“Does he know where we are now?”
“No, because it’s just you and me now, Tarini,” Austin said, checking the rearview mirror. The two-lane highway was deserted and they hadn’t seen another car for miles. “We won’t go back to my parents’. You won’t call your family. I won’t call mine. We won’t make contact with anyone. We both need a few hours of relative safety.”
He found a roadhouse surrounded by six dilapidated cabins. He told the owner he was up for fishing and bought the smallest pair of jeans and a three-pack of men’s undershirts from behind the counter of the attached fishing-and-hunting supply store.
The cabin wasn’t the Ritz Carlton, but it was perfect for his purposes. The space was small, cozy, clean and it appeared that none of the other six cabins were occupied.
He carried her to the bed, stripping off her stained clothes, ignoring the urgent tangle of physical wants as he drew the plaid wool blanket around her neck.
She watched passively as he threw logs into the wood-burning stove and lit it with crumpled newspapers. He held her bloody T-shirt in his hands, thought of how close she had come to dying and threw it into the flames.
A crackle, a hiss, and he closed the stove.
While she dozed, he made two cups of decaf instant on the kitchenette hot plate. Then he drew a bath, waiting impatiently for the hot water to run. He tested it with his fingers, adjusted the temperature and came back into the bedroom. He thought she might be asleep and he would have simply sat on the cushioned wicker armchair beside the bed, but she whimpered.
In pain, in fear, he didn’t know. But he did know that he had to help.
He picked her up and carried her to the bath. She didn’t protest as he tugged off her bra and panties. Her ankle was swollen blue and he wondered how she had managed to get as far as she had—eight miles in two hours, it made him admire her all the more.
As he rubbed some antiseptic on a cut high on her forehead, she winced but didn’t cry out. The blood on her knees and elbows looked horrible, but when she had soaked in the tub for a few minutes, the flesh revealed only minor scratches. All in all, she had come out of the ordeal surprisingly unscathed.
And he was grateful.
“Nothing bad happened to the baby?” he asked.
She shook her head and looked away from him.
He knelt at the tub’s edge and used the washcloth to sluice warm water on her shoulders and back. He pushed aside a few damp tendrils that covered her eyes. “Feel better?” he asked.
“It will stay with me a long time, won’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said, knowing exactly what she meant. Killing a man. “It will stay with you the rest of your life. You’ll always remember you did it. But it won’t feel this bad forever.”
“Have you ever killed?”
“Yes. Once. I had to, just like you did. It was him or me. He gave me no choice about that. And that’s the only way I ever think an honorable man should ever kill. When he’s faced with an enemy that will only play for keeps.”
“I hope I don’t ever have to do it again.”
“It’s my job to make sure you’re never in that position again,” he said softly.
Ordinarily he would have expected a lecture on his politically incorrect views. Instead, she looked up at him, eyes glittering with tears that she wiped away before they could fall.
He would rather have had the lecture, because he didn’t like to see her broken up this way. He wished he knew how to care for the emotional Tarini as well as he knew how to practice karate, fire a pistol or talk through a hostage situation.
“Are you really going to boss me around for the rest of my life?”
He chuckled. This wasn’t the time for heavy emotions—this was the time to pull her out of this mess. “Tarini, I’m going to make your life hell,” he said with mock severity.
“Why can’t you just disappear, like all those— what do you call them?—deadbeat dads?”
“No, Tarini, I’m not that kind of man. You and this baby are stuck with me. I’ll be very generous about alternating holidays.”
“Alternating holidays?”
“Hell, I’ll invite you over every Christmas, New Year’s and Thanksgiving that I get with little Vladimir. I won’t make you eat in the kitchen.”
He wanted to tell her that it could be different. They could do it together. He could marry her. She could be his. They could have a family.
They could get a house in the suburbs. With enough land for a sandbox and a swing set and white picket fence to make sure the little tyke didn’t run after a ball into the traffic.
Maybe even think about another baby.
Of course, she’d have to change her ways, get rid of that damnable independent streak, start thinking like a wife and mother.
Building a family sounded a lot better than arranging joint custody for the next twenty years.
And she had to know one thing—if he lived, he wasn’t going to settle for less than full participation in raising this child.
They could marry…
Funny that Austin Smith, determined bachelor, would be thinking about weddings and homecooked meals and buying a house in the suburbs.
A baby on the way did that to a man.
Besides, he loved her. And he was pretty sure that she’d kick up her heels like crazy, but she had a soft spot for him.
Then he remembered. She was a fugitive. His best friend was in a foreign prison.
He couldn’t make any promises and he couldn’t ask any of her when he didn’t know for sure that they’d wake up tomorrow morning.
Or the next morning after that.
It was very possible they didn’t have a future at all.
He could care for her tonight. He thought about the menu from the pizza-delivery shop that he had tucked into his coat pocket when he’d checked in. He should order her some dinner, something nutritious because she was eating for two, and then he should insist that she get some sleep.
Her doelike eyes blinked once, twice and again.
