“Theresa, this is a friend, Signor Lorenzo Rizzotti. Lorenzo, Captain Theresa Chiesa, a doctor with the United States Army.”
After the mention of her profession, Wulf’s friend’s mouth fell open briefly. “I will return later, sir, when you are less occupied. And not with your...doctor.” Despite his Italian name, Signor Rizzotti sounded like the BBC announcer on her hotel room’s radio.
“Don’t act bothered. I’m happy you received my second message about where to find us.” Wulf indicated the third chair, placed between their seats. “Sit, Lorenzo, and tell us what you know.”
“Sir!” As if shocked by the invitation, the other man stiffened.
Wulf grinned sideways at her. “This is how Deavers must feel when the team gives him the ‘sir’ treatment. Lorenzo, I’m not my brother.”
Wulf had a brother? Chris Deavers talked about his family constantly, and most of Wulf’s team had wives and kids, but she’d assumed Wulf didn’t have close family. What other mistakes had she made?
“Nevertheless, your situation imparts certain responsibilities.” Lorenzo emphasized the last word.
“Nevertheless?” Wulf’s grin grew as he locked eyes with Theresa. “Who replaced my Italian butler with an English major?”
“I attended Cambridge, sir. When your brother was—”
Wulf waved his hand at the chair. “Inside joke, my friend.” He leaned forward. “You dealt with everything I left in the garage?”
Lorenzo nodded, frowned and stared at the wall over their table, all at the same time.
“By the way, after we left the house, we were shot at, chased into the sewers and ambushed, so it’s been a long day. Let’s skip the formalities.”
“You trust her.” The flat intonation wasn’t a question. It was more like an accusation.
“I do,” Wulf said.
For Theresa, those two quietly spoken words rekindled the confidence that the older man’s disapproval had begun to squelch.
“So be it.” Lorenzo pulled reading glasses from a pocket inside his suit and laid several folded pieces of paper on the table. “The information you requested. Most of the numbers you gave me were easily traced, but for one I had to seek assistance from your brother.” His glance cut to Theresa. “At the time I was not aware...” He appeared to lack a word to describe her.
Too bad. She had a couple for him. She dredged up the expression she reserved for preteen smokers loitering at convenience stores.
Lorenzo adjusted his cuffs, as if to indicate, Your glare is a mere speck of dust, before he continued. “All the telephone numbers, less one, are mobiles. The Italian ones are disposables activated in Rome within the past forty-eight hours and purchased with cash. Two are American satellite phones that appear to be owned by a business.” His salt-and-pepper eyebrows raised to match the arches of an aqueduct lithograph on the wall. “Black and Swan.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised.” Wulf remained impassive. “And the landline?”
The dapper man harrumphed into his fist before he continued. “Your brother traced it through Polish number forwards and two Caribbean exchanges. He was not amused.”
“Is he ever?”
Theresa needed to hook a thumb under her bra strap and yank it into place, but the way the older man twiddled with his glasses, as if something as innocuous as a telephone number could disturb his world-class equilibrium, made her stifle the impulse.
“This number rings in an office in Langley, Virginia.”
Langley? She ought to know why that sounded familiar, but her mind blanked.
“Your brother requests that you cease and desist activities that intersect with the American CIA. I transcribed his quote verbatim. Let me find it.” He shuffled his papers. “Ah, yes. ‘Tell the puny milk-sucking idiot not to involve me, my resources or you—’ I believe he meant me, ‘—in this business again.’”
Wulf chuckled. “Tell my corporate-fat-licking big brother I salute his insult and would cheerfully exchange more over ale, if I weren’t busy earning an honorable living.”
“Of course.” Lorenzo cleared his throat and stood. “Will that be all, sir?”
“The man in the car.” Theresa’s voice cracked, but she had to know before he walked away. “What did you do with him?”
Lorenzo looked startled that the wordless bump would speak. “He is locked in the wine cellar.”
