In the Arms of Danger

by Madison Hayes

  Dicky blew out a frustrated snort.

  But the woman he’d fucked outside the pub had been slag. Not like the woman he shielded inside his arm. This one was sophisticated, American—with money, no doubt. Lived in a house, not a flat. A big home with acres of groomed lawns and a stable full of horses in the back garden. Not the sort of woman you fucked up against a damp wall in a back alley.

  If he could get to America he’d have it made, he reflected. If he could get to America. But it would be hard for Dicky Evans to get to America, or anywhere else for that matter—when Dicky Evans didn’t exist.

  Cutting a glance behind him, he tightened his hold on the little American as he steered her around a corner.

  A few blocks later Dicky stood on The Anston’s stone steps, lighting a cigarette, waiting to be sure the girl got a room. The inn’s porch was unlighted. The tall narrow building rose four floors above him, casting him in dark shadow. Dragging on his cigarette, Dicky scanned the neighborhood without moving his head, trying to locate his “tail”. When the inn’s door opened, he dropped the butt and stepped on it.

  For a long moment, he just stared at the female form framed in the doorway. The gold light of the inn glowed behind her, the warm color unwilling to venture out onto the cold stone porch. The yellow radiance backlighting her head haloed around hair one shade too gold to be considered brown. As she stepped outside, she pulled her thin blue anorak tightly around her chest. “I got a room,” she stated. “You were right. They took forty pounds for it.”

  It was cold and damp, and he was in a hurry to be gone, in a hurry to shake whoever was following him. He put an arm around her and pulled her tight against his lean frame as he planted a kiss at the corner of her lips. Pulling away, he watched the small bow of her mouth in her pale, heart-shaped face. Her thickly lashed eyes remained closed as she optimistically held out for more. Smiling, he waited for her eyes to open so he could have a last look at them. Her eyes were that unusual shade of turquoise you normally only ever find on postcards from Canada.

  Canadian lakes.

  Cool, he thought, and quenching. He’d like to stub himself out on her, he decided. Briefly, he wondered how she’d fit on his cock—then brushed the idea aside impatiently.

  It would be nice to spend the night in a warm, dry room, and he’d do her if he got the chance—if it weren’t for the man following him. He couldn’t imagine she’d put up much resistance. She was tiny. One way or another, he’d convince her to open her legs for him. Most women only wanted convincing. He could imagine her finally succumbing to lust, her slender body arching inside his arms, her mound pressed tightly against his damp groin as she whimpered on the end of his cock.

  It would be nice to fuck a woman properly, to have the time as well as a warm bed to do it in. Doubtless, that was what she was used to. Warm beds, crisp sheets and slow, thorough, clean sex. Slowly, he blinked this thought aside as he started to turn. Her uncertain voice turned him around again.

  “Thank you,” she stuttered. “For your help.” She took a deep breath. “Do you have an address? Phone number?”

  He felt sorry for her as his eyes burned at her through several moments of silence. With her faltering question, she’d revealed her interest in him and opened herself to rejection. He regretted what his next words must be.

  He felt sorry for the poor little rich girl.

  He felt sorrier for himself.

  Slowly moving the few steps toward her, he backed her up against the inn’s stone wall. With a hand on the wall beside her head and his body touching hers just enough to tease, he smiled down into her upraised eyes. “Let me go, girl. You’re better off that way. I’d only bring you trouble.”

  “Cell phone number?” she persisted in a brave, unwavering voice.

  “I don’t have a mobile,” he told her. “I don’t have anything. I don’t have a home or a flat or an address. I don’t have a place to sleep tonight.” His voice was a quiet rasp as he moved his lips to her ear. “And, if you don’t stop tempting me, I’ll take you upstairs to your room, despite the trouble that follows me. Leave it,” he told her. Pulling away from her, he turned and took the steps quickly then crossed the street. He didn’t look back.

