by Olivia Gates
But there was nothing sane about what she made him feel. Never had been, and, it was clear by now, never would be. Renewed exposure to her had caused the fever in his blood to relapse as if it had never subsided at all. As it never had.
The need to have it all out with her ate through his restraint. He’d only ever had speculations about her, didn’t have a single fact to quench the maddening thirst to know the truth.
But if he and his brothers had wiped their pasts and created new, perfectly verifiable identities, she’d far surpassed their combined undercover prowess. What they’d done only once, she’d done so many times she seemed to have never had an original identity.
As for their time together, which had scarred him in a way not even his nightmarish existence before it had managed to, he had only theories, no real answers to satisfy the gnawing uncertainty that never stopped asking how. Why?
Now he needed to know the truth.
Though he was certain she’d kept her end of the bargain, since there’d been no hint of suspicion in his identity, he needed to know everything to guard against any breach like hers ever happening again.
Or that was what he’d told himself as he’d torn his way over here. That it was a necessity, a prophylactic measure.
Slow steps finally took him to the semi–open plan kitchen. He found her flitting around, her hair up in a wonderfully messy mass.
As soon as he entered, she looked over her shoulder again, nodding toward the island. “Pull up a chair. I won’t be long.”
He walked up to her instead, struggled not to pull her back against his aching body.
She continued to work with fast, precise movements, pausing only when he tucked a lock of hair that had fallen over her shoulder back into her impromptu hairdo.
He bent, murmured in her ear, “Don’t you think it weird, with our history, for you to be inviting me to a meal?”
She straightened, continued to work with renewed zeal. “Why? I invited you to meals before.”
And he’d thought everything she’d served him had been ambrosia. “You were someone else then. Actually you weren’t someone at all, just a role. One that necessitated satisfying my every hunger to mollify me enough so you could dupe me. Which you did. No more reason for you to feed me.”
She flashed him another look over her shoulder that struck his heart like a bolt, before resuming work. “It’s the least I can do after I made a fifty-million-dollar-shaped hole in your pocket.”
“A fifty-million-dollar meal, eh?” He stepped away before he lost the battle and devoured her instead of the painfully tasty-smelling concoctions she was preparing. He walked back to the island, pulled out a stool and leaned his itching hands on the marble counter. “It had better be really good.”
“Of course it will be.”
There she went again with that supreme assurance. She’d never displayed anything near it in the past.
But then it hadn’t been the real her he’d known. She’d been playing the part of the part-time florist and kindergarten teacher who’d been out of her league in his world. In reality, with everything he was, everything he’d seen and done, the reverse might turn out to be true.
She now placed a plate heaped with triple the amount of hers before him, before taking a seat across from him.
He continued watching her, wondering if this was the real her this time, or if it was just another role.
She raised one elegant eyebrow. “You’re starving. Eat.”
A huff escaped him. She just kept surprising him with every word and action. “And you know that how?”
She pushed the cutlery pointedly at his hands. “Because I calculated that you haven’t eaten in at least six hours. I first saw you tonight five hours ago, and you hadn’t eaten at least an hour before that. I remember you needed to eat every three hours, with the level of exercise you maintained, and that nuclear metabolism of yours. You seemed to eat almost half my body weight every day. With your increased body mass, you must be in the red by now.”
He was. In every way. And he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He’d thought his appetite, which nothing had ever affected except her, had been stalled anticipating the ball. Seemed it had been an advance alarm. He had been anticipating her.
She started eating, and he gave in, followed suit.
The moment the thing he was eating hit his taste buds, an involuntary growl of hunger and appreciation rolled from his gut. “What is that?”
“Nasu dengaku.”
“What?”
Her lips twitched. “You don’t know your Japanese cuisine, do you?”
His gaze clung to her lips as her expression filled with what looked like unguarded humor. But it couldn’t be. This enigma probably was incapable of spontaneity.
Compressing his lips, he suppressed the moronic impulse to smile back. “I only look Japanese, remember? I spent my first twenty-four years as an identity-less weapon, then when I got out, I became American. I learned everything I could about Japan before I came, but nothing can replace acquiring knowledge firsthand.”
She nodded as she chewed, her brilliant eyes doing this hypnotic color dance. “It is a very complex country and culture. Such an extensive mix of modern and traditional, so many regional variations. You’ll need at least six months before you’re used to the most common daily practices, and a year to comfortably navigate the land and society.”
If he didn’t know better, he would have thought she was giving him sincere advice to ease his integration into his new homeland. But he did know better.
So what was she doing? No doubt more acting.
The acute senses that had never failed him clamored to detect her duplicity. But she was truly undetectable.
He exhaled. “Are you talking from firsthand experience?”
