Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4)

by Carolyn Crane

  And then she looked up at him and smiled.

  And he knew that there had never been a moment when he didn’t want a son, a family.

  She cocked her head quizzically, sensing his strong emotion. He wanted to tell her that he, too, loved Paolo. He wished she could understand that. He turned back and built the fire higher, as if that might show it.

  She set a hand on the boy’s arm. “Paolo,” she whispered. “Bedtime.”

  “No,” Hugo whispered, drawing near to the boy. He knelt on the other side of him and, gently as he could, he lifted him in his arms, something he hadn’t done since Paolo was small.

  He grumbled about it being a long day, but seeing Paolo play in front of the fire, being a boy in a way that Hugo never had, it made him want to hold him, to care for him.

  It was Paolo he wanted to hold, yes, but maybe, just a little bit, it was Hugo’s younger self.

  Hugo left, holding his boy to his breaking heart. All these years. It would’ve been so easy to play with him.

  So easy to call him by his name.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Rio stepped out of the Aeropuerto Internacional El Dorado in Bogotá into a chaos of taxis and buses. He made his way past harried travelers and hurried businesspeople and on past scammers who wanted to befriend him, most of whom quickly turned away, deciding that they didn’t, after all, want to befriend him. The air was cool and rich with the scent of smoked meat and diesel; he drew in a deep breath as he straightened his black jacket and fixed the cuffs of his silk shirt, looking forward to a good, hard hunt with a supposedly lethal opponent at the end. They were all supposed to be lethal, but they never were. Maybe this one was.

  The car Dax had arranged for him was right where he said it would be. Rio slipped in and began to reassemble his Smith & Wesson Platinum 500 from the various pieces he’d sent through baggage. He could get firearms in Bogotá; in fact, there was a sniper rifle waiting for him in a little shop in the Bogotá suburbs, but he was sentimental about his weapons. He didn’t mind new friends. But he liked to have old friends around him, too. And the 500 was a good friend.

  He’d never heard Dax sound so worried. Find her. Extract her if you sense danger. I prefer Kabakas alive, but I can just as well use him dead. Kill everybody you have to.

  Dax had warned him about Kabakas. Rio had heard of the man, of course, but he wasn’t worried. He was more than ready, and he’d worn his best suit.

  Kill everybody you have to, Dax had said.

  He always did. He slipped in the magazine.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Hugo forced himself to sit in the boy’s room and watch him sleep.

  He’d done that a lot at first, watching him, this small being who’d been robbed of his parents.

  A noise out in the great room. He hoped it was her going to bed—the feeling between them was too strong, too big. He was not his father, forcing himself on the help.

  It was only when everything was quiet out there that he allowed himself to return. His heart leapt when he saw her, curled up in front of the fire herself, head next to the stupid word game.

  Sleeping.

  He knelt beside her, sucking in her scent like a burglar inside her house. His heart pounded. He wanted to have her so badly it was very nearly a physical pain.

  Then she turned and opened her eyes. Her cheekbone was marred by imprints of the rough jute rug. There was no softness here; it was no place for a woman.

  “Isn’t it your bedtime, señorita?”

  She smiled, then. “It meant a lot to him that you played.” She turned away and gazed into the fire. Was she thinking about that first night? The night he’d made her come? Did she regret it?

  Even in stillness she had an unceasing quality, like a spring-fed stream. He’d felt the depth of her silence out in the field, but he felt it so much more now.

  He took his chair. He should direct her to bed, but instead he sat with her at his foot. He enjoyed it perhaps a little too much. Her bright hair flashed in the light, but the part nearest to him was dark. That was the part that he wanted to touch.

  “It meant a lot that you played,” she said again.

  “I never…I never knew,” he confessed. Never knew the boy would want that. Never knew how.

  “But you went ahead and did it,” she said, gazing at the flames.

  She would make him sound noble. As if he’d noticed that Paolo wanted to play and had indulged him, when really, he’d been pulled by the ear. By her.

  Like a starving man, he feasted on the beauty of her stillness and the glow of her skin—this woman who’d done her own terrible things, who could dwell with him in the quiet. He’d never met anybody like her. He found that he loved everything about her.

  Could she be happy here? She had been a prostitute in her other life; surely that wasn’t a good life. Could he induce her to stay?

  The idea stunned him.

  No. Somebody light and free and passionate like Liza, she wouldn’t choose life with a man who kept himself locked as tightly as that cabinet.

  He glanced over at the cabinet itself—all that pain and yearning that was in there. His life was in there. What if he showed what was inside? Wasn’t that her accusation—that he was as closed as the cabinet? What if he proved her wrong? Opening it would feel very much like opening himself.

  He couldn’t believe he was considering it. Then again, the act itself was simple: walk over and open it.

  “I want you to see something,” he blurted.

  She looked up, green, green eyes awash in humorous light. He got up and went to the cabinet, and when he looked back at her, the humor had faded. He himself hardly believed he was doing it. He’d never shown anybody the treasures and tokens he’d collected. Not even Paolo. He pressed up on the bit of molding that secured the key, and drew it out.