Laughing, Wulf tilted on his chair. “Hope you removed Ivar’s cases of Château Pétrus.”
“Sir, I am not a puny milk-sucking idiot.”
In the silence after Lorenzo’s departure, Theresa looked at the congealed chunks of gravy on her plate and realized her appetite had deserted her. Was the CIA on their side or not? What should they do? She still had her passport in her purse, but where could she go?
Again, Wulf read her mind. “We’ll take the rear exit.”
Because the restaurant had been dug out of the hillside, his plan made as much sense as dropping into the sewer, but she didn’t have a better one. She followed him through a stainless-steel door and an industrial-plastic curtain.
“A refrigerator!” Her feet slid on the metal floor.
“Relax.” His advice left a visible cloud in the freezing air.
She tried to ignore the red-and-white beef haunch he shouldered aside while he twisted an empty meat hook and immediately straight-armed a wall panel. It pivoted to reveal their path. Another. Damn. Tunnel. Every cell of her being balked. “Wasn’t the sewer enough?”
“I promise there’s a safe room and a bathtub at the end.” He handed her a flashlight from a niche. “I delivered on dinner, didn’t I?”
True, he had; more importantly, she wasn’t ready to be left behind.
As they walked down a slight incline, pieces of something bigger and more slippery than gravel crunched under her feet. Although the tunnel smelled old, like Great Aunt Mary’s living room, it was dry, which boded well for the room at the other end. She pictured cold beige tile and government-issue furniture, but it would be a secure space to clean up and rest.
Ninety percent of her believed Wulf could deliver hot water underground in an ancient landfill. The smarter ten percent focused on the key component of bathing: getting naked. Before she could decide which part to listen to, he stopped at a wooden door hung between massive beams and typed a numeric code on a keypad. A bolt snicked open. With the flick of a switch, he illuminated a large room. “Welcome to my parlor.”
“Isn’t that what the spider said to the—oh.” This wasn’t a sterile dormitory for American agents. As he beckoned her into a Renaissance fantasia, she understood why the fly had fallen for the fatal lure. A king-size four-poster anchored the right-hand wall, plum-colored velvet curtains trimmed in gold fringe matched tasseled pillows piled against the headboard and jewel-tone fabrics and polished wood filled the large room. The scene was the antithesis of the bland austerity she’d expected, and a manic need to giggle with relief expanded her lungs.
A few hours ago they’d been fighting to stay alive, and now...those were gold tassels.
Inappropriate reactions were natural after a release of tension, but she suspected that if she started to laugh, she wouldn’t stop, so she looked away from the bed to the tapestries and gilt-framed landscapes that covered the walls. Above an empty pool in the floor, stacked semicircles of exposed pottery had been smoothed into undulating ochre waves.
Wulf turned knobs to make water cascade from a faucet shaped like a dolphin’s head. “It takes time to fill deep enough for bathing.”
The massive bath couldn’t distract her from the bed. She knew exactly how far behind her it lurked.
As he shrugged out of his jacket and shoulder holster, Wulf stared at her face. One by one he undid the buttons of his ruined shirt. He intended to strip. In front of her.
/> “Who are you?” Grime glued her clothes to her back as she tried, and failed, to ignore the water thundering behind him. The steaming hot and clean water.
“You know who I am.” He sat to unlace his boots. “Wulf Wardsen, staff sergeant, United States Army.” He reached under his pant legs to unclip his knife sheath and the contraption that had once held a flashlight.
“How gullible do you think I am? You’re no more an E-6 than I’m a Swedish supermodel.” Even with his head lower than hers and his body still in the chair, she couldn’t feel at ease, so she put another chair between them. “Yesterday you said you lie to everyone. Right now that’s all I believe.”
“I am what I do.” He offered her a neutral expression, neither threatening nor revealing.
“The fancy motorcycle, the dinners, that huge house.” She waved her hand at his opulent cave, wanting to prod until he reacted. “And this place. Where’d you get the money?”
