“Lean forward, I’ll give you a neck rub.”
“You are not getting in this tub with me,” she said, eyeing the door that was open a crack. “Junker is right out there.”
“I say again, I’ll take him out if—”
“It’s disrespectful. Anyway, how many times do I have to say that we’re not together?”
“It’s a neck rub, not a ring,” he said and stood up to slide the leather of his belt from its buckle.
Panic made her cling for the edges of the tub. It wasn’t just a neck rub, it was a naked neck rub, and after how good his talented fingers had felt working her flesh out there in the room, she didn’t trust herself not to get confused if he touched her.
“Stop it,” she hissed. “Do not take your pants off.”
“Talk or I’m getting in there,” he said, “and I’ll make sure your little buddy out there knows exactly what’s going on in here… and what we did the other night.”
Narrowing her eyes, she resented how easily he could push her buttons. “Fine, I’ll talk,” she said. Strike sat on the toilet lid again. But before she got underway, she had to check something. “Are you armed?”
That intrigued him. “No,” he said. “Do I need to be?”
“I’m just thinking that after we start talking you might want to kill me.”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll drown you.”
The water. She eyed the tub that she’d just been enjoying a few seconds ago, realizing it could be her coffin if Strike decided it should be.
“Ok, now I’m feeling vulnerable and thinking we should do this later… Take your pants off.”
The side of his mouth lifted, and he got closer. “Now I’m too intrigued to fuck you… What did you do, naughty girl? Tell me and after I’ll make you come so hard, your scream will melt the foundations.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she muttered and rubbed the side of her neck. “Strike, I… I want to be honest because I figure that if I just tell you, it will be better than you finding out on your own. But… this really isn’t a good setup for me. I’m naked and slippery and you’re stronger than me and—”
He breathed out a kind of laugh. “You’re actually worried about this? Geez, Cupcake, I’m not gonna kill you. Why would I dispose of your body? Playing with it is too much fun.”
“You say that now, but…”
Her eyes wandered away from him. “This is about the Point,” he said.
Her attention leaped back to him. “How did you know that?”
“It is, isn’t it?”
Could he know? No. He’d said he was working on it. For a minute, she let her jaw move, but resisted telling the truth. But she couldn’t resist forever. “I lied to you. That… What you took from me at the resort wasn’t the Point.”
“I know,” he said, so calm and collected while she was the one left stunned. “It was a test.”
“You… you know?” she asked almost not recognizing the man sitting with her. “Why are you not mad?”
“The day you left me… I put the device into Opal, you walked out the door, and… something happened that’s never happened before.”
“What?” she asked, twisting to hook her hands on the side of the tub closest to him. “What happened?”
“I felt guilty,” he said. “Took me a minute to figure out what it was, but I actually cared that I’d hurt you.” He shivered, like the very idea of guilt made him feel sick. “I was on autopilot when I left you tied to that bed and as soon as I started driving, I knew something wasn’t right… it was like there was this weight in me… I didn’t get it.”
“That’s why you went back to Buddy’s? You hoped I’d come to you and we’d make up?”
He shifted an elbow onto the side of the bath. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I told you that you fuck with my head… When you showed up, I saw what I was doing to you, but I wanted to win. That’s what I always do. I do what suits me and I win… I’m used to toxic, like with Bella.” He’d told her. “I didn’t think you’d really go, I figured it was some kind of game, but you did go. I thought I was prepared to lose you, but when you walked out, I didn’t feel like I’d won.”
“You should’ve talked to me,” she said, sliding down the edge of the tub to get closer to him. “Told me what you were thinking. I thought you’d played me all along, that telling me you loved me, that our whole relationship had been a con for you to get your hands on the Point.”
“I saw a chance and I took it. It’s a way of life for me, baby. It’s the way my mind works, I wanted the Point and I saw a way to get it… Whatever you do to me, baby, no other woman’s ever done it… I guess I couldn’t figure out how to handle it… how to handle you.”
