“No,” he said. “I do not need to.”
“You think you can make my fantasies come true even without the benefit of drugs? Good luck, buddy boy. I’m on to your dirty tricks.”
“I did it at the club,” he reminded her. “The circumstances were difficult. You were flat on the ground, you had just held a poisoned knife to my throat. You had bodyguards outside the door poised to kill for you. And I never even got your clothes off.”
She sniffed. “Listen to you congratulating yourself. Bastard.”
He shrugged. “If you say so.”
His laconic refusal to be baited was driving her mad. She had to shut up. Pride dictated that she not drop her gaze, and maintaining that much contact was challenge enough.
His dark eyes saw so much. She felt transparent.
“You cannot bear the way you feel right now,” he said very softly. “I could make you forget. For a little while, at least.”
“With what?” she demanded. “Do you have some other pharmaceutical nightstick in your pocket?”
“You know with what.”
Her jaw dropped, at the hugeness of his vanity. “Oh! Here comes Janos, and his wonder dick! You mean to grant me a moment of blessed oblivion as a reward for helping with your crazy plan? How generous of you. A mercy fuck. Wow, what a prince. I am overwhelmed.”
He was shaking his head before she finished. “You know how much I want you,” he reproved her. “I couldn’t hide it if I wanted to.”
“Bullshit. You can hide and show anything you choose to,” she said. “Don’t try to persuade me otherwise. I can, too. I’ve had the same training you have.”
“I won’t try to persuade you,” he said. “The truth is the truth.”
“Don’t talk about truth,” she snapped. “It’s a big turnoff coming from a professional liar.”
He inclined his head. “Fair enough. If you do not want to hear it.”
She wrenched her gaze away from his, feeling fluttery and stupid, and felt her eyes dragged back to his by force. Damn him. That had never happened to her before.
“I want you,” he said quietly. “You want me. Why is it so shameful to you to acknowledge this? Why must you always fight it so hard?”
Her hands flew up to cover her hot cheeks, a hatefully femmy gesture that she regretted instantly. “Because you’re using me,” she said, her voice raw. “It’s shameful to let myself be used.”
He did not deny it. He was silent for a very long moment. “I am sorry,” he said finally. His voice was muted. “I wish that I was not.”
Well. Miracle of miracles. At least he was honest about that.
She couldn’t say anything snide about it, though. Her voice was stuck behind a stone wall in her throat. Her lips shook. Heat rose in her face. He moved closer, so slowly it was almost imperceptible, but all at once he was right behind her. She craved the heat his body generated.
Needed it, to warm the bone-deep cold inside her. Against the icy room, the red chemise. The snowflakes fluttering down onto the carpet.
She choreographed the words carefully. “Do not . . . wake up . . . Rachel. Understand?”
A brief smile touched his lips. “Try not to make so much noise this time, then.”
He shrugged off his jacket, hung it on the door behind him. Stripped off the tight black T-shirt underneath.
She would not let herself gasp or ogle. He thought well enough of himself as it was. But oh, God, it was difficult not to. Wow.
His body was startling. Big, broad, but every muscle sinewy and cut. From hard practical use, not from pumping iron. She’d felt coiled power vibrating when she touched him, she’d experienced the incredible reflexes when he wrestled her in Shibumi. Intelligent muscles, flexible and ready. They knew what to do without being asked twice.
She liked muscles like that. She liked power like that.
A triangle of dark hair on his chest arrowed toward his groin, lost in the low waistband of his jeans. He stood patiently, giving her time to check him out at her leisure. The thick, uptilted slash of his eyebrows, the sharp hollow of his cheekbones. The olive tinge of his skin, the thick bulge of his shoulders. Tendons snaked over his sinewy forearms. Blue veins formed subtle, pleasing patterns beneath his golden skin. She wanted to trace them with her fingertips. Memorize them.
