“You’ve been in my room,” she hissed so close to his ear if she bit, he’d sacrifice skin.
“No.” He pressed her floor with his elbow. “I want to talk.”
“We have nothing to talk about.”
“We have what happened to make you run to talk about.”
Not what she expected him to say. He’d successfully confused her. The breath she took softened her muscles. But it would be a mistake to trust that. “Are you going to attack me again?”
“I’ll do whatever I want.”
“Talk to me.”
She jerked her chin up. “Five minutes and then you leave or I’ll shoot you.”
She didn’t have a weapon on her; he’d swept her body for anything concealed, including a pat down of the soft purse she had slung across her shoulders, but it was still a viable threat.
“Five minutes, and if you’re not happy you can shoot me. I’m going to release you now.” Before someone called the elevator and they had to ride it back down again. “Try not to kill me in a public place.” It would be an amateur move and an ignominious end.
He let her go and she lurched for the open-door button. He followed her down the corridor, and when she fumbled through her bag for the keycard, he obliged by using his.
She blocked his entry with an outstretched arm. “Why are you still here?”
He pushed past her. “I told you.”
She following him inside and shut the door. “You know I have Sweet Celestia. Why didn’t you toss the room, take her and go?”
“More interested in tossing you.”
She blinked, then flushed, turning away and making a show of checking for Celestia, opening draws and fussing about, while his heart recovered from the pleasure of seeing that bright color in her face. The way she’d responded to him in that alley wasn’t simply leftover lust from her banished playmate.
“Not going to happen.” She turned to face him, perfectly composed. He’d stared at still images of her as Melody, so unlike his Aria, but now with her hair dark again it was easier to see his punk-ass danger girl. “Start talking.”
He didn’t want to stop looking at her, stop touching her, but for now, he’d settle for having her listen. “Your father was a son of a bitch. I don’t know if he was any easier for you to live with when your mother was alive, but from what I saw, he didn’t know what to do with a daughter.”
She dropped her chin and her hair swung forward, obscuring her face.
“Worse, he didn’t try to love you, just shut you out.”
She tossed her head. “Shut me out? That’s what you think happened? He left everything to you because he shut me out, like I was a stray cat with fleas he’d regretted giving access to the house.”
Something like that. The more Aria had rebelled to get her father’s attention, the more the professor withdrew from her. “He left everything to me because he was a heartless bastard and he didn’t expect to choke on a chicken bone at lunch.”
“Easy for you to say. You inherited the house, the money, his collections, his client list, his contacts. My entire legacy.”
“I was an idiot kid. I didn’t have a thought in my head about wills and inheritances. All I thought about was the next thrill and being with you. I had no idea what he’d done. Until they read the will I thought I was jobless, homeless, but fucking so in love with you none of that mattered. I thought we’d go on together, go straight maybe, never have to worry about him turning me in, turning you into someone who had to fight to breathe the same air as the rest of the world.”
“Liar. My father didn’t love me, but you manipulated him into leaving you everything. All I got was enough money to fund a degree, already paid to a college I didn’t want to attend. You stole it all and then you blame me for cutting out.”
“I know you, he never did. But you didn’t run from him—you ran from me.”
“What should I have done? Stayed to watch you spend my money, live in my house, sell off my antiquities so you could holiday somewhere tropical? He turned you into him. Egotistical, insufferable, lying, thieving, cheating bastard.”
“I didn’t steal anything from you. I’m nothing like your father. I know how to love you. But you didn’t give me a chance.”
“You know nothing about me.”
“I know you’re wickedly intelligent, ruthless, daring, fearless. I know you don’t need anyone. I know you are the rightful heir to your father’s crown, single-handedly pulling off the biggest heist in decades.”
“You figured I’d make it on my own, with nothing and no one.” She ground her teeth before snapping out, “Congratulations on being right.”
“I figured you’d come back, and when you didn’t, I searched for you. I searched for years, and only after I’d given up, there you were on my video feed, unrecognizable except for your glorious laugh.” He took a step toward her; she took a step back. “I know you, Aria. I know you loved what we did in that alley, and if I threw you on that bed and stripped you naked, you’d love it again.”
There was a moment, a look in her eyes where that possibility was achingly real. Then she said, “Get out before I kill you.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Like you didn’t take everything that should’ve been mine.”
“I didn’t. It’s all still there. The house, the money, the rare collections. I put them in a trust for you.”
She jerked back a step as if he’d struck her. “What?”
“I took your father’s client list. I took his connections. I borrowed his name to get jobs, but I’d earned at least that. I didn’t take anything that belonged to you. It’s all still there waiting for you to claim it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to. I can show you.” He put his hand to his pocket for his cell. He could call up documents to prove it.
“You’re going to show me exquisite forgeries. Who do you think you’re talking to? Dear old Dad might have taken you as his protégé, taught you all the tricks, but I listened at doors and went out and found new teachers and learned them anyway.”
