Kitty wasn’t too swift. “You don’t learn fast, do you?” he said, turning from the refrigerator with a bottle of milk in hand. “Push me and I get real unhappy. What I decide to do, I do in my own time.” His white-blond hair fascinated her, and the sweeping Slavic bones in his face. But his eyes were pure ice and the less she looked at them, the better she felt.
She let her head hang back. “How much more time do you need? You’re not human. What kind of man keeps a hard-on for hours?” A sick man with a problem. He definitely wasn’t normal. “I’ve forgotten how many times you’ve pulled out and left me like this.”
“Shut up.” He controlled an urge to slap her mouth. “My women don’t complain. They line up for their turn. Men like me don’t come along very often. I’ve got special talent. Enjoy it.”
Deliberately strolling, he got close and rolled the cold milk bottle back and forth over her breasts while she squirmed and her nipples puckered up hard. If she cried out, he’d decide he’d found a new form of torture to use again.
Kitty pursed her lips.
He’d handcuffed her wrists behind her and to the back of the tall bar stool where she sat. One ankle was tied to each of the front legs. Two of the stools, each with blue poppies on their upholstered seats, stood at a counter that divided the kitchen from a minute and very dark room where several tweed chairs crowded, arm-to-arm, around a TV in an ugly cabinet.
The toast popped. He’d eat it dry. “Sure you aren’t hungry? Maybe there’s some cereal,” he said.
“The only thing I’m hungry for doesn’t come in a bowl.”
He didn’t comment.
Kitty knew she must have marks on her wrists and ankles.
It didn’t make sense that Ryan would risk doing something she could show Rupert. Whatever Ryan was really up to, he couldn’t want his old partners in crime, Rupert and Winston, to get any hint of it.
She shook back her hair and pouted at Ryan. Whatever game he was playing, she’d play with him, at least until she could duck out and still be safe. “My wrists hurt,” she said, wriggling.
“And you love it. You’re insatiable.”
“It’s a good job I am,” she said, blowing at strands of hair that stuck to her mouth. “What you’ve done to me would kill some women.”
He grinned at her. “But not you, horny babe. Only woman I know with calluses in her nookie. Let me get my toast.” He’d already poured a mug of coffee. “Then I want to watch you do the squeeze number again. Never saw a woman get off that way before.”
“Sick bastard,” she muttered, but remembered to smile.
Ryan put his plate of toast on the counter and pulled his stool close to Kitty’s. Time to get real serious. He sat on the stool, took a swig of milk from the bottle, then drank some coffee and followed it up with a mouthful of toast. “Why did you come here tonight?” he asked, deliberately offhand. “It wasn’t because you knew I’d be here.” He’d been timing this question since he’d realized it could be the most important he ever asked.
He didn’t fool her. He tried to sound nonchalant, but the way he kept his eyes downcast warned Kitty that he was fishing for something he really needed to find out. “I thought Rupert might be here.”
Ryan’s eyes rose to hers instantly. “Why would he be?”
“I followed him here yesterday and I thought he might come back again.” She could keep it vague, at least for now, and until she found out what the exact information might be worth—or how dangerous it could be to reveal. “I needed a way to get some money out of him, so I hung around tonight.”
Ryan breathed a little faster. “He came to this house? He came into this house?”
He was getting angry. Kitty couldn’t guess why, but it scared her. “He didn’t come into the house,” she said, praying it was what he wanted to hear. “He looked so stupid—not that that’s hard for him to do. Talking through the letterbox in broad daylight.”
“About what?”
“Couldn’t hear.” Might as well take a risk now. “He left and waited in a taxi around the corner till the woman who lives here came out with a couple of suitcases and took a cab. Then he followed her.”
Shit, Ryan drought, Fish probably found out Olivia was on her way to New York. “Then what happened?” he asked.
“Don’t know. Later on I called him up at the shop and accused him of having an affair with her, but he denied it. Said she had something he wanted and he was trying to get it back. That’s all. Mind my own business. Same stuff he always says if I ask him about anything.”