And scars, more than she had imagined. He’d seen some rough use, and recently, too. He had scabs, scrapes. Green and yellow bruises. The bloodstained bandage on his upper arm. A reminder of the injury he’d sustained that morning, fighting to save them. His face was stark in the harsh glare from the lamp embedded in the bathroom mirror. It showed every mark. In this profound silence, the masks had fallen: the smooth businessman, the slick gigolo. He was all warrior now, hard and battered and deadly dangerous.
His eyes were black, his mouth a flat line. No dimples, no grin. He appeared to be taking this seriously. As well he should, considering what he risked, being intimate with someone like her.
He gathered her hair into a thick bunch, lifting it up to bury his nose in it. He kissed the back of her neck. His lips were so hot. So soft.
The contact made her flinch and shudder. Too much.
He hesitated and pressed his scorching heat against her to melt the ice. She had to squeeze her eyes shut, breathe slowly. Deliberately relaxing, accepting his energy into herself.
He did not move, his breath hot against her shoulder, his hands clasped around her upper arms. Minutes crawled by. Time was measured by her frantic heartbeats.
Then he hooked the shoulders of her dress and tugged the stretchy fabric downward, until the edge snagged against the jut of her nipples. He stared at that intently for a long moment, and wrenched the thing down. It dropped around her ankles.
She was naked but for the whorish garter belt and stockings. She was not a short woman, but she looked so small, so delicate, in front of him. She hated feeling delicate. Ghost pale, too, and too young, somehow with all that tangled hair hanging down. A big-eyed innocent. Tarted up in slutty, inappropriate lingerie.
His hands slid up to cup her breasts, and her body rippled in his hands. She stifled a whimper. Her skin almost hurt, it was so sensitive to every tiny touch. Vulnerable.
“Why did you do that to me?” she asked, her voice muted.
He nuzzled her shoulder, toying with her nipples with his thumbs. “Do what? The drug, you mean?”
She twisted in his grasp to meet his eyes. “What else?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “You dare to be indignant, after what you did to me in the hotel room?”
She waved her hand, irritated. “That’s different. I asked nicely for you to fuck off. Then I asked not nicely. You didn’t respond, so I had to put you down. Too bad. Very simple. Nothing personal. But drugging me to seduce me is completely different. That’s extremely personal.”
His hands dropped from her breasts and gripped her waist, stroking the curve of her belly. His eyes slid away from hers.
“I needed to get close to you,” he admitted. “And your defenses are so strong. It is practically impossible to get through them. I think that I could have done so, given time—”
“You think very well of yourself,” she cut in, stung.
“Given time,” he repeated firmly, “I could have done so. I did, at Shibumi. But Imre does not have time, and I do not have time.”
“So it was all about Imre, then? Just as I thought.” She felt an irrational urge to weep, scream, shove him away. “Not about me.”
“No.” His face contracted. His arms circled her, wrapping around her and dragging her close against his chest. She felt the bulge of his erection, prodding her buttocks. “God, no. I want you. Do not doubt it.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Of course, he had to say that. She would be a boneheaded bimbo to let herself believe it. But still, she stood there, wrapped in his warmth, her mind melting down.
He felt so good. Every cell of her body was thirstily sucking up his hot energy. There was s
o much of it. So much of him. He was delicious.
“It still doesn’t track,” she said stubbornly. “What does sex have to do with Imre? We won’t be fucking our way into Novak’s stronghold.”
He dropped his face to her shoulder and started kissing her again. “You found me out,” he said. “I wanted you, I could not melt you, and I could not bear to wait. Forgive me. I am a filthy porcone. The truth is out.”
“Stop using that word,” she snapped.
He lifted his head, eyes narrowed. “What word?”
“Truth,” she clarified, her voice cutting. “It bugs me.”
His face went somber. “Of course it does. It is the thing you need, above all else, no? The thing you long for, whether you know it or not.”
She snorted. “And how do you know this secret longing?”
“Because I need it as well,” he said. “We are two of a kind.”
The low, gentle vibration of his voice was the magic touch that slid through her defenses. She stopped fighting him, and herself. Her body ached for contact. Her nails dug into his forearms and her breath hitched with each slow, skillful stroke over her skin.