It wasn’t a lie and the paperwork was real, but he’d never convince her this way. “I’ll provide the bank account codes. There is a caretaker appointed to look after the house and another to retain the collections. They will recognize your authority immediately.”
“Why would you do that? You never needed to work. Never needed to take another risk again. Your secrets died with him, and an angry, disinherited daughter wouldn’t be able to do much to change that. You could’ve sold the house, the art, the antiquities.”
“They weren’t mine to sell.”
“You’re a thief.”
“I loved you. I thought you’d come back and we’d work it out together, but you disappeared. While I was signing papers I barely understood, you ran.”
“You never loved me. You just liked the idea of fucking with Dad by fucking me.”
He sighed. “That’s not true.” In her heart she had to know that.
“You’re a thief, a conman and a liar.”
“Why am I here? Why didn’t I take Sweet Celestia? You’d never have known it was me.”
She slapped her hands on her hips. “You’re running some scam and it’s so diabolical I can’t work out what it is. But I will. Get out.”
He sat on the bed instead. He’d take fight over flight. He’d take a bullet to be in the same room with her. “I only just found you again.”
“I don’t know what this romantic notion you have of me is. Whatever we were to each other it was a long time and a lot of lies ago. Get. Out.”
“Tell me you didn’t want more in that alley. Tell me you didn’t want skin on skin, soft on hard, my mouth all over you.”
She crossed the room and o
pened the door wide. “Get out.” But the flush was back on her face.
“You were the most ferocious thing I’d ever seen. Didn’t matter how daring the robbery, how high the risk of getting caught, the only thing that scared me was you.”
She let the door close, but stayed across the room.
“When he made me live in half that mansion house and not talk to you, I thought it was some kind of test, and in the beginning I was too afraid he’d turn me in to fuck with his rules. But you were worth every risk. My biggest score was you, when all we ever did was pretend not to see each other in the kitchen. And when I figured out he kept us apart to be cruel to you, it was all I could do to wait for you to turn eighteen before I took you from him.”
Her expression gave away nothing. Her posture was defensive. She’d learned that from the professor.
“Those nights when you came on raids with me, when all we did was thieve and laugh and kiss and then fuck till neither of us could think straight, they were the best nights of my life. I thought they’d go on forever.”
“Nothing lasts forever except lies.”
“We could’ve given it a shot.” He let a beat of silence pass and watched the war inside her push its way to the surface and flash in her eyes. “We still could.”
“You think you can get Celestia this way. You’ll have to kill me first.”
He stood instead and crossed the room to her. She was too proud to give up, to give in to him. “If I wanted Celestia,” and he did, she was his by right, “she’d be mine already and you know it.”
“Then get out.”
“I want you.”
Nothing, including the tremble that went through her, gave him the right to touch her, but he was a thief, a conman and a liar, and he loved her still, had never stopped, and he couldn’t help himself.
He put a hand to her cheek and slid his fingers into her hair, missed the prickle from the stubble, like he’d missed her tongue stud when they kissed. He stood close enough she could take him down with her knee. He stood far enough removed she could wrench away. He wanted her to choose this as much as he tripped toward it.
Up came her chin. “I don’t want you. I hardly remember us.”
She had so many ways to wound him. “You wanted a good time tonight and we only got started.”
“I got what I wanted from you already. What I could’ve gotten from any man.”
He eased closer, his other hand now on her forearm. She could shake him off so easily. “You used to lie to your father, tell him stories to make him think worse of you.” To make him notice her. “You made him think you were the town slut, when all you’d ever done was raise your eyes to mine. You’re one of the best liars I’ve ever met.”
She accepted his breath across her mouth. “I’m not lying now.”
He spoke against her lips. “Liar.”
Hellion, heartbreaker, heroine. A whisper kiss, another, another, exquisitely gentle, her hands to his face, at last again, the possibility she was his.
His to band tight with unsure arms, his to plunder with a tongue that only ever told her truth, his to crush against, to undress with hands increasingly unsteady, to grasp with a realization close to hope. Like this, all their artifice stripped away, not strangers, not lost to each other, but taken down to what made them essential, what made them love. He had to trust they’d find those parts of themselves gone missing and never want to ache for again.
“You want this,” he said. Her body did, her fingers on his shirt buttons, but her complicated mind was his ultimate prize. She was down to those thigh-high boots, and her skirt and the boots might have to stay, because his tolerance for working out how to get them off fast was frayed.
Her response was a kiss, hand holding his jaw, lips soft and yielding. It made him fall further, doubt harder. “Need to hear you say it. Say my name.” Otherwise he might think this was a dream.
She pushed away. “I don’t want you.” She walked past him and he spun to watch the sway of her hips. The kick of that skirt was a hit to his pulse. “I never missed you.” Her hands went to the skirt zipper and the fabric dropped to her feet. “I never thought about you.”
He had no spit to swallow. A scorpion tattooed over her belly made his hands fist. Not just a scorpion—Palazuzum. God of their laughter, their first night together.
