Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4)

by Carolyn Crane

She hesitated, then went, heart pounding. Because it was the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Because she’d been up for days. Because nothing was neutral between them. Because the sight of this frightening, maddening man in distress did something to her.

  Because Kabakas had supposedly perished in a fire nine years ago.

  She stopped a few feet away from him, just beyond the sphere of light cast by the flames.

  He stared into the hearth as he spoke. “What are you doing?” He was deeply affected by the drug—she could tell by the roughness of his words. She fought the impulse to move closer, to rest her hand on his hair, to comfort him. “Answer! What are you doing?”

  She had the crazy sensation that he was speaking from a primitive part of himself, as though the question was meant existentially. Here they were in the middle of nowhere, everything so strange, almost like a dream.

  “I don’t know,” she said, speaking from deep inside herself. “I don’t know what I’m doing.” It was the truth. She’d been so lost since Friar Hovde.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he whispered thickly.

  “You’re burned,” she said.

  He turned his head and raised his eyes to hers, those eyes that crackled with intensity. He looked wild. He was wild, this man tried to shape the world around him through brute force—forcing Paolo to his lessons. Sewing her up whether she liked it or not. Putting down a guerrilla contingent. Pulling a village back from the dead. They will come back, they will rebuild.

  He looked at the world as a dark god, bending it to his will. He’d even tried to walk through fire.

  But it was his humanity that struck her now. The brutal level of pain he had to be enduring.

  “You missed a spot.” She stepped softly to his side and took up the little jar of salve.

  He watched her every movement with pinprick pupils, a wild animal in the night.

  “You’re okay,” she whispered, dipping two fingers into the cool salve. Gently she slicked it onto the pinkest, most inflamed-looking skin.

  Much to her surprise, he allowed it. Maybe the pain outweighed everything else. He turned back to the fire, breath ragged, as she stroked the salve across his tormented flesh.

  She’d thought of Kabakas as many things over the years, but never as a suffering being. Never as an old friend. So human, so compelling.

  So fucking beautiful.

  Chapter Fourteen

  He stifled a sob as Liza’s fingers glided across his ruined flesh—not because of the pain; it was the relief of it that got him. The good things sometimes tormented him.

  The firelight behind her made the edges of her bright hair glow in a circle around her head. Like a fucking halo.

  Hugo lowered his head more deeply into the shadows. He wanted to continue watching her, but this was the position that felt best, elbows on his thighs, burns touching nothing, flesh far enough from the fire to have its company but not its heat.

  She had come to him.

  And he wanted her more than ever. Even now, raging burns and all.

  She painted on the salve so carefully, so gently. Her care calmed him as a new wave of pain came up. He pressed his eyes shut. His mind was out of order, his seared skin exposed to her gentle fingers. He wanted her—badly.

  “Go, now,” he grated.

  “I’m not done yet.” She kept on. He could feel her goodness like a shining thing, a force—he didn’t know why or how, just that her goodness was a force. Her passion was beautiful.

  You missed a spot. His heart nearly shattered when she’d said it.

  “Go,” he said, eyes drifting shut, because he needed to concentrate on the pain; every few moments it would break the surface of his mind like a jagged rock bursting up from the ocean floor, and he would have to begin again, smoothing, allowing, breathing.

  Now she was here, helping. Real, yet somehow not real. Like her hair.

  That hair was a clue to things not being right. It bothered him suddenly, that bright hair of hers.

  Opium sometimes gave him a keen kind of sight into people. Or maybe it just freed his mind to see what was there. What was it about her fake hair?

  He found a thread of the thought, but then the brick of rough pain came up through the placid sea of his mind. He closed his eyes and breathed through it; it was all that he could do.

  He felt her move around him. “There’s another spot you missed.” She waited for his reply.

  Something about her did not add up. Tentative. That didn’t feel right on her, either. But it was more.

  “It’s only fair, isn’t it?” she said, smoothing on more salve. “After how you helped me today?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut, broken by her kindness, by the way she cared to notice this in spite of what he was to her: a captor and a prison guard, provoking her in every way he could when he really just wanted to smell her skin. To kiss her. To take her ferociously.

  She touched him, light and sure, fingertips gliding. He felt it clear down to his cock.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes,” he breathed.

  His mind was a tapestry of thoughts, threads switching and flowing as she moved her fingers over him. The salve helped greatly, but it was her goodness—her passion—that cut through the pain.

  She felt like life.

  The village sometimes felt like life to him. There had been times when he would go down there during festivals—purely by accident—but once there, he’d feel a strange excitement, as though he were enjoying himself through them. His kinspeople who did not know they were kin.

  She blew on his burns, cooling him.

  He was reminded suddenly of the way the boy had cried the day he’d found him in the killing fields, crying alone among the bloody corpses. One battalion had attacked another—killing everyone. He’d taken out the attackers. When it was over, he’d been stunned to discover this boy—like a miracle—alive among the dead.

  The boy’s cries had sounded as loud as jet blasts. When Hugo had picked him up, the boy had stopped crying.

  Some might guess that Hugo had taken the boy, but it was the boy who had taken Hugo. Hugo would protect the boy with everything.

