Hot Pursuit

by Julie Ann Walker

  “Why did you lie just now?” he demanded.

  “I didn’t lie.”

  “Abso-bloody-lutely you did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Sweet Fanny Adams, they were doing it again.

  “Then explain how you can tell one person that you quit the CIA because of a dalliance with your boss and then claim to me that you never mix business with pleasure. One of them is a lie.”

  “Nope. They aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  “How so?”

  Emily’s jaw set at an obstinate angle, telling him without words that she was finished with the conversation.

  Bugger it all!

  Then an idea occurred, and a cool blanket of calmness wrapped around him, banking the fire of his frustration.

  If there was one thing that could win out over Emily’s stubbornness, it was her curiosity. The woman’s nosy nature got the better of her every time.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “I’ll tell you one truth if, in return, you tell me one as well.”

  She shook her head. He ignored the way a lock of her hair came to rest over her breast, the end lovingly curled around the tip as if to frame her unseen nipple. “But I don’t want to know just one of your truths,” she said. “I want to know all of them, you big smelly onion. For months, I’ve been dying to peel away your layers and see what’s underneath.”

  See? Curious as a cat. And if she was keen to get to know more about him, that had to mean she cared, yeah? Or at the very least wanted him? But despite the fact that earlier he had been champing at the bit to tell her his tale, to let her get to know the real him, sanity had returned and suddenly the thought of whipping open his emotional raincoat and exposing himself filled him with dread.

  What if she didn’t like what she saw? What if the real him—warts and scars and dodgy psyche and all—sent her running for the hills? He wasn’t sure he would survive that kind of rejection.

  Not from her.

  “Two,” he grumbled, feeling the tension in the muscle beneath his eye. Only Emily would think to negotiate at a time like this. “I’ll give you two truths.”

  “Three.” She was quick to come back. “I want three truths.”

  He grimaced. “This is turning into a terrible deal.”

  “Something tells me you wouldn’t recognize a good deal if it crawled up your pant leg and bit you on the pecker. Three little truths. That’s all I’m asking.”

  He experienced a jolt when she mentioned the words bite and pecker in the same sentence. His perverted mind immediately conjured up an image of her down on her knees, her soft mouth wrapped around… He shoved the vision aside.

  And little? He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the three truths she’d asked for would be anything but little. She didn’t want to know what his favorite color was—pink, like her cheeks—or what side of the bed he slept on—whichever side of the bed she didn’t want. She wanted to know him. To unearth the dark, disturbing things from his past that had formed him into the man he was today.

  “Fine.” He stuck out his hand. “You win. Three truths. But I get to ask my questions first.”

  When she reached to shake on the deal, he pulled her off the sofa and into his lap. She squeaked her surprise.

  “What are you doing?” She squirmed to be let go.

  “You got what you wanted. Three truths. It’s only fair I get what I want too. Which is you on my lap.” If he was going to open the lid on his dark past and expose her to all its shadows, he needed to keep hold of her while he did it. Whether to ground her in the present or to keep himself grounded there, he wasn’t sure. “Now, stop wiggling,” he scolded. “Unless…” He made certain his grin was lecherous. “You fancy wiggling a tad to the left. That would be quite fine, and I—”

  She shoved a finger over his lips. When he kissed it, she was quick to scowl and yank it away. She tried to act nonchalant about it, but he caught her rubbing at the spot where his lips had been. He could see the goose bumps on her arms, and a deep sense of satisfaction gripped him.

  “Your jeans are wet,” she accused.

  “Not that wet,” he countered. In fact, they were mostly dry.

  “Fine. But I would’ve thought you’d had enough of me sitting on your lap after the truck ride.” She looked petulant and flustered and quite pretty with her long hair having dried into soft, beachy waves. It was shiny and mink brown. But he knew when the sunlight hit it just right, he would see scattered strands of deep auburn and burnished gold.

  “Quite the contrary,” he told her. “I found I rather enjoyed it. Now I’m hooked.”

  “Humph.” She crossed her arms.

  He was tempted to kiss the frown right off her lips. Then kiss his way back to her ear so he could whisper dirty things to her before he made way down to her neck so he could suck on—

  “That fecking bastard bruised you,” he growled. There were four discolored circles on the side of her slim throat where lead Wankstain Brother had throttled her.

  “It’s nothing.” She waved a dismissive hand. “It doesn’t even hurt.”

  It might not hurt, but that didn’t stop Christian from imagining tearing out the asshole’s jugular—with his teeth—for daring to lay hands on her. In fact, he got so lost in the fantasy he didn’t realize how much time had passed until Emily said, “Well? Are we gonna do this thing or not? I ain’t got all day.”

  Right. The truths. And she’d whipped out her ’hood-girl grammar, which revealed how nervous she was about what he might ask.

  Brilliant. He wanted her nervous. He didn’t want to be the only one.

  “Truth number one,” he began, “why did you say you don’t mix business with pleasure when you do…when you have?”

