Page 31

CHAPTER 31

Maarja didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry that bully relative of yours is dead seemed inappropriate. “Connor? Your cousin Connor? Why him?” seemed safer.

“I’ve disappeared off their radar. They know this will flush me out of hiding.”

“They’ll kill a man to bring you to the surface?”

“He’s a minor player, but he’s my minor player.” Subtext: once Dante claimed you as his, you were his forever.

She slid from beneath the sheets. “Let’s do it.”

He gave a laugh. “I should have known you’d be prepared.”

She pulled a hotel robe off the hook. “I’m not the one who did whatever happened, if that’s what you mean.”

“I know that. But I didn’t order the hit, so who did?”

He seemed to be dismissing her abilities, and that irritated her. “Why do you know that’s not me? Anyone can arrange a hit, and after that scene at your mother’s funeral, I could be perceived as having motive.”

“If you were going to kill somebody, you’d do it face-to-face. For instance, me.” He put his hand to his chest where, after their shower, the blood welled up again and formed a smear of crusty reddish-black over his skin. “Suitcases are over there. Yours is packed. Car’s out back. I need my cell phone and that knife I tossed last night when you—”

She pointed at the suitcases.

“Son of a goddamn bitch!” He stared at the knife hilt buried in the cloth side of the wheeled briefcase.

She grinned at him. After that display in the hotel room in Sacramento, sticking his writing pen into the wall to scare Tabitha the snitch into a faint, Maarja knew he must be able throw a knife and hit his target 100 percent of the time. Right now, he was down to 99 percent because he’d wanted to get in her—

“All I wanted was to get into your chatte .”

“Pants.” She took a calming breath. “You wanted to get in my pants.”

“I don’t give a damn about your pants .” He lifted the matte gold hardside suitcase onto the bed.

“I’m simply saying—”

“I know.” He opened the zipper, pulled out a compressed packing bag, and handed it to her. “You want me to use some manners when I talk to you.”

“Do you know how?” she snapped.

“I know how. I like to see you flinch when I say the bad words.” He grinned at her the way she grinned at him. “Get dressed, take a piss, and we’ll get going.”

She sighed in mighty exasperation. “Do we have to call it that?”

“What girlie thing do you call it?”

She cackled a little.

“What? What do you call peeing? Pissing?”

“I’ll tell you if you promise to use that term from now on?”

“You call it taking a winkle or something, don’t you?”

Still smiling, she shook her head.

“Okay, I promise, what?”

He really wanted to know, and she really wanted to hear him use this euphemism. “After Chrispin graduated from high school, the family took a trip to France. We were exploring a park in Alsace–Lorraine, we watched the sunset, we wandered toward the parking lot—and the gates were closed. Locked. No one around. We hiked to another gate. Locked. We wandered until Alex snarled, ‘I don’t care, I’ve got to take a leak.’”

He was getting the drift, and grinned.

“She headed into the bushes, dropped her pants, and for the first time, a policeman showed up. He yelled, ‘No make à le pipi!’ and we’ve called it that ever since.”

“That sounds like pee-pee to me.”

“Yep, but it’s spelled differently in French.”

“You want to me to call taking a piss make à le pipi in front of my tough-guy relatives?”

She crossed her arms and waited.

He stared forbiddingly. Sighed. Said, “Go make à le pipi .”

She went into the bathroom and shared a smirk with her reflection. She and Dante had started a relationship—she refused to call it a marriage—and they were testing each other. She supposed that was what couples did and at this point, she refused to worry about that. Staying alive had a way of re-arranging priorities.

As she slipped out of the robe, she saw the smear of his heart’s blood between her breasts, and she was right back to the conflict of being a modern woman who half believed all his talk about fate.

She came out wearing black leather leggings, a body-hugging sleeveless camo T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. Black boots completed the ensemble.

He smiled when he saw her. “I told Andere I wanted an outfit you could fight in. I’d say he’s been watching too many biker movies.”

“Or dominatrix movies!”

He winced. “Please. I don’t want to think that about Andere and…no. Please no.”

He, she was displeased to note, wore brown cargo pants, a midnight blue golf shirt, a brown jacket (probably to cover the bulge of his pistol), and brown running shoes. “You look comfortable.” The bottle was gone from the dresser, so she knew the jacket concealed that, too.

He grabbed a NOLA baseball cap, pulled it on his head, opened the door, and gestured her into the corridor. “Are you not comfortable?”

“Physically, yes.” Every bit of the leather was buttery soft, easy to move in. “Mentally I feel as if I’m missing a whip and some chains.” She ran down the flight of stairs, glanced up to see Dante standing, staring at her as if it wasn’t only Andere who enjoyed the random dominatrix fantasy.