  She stayed by the fire. Did she not want to see inside? “Come,” he said.

  She rose tentatively and came to him. Why would she resist? Hadn’t she wanted this? Well, it was too late now. When he committed to something he committed with his whole heart.

  He unlocked it and drew open the door, revealing the carefully arranged trinkets and medals. Shiny coins. Train tickets. Colorful bottle caps he’d collected as a boy, before he’d learned the truth of who he was. Miniature figurines he’d loved. Colorful stamps, Swiss army knife, Chinese jade carvings, American baseball cards, a Canadian pen with a maple leaf on it.

  She stood next to him, now. Even the air between them grew livelier when she came near.

  He drew out an American baseball card. “It may not seem exotic to you,” he said, “but when I was first in America, these cards seemed so very American with the shiny bits and the bold marks.” He tipped it back and forth, letting the hologram coating catch the light as he’d done so often as a boy. “Everything so bright and important.” He felt so bare to her, suddenly. A strange feeling, but not altogether bad. He felt as if something inside him shifted. As if the scar tissue covering his heart had softened.

  He put it back and drew out the puzzle box. “Have you ever seen one?”

  “It’s beautiful.” She sounded so sad. Why?

  He handed it to her. “Try to open it,” he coaxed. “I think you cannot.”

  “Probably not.” She seemed hesitant suddenly. Why? Had he made a mistake in showing her?

  “A gift. My father chose it,” he went on. “He chose it for me, and it meant a lot.” He wasn’t explaining it well. It had been one of the good moments, when the man who raised him had seemed to care. It had meant the world. “He was a gardener, a handyman.”

  “Is that where you got your love of plants?”

  “No, he hated plants.” He should tell her. If he truly wanted to let her in, he would tell her the things that he never told anybody. He wasn’t sure if he could; he had never developed that muscle. “Go ahead. See if you can open it.”

  Fruitlessly, she slid around the pieces. Their hands brushed as he took it
from her and slid the panels in the combination that would make the lid spring open. There inside was a lion’s head.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said in a faraway tone.

  “All of these little treasures I collected.”

  He felt her keen interest in spite of that strange hesitation. “Go ahead.” He forced himself to gesture toward the box, inviting her in further. He stiffened as she touched a Jordanian coin, drew out a bus ticket from Nigeria, a pink jade box, and then a pen with the name of a Bangkok restaurant emblazoned upon it.

  “You visited all of these places?”

  “Lived in all of these places.”

  Finally, her fingers lip upon a small, blunt stick with a few crude carvings. The Moro graduation rite wand. It looked like nothing next to the shinier, more colorful treasures, but it was the most important item he owned. He’d struggled long and hard to earn it, spending years perfecting his skills, hands bloody from throwing the blades, from working the patterns. She seemed to sense its importance in the same way in which she sensed just how to touch a plant, the way she sensed what the boy needed. She turned it in her fingers. “Where did you buy this?”

  “It was given to me.”

  She would not meet his eyes. “A gift?”

  “In a way,” he said.

  “From your parents?”

  “No,” he said, studying the side of her face, needing her to look at him. “From a teacher on Quoro, down on the southern islands of the Philippines. I had left my parents by then.” He took it from her and gestured at the box. “I was miserable in all of these places; but this place, it saved my life.”

  She met his eyes now. “You left your parents…” It was more a statement than a question.

  He took a breath and studied the rites stick. “My mother and father served an oil company consultant who traveled the world. A Bolivian man. Very wealthy. My father hated the plants, but not as much as he hated me.” He slid his finger up and down the side. “Over and over I would go to him, thinking that this time I’ll make him proud, but with every accomplishment, he seemed to hate me more. I remember times he’d take the belt to me for good marks in school. He would beat me for being good. I never understood. But then one day I did—I was not his child. I was the Bolivian’s bastard. My mother, she would not have wanted her employer in that way. But she and my father needed those jobs, and sometimes you do what you must…” He had never revealed these things to anybody. “Hurting me, that was how my supposed father punished the oilman.”

  “Hugo.” She set a hand on his arm.

  He shrugged. “My biological father, he knew what was happening to me, but he would not stop it. My mother tried to intervene, but she could not guard me, and could not square off against her husband. That home, it was like poisonous soil. You take that poison into your veins, and it forms you.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “Our relocation to Manila made things worse. So much worse. One day I took all of the money that I had saved and my small box of trinkets—these things here—and I stole a boat, thinking to live on an island alone. I went deep into the Sulu Archipelago and arrived on a remote island, wild and quiet. I thought it was uninhabited, but I was wrong. The island people, the Moros, took me in. They were warring with other islands at the time, and I was big and strong and fast. And so angry, Liza, so angry. They trained me. They put me in their army. They were fierce, these fighters, descended from generations of fierce fighters. Even the Americans could not subdue the islands. The Moro fighters were the reason the army switched from .22 to .38 caliber sidearms. Those men taught me everything.”

  “Your mother must have missed you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She tried to protect you.”

