by Jordan Burke
I couldn’t stop myself from looking at her bookshelves, though, and the enormous collection of titles she’d amassed over the years. Thousands of them, arranged alphabetically by genre, just like a bookstore. It didn’t appear that she had anything rare, but what an eclectic collection it was. Hardbacks with all the dust jackets, paperbacks with most of the spines cracked. I wondered if she’d read them all or if she’d bought some of them used.
One shelf held a collection of contemporary erotic romance novels. I didn’t have any of them in the bookshop, but being an avid reader I recognized the titles from browsing online book retailers.
She had a modest collection of literature from abroad: French, Russian, and at least one from Greece.
I spotted a couple of travelogues. They weren’t something I was interested in, but for a fiction lover who loves to get lost in stories, those are about the closest you get to being whisked away to somewhere you’ve never been and encountering stories from people you would never meet. Based on what she told me about her love of reading, those made perfect sense in her collection.
She had one of almost everything, but I noticed there were no children’s or young adult books. Odd. Lots of adults were reading young adult these days. I had even picked up a few myself and found them surprisingly appealing.
I ran my finger across the books, from one spine to another, wondering what kind of erotic thoughts these books might have put in Catherine’s head. Or maybe those thoughts were already there, all her own, and I could find out her limits myself.
I was thinking about her going through my bookshop and the gems she would find in there when I heard the words, “Thank you.” Her soft voice drifted into the room.
I turned around, pulling my hand from the row of books.
She was standing in the doorway to her bedroom, the white top sheet loosely wrapped around her body. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail, but otherwise it looked like she’d slid out of bed naked, taking the sheet with her and standing there facing me.
I wanted to walk over to her, pull the sheet off and not even take the time to go back to the bedroom. The couch was right there. It would do.
But she had thanked me. “For what?” I asked.
She pulled the sheet tighter around her. “For telling me your first name.”
I walked over to her, putting my arms around her. Her head dropped to my shoulder. She felt so delicate, something I hadn’t noticed last night. Maybe she was tense then, and relaxed now.
“Can I still call you Watts?” Her voice was slightly muffled with her lips against my skin.
I let out a little laugh. “You don’t like the name Daniel?”
“No, that’s not it. I just—”
I cut her off. “I was kidding. You can call me whatever you like.”
As soon as I said it, a pang of guilt stabbed me in the gut. Jesus, the secrets I was keeping from her.
“I’m sorry about the whole name thing the other night,” she said.
I shook my head. “It’s in the past. Forget it.”
She lifted her head, looked me in the eyes, and said, “And yes, I want to call you Watts. It’s just that I’ve known you by that name for so long. And even though I’ve only seen you twice now, that’s who you are to me. I have this thing about names,” she said, pausing, and I let her take as long as she wanted before continuing. “I think it’s from reading. You know, associating characters with names because even when an author describes them you still paint your own picture in your mind. But for me, it’s the names.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, I can’t really explain it.”
I kissed her forehead. “I get what you’re saying.”
She shook her head slowly, as if she were about to say something negative, but instead said, “You always have.”
We stood there in silence for a few moments, me holding her, and the urge to move her to the couch getting stronger by the second.
“You hungry?” she asked, breaking my train of thought.
I visualized what I’d seen in her refrigerator and quickly came up with a solution so I wouldn’t hurt her feelings. “Let’s order Chinese. Know any places that deliver this late?”
. . . . .
The food arrived within thirty minutes. We spread it out on her coffee table and sat on the floor next to each other as we ate.
Catherine handed me a fortune cookie. “Do you believe in these things?”
“No,” I said, wiping my mouth with a napkin. “Do you?”
She shook her head. “Of course not. But open yours anyway.”
I did, and read it aloud: “Now is the time to try something new.”
“Oh,” she said, “maybe we’re both wrong and we really should believe in these things.” She laughed and cracked open her own cookie and read it to me: “Do not fear what you do not know.”
I stopped mid-chew when she said the words. Fucking hell, there were no better words than those to describe her current situation with me.
“That’s not much of a fortune.” She crumpled the slip of paper and tossed it into an empty rice container.
How wrong she was.
After we ate, we were lying together on the couch. I was on my back. Catherine was on top of me. The fitted sheet—which she’d been wearing for over an hour now—had drifted down to her mid-section. Her full breasts were against my chest. Warm. Soft.
Making me hard.
Her chin rested on the back of her hand, her palm flat against my chest. We weren’t speaking. Her eyes were closed and she had a faint smile on her lips. I was twisting a ringlet of her hair between my fingers.
A nice, easy, comfortable situation. Perfect.
Until she said, “Since you told me your name, I want you to know something about me.”
I was torn, but tried not to let it show in my expression. Yes, I wanted to know more about her. I wanted to know it all. But that would mean telling her all, as well, and I wasn’t ready to do that.
“I mean, do you want to know more about me?” she said, sounding a little fragile, probably doubting her offer since I hadn’t responded.
“Of course I do.”
She smiled. “My best friend is named Winnie.”
I continued looking at her, waiting for the rest. I raised my eyebrows a little, not following where she was going with this or why it was something she felt she needed to share.
“She’s a dog.” Catherine smiled. “Literally, a dog.”
I chuckled. “I figured that’s what you meant.”
She went on to talk about her time at the no-kill dog shelter and how much it meant to her. She told me about Winnie, and how they had been drawn to each other like magnets when Winnie first arrived at the shelter. She expressed regret about living in such a small apartment, and said that if she had a bigger place or a place with sufficient yard space, she would have adopted Winnie long ago. She had never mentioned any of this in any of our emails over the six months we wrote to each other.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like I’m looking for credit or something.”
“Did your parents let you have a dog when you were growing up?”