“So you pushed me away?”
Scooping her hand from the enamel, he laid it between his two hands, his chest resting on the back of his own hand when he hunkered down. “I didn’t understand why you were so mad, I didn’t get it. But it was my fault, I didn’t tell you what I wanted…”
“From us?”
“From the Point,” he said and sneered at himself. “It was never about taking over the world. I hate people, you know that, and as long as we have enough money to live, I don’t give a damn about dough. Hell, you’ve seen the kind of place I setup camp. I could reserve rooms in the Plaza and not pay a dime, but I pick a secluded, dingy hole because I like it.”
The loft wasn’t dingy. It wasn’t water-tight, but there was something appealing about its earthiness; something beautiful about finding love in an abandoned place. The loft was an embodiment of each of them. They’d each known what it was to be built up and then condemned and forgotten.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “If it wasn’t about the money or power… then what was—”
“The tech,” he said, his thumb brushing across her knuckles. “Tech turns me on, Cupcake… I had to see it.”
Sincere, yet hard, she doubted he expected her to swoon, but she did a little. “You’re a big kid, Stryker,” she whispered and boosted herself closer to kiss his shoulder. “You wanted to play with a shiny new toy.”
Slipping a hand out from between his chest and her hand, he cupped her face and tried to draw her mouth up to his. Rora parted her lips, her heart pounding; doubt, confusion, love, all of it bounced off each other in her chest. Before their lips could meet, she lay back, taking her head from his hand.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “I’m sorry, baby. Ok? I’m stubborn. I’m impulsive… This won’t be the last time I’ll hurt you. But the way I feel about you hasn’t changed. It won’t ever change. And my loyalty to you won’t change either.”
“I don’t want you to hurt me, Strike. I wanted you to love me… more than you loved the tech.”
“And I warned you… I’m weak.”
In so many ways, he was the strongest man she knew. That was part of the reason it wrenched at her heart to hear that the only thing he couldn’t be strong for, was her.
Rora tried to put it into perspective for him. He saw it as wanting to experiment with a new toy, but she saw it as a betrayal, and he had to understand her point of view.
“And what if next time it’s not tech, it’s another woman?”
Startled, he recoiled at the suggestion. “A woman?” he asked and sat upright. “Shit, baby, you don’t have to worry about that. My dick’s easier to control than my intellect. You remember the blonde? You served her up to me and I didn’t follow through.”
“Says you.”
“I don’t lie to you.” Her brows rose because she couldn’t contain her incredulity. “Ok, so I don’t lie to you about that kind of stuff. Being faithful, I can handle, women never really interested me anyway. You have your obvious uses but…”
“It’s those obvious uses that worry me.”
“Bella put it on a plate. She offered me both of you, together, didn’t take it, did I?”
“Because you can’t stand her,” she said, rolling to her back
and folding her arms beneath her breasts. But Rora breathed out to confess. “I’m not really worried about you sleeping around, it took me long enough to get you into bed, but… I’m trying to make you see why I was hurt. Prioritizing something else over me when I’ve told you the opposite is important to me… You broke my heart, Strike. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know if I can take the risk that you might do it again.”
“We both know that you love me,” he said, in a quote from their first night together.
Being led by her heart would be easy, but she still needed answers. “Why did you let me think you were working on the Point?”
“Wanted to see if you’d tell me the truth,” he said. “You didn’t.”
She stuttered. “I was shocked. I thought you’d want to kill me for misleading you like I did. I really thought that you’d have accessed the Point, seen it wasn’t what you thought, and come on the hunt for my blood.”
He hunkered down. “After you walked out of Buddy’s, I sat forever just looking at that front door.”
She knew what that was like and a burst of satisfaction curled her lips. “I sat staring at that door in the weeks after you walked out on me. I was staring at that door when I decided to go bust up all those cars to get your attention.”