  “The fights were getting worse. She would’ve had to choose. It was better that I left.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No importa.” He shrugged. “My so-called father died years later The oilman cast my mother out for a younger and prettier servant. I was rich by then. I found a way to ruin him.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I set her up in a small house.” He put down the stick and picked up the puzzle box again. “Paolo would love this. I could have given it to him, but I kept it locked up instead.”

  “You could give it to him now.”

  “What I mean…” He paused. “This remoteness; it is a coward’s way to raise a boy. I let him think I don’t care.”

  “He knows you care. He thinks the world of you.”

  “I will give this to him.”

  She picked up the Moro wand again, eyes half hidden by dark lashes, but he did not miss the sadness. She set it down. “Thank you for showing me. These things are wonderful.”

  He heard the lie in her words—she didn’t think they were wonderful at all. They’d shared too much stillness for her to lie to him effectively.

  She turned and went to the fireplace.

  Sometimes his instincts as a killer doubled as instincts as a lover, like the instinct to chase down prey when it darted away. He did that now. He went after her. They’d connected for a moment, and he couldn’t stand to lose that. He could not let her go.

  He set his hands on her shoulders, feeling torn in two.

  He tightened his grip and turned her.

  She looked…worried.

  She’d seen inside the box, which was more like his heart than she could ever imagine. And she’d come out worried.

  “Corazón,” he said, brushing a knuckle across her cheek. “I won’t hurt you.” And like the killer that he was, like the taker that he was, he closed his mouth over hers.

  He felt her body change between his hands. She seemed to fill with lust, or maybe loathing. Still he kissed her, pressing his tongue to the seam of her lips, forcing her open, desire pulsing through him. “Entrégate a mí,” he gasped. Give yourself to me.

  She pulled away, breath coming fast. “Fuck,” she breathed.

  “What?”

  She studied his face. It was strange, the way she looked at him, as if she were seeing him for the first time. “Fuck,” she said again. It meant something different the second time; what, he didn’t know.

  He simply pulled her to him, hands fit over the small of her back and the swell of her ass, molding her to fit him.

  She grabbed onto his hair as he took her mouth. His cock was a hot, rigid bar against her heaving belly. He sucked in her tongue, hands exploring her body.

  She sighed. Softened. Melted into him like sunshine.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  He was Kabakas. And he was kissing her.

  Kabakas.

  He was beautiful and dangerous and wild, and he was kissing her, taking her over, and in that moment she didn’t care; she just wanted him. She’d always wanted him. It was no time to lie to herself.

  Ever since she’d tacked that blurry photo up on the bulletin board, she’d wanted him.

  She pulled away, looking at him again. Kabakas. “Fuck, yes,” she amended, twisting her fingers in his sooty hair, pulse skittering. Then she kissed him again.

  He groaned into her kiss, moving against her.

  This is fucked up. A little voice in her head kept chanting it over and over as his huge hungry hands roamed over her hips and ass. This is fucked up.

  And she’d never been more turned on in her life.

  He spoke to her in Spanish. Hot, dirty words.

  “Tell me in English.” She wanted to be with him on every level.

  “I want to strip you bare and devour you.” He stood back to undo her buttons. “I want to hold you still and fuck you in every hole.”

  She opened her mouth to speak. She wanted to tell him fuck, yes. She wanted to tell him that he wasn’t alone, that she was here with him under the endless night sky. That she’d always been with him. She wanted to tell him that the things inside the cabinet were beautiful. That the Moro wand was amazing. All of these things she’d wondered about for so long.
Like treasures he’d kept for her.

  “I want to fuck you and devour you with every part of myself,” he said. “Every part. And make you come as much as I please.”

  Nothing mattered, nothing made sense. Loving Kabakas—it was all wrong and all right.

  She stiffened. Love—where had that come from? What was she doing?

  “You never have to say yes when you’re thinking no,” he said, sensing her stiffness. He still thought she was a prostitute, of course. “I’ll be gentle,” he whispered into her hair. “If you prefer it,” he added.

  She closed her eyes as he sucked in a bit of skin from her tender neck, a bright, sharp bite of pleasure, and then he licked her there, and kissed her.

  Heat pooled between her legs.

  “You have nothing to fear from me.”

  Except that she did. He touched something raw in her, made her feel out of control. She was so full of guilt and shame, she didn’t know if she could survive too much of a breach.

  And on a more practical level, if he ever found out who she was, he’d kill her.

  He’d have to; he’d see her as a threat to himself and Paolo, and he’d have to kill her. His harsh love for Paolo ran deeper than midnight.

  “Corazón.” His hands shook as he pulled up her dress, up, up, over her thighs, over her hips.

  He seemed to be trying to be extra gentle with her and barely managing it—his touch was bottled thunder, liable to shatter the glass at any moment. It turned her on like nothing else.

  “You,” she said, tracing the scruff on his chin.

  He kissed her forehead, and with a swift, sure movement, he picked her up and carried her to his bedroom. She undid the buttons on his shirt, kissing every newly bared space until he set her down on his bed.

  She went up on her knees, then undid his belt buckle and shoved down his pants. His massive cock sprang up, golden brown, skin taut over ropy veins, like a map to somewhere else.