by Meli Raine
His touch makes me wet, an ache rising within me that I’ve never felt before.
“Yes,” I tell him, ask him, beg him. I would do anything for him, right here in this endless moment where anticipation turns me into someone I don’t know. Someone who wants him with every fiber of my being. Someone who can’t help but move millimeter by millimeter until that hot, intense breath is warming my nose, until the world is nothing but his lips, his tongue, his hands.
On me.
“You,” he says, blowing lightly on my closed eyes as his wall of heat comes closer, “tell me. Are we a couple? I know my answer. What’s yours?”
I use my mouth to respond. But not with words.
The kiss isn’t polite. Raw and filled with long hours of wondering, it’s the kind of kiss you don’t expect because you can’t control it. It takes over completely, dominating the space between us, turning the absence of touch into an abomination. I bite his lower lip and he sucks in mine, the flick of his tongue a preview of softer, lower flesh he plans to minister to. In the holy sanctuary of our bodies pressed together, we sing.
The melody requires rhythm, Silas’s hips pushing against my belly, his body seared against mine by the time I break the kiss to breathe. Nothing else matters. Not coffee, not his absence, not the layered mess of my identity. We’re bonded by this and only this, his hands pulling my shirt up, mine reaching for his belt buckle and finding his thick bulge.
Bzzzzz.
Our phones vibrate in unison, unrelenting and demanding.
He groans. It’s a sound of resignation. I step back and let him deal with the war inside him. Sometimes I win. Sometimes I lose.
He frowns at his phone as he reads. I grab my phone and see a message from Lindsay about getting together, then all the earlier messages from Mandy. I look at the clock. In twenty minutes or so, I need to get going.
“Silas–”
I know my phone is being monitored by many layers of government intelligence, so by the time Silas is done with his work text, he already knows.
“Hmm?” he asks, eyes going unfocused, coming in for a kiss.
“Mandy texted me and wants to–”
“No.”
I didn’t ask permission. It’s clear Silas isn’t offering support, either. His body goes rigid, hands in fists.
“You sound like Drew.”
“Good. Lindsay’s alive because of Drew.” His face is a shade of red I associate with arousal–or anger.
“Mandy wants to meet me in a park. A public place. It’s not like Tara. We’ll be outside the entire time, completely in view.” What a shift. From nearly having sex on the living room floor to arguing about my turncoat friends.
“A sniper could take you or her down,” he points out.
“A sniper could have killed me a long, long time ago, Silas.”
“Just because they haven’t doesn’t mean they won’t.” He crosses his arms over his chest, taking a deep breath, making himself bigger.
I open my mouth to reply, but then his words hit me so hard, I feel sucker punched. “But–”
“My team will surround you.”
“Fine!” I can choke that out because it’s easy. Processing is hard.
Reacting is so, so simple.
In fact, it’s so basic, I can’t control it.
“Why do you want to meet with her at all? These women handed Lindsay–and you–over to those bastards. Ruined Lindsay. Went to the media and destroyed her reputation. Why would you want to let them into your life, even a crack? Look at what happened to Tara, damn it. That cannot–will not–happen to you!” Silas’s whole body is one thick mountain of tension, all his muscles on high alert, arms still crossed, eyes dark. I can see him imagining the worst, the pain of future possibilities reflected back at me, but he’s haunted by something else.
“I’m looking for information,” I say through clenched teeth, my hands sweaty and pressed against my hips. I’ve never wanted to kiss and slap someone at the very same time. He’s making it impossible for me to remain rational. All my anger turns into a deadly beat that takes over my body until I need to scream or come.
Or maybe both.
“That’s my job,” he says as he grabs my shoulders, hard, and pulls me into a kiss that’s meant to tame me, to shut me up. As his tongue fights mine for primacy, I realize this isn’t a kiss that says anything more than that. Civility is long gone, and all that is left is lust.
Lust it is, then.
