by Linda Howard
Desperately she groped for his erection, wanting, needing to seize some of the power, to balance the scales. Her fingers closed around the thick shaft, and a split second later his iron grip was on her wrist, firmly moving her hand away from him. “No,” he said as calmly as if she’d offered him a slice of toast.
“Yes,” she insisted recklessly, reaching for him again. “I want you in my mouth.” In her experience, no man could resist that offer.
But the hard line of his lips curved in faint amusement as he caught her hand and anchored it to the bed with an unbreakable grip. “So you can make me come? You’re in a hurry to get rid of me.”
Drea stared up at him, her emotions in such a roiling storm of lust and anger and ever-present fear that she trembled.
He secured her other hand, too, holding her firm as he moved over her and took what he wanted.
THE HOURS THAT followed were a blur of lust and sex and fatigue, but a few moments were crystal clear. After her third climax she tried to squirm away from him, exhausted and overstimulated and unable to bear any more. “Leave me alone,” she said fretfully, slapping at his hands as he drew her back to him, and he laughed.
He actually laughed.
She stared up at the curve of his mouth, the flash of white teeth, by now expecting the way her stomach muscles clenched and the bottom fell away and she went rushing back down into the dark pit of longing that he’d uncovered. No other man had ever paid so much attention to her needs over his own, had lingered over her body, as he did, with slow touches and hot kisses. Orgasms, for her, had been what she faked with a man and provided herself when she was alone, and that had been partly her own choice because she couldn’t concentrate on providing the maximum pleasure for the guy if she was distracted by her own reactions.
He had done to her what she usually did, taken over her role, focused on her and provided so much pleasure she felt slightly drunk with satiation. He’d held back, stopping several times when he was on the verge of coming, and the strain was finally showing. His hair was damp with sweat, his face set in a hard, intensely focused expression; his eyes glittered with an intent so hot her skin should have scorched as he looked at her.
Until he laughed, and for a snapshot in time she saw him relaxed and momentarily—very momentarily—unguarded.
He hadn’t kissed her on the mouth. He’d kissed practically every other place on her body, but not her mouth, and suddenly she wanted that more than she wanted anything else he’d done to her. Impulsively she reached out and touched his face, her fingers lying lightly along the hard line of his jaw, feeling the faint roughness of whiskers and the heat of his skin. His dark brows lifted slightly in question, as if her touch puzzled him. Drea surrendered to the want, lifting herself and clinging her mouth to his.
For another of those frozen moments she felt him go as motionless as stone, as if he had to force himself not to pull away, and inside her chest something squeezed as she waited for him to reject her kiss.
But he didn’t, and tentatively she tilted her head to deepen the contact. His lips were soft and warm; the heated scent of him filled her, called to her, jerked her from satiation to need. He hadn’t opened his mouth for her and she craved that, but was almost afraid to ask for more. She dared the smallest touch of her tongue to those soft lips.
Abruptly he was kissing her in return, wresting control from her and pressing her back onto the mattress, his heavy body covering her. He kissed her as if some primal beast in him had slipped its leash and he wanted to devour her, his mouth hungry and hotly demanding, his tongue dancing with hers and forcing more response. She clung to him, arms and legs twined around him, and gave herself up to the storm she’d raised.
At another moment, lying exhausted and half-asleep, she realized she didn’t know his name. That lack of knowledge hurt her, somewhere deep inside where she let no one touch. The way he’d kissed her emboldened her, let her reach out to rest her hand on his chest as he lay sprawled beside her. His heartbeat thudded fast and strong under her fingers and she flattened her hand over it as if she could link herself to that beat of life. “What’s your name?” she asked, her voice soft and drowsy.
After a moment of silence, as if he weighed her reasons for asking, he said calmly, dismissively, “You don’t need to know.”
In silence she removed her hand from his chest and curled on her side. She wanted to jump astride him and tease him, nag him, pry the information out of him, but one of the rules she’d developed over the years was not to nag, to always make herself agreeable, and the action, or lack of it, was so deeply ingrained she couldn’t persist. Still, his lack of trust chilled her. She might feel as if some weird link had been forged between them, but he evidently didn’t feel the same way. He was a killer, pure and simple, and he stayed at the top of his profession by trusting no one.
Some time later he lifted his head to look at the clock, and Drea did the same. Almost four hours had passed.
“Now,” he said, his tone going rough and deep as he moved over her, pushing her knees apart and settling on her, in her. His muscles tightened, and a stifled groan rumbled in his throat, his chest. He shuddered, as if being able to release his self-control was a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain.
She caught her breath at the power of his invasion. She was swollen and more than a little sore from everything he’d done to her, yet she didn’t want this to end. “We still have an hour left,” she heard herself say, and cringed inside at the small note of pleading in her voice.
A cynical expression hardened his gaze. “Salinas won’t honor the full five hours,” he replied as he began thrusting long and deep. It was as if a dam had been breached, and the power that had been restrained suddenly rushed forward. All she could do was cling to him and try to weather the storm, offer him the same generous use of her body that he had given her—and be surprised, yet again, by a response she hadn’t thought herself capable of. He stiffened and began coming, groans tearing from his throat as he surged against her in powerful rhythm. She locked her legs around his and arched upward, her own raw sounds of pleasure piercing the air as her climax chased his.