  On the other side of the street, Dicky strode out the length of a tiny, fenced courtyard park, turned to walk along the back of it, turned again at the corner then slipped into the park through a tall wrought iron gate. Leaning against a tree, he lit a cigarette and waited.

  When the cigarette had finally burned down to sting his fingers, he flicked the butt away and shrugged, deciding that he’d shaken the “tail”, or that his stalker had lost interest. With that thought, he let himself back out the gate and shot a final look at The Anston. A small pinpoint of light glowed in the dark shadows beside the steps rising to the inn.

  Dicky’s eyes narrowed on the spark of orange. Swiftly, he strode away from The Anston, turned the corner, then jumped several walls, fences, and a final hedge to arrive in The Anston’s back garden. Flattening himself against the inn’s gray stone wall, he edged down a narrow alley toward the front of the building.

  A man stood finishing a cigarette. A man in a black jacket and dark trousers, his eyes turned upward to rest on one of the building’s lighted windows.

  And Dicky realized. The stalker hadn’t been tailing him.

  He’d been following the girl.

  The man disappeared from Dicky’s view, but his steps echoed in the alley as he climbed the stairs toward the front door of The Anston. Dicky stood in the narrow defile between the wall of the inn and that of the adjacent building, his eyes scaling The Anston’s gray stone to the lighted window.

  He reacted without thinking. Up. And quickly. He didn’t know why the girl was being followed but he didn’t want her to be alone when her stalker caught up with her.

  Placing his hands flat on the walls crowding in on either side of him, Dicky flexed his arms, lifted his legs, and went up between the buildings as though climbing a chimney, bracing himself with feet and hands, arms and legs, pushing against the cold, damp stone as he moved upward. Upon reaching the fourth floor, he caught the roof’s edge as he hauled himself over the eaves and crouched beside the window set into the steep, slate roof.

  Within the small room, the slender bit of a girl sat at the end of a single bed, the light from the room’s television splashing on her in varying colors. Dicky reached for the bottom edge of the window and grinned when it slid upward. Swinging his legs inside the attic room, he sat on the window’s ledge and paused, holding his breath, as he took a moment to admire the view. The girl was dressed in a tiny top that quit trying to be a T-shirt just below her small breasts. The captivating outline of her nipples was stamped on the thin jersey of her cropped T-shirt. Other than the tiny top, only a small piece of pink silk wrapped her hips.

  Tilting his head, Dicky frowned at her, wondering why she hadn’t noticed him. Her attention was firmly fixed on the flickering TV screen. Leaving the window open behind him, he stood inside the room. On the television screen, there were boats in the water and floating wreckage. His eyes flitted to the girl then back to the screen.

  And all of a sudden, Dicky realized what he was looking at—what she was looking at.

  Moving toward her smoothly, he got himself beside her. Her lips were white, her skin almost transparent as she turned her shocked face toward him. Her eyes were all the bluer against the stark white backdrop of her bloodless skin. As he slid onto the bed beside her, he collected her onto his lap and turned her head with his hand, cradling it into his neck as the newswoman finished her report.

  “As yet, no terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack that sank the Liverpool-Dublin ferry this afternoon. All are feared lost.”

  Dicky glanced around, but there was no phone in the small room. The attic bedroom was tiny, with barely enough space for the television cart, single bed, bedside table and a simple wooden chair.

  “You need to contact
your family,” he told her. When she didn’t answer, he pulled her face out of his neck. “You need to call home. To America.”

  Her eyes filled with dread. “My father’s on a dig.”

  Dicky shook his head, confused. He didn’t understand her words. He didn’t understand what she was trying to tell him. The pale, soft skin of her neck, only inches from his lips, was incredibly distracting.

  When he finally gathered his wits enough to think about it, he realized that the girl’s acceptance of his presence was damn odd. She leaned into him as though she belonged to him, belonged in his arms. She should have been wondering where the hell he’d come from.

  But she was in shock, he reminded himself.