Ha! Danger permeated the air, each breath could be her last, and something about the prospect of death balanced by the prospect of sex enhanced every aspect of this moment. She took the corner and started down the next flight of stairs, then popped back to catch him in mid-stride. “The pants are tear-away,” she said.

He missed a step, jumped, landed, stumbled again, and when he righted himself, he moved so swiftly that if she hadn’t been prepared, he would have caught her and—she didn’t know what he would do. Tear away the pants?

She sprinted down to the ground floor and into the dark quiet kitchen. Catching her as she bolted for the closed back door, he pulled her close. “Stop,” he said. “Quiet.”

His body was tense; she didn’t know how to read that. Wariness as they prepared to leave? Or sexual need that must be reined in? She guessed the answer to both was yes .

He opened the door, stepped out ahead of her, did a visual check, then gestured her out. “That car.” His voice sounded perfectly normal, the tone conversational.

That car was an SUV, a couple of years old and a generic silver color.

Rain splattered her as she hurried to the passenger door. “I thought it would be the limo.”

He walked close behind her, and with his hand on her elbow, he helped her in. “They won’t be looking for this car.”

“That’s for sure. It looks like a soccer-mom car.”

“I have my soccer-mom fantasies.” Now that he had her in the car, he lingered as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “Will you wear rolled-down cotton socks and white tennis shoes for me?”

“I’m wearing tear-away leather leggings and you’re lusting after cotton socks and white tennis shoes?”

He pointed his thumb at his chest. “Midfield defender.”

He had surprised her. “You played soccer?”

“In high school. Why do you sound surprised?”

“Team sports seem so…normal.”

“High school was normal. Team sports were normal. How do you think guys get soccer-mom fantasies?” Leaning in, he kissed her surprised mouth. He shut the door and came around. “Make sure you’re belted in.”

“Of course.” She clicked the seat belt. “Out of curiosity, what are you expecting on this trip?”

“Nothing. But I haven’t lived this long by not anticipating everything.”

My God. The world he inhabited.

She heard his voice in her head. You are one of J?nos’s tribe. Think what you like; you were born to this world, same as me.

Damn him. She didn’t want his voice in her head.

He put the vehicle in gear, pulled out, and drove without headlights up the road to Angelica’s estate. The gates opened.

He drove in.

He parked.

He drove out.

The gates closed.

She didn’t know why, but she figured he knew what he was doing. He’d better; this SUV had a manual transmission. He shifted gears from first to second to third to fourth to fifth… She knew how to drive a stick, of course; that was one of the requirements for her job, to be able to drive vans and trucks of all sizes. But most people couldn’t, and darned if she could figure out why he didn’t have an easier-to-drive vehicle. Except…if a person knew what they were doing, driving a stick gave a control that couldn’t be duplicated with an automatic. He liked control. He demanded control. She almost asked if he would ever allow her on top…but he drove without headlights until they turned onto California Route 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, and she didn’t want to distract him. Intermittent rain splattered the windshield, and without stars or moon, the night was so dark it loomed .

When he did turn on the headlights, she breathed a sigh of relief. People who had a lick of sense didn’t drive the Pacific Coast Highway at night; it curled and twisted in switchbacks, took dips and rises like the roller coaster in Santa Cruz, and experienced regular slough-offs that would expectedly take the (mostly) two lanes of asphalt into the Pacific Ocean.

Maarja and Dante headed north in the deepest dark of night with fog curling through the valleys and rain squalls dusting the heights. The southbound lane clung to the edge over the Pacific, but they were tucked up against the cliffs, which provided a greater sense of security about not toppling into the waves and at the same time a niggling worry about boulders tumbling off the cliff sides and smashing them flat.

She didn’t even know how to be properly afraid.

She started giggling.

“What’s so funny?” Dante asked.

She mimicked him. “It’s four thirty in the morning, and I’m about to get laid.” In the faint light of the dash, she could see him smirk.

“It was. And I was.”

“ I was sleeping.”

“Afterward, I was going to let you sleep late.”

“And wake me up how many more times?”

He shook his head. “Three’s my limit.”

The inexhaustible lover: another romance myth shot to hell.

He continued, “After that, you’d be too sore.”

So…inexhaustible and considerate. And bossy and conniving.

“Sleep now,” he suggested. “I’m driving.”

“On this road? At this speed?” Because he wasn’t wasting time. The headlights flashed, illuminating pavement and cliffs and dips at an alarming velocity. “I can sleep when we get where we’re going. Where is that, by the way?” Subtle, Maarja.

“My office in San Francisco. I’ll drop you off there. You’ll be safe while I check out the situation.” He didn’t even pause for her to come up with an answer. “Is precognition a common gift among the Rom?”