“My brother’s an independent investor.” To unbuckle his belt, he stood. “He handles my finances too.”
Dinner soured in her stomach. She’d lived her whole life trying to distance herself from “independent investors” like her stepfather and his cronies. She’d tried to live by the ethics of her biological father, but one smoking-hot kiss and she wasn’t so different from her mother. “I refuse to have anything to do with a criminal.”
“So do I. I’m not one.”
She yearned to believe him, to let him put his rock-solid arms around her so she could rest her head on his chest and stop worrying. She wanted to trust the man standing in front of her wearing only tattered jeans, but she still didn’t know how to sort his lies from the truth.
“Take me to the airport.” She couldn’t look at him while she announced her decision or she’d waver. “I want to go back to Afghanistan.”
“With Black and Swan looking for us, you’re not safe there.”
“I’m not safe here.” An understatement. “So I might as well be there.”
“I can protect you.” He raised his voice louder than the water pouring into the pool. He’d lost his detached look and instead coiled as if he might spring.
“What the fuck?” She felt like she’d been centrifuged. Everything she knew and believed about herself as a doctor and about the army and its people had been spun on its head today. “I’ve spent years taking care of myself, and I could do it a lot better without getting mixed up in your problems. I’m out of here!”
His nostrils flared. “No.”
“Screw you!” He could keep his lies and mysteries. She flung herself at the door.
His hand shot past her shoulder to slap the wood as she grabbed for the handle. “You’re safer here.”
“Fuck off!” She jerked with both hands, and the door opened a few inches. But when her shoulder blades bumped his chest, his bare chest, she froze. The atmosphere was charged so high she feared any sound would ignite a conflagration. To her right, at eye level, nothing but his fingertips grazed the wood. Although she couldn’t move without brushing his body, if she wanted to leave, all she had to do was pull again.
They both knew he wasn’t to blame if she didn’t.
“You keep using those words. Like screw.” His voice had deepened and gone quieter. She only heard it because he stood close enough for his body to bracket hers. It was the voice he used before he kissed her. “And fuck.”
She fixated on the ancient wood in front of her face. If she twisted, if she shifted one millimeter, her body would connect with his and then she’d be lost.
“You said that word more than once, didn’t you?” He turned her around with hands that seemed to burn through the cotton of her shirt.
Pressing her temple into the wood, she closed her eyes against the penetration of his gaze lest he read how easily he could change her mind. She didn’t move, not when his fingers stroked the side of her neck. Not when she felt him lift her hair from one shoulder. She fought hard to suppress shivers, but she didn’t tremble, not even when he spoke so close to the bare skin at her throat that his breath swept across every nerve.
“Do you like to say fuck? Do you want to say it again, right now? To me?”
Her glutes and inner thighs clenched.
“I think you were trying to give me an order, weren’t you, ma’am?” He drawled the last word like he dared her to contradict him.
She pressed into the door, seeking something to grab that wasn’t him. The croak she made was hardly a word, so she tried again. “This is against the rules.”
“Wasn’t it you who said we’ve broken too many to care?”
She lifted her hands to push him but stopped with her wrists against her own aching breasts. Inches from her fingers, his nipples showed through the golden hair that proclaimed him a man. She had nowhere to look that he didn’t fill. And he was glorious.
“We have to stop,” she whispered in a voice so soft she didn’t recognize it as her own.
“Why?” He preempted her answer by wrapping his thumb and first finger around each wrist and raising her hands above her head.
Because if I don’t leave now, I’ll give in to you and I’ll lose everything I’ve worked for. With her breasts higher and closer to danger, her breathing betrayed her excitement. She couldn’t form the words let go because her mouth had rebelled to join her body.
“I’m only looking.” He transferred both of her wrists to one hand.
“You’re doing more than that.” Each time he shifted, the bulges and ripples of his muscles worked seamlessly to do his bidding. The arm he raised had the contours and definition her imagination had supplied and more. Part of her wanted to pull against his grip so she could watch his body tense and uncoil, but a shred of common sense held her still.