“I never loved you, Cleve Jones.” She made a beckoning movement and he had no will to disobey, ditching his shirt, going to his knees in front of her. She took a handful of his hair and jerked his head back so they were eye to eye. “I never lie.”
She lied with every panted breath. He pulled her down to his lap. She was the scorpion and her sting would probably kill him, but he was beyond caring. They fed on each other, marked each other, and he almost took her there on the floor on his knees with her boots at his back, but it wouldn’t be enough.
With her wrapped around him, he got to his feet, then dropped her to the bed. She sprawled on her back, breath halting and eyes heavy. It’d be a mistake to think she wasn’t still a risk. She vibrated with it. She could take his eye out with a stiletto heel.
He’d been hard for her in the alley, he was painfully rigid now. He got rid of his trousers, then crawled over her, hands to her thighs, spreading them. The scent of her strong now, making him groan with anticipation.
The first taste was a time machine tossing him back in space to the backseat of a stolen car. He’d jacked a big luxe sedan more suited to laying her out and getting between her legs than a fast getaway from a break and enter. She’d thrashed and wailed and scratched that night, then returned the favor with a certain savagery that made him half certain he’d need a hospital. What would she do now?
He settled over her to find out. A few long, deep, slow licks and a graze of teeth and she almost bucked him off. “Pickled fucking Christ, Cleve.”
It wasn’t I love you, but he’d take it. He collected her twitches and curses, her hands twisted in the bedcover, and the sharp stab of her boot heel in his thigh as trophies. He played her up and down the scale of desire, and added his fingers to bring her to crescendo. She broke so beautifully into stillness and silence he thought for a moment he’d damaged her, until she reached for him.
“My turn.”
He rose up over her, braced above her. “I’m not keeping score. I’ll play you all night if you want that.”
“It’s always about the score.”
Everything else in his life was. He notched between her legs. “Not you. Never with you.” He toyed with entering her, slid against her wetness, the pressure of that glide making them both moan. “You need that, baby.”
“I—oh—” Twin spikes from her boot heels on his ass said it all.
“I should—” Arms around his neck, heels stabbing, she wasn’t going to let him up to find a rubber without a struggle.
“I have an IUD and I’m good to go, but if you give me a disease I will—”
No more threats. No diseases, no accidents. The best cons and liars were also the most careful. He adjusted his hips and pushed home, past an unexpected tight ring of muscle and nails biting into his neck, and into the lush even heat of her, until he was seated all the way in and Aria stopped holding her breath and softened under him.
He dropped his forehead to her shoulder, overcome by the collision of desire and relief and the immensity of having Aria in his arms after all the years of having her only in his thoughts.
“Don’t fall apart on me,” she said. Hard words that didn’t match the tenderness of her hands on his back or the way she crossed her legs, boot leather squeaking as she rocked her pelvis.
“Too late.” He lifted his face to look for her eyes. “Been there, done that. Bought the T-shirt and wore it till it disintegrated. Never recovered.”
She said, “Liar,” but her lips tremble
d and her eyes were wet and it was no lie when she kissed him with inflamed longing that matched his own.
When he moved in her, it was to find the part of himself that believed in happy endings, and knew paradise wasn’t the place he’d created in the Balinese mountains, but the woman who met his every thrust with her own, who said his name over and over, in a voice broken with passion as they spiraled together and both fell apart.
For the first time in a long time, post-sex didn’t make him antsy. He didn’t want to leave the bed, clean up and move on. He wanted to stay there forever. Aria, free of her boots at last, tumbled over his chest, almost asleep, no more tension in either of them, only a kind of peace he couldn’t remember ever feeling.
Maybe it was the bed.
There hadn’t been too many beds in their relationship. A lot of cars, walls, staircases, the club chairs in the professor’s study, but mattresses had been rare and a whole night sleeping together was something they’d never done.
“I want to stay, sleep with you,” he said.
“Hmm.”
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
“Old man.” His laughter disturbed her; she lifted her head and blinked at him. “You used to be good for more than one round.”
“Not that we’re keeping score, but you’ve had three rounds.”
She climbed across him, and that’s all it took to be young again.
Chapter Seven
Aria had to stop feeling like this. Like an idiot schoolgirl who thought love was real and she was the only one in the world to find it. She’d been that girl, but that was long ago, and she’d wised up since then. She had to stop letting Cleve get to her. Oh, he could make her orgasm as many times as he liked, but he couldn’t touch her with such reverence, couldn’t look at her like he was ready to die for her, because that was every dirty trick in the book.
He was a filthy rotten liar, apprenticed to the best of them, no matter what his lips on her skin said. All the sweet touches and cravings he built were carefully calculated to get her to relax, to give in to him. He didn’t have Celestia, but that’s the way he intended to get her, with his honeyed tongue and hot sex.
Caught in the Act: A Jewel Heist Romance Anthology Page 5