  “It wasn’t a lie,” she insisted, still wearing a mulish expression that made him snuggle her closer despite her protests. After a couple of seconds, she gave up and leaned against him, all soft weight and sweet-smelling shampoo. “If you recall, I didn’t say I’d never mixed business with pleasure. I just said I don’t mix them. As in currently.”

  That didn’t bode well for him, did it? Something hard and sharp settled inside his chest. “Why? What happened between you and your boss?”

  “He fell in love with me.”

  The way she said the words was how someone else might say, The sun darkened, the moon turned to blood, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appeared on the horizon.

  The hard thing that had settled in his chest turned out to be a vise. It clamped around his heart. “He fell in love with you? Is that such a bad thing?”

  “Yes!” she huffed exasperatedly, looking at him like the answer was obvious. “Because it ruined everything when I didn’t love him back. When I couldn’t love him back. And believe me, I tried. Richard Neely was smart and handsome and about the sweetest thing ever.”

  If it was difficult seeing Emily holding hands or dancing in the arms of Rusty, a man who had no more sexual interest in her than he would in a kumquat, then it was absolutely agonizing imagining her in the arms of a man she thought of as smart and handsome and sweet. A man who had loved her and had no doubt made love to her on many occasions.

  “He had these cute dimples,” she continued. “And on Sunday mornings he would bring me breakfast in bed and then—”

  “Oh, go on then.” Christian clapped a hand over her mouth. “Spare me the details.” Green had edged into his vision, and he was afraid if she continued, he might hulk out and start tearing books from the shelves in a jealous rage.

  “He did anything and everything I ever asked,” she said when he dropped his hand. “He never argued with me. He always gave me anything I wanted.”

  As opposed to Christian, who always argued with her.

  “But…” She shook her head. “I didn’t love him. Not the way he wanted to be loved
or deserved to be loved. And it caused huge problems at work when it all fell apart. He didn’t understand why I didn’t love him, and I couldn’t explain it in a way he accepted. So his adoration turned to anger. His love to hate. It got to where he couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me.”

  Her expression was resigned and more than a bit sad. “As you can imagine, that made working in the same office more than a little difficult. He tried to get me a transfer. He really did.” She shrugged. “But there were no positions available. So I took pity on him and quit.”

  That’s Emily for you, Christian thought. Tough and tenacious on the outside. Selfless and sweet on the inside.

  Of course she would sacrifice herself for her former lover. She’d been up for taking a bullet for Christian, and until today they’d barely even touched.

  “And that’s when you made the decision never to mix business with pleasure again?” He watched her closely.

  “Exactly. I loved my job with the CIA. Thought I’d never find work like that again. Then, Boss offered me the gig at BKI. And holy shit! I love working there just as much. Maybe more. I will not fuck it up. I will not put myself in a position to have to start over. Not again.”

  For a long time, Christian remained quiet, arranging his thoughts, trying to come up with a good way to assure her that her past held no sway over her present. She hadn’t loved this Richard Neely bloke? So what? That didn’t mean she couldn’t fall in love with Christian. That didn’t mean she shouldn’t give the two of them a fighting chance.

  “You said you couldn’t explain to Neely in a way that he would accept the reason why you didn’t love him,” he said. “How about trying to explain it to me.”

  “Nope.” She shook her head. “You’ve had your three truths.”

  He blinked. “I beg your pardon. I’ve only—”

  “Think about it,” she interrupted. “You asked why I lied, and I told you. You asked what happened between me and my boss, and I told you.” She ticked off his questions on her fingers. “And you asked why Richard falling in love with me was a bad thing, and I told you.” Her grin was decidedly wicked when she finished with, “That’s three, bucko. Now, it’s my turn.”

  The muscle beneath his eye, not to mention the one in his jaw, went properly crazy. “You fight dirty,” he accused.

  “And don’t you forget it.” Her grin was positively impish.

  * * *

  Emily was so proud of herself for the way she’d handled Christian’s questioning that she was tempted to blow on her nails and rub them against her sweatshirt. But he already looked like he wanted to take a bite out of her. Blowing on her nails and rubbing them against her shirt might be enough to push him over the edge into action. Since she’d spent five minutes convincing him she was determined to live by a tenet that made sure his mouth came nowhere near her, she kept her hands fisted firmly in her lap.

  “Question number one,” she said, arranging her thoughts into some semblance of order. It was more difficult than usual because she was, you know, sitting on Christian’s lap. And he wasn’t helping matters a damn bit by tracing slow circles over her hip with the rough pad of his thumb. Still, she managed, “You said your mother was responsible for your father’s death. Explain.”

  He lifted a sardonic brow.

  “What?” She frowned.

  “I didn’t hear a question in there. But I suppose I mustn’t be surprised. Asking for things isn’t really your forte, is it? You’re better at demanding things. Bossy to your core.”

  “I’ve learned that if I ask for something, it’s easy for someone to tell me no. Now stop Christian Watsoning.”

  When his brow furrowed into one of his delightfully sexy scowls, she resisted the urge to shoot a victorious fist in the air.

  “Thought I told you to bugger off using my name as a verb.”

  “Thought I told you to bugger off changing the subject,” she mimicked in his accent.

