Dangerous Secrets (6 page)

Nick kicked the door closed behind him and slid her down his body. There was no way on earth she could miss his erection, even through his pants and overcoat. As she felt that hard, steely column, her stomach muscles contracted and she shivered.

A second later, his scarf and her coat lay on her hardwood floor and he cupped her head as he kissed her. Deeper kisses these, harder, longer. Luscious, never ending, electrifying.

Charity was standing slightly on tiptoe, holding his thick wrists when he lifted his head, those mesmerizing cobalt blue eyes locked on to hers. His thin nostrils were slightly flared, his cheekbones were flushed red underneath his heavy tan. His beautiful mouth was flushed and wet. Still, though he was definitely aroused—the erection pressed against her belly was vivid proof of that—he looked utterly in control of himself.

Unlike her. Charity felt as if she were melting. Inside she was buzzing, dizzy with desire, hardly able to catch her breath against the tight band around her chest. The only thing holding her upright was her hands around his wrists. Otherwise she’d collapse in a puddle at his feet.

Somewhere far away something was ringing, some kind of bell. Well, that fit. A celebratory bell was a perfect soundtrack for what was going on inside her. It took her bedazzled brain almost a minute to realize that it was the telephone ringing. Her answering machine in the living room picked it up and she could hear her own voice asking whoever called
to leave a message. Whoever it was, it couldn’t have been anything important, because there was a click as they hung up.

Thank God it wasn’t Uncle Franklin calling about yet another problem with Aunt Vera. Charity liked to think that she would,
could
break the spell of this moment if her aunt and uncle needed her, but she was glad she wasn’t being put to this test.

Nick behaved as if the phone hadn’t rung at all. He was watching her intently, gaze focused on her face, searching for something. Whatever it was he wanted, it was his.

“Charity,” he said, his deep voice low, then stopped. There really wasn’t anything else he had to say. What he wanted was clear. Every line of his big body was drawn in desire.

There was only one possible answer.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Vassily Worontzoff’s mansion

Vassily used his stylus to punch in Charity’s number and listened, with growing apprehension, to the empty line and the far-off ringing, then her lovely voice asking him to leave a message. He didn’t want to leave a message, he wanted to talk to her.

She wasn’t home. Why wasn’t she home? Where was she?

Charity seldom went out. She might be with her aunt and uncle, but she’d spent the evening before with them. And they were so elderly they ate at six and were in bed by nine. It was now almost ten.

Vassily put down the phone with a frown, clawed hand hovering over the receiver. He daren’t call again. He had to ration his calls to Katya—
Charity!

He limited himself to no more than two calls a week and rationed their occasions out together. Two, three times a month. He didn’t dare go beyond that. Not yet.

But soon.

They’d already met for tea this month and he’d casually dropped by the library to bring her a package of piroshki he’d had specially ordered and airlifted from Moscow, just for her. She wouldn’t know that, of course. He’d said a friend had brought by several boxes and too many sweets weren’t good for his health.

And then of course there was the soirée he was organizing on Thursday. His soirées were for her, only her. He loved music, but he had a very extensive CD collection and he could have himself driven down to New York or to Boston any time he wanted when he desired live music. New York in particular had proved very satisfactory that way. He kept an apartment on Park Avenue, owned by a corporation with ten shells around it. No one would ever know it belonged to him.

The apartment had been decorated in the pastel colors Charity loved, filled with her favorite music CDs, stocked with her favorite teas. He’d bought an entire wardrobe of designer clothes in her size, just waiting for her to step into them. Everything was ready. His new life was there, shimmering just beyond his reach. With each passing day, its outlines grew more and more solid, more substantial.

Soon now.
Soon
.

Soon, she’d see, and understand. Soon, she would be his.

He’d been waiting for this, working for this, since he’d
moved here five months ago. Charity was meant to be his, his Katya come back to life. This is what he’d been working for, without realizing it, since December 12, 1989, when the KGB had come for them. It was a date carved into his heart with acid, never to be forgotten. The day he’d ceased being human.

