I was panting, too, I realized. I started to cry, though I couldn’t say why. I looked down at the gun, but it felt too heavy to even raise.
And nothing made any sense at all anymore.
He dropped his arms. “No?” he said, reaching for the gun, pointing it at his chest.
My hands shook and I let go of the gun.
Quicker than I could move, he snapped it around and slammed it into the holster. “What?” he gasped. He had me in his arms and pulled me to his chest. My knees gave out and I sank into him, crying. “What the hell were you doing?” he said. His lips were at the top of my head, his fingers at the back of my scalp.
“I h-h-heard you,” I blubbered. “I heard you, I heard you. You’re going to kill me, you’re going to kill Lucy, and me, and the baby, you and... Eric...”
He squeezed me tighter, and the embrace made me melt away further. It felt protective, his chest filling with air, a long sigh escaping him. I went limp. I was so lost, and all I could think of was how good it felt to be in his arms, even if this was my last moment on earth.
“Natalia,” he said. And then he began to rattle off something in another language.
He pushed me in front of him, shaking me by my shoulders. “You are such a stupid, stupid girl. You understand nothing.”
We stood there, staring at each other, my eyes so filled with tears that I could barely make out his face.
“You’re not going to—”
“No. You silly girl. I’m not...” He pushed both hands through his hair. He was squinting, thinking, searching his mind for something. “Don’t you understand anything?”
I shook my head.
He lifted my dropping face by the chin. “Natalia. Natalia. You’re the one who is going to kill me.”
I was crying again. I collapsed to the deck. “I don’t understand,” I sobbed. “I don’t understand anything.”
He lifted me by the arms and pulled me close to him again. “I know. I know.”
We were there for a long time, the boats bobbing slightly as a breeze picked up.
“We’re going home,” he said at last. He pushed me toward the seat by the cockpit. “Sit there,” he said firmly.
He took the wheel of the boat. “I promise to tell you,” he said, looking into the controls. “I promise to tell you everything.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Alaric
A storm was picking up. I radioed ahead to tell my pilot to come for Eric, to get him off the island before we returned. I saw the helicopter rising from the helipad as we approached. It was my final bit of capital, but it was the way it had to be.
Natalia was sullen, pale, drenched like a drowned rat but still beautiful, staring at me all the way home. But she was alive. The fear I had felt—of losing her, of finding her body limp and lifeless in the water—gripped me again and again, and could only be tamped down by looking over to see her there, still alive, still blinking.
I ordered her out of the boat and followed her to the staircase, but she was exhausted and so by the tenth step I had put her arm over my shoulder to help her up, and I carried her after the first landing. She slipped an arm around my neck and turned her face to my chest, and her breath against my bare skin ignited me, a reminder that she was still alive.
She was cold—even at this latitude, the ocean was cold that far out. I took her to my room, to the large bath, and I stripped her clothes from her as she stood, shivering, watching me as though she couldn’t believe that I existed.
I changed into dry clothes while she warmed up in the bath, staring at the tiles, huddled with her knees to her chest. I got her out by extending my arm, and she came willingly into the towel I held out for her.
I walked her out to my room, where she looked around, the towel wrapped protectively around her. She dropped a hand to the bed—my bed, a place she had never been. Then she looked up at me, and her hold on my heart was sealed completely in the grip of her expression. I knew what I had to do.
“Why?” she said helplessly.
There was no easy way of knowing what she meant by that. No easy answer, no matter what she had intended. Why had I brought her here? Why was she in my room? Why hadn’t I let her drown? Why, any of this? Why was she so dangerous? Why?
I reached for her, pulled her to me, and kissed her lips, which were still cool but warmed beneath mine. Then I looked at her and she stepped back.
There was a moment, fleeting and horrible, when I didn’t know what she would do.
But she brought her fingers to the top of the towel and loosened it, letting it fall to the floor. Her eyes burned into mine.
I stepped toward her, and in moments we were falling onto the bed, her body warm beneath mine, cool patches melting beneath my touch. My spine inflamed with pleasure when I drew my tongue along the edge of her earlobe and her skin turned to gooseflesh from her neck to her elbow.
The purpose of me taking her now was different than before: I wanted to taste her skin and feel every inch of her, to know that she was mine.
I moved down her body, sucking her hard nipples into my mouth to make her arch her back and press her flesh against me. As I traveled the length of her body with my tongue I found places where she was still cool, a chilling reminder of how close I had come to losing her. I needed to feel her under me, to be inside of her and burst inside of her soft flesh to know that she was really safe.
I kissed the inside of her thighs until they quivered as she dug her fingers into my hair. She pressed my face to her pussy and I teased her as long as I could, running my tongue along the soaked edges of her lips before lapping the buttery folds and capturing her swollen clit in my mouth. She gasped and pushed me to her as I darted across the face of it and made her body jerk helplessly with pleasure.
“Alaric,” she breathed, and I didn’t wait for her to say anything more—she wanted me, and I could not wait any longer for her. My thumb caressed her throat and I held her mouth close to mine as I sank inside of her hot pussy, as deep as I could get. Her breath seemed to be punched from inside of her in my first thrust, and for a moment we were both breathless, looking into each other’s eyes, her body pulsing around me.
