by PJ Adams
She’d spent two nights there, trying to work out what was happening and why she was suddenly so powerless. She’d been vulnerable and scared, and must barely have slept at all.
It was natural she should sleep so soundly now. She lay on her side, one knee drawn up, the leg below it stretched out.
Until a moment ago, Mitchell had been lying there, holding her. Feeling her softly breathing in his arms.
He’d got hard again.
Her perfect ass in his lap, his dick lying against the split, starting to fill out, to push against her and that crack yielding just a little.
It would have been so easy to press against her still, shift position so he was pushing against the folds of her pussy, easing into her from behind as she drifted back to wakefulness and started to move against him.
So easy.
And it had taken so much self-control to stop himself, to gently draw his pelvis back, away, to dip his head and kiss her on that flawlessly smooth skin where shoulder becomes neck, to breathe her in deep and then, slowly, carefully, extricate his arms so he could roll away, turn to sit on the side of the bed, his dick throbbing upright against his belly, his heart pounding.
She needed to sleep.
Needed to recover from her ordeal of the last few days.
He stood and looked back at her delicate shape. Moved across the room to the doorway and out into the main living area. He’d get some water, find a blanket to wrap around himself against the cool night air, and think.
He stepped out into the living area and was stopped in his tracks by the sound of a throat clearing. A deliberate sound, designed to catch his attention.
A woman’s throat clearing.
He looked across to the kitchen doorway and saw her standing there, arms raised before her, a pistol aimed casually in his direction.
Laura.
“You might have kept the noise down,” she said. “So sweet, though. Although you must have realized she was faking it. You never made me scream like that.”
§
“You might want to get some clothes.” She nodded her head, indicating his nakedness, his rapidly diminishing erection. “Save that one for later, eh?”
How long had she been here?
Long enough to have heard them. Had she been here all that time?
He’d checked the place thoroughly when they arrived. It hadn’t been used for weeks. Regan had said he was last here around New Year, and there had been nothing to indicate anyone had been here since then.
No sign of people at any of the neighboring cabins, either. No other cars about, although she could easily have hidden hers.
He sensed movement, Sunita coming to stand at his shoulder. He glanced back and saw she’d pulled on that big t-shirt. He was more concerned with her modesty than his. She didn’t need Laura’s cold scrutiny.
When he looked back across the room, Laura had lowered her gun. “Get some clothes,” she said again. “I don’t want to see it.”
She sounded... tired.
He wondered what was in her head. What mental and emotional space she now occupied since they’d split up.
He couldn’t bring himself to hate her, even though she deserved it, and god knows he’d tried.
He turned, squeezed Sunita’s arm gently, moved past her to get some clothes and pull them on.
“What do you want?” he said, coming back out into the living room and flicking the light switch. Laura was here alone, so putting the lights on didn’t matter. If she’d come with back-up she’d never have entered the cabin and confronted them on her own.
Laura stood with her back to a window, her ass resting on the ledge, arms folded across her chest.
“Oh really, Mitch. Did you ever think you’d fool me? That separate cars thing, and pretending you’d be driving on your own down to London? I know you better than that. Better than you know yourself.”
A look exchanged, between Laura and Sunita. Mitchell felt outflanked, as if he was in the middle of a stand-off between the two women, all of a sudden. A territorial thing, even though Laura must know she had lost long ago. Not even lost: she’d walked away. He knew her too, though; he knew she would want some kind of victory, regardless.
His hands at his side, he moved one to press against the small of Sunita’s back, stroking her spine with his thumb.
“How did you find us?”
“I knew you wouldn’t head anywhere obvious,” she said. “But then, how obvious is that? I knew Terry Regan had this place, and you don’t exactly have many friends to turn to other than Terry, do you?”
He felt Sunita tense, and felt a sudden surge of... He didn’t know what he felt, didn’t recognize the emotion, but it spoke deeply to him that Sunita had taken Laura’s sparring and petty point- scoring against her calmly, but then clearly reacted the moment she had a dig at Mitchell.
“But how did you know where this place was? Even I didn’t know until a few hours ago.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I’m smarter than you, don’t you get that by now? I can work these things out. That, and the tracking device I put on Terry Regan’s car...”
Alex Mitchell was good at what he did. That wasn’t arrogance on his part, it was cold assessment, the kind of self-knowledge that can make the difference between life and death: know your strengths, just as you know your weaknesses, but also be damned sure you have a good measure of both.
But Laura had always been his blindspot. She’d always been able to put herself one step ahead of him.
“So what’s the situation?” he asked her. “How bad?”
“I’ve been given authorization,” she said, that tiredness in her tone, again.
They both knew what that meant, but Sunita wouldn’t understand.
