Ripped (2 page)

Oh, holy hell, he was like marble. I could feel how firm his body was through the layers of our clothes, and it made my pulse quicken. I tensed, warmth gathering between my legs.

Mentally, I scolded myself. It was pretty obvious that this guy had killed Prince Larbi. Now, I didn’t think Larbi was in the running for Humanitarian of the Year or anything, but that didn’t mean that I approved of running around killing people. And I certainly didn’t get a charge out of guys who were killers or anything.

But here I was, feeling warm feelings for this guy.

Our bodies were so close.

It was just because he was attractive, I told myself. He was hot—that was all. If he’d been ugly, I would never have—

He put a gun against my temple.

“Drop the gun,” he said to Starling, his voice a low growl.

CHAPTER TWO

Cade

I always kept a spare gun on a job. Never knew when I was going to run into trouble, and it wouldn’t do to be unarmed. I hadn’t expected trouble to be in the form of this barely-dressed, over-made-up girl, but life’s full of surprises. From what I gathered, these girls were sisters, and the gun-wielding girl was a member of Prince Larbi’s harem. The t-shirt girl was not.

Good.

Why I cared about whether or not she’d been fucking Prince Larbi, I didn’t know. I was holding her pretty close right now, and she was all softness and curves, and I was thinking about how nice it would be to bend her over the desk and—

Well, not with the dead body there.

Murder might get me charged up, but corpses didn’t.

I cleared my throat. “Drop the gun, or I shoot your sister.”

The girl in my arms quivered. “Don’t,” she whispered.

“It’s up to your sister here,” I said, glaring at the gun-wielding girl. The quivering made my cock stir. Inwardly, I cringed. I didn’t want her to feel it if I got hard. Why I cared, I didn’t really know. It was just embarrassing.

Of course, I was threatening to kill her, so that put a damper on any interaction we could possibly have.

It probably shouldn’t matter. I should probably be shameless, just drive my hard-on into the curve of her ass, dry hump her right then and then, like a dog. I had the gun. I could do what I liked.

But.

Well, just because I was a contract killer didn’t mean I was an asshole.

The gun-wielding girl took one hand off the gun. “I’m just going to call the police.”

“Don’t do that,” I said, jamming my gun tighter against her sister’s skull. I wouldn’t go to jail, of course. I was working for the government. But it would damage my reputation. I didn’t get arrested, ever. I got away clean. If I were to be entangled in the justice system, it would make me look as if I didn’t know what I was doing.

The girl in the robe hesitated.

“Put the gun down,” I said.

She put the gun down.

“Now,” I said. “Come away from the phone.”

She bit down on her lip.

Oh, damn it all to hell, it didn’t matter now. I could let go of the t-shirt girl and make a run for it, but the girl in the robe would call the other guards and they’d be on me before I got out of the building. This whole situation was fucked.

“Why did you do it?” said the girl in the robe. She let out a sob. “Why would you hurt him?”

I gritted my teeth. “Now, look here. You were not supposed to be here or to do any of this. If you hadn’t shown up, I would have simply walked out of here, and everything would have been fine. But now you’ve seen me—”

“Oh, God, you’re going to kill us, aren’t you? Because we can identify you.” Robe girl was lost in sobs, clutching her face, smearing mascara over her cheeks.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Do you have any idea how unreliable eye-witnesses are? You wouldn’t recognize me in a million years. No, it’s only that there was a gun shot, and people heard it, and—”

The door burst open.

Yeah. That.

I turned to face the two guards who had entered the room, thrusting the girl out in front of me. “No one moves or the girl gets it!” Ha. I always did want to say that. I grinned.

The guards froze.

“Throw down your guns,” I said.

The guards hesitated.

I backed up. “Guns on the ground or I blow off her head.”

The girl in my arms shook again. She was terrified.

I felt a little guilty about that. Poor thing. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She wasn’t even fucking Prince Larbi. Anyway, she didn’t need to worry. I wasn’t going to shoot her in the head. That wasn’t my style. I might have been a contract killer, but I had a code. Kind of like Dexter, only I got paid for murdering people.

The guards exchanged a look, and then they both bent down and carefully lowered their guns to the ground.

“Good,” I said, backing up some more, taking the girl with me. “Now, we’re going out the door here and out of the building. When I get to the ground floor, if there’s anyone there waiting for me, I’ll blow her so full of holes, her mother wouldn’t be able to identify the body.”

The guards both flinched a little.

Inwardly, I grinned. I’d really sold that, I thought. I backed up again, going through the door, pulling the girl with me.

Once we were out of the office, I kicked the door closed, and then I turned around, pushing the girl ahead of me, and lowering the gun.

* * *

Shell

My heart was doing jumping jacks inside my rib cage. I had never been so terrified in my entire life. And for some reason, the fact that I’d been marginally turned on when all this started meant that my brain had crossed all the wires and was pumping the adrenaline between my thighs. With every beat of my heart, my pussy throbbed. I was getting wet.

But I was afraid. Really afraid. This guy was claiming that he was going to blow my head off, and that did not excite me. Being dead was not high on my list of turn-ons.

Once we were out of the office, he let go of me, pushing me forward.

I stumbled ahead of him.

He yanked me to my feet. “Run,” he said.

I didn’t. I didn’t move my legs. I wasn’t going to do what he said. He was going to kill me.