“I have been here just over a year now.” Her gorgeous head inclined, and her deep red silky hair sparked fire in the overhead halogen spotlights. “Bear in mind, it might be years before you can fully integrate. Good news is, speaking fluent Japanese will shorten and ease the process. It did for me.”
She’d never let on she understood a word of Japanese.
“I have more factors to shorten and ease the process. I will have a Japanese wife. Something you didn’t have.”
“I certainly didn’t have a Japanese wife.”
He held those teasing eyes, and the urge to ask became irresistible. Not one of the dozens of relevant questions, but the one that blocked his throat like a burning coal.
“Is any of this—” he made an encompassing gesture at her “—real? I know your past self was all an act. Is this new persona all a part of your new act?”
Instead of answering with the same directness she had till now, her eyes lowered to her plate as she resumed eating.
He ate, too, because the food was just too delicious and he was famished, and because her silence made him feel as he imagined people did when waiting for a heart-stopping twist in a movie, increasing their popcorn munching in anticipation.
Then she raised her eyes. “I never really acted with you. Apart from the pretense that I was someone...normal, with what that entailed of prefabricated and rehearsed details, everything else—my actions, my characteristics, what I said to you, what I did with you—that was all the real me.”
His heart went off like a clap of thunder in his chest.
“Yeah, sure.”
She nodded, as if accepting his ridicule. “You asked, and I answered. You’re free to take my answer or leave it.”
“I’ll leave it, if it’s all the same to you.”
“It is.”
He just bet it was.
After wolfing down the last piece of mystery food on his plate, he looked up at her again. “So what was that I just polished off? This nasu dengaku?”
“And it just became one of mine.” He sat back in his chair. “Anything else to eat? Though it was great, it has nowhere enough calories for my so-called nuclear metabolism.”
“Of course. That was just the appetizer.”
With that she rose, and went about preparing and serving him two more courses and dessert.
All through, he struggled not to become submerged in the surreal feeling that this was the same woman he’d once wanted with everything in him, that he was sharing with her a warm, intensely enjoyable meal at home. The one thing that kept yanking him out of this false scenario was that he was getting hungrier. For her.
Before that hunger overpowered him, he rose to help her clear the kitchen. After everything had been washed, dried and put away, he turned to her.
“That was unexpected, and unnecessary, and certainly not what I came for. But thanks anyway.”
“That was appalling.” She wrinkled her nose. “You owe me no thanks, and you wouldn’t thank me even if I save your life now. But I believe you were trying to be gracious, and it only came out the opposite.”
“I wasn’t aiming at graciousness. As you pointed out, I owe you none.”
“But you owed it to your fiancée and Hiro, and you were even worse with them. And that won’t work if you want to integrate into Japanese high-class society then take it over. Politeness is paramount here, and the higher you go in society, the more vital it becomes. If you can’t act gracious with your fiancée and the man holding the ball celebrating your engagement, you’re in deep trouble.”
“Spoken as the ultimate actress that you are. Maybe I should get lessons from you.”
“Maybe you should.”
Their gazes collided and wrestled for a long minute.
Before he did what he knew he’d regret, he finally asked the question he’d told himself he’d come here to ask.
“Earlier you said you were sent to expose me as an assassin. Explain.”
She gave a dismissing shrug. “What is there to explain?”
“Everything.”
“Again? I don’t have time for your sweeping generalizations right now. So just narrow down what you want to know, please.”
Fighting the urge to roar, he hissed, “Who sent you?”
“Boris Medvedev.”
That her response was so immediate, so succinct, would have shocked him all on its own. But that name struck him like a hammer to the temple. It made him stumble back a step.
Medvedev. His personal handler, who’d been assigned to him when he’d been ten. Raiden had spent fourteen horrific years under that man’s sadistic eye and lash.
Medvedev had been punished, brutally, when he’d “lost” Raiden. All the handlers had been, when each of his Black Castle brothers had escaped. His brother Rafael had been agonized to know that, as he’d considered his handler, Richard, his mentor. Raiden, however, had been viciously glad that Medvedev had been the most punished and demoted. He owed that man a debt of pain and humiliation nothing could ever satisfy.
But Medvedev wasn’t only a sadist, he was an obsessive. It had been what had made Raiden’s escape the hardest. And while all their handlers had been sent in search of them, he bet it was Medvedev who’d kept looking after everyone had given up, needing to take his revenge. And most important, to reinstate himself. Though Medvedev had been another abductee of The Organization, he’d suffered from Stockholm syndrome and had integrated totally with his captors. The Organization, and his position within it, was everything to him.
But Raiden had thought even Medvedev had given up the search eventually. He’d underestimated his obsession. And his knowledge of him. His former handler knew him so well he’d suspected his new persona.
But suspicion wouldn’t have sufficed. Only solid proof would have been good enough to take to The Organization, that Raiden Kuroshiro, the heavily documented pillar of a global conglomerate like Black Castle Enterprises, was the operative who’d escaped them. Escaped him.