When their bodies quieted, he extricated himself and immediately moved away. “Is it all right if I use your shower?” he asked, walking toward the bathroom.
Drea searched for her voice and whispered, “Sure,” a useless permission because he’d already closed the door behind him.
She lay amid the tangled sheets, knowing she needed to get up but unable to put thought into action. Her body was heavy and limp, her eyelids dragging downward with fatigue. Disjointed thoughts formed and disappeared. Everything had changed, and she wasn’t yet sure exactly how. Certainly her time with Rafael was over, or almost over, and she needed to think about that, about what she should do. She knew what she wanted to do, and the idea was so new, so foreign to her, that she could scarcely take it in.
He came out of the bathroom within ten minutes, his hair wet, his skin smelling of her soap. Silently he began dressing, his expression calm and remote, as if he were lost in thought. She watched him, drinking in every inch of him, waiting for him to look at her. What they had shared for the past several hours had been so intense she almost couldn’t remember what her life had been like before, a line of demarcation so plainly drawn it was as if everything before was in shades of gray and everything after was in Technicolor.
She waited, and still he was silent. She waited, certain that when he finished dressing he’d look at her and say…what? She didn’t know what she wanted him to say, only that pain was swelling in her chest again, a pain that threatened to suffocate her. She couldn’t stay with Rafael any longer. She wanted more, she wanted to be more, she wanted…God, she wanted this man, so intensely she couldn’t let herself fully realize the breadth and depth of it.
He turned toward the door without saying anything and in panic she bolted upright, clutching the sheet to her breasts. He couldn’t leave the same way Rafael had, as if sh
e meant nothing, as if she was nothing.
“Take me with you,” she blurted, choking back the humiliating burn of tears.
He paused with his hand on the doorknob, finally looking at her, his brows drawing together in a faint frown. “Why?” he asked in a sort of remote puzzlement, as if he couldn’t understand why she’d said something so outlandish. “Once was enough.” Then he walked out and Drea sat motionless on the bed. He moved so silently she didn’t hear the penthouse door open or shut, but she felt his absence, knew the exact moment he left.
Silence closed around her, profound and tomblike. There were things she needed to do, she realized, but actually doing them seemed beyond her. All she could do was sit there, barely breathing, considering the shambles her life had suddenly become. She had just been screwed, in more ways than one.
3
WHEN THE ASSASSIN LEFT SALINAS’S PENTHOUSE, HE DIDN’T take the elevator. Instead he strode silently to one of the stairwells and went down four floors. Taking a key from his pocket, he unlocked the door to the luxury apartment he’d leased for a couple of months. He had to live somewhere, and though he moved frequently, he liked being comfortable. When he had to, he could—and did—endure long periods of wretched discomfort, but this wasn’t one of the had-to times. Besides, it amused him to live right under Salinas’s nose.
The silence wrapped around him like a welcome blanket. Only when he was alone did he relax—at least, as much as he ever relaxed. The rooms were spare, not because he couldn’t afford to buy furniture, but because he liked the space, the emptiness. He had a place to sleep, and a place to sit. He had a television, and a computer. The kitchen was supplied with just enough for him to get by. He didn’t need anything else.
When he moved from here, he would wipe everything down beforehand with a cleaning solvent to remove any fingerprints he’d left, then he would donate all the furnishings to a charity. Finally, he would have the apartment professionally cleaned, and it would be as if he’d never been here at all.
He would take some of his clothing with him, but, like the furniture, he wore things only a few times before donating them. If a sharp forensics tech found a thread that had first escaped his own notice and then the attentions of the cleaning service, and if by some colossal stroke of good luck on an investigator’s part led to him, nothing in his wardrobe would match that thread.
His computer was his Achilles’ heel, but he couldn’t do the necessary research prior to each job without it, so he did what he could to limit the risk, periodically wiping the hard drive, then removing it and installing a new one. As a final precaution, he would physically destroy the old hard drive. His safety routines were time-consuming, but they were simply part of his life. He didn’t fret about them, he simply did them.
He traveled light, and he traveled fast. He had a sentimental attachment to nothing, so there was nothing from which he couldn’t walk away. As for people…they were much like his possessions: temporary. There were people of whom he was fond, in a distant way, but no one who elicited any strong emotions in him. He didn’t even get angry, because he saw it as a waste of time. If the issue was minor, he walked away; if it was something he had to handle, he took care of the matter calmly and efficiently, and wasted no time worrying about things afterward.
Being a killer was neither something he worried about nor reveled in; it was simply what he was. The assassin was a man who knew himself and accepted that knowledge. He didn’t feel what other people felt; emotions, to him, were mild and distant. Because of that, nothing ever overruled his brain. He was sharply intelligent, and physically he was strong and fast, with the extraordinary hand/eye coordination that all truly superb marksmen possessed. Everything about him was perfectly suited to his chosen occupation.