It was a natural follow-up question in the conversation. People talk about their pets as though they’re members of the family—and why shouldn’t they?—and invariably the conversation turns to the subject of first pets, childhood pets.
But her facial expression changed when I asked the question. Her brow furrowed, her lips pursed, and she closed her eyes for a moment before laying her head back down on my chest.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The pain from deep down inside of her, the pain I saw the other night in the hotel room, was no longer entirely a mystery. It stemmed from her parents. I just didn’t know the details and it was clear to me that she wasn’t ready to share them.
“Was part of the excitement of this not knowing much about me?” I asked, trying to bring the subje
ct back to us, a more pleasant topic.
“I do know a lot about you.”
“I mean the details of my life. The things we agreed not to share.”
She shrugged a little. “Actually, yeah.”
“Then there’s no reason to take that excitement out of this just yet,” I said. “We can draw it out as long as we want.”
She nodded.
Perfect. Not sharing everything right now would buy me a little time to work out the details of how I would slowly reveal myself to her.
Selfish? Perhaps to some degree. But it also gave her a little time to prepare herself to tell me about her life.
She shook her head, now nestled against my chest. I felt the warmth of her breath blowing across my chest. “I’d love that,” she said.
After several silent minutes she said, “Will you stay with me tonight?”
“I was planning on it.”
I knew, in that moment, she was going to be my downfall, one way or another.
She turned her head toward me, resting her chin on my chest. She kissed me on my chin, then said, “Which was your favorite? First time or second?” Asking me about the two times we’d just had sex.
“Do I have to pick?”
She nodded.
If this had been anyone but Catherine, I would have been suspicious that it was some kind of trick question, maybe a way of trying to secretly find out if I’d liked it hard and fast or soft and slow.
Truth was, I liked it both ways. And since it was Catherine, that’s how I answered. I added: “But I’d give a slight edge to the first.”
“Because it was the first?”
“No. Because of your reaction when I first entered you.”
She paused for a moment. “Oh, God. Do I even want to know what my ‘O’ face looks like?”
I could have answered that question in a way that would have quietly ended the topic. The answer could have been sweet. But I opted instead for the first thing that popped into my head. “I’ll show you sometime.” I looked down to see her raising her eyebrow.
“What?” she said. “You’re going to take a picture or a video?”
“No. Just trust me. I know what we’re going to do.”
She chuckled. “Of course you do, with all of your experience. I have full documentation of that, by the way. I’ve saved every one of your emails.”
I figured this was as good as time as any to reveal something else I’d been keeping from her.
“Those were mostly stories, Catherine. Fiction. I made up most of them.”
She shifted and sat up, pulling the sheet up to her chest and covering herself. Her eyes narrowed and her head moved slowly side to side. “You bastard.” She gave me a playful slap on the chest. “But I’m glad you really haven’t been with that many women. So how many, really?”
“The number isn’t important. And I won’t ask about, nor do I want you to volunteer your number.”
She shrugged. “Okay.” I could almost see the curiosity flooding her mind. I liked it.
I reached up toward her neck. She probably thought I was going to gently pull her down to me for a kiss. But instead, I grabbed the sheet and tugged it off of her.
“We’ll know everything about each other soon,” I said, cupping the underside of her breast. Without even touching it, her nipple responded by puckering tightly. “But you should never hide these from me.”
She smiled, leaned down, and pressed her mouth against mine. It was a passionate kiss, one that held the promise of a third round of sex.
Out of nowhere she said, “I don’t think you left the room because I asked your name.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I think it’s something else,” she continued.
“And what might that be?”
She looked at me for a moment. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to figure out what to say or how to say it.
She shrugged. “I’m not sure yet.” She bit her bottom lip, as if in deep thought. Her hair draped over her left eye.
I reached up and tucked it behind her ear, not saying anything.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Sure.”
“The other night at the hotel, why did you tell me I would be better off staying away from you?”
Her eyes locked on mine, a dead stare. It was as if she thought she could find the answer if she looked hard enough.
“With me, there might be as much pain as there is pleasure,” I said.
She smiled, totally misinterpreting what I meant. “I think I could handle that sometimes.”
I shook my head and started to tell her that she had it all wrong, but as soon as I opened my mouth, she cut me off.
“Just tell me what you mean,” she said. “I kind of had some ideas already, anyway.” Her face turned into a frown.
“Like what?”
She shook her head. “Don’t try to turn this around on me.” She managed a slight grin. “If you don’t want to tell me right now, that’s fine. Whatever it is, it can’t be all that bad. You’re here, right?”
I nodded.
“So let’s just take it slow,” she said. “See what happens. We made it this far, right?”
I had my doubts about what she was saying, but I agreed anyway.
She sat back up, then stood, telling me she’d be right back. “I do want to know you.” She looked at me, hard, for a moment before continuing. “Just promise me I’ll know you before too long?”
I nodded. “Promise.”
I sat up and watched her walk down the hall, my mind swimming with curiosity about her past, her present, her future—our future, if there was to be one.
It wouldn’t be long before I would share with her the fact that I owned a rare bookshop.
Of course, that was all a ruse. One that I would eventually reveal to her. After all, I had just promised her I would. So maybe sooner rather than later.
For the immediate future, though, she wouldn’t have a clue that I had an entirely different life. Not a clue that I had only been in the United States for ten years. Not a clue as to exactly why I had come here, and what exactly I was up to.
It was just the way it would have to be—she would have no idea who or what I really was.
Spy? Agent? Operative? Mercenary? Assassin?
Sometimes I wasn’t sure myself.
The SHATTERPROOF Series is a three-part serial released over the course of three weeks, continuing with part 2 of 3, ILLICIT CONTACT, available July 16, 2014.
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