So five years ago Medvedev had hired her, no doubt the absolute best he could find, to bring him that proof. And she’d found it.
But since Medvedev hadn’t made a move since, it was proof she’d upheld her end of the bargain. But now that he knew Medvedev had been her recruiter, he couldn’t understand how she had.
He looked at her in renewed confusion. “Medvedev was obsessed with me. He must have watched your every step during those five months, must have demanded regular reports of your progress, and evidence that you were on the right track.”
Her eyes turned indigo. “I didn’t give him any.”
“And he kept financing the fictional life you led? For five months with no signs he might get his money’s worth? And it would have been longer if I hadn’t discovered you and you were forced to end the charade. Then when you struck your bargain with me, you told him I wasn’t the one he thought, and he didn’t suspect you’d decided it was more lucrative to work for yourself? Doesn’t sound like him.”
“I can be very convincing. As you very well know.”
With that, it seemed she considered the conversation closed, and she walked past him on her way out of the kitchen. He caught her back to him, slammed her for the second time tonight against his length.
As her breath left her in a gasp that flayed his chest and neck, his hands tightened on her flesh. “I’m not done here.”
Though she was much smaller now without those precarious heels and felt vulnerable in his grip, the entity that held his gaze was the most powerful presence he’d ever encountered.
Then she huskily said, “I am.”
“Maybe you are, Scarlett, or Hannah, or whatever your real name is. But we’re not done.”
In one explosive movement fueled by five years of betrayal and frustration, he lifted her up onto the island, yanked up the flowing skirt of her black dress, exposing honey tanned legs and thighs, wrenched them wide apart and slammed between them.
He held her eyes for one last tempestuous moment. They all but screamed at him, Do it!
And he did. He lunged, crushed her beneath him, crashed his lips on hers.
Her cry went down his throat as he poured his growls down hers, his lips branding hers, his teeth sinking in their plumpness, his tongue filling her mouth, over and over, invading her, draining her. Her heat and taste and surrender were a sledgehammer to his remaining shell of reason.
His hands glided all over her silkiness, mad with remembrance, sinking in her craved delights, seeking her every memorized trigger, until she writhed beneath him.
At her moan, he slid between her splayed legs down to her core. He nipped her intimate lips through her panties, making her cry out and convulse before he pulled them off with his teeth, his eyes never leaving hers. They’d always told him exactly how she’d felt, what she’d wanted. They’d been far more potent than any mind-altering drug. They still were, sending him clear out of his mind with lust.
She’d always been vocal, too, corroborating her eyes’ confessions and demands. Now she said nothing. Yet her body spoke for her, her back arching deeply, legs trembling out of control, core weeping with arousal. She was so ready for him. As she’d always been. He’d always wondered if it had been part of her uncanny ability in subterfuge, if she had a trick to achieve such powerful arousals and orgasms every single time.
But it had felt real then. And it still did. Now she felt as desperate as he was, her body shuddering, her breath fracturing, her skin radiating heat, her core pouring its plea for his possession, its maddening scent perfuming the room, filling his lungs.
He rose between her legs, freeing his rock-hard erection before pushing her
knees back against her body, opening her fully for him.
Holding the eyes that had turned into cobalt infernos, without any preliminaries he rammed into her, all his power and pent-up hunger and anger behind the thrust.
Her cry at his abrupt invasion was a red-hot spear in his brain. Like a glove, her slick tightness yielded to his power, sheathed him, searing him with her fever, until he thought she’d burn him to ashes.
For delirious moments, he stilled inside her. This was the ultimate embrace he’d been going insane for. Everything he’d ever craved.
Then the urge to conquer her, to lose himself inside her crested again, and he withdrew, then plunged again and again, harder each time, faster. Her cries punctuated his thrusts. Every time he sank deeper, the need to breach her, to bury himself into her recesses, blinded him.
He lodged inside her to the root, and she arched in a deep bow, her inner muscles clamping his hardness in unbearable tautness, her face clenching in agonized urgency, her every muscle beneath and around him buzzing on the edge of a paroxysm. Another thrust would make her explode in release.
He gave it to her, with everything in him.
Her shriek pierced him as her core splintered around his girth and his body all but detonated in the most powerful orgasm he’d ever experienced, even with her. His roars echoed her desperation as his body caught the current of her convulsions. Excruciating pleasure shot through his length in jet after jet of white-hot release until he felt he’d drained his essence into her depths.
The world seemed to vanish as he slumped on top of her, nothing left but feeling her beneath him, still trembling, her core still milking him for every last drop of sensation.
In what could have been an hour, the arms and legs that lay nerveless with satiation around him started to tighten, as did the velvet gripping his erection.