She pushed herself up on her elbows, staring at me as though seeing me for the first time. Her body pulsed around me, her legs enclosed me and squeezed me against her. I moved with her until she was on my lap, her hard nipples against my chest, her mouth moving against mine. Our lips brushed and then crashed together, our breath mingled and our foreheads met as we gripped each other’s hair.
My arms were around her as I moved her body up and down on my lap, each sensual inch of her pussy gliding over me and driving me wild. I buried my face in her soft breasts, fingers pressed against her back, and her moans vibrated against my cheek as her breasts slid across my face and she squeezed my cock with her liquid body.
I clung to her as she rolled on top of me. I was just at the edge and could not hang on any longer, when I felt her whole body shudder and seize around me, solid as rock for a moment. Her hot pussy liquid boiled around my cock as she came. I leaned back, my hand on the back of her neck and the other pulling her by her hip so that I could thrust myself so deep inside of her that there was nowhere else to go. Everything I had ever kept tightly guarded inside myself burst open into her soft flesh, filling her, emptying me. I leaned forward onto her heaving chest, slippery with sweat, the scent of her skin hot like flowers in the air in the dead heat of summer. Her fingers raked my scalp through my hair, and I was completely lost as I had never been; I loved her, and I needed her, and she emptied and completed me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Natalia
He lay me down on the bed, still inside of me, and propped himself on top of me after he came, and I never wanted him to leave. The weight of his body was not enough, not enough to hold me to the earth. I loved him, and I wanted him inside of me forever. I knew as soon as he began to speak that something would shatter what had just happened between us.
But there was no way out for me and lying there I knew I had started loving him a long time ago.
He rolled to the side and I went with him, looking into his eyes. He entwined his fingers in mine. The man next to me was so different than the one I had come to know.
“I wanted this for a long time,” he said.
My heart dropped and swelled and seemed to take on a life of its own inside my chest. He touched my mouth before I could say anything.
Then, abruptly, he sat up, resting his arms on his knees.
I sat up slowly next to him and put my hand on his arm. I traced the tattoos with my fingertips. When I reached the middle of his bicep, he closed his fingers around my hand, and held it so firmly it almost hurt. “Natalia,” he said.
I waited. He was closing up again.
“Please just tell me what—”
He moved, with his panther-like grace, quickly, so that he was standing up at the foot of the bed. “I’m a bad man, Natalia,” he said without looking at me. “I’m a bad man, with a lot of enemies.”
I pushed myself close to the edge of the bed. I had known he was ‘bad’ for a long time, wondered exactly how bad his ‘bad’ could be. The money, the guns, the tattoos, the mystery—of course he wasn’t a schoolteacher, but it was too frightening sometimes to think of just how bad he might be.
I wanted to ask, but I didn’t dare. My heart went cold before I mustered the strength to ask the question I really wanted to, and instead I said, almost stupidly, “You don’t seem like a bad man to me.”
Like lightning, the way his mood often changed, his eyes went dark and the man he had been while making love to me seemed to disappear beneath his dark exterior. “Don’t make that mistake for a minute,” he seethed.
The same cold feeling that had washed over me when I met him what seemed like another lifetime ago in Kitty Bang Bang rose up from my feet to my chest—but it didn’t consume me. “What’s ‘bad,’ then?” I asked. “What have you done?”
For a moment it looked as if the darker, colder side of him would tell me, but his expression softened suddenly. His fists closed and he walked to the window, as though he wanted to hide something from me.
I waited, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to get from him, which side of him would begin speaking.
“I’m a bad man, Natalia, and I want to leave it at that. There’s no—” He sucked in his breath. “There’s no reason to tell you anything more than that. I don’t want to be that. I want to be a different man. You deserve a different man.”
My heart felt like it would balloon until it burst. “Alaric—”
He turned to face me, to interrupt me. “I’ve never had anything I was afraid of losing. Do you understand?”
I was on the bed, on my knees, unable to speak for an entirely different reason than I had ever expected.
He stepped toward me and brushed a strand of my hair away from my cheeks, where it had clung with the sweat of our lovemaking. The hair snaked over my skin with the pull of his fingers, and the shudder it gave me traveled down my spine. His blue eyes burned into mine, and the love inside of them was almost too intense to look at. “I’m afraid of losing you, Natalia. Very, very afraid of losing you. And I don’t like fear.”
His thumb had traveled to my lips and brushed them gently.
“That’s what you overheard, me talking to Eric, Eric talking to me...” He closed his eyes with impatience. “It doesn’t matter. Eric is an old friend, a friend of the man I used to be, the man I don’t want to be anymore. Eric is the one who suggested that I get rid of you.”
“I think I’m pregnant,” I blurted in a whisper.
He leaned forward to kiss me and put his forehead to mine, intertwining our fingers. “I knew that,” he said quietly. “That was why Eric was here, to be your doctor.”
I was stunned for a moment, and then just as quickly it seemed silly to me that I had ever thought I could hide something like that from him.
