Lying and Kissing(32)

The pain rolled down my cheeks in big, hot waves, dripping onto my dress and onto Luka’s muscled arms. My wet hair was soaking his collar and now my tears were soaking his sleeves and I was a disgusting mess but he didn’t seem to care. He just wrapped me tight in his arms, so tight I could feel his heartbeat thumping against my back, and he held me.

I don’t know how long it took us to drive to his apartment. But I know that, eventually, the tears slowed and the memories crawled back to their homes in my chest and the ice re-froze. Thinner than before, though, and with cracks like a spider web.

I sniffed and blinked and took some deep breaths and said, in a small voice, “I’m alright, now.”

He made a disapproving noise, as if to say that no, I most definitely wasn’t and he knew it, but that he’d accept it for the time being. He squeezed me and then held me against him until the car pulled up.

His building was a skyscraper whose concrete base looked solid enough to withstand an apocalypse. A doorman dashed to open the doors for him before we were even out of the car and he led me straight inside, his arm around my waist. Both the doorman and the woman behind the reception desk did an incredible job of ignoring my soaked hair and the make-up running down my face.

There was an elevator at the far end of the reception hall. Luka didn’t have to press a button and wait. He just turned a key in a lock and the doors slid open, the elevator already waiting for us. Inside, there was only one button.

I swayed a little in my heels as the floor pressed upward under our feet. A hundred floors sped past. We were going to the penthouse.

There was a short, bare corridor, with a camera pointing right at the elevator door. His front door was a huge slab of polished wood, as strong as it was beautiful. Luka turned another key and heavy bolts clunked back.#p#分页标题#e#

We emerged into a huge, two level living room. There was a sort of pit sunk into the floor with cream leather couches on three sides and I caught a glimpse of a kitchen area off to the right. But I barely looked because in front of me was...Moscow.

The walls were floor-to-ceiling windows, with no drapes or blinds. But we had privacy, of a sort, because we were the highest building for miles. The city lay spread out around us like a map, traffic just glowing worms of light far below.

Luka put a hand on my arm and led me gently to a door. Behind it was a wet room finished in dark gray slate. The edges of the room were in darkness, giving the illusion that it went on forever. In the center, recessed spotlights picked out a gleaming metal shower head and the circle of floor beneath it.

“Take your time,” said Luka. “Clean that bitch off you. Dump your clothes outside the door and I’ll have them cleaned.”

I swallowed and looked around for a bathrobe. “Do you have anything else to wear?”

A smile touched his lips. His accent stroked each word, elongating the Es, turning them into vibrations that traveled up and down my spine.

“You won’t need anything to wear.”





I closed the door, shutting out Luka and his world of violence and money and isolating myself in the silence of the wet room. I locked the door. Then I leaned my back against it.

You won’t need anything to wear, he’d said.

This was it. He wanted to have sex. Luka Malakov wanted to have sex with me.

The fact that it had been in the cards all along didn’t make it any less of a bombshell. He was everything I stood opposed to. He was the literal enemy, the sort of man I’d sworn to protect the US from. And I was going to give myself to him?

Give yourself to him? A mocking little voice spoke up inside me. As if it’s the supreme sacrifice?

I felt the heat roll down my body, making my breasts tingle and my belly throb, finishing in a hot ache between my thighs.

If I slept with him because it was my job, because I had to...did that make it okay? Or did that just make me a whore?

All this on top of the fact that even simply having sex—normal sex, with a normal guy—would have been a major event in its own right. It was six months since I’d dated, and that had only lasted a couple of dates. It was just over a year since I’d had sex.

And this wouldn’t just be sex. I remembered Roberta’s warning: God knows what he’ll want in the bedroom.

What would it be like? To be with a man as big and powerful as him? To lie under him, while he…

I squeezed my thighs together.

This is nuts. I should call the whole thing off. I should tell Adam I needed to bail and fly home to the US and even quit the CIA if I had to. I can’t have sex with a guy like him!

...however much I want to.

I reddened guiltily.