by Naomi West
She drinks deeply from her beer then turns to look me straight in the eye. She’s steady. “I would apologize for that, Mr. Jones, but it’s quite clear that you enjoyed it enough to make up for the imposition.”
I grin at her and lean back on the booth again, my arms across the top. “Yes. I did.”
She says nothing, just stares into her beer for a second. “I don’t usually do things like that. Actually, I never do things like that. It’s just I was scared, and I wasn’t thinking. I just thought, I needed a way to make them see that I won’t do what they want. And for a perfectly good reason! And then you were there, and being so nice to me already. And, oh, but now I’ve dragged you into it. And what if you’re in danger now? Oh, god. I’m so sorry, Mr. Jones. All becau-”
“Rowena,” I say as I place a hand gently on her neck, the same place I held her moments before. She jumps, goes still, looks at me with those forest eyes. “For a kiss like that, I’d face a firing squad.”
For a moment, she leans into my hand on the back of her neck, surrenders to it. My fingers tighten infinitesimally. An image flashes through my mind. Holding her there while she moans my name. Holding her there while she’s got her mouth full of me. I drop my hand.
Christ. Get a grip, Squire.
Running a finger around the edge of her beer glass, she makes it sing for a second. One long, clear note. She breaks the note and turns to me. Her eyes clear now, of lust and fear. “Row.”
“Excuse me?”
“Most people call me Row, except for my father. And those fuckheads.”
I snort a little of my drink up nose. This is why I love the world. You think you know somebody. And then they say fuckheads.
She continues on, ignoring the beer I’m wiping off my face. “So I figure you can call me Row as well.”
“Considering I’m your husband?”
She smirks at me. “Considering.”
“You got a last name to go with that?” I ask her, though I already know.
“Rourke. Row Rourke. Try and say that ten times fast.”
“Row Rourke. Row Rourke. Rowrourke. Rorko. Ruh-ruh. Impossible. Jesus that’s a mouthful.”
She smiles at my attempt and it lights her face. “It helps if you add the Ph.D. at the end.”
“Alright, Row Rourke, Ph.D. Let’s get you safely home.” I lift up to get my wallet and throw some bills on the table.
“Oh, you don’t have to pay for my dinner,” Row says, her eyes counting the bills I laid out.
“Honey, for a kiss like that, I should be paying tuition at whatever school you decide to go to next.”
Chapter Five
Row
"Do you speak French as well? I know a lot of Cajun people do." Dwight Jones asks me as he walks me back toward my hotel. This is all so surreal.
I feel like I'm floating. My body is still vibrating from that... kiss? Was that just a kiss? Could that possibly have been just a kiss? I feel like I've been hit by a truck and done a two-hour yoga class all at once. I'm limber, loose, and reverberating with the echoes of it.
It's the only explanation for why I'm letting this strange man walk me home. Logically it doesn't make any sense, and my brain is screaming at me for it. Allowing one strange man to protect me from other strange men doesn't compute.
Yet, here I am, brushing shoulders with Dwight Jones as we take the short walk to my hotel.
His question comes to me through a field of velvet. My brain is completely fuzzy. French? What the hell is he talking about?
"I speak seven languages.," I reply, and barely recognize my own voice.
"Seven?" he exclaims. "Holy hell. I could never manage more than a few vocab words of Español, myself. And not a word-I tried a hundred times-with French. Shame, because I always thought it always sounded so sexy. But none of it ever stuck.”
My mind starts to clear a little bit. "Like Kennedy," I say.
His head snaps around to stare me in the face. "What did you just call me?" he asks, his voice sharp in a way I haven't heard yet.
Interesting.
"I didn't call you anything. I said you were just like Kennedy. JFK. He tried to learn French a hundred times too. And never could."
"Oh. Right," he gives his head a little shake. "I think I’ve heard that somewhere before."
Very interesting.
I wonder if it would say “Dwight Jones” in his passport. I sigh at myself. You'd think that because I’m wondering if this guy was even telling me the truth about what his name, I would know to cut and run. And yet, here I am, still strolling.
We arrive at my door and my stomach flips. Go inside, Row. Say goodnight and go inside. Sit down with your books and get some work done before bed. I'm screaming the words in my head, but somehow, the directions don't quite make the journey down to my body. Instead of going inside, I'm standing still, looking up at him.
He pushes the ball cap back, and some of his hair comes tumbling forward. It’s
a lighter brown than I’d thought it was in the bar. Almost blonde in the street lights. His eyes are the sharp blue of cold, cold water.
He leans over me, one forearm on the wall above me. His face is close enough for me to be able to smell his soap. There's a heat kicking off of him like he's got some kind of internal furnace.
“Your eyes are so blue they make me thirsty,” I say without thinking and almost gasp at the smile that breaks out over his face. He’s suddenly years younger, and sweet.