They’d just finished making love, he and Katya. Once was never enough with her, he’d found, so as he lay next to her, his cock had been still half erect, still slick from her. The room smelled of her perfume and their sex.

He wanted her, endlessly. They’d been lovers for a year, and he knew he could have her as much as he wanted, but the wanting was always there. The first, frantic desire, where he’d bedded her as often as he could, for hours a day, had subsided a bit. Not because he desired her less, but because he knew she was his. All he had to do was reach out a hand, and she was there.

Katya, his beautiful Katya, had been lying on her stomach, sated, rosy, smiling. He lay next to her on his side. One hand propped up his head, the other lay in the small of her back. He was composing a poem in his head, an ode to woman, for it seemed to him in that moment that Katya embodied every beautiful, desirable woman who had ever walked this earth.

The smell of woman was in the air, and he knew generations of men had lived and died for that smell, the smell of slick, hot love.

Idly, he began to compose an “Ode to Woman,” a poem that had simply welled up inside him. The first poem in his life that had come to him perfect and complete and whole in one simple rush.

He had been touched by the gods that afternoon.

The words had come, powerful and golden, in perfect cadences. He didn’t need to write them down; the words were etched in his heart as they came to him. He beat out the rhythm of the poem with his forefinger, against the swell of Katya’s perfect white buttock, like the beat of a song, the music of poetry against the skin of his woman.

She’d known what he was doing. Of course. Katya knew him, knew him down to his soul. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been able to pluck the words from his head.

His finger tapping the cadences of the words on her soft skin, he’d just ended the poem, the best thing he’d ever written, when the harsh knock sounded at the door.

He hadn’t even been given the time to get up, put his clothes back on, armor himself with dignity. The KGB goons kicked his door down and, weapons drawn, dragged him away from a screaming Katya.

This is impossible
, he thought frantically.
No! Russia has changed! The world has changed! The Berlin Wall has just come down!
he screamed, before a rifle butt in the head felled him.

He shook his head, stunned. This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. Gorbachev had introduced glasnost, perestroika. Russia was, finally, opening. The long Stalinist nightmare was over.

And anyway, Vassily was no dissident. He was apolitical. A writer. A writer of the New Russia, with no agenda other than creating great literature. He was lionized amongst the intelligentsia, a New Russian, a man freed from the shackles of the past.

But the men who broke down his door were throwbacks–
brutal brutish men, coming out of the murky hallway like orcs out of a dark cave, out of a darkness before time.

This was a mistake. He was Vassily Worontzoff.
Dry Your Tears in Moscow
was a best seller. One of his short stories had been made into a film that had won a Leone d’Oro in Venice. He’d been interviewed on TV, on a number of the brand-new channels that were opening Soviet society up. He hobnobbed with the new businessmen, with the media darlings.

They’d named him a Chevalier de la République in France.

He had to contact someone, get this cleared up, he thought, as the goons tossed him his pants, then dragged him, bare chested, into the hallway.

And then his heart stopped, simply stopped, when the third officer went back into the house and dragged a screaming Katya out into the hallway.

His gaze locked with hers.

The great Soviet scorpion was dying but its poison-tipped tail still had the power to sweep lives away. He would be accused of anti-Soviet propaganda—such a huge joke when the Soviet Union was falling apart. Daily, pieces of it were breaking off, like floes off a huge iceberg, floating away on the tides of history.

He would be accused and sentenced to a prison camp, a certain death sentence. A long, lingering death sentence. There would be no getting out alive.

And now they had Katya. This was beyond his worst nightmare.

He thought being taken away by the KGB would be the worst thing that could happen to him. But he’d been wrong.

Screaming, raging, fighting every step of the way, desperate to shield Katya, he was dragged out of the building on Arbat Street and into a waiting Zil.

The twelfth of December, 1989.

The day Vassily Worontzoff died.

Yes!

Nick had known that the answer to his unasked question would be yes. Letting him come in for coffee was girl code for
Do you want to have sex?
And the answer was yes.
Hell, yes!