He slid his hand down between her legs, stroking the damp seam of her labia with a fingertip, in no hurry to penetrate. It was just an invitation, a gentle call to all her nerves to get ready, to work themselves into tingling awareness. He rubbed her clit, a lazy, undemanding swirl around . . . around. Reminding her that he was thinking about it, that he had big plans for it . . . and oh . . .
God. A shudder arced through her body. The accumulated tension of years, violently unwound by his light touch, throbbing through her.
Tears shimmered in her eyes. She squeezed them shut.
“I barely touch you, and you come apart,” he murmured. “Beautiful.”
But it didn’t make her feel beautiful. It made her feel like she had no skin. Foolish and needy. And so goddamn stupid.
She couldn’t bear to play the fool again so soon. She couldn’t push him away, either.
So she chose another path.
Instinctively, she threw a switch inside her brain. A technique she’d learned when she was very young, and it had served her well. Her seductive siren persona, the part of her that could drive men mad with pleasure while mentally composing a grocery list. A part of herself she had never intended to use again after the Novak debacle. It was ready to do its job, though, and it was a blessed relief to feel that power rise, bolstered by her confidence in her own beauty, her practiced skill at giving pleasure.
It had never failed her, except with Kurt Novak. And he’d been a special case, being something both less and more than human.
But Janos was wonderfully human. It would flatten him to the ground, just as he had done to her. Yes. She couldn’t wait.
She turned and shoved him back against the wall. He looked startled by her sudden aggression. She splayed her hands over his hot, hard chest. Her palms crackled with the hot polarity between them.
His eyes narrowed at the change in her. She sought out every tiny detail of him with her fingertips, then her lips. She trailed hot, moist kisses down his chest, feeling him shiver and gasp as she kissed and tongued the tight, dark nubs of his nipples, perched on the flat, hard shelf of his pecs. Tasting his sharp salt flavor. She slid her hands down over the rippled belly muscles, the silken grain of dark hair arrowing down to his waistband. She wrenched the buttons of his jeans open, yanked them down his thighs, combed that arrow of hair with her fingertips down to where it swelled again to a springy tuft at his groin.
And his cock. So thick and broad, filling her hand. The slit at the tip was gleaming with slippery pre-come. She anointed her hand with it and stroked, pulled, gripped, milked him. His eyes closed, and he flung his head back. His breath rasped harshly.
Ah, yes. This was much better. She was in control. Disposed to make his wildest dreams come true, to be his nympho siren, blow his mind, rock his world. She sank to her knees with theatrical slowness, breathing in the salt tang of his skin, the hot musk of his groin.
His cock jutted out so far she had to scoot back to accommodate him. She stroked the whole throbbing, empurpled length of his broad, veined stalk with her tongue, swirling it all around the crimson head. She took him into her mouth, creating the wet, silken suction that all men dreamed of with her lips and her tongue, varying it with luscious lapping, teasing flutters, deep and bold and hungry. She caressed the dips and swells and hollows of his naked hips.
She deepened the strokes, pulling him as far as she could into her throat, suckling hard, fluttering her fingers under his heavy balls. He wound his fingers into her hair, urging her on with pleading tugs, now and again holding her still and drawing back to climax without ejaculating. Three times. The man had astonishing self-control.
She would make him lose his control, goddamnit. She would punish him for demolishing her life, for making her want him so badly. For being so strong, so difficult, so persistent. She would make him explode and weep and beg. She would show him who was boss.
He cupped her face in his hands and pulled it gently away from his body. “No,” he said unsteadily.
She looked up, confused, and wiped her mouth. “No, what? No, not yet? No, not in my mouth? Be specific.”
“Not with a sex toy,” he said. “I prefer the real woman.”
The rejection was a slap. Soul deep. Entirely unexpected. She stared, shocked to immobility, then rose and backed as far away as the small room would allow. “If you hate it, just fuck off.”
He winced. “No. I did not hate it. You misunderstand me.”
