My Dangerous Pleasure (9 page)
P
aisley laughed, but she was faking it because for the minute that she’d misunderstood what Iskander had just said, some twisted part of her had considered saying heck, yes, she’d take a shower with him. She couldn’t, of course. And wouldn’t. Not even with the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.
“Oh my goodness. Of course you meant separate showers.”
“Sure.”
She brushed gray dust off her arms. The stuff clung to her shirt and skin like there was glue in it. “I would love to take a shower. Thank you.”
He grinned. “Sorry about that. That just came out wrong. I’m not really a perv.”
“No worries.” It was hard not to believe he’d been beautiful all his life, but maybe not. Maybe as a kid he’d been chubby or had a bad complexion, or maybe that incredible bone structure and musculature hadn’t come together until after the horror of adolescence. She wondered if he’d been the class clown when he was a kid.
“You need to get out of those clothes.”
“Desperately.” She picked at her shirt. She liked the idea of Iskander having been imperfect once. It made him more human. “The stuff sticks like glue, doesn’t it?”
How odd, though. There was a coating of the gritty stuff on the floor around where Iskander stood and hardly any around her. She scratched a spot behind her shoulder while she looked around. Some of the grit had gone down the back of her shirt and was itching something fierce. He kept his house tidy. There wasn’t much clutter that she could see as long as you didn’t count the trail of dust they’d left. “We’re tracking it all over your house.”
“I’ll clean up while you’re in the shower.”
“There’s only one problem.” A chasm opened up in her stomach as the extent of her losses hit home. She couldn’t run up to her apartment and get a change of clothes. “I haven’t got any clothes but these.”
He kept brushing dust off his torso but looked at her from under his thick lashes. She was used to men staring at her chest, and she was glad he wasn’t. “Give me your sizes, and I’ll run out and pick up a few things. Enough so you can go out in public and get new stuff.”
Paisley stood there, her skin itching just about everywhere, and felt lost. Completely lost. Her stomach clenched as her thoughts flashed to her incinerated apartment. She’d lost everything. “I haven’t got any money.”
“Hello?” He waved his hands at her. “Plastic?”
She gazed at him. “My credit card was in the freezer, and the freezer is gone.”
“The freezer?” He blinked and she caught a flash of blue on his eyelid. “Why the hell would you put your credit card in the freezer?”
“My accountant put me on an austerity plan for the first five years of the bakery, and this is only year two. I’m not allowed to use a credit card except in dire emergencies. I read you should freeze your credit cards in a block of ice so you can’t use them.” She slumped against the counter and fought the urge to cry. “I pay cash for just about everything, and it so happens I just spent mine on groceries.”
Iskander came over and patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, cupcake. Jesus, don’t cry. I promise everything’s going to be okay.”
She straightened and tried to brush off the dust that had accumulated in the crook of her elbow, but the stuff clung to her shirt and fingers. Tears jammed up in the back of her throat and burned behind her eyes. She was breaking up emotionally, and his being so nice to her wasn’t helping her keep herself together. “I’ve got maybe ten dollars on me.”
“Whoa.” His eyebrows shot up. “No crying.”
She swallowed hard. “Nothing except the groceries, the contents of my purse, and the clothes on my back.” She was talking too much, she knew it, but Iskander was a sympathetic listener. If there was anything she needed right now, it was sympathy. “I have less than a thousand dollars in the bank, and I need that money for emergencies.”
“You don’t think this qualifies as an emergency?” He shook his head. “You’re right. It doesn’t. I’ve got your back.”
She kept brushing at the grit on her clothes, but it just would not come off. The reality of her situation rolled through her. Her hands shook as she swatted harder at the dust. The stuff stuck to her fingers.
Iskander picked gray globs off her arm and fingers and shook his hand. The grit fell slowly to the floor, where he stepped on it like he was making sure it was dead. “There’s no crying in this house.” He put a hand under her chin and pushed up. She kept her eyes down, but a tear trickled down her cheek anyway. “Hey, Paisley,” he said softly. “Cupcake. Listen to me. If you have to cry, I’ll man up and take it, all right?”
“I’m fine.”
He reached over the counter, grabbed a paper towel, and handed it to her. She dabbed at her eyes.
“Bless you for being so sweet.”
“My insurance will pay to replace your stuff, so don’t worry about money. I’ll front you enough cash to get by.”
“You can’t do that.” Her scalp was starting to itch, too.
Her landlord’s expression turned serious. So much so that he looked like a different person. A frisson of arousal rolled through her. When he wasn’t smiling, his features were a bit austere, and the tats made her think of gangs and street soldiers and the kind of man who got ink like that, which had surely been no trivial process to undergo.