While he might not have standards, as such—because standards seemed to imply some sort of moral guidance system—he did have rules. His number one rule was: never kill a cop. Never. Under any circumstances. Nothing would bring the full fury of law enforcement down on him faster than harming one of their own. Nor did he ever take a job involving romantic affairs, because not only were they messy, they tended not to be lucrative. His prime targets were usually connected to the crime underworld, industrial espionage, or politics. The cops didn’t really care about the former, the second category tended to be hushed up, and he never took a political job in this country. That kept his life as tidy and uncomplicated as he could make it.
He went into his bedroom and removed his clothes, dropping them into a hamper in the closet, then went naked into the bathroom and carefully peeled the flesh-colored latex from his earlobes. He constantly changed his appearance in small ways, on the theory that he couldn’t be too careful. Surveillance cameras were everywhere these days, thanks to the bastard terrorists. He always did his homework and located the most obvious places for surveillance to be set up, assumed he was being filmed, and worked the angles.
He could have showered here, instead of in Drea’s bathroom, but she was far more astute than she wanted people to know. Short of an emergency, not many people would forgo washing off after four hours of sex—unless they knew they could shower very soon somewhere else, like maybe somewhere else in this very building. She might not have come to that conclusion, but he hadn’t wanted to take the chance. Anyone sharp enough to pull the wool over Salinas’s eyes wasn’t a person he could take lightly.
The afternoon had been…satisfying. Very satisfying. Not only had he learned a lot about Salinas, but he’d pushed the boundaries of his own self-control and had a great deal of pleasure from it. He’d wanted to know how much Salinas needed him, and the answer was obvious: very much—enough that Salinas had agreed to share his woman, which ran contrary to the basic foundation of his heritage, his position, and his ego. The only time someone in Salinas’s position would give away his woman was when he was tired of her, and the assassin was damn certain that wasn’t the case.
The identity of his latest target, a major drug trafficker in Mexico, had made the assassin curious. Salinas was a major distributor, but his operation was on the delivery end of the drug chain. Drug dealers were constantly knocking each other off, but for a distributor to have a supplier eliminated was…odd. Something else was going on, something that could prove to be very lucrative to a man who was the best at what he did.
The assassin had carefully considered all the angles and possibilities, and devised a way to find out what he wanted to know. If the answer was “yes,” then Salinas would soon desperately need the assassin’s services, which in turn meant the assassin could name his price for the job. If the answer was “no,” no real harm was done, because while he’d have to stick by his implied threat to never work for Salinas again, there was never any shortage of jobs. There was, in fact, a surplus of people who wanted him to kill other people. Economically, there was no downside for him, and a “yes” answer also gave him a nice physical bonus: Drea.
He was a solitary man by nature, but he wasn’t a monk. He liked women and he liked sex, though he regarded both much as he regarded his own physical comfort: something he could do without if necessary. Normally he stayed far away from other men’s women, because the situation could get sticky and he didn’t want that much attention drawn to himself. But something about Drea had caught his interest the first time he’d seen her.
It wasn’t her looks. He didn’t have a particular type that he liked, but at the same time he’d never gone for the skinny, overly sexual, big-haired bimbos. Yet the attraction he’d felt for her had been instant and strong. He supposed skin chemistry outweighed all the negative factors, and led him to take a second look, which was when he’d realized that, regardless of how she looked and acted, she was far from dumb.
What had given her away wasn’t anything she’d done, really. He had to admit, her act was flawless. Rather, it was his own heightened awareness of her. He’d always been, by nature and by practice, a skilled observer; the predator instinct in him accurately read minute
changes in expression, in body language. He couldn’t pinpoint what had alerted him, only that he abruptly knew there was a sharp brain under all that hair, that she was playing Salinas like a violin.
Realizing that had only increased both his attraction and his admiration for her acting ability. She wasn’t running a con, he had no doubt Salinas was getting good service for his money, but she was definitely running a risk. Salinas wouldn’t blink at having her killed if the least thing made him suspicious of her.
The assassin respected survivors, and Drea was that. When he saw a way to have her, he didn’t hesitate.
He’d been faintly surprised by her initial reaction. Women like her, who traded on their looks and bodies to get what they could from men like Salinas, usually saw sex as a commodity. At first he’d thought her reluctance was just an act, to pander to Salinas’s ego, but when it became obvious she was truly terrified, he’d mentally shrugged and decided to drop the whole thing. He’d found out what he wanted to know, just by Salinas’s reaction.
When she ran out on the balcony he’d started to leave, but an unusual impulse had sent him after her. She looked terrified enough to jump, and he didn’t want that. Going out there had been risky—hell, the feds had to have Salinas under constant surveillance—but ultimately worth it. He’d touched her arm and felt the burn and sizzle of an almost electric connection, and within seconds she’d been responding—still frightened, but she’d felt that potent chemistry as strongly as he had.
He liked taking his time with sex, but today had been unusual. Once Drea had gotten over being so scared, she’d turned hot enough to scorch him. In the intensity of her response, he’d read how starved she was for attention, for being seen as she truly was, seen how much she needed to be stroked instead of being the one doing the stroking. Salinas had to be a lousy lover, selfish and lazy, to leave a woman that hungry.