She laughed bitterly. “That’s for sure. Ungrateful prick. I’ve never had any complaints before.”
“I am sure that you have not.” His eyes sharpened to that penetrating look she was beginning to dread. It made her feel too fragile. “You went to your comfort zone, no? I do not want to go there, where you have entertained all your other lovers.”
She gasped, at his outrageous nerve. “All my other . . . oh! Am I not good enough for you?”
“Do not be ridiculous,” he said. “It is only that I prefer you as you are.”
Yeah. As vulnerable and raw as the grief-stricken girl she had been. No.
“I can’t.” She was horrified to hear her voice breaking.
He reached out, brushed her hair off her face. “You can trust me,” he urged gently. “I will not hurt you.”
She flinched away from his touch and covered her shaking mouth. “You have,” she said. “If you don’t want me, then go.”
He blew out a fierce, frustrated breath. “I knew you would be like this. Sooner or later, something inside you would run away and hide, and I would be left with a beautiful doll in my arms.”
“Whore, you mean, not doll,” she hissed. “Go ahead, say it. It’s how you make me feel.”
He lifted a lock of her hair and pressed his lips to it, stroking it against his cheek. “I would be the last one to judge a whore,” he said quietly. “I know what it means to do what you must to survive.”
She jerked her hair back out of his grasp. “How could you know? Do you know how it feels to be used like a thing and tossed aside afterward like garbage? What you have to turn yourself into, just to survive?”
“Yes,” he said.
She stopped, mesmerized by his aura of tightly leashed power and his battered, inscrutably beautiful face. “You?” Her voice cracked. “Oh, please. Give me a fucking break. Your job experience as a professional gigolo is irrelevant, Janos. Look at you. You’re a man, you’re six foot four, you’re at least two hundred and fifty pounds. No one could use you and toss you. You have no clue.”
“You are wrong.” He glanced down at his own body, and gave her an odd, lopsided smile that struck her as heartbreakingly sad. “You hate men too much to imagine that they could ever be vulnerable, no? I was not always this big.”
She closed her mouth and chewed her lip. “Oh,” she murmured.
“I was y
oung when I . . . when it happened,” he said. “But it is not something that you forget.”
An awkward silence lengthened between them. He had cut her anger off neatly at the knees. He had a frightening talent for that.
It could be a lie. But something about the spareness of his words, the look on his face made her think that perhaps it was the truth.
Truth. There it was again. That volatile, changeable, dangerous word. Dogging her at every turn. At the center of everything.
“So . . . now you’re fine?” she asked. “You’re all over it?”
He shrugged. “You find ways to take your power back.”
“Yes, that’s exactly it. Taking my power back,” she muttered. “That’s exactly what I was trying to do.”
He frowned. “I don’t want to play games with you.”
“So what the fuck do you want? I was giving you the benefit of everything I have to give a man, everything I know, and you reject it, you ungrateful son of a bitch. So what do you want? Spell it out for me!”
He opened his hands, looking bewildered. “It is . . . a feeling. I do not know how to explain it. I never felt it before. It is like seeing without eyes. Something beyond the senses. But it was amazing.”
The desire to believe every word he said, to fall into this honey-baited trap, was so strong, it almost swept her away. But he was too damn smart. Sharp enough to read her mind, to know exactly what would tempt her, what would melt her.
She wiped angry tears away. Gave him a hollow laugh. “You want something that doesn’t exist, Janos. Or something that’s long dead.”
His face turned obstinate. “I felt it before you took me in your mouth. You were there with me, and suddenly you were not, and I was being fellated by a beautiful cortigiana, her mind and heart a million miles away from me. I am sorry. I did not mean to hurt your feelings. But it made me feel lonely.” He gave her a rueful shrug.
Tam rolled her eyes. “Oh, crap. I’m doing the one man in the whole world who gets depressed and lonely when a woman blows him.”
“Yes, yes. I know. There are worse things,” he cut in impatiently. “I have no reason to complain. You almost killed me with pleasure. But it is not enough, after feeling the other.”
Ultimate Weapon Page 23