For a moment, he considered leaving it at that. Sunita didn’t need to know. Then he turned his head to her, and said, “They’ve decided you’re too much of a risk to national security. They don’t want your knowledge falling into the hands of anyone else. They don’t want you to fall into the hands of anyone else.”
She got it straight away. Laura had been sent here to kill her.
“But...” she said, before pausing and starting again. “But my work is going to save lives. Why would anyone want to stop that?”
“It’s not about that,” he said. “It never has been. It’s about control. The ability to save people is a weapon, just as much as guns and bombs are. They want to control that, just as Bowler did. But now they’ve decided they can’t control you any more.”
“Not just Sunita,” said Laura. “You too, Mitch. I’ve been given authorization for you both. And if I have, then you know there are going to be others on your tail, too.”
He met her look. That silent communication thing. He didn’t need to ask out loud why he was still breathing. She’d slipped in here easily enough, caught them off guard. She could easily have killed them both some time ago.
But she hadn’t.
“Go,” she said. “Fuck off, Mitchell.”
Could he trust her? Part of his mind couldn’t ignore the possibility she was still playing games, but he couldn’t work out what those games might be.
She moved a hand, down to reach behind her waist, and Mitchell flinched, thought she was going for her holstered Glock.
Instead, she took something from a back pocket. A pair of long plastic cable ties.
“Tie me up,” she said. “Make it look convincing.”
§
She sat in a wooden chair backed up against the wall, her arms passing through the back of the chair and zip-tied at the wrists to a metal pipe. It wouldn’t stand up to much, but this whole cabin was pretty insubstantial and this was the best they could do.
As Mitchell leaned in to check the zip-ties, Laura grinned at him, and said, “Just like old times, eh, Mitch?”
He glanced at Sunita as he straightened, his cheeks burning. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d blushed. Basic training taught them how to take control of t
he body’s automatic reactions, anything that might indicate emotional response and betray an agent in a tight situation.
Sunita smiled, perhaps trying to reassure him. She couldn’t have missed the way Laura took every opportunity to make him squirm.
He stepped back, stopping himself from asking if Laura was comfortable. She wasn’t, and she shouldn’t be if this was to be credible.
Laura nodded up at him, said, “Now hit me like you mean it.”
He couldn’t.
He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
“Come on, you pathetic bastard, show some balls for once. Fucking hit me.”
A blur to his side, a sudden movement as Sunita stepped forward, swung her arm back and then drove it forward, the fist balled, smashing it into Laura’s face so her head jerked back and thudded against the cabin wall.
He stared.
Sunita didn’t do things like that. She wasn’t the kind of person who would ever punch her new lover’s ex so hard she must almost have fractured her skull against the wall. She was too nice...
Sunita shrugged, gingerly exploring her fist with her other hand. “Sometimes good people have to do bad things,” she said.
He still stared, the moment only broken by a harsh laugh from Laura.
“Brilliant!” Laura gasped. Her mouth was bleeding, her nose, too. “I like this one, Mitch. I like her a lot.” Then, after a pause, she fixed Sunita with a hard look and added, “Don’t break him, bitch, you hear me? Or I’ll come after you, wherever you are.”
Sunita nodded, turned away, and went to the bedroom to get her things, job done.
Mitchell was left staring at Laura, still struggling to catch up.
“Go, you bastard,” Laura said, clearly in pain. “Take Terry’s car, not mine. The Company will be tracking mine, but I’m the only one who was tracking yours, so you’ll have a head start until they find me. Dump it before morning, though, because I’m going to tell them how to find it... how I found you.”
He had worked that out already, but let her speak. Let her be his savior one last time.
He backed away, as Sunita emerged again.
“Now fuck off and have a life,” Laura said. “Take your opportunity. At least one of us has worked out where happiness lies. That’s a hell of a lot better outcome than I’d ever have bet on, you know?”
Mitchell nodded, took Sunita’s hand, left Laura with her farewell words. She didn’t need anything more from him, other than the luxury of having the last word, one final time.
Epilogue, a month later, and several thousand miles away
She sat on a recliner, a big straw hat shading her head, a parasol stuck in the sand angled to shade the screen of her laptop.
Angular palm trees clustered around where she sat, and the white sand of the beach sloped down to meet a perfectly clear sea under a perfectly azure sky.
She had always said she could work anywhere. The world was her laboratory. Well, the world and a powerful laptop with good internet access.
Now though, she flipped the laptop closed, done for the day.
They’d called in favors to get her out of the country, find some degree of protection. Alex Mitchell had all kinds of contacts who still felt loyalty toward him; Terry Regan had merely been the first of many.
And Bernard Bowler. He knew he’d lost, but in the end it was all a game to him, and he was drawn to mischief like a naughty schoolboy. His lawyers were working on the complexities of her case right now and might even win. And inevitably he would try to twist it, present himself as a savior of the people, championing intellectual freedom against those men in suits.
