoodie, instead, now wearing his dark-wash jeans and the black shirt he’d been sleeping in since they arrived. At least, whatever soap he’d managed to find to use in the shower upstairs left him with a fresh, crisp scent. One she couldn’t stop trying to inhale.
Another problem.
Perfect.
“I told Freddie we might be here a while longer,” Luca said.
“You don’t need to be here at all. In fact, you would make shit a lot easier for me if you do leave before someone finds—”
Luca sucked air through his teeth, jumping in to say, “Yeah, probably not.”
“Why are you so ...”
His head tipped her way, those shockingly intense green-blue eyes of his watching her like he was trying to dissect her. The shadows from the lack of lighting in the bar only hardened the lines of his handsome face even more. If there was a God, then he spent a little more time creating Luca.
Unfortunately for her.
“I’m not anything,” Luca said, “and maybe that’s the problem. I’m not all that different than how I used to be, Penny, but you ... well, you’re entirely new. I me
an, look at you.”
She blinked. “I don’t under—”
“I spent the last five years chasing after a ghost. I was trying to find someone who didn’t exist anymore. Everything you are is not what you were, and that’s fine. It’s certainly for the better, but it took me a second to catch up to speed. Don’t fault me.”
“Is that ... an apology?”
Because she wasn’t sure.
Luca chuckled, the sound a sinful tease to her senses. “What would I be apologizing for, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Finding me?”
“Nah, that was just my job. Anything else?”
Penny didn’t reply.
What could she say?
Luca lifted one shoulder, saying, “There’s your answer.”
Penny rolled her eyes. “Prick.”
Maybe it was the alcohol doing stupid things to her already foolish brain, but when she found Luca looking over at her with the kind of smile that could make women swoon, a soft giggle escaped her mouth. The sound only made his gaze drop down to her lips while his smile dipped into an all too knowing smirk.
“We’ve got a problem,” she told him.
Luca arched a brow. “Do we?”
“I think so. Starting with the fact you’re an issue that’s going to cause me even bigger problems if I don’t get you under control. No matter how many times I tell, and ask, you to leave me alone, you won’t. What happens if someone doesn’t give you a choice in the matter?”
“The tracking you thing?” Luca shook his head. “Again? That’s nothing.”
She didn’t think so. The man couldn’t possibly know it but every second he spent around her put his life in danger. And not just him ... his family and friends. Anyone who might cause issues for The League but especially those that became visible to the people she was hunting. Because if the monsters couldn’t find her, then they would move onto the next best thing. People she cared about; anyone attached to her life that they believed would hurt her to lose.
She had a feeling Luca wouldn’t care if she tried to explain. Five years of his life had been dedicated to finding her and bringing her home. If that wasn’t an obsession, then she didn’t know what was.
Did he even realize it?
That was the real question.
“What else would I be talking about?”
“I was thinking maybe that you realized I don’t really see you like the same broken little girl I used to ... and it fucked you up.”
Penny swallowed hard. “Well—”
“Penny.”
She looked his way.
He hadn’t looked away.
“What, Luca?” she whispered.
“It fucks me up, too.”
“What do we do with that, then?”
He flashed his teeth in a grin. “Maybe this.”
“What—”
He closed the distance between their chairs before she even knew what was happening. When his lips pressed against hers, there was no hesitation in Penny’s mind before she answered his kiss back. His hands threaded into the loose waves of her white-blonde hair before finding her jaw. Every stoke of his lips against her own coaxed open her mouth until his tongue tangled with hers.
There she was.
Stupid, again.
Breathlessly dumb.
But happy.
All because he kissed her.
When he did finally pull away, Penny was left with more confusion than before. At least when she only had her own attraction to deal with, things were easier. Adding his to the mess made all of this far more complicated. Because it—they—couldn’t be anything. Ever. Certainly not like this.
“I wanted to see,” he murmured, his thumbs stroking the line of her jaw with a touch that sent heat spiraling throughout her body.
“See what?”
Her words were air.
He didn’t seem to mind.
“If you wanted me to kiss you again.”
Penny could only ask, “Did you figure it out?”
“I did.”
And then he kissed her again. Penny let him. She wanted it.
15.
Luca
THE last thing Luca expected to find himself doing was Penny. So to speak. A part of him was still trying to reconcile the girl he remembered with the woman she had become in the years since he’d first met her. But it had become very apparent to him that it didn’t matter when that time was already over, and he had to deal with the now.
And Penny now?
He wanted that.
Her.