On tiptoes, I reach around his shoulders and slide my hands up under his shirt, pulling it over his head with a full-body rush that makes me so ready for him.
“Hey, hey,” he laughs, grabbing my wrists gently and stopping me. “Trust me, I appreciate the sentiment, but I can’t.” He pulls me into his arms and kisses me like a man who doesn’t know the meaning of the word can’t. “I don’t have time.” Regret infuses his words. “I’ll have to take a raincheck.”
I groan, my blood filled with lust to the point of exploding my body into a million tiny pieces of need. “Seriously? You started it by kissing me!” I grab his hips and pull him against me, rubbing up, feeling his thick erection through his clothes. “What about a quickie?”
“You’re killing me,” he says in a deep, throttled voice. “But I don’t have time.”
“I thought guys liked quickies?” I rub against him again, wondering where on earth this version of me came from? I don’t do things like this.
Then again, I’ve never had the opportunity.
“I do indeed like quickies.”
“Then prove it.”
“Jane,” he growls.
“I’ve been baaaad,” I whisper, looking up at Silas through my eyelashes, pretending to be coquettish and coy.
It stops him in his tracks, his reaction unnerving. I’ve never seen Silas’s face look so wolfish. So predatory.
So dominant.
“You’re determined to go, aren’t you?” His question comes out of the blue, like someone poured crushed ice up and down the length of our half-clothed bodies.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want you to see her.”
“I–I know.” His abrupt change is throwing me off, my body’s signals so confused.
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“You have to promise me you will cancel.”
No, I want to say. No, I need to tell him. No. All my nos I haven’t been allowed to assert come crashing into the back of my teeth, scraping along the scalloped edges of the tongue that presses against the pearly curves of my bite.
No.
“Okay,” I say instead, buckling under, wanting to please him. “I’ll cancel,” I lie. I hate the lie. Hate it.
Yet I need it, too.
His chest lowers, sinking with relief. My fingers brush against the light hair on his chest. “Good.” Silas gives me a perfunctory kiss on the forehead. “Glad you see reason.”
Reason? As long as I do what I’m told, I’m reasonable? As long as I agree with him, I’m rational? There can be no other opinion?
As he stands, I see reason, all right.
A big old reason why I’m going to make sure I damn well do see Mandy.
As Silas showers, a plan takes shape.
Quickly, I compose myself, pulling my clothes into place, finger-combing my hair. As far as I know, Silas is my only detail. When he’s in charge of me, he’s it, unless we have a standing driver.
That means this is my chance.
I grab my phone, then pause. If I have it, Silas can track me. I look at the clock. 11:10 a.m.
I could take an Uber, but they’d find me. Fast.
I can’t walk there in time, and the bus or train is unsafe.
My eyes are drawn to my beautiful centerpiece, the unicorn’s glitter-covered eyelids telling me the answer.
A girl named Lily.
* * *
“Jane! I told you the unicorn–”
I round the counter’s edge and pull
her gently behind the small door that separates the back rooms of the business from the customer-facing section.
“What’s wrong?” she gasps.
“Do you have a delivery van?” I’m breathing hard from running. Once Silas realizes I’ve disappeared, he’ll find me quickly. I don’t have much time.
“Yes.”
“Can I ask for a huge favor?”
“Sure. Anything. What?”
“Can you drive me to the park? The one by the beach?”
“That place? Why?”
“I need to meet a friend.” My chest aches from the unexpected sprint and air is trying to get in my lungs. It feels like I’m breathing through cotton candy.
“What about your bodyguard? Or, like, an Uber? Why can’t you–ohhhh.” Her face registers complete shock, then her eyes narrow, canny and sharp. “You don’t want your bodyguard with you, do you?”
“No.”
“I understand. He was kind of an ass–”
“I don’t have time, Lily. Can you please drive me? Or can I borrow the van?”
“God, no! My mom would kill me if I lent out a business-registered truck!”
“Then can you take me?”
“Depends. Why? You’re not doing anything illegal, are you?”
