Dangerous Passion (21 page)

Many a time his life had depended on whether it would rain or snow.

Grace’s eyes were tracking the light drifts. “So beautiful,” she murmured.

“Hmm.” He’d buried his face in her hair, nose next to the soft skin behind her ear. Why look outside when he could watch her in the dark glass? It was just snow, for fuck’s sake. He’d once nearly died from exposure in a snowstorm when he was still living on the streets. Snow was cold and wet.

Better to be warm and dry.

She shook his arm a little. “Look, Drake. Look out.” He reluctantly dragged his ghost eyes from her ghost eyes to focus on the scene outside.

She held her hands out, as if to encompass the entire scene. “I want to paint it, just like this. All silver and midnight black, the buildings gleaming mysteriously in the darkness. Look down, Drake. See the fog rising? It makes the buildings look like islands in the sky, doesn’t it? I’ll paint it with the contrast between the billowing fog and the slanting snow with a monochrome palette. You’ll love it, I promise.”

Drake froze.

For a second, something terrifying happened. All those hours over the past year simply staring at her paintings caused a shift in his perception. For a second, he saw the scene through
her
eyes. Not merely snow, which he hated and considered a nuisance at best, even life-threatening at times. He’d seen past his hatred of snow to the landscape beyond.

It was magical, this landscape, seen through her eyes. A rich fantasyland of silvery darkness. Her eyes were tracking the snow and he followed her gaze in the reflection of the dark glass. She was imprinting what she was seeing, and sometime in the future—maybe tomorrow or next month or next year—a masterpiece would form beneath her clever hands and he would look at it forever. Only this time, he would look at it and remember the exact instant she got the inspiration.

By some mysterious alchemy, she was changing him. Opening his heart to the beauty of the world. It was frightening and he wasn’t altogether certain he liked the thought, but there it was.

He was looking at the black and silver shapes, the misty fog, the slanting snow and finding them fascinating instead of calculating how much the bad weather would impact his business.

The world was vastly more mysterious and beautiful than even he knew.

For the past fifteen years, he’d lived in locked-down conditions in his homes, traveling only under the tightest security he could devise, from car to plane to hotel and back. His life was work and sleep, with little in between; he lived in sterile and controlled surroundings. His world had narrowed to walls, whether of a hotel room or a car or a plane didn’t make any difference. The outside world had become an abstraction, a mere construct to include in his calculations.

She met his eyes again in the glass, a small smile on her lips, as if she understood what she’d done to him.

She’d fucking changed him, that’s what she’d done.

This woman had reached down inside him, with her art and her beauty and her kindness, and pulled him inside out. He didn’t much like it, but he couldn’t deny it. He was changing, feeling the ground beneath him shifting in a terrifying and exhilarating dance.

His hands moved fast and in a moment she was naked.

“Lean forward,” he said, his voice suddenly guttural. “Brace yourself against the window.”

Startled, Grace watched him in the window as she leaned forward. He felt her narrow rib cage arch as she placed both hands on the pane. He put a foot between hers and forced her to open her legs, fitting himself more snugly against her.

He’d been erect the whole time, but now she could feel him surging against her, his cock swelling as he pulled her tightly against him.

He couldn’t wait one second more. She was in his head. He had to be in her body.

He watched her carefully in the window. She was pressed against the pane. Her breasts would be cold, but he was keeping her warm from behind. And his cock would warm her up.

He undid his loose cargo pants, grabbed a condom from a side pocket, then kicked them away when they fell to the floor. He whipped his sweater up and off, eyes never leaving hers in the reflection.

“Open your legs more, Grace,” he whispered.

She obeyed immediately, kicking his excitement up, making his blood flow hot and thick through his veins.

It was going to be rough.

Oh God. It was going to be rough.

Grace watched her lover’s face in the dark window, the image more ghostly than if it were a mirror, as if he were insubstantial. Yet Drake wasn’t insubstantial at all. He was male power and male muscle, treading this earth more heavily than most.

She could feel him hot and heavy at her back, his hands holding her tightly. He opened her legs with his and fitted himself against her.

Each time they made love, there was this startled moment when she realized just how big he was, long and thick and as hard as steel. In the beginning he had been so careful with her, entering her slowly, by degrees.

Lately, though, he let his excitement get the better of him, understanding that her arousal grew each time they made love.

His control was paper-thin now. Grace knew this moment was coming, but now that it was here, fear tempered her excitement. Up until now, though he’d brought her to orgasm over and over again, Drake had been in utter control of himself.