Ryan relaxed. Fish had come here trying to get the photos. Moody would have sent him. “Did he say whether she gave him what he wanted?”
“No.” She’d hold off on the envelope she’d seen passed through. “But he wouldn’t, anyway.”
“When did you say this was? Yesterday?”
She looked at the yellowing ceiling and frowned. “I suppose it was only yesterday. It feels like years ago—so much has happened since then.”
Ryan did believe Kitty was being straight with him. What she said fitted in with Olivia’s movements, as best he knew them. Unfortunately, since Rupert hadn’t got what he wanted, and those photos must be so important to him, it made sense he’d try to catch up with her. Rupert was Winston Moody’s follower and wouldn’t leave the country without talking to him. The way Ryan saw it, Rupert would have returned from Heathrow to the antique shop, and he and Winston could have left for New York by now. Ryan decided that if they had, he’d have to make sure they didn’t get in his way.
“You’re something special, babe.” He held the bread to Kitty’s mouth, but she turned her head away. “You need to keep your strength up.” He laughed.
“You’re a piece of Yankee shit,” she told him. “Damn you, you’re getting crumbs all over me.”
Every word from her mouth made him feel better. She didn’t know a thing that mattered. If she did, she’d be more careful, much more careful, around him. Most likely she wouldn’t be here at all, unless she was so twisted that fear turned her on.
Kitty was that twisted, she had to be. She’d followed him in here, hadn’t she?
“Get the crumbs off me. They itch.”
He glanced at her naked white body. “Can’t allow that,” he said.
Kitty liked the way he looked at her. He leaned forward and blew on her breasts. She squealed. He stood up and bent over her, getting into the blowing thing. His warm breath started her writhing. Ryan blew and followed up with brushing hands, and the brushing hands dealt practiced tweaks and slaps. And her skin flushed with intense arousal.
Ryan saw when her eyes lost focus. She was starting to come again.
He sat back on his stool and tasted the coffee again. “Not bad, but then, I made it.”
“You bastard. Finish it. Finish it.”
“Did you see me tonight, Kitty, or this morning?”
She tried to squeeze her thighs together but couldn’t, the way her ankles were tied to the chair made sure of that.
The heat faded. Ryan looked into her eyes intently and said, “Did you? Have you seen me in the last twenty-four hours?”
“I’m seeing you now, aren’t I? Creep.”
“Wrong answer.” He tapped her leg. “You haven’t seen me at all. The question isn’t likely to come up, but just in case it ever does, you haven’t seen me since you nagged Rupert into taking you to New York last year. Remember how much fun we had when Rupert wasn’t around?”
“Why do you need me to be quiet about you?” The instant she asked the question, she wished she hadn’t.
Ryan turned his next tap into a slap that left the red impression of fingers on her thigh. Grimly he observed the tears she couldn’t hold back. “I’ve got plans for you, Kitty, plans for you and me. You’re going to like them, but not unless I’m convinced you deserve what I’m going to offer you. I’m going to tell you what I’m offering, and what I’ll expect from you.” The idea had come to him shortly after she’d
showed up last night.
“I’m all ears,” she told him, blinking the tears away. Her leg still stung, but she was even a little excited, not that she intended to let him know. After the last few hours, he’d have difficulty believing it, but she was known for playing hard to get.
“A swank apartment in New York and an allowance you won’t be able to spend fast enough to make a dent in. How am I doing so far?”
“Go on.” Her heart had speeded up.
“Your mouth shut unless I tell you to open it.”
Orders again. “You’ll have to spell that out, especially the reasons and what I’m going to get out of it.”
“Not a big enough carrot yet, huh? You don’t change, Kitty. I’m going to make more money than your little brain can visualize. I’m going to make so much money, I’ll be running with people you’ve only read about. A woman I could train to fit in as Mrs. Hill could be a real asset to me.”
He couldn’t be suggesting he wanted to marry her. Kitty managed to sit up straighter. “Aren’t you forgetting something? Like Rupert?”