I give her a nasty look.
“Don’t judge me! I just need to make sure. Mom says if we use the truck for personal trips, it can pierce the corporate veil or something. Mom is a rule follower. She asks permission.”
“Then you’ll need to ask forgiveness if something goes wrong,” I tell her.
“You don’t know my mother at all,” Lily mutters, but she peels herself away from me, goes to the front of the store and flips the sign to Closed.
“Twenty minutes. I can give you twenty,” she says as we sprint out the back door to an alleyway. A green van the color of grass, wrapped in photo images of colorful flowers, greets us. I get in the passenger’s seat and instantly feel like I’ve had the best night’s sleep on top of drinking three shots of espresso.
I snap the door shut and so does Lily. “Wow!” I gasp.
She grins, her smile lighting up her face. Normally, she looks like me, but not now. I’ve never, ever been that relaxed, so happy and sure.
“It’s great, isn’t it? Like rolling around town in your own little rain forest.” Lily starts the van and peels out of the alley. She pauses at the end before making a hard right.
“I assume you’re doing this to meet a hot guy,” she shouts as we barrel down the street.
“No. I’m doing it to avoid a hot guy, actually,” I explain.
The van slows down slightly, then speeds back up. “You mean, some guy is in hot pursuit? We’re in danger?” she squeaks.
“No, nothing like that. I would never ask you to put your life in danger for me, Lily. Never. I just need to get away from my guards and meet an old friend.”
“Why don’t you want them there?”
“They don’t want me there. Overprotective. It’s tiring being told what to do and where to go all the time. Sometimes I want my freedom, you know?”
“Oh, yes. I still live at home with my parents. I work in their store. My little brothers are still at home. A freshman and a senior. I get told what to do all the time.”
My silence makes her words fade out.
“Oh, damn, Jane! You mean you’re controlled by your security guys? 24/7?”
I nod.
“That’s just wrong!”
“It’s for a good reason.”
“Which is?”
“To keep me alive. Someone tried to blow up my car and shot at me just this week.”
“Are you sure escaping from your own guards is such a good idea?”
“I just need an hour. Ninety minutes, tops.”
“Why?”
“Because he told me no.”
“Who?”
“My, uh...”
“The hot guy?”
“Yeah,” I sigh.
“You’re dating some hot dude who tells you when you can see your friends?”
Weird way to put it, but... “Yes.”
“Oh, man. Now I get it. Screw him.”
I blush.
She laughs.
We drive.
Within three minutes, my nose feels like I’m a bee sipping nectar and we’re at the spot in the park, right on the edge of an enormous sea of grass leading down to the beach. Crabgrass edges the “lawn,” if you can call it that, and kids are playing Frisbee. Mandy’s a nervous mess of legs and folded arms, looking up at every car that pulls into the parking lot.
When I climb out of the green florist’s van, she gives me a squinting look of revulsion.
Ah, Mandy. Never change.
“Thanks, Lily,” I say sincerely, moving fast. “Go back to the store. I’ll be fine getting home.”
“How?”
“My hot guy will find me. I won’t have a choice.”
“But I gave you a head start, didn’t I?” She puts her closed fist out for me to bump.
“Yes,” I say, bumping back.
“Sisterhood!” she calls out as I jog away.
“Is that an undercover van? FBI? CIA?” Mandy asks.
“I can’t answer that question,” I tell her.
“Young agent,” Mandy replies, eyebrows up. “I guess they recruit right out of college.”
“Are we going to stand here and talk about my driver, or are you going to explain why you wanted to meet? The last time one of you reached out to me, I ended up on the cover of every tabloid, wearing her blood.”
“Jesus, Jane. Have some compassion for the dead.”
“I’ll do that when you show a shred of it for the living.”
The skin around her neck begins to redden. “I knew you’d throw that in my face. It was only a matter of time.”
“Five years. Five years, and you let Lindsay, and then me, be tortured. Long time,” I spit back.
