Page 106 of Nothing More

Her sex clenched, and her pulse skipped, and she wanted to wreck him, leave him limp and drooling, but that simply wasn’t possible, because he could wreck her right back.

“Fine.” She moved to bite his lip, and he dodged, set his teeth along her jaw in warning.

“Go,” he said,commanded.

Raven spread her knees on the mattress, either side of his thighs, and she went.

Twenty-Two

Someone was knocking. Rather insistently. Raven was very warm, and very comfortable, even if her pillow was somewhat firm, and waking seemed like a horrible idea.

But the knocking wouldn’t let up.

She cracked her eyes open, and blinked a few times. It was dark, only a faint stripe of ambient city light lying along the foot of the bed. The foot of an unfamiliar bed.

A passing moment of panic, a flitting like sunlight past a leaf, and then she knew she was in the safehouse, the penthouse flat with the lovely terrace with the potted trees. The master suite, its four-poster, too-tall bed.

Toly shifted beneath her, sheets shushing and hissing as he stretched his legs. “What the fuck?” he croaked, voice thick with sleep.

Raven sat up, pulled the covers up over her bare breasts and clicked the side table lamp on – blurred vision, smear of yellow light, too harsh for her tired eyes – just as the bedroom door swung open. Should have locked the bloody thing.

A few more blinks, and she was able to identify the figure in the doorway as Tenny, fully dressed, expression unimpressed.

Raven came instantly, fully awake. “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, hiking the covers up to her chin. It was shame and embarrassment that turned her cheeks hot, but she schooled her face to indignant.

“I knocked,” he said, offhand, shrugging with one shoulder.

Beside her, Toly sat up, pushed his hair off his face, and grabbed his cigarettes off the table on his side.

“You’ll want to get dressed,” Tenny continued. “Dixon’s here.”

Raven felt her brows fly up. “Melissa Dixon?”

“Do you know another one?”

Raven checked the clock. “It’s six-ten!”

“Yeah.” Tenny stepped out, and pulled the door halfway shut. “Time to get up. Bring your toy,” he said, with a parting head-tilt Toly’s direction, and shut the door with an intentional slam.

“What a wanker,” she muttered, though her pulse was kicking, flooding her with unwanted adrenaline.

Toly had drawn his knees up, arms draped over them, and held his cigarette between his teeth while he blew smoke up at the ceiling rose. He wasn’t scowling, for once. His bland expression spoke of an inner turmoil, she thought, and wondered if it was as tempestuous as her own.

She flipped the covers back and stalked naked across the room toward her open suitcase, where it rested on top of the dresser. “What could this possibly be about? Couldn’t she have called? And when did Tenny even get in? I didn’t hear anything, did you? The door or the alarm or anything?”

When he didn’t answer, she turned around, knickers in one hand, bra in the other, and saw that he was still sitting and smoking, staring into the middle distance. His face totally impassive – but his eyes white-rimmed and hectic.Nervous.

Tenny knew about them, had known, but when they walked out of this room, there was no pretending they were any sort of secret anymore. Whoever was out there – Melissa for sure, which likely meant Pongo, in addition to Bennet and Shep, maybe Cassandra, if they’d been noisy and woken her – would know they’d both come from this room together. That they’d slept together.

There was no way for them to know that Raven wanted it to be something more, and now wasn’t the time for her to think of that.

She took herself firmly in hand, dressed, wished for a shower she didn’t have time to take, and whipped her hair up into a quick bun. She pulled on her gray silk dressing robe, slid her feet into slippers, and went to stand beside the bed.

Toly took a long drag, and angled his face away from her to exhale through nose and mouth, forceful gray streams, the acrid smell tickling her nostrils in a not-unpleasant way. When he turned to face her, finally, she found he was worse off than she’d thought from across the room. He lookedlost, like a frightened little boy rather than the cold-faced killer he’d always been.

I’ve broken him, she thought.

In truth, they’d broken each other. For her own part, she found it impossible to consider normal, mundane dating in the future, with another bland, blowhard “fancy man,” as Toly had called them.