Nick thought of nothing else as he drove them back to her house. She’d murmured directions, but he didn’t need them. He’d driven so often to her house on his stakeouts, he could find the way blindfolded.

And now that he’d spent an evening with Charity, he could probably find
her
blindfolded, by smell alone. She had the most enchanting scent. The whole car was filled with it. Some fresh springlike perfume mixed with shampoo and soap and warm woman. Unique, heady.

In the car, her scent alone had been enough to make his cock sit up and take notice, not that it needed any stimulation. Good thing he had on his expensive cashmere overcoat.

Nick was a good strategist. He set goals and figured out how to meet them with the tools at hand. This was the staging phase, the one right before battle. This was when his body started readying itself for combat. His senses heightened, his heart rate slowed, he saw and heard with unusual clarity.

The next stage was crucial. He had to convince her to trust him. Taking a woman to bed was the best way to do that, he knew from long experience. So he should be moving things slowly around to getting into her pants.

Nick knew exactly how that was supposed to work. Walk her to her door, a light kiss before she opens it, just to break the ice, another kiss after she’d poured their nightcaps. Sitting on the couch, listening to the music she’d put on, idly chatting. Another light kiss, then another, less light this time, with a little tongue….

Everything slowly, with style, giving her time to get used to him.

He could do it. He’d done it before, countless times. He always kept his cool during sex. Hell, with Consuelo, he could have recited from memory whole chunks of the Army Field Manual while fucking, trying not to wince while Consuelo’s razor-sharp claws dug into his back. Keeping his cool before, during, and in the aftermath of sex was easy, he’d done it all his life.

No matter how heated the fucking, a part of him remained detached and was sometimes even able to comment on the proceedings, as if he were at a show.

He needed that cool right now. This was a job. A pleasurable job, okay, and man, did he deserve it after the shit details he’d been on in Afghanistan and after a year in the employ of the Drug Lord from Hell and his sister, Cruella De Vil. He had the moves, all shiny and polished from lots of use.
He had the moves, the words, he had it all in his armamentarium. This should be a snap.

Have sex, make sure she was pleasured, gain her confidence, seduce some intel on Worontzoff out of her, gain an invite to the musical evening Fuckhead was organizing…that was the mission. He’d done harder things in his life, he could do this. Easy.

So why was he finding it so hard to focus on the job while she was in his arms?

He stopped just inside the door, back against it, just for a second. His knees had turned weak when her tongue met his. It was crazy. Maybe it was the bottle of wine he’d polished off over dinner, though he was known for being able to hold his liquor. He was Irish, after all.

So maybe it wasn’t the wine, but her mouth. The taste of her, spicy, sexy, with an overlay of the chocolate and cream desert.

He lifted his mouth for a moment and looked down at her. Her hair spilled over the collar of his overcoat, light against the dark color. Her lips were red, slightly swollen, pale gemlike eyes wide, the pupils dilated. A vein beat against her neck and he wanted, violently, to feel that beat against her breast.

She was watching him, taking cues from him, though the only kind of cue she could get right now was
How fast can I get you into bed?
Should he be slowing this down? Her eyes fluttered shut and she lifted her mouth to his in a kiss that was all too short.

Maybe he didn’t have to slow this down. Which, all in all, was a good thing, because he didn’t know if he could.

“Do you want coffee?” she whispered finally, pulling back and searching his eyes. Did he want coffee? Shit no, he didn’t
need coffee, he didn’t need any stimulants. The way he was feeling right now, he needed someone to hose him down.

“No,” he whispered back.

Christ, she was pretty. No, she wasn’t just pretty. She was beautiful. Not many women were beautiful, magazine articles to the contrary. They gussied themselves up, and a lot of them that were secretly dogs wore so much makeup you really couldn’t tell what they looked like in there, under all the glop. And then of course there was the knife and the needle, giving half the women in America the same thin, upturned nose and big pillowy lips.