“If I thought it would’ve worked, I’d have put a hole in the Earth to bring you back to me. Playing with a piece of tech wasn’t worth losing you… but I didn’t know that until it happened. Seconds after you left, I took the USB out of Opal and waited. I was sure you’d come back. When you didn’t, I went on a binge, got myself good and drunk. I didn’t know how to pursue you, I’d never cared about chasing a woman down for anything except business before. I thought you’d come back to me… you didn’t.”
“In my defense, Bella had me locked up.”
“I know that now,” he said, leaning closer to pick her hand out of the water to press it on the edge of the tub again. “And I’m sorry I let her hold you. I wanted to be the one to come for you, but if she’d found us both in that room together, she’d have locked the door and made us do things to each other, and to her that—”
“If you’d walked into that room, I’d have thought my nightmare was coming to life,” she said, but he didn’t respond to her attempt to joke.
Probably because it wasn’t much of a joke. Bella would’ve used their love to play them off each other and Rora’s nightmare probably would’ve come true because if it meant saving her life, Strike would’ve had sex with Bella in front of her, and he wouldn’t have had a choice.
“I’m still sorry, Cupcake.”
Something dawned on her. “If you took the USB out of Opal without using it, how did you know that it wasn’t the Point?”
“Because I tried to do what you asked me to do. After the first week, it struck me that maybe if I destroyed the Point, you’d be happy. You’d know I was for real and didn’t give a fuck about it. So, I did. Except it took no time at all to wipe the USB and that was when I knew you’d conned me. Something as powerful as the Point wouldn’t have slipped away in seconds. I’d used an atom bomb to destroy a grain of rice… I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me when you were telling me at the resort what you’d done to Benjamin. You did the same thing to me. Suddenly, I don’t know, everything fell into place. You took me to the same place you took Benjamin when he thought he was hiding the Point with you?” She nodded. The corner of his mouth lifted. “Damn, you’re good, baby.”
The last thing she’d expected was to see him relaxed about it. “You… you’re not mad?”
“Proud,” he said. “You proved something to both of us… You said in the loft that I had to trust myself. I would never have been able to do that if you hadn’t given me temptation like that. And yeah, I failed at the first hurdle, but ultimately… I chose you, baby. I chose you over the tech… That’s how I know this is different. That’s how I know you can trust me… because finally I can trust myself… when it comes to you anyway.”
Rora still wasn’t a hundred percent sure that the story was true, he could be trying to manipulate her into giving up the real Point or Leandra’s location. But she’d never seen him like this. There was a new kind of optimism in his eyes when he looked at her, like he really could see his redemption in her.
While she was still trying to figure out how to respond. There was a noise from beyond the bathroom.
Sitting up straight, she listened to the scuffle and the mumbled voices. “Strike,” she said.
Up on his feet, he went to the door to try to peek out, but the angle wouldn’t give him a great view.
“Stay in here, Cupcake,” he said, and opened the door to slip out.
FOURTEEN
Screw that. If there was something going on out there, she wasn’t going to sit in there and wait to be attacked by a random assailant. Getting out of the tub as quickly and as quietly as she could, Rora grabbed her nightdress and pulled it on although her body wasn’t completely dry.
Leaving the bathroom, she could still hear some kind of kerfuffle, but there had been no gunshots and it didn’t sound like physical fighting. Someone was on the bed, a man. She could only see his legs because Strike and Junker were at the bottom of the other bed arguing and shoving each other.
“And I say we kick him out,” Strike said.
“He’s bleeding,” Junker said. “This man needs help.”
Pushing between the two men, Rora cared less about their argument and more about whoever was strewn out.
“Oh my God,” she said, climbing onto the bed to crawl up beside Torres who was laid there, and just like Junker said, he was bleeding. “What happened?”
His face was red, his eye swelling, there were cuts and bruises all over like he’d been in a fight.