  Still. It felt so goddamn right. It felt like he should be with her and she should be in his arms.

  Pulling her hair clear of her neck was just an excuse for Dicky to run his street-worn hands through the swathe of gold silk that begged to be stroked. Trailing his hand down over her shoulder, he let his palm rest on her shallow breast, the act not sexual so much as assessing, a measuring of how she fit him, taking stock of what he held in his arms—of what he had in her. The small, dainty breast only just filled his cupped palm and yet it was enough. It was more than enough.

  Before he knew it, before he could control it, it turned sexual. His body responded to the small, warm bit of woman in his arms with alarming rapidity, striking him hard below the belt as his cock stiffened in a hungry surge of anticipation. Quickly, he pulled his hand from her chest and returned it to stroke through her hair.

  “He’s out in the middle of Montana,” she explained. There’s no cell phone service. He’s on a dig for dinosaur eggs. I…don’t know anything about the project.”

  Dicky cursed softly. “You’ll have to go to the police.” His eyes cut to the open window—one of the two escape routes from the small room. His gaze swung back to the room’s door as he considered the man with the cigarette, calculating where he might be at that precise moment. In the hall, watching. In the lobby, waiting. “I’ll take you to the police station in the morning,” he finally decided. Sliding the girl out of his lap, he stood to check the lock on the door. On his way there, he hit the power button on the television.

  “I was watching—”

  “They’re all dead,” he told her.

  She shook her head at him. “But…who did it?”

  Leaning against the door, he dug in his pocket for his cigarettes as he stared at her. “Did you see anyone? At the docks?”

  She shook her head again and shrugged in confusion. “I saw a lot of people.”

  “Yes,” he cut into her statement, “but did you see anyone in particular? Anyone who stared at you, got angry with you, cursed at you? Did you see anyone suspicious?”

  “Suspicious?”

  “Someone who didn’t belong. Someone with a hat or a hood. Someone too young or too old. Someone too nicely dressed. A tramp where a tramp shouldn’t have been?”

  She shook her head.

  He lit his cigarette and shook the match in his hand. “Yes, you did. Think.”

  “Why do you think I saw…?”

  Dicky watched her eyes register something new.

  “There was a man,” she said slowly.

  Dicky dragged on the cigarette and waited.

  “He bumped into me as I came out of the ladies’ room. He nearly ran over me. He stumbled and almost went to his knees.”

  “Did you get a good look at his face?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” he muttered.

  “What?” she asked. “Do you think he might have had something to do with the accident?”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” he informed her. “Tell me what he looked like.”

  Dicky nodded as she stumbled through her description. The man she described wasn’t the stalker who had followed her here to the inn, and that was troubling because it meant there was more than one of them out there—and where there were two there might be a whole organization.

  According to the girl, the man at the docks wasn’t a featureless, nondescript character. Even if the blond were to dye his hair dark, his prominent nose, scarred temple and narrow, jutting chin would give him away. He had the sort of face that would jump out at you from a database of mug shots, the sort of face that would lend itself to a good composite drawing. Dicky could understand the terrorist’s zeal to eliminate the witness.

  And that’s what they planned to do.

  They were going to kill the girl.

  “But why would the Irish—”

  “I doubt it was the Irish,” Dicky cut her off. “Either side.”

  “Why would anybody? I mean what’s the point? Why kill innocent civilians?”

  “To get someone’s attention.”

  “The government? The government won’t deal with terrorists! They know that. Everyone knows that! It hasn’t done the Irish any good in all the years of bloodshed.”

  “No?” he argued. “They have representation now.”

  “Sinn Fein? They could have gotten that without bloodshed. The UK has elections!”

  Dicky nodded. “Our elections are next week.” He waited for her to draw some of her own conclusions. When she offered none, he continued. “This attack is meant to sway the election’s outcome. Like the attack on the commuter train in Spain. Not to influence the government, but to change the government. Get the people’s attention. Change leadership and get England to pull out of the war in Iraq.”