This was where he trod carefully, but said what she wanted to hear. “You were always too good for him. We might have to be patient, but not too patient. A trip to Reno or Vegas will deal with the small stuff. In the meantime, Rupert’s a nobody among the people who matter. They don’t know he exists. This is for you and me, baby.”
Kitty swallowed. No matter what else she did, she had to remain cool. Seeming too eager could make her a whole lot less appealing to Ryan and she wanted him, at least until she got her share of all that money he was talking about.
“What do you say, sweets?” Ryan did what he didn’t much like to do—he kissed Kitty, a deep, tonsil-touching kiss that brought her breast on a search-and-titillate mission. She brushed her nipples across his chest and panted. He pushed his hands into her hair and made the kind of meal of her mouth that was guaranteed to start her begging for him to come inside her. Well, he knew how to do that. A little slight of hand, so to speak, and he could do it just fine, but not before he had her so starry-eyed at her prospects with him that he’d be able to believe her when she agreed to everything he wanted from her.
When Ryan pulled his lips from hers, Kitty knew what it would feel like to have a plunger used on her mouth. He prolonged the sucking contact and she heard a faint “pop,” when skin parted from skin. She kept her eyes closed and sighed. “Lay it on me, Ryan,” she said.
“Anything you say, baby.” And he moved between her legs to rest his rock-hard dick on her belly. “Okay?”
“Almost.”
“What do Rupert and Winston say about me?” He kept a smile on his face, but he watched her minutely, searching for even a flicker of some reaction that would mean he had to rethink the next move.
There was no flicker in Kitty’s eyes. “They don’t talk about you at all. The last time I mentioned you, Winston said you were none of my business.”
Good. Not that he’d expected anything different. Winston and Rupert had every reason to want to keep their association with him real private. “Let’s play it their way, then,” he told Kitty. “In fact, we’ve got to. You’re going to witness a miracle, baby. By the time we’ve finished with Moody and Fish, everything they’ve got will be ours. And all their connections, too— you do know about the connections?”
She frowned, as if thinking was unfamiliar. “You mean those people they deal with in other countries? The ones who pay them so much money?”
“Those are the ones,” he said, making sure he sounded a whole lot more patient than he felt.
Something tapped the kitchen windows.
Ryan stared into the darkness outside but didn’t see a thing. “What is it?” Kitty craned around to look and her eyes grew huge. “Ryan, someone’s out there watching us.”
“That’s the problem with forgetting to cover the windows.”
Men were so unobservant. “There’s nothing to cover them with. See who it is. Don’t let them get away.” He executed a sloppy salute and strode to the door. “You’re naked,” Kitty said in a harsh whisper.
“Lucky world,” Ryan told her and threw open the door. He’d picked up his Beretta on the way and stood back from the thick gloom in the tiny garden behind the house. A stiff breeze raised gooseflesh all over him. It didn’t do what it might be expected to do to a man.
“Close the door,” Kitty moaned. Nude and shackled, she was in a direct line with the door. Vulnerable didn’t come close to describing how she felt. “I’m cold.”
A black cat shot into the kitchen. Sinewy and tall, he jumped onto the chair Ryan had vacated and from there fell upon the barely touched toast.
Kitty screamed. “Get him out of here. I hate cats. I’m allergic to them.”
The diversion came at a good time. Moody and Fish wanted to forget he’d ever existed. When he’d first suspected they intended to cut him out of the action he’d been right. Turning the tables, cutting them out instead, would be a delicate operation, but screeching on a stool behind him was the answer to his prayers, an answer he hadn’t even thought of until she’d followed him in here and put on her show.
“Ryan!”
“It’s okay. Just be quiet and let me think.” Trees rustled. There was no moon, and he couldn’t see anything but shadows. Those flowers the English went bugs over, the ones that smelled at night, layered their heavy scent into the wind. He could barely make out a path of broken slabs of stone with moss in the cracks. Everything in this country was on a miniature scale. Made him want to throw out his arms and push for more space.
“It’s climbing on me!”
