Lying and Kissing(41)

I was meant to be getting involved with him. I was meant to be becoming his girlfriend. But this thing that I’d inadvertently unlocked between us, this darkness in him I was drawn to and the innocence he was drawn to in me...that was something altogether more dangerous. I couldn’t.

He gripped my arm, hard. “I have to have you,” he said.

I felt my legs weaken under me. I swallowed and then, in a voice that didn’t sound like my own, I whispered, “Yes.”

He moved back far enough that I could see his face. “I have to go on a trip for a few days,” he said. “You’ll come.” Not do you want to come? You’ll come.#p#分页标题#e#

“A trip?” I asked uncertainly.

“It’s on a yacht,” he told me. He grinned, getting a little of his confident charm back. “We will be away for a few days. I will have to go to a meeting, but the rest of the time….” He kissed me again, slowly but with no less heat than before.

I had no idea what to do. Go away with him?! Where? That wasn’t even vaguely within the scope of the mission. But I was meant to be getting close to him...and the idea of more time with him sent thick, dark tendrils of heat straight down to my groin. “Okay,” I said.

For just a second, he smiled like a child at Christmas.

I stepped back from him and opened the door, thinking fast. I had to somehow find out where we were going, so I could tell Adam. “I’ll have to get something to wear,” I said. “Where are we going? Will it be hot? Cold?”

He smirked. “Cold,” he said. Damn! I needed a location—at least a damn country! But I couldn’t push it too hard or it might look suspicious.

He picked up a pad of Post-It notes from the counter, wrote on the top one and gave it to me. “Tell the taxi to take you there. Tell them I sent you.”

I looked at the note. The name of a store and an address. Luka’s handwriting was all bold strokes and sharp angles, powerful but precise. “Okay,” I said doubtfully.

I backed out of the door. As I reached the threshold, he suddenly reached out and grabbed the collar of my dress, preventing me from moving further. Then he dragged me back inside and kissed me again, hot and long and slow, his lips owning me totally.

“I will collect you from your hotel at three,” he said.

And he gently closed the door.





The cab was waiting for me, just as he’d said. And the driver took the Post-It note and drove me there without complaint, even though he’d only been paid to take me to my hotel. Did Luka have some sort of bottomless credit line with these guys, or were they just too scared of him to complain?

The thick Plexiglas partition between the driver and me helped cement it in my mind as cab and not car and that crucial pathway in my broken brain didn’t light up. No flashbacks. But the fact that it could happen so easily, as it had in the car with Luka, was terrifying.

I hunkered down in the back, arms folded across my chest, and tried to process. Was it just about sex, with Luka? That certainly made sense, given that we’d barely spoken from the moment we got to his apartment to the time he—I flushed. And that morning, he’d seemed ready to hurry me out. And yet he’d sat there watching me, when he thought I was asleep. And even during the sex, I’d seen that flicker in his eyes, gotten that feeling that, however much he treated me like something to simply be fucked, there was a lot more going on inside.

And what about this trip on the yacht? I kept Adam informed of where I was. In theory, if I got into trouble, he could get me out. But that didn’t apply if I was off in the middle of the ocean. I didn’t even know which country we were going to.

I tried to focus on the mission, but I couldn’t help wondering what it meant, that Luka wanted to take me away with him. Did I qualify as a girlfriend, now? My last relationship had been in college and had followed the same pattern as the ones in my teens: flirting and kissing and dating and then, eventually, something more physical. This was completely different. Was I a lover, now? That sounded like something out of a 70s French movie. Was this how grown-up relationships were—you fucked the guy and then you hoped that you started to mean something to him?

I went around and around thinking about it, getting more and more worked up. Just when I was about to wind down the cab’s window and scream to vent some stress, my phone rang. I presumed it was Adam and grabbed it. “Hello?”#p#分页标题#e#

“Arianna. Thank God. What in the name of fucking fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Nancy.

And suddenly, everything was okay. At last, I had someone I could talk to. Someone who’d understand what it was like to be undercover.