Charity had a natural beauty that didn’t scream
look at me!
in any way, and yet once you did, once you really
looked
, it was almost impossible to tear your gaze away.

Her makeup had almost gone, but she didn’t need it. That clear, porcelain poreless skin that looked softer than anything human could possibly be, the big, tilted light-colored cat’s eyes, the delicate shape of her cheekbones and jaw—they were a magnet for the eyes.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he whispered, then winced. “
Whoa.
Sorry.”

“Thanks,” she whispered and laughed softly. “Why are we whispering?”

They were whispering because it was a whispering moment. Actually, it was a magical moment. She felt so good in his arms. Everything about this felt good. The night, the woman…

It was utterly silent, as if they were the only people left in a white world of snow and silence. She was smiling dreamily up at him, beautiful and welcoming.

This was the best place he’d been in since—shit, since he didn’t remember when.

Nick leaned against the door with her in his arms. He leaned against it because it was there and because, crazily, his knees were buckling.

It wasn’t Charity’s weight. She was slender, even slight. He’d bet the farm she didn’t weigh more than one twenty, tops. He’d climbed a mountain in the Kush carting a rucksack weighing more than eighty pounds, sixteen liters of water, and his XM8 with nine magazines, which weighed over twenty pounds. He hadn’t done it laughing and he hadn’t leaped like a mountain goat, but he’d done it.

Holding Charity was a snap in comparison. So why were his legs having problems holding him up?

Their eyes met and they moved as one. He bent down to her again just as she lifted her face to his. The kiss was long and deep, his cock rising painfully every time his tongue touched hers. He lifted his head again and smiled down into her eyes. Might as well just ask it.

“So—we headed for the bedroom?” Please God, let the answer be yes. If it wasn’t, he was going to howl. Tonight his fist simply wouldn’t be enough for the blue steeler in his pants.

She nodded.
Yes!

Another kiss that had his thigh muscles clenching. He was about ready to carry her off to the bedroom when the three molecules of brain matter he had left rang a warning bell.

The house was large, particularly for a single woman. It had been her family’s home. It was large enough to have to ask where her bedroom was.

He knew perfectly well where her bedroom was. He’d been in her house twice—he’d picked her locks while she was in the library, combing the house for clues to who she was.

Initially, it had been to find weaknesses, things he could leverage for intel. Drugs would have been good. Lots of alcohol would be good, too. Maybe a stash of heavily used vibrators and sex toys, though he’d sincerely hoped not at the time.

Addictions were like a door with a
WALK THROUGH ME
sign on it. Weaknesses, champagne tastes on a beer budget, sexual deviancy—they were all chinks in the armor, chinks he wouldn’t hesitate to use.

Thank God there’d been nothing. Consuelo had put him right off that stuff. If he never saw a fur-lined handcuff, if he never fucked a woman who was high in his life, he’d be delirious.

As it happened, there was nothing in Charity’s house but beautiful furniture, books, and paintings. Charity’s life was as easy to read as a book, appropriately enough, because her house was full of them. Full of CDs, too. The bought kind, which he thought was overkill in the upstanding citizen department. He was a law enforcement officer and he hadn’t bought music since 2001. Charity did, which spoke volumes.

There were watercolors everywhere, signed Clarissa Prewitt. Her mother.

The house, he realized now, was a reflection of her. Elegant, classy, feminine.

Another kiss that had his thigh muscles clenching. “Which way to your bedroom?” he asked against her mouth. He knew the answer. Corridor to the left. First door to the right.

“Corridor to the left,” she said. “First door to the right.” He started moving as soon as the words were out of her mouth. She looked up at him, wide-eyed. “You’re going to carry me to the bedroom?”

“Oh yeah.” It was the fastest way to get there. He needed fast because he was burning up. He needed fast before his knees gave out and he tumbled with her to the floor.

If they fell on the floor, he’d fuck her there, which was not good. Not romantic. This had to be romantic. He could do romantic. Couldn’t he? Since when wasn’t he in control?