Now the reflection in the window showed a man straining for control. The cords in his strong neck stood out, his jaw was tight with tension, muscles bunching along the jawline.

His power struck her anew. Though he didn’t tower over her, his shoulders were almost twice the width of hers. Looking down at his hand cupping her, she saw the taut, thick, sinewy muscles of his forearm, wildly erotic against her belly. He slid his hand further, fingers stroking her labia, his hand rocking back and forth in a silent request for better access.

Of course. She didn’t even think twice, merely widened her legs further. Whatever Drake wanted, she’d give him.

He fit himself to her, big, blunt, hot. She braced herself because that first entry was always slightly painful, no matter how aroused she was.

He was watching her face carefully in the dark glass. He must have seen her slight wince. He didn’t move forward as she expected he would. He merely waited, poised at the mouth of her sheath, breathing so heavily against her that she could see her hair sway in the dark pane.

His jaw muscles worked. “Not yet,” he muttered, watching her eyes. “Press up against the window.”

Grace could barely understand his guttural tones. “What?”

“Lean against the window. Now.”

His voice was low, utter male command. She obeyed instinctively.

She sharply drew in a breath as the entire front of her body met the cold window, hands splayed, breasts, hips, legs meeting the icy pane. He crowded right behind her, like a huge hairy man-furnace. The two extremes of temperature somehow excited her, her nipples puckering with the cold.

Shockingly, he reached down and opened her with his fingers, nudging her forward with his hips. His fingers had exposed her clitoris, which was pressed against the freezing window. She registered the chill against her sensitive flesh in exactly the same second as he entered her, his penis a huge, hot column heating her up from the inside out. Her entire body went into overdrive.

She gave a cry as he started moving, hot and hard inside her, pressing her against the freezing window, a raging furnace at her back and inside her. His movements were hard, almost harsh, on the edge of being painful but…not.

She lifted her eyes to look at their reflection, his face grim as he moved in and out of her, the thrusts fast and hard. Their eyes met and she was shocked at her expression, eyes unfocused, mouth open, throat arching back against him. The very picture of a woman in sexual ecstasy, reduced to her animal nature.

A keening sound filled the room and it took her seconds to recognize it as her own voice. It was unlike any sound she’d ever heard herself make, an animal cry. She wasn’t even feeling the cold of the window any more, her entire body was suffused with heat, she was burning up alive.

With a thrust that drove her to her toes, Drake grunted and started coming, swelling even larger, his thrusts irregular and fast as his breath huffed in and out. It felt like he wanted to punch her right through the window. She looked down at the shops and people and cars, the busy street of a great metropolis.

Grace came with a cry, every hair on her body standing up, shaking with pleasure. Suddenly, her senses expanded. As she looked down, it was as if the window had disappeared and she had become one with the people she could see hurrying along the streets, one with the snow drifting down from the sky, one with the energy of the city, pulsing in her fingertips.

She was no longer Grace Larsen, separate and alone and somehow always apart. In one electric pulse, she became one with everything around her, as her body convulsed and shook.

Across the seventy-five feet of a Manhattan street and slightly to the north, giving him an oblique shot, Rutskoi watched the two figures through his thermal scope.

Drake and the woman. It could only be them. One slender, the other not much taller but much broader.

Naked.

Fucking.

He watched the fiery red-and-blue bodies writhing in the small circle of his scope, completely unmoved.

Rutskoi liked sex just as much as the next man, maybe more. He’d blown half his first paycheck as a newly minted lieutenant on whores in Grozny, celebrating staying alive for one whole month by staying drunk and with his dick in a prostitute for days at a time. But on the job, it all went away. He felt nothing on the job—not lust, nor hunger nor thirst nor exhaustion. All he felt now was the deep sniper’s calm, a oneness with the ground and the rifle and the scope.

The woman was now flattened against the window by the weight of Drake’s body and Rutskoi’s finger tightened slightly. Christ, she was in his sights. Right there, in the crosshairs.

A 4-kilogram pull on the trigger, double the pull on a beer can, and his .50 caliber bullet would travel at 2500 kilometers per hour toward the red and green and yellow outlines shimmering through the thermal imager.

But he had no way of knowing how thick Drake’s windows were and at this angle of inflection, he had no guarantee that it would penetrate or, if it penetrated, whether it would pass through the woman to Drake.

So he watched the fiery figures writhe and told himself to hold his fire, watched the woman’s hands outstretched on the glass like five-fingered flames as Drake fucked her from behind.

They would be in his sights at a straighter angle soon enough.

He could wait.

For 10 million dollars, he could wait for as long as it took.

November 24