“Is this how you talked to Tara when she reached out to you? Because I’d slit my wrists, too, to get you to shut up about it.”
“Don’t even joke.” I look furtively around us. “You have no idea what I had to do to get here. So this better be worth it.”
“I don’t know if it’s worth it to you, but it is to me. I’m trying to survive.” Her eyes dart everywhere, assessing. “We’re terrified.”
“We?”
“Jenna. Our families. Tara’s family. We know there’s footage proving someone else killed her and not you, but maybe you made him do it.”
“You think I have that kind of power?”
“The media make it seem like you do.” Her casual shrug makes me want to strangle her.
“You’re not that stupid, Mandy. You know it’s not true. And besides, get to the point. Fast. When my guards find out I ditched them, they’ll come roaring up.”
“You came here with no guards? Are you crazy?” Eye bulging, she gives up all pretense of being calm and cool.
“I’m motivated.”
“I assumed you’d have a detail! I only picked this place because it seemed safer. I figured your guys would protect us! That’s the whole point!”
I shrug. “Sorry. We’ll have to take our chances. Make it quick.”
Squinting in frustration, she looks at me with disgust. “You evaded your own bodyguards. I always thought you were the smart one in our group. What a stupid, stupid thing to do. They’re killing us all. One by one. Why would you–”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Planting her hands on her hips in defiance, a very pissed-off Mandy says caustically, “You were the goal. Not Lindsay.”
All the muscles around my lungs stop working. Mandy stares at me, her features full and sharp, as if I’m seeing her through an increasingly focused lens.
“What?”
“You, Jane. Didn’t Tara tell you?” Her affect is nasty. She knows her words hurt me.
That’s the point of saying them.
I rifle through memory, as if those few minutes I spent talking to Tara at the bar were a stack of photographs and I need to search to find the right one.
“Blaine wanted you. Alone. We were supposed to leave Drew and Lindsay and you there. But you were so damn stubborn.” Fear makes her blink rapidly, her eyes darting everywhere as I watch her. “You wouldn’t listen. So we took you with us.” Her face tightens, almost crumpling with tears.
Almost.
“If you’d stayed, it would have been easier. We didn’t know how bad it would get,” she adds.
“If I’d stayed? If I’d stayed at the house because Blaine wanted me there? You mean when they raped and tortured Lindsay?” I can’t keep my voice from rising. “Do you hear yourself, Mandy? You’re saying I should have stayed behind so they could do the same damage to me!”
“I’m not saying that,” she says emphatically, shaking her head. “But Blaine was so, so pissed at us. It made everything harder when we had to lie.”
Matter-of-fact tones don’t blunt her words. They worsen the impact, in fact.
A distant alarm starts in my body, ringing a slow, ominous bell that tolls for me. Silas’s warnings aren’t just about shitlords and crazies, or political operatives ten levels deep.
Mandy is a literal threat.
To me.
Blasé about what she did five years ago, talking to me now as if I were the cause of her pain, Mandy is the epitome of every soulless part of this network that controls me.
She’s sad that I didn’t fall into a trap Blaine set for me five years ago. Sad because my actions made her life harder.
“What do you want from me, Mandy?” I ask, the words rolling out of me, slow and ponderous.
“Protection. You’re so lucky,” she whines. “You have a security detail. We told the investigators everything after Stellan, John, and Blaine died, and they gave us nothing. Left us hanging. And look at Tara. I don’t want to die like that! So gruesome. So gross. No–I need a bodyguard. I deserve one. I want what you have.”
I want what you have.
Tires peel behind us, the long, high shriek of rubber on asphalt insistent and violent. I close my eyes and count the seconds. One, two, three...
“JANE!” Rough hands grab my arms, the sudden shock of Silas’s violent yank combining with Mandy’s words to make me rattle in my skin. Pulling me away from Mandy, Silas practically drags me a hundred feet from her, hissing in my ear.