“Order me to stop.” His palm hovered over the spot where fabric stretched across her nipple.
She was the one who moved first, who pushed the pressure receptors in her nipple against the thousands of touch receptors in his palm, and they both knew it. Shock zinged from her breasts through her spine to her trembling knees while her body begged for more friction.
He brushed across her other nipple, the fabric of her shirt too flimsy to contain her breasts’ pilomotor reflex, and she knew she wouldn’t stop him.
“Tell me.” His palm circled harder, drawing her tighter. “It’s your decision.”
“My questions...” She arched from the door deeper into his hand.
“Ask.” His fingers changed the play and rolled her nipple tighter still. “Anything.”
“Are you...” She wanted to touch him, but he kept her hands pinned. She twisted her head on the wood, trying to recall her questions. “Undead?”
“Exactly the opposite.” His breath tickled her neck when he spoke. “I am very alive.”
“Then what?” She wanted him to reach under her shirt as much as she wanted his answer. “What are you?”
“I am a barbarian.” Saying it seemed to release his last restraint. The lust that burned in his eyes and hardened his face was a look her few, carefully chosen lovers had never showed. Something in him broke free, and she sensed it coming for her, stalking her.
She desperately wanted it to catch her.
“A scourge of peace-loving folk.” He inserted his free hand in the neckline of her shirt and kept his gaze enmeshed with hers.
If he hadn’t held her wrists, she might have slid to the floor. Past seductions had always followed the usual couch-and-grope routine, never words and walls and waiting, fully clothed and wobbling, for a touch larger than her imagination.
“A conqueror.” He pulled until her neckline chafed her sensitized skin, then let go of her wrists to use two hands on her shirt fabric.
Leaving her arms extended over her head, she waited. The tearing sound blended with the moan s
he couldn’t hold back.
“I am a berserker.”
She envisioned him in battle, swift and brutal, as he’d been in the street. Would he drive into her here against the door? The thought called up an Amazon who wanted to fight free and conquer with him, conquer him. Maybe she’d take him here on the floor and damn everything. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Nooo.” Her hunger was too much.
Heat disappeared from her skin as even the rasp of his breath disappeared into silence.
She opened her eyes. His head was thrown back and he dug the heels of his palms into his eye sockets as if struggling. He’d misinterpreted her attempt to stop herself. Not him.
“Kiss me,” she managed to whisper.
Shuddering, he dropped his hands and closed the gap between them until they shared one breath. “Don’t ask me to stop unless you mean it.”
His gaze called to cravings so intense that she shivered, echoing him. “I won’t.”
“Then I will pillage your mouth.” With one finger, he touched her lips, then traced a line from her jaw to her throat. “I will claim your neck and your body.”
She lowered her chin to watch his finger slip between the cups of her bra. Her torn shirt hung like draping on a statue of Venus while he trailed fire across her bare skin.
“I will plunder until my sword is exhausted.” He wove a spell of words she never wanted to escape. “You will be my prize. But you must agree.”
Closing her eyes, she moaned.
“Say it.” His mouth returned to the pulse in her throat. “Say yes.” His fingers covered her breastbone.
She wanted to abandon herself to his touch more than she wanted answers, more than she wanted to be a doctor, more than she wanted her next breath. Yes.
“Let me hear it.” While his thumb drew a line along her collarbone, his voice pushed her to the end of her resistance.
“Yes.” Dizzy, she swayed into his hand and spoke louder. “Yes.”
Before she could help, he’d stripped the ruined boots and clothes from her body and carried her into the pool. Her skin prickled with the water’s heat, but once he slid next to her on the submerged stone bench and ran his wet hands over every inch of her body, the hot steam cooled in comparison to the fire under her skin. He’d threatened to plunder, but instead he touched her as if she was as fragile as glass. Even his kisses had the tenderness of a first encounter, not the fierce need burning in her after days spent building to this point.
First to Burn Page 19