Since about five minutes ago, apparently. He was kissing her and panting and sweating by the time he made it into her bedroom and gently put her on her feet. It would be easier to get her clothes off if he could just stop kissing her, but that seemed beyond his ability. He had one hand around the back of her head and he was fumbling with her clothes with the other.

Damn! Why didn’t he have
three
hands so he could undress himself at the same time?

He worked fast. Sweater, bra, skirt, stockings—thigh highs!
Yes!
—panties, shoes.
Ding!
Charity done. He lifted her again and placed her on the bed. An uncharitable observer would have said he threw her on the bed, so hard she bounced.

Now him.

God, he broke the land-speed record for undressing. Overcoat, shirt, undershirt, pants, briefs, shoes, socks.

Put on a rubber in record time.

Thank
God
he wasn’t on a mission because then it would have taken him minutes to get out of his shoulder rig, get rid of the ankle holster, unhook the spare magazines and flashbangs, lose the combat knife and sheath…

No wonder soldiers didn’t fuck in the field. It took them an hour to get undressed.

Finally, finally, he was naked and looking down at an equally naked Charity, spread out on the bed, a luscious little soft pale morsel, arranged solely for his delight.

As stoked as he was, as horny as he was, as much as he wanted to jump her bones, he paused for just a moment to look at her, the pale perfection of her. Besides that delicate, slender body, all female grace, the expression in her beautiful eyes was enough to stop him dead. Softness, humor, affection…

It wasn’t what he was used to seeing in his sex partners. He was used to seeing lust and desire, and no emotions at all.

He frowned. Was she turned on? Or was she all wrapped up in this romantic fantasy she’d created in her head?

Only one way to find out.

Nick leaned down and clasped his hand around her ankle, pulling her leg out a little, anchoring it to the mattress. He was sidetracked for a second by the sight of her foot emerging from his dark fist.

God, even her
feet
were lovely. High-arched, narrow pink-tipped toes. Good enough to eat. If he were to start at her toes, though, it would take him all night.

Some other time.

His eyes tracked from her pretty feet, up over the narrow ankles, up the long length of her legs and…ah. There it was, the source of all delight.

Here, too, she was perfection itself. A little cloud of pale brown pubic hair surrounding puffy pink tissues that, yes, thank you, God, glistened. It was official. She was turned on. He could get going.

Well, one last thing.

Nick let go of her ankle and ran his fingertips up her leg, enjoying every inch of the trip. She was smooth and warm and entrancing. He slowed his hand down to savor the sensations, watching her eyelids droop a little.

Oh yeah. Her cheeks were tinted pink now, as were her nipples. He could see her heartbeat in her left breast, rocking the soft tissues. She was getting turned on by his finger on her leg.

Oh, and maybe what she could read in his eyes.

“Nick,” she whispered.

“We’re getting there,” he answered. Oh God, this was just such a delight.

Finally, his hand arrived where it wanted to be, against her soft little cunt. She was wet and getting wetter by the second. His finger was enough to call up moisture out of her body, which he spread against the lips of her sex. He dipped his finger into her, just a little, and felt her jolt and sigh. He pressed his free hand against her knee, pressing it closer to the bed, opening her more for his touch.

The instant she understood what he wanted, she spread her legs for him. Nick could barely tear his eyes away from her—pink and puffy and soft.

Her eyes were closed now and he knew she must be concentrating on the sensation of his hand on her, at times in her. She sighed.

He could keep this up forever, just touching her lightly in the silence of the night, but when he glanced down at himself, he realized he’d better do this the old-fashioned way before he blew all over her belly and embarrassed himself and her.

He was enormous, red and swollen and hard as a club. His hand was having a good time and his head was, too, but his cock was protesting.

Do it right or I’m out of here.

Okay
, he told his dick. It always had been a hard-ass.

Keeping his right hand cupping her cunt, he leaned his left hand on the mattress, right next to her sharp little hip bone and mounted her.

Now the sensations changed. He no longer felt a dreamy sort of pleasure, as if in a daze. Now the feelings were sharper, harsher, keener. Acute and hard-edged.