He smiled. She was tired, but being Tarini, wouldn’t admit it.
He’d put her to bed and spend the rest of the evening planning their showdown with Karinolov. He wondered if he could at last persuade her to stay somewhere. Maybe he could rent a downtown hotel room and put Bob on detail to watch her. Or would it would be safer to have her in hand?
“Austin?” she said, interrupting his thoughts.
“What is it?”
She stood in the bath, water sluicing down her curves. He stared openmouthed. Her body was as taut and as exciting as ever. If anything, the only change pregnancy had wrought was to add greater fullness to her breasts.
His hardness was immediate and forceful. He didn’t move, fearful he would lose control of himself.
“I’m finished with my bath,” she said, her voice both wistful and inviting. “Why don’t you get a towel?”
IN THE SHADOWS of the apartment building’s staircase, Karinolov pulled away from Tanya, sighing. He made his appraisal as she looked up at him with large, chocolate-brown eyes.
She was pretty, in a fresh and innocent sort of way. Her kisses were like cotton candy—chastely sweet, unsatisfying but oddly addictive. He ran a coarse thumb over the flesh of her lower lip.
“Are you sure you can do this?” he asked.
“Will it save my sister?”
“Yes. It is the only way.”
“She doesn’t like you.”
“I know,” Karinolov said mildly. “And when you see her, she will say terrible things about me. But you can see the true me.”
He took her hand and pressed it to his heart.
“Tanya, my darling. May I call you darling?” He paused, but didn’t wait for the answer, which he knew would be yes. “Darling, you must go now. There is no time to waste.”
“Let me just go upstairs and tell Mama.”
“No,” he said, restraining himself from being too forceful. “Go now. She will only
try to persuade you to stay. You will argue and it will be upsetting for you both. It is late. Tarini needs you. Go now. Do you know exactly what to say and do?”
Tanya nodded. Karinolov marveled at her loyalty coupled with docile obedience to his will. Maybe it was because she was young and in love. He decided impulsively that he liked these traits in a woman, though he found those same characteristics repugnant in a man.
He escorted her to the waiting car.
As she settled into the driver’s seat, he leaned through the window and clasped her seat belt together with the tenderness of a lover.
He wished her luck and she drove off into the night. An aide stepped off the curb and came to his side.
“Have one of the men clip the apartment’s telephone wires, just in case. And have your officers follow the two women back to the mission,” Karinolov said, staring until the car disappeared around the corner. “From a good distance, because Tarini’s smart enough she’ll watch for someone tailing her.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And kill them both if they deviate from the route.”
“Yes, sir.”
And then Karinolov’s face broke into an uncharacteristically revealing sneer.
His next task would give him great pleasure.
“I’ll go upstairs and get Mama,” he said.
Chapter Thirteen
Without taking his eyes from her face, he pulled a white terry towel from the rack on the wall and held it out to her. It took every bit of his self-control not to touch her, not to blot the droplets from every inch of her flesh.
Or to reignite a flame that he had so determinedly put out that terrible day in January when he realized she didn’t want to see him anymore.
He willed himself not to stare at her precious curves.
She looked at the towel and then at him with an ambiguous innocence.
He pulled a sharp breath and stilled his response to her unspoken invitation.
“No, Tarini, please, I can’t,” he said, though he could. She had no idea how much he could.
And the old Austin, the one who kept his relationships with women simple, would have picked her up, wrapped her legs around his waist and steadied her on the vanity. And taken her. Swiftly, urgently, satisfying his own urgent needs while expertly bringing her to a shattering climax.
But making love to Tarini wasn’t just about physical gratification anymore.
“Austin, please.”
“I don’t want to take advantage of you,” he said, the truth sounding pitifully lame.
He should take her. Right here. As she asked him. He was ready, the force of his hardness quick and demanding. She was ready, he thought, giving himself permission to look at her. If the tremble of her upper thighs and her erect nipples were any indication, she wanted him every bit as much as he wanted her.
She took the towel and held it up against her modestly. As she did, her breasts strained up over the terry cloth in round globes.
He groaned.
She was as tormenting with a scanty towel held against her as she was naked.
“I want to, I really want to,” he explained, hanging on to his self-control with only the barest thread of will. “I want you, Tarini, but I can’t take advantage of you. You’ll regret this.”
“Why?”
“You’re very vulnerable right now. You’re in shock. You’re not completely recovered.”
“You always said I was a survivor.”
“I never meant that as an insult or as an excuse for me.”
“I could survive spending a few hours in bed with you,” she said with a suggestive smile. “The question is—could you survive it?”
He felt uncomfortable with her repartee, although it was no different than the kind of sex talk they had used in December.
He had thought then that it was a sign of how much she was like him—how sophisticated and knowing, how experienced and epicurean in her tastes. He had never asked her about past lovers, but the way she had talked and teased about sex when they had come together in December, he had assumed there were men. At least a few.
She, like himself, was simply discreet about the past, he had assumed.
Now he knew, to the core of his being, that the playful sex talk had been an act, a role she had taken on so that he would regard her as an equal in bed.