More than he should—more than was okay, even.
He had done well to ignore it during their stay at Freddie’s haven but with nothing else to do but look at Penny, or wander the halls of the large building and think, it kept leading Luca back to the same thing. Her.
It all came right back to her.
He shouldn’t have kissed her the first time, but that could be excused as a needed requirement to get the two of them out of a bad situation. Except he kept thinking about it. The way her lips felt against his—how he wanted another taste and to touch her again. Until his fingers felt a phantom ache that didn’t exist, and they itched with the need to trace the scars that covered her thighs and arms and even her chest while she slept in the small bed next to him.
Oh, he hadn’t slept.
Not a fucking wink.
He’d been too busy staring at her.
“You’re obsessed,” she whispered against his lips.
Luca’s heavy breath pulsed from his mouth to hers when he hovered over her where he had backed her against the hallway wall. Just outside their room. Another couple of feet and they would be safely out of view. Yet, when those words slipped past her trembling lips, swollen and pink from their kisses, he couldn’t think about anything but what she said.
“How—”
“Me,” Penny told him. “You’re obsessed with me. Maybe the idea of me or this ghost of who I used to be, but still ... How could you not be? How long have you spent looking for even a hint of my existence? How many times have you talked about me, thought about me ... how many pictures and videos have you watched for even a glimpse of me? Am I in your dreams, Luca? Do I fill your thoughts when the day is quiet and no one is around? Do you think of me in a crowded room, too?”
God.
Every single one of her words hit him right in the fucking chest. Like they were punches she had thrown with the knowledge that their impact would take his breath away. It certainly didn’t hurt like he thought maybe it should, but the weight was still heavy.
And hard to carry.
He wanted to deny it.
He tried.
“You don’t know that,” he muttered, watching her while his hands locked her wrists at both sides of her head. “You don’t know any—”
“Am I your every waking thought? How many calls a day are dedicated to finding information about me? Have you ever dated in the last five years since you started this for Naz? Do you have a life at all outside of trying to find me? Or is it just ... me?”
A slow, steady stream of air passed his lax lips as he desperately tried to find something—anything—to prove what she said wasn’t true. Not because she seemed pleased or satisfied but rather, that she knew at all. That she could say it so easily, without malice, while it still managed to taunt him all the same.
But she wasn’t wrong.
Here he was at thirty years old playing hide and seek with a ghost from his past, but the game had changed. Everything he used to want was inconsequential to winning. Because winning meant finding her and bringing her home to the people who loved her the most. He couldn’t quite say that he was ready for the new rules—the game had clearly changed between them—but what choice did he have now?
“Luca,” Penny murmured, “just say it.”
He wanted to.
He did.
“So what if—”
“Because there’s only one way this can end,
and you know that. I’m going to disappear again. I have to. My job isn’t done, and it might never be. And you, well, you’re going to keep chasing me. Don’t you want something else—something more with someone who ... don’t you want to live?”
He blinked.
Again with those targeted words that he couldn’t deny or avoid.
“Why are you saying this?” he asked, stuck between the thumping pain in his heart, and his cock that had been hard from the second he kissed her again downstairs. “Why would you say these things to me now?”
Penny was a beautiful creature; it was impossible not to see all the reasons why when he was this close to her. The blue veins under the surface of her almost white skin. How the slight flush of pink traveled from her cheeks to her throat and even down under the tank top covering her chest. Without makeup, she looked like porcelain with blonde lashes and brows that framed the bluest eyes he had ever seen.
The curves that made up her body was a map he wanted nothing more than to learn with his tongue and his hands and his cock. She might have been damaged by her own hand—and by others, too—with scars he could see and even more that he couldn’t, but she was still perfect.
A living, breathing doll.
Except she wasn’t a doll.
She was right.
Until then, she hadn’t been real to him in a way. The idea of her had been something he felt like he was trying to save for his friend and sister. Nothing less, and nothing more.
But then she was.
She was more.
“Because who else will?” Penny asked. “Who else knows the truth to tell you it, Luca?”
“Stop it.”
The force of his words matched the strength in his hands when he squeezed her wrists tighter against the wall and stepped closer. Crowding her space until their lips were a breath away and their noses touched.
She stared him down, though.
Unafraid.
He liked that, too.
Luca wished he didn’t.
“Just stop—”
“No,” she replied softly. “I won’t. Ever. Because neither will you.”
He hated that she was right. Even more, he hated that he didn’t care because it made no difference to what he would do after this. She had to know it, too.
