It was stupid of me to want so badly for him to talk about me in that same way. But I did. First I wanted to blow his mind by bagging someone huge. Then I wanted him to give me the respect I deserved.
And where did Corbin fit in? He was a wanted killer. But he’d saved me, and had treated me kindly. He hadn’t really threatened my brother’s life. Why did that touch me? Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe he’d faked the call because he didn’t have anyone to carry out his dirty work. Maybe he would have done it if he could have.
I walked out of the bathroom, carrying the candle. The greatest catch of my career was sitting on the sofa, holding a plate of baked pasta. A second plate sat on the coffee table along with two beers. I stopped, measuring the breadth of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw, the length of his hair over his ear.
He deserved to be brought to justice. And someone would probably find him. He was too sloppy, showing his face in that shopping center, even with the cowboy hat. I had been lucky, but it had been far too easy for me to figure out who he was. If I’d been on top of the lists, if I hadn’t let my father bureaucratize the adventure out of me, I would have recognized Corbin at first glance.
“Are you going to stand there and stare at me, or do you want to sit and eat?” He picked up the beer.
My hands had curled into fists, and I straightened my fingers. A small ache in my fingertips tickled through me when I did that, reminding me of my ordeal the night before.
“I can hear the gears turning in your head. Come sit.”
I went and sat next to him.
“Eat. It won’t be easy to heat the food up again until the power comes back on.”
I picked up the beer instead and took a few gulps, then I set it down. “Do you enjoy killing?”
The dancing firelight cast strange shadows in his eyes. “I’m good at it.”
“People tend to enjoy things they’re good at.”
He set down his bottle, drained. “I’ve got three more questions for you.”
I wasn’t in the mood for these sorts of games anymore. Not now. I was going to tell him to drop it, but a glimmer of curiosity managed to escape through my dismal mood. “Ok.”
“Question eight. Why do you want to turn me in so badly? And don’t say it’s only about the money because I know it isn’t.”
“Prestige. Respect.”
“And then what? You go after bigger and bigger captures until you get yourself killed?”
I shrugged. “Or maybe I retire. Dunno. That’s question nine.”
“Nope. You didn’t answer. You said you don’t know, so it doesn’t count.”
I furrowed my brow.
“You don’t even know what you want to be or to do.”
It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer, didn’t even think about what it would mean if his words were true.
“I have a proposition for you.” He put the plate of food into my hands. “I see a woman who can’t reconcile her personal feelings for me with what I do for a living.”
“Feelings?” I snorted. “The sex was hot, but—”
“You know what I think you like?”
“I like seeing justice done,” I said.
“No, Audrey.” He was nodding very slightly, a smile on his face. “You live for the hunt. You like trying to outsmart people, and you figure if you can outsmart one of the big game, that means you’re the best there is.”
“And this is based on knowing me for all of a day?”
“Well, let’s see. You get a glimpse of a man in a store and decide to go after him. Never mind that there are a million different explanations for the conversation you overheard. You want to investigate because you have to know. Because your curiosity controls you. Then, when you find out who he is, you make the harebrained decision to come after him, on your own, when there’s a crippling storm moving into the region.”
“There was a narrow window. And I couldn’t find anyone. Don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a storm—”
“I don’t believe that for a second. If this is a family business, you could have made a single phone call and gotten backup. You could have called the cops. Those FBI lists? Information leading to an arrest. You could have given the address, and they would have sent someone out and you’d collect the money. It’s not about the money, and it’s not about making sure that justice gets served, though I’m sure those things appeal to you. You, my darling fugitive tracker, like the hunt.”
“Interesting theory,” I said lightly, but inside I was shivering. What if he was right? If that was the case, that didn’t make me any better than my father, and not much better than one of the people I hunted.
“But in your business, what it really means is that you paid off the right person. You found your quarry’s enemy and got him to talk. You bribed someone to sell out a friend or family member. That’s how the big bounties are caught. You just need enough money. There’s nothing noble in that.”
“Said the murderer.”
“Touché. But how would you feel about really trying your skills?”
I gave him a long look. Was he really suggesting that I—
“No, not doing what I do. You don’t have the stomach for it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. Audrey, I don’t have the stomach for it, and I’ve killed almost 40 people. Most of them were creeps of the first degree, and every single one of them would have killed me first. I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you that I get all teary after I kill someone, but it does weigh on me. I’m not completely an animal.”
I tipped the rest of the beer into my mouth, then took a bite of the pasta. Delicate flavors swirled around my taste buds, but I didn’t let it distract me from my goal. “So what percentage monster are you, anyway? 80%? 95%?”
“Like anything, it depends on the situation.” His expression darkened. “When I see a helpless woman passed out in the road and I bring her home, my monster percentage is low.”
“And when you strip her naked and spank her until she screams?” My body hummed to life, every cell suddenly alert, primed, wanting him even though it was so wrong.