He wrapped an arm around my waist and picked me up. “I’m not going to kill you. I promise. Now,
run
.” He set me back down on the ground.

This time, I did run.

I don’t know why.

Possibly it was because I was all hot and bothered—scared and aroused at the same time—and my brain was clearly kicked into some kind of fight-or-flight-primitive scenario. Since fighting wasn’t an option—he was made of marble, remember—flight was all I had.

I ran.

He steered me out of another door in the prince’s bedroom and into a hallway. He seemed to know where he was going.

There was an elevator ahead.

He yanked me to a stop, shot a glance over his shoulder, and hit the down button.

I gasped, my heart racing, my breath coming in short bursts.

He rocked on his feet and gave me a sheepish smile. “Sorry about this.”

Seriously? I gaped at him.

The elevator opened.

He gestured with the gun. “Ladies first.”

“Fuck you,” I said. It was stupid to say that to a guy with a gun, of course, but as I mentioned, my brain wasn’t really functioning. All the blood in my body seemed to be heading between my legs. I was drenched down there.

Totally weird.

He pushed me into the elevator, just as the door to the prince’s bedroom opened up and the guards who’d failed to save us before burst out.

The elevator door closed behind us.

The man pushed the button for the ground floor. He looked me over. “Seriously, I know I said I would kill you, but I was just trying to get away. This is all just bad luck for both of us.” He smiled again.

I licked my lips. He had a nice smile. Also, now that we were close, I could see that he had long, long eyelashes. Too long for a boy. They ringed his eyes and softened his masculine face, making him look almost… pretty.

God. Why was I noticing shit like that? I swallowed. “You’re only saying that to lull me into a false sense of security.”

“No, I’m not.” He looked offended. Then he shrugged. He grinned again. “But it’s smart of you to say that. If you were really in danger as a hostage, I bet you’d live through it regardless. Never let your guard down.”

What? He was complimenting me? I was thoroughly confused.

The elevator door opened.

He snatched me back against him again, gun at my temple.

I whimpered. I couldn’t help it.

But there was no one there.

“Walk,” he said in my ear.

I walked. He had told me he wasn’t going to kill me, so maybe I should have simply refused to obey, called his bluff.

But with the cold metal of the barrel of a gun against my skin, I simply couldn’t afford to take that kind of a risk.

We went about ten feet to a door that opened out into the spring air. Outside, the sky was blue, dotted with tiny, fluffy clouds. There were birds chirping at the top of their lungs. There was a strip of well-manicured grass ahead of us, then the sidewalk, then a street. Across the road was a parking lot.

No one was out here, at least none of the guards were.

“Okay,” I said. “You got away. Now let me go.”

He moved the gun from my head to the small of my back.

I shivered. There was something intimate about that, something terrifying.

He looked around. “I don’t think so. They could be watching. You’re going to have to come with me. Sorry about that.”

“Come with you?” What? No, no, no, I was not going somewhere with this man who I was inappropriately attracted to. Definitely not.

“Not forever. Just until I can get out of here. Get clear. I’ll need some insurance, and you’ll do nicely.” He poked me with the gun. “We’re going across the street.”

I moved, hurrying ahead of the gun.

We crossed the strip of grass, the sidewalk, the crosswalk that went across the street, and then he pushed me inside the driver’s side of a black Ford Mustang.

“Crawl over to the other seat,” he told me.

I crawled. I guess he thought that if he let me get in the passenger side, that I would just jump out and run. Well, he had another thing coming, because I was just going to throw open that door the minute that I got—

He locked the doors, settling into the driver’s seat. “Sorry,” he said, and he really did sound contrite.

I glared at him.

“Look, this will all be over in a few hours,” he said. “I promise. You’ll have a fun story to tell your friends. Your boyfriend.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I muttered, unsure why I was telling him that.

“Oh, too bad,” he said, but actually sounded pretty happy about that.

My lips parted, and I watched him turn the key in the ignition. “Are you
flirting
with me?” I said.

He laughed. “Flirting?” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Buckle up.” He backed the car up, one hand on the steering wheel, one hand pulling his own seatbelt over his body.

I was flung forward by the force of the car’s movement. I seized my seatbelt and pulled it on.

The car hurtled forward. I grasped the door handle for dear life.

He careened out of the parking lot and onto the street. Within minutes, the prince’s home was too far away to see. “Are you flirting with
me
?” he said

I snapped my head back forward to look at him. I sputtered. “I would
never
.”

He nodded, still smiling. The car was a five speed. He switched gears. “Well, me either.”

I sat back in the seat and stared straight ahead.

We took I-270 and drove out past Shady Grove, right to the edge of where the metro stations stopped. Then he took an exit, pulled into a parking lots in a strip mall that contained a Target, a Walgreens, and an H&R Block, and stopped the car.

He began unbuttoning the buttons on the security guard shirt he was wearing. “I know this is inconvenient, but you’ve got a cell phone, right? Someone can come pick you up?”

I was gaping at his bare chest as he revealed it. His skin was tawny. His stomach was flat and hard.

“Even if not,” he said, “you can probably walk to the metro from here.” He tugged the shirt off, tossed it in the back seat, and pulled out a t-shirt from back there.

I swallowed.

He grinned at me, holding the t-shirt. “Like what you see, then?”

I looked away.

He pulled the shirt over his head. “You could stay if you wanted.” He leaned across the car so that our faces were nearly touching. “You could show me what’s under your shirt too.”