“Burke went rogue,” Torres said, wincing when she started to help him take his arm from his jacket. “Killed four of our guys and then called it in accusing me.”
Getting his jacket off, she dropped it onto the floor and then started to unbutton his shirt to find out why Torres was cradling the rather nasty patch of blood across his opposite shoulder and arm.
“Burke?” she said. “Why would he want to—”
“He’s going after the Black Jewel. He’s got her scent, he’s tracking her.”
“That makes no sense, why give us the tech if he was going to go after it himself?”
“She has the answer to the question,” he croaked, sagging onto the bed when she took his arm from his shirt sleeve. “The tech meant nothing until we found out it was important to the question.”
It was easy for her to almost forget that there were still people out there seeking the Point. Rora was so caught up in what it had done to her and Strike that she forgot about the world at large.
Glancing over her shoulder at Strike, all she got from him was a shrug, which she couldn’t interpret as good or bad.
“Doesn’t matter, we’re bailing out,” Strike said. “We don’t trust this asshole.”
Peeking at the wounds on Torres’ arm and shoulder, she figured they did look like gunshots. The one on his arm was a flesh wound and it looked like it had stopped bleeding. The other wasn’t so benign.
Balling his shirt, she pressed it to his shoulder and put Torres’ hand over it. “Press hard,” she ordered and turned around to climb off the bed. “You two come with me.”
There was blood on her hands, so she couldn’t grab hold of anyone, but she marched to the bathroom, hoping Strike and Junker would follow. She went to the sink to wash her hands, as soon as she saw Strike over her shoulder, she raised her brows.
He put his hands up in surrender. “I didn’t tell her,” he said. “I’m thinking Burke’s making assumptions because, uh…”
Knowing that tone, she spun around, grabbing a towel from the rail. Junker came in and closed the door. “What’s happening?” Junker asked.
Strike turned a scowl on him. “You don’t need to be here. This is where the grown-ups make d
ecisions that save lives.”
Grabbing his arm, Rora turned Strike back to her. “Because, uh, what?”
“I put word out that she knew,” he said.
Her mouth fell open and it took her a minute to return to reality. She smacked his shoulder. “Oh. My. God,” she said, hitting him with each word. “I can’t… I don’t even know where to start.”
“Look, it’s no problem. The more people looking for her, the easier it will be for me to track her. She had you for over a week, people believe she got the truth out of you.”
“That’s not the point, S—” Sealing her lips, she breathed out through her nose.
“What are you talking about?” Junker asked. “What does this Burke think that the Jewel knows?”
Rora took a deep breath, prepared not to lie to him anymore. “The project of Benjamin’s that you thought Exile had,” she said and winced when she made eye contact with Junker. “It’s called the Point and Exile thought he had it too. But he didn’t… because I lied to him… no one knows where it is… except me.”
Junker blinked once, but he stood completely still for at least half a minute, looking at her like he didn’t recognize her. “You’ve… you’ve known this the whole time?” She nodded. “And he knew this?” She nodded again when Junker pointed at Strike. He ran his hands through his hair. “This is why you thought he wanted to kill you?” Junker looked at Strike. “If you hurt her—”
“If I hurt her, what, Square? Rora is my woman, and our shit, is our shit, and there’s no one on this earth less capable of hurting her than me. You on the other hand—”
“Ok,” she said, laying a hand on Strike’s chest to stop him advancing on Junker. “Let’s save this for later… What do we do with him out there?”
“Put him out of his misery?” Strike said.
Junker scoffed. But she chewed on her lip, keeping her eyes on Strike’s. His brows rose slowly, and he tilted his head in a sort of shrug.
Junker looked between them. “Aurora, you cannot be thinking—”
“Ok,” Strike said, spinning to face him. “Let’s get one thing clear now, if you use her name again, I’ll cut out your tongue. Call her Kero or you’ll call her nothing.”
Kiss Chase Page 14