“Yes, I can,” he said. “What do you think insurance is for? Let me take care of this. At least until you’re back on your feet, all right? You can save your emergency fund for when you’re really desperate.”
She had to swallow a lump in her throat in order to reply. “That’s generous of you.”
“Since you’re staying here, give me your cell number. Just in case.” She did and he entered in into his phone. He called her number so she could add his to her contacts. How odd and unsettling that he looked so different, so serious. So capable of violence. She backed away from him. “I’m texting another contact to you. If Rasmus bothers you, you call the police, but then I want you to call this number, okay?” He pressed a few buttons and then her phone beeped. “Put that in your favorites or on speed dial or whatever so you don’t waste time looking for the number. If you do have to call, tell whoever answers that Iskander gave you the number and that you need help. It’s going to be someone I work with, okay? If for some reason they don’t know you’re staying with me and that Kessler is after you, I promise you, it’s enough that they know I told you to call, okay?”
She was having a hard time adjusting to the serious Iskander. “And just who is it you work with?”
He frowned. “People who know how to deal with shit like this.”
“Like?”
“That’s all I can tell you right now, okay? You call if you have to.”
She nodded. Not that she would. He seemed to have guessed her reluctance to do any such thing, because he narrowed his eyes at her.
“Trust me, whoever answers at that number will have no trouble with Kessler.”
Her heart lurched. “You sound like you know him. Do you?”
“Kessler?”
She hated that Rasmus Kessler had made her so suspicious. He’d proved to her how easy it was to fool people and what an illusion it was that life was ever safe or simple. “Do you know him? Has he been calling you about me, too?”
“No, he hasn’t called me about you or anyone else.” His sharp look wasn’t anything like his usual cheerful self. He didn’t smile at all, and his expression gave her a chill. “I wish I’d known he was bothering you.”
“Why?” She was past wanting to cry. Mostly. But she was hollow inside. Bereft. “So you could evict me because I have a stalker?”
A guilty look flashed across his face and made her think that’s exactly what he would have done. “No,” he said.
She thought,
Liar
. Then he shrugged. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was looking at the real Iskander. What was it his friend Harsh had said?
One of the most dangerous men I know
. What if he was?
“Look, if Kessler shows up again, it’ll take him a while to get past my pro—professional security, so I promise you, you’ll have time for both calls.”
Looking at him now, she believed Harsh was right that Iskander was dangerous. She took a step back. “He isn’t right in the head. You and your friends, whoever they are, need to understand that.”
“Believe me, we do.” Somewhere in his private thoughts, a switch flipped, and he was back to the smiling, mellow specimen of male beauty she knew. His grin broadened. “You’re getting all worked up over nothing. He isn’t going to come back today. He’s blown his wad for a while.”
“He’ll call,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“It’s what these sickos do.” She’d had to explain this before to people who didn’t get it. As she’d learned, there was a set of behaviors and psychological patterns involved in what Rasmus was doing to her. “He’s going to call because he thinks that now that’s punished me, I’ll see the error of my ways and agree that I love him.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Of course not.” She threw a hand into the air. “Not to a normal person. But he’ll call. A dozen times. Maybe twenty or thirty, and when I don’t answer, he’ll probably come here now that he’s found out where I live.” She felt the corners of her mouth twitch because, darn it all, she was about to cry. “I’ve been lucky up to now. He hasn’t harassed me at home.” She swallowed the lump in her throat that formed at the realization that her life had just gotten much, much worse. “He’ll start driving by here. Leaving me presents of dead birds, and, God, I don’t even want to think about it. You don’t want any part of this, trust me.” Her eyes burned with incipient tears. “It’s a nightmare.”
“Like I said”—he waved a hand—“professional security here.”
“What if you’re wrong?” She gripped the counter behind her. She didn’t see anything but the worst outcome. “What if he burns down your place, too? Because I’m in it?”
“That’s not going to happen.” He sighed and brought out his phone. He pushed some buttons and while his call was connecting, he said, “Make that list of what you need and your sizes. Gray. Hey… uh, are you free? Good. Listen, I need you to do me a favor. My tenant… yeah, her. She’s in a jam. She needs some stuff, and I don’t want to leave her here alone. Exactly. I owe you. I’ll e-mail you a list. Ten minutes. Fifteen tops. Me too. Thanks. Tell Durian I said hi.”
While she was writing her list on the back of an envelope she’d scrounged from the bottom of her purse, she said, “Your friend doesn’t have to get me clothes. I can do laundry and be fine for later.”
“She’s getting you clothes. Up to you whether they fit.”
“Fine.” She wrote down her sizes and handed over the envelope. In her experience, most men understood bra sizes quite well, but there was no hint of a smirk when he glanced at it. Maybe her luck was finally turning. Her landlord was turning out to be a genuinely decent guy.