“That depends.” He smiled, his teeth flashing white. “Is she secretly hoping for me to blow her mind? Has she been waiting her whole life for someone to make her question everything she thought she knew about the world?”
“God, I hope you aren’t talking about me.”
Instead of furthering his case, Corbin scraped up the last of his pasta and put the plate down. “Let me know if you want to hear my proposal.”
“Oh, I want to hear it. I’m just preparing myself to die laughing.”
“What if you could save lives?”
“By working with you? How? Keeping you busy in the bedroom?”
He smiled. “Now there’s an angle I hadn’t considered. No, I was thinking more along the lines of creating situations where no one needs to be killed.”
I frowned. I had no idea what he meant.
“I’m part of an organization that does… risk assessment. Sometimes, someone decides that the most expedient way to get from where we are to where we need to be is straight through whoever is standing in the way.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it. Corporate speak for murderers.”
Maybe it was my imagination, but a grimace seemed to flash across his face. However, when he resumed speaking, his voice was calm. “Sometimes it turns out there’s a better way. And sometimes, we don’t realize there’s a better way until the problem has been dealt with.”
Now it was my turn to wince. Dealt with. Like he was discussing a warehouse shipping delay. “And you want me to, what? Tell you when you can get what you want without killing someone?”
He nodded. “Pretty much.”
“And when I can’t figure something out, people will die.”
“Not very nice people. Think of what a police officer does. They weigh risk. Sometimes that means they have to act in such a way that peopl
e die.”
“Not five people by November.”
“Good memory.”
“It’s not the sort of thing one forgets easily. I’ll probably have nightmares about it.”
A dark look crossed his face. “That would upset me. Here’s my ninth question. Will you seriously consider it between now and tomorrow?”
“No. I can’t be involved with something illegal.”
“Like stalking people? Breaking into houses? Illegally eavesdropping?”
“Conversations in public are fair game. And I’ve never broken into a house.”
“You had a listening device. I had thought, at the time, maybe a hearing aid turned up. You didn’t react normally when we spoke louder. The blind old lady behind the counter reacted before you did. And you were stiff. People go very still when they’re concentrating.”
Ouch. “Thanks for the tip. Now what’s your last question?”
A wicked look flashed in his eyes. “How much did you like the sex?”
He caught me off-guard. “No comment. Next question.”
“A request, then. If you won’t consider my offer, will you at least pretend none of the last hour happened? I’m enjoying my time with you. And while I never would have chosen for this situation to happen the way it did, if I had to be stuck in a house with someone, I’m lucky it was you.”
His words left me speechless.
“Yes or no?”
I nodded, glad that the flickering light from the fire would do a nice job of hiding the blush that I felt spreading across my cheeks. Corbin took my plate out of my hands and slid it on the table. Then he brushed his thumb across my mouth. “You caught me by surprise in so many ways. I’m not afraid to admit the sex was hot.” His burning lips pressed against mine.
I resisted. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him, because I did. But could I respect myself for giving in now that I knew what he was?
Physically, the question was answered as the wetness between my legs increased. Corbin didn’t tell me to soften my lips for him, but I felt the request in the way he kissed me. He was being polite, but I knew what he did in the bedroom. I knew what he wanted.
And if I responded to him, his requests would turn to orders that I wasn’t sure I could resist. But my hands seemed to have a will of their own, and I found my palm filled with his hardening length.
His eyes bored into mine as he pulled me to standing and walked me backward, a bastardization of our earlier waltz. My hip bumped into a table and a lamp crashed to the floor. Corbin ignored it, his attention laser-focused on me. I found myself up against a wall, and when he kissed me, it was raw. He worked his hand under the flannel pajamas, and without preamble, thrust two fingers deep inside me.
I gasped, my face hot as lava, and pulled the pajamas down so that the elastic gripped my thighs It was so quiet that the sounds of his fingers in my slick flesh echoed, at least until my desperate panting drowned them out. He smelled like beer and aftershave, and his hooded eyes locked to my face.
“You know what I like about your body, Audrey? How grateful you look when I give you orgasms.”
“Not true,” I gasped.
He twisted his hand so that his thumb stroked my clit in time with his words. “True.” Stroke. “Shocked.” Stroke. “Grateful.” Stroke. “And humbled.” He played my body like an instrument. “It’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
If I were telling the story of my life, I’d say that I slapped him, shoved him away. I meant to, and even went so far as locking my hands around his thick, plunging wrist. But instead of pushing, I pulled, grinding my hips on him, rising up on my toes and riding him hard. I couldn’t look at his face, not knowing that he was watching so intently, but out of the corner of my eye, I registered his expression, how intent he was, like part of him was memorizing every detail.
The heat of his erection burned through the fabric between us. He leaned into me, hammering his fingers into my spasming hole as he ground his length against my hip, letting me know how much I turned him on.
“Go on, now,” he said. “Let go.”
And I did. It wasn’t pretty. The back of my head banged the wall, and I managed to slip on an unrolled pajama leg, but he caught me easily, supporting me while I flailed and writhed and panted and begged incoherently, “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t.”