“I don’t understand why we can’t just—”
Alaric squeezed my hand. “Natalia,” he said. “Trust me when I tell you, if anyone knew that there was a way to get to me, then they would use it. And right now... you are the way. You... and...”
His fingers brushed over my belly.
I was overcome by the love I could feel in his touch, by the way he looked at me, so much so that I forgot my next question. His fingers traveled over my belly, almost weightlessly, and then to my breasts, where they brought my nipples to attention before abandoning them to their aching need to stroke the hollow of my throat.
The conversation, I could feel, had ended, because Alaric was staring at the places that he touched with such intensity that I knew he was thinking of nothing else. He cupped my right breast and brought my nipple inside his mouth, and I had to close my eyes in ecstasy.
From there, I let myself fall into a place where I thought of nothing else, and felt nothing else except for the touch of his fingers, light and teasing. The heat of his mouth against my inner thigh then enclosed around my clit, his tongue deep inside of me and then pulsing against the most sensitive part of my body as my limbs jerked involuntarily with the intense pleasure he wrung from me.
And then there was nothing but the fullness inside of me as he filled me again, his cock stretching me open, his hands in my hair and his mouth against mine. His hard muscles were hot on my chest as he pushed my hands to either side of us and entwined his fingers in mine, thrusting deep inside of me again. In my abdomen a fire raged until it gripped like an electric shock and my back arched, pushing me against him, my heels digging into the hard muscled small of his back. He buried his head next to mine and bit gently into my shoulder as he came, and the warmth of his cum overflowed in my pussy.
We lay next to each other, fingers intertwined, our legs tangled. I stared at his face until my eyelids were too heavy to keep open. I don’t know how long it lasted, lying there, knowing he was watching me, thinking of nothing but all the places where he was touching me.
And then, just as I was drifting to sleep, my eyes flew open, my whole body dead cold at the thought.
Alaric was still looking at me, as though he had never drifted off. His eyes widened with alarm as I drew back from him and then sat up. “So what is it with Lucy?” I asked.
“What?”
“Lucy. Eric said you should get rid of Lucy. Why? Is it because you’re paying for her hospitalization? You could just stop, right? Or... hide the money trail, can’t you? I don’t see what... you can’t, you just can’t do anything to Lucy.”
My eyes were welling up with tears.
And then, when I looked at Alaric, a new stab of pain went straight through my chest. His eyes had gone dead and cold again. What I saw in his face was frightening.
“You can’t kill Lucy,” I repeated. “It’s not her fault you’re a bad person. She doesn’t even know you. She doesn’t even... it doesn’t even make sense...”
My voice trailed off. I felt I was very close to a truth I perhaps didn’t want to hear, and I could see that Alaric was shutting down, closing the doors to the Alaric I had just found, and replacing him with the man who had kidnapped me, the bad man...
He sat up. His mouth was a straight line. “Something has to be done about Lucy,” he said coldly.
“What?” I gasped. “What?”
I was filling with rage, seeing how easily he turned back into a monster. I should never have fallen for him, I thought.
I hit him, and he didn’t even react. I started to pound on his arms and then, because he turned to face me, his chest. “You bastard!” I yelled at him. “You fucking bastard, I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you, I knew it!”
He pushed me down onto the bed and held me there, while I closed my eyes and prepared to be turned over and spanked. But the spanking never came.
He pushed himself off the bed, and when his weight pressed me down, my wrists screamed in pain. He stood up, looking over me. “I told you,” he said,
his voice flat, his eyes robotic and cold. “I’m a bad man.”
“Lucy hasn’t done anything,” I sobbed, cradling my wrists. “She doesn’t even know you.”
He looked down at me, his face contorted by an emotion I could not read.
“If you kill her, you are an animal,” I seethed. “You are a bad man, and you’ll never be anything else.”
His lips pressed together more tightly. Then he shifted his gaze to the window and nodded, as though in the inky sky there were someone out there who had confirmed something for him. “Maybe you’re right.”
He pulled on his shorts and took his gun.
I stared at him, my heart bleeding painfully into my chest.
He turned and walked out of the room.
“I hate you!” I screamed at him. “I’ll hate you forever!”
And then I collapsed on the bed, sobbing.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alaric
Her words burned through me.
There was nothing but bad choices, I thought, taking the gun apart and cleaning it, staring into a blank wall so that I could do the motions from muscle memory. I did it over and over again, trying to keep my mind away from her voice, which yelled at me relentlessly, “I hate you! I’ll always hate you!”
She would, I knew. She would hate me, and the dream would be over. But if I left Lucy to the dogs who would eventually come for her, she would die a slow and painful death, and when she did, she would release from her lips the name Natalie Paulson. Adopted.
And it would only take one casual glimpse at a yearbook picture or the wall of seedy pictures at Kitty Bang Bang to see that ‘Natalie Paulson’ was Kyril Karkarov’s daughter. Andrej would sing like a bird, because he was no dummy either. And it wouldn’t be long before Natalia Karkarov would be the item to steal. What a great day it would be when they discovered that Natalia Karkarov not only opened Swiss safes, but could also open the doors to anything and everything you ever wanted to get from Alaric Vitkus.
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