“Am I putting the moves on you or is it the other way around?” he asks. But he doesn’t wait for an answer, he’s closing the distance between us. His breath kisses my lips before his mouth does, and it’s all I can do not to moan out there on the street.
He holds, right before our lips touch, and for a second I think he’s just pausing to elevate the tension. But then my eyes flutter open and I see the expression on his face. Concentrated. Listening. His eyes are pinned to the door of my hotel room.
“What-” I start but he holds a hand up for my silence.
He grips my shoulders and moves me four or five feet farther from the door than I was. He gives my shoulders a squeeze and then holds his hand up again. Stay. He’s telling me, staring into my eyes with an intensity I’ve only ever seen one place before. On my face when I’m working.
Interesting.
He glides soundlessly back to my door and steps to the side, his back against the wall. A gun appears in his hand out of nowhere.
Something flips around inside me at the sight of the blunt black object. God. He had that on his body when we were kissing in the bar. It was sitting next to me the whole time. I’m not particularly squeamish of guns, but this one is making my stomach flip. It’s either that or it’s him.
Before I have a chance to decide, he’s leaning over, and quick as a cat shoves my door open, stepping back to the side.
Two little pinging flashes come jetting out my door and slam into the concrete pillar opposite.
Those were definitely bullets, shot with a silencer. I reach down and grab my own pistol from where it’s strapped to my thigh and drop to the ground, crouching against the wall.
Before I can do anything else, Jones has catapulted himself into the room. I hear a shout, a crash, and the wet smack of flesh on flesh. Someone groans and I see a limp hand roll out of the door of my room.
Lunging forward, I slide along the wall and peek my head in the door to make sure it’s not Jones. I instantly recognize one of the two cousins of Stavros and Vasilis that were just in the bar. And sure enough, there’s the other one, currently getting the ever-loving stuffing beat out of him by Jones.
The man is big, meatier than Jones. And he gets a good hit in that snaps Jones’s head back. In the meantime, big man pulls out another gun from the belt at his waist. Before I can react, Jones is kicking it out of his hand and smashing the man to the ground. Big man’s head hits the floor with a brutal crack, and his eyes instantly close.
Jones isn’t done. He i
mmediately walks over to goon number one, passed out beneath me, and gets his feet. He drags him over to big man and dumps him. Jones pulls two pairs of handcuffs from his back pocket.
So I guess he also had those on him while we were kissing.
Alarm bells, Row. They should be loud enough to call the fire department at this point. But of course, nothing. I’m still not scared of this guy.
Jones cuffs the two guys to one another around their wrists and around their ankles. He grabs my hand, drags me out of the room, slams the door closed.
My mouth drops open as he pulls a set of keys out of his pocket and easily unlocks the door to my father’s room. He shoves me into the room, and I fall in a heap on the bed. Confused more than anything, I point the pistol in my hand at Jones’s heart.
“Where the fuck did you get that?” he asks, annoyed. And in a move so fast that I don’t see it with my naked eye, he’s snatched the gun out of my hand, emptied it of bullets and tossed it back on the bed next to me.
Without thinking, it’s been a really confusing few minutes, I lift the skirt of my dress to show him the strap on my thigh that keeps my gun. “From here.”
I slide the now useless gun back into place and look up at him. He’s staring at my thigh. Something dark races across his face. Something dark and hot and dangerous. I keep my thigh exposed.
I don’t know who the fuck this guy is, or what’s about to happen, but I know that showing bare skin is distracting him, and I need just about all the upper hand I can get.
His eyes flick back to mine and I barely recognize him as the kind, smiling stranger from the bar. There’s only calculation on his face, dark and tinged with lust. A shiver races down my spine, and it isn’t fear.
“You’re not scared of me,” he says.
“I’m confused,” I say, leaning back on the bed and crossing my legs, his eyes flick back down, over my body. “And I hate being confused. If I asked you who you were, would you tell me?”
He tosses his hat on the bed beside me and goes to my father’s window, pulls the drapes back just a hair, enough for him to see outside. The orange glow from the street lamps cuts a slice of light across his face.
“I’m a ghost. Someone you were never supposed to see in the first place.”
I shake my head. So, questions are not going to be met with straight answers. I could ask a hundred, all the ones that are pinging around in my head, and get a hundred evasive answers. Or I could just ask one. The right one.
“So, what happens next?”
He lets the drape fall back and the room goes back to a deep blue dark. It’s got to be past ten o clock. My father should be back any minute.
Jones walks towards me and in a flash, I’m pushed back on the bed. He pulls a skinny rope from his pocket and my hands are tied to the headboard.
“In a second, your father gets home. I incapacitate him and then you. And then I take you to the man who paid me to find you.”