She didn’t care. It was out there now. Her work. She’d published it far and wide online, open-sourced her knowledge and the techniques she had developed.
She’d given it all away.
All she’d ever wanted to do was help people.
In the one conversation they’d had before she left the country, Bowler had still tried to convince her, arguing that if she gave away her intellectual property then there was no profit in it, and so no incentive for firms to develop her tools.
He was wrong.
There were people all over the world who were interested, queuing at her virtual laboratory door. Aid agencies, independent campaigning organizations, charities, all out there wanting to help people. They were people just like her, fighting Ebola and avian flu, fighting for justice and human rights; people who would leap at the opportunity to use her knowledge and expertise.
Right now a Medecins Sans Frontieres team was trialing her immunology toolkit in the field in North Korea. It wasn’t a magic pill, but early results were promising, and in her own small way maybe Sunita was beginning to make the world at least a marginally better place.
To ask for anything more would be selfish.
She’d never been in this for personal gain, and if giving up her comfortable life at the University was the price she must pay then it was a relatively small one.
§
That thing with Alex...
She’d had to step back, give herself time to process.
She’d known at the time her judgment was being clouded by biology, her feelings distorted by the body’s responses to stress. That was her field, after all: biology, human biochemistry.
She knew how these things worked.
She’d understood how the adrenaline and endorphins released in response to stress and danger could combine to affect your perception and judgment. Periods of stress and risk are never a good time to make important choices.
It was just like when you emerged from the break-up of a relationship: your judgment clouded, your perspective foreshortened. At times like this you needed space to catch your breath, assess, not rush into anything on the rebound.
She knew that all made sense. That it was a rational assessment.
But if there was one thing she had learned through all this, it was that sometimes you needed to find a way to convince that annoyingly rational part of your mind that it would have been okay to have gone with your gut in the first place. Sometimes those primitive biological responses get it right and you just have to plunge straight in.
Sometimes, even though the timing isn’t right, you need to take your opportunities rather than risk losing them forever.
Alex...
A shadow passed over her.
“Dr Chakravarti.”
“Sunita.”
“Sunita.”
She tipped the brim of her hat up with her forefinger, saw him looking down at her. Alex Mitchell.
“You want to get a beer?” he asked. “I’m fucking melting.”
Afters
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About the author
Writing under other names, PJ Adams is a successful novelist, with several novels published by major publishing houses and optioned for movies. As PJ Adams, she writes in the genre closest to her heart, erotic romance and suspense – love stories with that added heat, including the international bestsellers Trust, Black Widow, and Winner Takes All.
You can find out more about PJ and her writing on her website, on http://www.facebook.com/pollyjadamswriter and on Twitter as @PollyJAdams.
More from PJ Adams
Trust
Never trust a man who says, "Trust me."
Jess.
As soon as I saw him, I knew I was in too deep. He's a gentleman criminal. A cold-blooded villain. Half the city's terrified of him and the other's on his payroll. Now his sights are set on me... but I can't let him have me, no matter how much I'm drawn to him. I can't let myself fall.
I came to London to put things right, not lose my heart to a dangerous crimelord. He says he won't hurt me... but how can I trust a man like him?
Dean.
I'm in the thick of the biggest gang war London's ever seen: Russian mobsters on one side of me, crooked police on the other
. Then she appears and changes everything. She makes me feel things I've never felt before and can't allow myself to feel now. But already she's closer to me than anyone has ever been... and I'm starting to suspect she has a secret that could destroy us both.
From the moment I saw her I knew I needed her, naked and moaning under me, but I can't afford to give in to that need. Can't afford to care.
Too many lives depend on it, including hers.
Trust: A steamy, edge-of-the-seat romantic suspense thriller from the author of Winner Takes All and Black Widow.
Trust is available from: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and other Amazon stores.
Excerpt
I turned to him and he was looking at me, something in his eyes.
He put a hand to my cheek, and for a moment I thought he was going to try to clean any remaining blood away, but then...
His touch. It was gentle, almost imperceptible. Fingertips on my cheek.
His hand moved to cup my jaw, forefinger against the lobe of my ear, a sudden, electrifying touch as his fingertip tugged on my earrings. My response surprised me, my sensitivity unnaturally heightened.
The adrenaline thing, I realized. Was this the fight or flight phenomenon Dean had referred to earlier? Coming down from the adrenaline rush, the aftermath of danger... he'd said it heightened everything: responses and needs.
He kissed me.
His lips tasted of metal, that coppery tang of blood.
His hand slipped round to the side of my head, fingers sliding deep into my hair, gripping and steering me, as his tongue pressed, almost delicately, between my lips.
I pulled away.
I wasn't ready for this. Wasn't ready for him. A man like him.