  He sighed as she spread the salve onto his skin, cooling the heat, lulling him. “How long?” she whispered. “How long have you had these burns?”

  “Nine years,” he breathed.

  She seemed like an angel. I don’t know what I’m doing, she’d said. It was as if she had hit at some deep truth in him, because he didn’t know what he was doing, either. He only knew he wanted to take her, to ravish every cool, soft part of her.

  He should never have taken this woman from the airfield. He should never have let her see his face. He’d doomed her with that lapse in judgment. She was more a prisoner now than his own mother had ever been as a maid to the Bolivian oilman.

  This prostitute, alone in a strange land. Trapped on the mountaintop, miles from civilization, surrounded on all sides by treacherous terrain, a captive of a killer. A woman without choices, being so gentle, and all he could think of was throwing her against a wall and taking her.

  Her touch was gone.

  A soft clink as she set the small glass tub upon the table.

  “Will you be okay?” she asked.

  He wanted to let her know that it was always worse after exertion and he would be much better tomorrow. He wanted to tell her how in the months after the fire he’d learned how to handle pain. So yes, he would be okay. Yet not. He imagined telling her what it had been like inside that burning home, how he couldn’t see anything. How it had felt to hear his mother cry out and not be able to get to her. How it felt to know it was him they had been trying to kill. His own mother’s blood was on his hands. Same with those families in the Yacon fields. He hadn’t wielded the blades, but he’d inspired the blades.

  “Hugo?”

  He wanted to tell her about the months after the fire, laid up in a hospital, an unknown patient, alone, and how grateful he’d been. He w
anted to tell her how bloody he sometimes felt, as though his very soul were stained a deep savinca red. He wanted to tell her what it was like to walk in the Yacon fields among the dead, knowing those people had been killed in his name. He wanted to make her see that attacking El Gorrion was only about llapingachos because the hole in his soul could not take any more tearing.

  He’d never revealed these things to anybody, but he wanted to tell Liza all of it, as if telling her would act as salve to his heart.

  He could feel another round of pain starting, breaking the calm.

  “Can I do anything else? Do you need some water?”

  Don’t go, he thought, looking up. She stood there in the too-large gray uniform with her arms slightly bent, hands hovering near her hips as though she didn’t know what to do with them.

  As if in slow motion, he watched himself take her hand, and then he yanked her to him. She gasped as he buried his nose in her belly.

  “Please,” he whispered. He hadn’t meant to scare her; he’d just needed to touch her. And then he looked up and met her eyes—those intelligent eyes so full of truth… with the false color covering them. Her hair, too. Falsehood wrapped in falsehood. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The opium sight always showed him when something was wrong.

  “Why do you keep your hair like that?” he rasped.

  Alarm flashed in her eyes. “What?”

  “Your eyes. Your hair. Why?”

  She lifted the hand he hadn’t captured up to her head. It wasn’t the question he’d meant, but that was the thread he had now. Best not to work against the opium instincts.

  She regarded him with that blank mask. No! He’d caught on to something—he knew it.

  “Why?” He squeezed her hand.

  “Some people think it looks good.”

  His stomach felt funny. Why was she in his home? Who was she? What was she?

  He let go of her hand and stood, shaking with need, forgetting all about his pain; there was only the familiarity of her. The mystery of her. The need to get inside her—mind and body.

  “Hugo…”

  He pushed her to the wall next to the fire, staring down into her green eyes, which looked all the more strange in the room’s glow. They kept him from seeing into her. He reached up and grabbed the back of her hair, so false. Something was off.

  She was panting.

  He tightened his fist and jerked her head back to better look at her eyes.

  He held her there. Then he kissed her.

  She sucked in a breath—he felt it inside his mouth. She was a whore and she thought he would fuck her now, and he would. It was bad, yes, but he was bad.

  And her lips were soft and sweet.

  Pain sizzled across his skin as he pressed her to the wall, pushing in with his hips, feeling her soft belly with his cock as he kissed her salty neck. She was warm and pliant and gasping.

  “Hugo.”

  “No?” He pulled back and began to undo her buttons. He told himself that he needed to let her say no if she wanted to say no.

  She was trembling. “Your burns.”

  “I do not feel them, corazón,” he whispered, hands too clumsy on her buttons.

  She set her hands on his shoulders, just above the burns. She gasped, trembled with aliveness, as if she’d never been with a man before. It made him want her like fire.

  The buttons did not work. Frustrated, he began to pull up her skirt, only slowing as he made contact with her warm thighs. He ran his palms over her skin there. It only made him need more of her.

  And then something happened. She stopped trembling. She stopped gasping. She seemed to change.

  “Fuck me,” she whispered, smooth and cool as glass. “Do it, baby.”

  He slowed. The hair, the eyes, and now the talk, so smooth and cool. Why was she hiding?

  “What are you waiting for?” She reached down to his belt buckle and began to undo it.

  He grabbed her wrists and pressed her arms to her belly, backed her harder to the wall, forcing her to be still so that he could think. His burns raged, his cock strained against her belly. He had her trapped, yet she was hiding right in front him.