He closed the door and went to Kitty. The cat had discovered the residue of crumbs that still clung to her skin.
“Please, Ryan. I’m going to be sick. His tongue hurts.”
The critter was no dummy. With a long, sandpaper tongue, he lavished a bath on Kitty, and he wasn’t missing many places. Ryan wasn’t keen on cats either, but he stroked the animal and hid a grin when it arched its back and drove sharp claws into Kitty’s legs and stomach.
Her slitted eyes and the way they glittered at him suggested he’d had enough fun with this if he hoped to gain her trust. “Off you go.” He tossed the cat down and it immediately disappeared into other regions of the house. “This is the plan. First you tell me how hard it would be for you to go on vacation—alone, or so-called alone.”
“I do what I like. Sometimes Rupert doesn’t see me for days or weeks.” She didn’t add that she frequently stayed away until she needed money and she might sometimes let her husband look at her in exchange for what she wanted, but they hadn’t made love for months.
This was perfect, Ryan decided. “He never appreciated you. But I do. Do you love him?”
Kitty laughed. “Love him? No. He had money and I didn’t—end of story.”
Better and better. “So there aren’t any loyalties hidden away?”
She shook her head. “No, Ryan. You shouldn’t have to ask. Come here. I want you back where you were before that sodding cat arrived.”
Obediently he rested himself on her stomach again. Kitty contrived to move beneath his erection. The tightness inside him intensified. This time he couldn’t make an excuse to go to the bathroom and ease himself.
His face, the sincerity in his eyes, wasn’t what she expected of him. “I want to hold you,” she said softly, looking down at dimensions any man would love to show off in the showers. “I want you to believe that you are the answer to my prayer. I need you. I can’t believe I was lucky enough to find you tonight. It was fate, Ryan. I’m going to be whatever you want me to be.” And he would pay for the honor.
The faithful Doberman stare worked every time, Ryan decided. “Will you marry me, Kitty?”
Her heart pounded and her skin fired up from underneath. She couldn’t quite get a breath.
“Kitty, honey? Will you come to the States with me and be my wife, partner?”
“Yes,” she finally ma
naged to say. “But—”
“No buts, baby. I’ll take care of everything, but you’ve got to promise me something.”
“Undo the cuffs.”
He chucked her under the chin and rubbed their noses together. “Soon. I’ve got a present for you first. But you’ve got to promise you won’t say a word to Winston or Rupert.”
“I wouldn’t!”
“I know, I know, you don’t think you would, but you could be tempted if one of them gets smart with you. And I wouldn’t blame you.” With a knuckle, he circled first one big, brown nipple, then the other—and he pinched the bud between finger and thumb and pulled, more gently than he’d have liked to.
Another explosion was building for Kitty. When she had time to think, she’d try to remember how many times she’d climaxed since they’d been together. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “You’re killing me.”
Not yet, babe. “Kitty, if you did say something to Rupert or Winston, you’d ruin everything.”
“I won’t.”
“Not a single word? As far as they’re concerned, this night never happened, and if anything ever comes up about me, you’re going to be puzzled because you’d forgotten all about me. Okay?”
“Oh, yes, oh, yes, Ryan. I love you.”
Sure she did. “You’re sure they’ve never said anything about me recently?”
“Not a thing. In fact I asked when we’d see you again.” She lowered her lashes. “I’ve kept hoping, you see. Winston called me a meddling bitch. He told me if I said your name again, he’d shut me in his storage room. I know all about that room. It’s got one-way glass and things happen in there. Rupert told me. But saying that to me has cost that little pervert plenty, and—”
“I believe you, honey. How soon can you be ready to leave—maybe leave for several weeks if things don’t go as smoothly as I hope?”
“Really quickly.”
“Good. I’ll book the plane tickets. We won’t travel together, or be together in the States—”
“Oh, Ryan, you said—”
“Hush.” He pressed his fingers over her mouth. “Let me finish. We won’t be together until it’s safe and all the details are fixed. But we’ll talk a lot. And you’ll talk to Winston and Rupert.”
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