It was entirely possible that she worked for Lartet—or even for Padsha Bashir. That she’d been assigned to follow him and find out why he was here, why he was looking for Dimitri Ghaffari, whom he was working for.
The story she’d told him could well be completely fictional, designed to make him say, “Don’t worry, I’ll help you. I’m with the U.S. Government. Your troubles are over—I’m one of the good guys.”
And then, after promising to figure out a way to smuggle her safely out of K-stan, he would tell her to stay here, to stay hidden, to wait for him to contact her. But instead of following his instructions, she would wrap herself in that burka and slip out into the streets. She’d take all the information he’d revealed about himself to Lartet or Bashir, and then this entire mission would be in jeopardy. And the lives of his entire team would be in peril.
Decker caught her hands again as she unfastened the top button of his pants—she was persistent, wasn’t she?—and pulled back to look at her.
She was as short of breath as he was, her mouth wet from kissing him. The look in her eyes was one of pure arousal, but Decker didn’t doubt for one second that that was something she’d had a lot of practice faking.
She was a pro, there was no doubt about it.
“Please . . .” She moved to kiss him again, but this time he held her off.
“I can’t do this,” he said, but even to his own ears, his voice lacked conviction.
“Are you married?” she asked him. “Is that why you don’t want to . . . ?”
His cover included a fictional wife in Virginia, but he found himself saying, “No.”
“I’m not either. Not anymore.” Sophia’s eyes welled suddenly with fresh tears that seemed to surprise her more than they surprised him.
As Decker watched, she wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, as if these were private tears, ones she didn’t want him to see.
If this were part of her act, she was damn good.
But then she smiled at him, a smile that was forced and rueful—Sophia the brave, dauntlessly going on despite life’s tragedies. “Sorry,” she said. He almost applauded her performance.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked, wiping her nose again. “Linda Sue back in Kalamazoo? Trust me, she’ll never know.”
Even though he had no right to, Deck thought briefly of Tess, who was probably sound asleep not back in Michigan, but in Rivka’s pantry. Tess, who really was brave—and honest and true. Tess, who was everything a man could want in a woman, both sweet and sexy, the kind of woman you could take home to Sunday dinner, to meet your parents—after she’d totally rocked your world on Saturday night.
Tess, who couldn’t look at James Nash without her heart showing in her eyes.
Decker shook his head. “Look, Sophia, I know you think I’m going to deliver you to Bashir—”
“Yeah, right, but of course you’re not. Money means nothing to you.” She didn’t believe him.
This was where he should stand up and prove it by walking out of there.
Instead he said, “So okay. Say we . . . go into the other room and get to know each other better. Then what? How do you propose I get you out of Kazabek without any papers, without a passport?”
She blinked at that, as if she hadn’t really thought too much about that. And wasn’t that interesting? It surely meant something, but he just couldn’t wrap his mind around what, as she shifted and her gown shimmered.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Don’t you have, I don’t know, connections?”
He didn’t answer that. He just sat and looked at her, hoping she would keep talking.
Maybe some information he could make use of would come out of her mouth.
Yeah, sure. That’s why he was still sitting here. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that she’d offered herself to him on a plate.
It had nothing to do with the fact that he wanted—desperately—to take her up on that offer.
No, want wasn’t the right word for it. What he was feeling was bigger than want, more powerful than need. It was . . .
It was bullshit. That was his dick talking. Bigger than want, his ass.
He was beyond horny, she was nearly naked, and he wanted to accept her offer because he was human, he was male, and he had been celibate for too fucking long.
And even though she wasn’t a streetwalker as he’d first thought, she obviously saw sex as little more than an intimate handshake. A deal sealer. A way to control her environment and the people around her.
She reached up to touch his face, tracing his lips with her thumb. And again he didn’t back away when she leaned in to kiss him.
It felt too damn good.
She was winning and she knew it.
“I need this,” she told him, and if he squinted at this entire situation really hard, he could almost talk himself into believing her.
She kissed him again, sliding back onto his lap. And he let her. And he let her and let her, glad he didn’t have to worry about her going for that little revolver he’d taken from her at the factory—he’d left it outside—and wondering just how far she was going to take this before she made a break for that door.
Because surely that was her goal here.
Wasn’t it?
She’d glanced over at it often enough when they’d first started talking.
“We’re both alone in this world,” she said, her mouth soft against his throat, her body warm in his hands. “I want to, and I know you want to—”
“You want to, because if I do sleep with you,” Deck said, “I’m less likely to return you to Bashir’s palace for a lot of reasons, the most compelling being that there’s a solid chance they’ll stick my head on a pike—” She actually flinched at that—interesting. “—for messing with Bashir’s property—never mind the fact that he’s dead and they have a date on the execution schedule already reserved for you.”
“I want to,” she argued, “because I want to. Because I’m alive, and because it’s my choice—because I finally have a choice.”