He kept his fingers in me through the last twitches, and he was still there when I came back to myself. Then he slowly pulled out and, even slower, put the fingers into his mouth and sucked them.
I turned my head away, trying to hide my embarrassment, but then he kissed me again, the taste of my pussy faint on his lips. His hand trailed from my shoulder to my breast, pinching my nipple. “Feel better?” he asked.
I nodded. “I’m… really tired,” I said, which wasn’t untrue. It was late, and even though I’d slept through huge chunks of the day, I’d been through a lot, too. But I also wasn’t sure how I felt about my attraction to this man. Never in my life had I been so conflicted. To me, the world had always been black or white, right or wrong. And I still believed that. Which meant… I was on the wrong side.
My head dipped, and I crossed my arms over my chest.
Corbin stepped away as if sex wasn’t on his mind. “I’ll get bedding,” he said. He went upstairs and returned with a stack of blankets and pillows. I watched numbly as he created a makeshift bed on the couch. He fussed over the details, making sure things were arranged to his satisfaction. Control freak or gentleman? Did it matter?
He straightened and looked at me. “If you want to brush your teeth, there are extra toothbrushes in the bathroom upstairs.”
I nodded, getting the hint. He would take the couch. Which was generous, though unfair considering that I was the guest, but I didn’t fight him on it. Not when I knew I would lose anyway.
~~~
Even with the candle flickering on the bedside table, I couldn’t fall asleep. The bedroom was too unfamiliar. Hotel rooms had always posed a challenge, which wasn’t a huge problem as I rarely traveled thanks to my pauper’s salary.
I turned and bunched the pillow up under my head. Traces of Corbin’s aftershave wafted in the air, and I closed my eyes. Thinking about him physically hurt.
His offer to become a criminal. What was that about? Though technically, I would just be analyzing data or something.
Yeah, right. That wouldn’t fly in a court of law, and when his assassin corporation went down, I would, too. The thought of my name on the Most Wanted list made my stomach churn.
I turned over again and stared at the ceiling. I wondered where Corbin was going next. What he’d be doing.
Where he thought he was going, I corrected myself. Because I still planned to haul his cocky ass into town.
Who was I kidding? I couldn’t do it. I’d chalk it up to owing him for saving my life. I sighed deeply. What a mess.
I found myself sitting up and pushing my hair out of my face. My hand, opening the door, felt like it belonged to someone else. The door silently swung open. Corbin must have fed the fire again because it was brighter than before, and I stood in the hallway and looked at his sleeping form on the sofa below.
It would be so easy to slip handcuffs on him. Mine were in the car, but I bet Corbin kept some in that lair of his. Could I sneak into it without him noticing?
Then I remembered the rope I’d discovered earlier in the bathroom. I dug it out of the drawer and silently descended the stairs. Corbin didn’t stir. I slipped into the kitchen for a large knife and cut several lengths of rope to fashion four handcuffs, two each for his arms and legs. Better to be on the safe side.
My heart hammering, I crept close to his peaceful form.
When he was awake, his face always held a certain tension. Asleep, however, he looked younger. Relaxed. I knelt beside him, the rope twisting in my fingers. The burden of what I was about to do weighed on me, and nausea brewed in my stomach.
I raised the rope, staring at his hands, try
ing not to think of how attentive they had been on my body hours earlier. I knew that if I did this, I’d always hate myself, but I also knew he’d understand. Did that made it better or worse?
An eternity passed with me standing there, frozen, unable to take the unforgivable next step. I wanted to. I willed myself to, but instead, I slowly lowered my hand, and my head dropped, defeated.
“Thank you.”
I jerked and lost my balance, nearly falling into the coffee table. Corbin’s eyes searched mine, and I couldn’t look away.
This was what people meant when they said they’d gotten lost in someone’s eyes. I felt like I was drowning inside of him, smothered, flailing. A strange, sob-like noise rose from my throat, and the rope slipped out of my hands.
Corbin pulled me close without fully sitting up, or maybe I climbed onto the couch, pressing my body into his space, wanting him to surround me and drown out my doubts and nascent self-hatred. He wrapped the blanket around us both, and his strong arms came around to enclose me in a firm embrace. The sexual attraction that I’d been tamping down flared, but more than sex, I just wanted this moment of peace to last.
It made no logical sense, but I felt safe in his arms. Every fiber of my being was screaming at me to accept this strange, complicated gift of a weekend with Corbin. He squeezed me tighter. “Go to sleep now,” he said, his voice husky with exhaustion. “Everything will be ok. I promise.”
My eyes closed. I believed him. His words lulled me into a deep sleep, that, while not happy, was blissfully uninterrupted.
~~~
When I woke, I was a little chilly. The fire was nothing but smoking embers, but I saw the light on the digital clock blinking. The power must be back on, but maybe the heater needed to be manually reset. I turned over and found that I was alone.
Trapped by a Dangerous Man Page 9