  “Sway the outcome! But the man…that man at the ferry, wasn’t Middle Eastern.”

  Dicky nodded. “That’s what troubles me.” The man she had described sounded more Nordic than either Irish or Middle Eastern. Tall with straight blond hair. But, without any evidence to the contrary, the British public was more likely to suspect the Muslims than the Irish. And in the end, that was the bottom line. That was all that really mattered as far as the perpetrators were concerned.

  Dicky pushed off from the hotel room door then cut a glance back at it. The lock was flimsy at best but it would stop someone from sneaking in quietly.

  And that’s about all it would do.

  Chapter Three

  Julie must have fallen asleep as they talked. She didn’t remember pulling the sheets and blanket up over herself. But when she woke, she found herself snugly tucked up into bed and the bedside clock reading three-thirty. Dicky was where she’d left him, seated on the window’s ledge, with one leg out the window. A heavy, unlaced boot was flat against the vertical window jamb. The room was dark and cold. Rolling to the edge of the bed, she stood and crept toward the door. There was a rustle of movement—then Dicky was beside her.

  Julie regarded him with a wry smile. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

  He shrugged his coat down his arms and wrapped it around her shoulders. “Right. Is it down the hall, then?”

  She nodded a curious frown at him.

  “I just want to see where it is,” he told her.

  With a hand on her elbow, Dicky pushed her down the hall and stepped into the bathroom with her. Stopping just inside the door, his eyes flicked around the tiny room and settled on the cracked mirror over the ancient porcelain sink. As though he cared about his appearance, he pulled a hand through his dark hair just before he backed out through the door, closing her inside the small bathroom.

  When Julie stepped out of the bathroom a few minutes later, Dicky was lounging against the stretch of wall between the bathroom and the door to her room. Caught in the dark shadows between two pools of light that dropped from overhead, her dark prince waited for her. His loose jeans slouched arrogantly on his hips while his thin T-shirt hugged his upper body in a carnal embrace. As he pushed himself away from the wall, the jeans and T-shirt parted ways for a bare instant and Julie blinked at the rapid exposure.

  A glimpse of smooth, hard flank.

  Tight skin stretched over a lean male abdomen.

  Although Julie wa
s intelligent enough to know that the dark-haired upstart was nothing but trouble, she was nonetheless female enough to feel an overpowering tug of attraction to the young man. He had to be the most dynamic male force she’d ever stumbled across in her lifetime. The bad boy Brit was the sort of guy no woman could ignore and few women could resist. Julie was smart enough to accept that fact. And she wasn’t about to argue with her senses, which were pushing her toward the enigmatic stranger. Somehow, Dicky made her feel like the sexiest thing alive, small breasts and past history notwithstanding. Having barely uttered a word of interest, he had drawn her in with nothing more than his hot, assessing gaze, and a streetwise touch that was both protective and possessive.

  With an arm around her, Dicky herded her back into the room.

  “Aren’t you tired?” she asked as he closed the door behind him.

  He rolled his shoulders. “No,” he told her, though the shadows beneath his eyes suggested otherwise.

  “The bed’s big enough…for—”

  “No,” he answered quickly. “No. It’s not nearly big enough. It would take a lot more than that to keep me out of your—”

  Dicky broke the words off, realizing he was leaning toward her, head tilted forward, lips bent on taking her mouth as she tipped her chin up as though to receive his kiss.

  If he got in that bed with the girl, he’d fuck her and that was all there was to it. And he didn’t dare allow himself to be distracted as long as her stalker was still out there somewhere, waiting to make his move. Pulling back, Dicky unwound his coat from her shoulders. Slowly, as though it was Christmas, he unwrapped her and stared at the gift that was her slender body.

  He would have groaned if his throat weren’t so fucking dry. Jesus, she was a hot little package. His chin lifted a fraction. “Hop back into bed,” he told her. “I’ll tuck you in.”