“That’s total bullshit,” he said, but he wasn’t sure she heard him, because she was kissing him on the mouth again, then distracting the hell out of him by slipping her hand down into his pants, and . . .
“Whoa,” he said, but she only kissed him more deeply.
She was . . . He was . . . Was he actually going to do this?
Yes.
And why the hell not? God knows he wanted to.
And, like the lady said, it was her choice.
Except Decker knew that it really wasn’t.
But she said it was.
And who was he to decide for her, as if she were a child, whether this truly was or wasn’t her choice?
If sex really didn’t mean that much to her, if she had the mind-set of most of the women that James Nash dated . . .
Except this wasn’t a date. And she was selling herself to Decker—there was no question about that.
He was a lowlife, he was scum, because, right at that moment, he was willing to buy.
She slid off him—all that soft warmth suddenly gone—and here it came. The dash for the door that he’d been more than half expecting. He had one hand wrapped around her wrist—an easy enough hold for her to break—but she clasped his hands and pulled him to his feet with her.
“Let’s go to my bed,” she said instead. “It’s softer than the tile floor. My knee is pretty bruised.”
She lifted her skirt, and he saw that she’d scraped the shit out of her knee, probably during her escape from Bashir’s palace.
Provided that had really happened.
Yes, let’s go to your bed, was what the low-life scum wanted to say, but there was still some Dudley Do-Right in his system—and it had control of his vocal cords.
But “I can’t—” was all he got out before she kissed him again, wrapping one leg around him even as she tugged him with her toward the blankets piled up on the floor in the other room.
<
br /> Oh, this was a mistake in so many ways. Too many to count.
But she somehow had his pants unzipped and when she slid down to the floor to kneel in front of him and . . .
“Unh,” he said as she . . . And then she . . .
Okay. Okay. Apparently she wasn’t going to make a break for the door immediately.
Jesus.
Jesus.
He was vulnerable. There was no doubt about the fact that this was a position of intense vulnerability. If she wanted to, she could seriously damage him in so many different ways. But if that was her intention, she would have hurt him already.
And that was not pain he was experiencing.
She tugged him down onto the blankets with her, which gave her a better angle to . . .
Oh, yeah.
Decker knew that there was a list of reasons he shouldn’t be doing this, but the pro side of this particular page sure seemed to cancel out all the cons.
He kept his eyes open, kept track of where she had her hands, aware that although he’d taken a weapon from her back at the factory, he hadn’t searched this room.
But ho-kay. All-righty. This was not what he’d expected her to do. It was now exceedingly easy to keep track of her right hand as well as her mouth and . . .
Decker reached down and grabbed hold of her left wrist. Keeping his eyes from rolling back in his head was a more serious challenge. He must’ve made some kind of noise, because she glanced up at him, her own eyes bright.
She’d stayed alive for the past two months, possibly even longer if her story about Ghaffari and Bashir was just a sad tale she’d made up to win his sympathy, by doing this. It was a sobering thought, and yet she managed to distract him—she was that talented.
Skilled.
Practiced.
Jee-zus.
It should have been a turnoff—in theory, he would have expected it to be. But Decker had found in life that reality and theory frequently were quite different.
This was . . . surprisingly freeing.
There were no emotional strings attached. It was the first time in a long, long time that he’d had a sexual encounter that wasn’t layered with deep meaning, heavy with expectation.
This was . . . what it was.
And apparently she wanted absolutely nothing from him.
At all.
This was similar to what Nash did on an almost nightly basis. Sex with no emotional connection. Sex for the sake of sex. Because it felt good.
And good was one freaking understatement.
Decker knew that he probably should have been ashamed, and sure, if he tried hard enough, he could find part of him that was. Not only should he be back at Rivka’s by now, but he was taking advantage of a woman who was in desperate need of help. This poor, frightened, down on her luck woman who—
Holy shit, holy shit, whatever she was doing was—
Decker came in a rush that didn’t quite blind him enough to keep him from realizing that he’d just lost her right hand. He still held her left wrist, but her entire right arm was hidden . . .
He jerked back, away from her.
. . . with her hand buried beneath them, beneath the blankets . . .
Away from her teeth—fuck!—he rolled hard to his right.
. . . as if she was reaching for a knife or . . .
The sound of a gunshot at close proximity was deafening, as a bullet whizzed past his head.
“Shit!”
. . . a handgun.
Decker rolled back to the left, pinning her arm as well as whatever weapon she had hidden under those blankets.
She cried out—he was hurting her—but too fucking bad! She’d just tried to shoot him in the head.
While she was . . . While he was . . . Shit.
Somehow that made her murder attempt unforgivable. Assuming that a murder attempt was something that could be forgiven.
She cried out again as he forced her to let go of the weapon. If she’d been a man, he would have broken her nose because he would’ve elbowed her far harder in the face while he was at it.
Of course, if she’d been a man, this never would’ve happened.
