by Helena Newbury
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© Copyright Helena Newbury 2015
The right of Helena Newbury to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
This book is entirely a work of fiction. All characters, companies, organizations, products and events in this book, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any real persons, living or dead, events, companies, organizations or products is purely coincidental.
This book contains adult scenes and is intended for readers 18+. It contains scenes that may be triggering for sexual abuse survivors.
Cover photo: Alexei - Konradbak / Depositphotos
City - Appalachian View / Depositphotos
Thank you to Liz, who deserves pizza.
And thank you to my readers, who allow me to do what I love.
Alexei
I met her on my way to kill someone.
I was heading up to the tenth floor of the building, to check out the target’s apartment. But there was a coffee shop on the ground floor and I figured I should get some coffee as a prop. The first rule of a job like this is: wear a suit, because no one stops a guy in a suit. But a guy in a suit carrying a cup of coffee from the coffee shop downstairs? People will actually hold the door open for you.
The place had big plate glass windows that were running with October rain, turning the street outside into a rippled gray blur. Inside, it was all warm golden light and polished beech wood. I shook off my coat and stood there for a second, soaking up the music and the heady tang of coffee.
I bought a black Americano, pure and uncomplicated, the way things should be. And I was just burning my lips on it when I turned around and almost ran into her.
I didn’t know it then, but nothing would ever be the same again.
Gabriella
I didn’t really want to take a break but I’d been at my screen for ten hours and the other two—Lilywhite and Yolanda—were starting to chant in the chat window: TAKE A BREAK, TAKE A BREAK and refusing to talk to me until I did. So I grudgingly went downstairs to get a coffee.
The coffee shop had become an extension of home, so I didn’t bother to change. I knew it would be warm down there so I just put on some sneakers and went down in the leggings and tank top I had on. Hell, I debated whether to bother with the sneakers. I knew I probably looked a mess, but no one was going to see me and, if they did, they weren’t going to notice me.
I headed towards the counter. A big guy in a raincoat was ahead of me in the line, so I twisted and looked out of the windows while I waited. A gray world—even the yellow New York cabs looked muted and cold. Who in their right mind would want to go out in that? Besides, I was crazy busy and it would be dark soon—
My stomach lurched at the realization. Another day gone. It was now forty-two days since I’d left the building.
I was getting worse.
It’s fair to say I was distracted. I heard the big guy move, in front of me, and just assumed that he’d move to the left, towards the little rack of milk and sugar and wooden stirrers. It was only when I took a step forward that I found he’d just turned around, and now we were practically touching.
I looked up.
And up.
My first impression was one of hardness. Everything about him was brutal, but not brutal and ugly. Brutal and beautiful. His suit was so black and its creases so sharp that it looked as if it would hurt, if you ran your hand down it. His gray raincoat glistened like a wet sword blade. The sheer size of him—a head taller than me and heavily muscled—made me think of some military machine, all power and strength. He looked as if he could go through a brick wall.
His shirt may have been white and pure, but it only worked to contrast the danger underneath. A powerful chest swelled under the soft fabric, pushing it out, drawing my eyes to follow the hard lines of him all the way to his shoulders. The collar almost hid his tattoos—I could see the very edge of them, a hair-width line of blue-black on his tan skin. There was no way to know what they were. But the very fact they were designed to be hidden meant they must be some sort of code, only to be revealed to the right people. I wanted to be one of those people.
He was gorgeous...but in a way I’d never seen before. His face was utterly uncompromising, as if a sculptor had carved it from ice-cold granite, filing away rock to form the high cheekbones, chiseling out that solid jaw. The fact he was still wet from the rain only added to the effect. It was like watching raindrops slide down a rugged cliff face, chasing each other over the valley of his upper lip, sliding down over the swell of his full lower lip—the one part of him that looked soft—and breaking up as they hit his darkly-stubbled jaw. He was thunderstorm-beautiful.
I heard coffee hit the ground and realized he’d spilled it towards himself, rather than spill it down my front. I looked down at his shoes, now steaming and wet. Then I looked back up and—
This time our eyes met and I felt a wrench. Like something had caught hold of my soul as it flitted along in life and brought it to an immediate, shuddering stop.
His eyes were steel-gray, shockingly light. I’ve never seen eyes like them, bright and clear but completely without warmth. Eyes that decided your fate in a millisecond. They had such an utter sense of purpose that they made everyone else look as if they were sleepwalking. Being under his gaze was scary as all hell. If I could have remembered how to move, I would have taken a step back. They were eyes that made you run.
Except….
As I stared into them, I thought I saw them change. I thought I saw the faintest hint of blue, like clouds breaking apart to reveal the sky. And that wrench happened again, pulling me towards him instead of away. I rocked on my heels, my brain screaming at me to go one way, the rest of me drawn forward.