But she hadn’t been his equal.
She had been an innocent.
And he had been an unwitting predator. He had introduced her to lovemaking techniques that would put a blush on the most jaded call girl, and Tarini, not yet schooled in her own or in his needs, hadn’t known enough to hold anything back.
She had learned from him the arts of pleasure so quickly and eagerly that he had not noticed her hesitations. He’d thought that he had met his match.
And he had, but not in the way he’d imagined.
He winced at the sex talk now, knowing she was reaching out to him in the only way she thought he would respond to. She must think I’m some kind of brute animal, he thought “I can’t do it, Tarini.”
“Austin, I want you.”
“I don’t want you to hate me later,” he said, running out of excuses. “I don’t believe a man should do that to a woman.”
“I thought you didn’t mind me hating you,” Tarini countered slyly. “In fact, I thought you hated me just as much as you think I hate you.”
Austin squirmed. “I do. I mean, I did. Actually, I don’t hate you. I never really did. I just felt betrayed and jerked around, but now I know you didn’t mean any of it to hurt me. You were simply protecting yourself in the only way you knew how, and that I was—”
“Just shut up and kiss me. You’re terrible at talking about feelings.”
“Tarini, if I kiss you once, I’ll want to kiss you again. And again. I won’t stop. And you know what I can do when I don’t stop.”
“Yes. I know.”
She looked at him archly. She wanted to forget so much and she thought she would in his arms. He suddenly understood that be could give her a night of pleasure that would heal her shock and terror of the day’s events.
“Please, Austin,” she pleaded softly.
It was the sudden stripping away of any coquettishness that drove home to him how much she needed him.
She reached out and placed her palm over the hardness that strained against his jeans. He grabbed her hand, intending to push it away.
But he couldn’t.
The most beautiful woman he had ever known was pulling out all the stops, and at some point his self-control was shot.
Still, she couldn’t be mercenary about this seduction—it wasn’t in her nature. He noticed her haunted eyes searching his face. She wanted some reassurance.
Austin guessed it was because he had said nothing, absolutely nothing, about love. If he said the words “I love you” now, with no sanctuary to offer her, he’d be damning his honor. And Austin could never do that. Not if he couldn’t protect her from Karinolov.
“Tarini, if I kiss you, I’ll want to do more,” he warned her one last time.
She dropped her towel. He groaned. She knew how to destroy his self-control.
“Did I say anything about less?” she asked.
HE CARRIED HER to the bedroom, which was lit by the glow emanating from the window of the stove. She slid under the worn but clean sheets. But as she pulled the wool blanket over her shoulders, she saw that Austin wasn’t moving. He leaned against the wall watching her with knowing eyes.
She needed him. She had gone through so much in the last two days that she needed his strong embrace, his bruising kisses—oh, admit it, she admonished herself, she needed the release he gave her. The glorious feeling of teetering on the edge then careening down the roller coaster of sensation, held only by his safe, strong arms.
It was so honorable that he couldn’t take advantage of a woman he regarded as having betrayed him in every possible way. He must sense her vulnerability, and ordinarily, she would admi
re his forbearance.
Funny how just the day before, just hours before, he had despised her, maybe deep down he still did. But he wouldn’t harm her, and had come back for her—and had found her.
Now he was the only man who stood between her and death. He had faced guns, explosives, and would face down the law if caught harboring a fugitive. He had made her a promise on the New York sidewalk, that he would lay down his life for her. And he meant it.
And now he was scared to touch her.
But she wanted their lovemaking, if only to fool herself for a few hours that things were the way they had once been. She was seducing him and from the way his jeans strained against his body, she was doing pretty good.
She threw off the blanket and sheets. Kneeling on the bed, she put a pout on her face and posed seductively.
“Austin, you’re very talented,” she purred. “But you can’t make love to me from all the way over there.”
He narrowed his eyes.
She challenged him with a purposefully sultry look.
“Tarini, this isn’t you.”
Defeated, she felt the sting of salty tears in her eyes. “Austin, please, I beg you to remember what we shared,” she said. “I don’t know if I meant anything to you then, and I don’t want you to make up any sentiments you don’t really feel. But remember, we were good together. I need you, Austin, I need you to make love to me. I’ve been on the run, I’ve killed a man, I’m scared to death and I need you.”
There. She had broken down and said it all. She closed her eyes and hoped the earth would open up and swallow her whole. She had debased and humiliated herself, and as she closed her eyes to the tears, she knew she hadn’t even persuaded him. And then she heard a button rolling across the floor, and her eyes flew up to him.
He yanked at the buttons of his denim shirt—but didn’t pop any more of them—as he approached the bed. Feeling the glory of ardor, Tarini finished the job for him. Her hands lingered on the lattice of hard muscle underneath. Goose bumps rose on his flesh and then subsided as he released a low whistle of pleasure.
Her hand caught and recoiled from the barrel of the gun sticking out of the waistband of his jeans. He pulled it out and put it on the nightstand.
His Kind Of Trouble Page 12
