Kissing My Killer (6 page)

Alexei

This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.

I had one arm around her waist. Her back was against my front as I walked backwards, dragging her heels along the carpet, checking over my shoulder for any witnesses. My careful plan was gone. Inside, I was beating myself up over and over for my stupidity, but even that couldn’t completely distract me from—

Her soft ass grinding against my crotch as she kicked and struggled—

That mass of walnut-brown hair, cool and wet against my neck—

Her open, panting mouth, lips soft against my palm—

I reached the door of her apartment and hauled her inside, kicking the door shut behind us. I dumped her in a heap on the floor.

She opened her mouth to scream.

I pulled out the gun and pointed it right at her face.

Gabriella

My scream died in my throat. I stared down the barrel of the gun and it seemed to expand to fill my vision, a black hole that was going to consume me. He was panting, though nowhere near as hard as me, and his eyes were wide. But the gun didn’t waver at all.

I was sitting awkwardly, one leg bent and one straight, but I didn’t dare move. I looked up into his eyes. The icy gray was there, colder than it had been in the coffee shop, colder than anything I’d ever seen. A merciless, machine-like gaze. But this time, I could see the other side of him, the flash of blue stronger than it had been before. He was battling with himself. My fate was being decided, right in front of me.

“You’ve got the wrong person,” I croaked. “I’m nobody.” I hadn’t been ready for how the last two words made me feel.

He shook his head. Then he said, “You’re the hacker.”

And I suddenly realized what his accent was:
Russian.

He’d been sent by Nikolai Orlov. Or one of the other Russians the Sisters of Invidia had hacked. We’d thought we were untraceable. And it had all happened so far away, on computers in Moscow...none of us had ever contemplated that these animals might catch up with us in the real world. “Oh Jesus Christ,” I whispered. Which was as good as an admission.

His entire body was tensed and tight. I could see the corded muscles in his neck standing out and the white of his knuckles as he gripped the gun. And then I saw his finger start to tighten on the trigger.

Alexei

You have to.

What I wanted was irrelevant.

How I felt about her was irrelevant.

My entire career, I’d followed the rules: be distant, be disconnected, be a machine. And then she’d appeared out of nowhere and changed everything, made me break every rule.

And now I was paying the price.

One bullet. One shot between the eyes. One squeeze of the trigger.

That’s all I had to do.

I’d never closed my eyes before. I’d always figured I owed them that, the people I killed. But I closed them now.
Just do it. You can pull the trigger and not open your eyes until you’ve turned away.

It was worse, with my eyes closed. I could see her in the coffee shop, looking up at me. I could see her naked in the window. I could see her as she was now, in her nightshirt with the cartoon elephant on it.

How?!
I screamed at myself.
How could you not guess it was her?
But I already knew exactly why: this girl had bewitched me from the very first moment we’d met. After that, my brain hadn’t let me even entertain the possibility that the hacker might be female. She’d made me lose my edge and that was terrifying.

My finger tightened a little more on the trigger. All I had to do was move one finger. It shouldn’t be this difficult.

Um…
she said in my mind. We were back in the coffee shop and her wrist was so slender, so fragile in my hand.

I could smell her: strawberry soap and warm femininity. I heard a tiny, silken sound, right at the edge of perception, and realized it was the sound of her hair as she frantically shook her head.

I opened my eyes.

She’d started crying while my eyes were closed. Her cheeks were gleaming with tears and those big hazel eyes were scrunched up and brimming. I watched her cry and it was as if someone was crushing my heart in their fist.

The arm holding the gun suddenly dropped and I spun to face away from her. “
Chyort voz'mi!”
I yelled.
Damn it!
I called myself
zalupa
and
dolbo yeb
and a few other names beside as I cradled the gun in both hands, hoping that I could work myself up to it.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t kill her.

I turned back to her and sat down on the floor with absolutely no idea what to do next.

Gabriella

He sat down heavily, his muscled body sending a shockwave through the floor. I didn’t dare to move. Should I look at him? Not look at him? Which would be more likely to spur him to violence?

Everything I’d ever read or seen on the news about hostages and gunmen was blurring into one in my head, but none of it made sense. Those people were all crazy guys who picked up a gun and started shooting because something went wrong in their lives, or because there was something wrong with them. This guy was different. He’d marched into my apartment utterly efficient and without hesitation and he’d clearly been ready to kill me...until, suddenly, he couldn’t.

He wasn’t a crazed killer driven by emotion. He was a professional and emotion was the only thing keeping me alive.

He was sitting with his knees up and the gun dangling between them, staring at the floor. The sheer size of him would have been intimidating even without the gun.

I had one leg bent under me and it was starting to cramp really badly. I
had
to move it. I did it as slowly as I could—

He didn’t lift his head, but he raised his eyes to look at me. God, he was gorgeous. Those gray eyes were beautiful but, when they were filled with doubt and conflict as they were now, they were achingly sad. How could a man so strong, so physically brutal, have that much emotion inside him?

And why did I feel such an instinctual yearning to try to help him with the pain?

I slowly finished moving my leg. That left me sitting in the same position he was—on my ass on the floor, knees up, facing him. For a long moment we just sat there, barely breathing.

What the fuck am I going to do?

I tentatively leaned forward and put my hand on his ankle, just trying to make some sort of connection.

And that’s when he grabbed me.

Alexei

Her fingers closed on my ankle and that snapped me back to alertness. All those hardwired instincts kicked in, the ones that had been forged in the mud and the rain with my commanding officer screaming in my ear. I
reacted.

I grabbed her wrist and
heaved
and she flew through the air like a doll. She landed on the floor on her back, the air knocked out of her, and I was already on top of her. One hand was on her upper chest, pinning her down. The other held the gun, the barrel pressed to her forehead.

I was almost as shocked as she was. I’d done it on instinct, without conscious thought. But suddenly I was there, the gun cocked and ready—

Do it! Do it now!

Her eyes stared up at me beseechingly. I couldn’t do it. But I couldn’t let her go, either. The consequences of
not
killing her started to sink in. I had no idea what to do.

And as my mind spun, the rest of me was left to react in its own way. I started to become aware of things. Things like the scent of her, again, every breath I took drinking in more of her.

Things like the way her body felt under mine, so soft and warm. I was basically lying on top of her. One of my legs was outside hers, but the other was between them, our groins pressed together.

I glanced down at my hand. I’d just pinned her down, the way I would a man. But that meant my fingers were brushing her collarbone and the heel of my hand—

The heel of my hand was on the upper slope of her breast.

I could feel the warm softness through the thin fabric of her nightshirt. I remembered that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

I looked down and saw that the nightshirt had ridden up when I’d thrown her. On one side, it was rucked up around her upper thighs. On the other, it was high enough that I could see her black briefs and even the skin just above them.

I could feel myself getting hard. My body’s caveman reaction, a gorgeous woman powerless and spread beneath me….

No! Jesus, no!
I wasn’t going to take her by force! The idea sickened me. But that didn’t change the effect she was having on me. I was rock hard, now. I knew she must be able to feel the bulge in my pants because it was throbbing against her thigh. And the head of my cock was right up against the front panel of her panties.