“Esposito,” I whisper and Jones’s head snaps around to stare at me. For the first time, my blood runs cold with fear. It clouds my vision for a second, but I force it back. Fear makes people do stupid things. I’m not stupid. I’m smart. I have two Ph.D.s for fuck sakes. I can’t overpower Jones, or whatever his name is, especially not while I’m tied to this bed. But I can figure a way out. “You work for Esposito,” I say, trying to keep my voice as calm as possible.
He shrugs and pulls the chair out from the desk. “What can I say? Great health benefits and a killer 401k plan.”
“He must want us alive. Which is why you incapacitated the cousins,” I nod my head toward my room.
He neither confirms or denies.
“So you won’t kill me.”
Again, he gives me no indication either direction.
“But you might hurt me.”
Something flashes across his face. Heat. And something else. Regret, maybe? Hmm. I interpret that to mean that he doesn’t want to hurt me. But he will if he has to. Alright. I have to go for broke here.
“I’m not going to beg. Or offer money. I’m sure you hear that from every person you… find for Esposito. But I’m going to tell you two things.”
He shifts in the chair and a moment of curiosity holds in his eyes before he shutters them again.
“My father is a brilliant man. And he’s searched almost his entire life for something we are a hair’s width from finding. What we’re digging for at that site. It’s important. I can’t tell you what it is. But it is deeply important. And if you take us away, grave robbers will come. And they’ll strip the site of every artifact.”
He looks bored. Fine. He doesn’t care about history. I’ll have to tell him the whole story.
“If you know Esposito, you know he’s a lover of historical artifacts. He offered to fund this trip. And before I could talk my father out of it, he’d taken the money. But it’s been too long. Esposito’s grown impatient. And besides, he found something he wanted even more than what we’re searching for.”
I stare Jones right in the face. “He wants me.”
He shifts in his chair, his eyes scanning over my body, hitching on all the good parts.
“The last time I saw him,” I continue. “Was in Milan. We were searching a site in Italy. With no luck. He came to check our progress. He told me-” I break off, but can’t control the shudder that runs through me. “That I belong to him. That he owns me. Because of the money he paid my father. That he owns me. And that someday, he’s going to do whatever he wants to me. You came here to take me to that someday.”
I look up at Jones and see the raw fury in his expression. I expect him to temper it, go neutral, the way he has every other time. But he doesn’t. The temper grows. He stands and without looking back. He’s gone from the room in a flash and I hear him enter my room. There’s silence, and then the door to my father’s room comes open.
I’m disoriented for a second when I realize that it’s my father coming through the door, not Jones. He sees me. His eyes widening and his hand going to the pistol at his belt.
“Rowena-” he cuts off and falls in a heap in the doorway. Jones steps over him, pocketing the syringe he just injected into my father’s neck. He drags my father inside, the way he did with the man next door. Slamming the door, he turns to me. His eyes crackle with hard fury.
But it’s nothing compared to the fury in my own eyes. This motherfucker thinks he can tranq my father? Kidnap and deliver us to the most reprehensible man on earth? I take back everything I said about Jones. I fucking hate this guy. I can’t tear my eyes away from my father’s prone body. Rage boils inside me.
“Your father is going to be fine,” he says, stalking toward me.
Come on. Just a little bit closer. One more step.
The second he’s close enough to me I jam my heel into his stomach. I hit more hip than organs but I have the pleasure of seeing him bend forward in pain. In the next second, two things happen. One-I realize that one of my wrists is slipping out of the rope. And two-he grabs at my feet, trying to hold me down.
I slide my wrist free, even though it takes off about twelve layers of skin in the process, and clock him on the side of his head. He whips around, a look of surprise and… interest? on his face. He shifts his weight onto the bed and grabs my hand now too. His knee presses my legs down and his hand is pinning my arm to the bed.
But that doesn’t mean this is over. I struggle against him. For some reason he’s trying not to hurt me. Which gives me the advantage here. Because I don’t give a fuck if I hurt him. I kick my legs and throw my weight around as much as I can. I can’t dislodge him, but I do get one of my legs free. I use it to try and kick him in the kidney, but he grabs it with one hand, pins it to his side.
“Row!” he shouts. “I know about your father’s heart condition.”
I freeze instantly. Nothing he could have said would have stopped me faster. He crouches over me, pinning my hands to the bed and my leg around him. His face is six inches from
my mine. I can smell him. I can feel that considerable heat kicking off from him.
“I know about his heart attacks. I did my research. I found a sedative that wouldn’t hurt him, ok? Now stop fucking fighting me before you hurt yourself.” His eyes bore into mine for a moment, before they fall to my mouth, open and panting, to my chest, violently rising and falling with each breath. His eyes are heating, cautiously, as he watches to see what I’m going to do next. But for now, he’s obviously enjoying our position.