  He glared at her. She glared back. Then his face softened, and his eyes drifted to her lips. The look in them said, I want to kiss you.

  She snapped her fingers in front of his nose, forcing his gaze back to hers. She made sure her frown replied, Stay on topic!

  He sighed, making it sound like he was the most put-upon man in the world. Then he opened his mouth, and the story that spilled out shook the foundations of Emily’s emotional walls.

  “Both my folks fancied getting pissed…er…drunk, as you would say,” he began, looking off into the middle distance as if it held all his memories. “Not every day, mind you. But on the weekends? Yeah. They blew off steam. Liked to have their mates over or go out on the town. And when they did, it was a proper piss-up, a major party. My dad was actually the worse of the two at the start. Some of my earliest memories are of my mum helping him stumble through the front door of our East End walk-up, then tossing him on the sofa and setting a dustbin beside him in case he needed to heave.”

  Emily frowned. She could definitely relate to having been raised by bad parents.

  “One Saturday night about a month before my sixth birthday, they were at a pub with friends,” he continued. Was she imagining things, or did his voice hitch? Just a little? Her heart felt that hitch all the way to its core. “Both were too plastered to drive home. But of course, of the two of them, my dad was the worse. So Mum took the keys and got behind the wheel.”

  Emily sensed the tension in the muscles of Christian’s chest, felt his thigh tighten beneath her bottom. She was so tempted to take his face between her hands and kiss away all his pain and sorrow. So tempted to throw her hard-learned lessons right out the window and…give in. But instead, she clasped her hands together and squeezed her fingers tight.

  “She blew through a stop sign at an intersection, and a delivery truck T-boned their Ford Fiesta.” His Adam’s apple bounced in the column of his tan throat. “It crashed into the passenger side of the vehicle. The docs said my dad died instantly. But my mum?” He shook his head. “She barely had a scratch. I think that actually made things worse in the end. I think she might have done better with the rest of her life had she been injured.”

  “What? Why?”

  The questions were out of Emily’s mouth before she had a chance to reel them back in. She’d used up her second truth, and she’d planned on it being something else entirely. Like, what his tattoos meant—if they meant anything—and why he’d gotten them.

  The thick black patterns that inked over his muscular arms didn’t jibe with the man she knew, the one who drove a fancy car and wore designer clothes. But she suspected they jibed very well with the man beneath those designer clothes. The one who was down and dirty, gruff and gritty.

  “The guilt ate at her,” he said. “If she’d been seriously injured, I think she would’ve been able to deal. But she couldn’t live with getting him killed and her walking away as if nothing had happened.”

  So many questions buzzed through Emily’s brain that she felt like she’d shoved her head in a beehive. She had to grit her teeth to keep from asking them.

  And why the hell wouldn’t he stop rubbing her hip? Warmth had spread from the skin beneath his hand, and now her whole body was suffused with it.

  “Is she the reason you stayed in England after Boss invited you to join him at Black Knights Inc.?” she asked. The look he shot her had her lifting a brow. “What?”

  “That’s the second time today I’ve thought you were either a mind reader or else practicing witchcraft.”

  “Really?” The thought delighted her. “When was the first time?” Then reality sank in. Shit, that was question number three. “Never mind!” She slapped a hand over his mouth. “Don’t answer that.”

  His eyes sparkled mischievously. He’d tried using her own technique against her, piquing her interest so she’d use up her truths.

  “I’m not the only one who fights
dirty,” she accused.

  “And don’t you forget it,” he parroted her words back to her. Then he placed a hot kiss in the center of her palm.

  She snatched her hand away, dropping it into her lap. If he noticed that she curled her fingers, trying to hold on to the heat of his kiss, he gave no indication.

  “So out with it,” she demanded. “Is your mother the reason you stayed in England after Boss invited you to join him at BKI?”

  “Yes.” His nod was perfunctory. “After I was let go from the SAS, when I was trying to make my way as a civilian, I moved back in with Mum. After Dad died, she didn’t only get soused on the weekends. She did it all day every day. Held on to the bottle like a lifeline. She was self-medicating, of course. When she was pissed, she could forget she’d been the one behind the wheel that night. But miracle of miracles, with me back home looking after her, suddenly it seemed like she was trying to pull her shit together. She stopped spending all her government support checks at the pub and instead started buying decent food for the flat. She even went ’round to the local Jobcentre offices and applied to be placed in a position.”

  From the tender age of six, he’d lived with a drunk mother and a dead father.

  Snap. Crackle. Pop.

  That wasn’t Rice Krispies. That was the foundations of Emily’s walls. Because she got it.

  Her parents might not be drunks, but she knew all about addiction. Her mother and father were both addicted to love, addicted to the high it brought them. They’d sought it with single-minded determination, and their searches had, more often than not, left Emily all alone.

  “Then one night, about three months after I got back, I found her in an alley,” Christian continued. “She was half frozen, half dressed, and totally piss drunk. And that’s when I knew.”

  He stopped there. Didn’t say another word for a full minute, simply stared into space.

  Even though she’d used up her three truths, Emily posed a question anyway. “What did you know?”