Mad as hell—at himself as well as at her—heart still pounding, Deck pushed her back so that she slid on her ass along the tile floor and hit both the pipes and the wall beneath the row of sinks with enough force to knock her off balance.
By the time she scrambled onto her hands and knees, Decker had her weapon, a neat little WWII era Walther PPK, aimed at her forehead. He also had his pants zipped.
“Don’t do it,” he said.
She looked at the door, at the Walther, at his face, then sat back on her heels. She was crying a river of tears, but this time she didn’t make a sound. She just looked at him with eyes that were completely devoid of all hope.
She just sat there and waited—for him to kill her.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Tess glanced up as the third-floor bedroom door opened and Jimmy Nash came into the room.
He looked wary and apologetic, and he actually cleared his throat. He didn’t even try to force a smile. He was just so damn serious, she had to turn away.
God. Help.
Tess pretended to return her attention to her laptop computer, open in front of her on the bed.
“So.” She spoke first, before he did, eyes securely on the monitor. “I once saw this movie where this character—he’s supposed to be a Hollywood actor, completely self-absorbed. But he’s drunk and he gets into this car accident, like the car flips over but nobody’s hurt, and he climbs out and says, ‘So. That happened,’ and I always thought that was just the best line, you know? So. That happened.”
She glanced up to find him watching her.
“It was never my intention to—,” he started, but she cut him off.
“No kidding,” she said briskly. She may have been drowsy and confused about where she was and when she was, but she remembered, in extremely explicit detail, who had grabbed whom. “That was my handiwork—pardon the pun. I’m the one who owes you the apology.”
He crossed the room, toward her, toward the bed. “No, Tess, you—”
“Yes,” she said. “And it will help quite a bit if you would simply say ‘Apology accepted,’ and then never mention it again. And don’t you dare even think about sitting down on this bed.”
He stopped himself, straightening back up. He sighed. “Tess . . .”
“From now on, if I’m using the bed, you’re not. And vice versa,” she told him as matter-of-factly as she could. She even managed to look up at him and flash a polite smile before returning her attention to her computer. “We can work out a schedule for sleeping. Every other night I get the bed and you get the floor, and—”
“Tess—”
“ ‘Apology accepted,’ ” she repeated, eyes firmly on that screen. “That’s really all I want to hear right now, thanks so much.”
“What we did—”
“What I did,” she corrected him sharply.
“What we did,” he said again, sitting next to her on the bed despite her protests, and folding the computer closed so that she’d have to face him, “was enough to get you pregnant. It doesn’t take much, you know.”
Of all the things she’d expected Jimmy to say, that wasn’t one of them. She blinked at him for a few moments. Pregnant?
“You didn’t think about that, did you?” he asked. When he wanted to, he could make his eyes seem so warm, even tender.
Tess shook her head. Her focus had been so completely on the fact that Nash now knew she still wanted him—that he’d found out that if it were up to her subconscious self, they’d be having screaming wild monkey sex every time they had five minutes free. He now knew that her body was at serious odds with her brain when it came to her attraction for him.
He knew that what she wanted was different from what she wanted, and that when push came to shove, there was a damn good chance—if she were vulnerable enough—that sh
e’d start pushing and shoving.
With great enthusiasm.
Oh, God.
“I’m not pregnant,” she said. “Really, James, the odds of that—”
“But it is possible,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, but come on, that’s worst-case scenario thinking,” Tess said. “It’s also possible there’ll be another earthquake tonight that’ll bring the roof down on top of us.”
“Okay,” he said. “You’re right. But . . . I just wanted you to know that I intend to take responsibility if—”
“What?” She was incredulous. “For something you didn’t even do? Don’t be ridiculous—”
“Excuse me, I was there. I know exactly what I did. And I’m just saying—”
“Well, don’t. God! Nash! Give me a fricking break.” Tess pushed herself farther back on the bed, away from him, all but kicking at him with her feet. “I’ve told you what I want you to say.”
“Apology accepted?” Jimmy stood up.
“Thank you.” God.
“No, that was a question,” he said. “I didn’t say it.”
What? “Yes, you did. I heard you—”
He laughed. “No, no, see, I said it, but I didn’t say it—”
Oh. My. God. “Is this some kind of big hilarious joke to you? Because in case you haven’t noticed,” she told him through clenched teeth, “I’m not laughing!”
“Yeah.” He wasn’t laughing anymore either. “Right. I always think it’s funny as shit when I do something I’ve never done before—ever. Something that might completely screw up the life of someone I happen to care very much about.”
He was standing there, looking about as upset as she’d ever seen him. And if he hadn’t run away to Mexico for two months, if he’d bothered to call her to tell her he was okay—even just once, one fifteen-second phone call—she might’ve actually believed him.
Instead she snorted, trying to push away those pathetic feelings of loss that surfaced every time he said or did something even remotely sweet. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . . “Oh, you so just want to sleep with me again. Could you be any more transparent?”
Flashpoint Page 18