And then I didn’t have a choice anymore, because he grabbed my wrist.
Alexei
The first thing I noticed was her scent. I caught it in the air before I’d even fully turned around: zhimolost—what the Americans call honeysuckle. My grandmother used to grow it in her garden. And some strawberry-scented soap and, beneath it all, the smell of a woman: warm and sexual and calming on a level beyond all the other senses. I wasn’t used to smelling that. All the women I’d been with, in the last few years, had doused themselves in too much perfume and hairspray. But this woman...I could have just inhaled her scent for hours.
I looked at her and she was...soft. Perfectly soft, in the way only a woman can be. She was so close, as I turned, that some of her hair brushed against my chest. It was the color of walnuts and its ringlets made it seem even softer and more sensuous. It fell past her shoulders, brushing the pale skin left bare by her tank top. I wanted to bury my fingers knuckle deep in it and feel the silk of it against my skin.
Her face was all flowing lines and sweeping curves, from the arched brows and big, hazel eyes to the elegant nose and broad, full lips. I wanted to sweep my palms over the soft skin of her cheeks, my thumbs sliding over the satiny skin, and lean down and explore those lips.
It wasn’t an attraction. It was something far more than that.
I knew, in that second, that I’d glimpsed the perfect face. I could see ten thousand more and I’d never see one like hers again. I wanted her in a way I’d never wanted a woman before. I wanted to kiss her and lose myself completely in her softness.
And then I realized my cof
fee cup had tipped forward when we almost collided and that I was about to spill scalding coffee all down her front. I tilted it back, instead, dumping a good portion of it onto my shoes. We both looked down.
But she was shorter than me. That meant I was looking down at her body, at the twin swells of her pale breasts as they pushed out the front of her tank top. They were the most gorgeous breasts I’d ever seen, full and yet pert, bouncing just a little as she moved. Her whole outfit was black, throwing her pale skin into sharp relief and making her body into one perfect, smooth silhouette. Her waist was slender but her hips and ass flared in a way that made me want to growl aloud. Her legs were long and the lines of them drew my eyes all the way down her thighs to her shapely calves and then back up. The mood in my head shifted in an instant. I’d been getting all fucking poetic about her beauty and softness. Now, I wanted to scoop up that gloriously soft body and do very bad things to it.
I wanted to fill my hands with her breasts and squeeze them together into one sweet valley and lick my way up it. I wanted to press her down over one of the tables and jerk her leggings down over her creamy-white ass, rip away her panties and—
She looked up, right at the second I looked up, and we locked eyes. Everyone I meet, in my line of work, has the same eyes: tired and suspicious, bitterly cold. Hers were so innocent, so untouched by all the horrors of the world. It was like finding one perfect flower in the rubble of a building. I almost felt guilty at what I’d been imagining. Almost. On another level, her innocence just made me want to do it more.
She started to move back and my reaction was instinctual. I grabbed her wrist because I couldn’t let something so incredible get away.
Gabriella
I looked down at his hand on my wrist. Warm and soft and yet iron-hard in its grip, no give there at all, and his hand was so big. The heat of him throbbed into me, sending prickles up my arm. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out. God, he was so gorgeous...and he was looking down at me with an intensity that blasted straight through to the very center of me, making me catch my breath. It rolled down through me, changing to heat that soaked downwards….
I lifted my arm and his grip didn’t falter, his arm lifting too. He didn’t exactly resist my movement—he didn’t have to. He was so big that just trying to lift the muscled mass of his arm was an effort. If he actually wanted to hold me in place, I realized, he’d have no trouble at all. He could probably hold me against the wall, or down on the floor, with just one of those big hands—
Another, unexpected wave of heat, starting somewhere deep inside and twisting between my thighs.
I glanced around. People were starting to look at us and I wasn’t used to that. No one ever looks at me. It’s not just that I’m unremarkable, it’s that I’m not normally around people. I was suddenly very aware of what a complete mess I must look—leggings and tank top, sneakers...I’d just run into the hottest guy I’d ever seen in my life and I looked like—
Well, like a girl who never goes out.
I swallowed. “Um.” The first thing I’d managed to say to him and it wasn’t even a word. I waggled my wrist.
He looked at his hand as if seeing it for the first time and slowly, reluctantly, released me. My wrist immediately felt cold: I missed his touch. I started to say something but he cut me off.
“Who are you?” His accent sounded like icebergs crashing together in the blackest night. The who was a bitterly chill wind and the r was like the grind of ice on ice. He snapped it out, a demand, but it somehow didn’t sound rude. It sounded more like he just had to know, right now, and there wasn’t time for pleasantries.