  “W-what?”

  “Shhhh,” he said as her skirt fell back down.

  “Don’t you want to fuck?”

  He took her wrists in one hand and clapped his palm over her mouth. Yes, he wanted to fuck, but he wanted to fuck the trembling, gasping, living Liza. Not this one. There was something wrong here. What?

  She watched him warily, breathing through her nose, now. He removed his hand and kissed her tenderly. He didn’t usually kiss like that, but instinct moved him that way now, and a hunter always paid attention to instinct.

  He kissed her lips and her neck and her cheek, and then he slid his whiskered cheek against her silken cheekbone, gently now.

  And that was when he felt the lurch in her. A trapped bird in her chest.

  He remembered the kitchen. She’d almost cried—not when he’d put the needle in, but after. He’d imagined it to be a delayed reaction, but now he knew: it was the gentle way he’d touched her.

  She was at home with hard men, cold men. Men who paid her, maybe even hurt her. She was steel for such men. But tenderness melted her. Made her alive.

  He liked her alive.

  He slid a hand down the side of her neck, watching her eyes.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He kissed her in answer. Finally he could see into her, in spite of the false green eyes and all the rest. She’d been hurt, maybe badly—how had he not seen that?

  She felt so deeply familiar.

  Her wounds were not fresh; they felt worn. Those sorts of wounds he understood well thanks to years of fists and boots and his father cursing God above. Liza was a drug whore—of course bad things had happened to her. Very bad things, he now realized.

  “Don’t you want me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he grated out. He let her wrists go and grazed his knuckles over her cheek. “I do,” he said. Like a fever he wanted her.

  She pushed her hips against his and his breath hitched. God, yes, he wanted her.

  “Please,” she said. He believed her now. Do it, baby had been a lie, but this please was not.

  He slid up her skirt again, but differently this time. Slowly, making it about her. His hands slid along the warm, smooth flesh of her thighs. He let her feel his desire for her, let her hear the beautiful slide of her skin, down and up, down and up. The sound filled the space around them. Just the sound and feel of her skin under his skin was more erotic than anything he’d ever done with all the women he’d ever fucked.

  And then, slowly, he slid one hand around her hips and gripped her bare ass under the panties. Her breath sped. The other hand he slid between her legs, touching her over her panties, almost chastely.

  She gasped.

  He took the gasp in a kiss. She was his again.

  He began to make lazy circles on the damp cotton between her legs. Slow and lazy.

  She pulled away. “It’s okay, you can just fuck me.”

  “I know,” he said, continuing the circles, watching her eyes.

  “Hugo.”

  He kissed her again as he slid his fingers under the elastic now, into the warm, wet folds of her core.

  “You don’t have to,” she said into the kiss.

  You don’t have to be good to me, she meant. You don’t have to make me come.

  He kissed her neck as he fondled her. He felt her body move with every lengthening stroke. “I’ll do what I want.”

  “Hugo…” Her whisper sounded thick. He stoked up the pleasure, sliding his fingers relentlessly, invading her, finding the rhythm that seemed to match her undulations. “Hugo.” Her voice sounded far away.

  “Shhhh,” he said.

  She gasped as he pushed his fingers inside her now, thumb stroking her taut nub. He would not take her; he would make her feel good. It was all he wanted now—just that.

  He strok
ed her to a rhythm that matched her soft breath. He could always feel when a woman’s body became his, control switching over, pleasure building.

  Mercilessly he drew his rough fingers through her tender folds. She felt like molten silk, and his touch was a tide, pulling her out to sea.

  Chapter Fifteen

  She tried not to rock along, but he was pulling her apart. Killing her with tenderness.

  Feeling too much of her.

  She pushed at his bare chest. “Not like this,” she said.

  He stilled. “Not like what?”

  Not gentle, she thought. Not kind.

  She let out a sound of frustration and he started up again, seeming able to read her body. When had anybody ever touched her like this? He nuzzled her again, that heavy slide of whisker on her cheek as he stroked her. “It’s okay, corazón,” he whispered.

  And it was his words that broke her, made her shatter to pieces there in his hand.

  He held her as she came, slowing his motions, whispering endearments in Spanish that she should not understand.

  Corazón, he called her. Heart.

  He kissed her one last time, on the cheek. He drew away slowly, as if to make sure she could still stand upright, as if he knew he’d torn her apart with kindness. Then he returned to his seat, leaving her standing there, boneless in the firelight, flames dancing on the ceiling.

  She straightened her dress, heart thundering. “Nothing more?” she whispered.

  “Leave me.”

  He didn’t want to fuck? Not even for her to blow him? She wished he would, just so she could take something back.

  Like herself.

  “Do not come out again until you hear the bell.”

  She stared down at this beast of a man who just might be Kabakas, who’d battered her defenses with kindness. It seemed like a dream.

  “Go.”

  She turned and stumbled to her room, exhausted beyond comprehension. She flopped onto her bed, buzzing with his touch. What had just happened?

  She opened her eyes, stunned at the brilliant sunshine streaming through the window. It was late morning—nine, maybe. How had she slept so deeply?