I tried to answer but the first thing on my tongue, the honest answer, was: no one and I was sure that wasn’t what he wanted. And his accent was doing something to me, vibrating through my body and making my chest go light and fluttery, my toes dancing inside my sneakers. I hadn’t heard anything like it before. I’d known a guy who was Polish, once, but his accent had been like a faded photocopy of this one. I tried to gauge his age. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight? About five years older than me.
He seemed to realize that he’d been abrupt because he frowned and said, “Sorry. What is your name?” The is sounded like izzz.
I started to say Gabriella but, at that second, the person behind me in the line got tired of waiting and asked me, “Are you going to order?”
And suddenly the whole reality of it came back to me. Echoes and brightness and polished floors and stifling, air-conditioned air. I was in the coffee shop, which is just borderline manageable for me on a good day, and I was surrounded by people and I didn’t remember the room being this big or the doors being that far away and I didn’t have his hand on my wrist anymore so I felt like there was nothing solid, nothing to hang onto and and—
I bolted. I threaded between the tables, hauled open the door to the lobby and sprinted into the elevator, thumped the button for my floor and panic-breathed all the way up to apartment 1006. I slammed the door behind me and locked it. Then I sat and panted with my back against the door.
As I calmed down, the shame took over, hot and all-consuming. I’d met someone and it had felt important—something that might never happen again. And I’d fucked it up because I was a pathetic, panicking freak.
He’s probably still there. Go back down there.
I almost laughed at that thought. Now that I was panicking, the corridor outside my apartment might as well have been black, airless vacuum, completely impassable. I’d never see him again.
The part of my mind that made me panic, the part that kept me shut up in the apartment, whispered that my mistake had been going downstairs in the first place. I would have been okay if I’d just stayed put.
I wouldn’t go to the coffee shop again.
Alexei
I stood there for a moment, trying to process what had just happened. She’d been there and then she was gone. It had happened so fast I could still smell the scent of her.
I’d seen something in her eyes just before she ran, a sort of realization. She’d woken up to something and been deathly afraid of it. I would have understood if she’d been afraid of me, but she hadn’t known what I was. Something else, then. Something that lived inside her.
It hit me that I had no way to find her again. I didn’t know if she even lived in this apartment building.
The guy who’d been behind her in line was shaking his head as if to say, some people. He stepped forward to take her place.
I’d never see her again. And it was his fault.
I put my hand on his chest and pushed. The guy staggered backward and knocked over a table, winding up in a heap on the floor. A couple of people screamed.
In the silence that followed, I realized I was panting. I was angry, and I never get angry.
I stalked out into the lobby, got in the elevator and hit the button for the tenth floor. What the hell had I been thinking? Hitting that guy would attract attention. I’d never even contemplate doing that normally, even if he’d been up in my face. And he hadn’t been. He’d just scared her away.
Her. Those hazel eyes and that pale skin. She’d made me completely lose reason.
And she’d made me forget who I was...what I was. I’d seen an angel but I’d forgotten that angels are out of reach of mortal men...let alone devils.
For a second there, I’d seen a different world—a world of warmth and comfort and laughter. That wasn’t my world and it never would be. Doing what I do means living outside that world, in a place that’s cold and unforgiving. The harshness of it is what makes me keep my edge. If I lose that edge, I’m nothing.
I’d lost it just then, just for a second, when I’d hit that guy. No, before that—when I’d asked who she was. I should have just walked away.
I shouldn’t have been interested in her in the first place. Oh, sure, I love to fuck. I’ll take a blonde from a bar home for the night. Some of those women have a thing for gangsters—they soak their panties, right there i
n the bar, because it’s so dangerous and wrong to fuck us. I take those women home and show them exactly what it’s like to be pounded by a bad boy. I give them every sweaty, gasping orgasm they can manage and more and it feels good, for a few hours. But in the morning it’s over. I never see them again and I don’t care.
Her, though...I’d barely met her and yet the idea of not seeing her again made me crazy.
Get yourself together!
I straightened my tie and stepped out onto the tenth floor. All I wanted to do was to get the layout of the place. I walked down the hallway, counting rooms and figuring out which window it would be. One, two, three, four, five, six.
I stopped outside 1006. That’s all Nikolai had given me—Apartment 1006. I didn’t even have the name of the guy.
It was almost tempting to knock on the door right now and get it done. But I’ve survived this job so long because I do things carefully, step by step. The guy could have five men in there with him, or a girlfriend or even a kid. I’d check it out first through the window.
Then I’d kill him.
Gabriella
When my breathing had slowed, I walked through to my office and sat down at my desk. Working would make me feel better...and stop me thinking about what had just happened downstairs. Lilywhite and Yolanda were waiting for me in the little chat window we keep running in the corner of our screens.
diamondjack> Back
I’ve been diamondjack forever. A male name makes things about a thousand million times easier, in the hacking world.
lilywhite> Good break? :)
diamondjack> Yup, great. Let’s get back to it.
Kissing My Killer Page 1
