When she just stands there staring at me in confounded silence, I figure the cat’s already out of the bag, so I might as well go for broke. “So, did you?”
“I don’t know,” she says, sounding thoughtful. “Is that what you call it when you think about someone every second of every day, dream about him every night, know without a doubt you’ll never experience anything quite as wonderful as the way he made you feel? When you ache that it’s over, yet still feel privileged to have experienced it anyway?”
I have to swallow before I answer, because someone has shoved a rock down my throat. “Yes.”
Her smile is so beautiful it could end wars. “Then I definitely didn’t miss you.”
That rumbling sound echoing through the kitchen is the growl emanating from my chest. It only serves to piss me off even more that hearing it makes her smile grow wider.
“And if you want me to decide I like you again and start telling you the truth, you better count me in on any plan you have regarding Capo, and tell me everything from here on out,” she says, full of sass and tartness. “Including,” she adds when I open my mouth to talk, “any other things I’ve been instructed to steal that you already have in your possession.”
My eyes narrow to slits. “You better sweeten that demand with a kiss, woman.”
She lifts her chin and looks at me the way one might look at a piece of debris in the gutter that fell off a passing garbage truck. “You’ll get your kiss when I get my promise.”
My brows shoot up my forehead. “You think you can blackmail me?”
“Yes, Ryan,” she replies with supreme confidence, a queen addressing her lowly subject. “That’s exactly what I think. Now, do you want your kiss or not?”
“I’ve negotiated with terrorists before, you know.”
“You’re calling me a terrorist?”
“I’m calling your bluff.”
“I’m not bluffing.”
“Oh, yeah?” I rub my chin and give her a long and lingering once-over, calculating the odds of being stabbed depending on what I say next. There’s a butcher’s block of knives on the counter to her left that I’m pretty sure she’s been eyeballing during this conversation.
“So you don’t care if you ever kiss me again? You can totally live without my mouth on yours?” A hint of a smile lifts the corners of my lips. “Or any other parts of your body?”
Her cheeks faintly darken with color. Her chin lifts another inch in the air. “That’s right.”
I chuckle. “You used to be a better liar, darlin’. But okay. You’re on.”
She blinks, a little frown forming between her eyebrows. “I’m on?”
I shrug, turn back to the stove, and start to scrape out the burned bacon from the frying pan into the sink. Whistling cheerfully, I reach under the counter for the dish soap, then proceed to wash the frying pan, taking my time to scrub off all the little black bits, one ear trained behind me for a different kind of whistle, the sound the edge of a knife makes as it slices through the air toward the tender space between my shoulder blades.
That sound doesn’t come. By the time I’m finished with the pan, Mariana has settled into a chair at the table, legs crossed, fingers tapping, searing my face off with her eyes.
I smile at her.
She smiles back with the sharpness of a viper’s fangs. “Enjoying yourself?”
“Just cleanin’ up the mess, baby. It’s kinda my thing, cleanin’ up messes.”
If a man could be struck dead from a look, I’d already be six feet under.
“Funny,” she says lightly. “And here I thought your thing was causing blindness with your teeth. How much work have you had on those chompers? That shade of white must’ve cost a fortune. They’re as snowy as a unicorn’s flank.”
I make spokesmodel hands at my smile. “These old things? Oh no. These are bona fide, baby. I never even had braces.”
She makes a face like she’s sucking on a lemon wedge. “What about that nose? And that jaw you’re always parading around like it should be chopping a cord of wood? I’ve seen axes with softer edges. There’s a history of cosmetic surgery there, right?”
I mouth You wish and stroll over to the fridge, where I open the door and stand peering in. “You feel like breakfast or lunch?” I ask over my shoulder. “It’s kinda brunch time, which is why I went with bacon—though really, bacon’s apropos for any meal on account of it bein’ so delicious—but I’ve got fixin’s for sandwiches, omelets, pasta, crepes—”
“Crepes?” she repeats loudly.
I turn and look at her, glaring at me like a warlord from the kitchen table. Blinking innocently, I say, “I knew I was gonna have a guest from Paris, so I stocked up.” My lips twitch, but I try very hard not to smile. I’m only marginally successful. “Got escargot, too. You want some of those? Not really my thing, but I figure with you bein’ French and all”—I add emphasis on the word French—“you’d enjoy ’em.”
She flattens her hands over the tabletop and exhales. I imagine plumes of white frost emanating from her nostrils, like the smoke from dry ice, and suck in my cheeks to keep from bursting into laughter.
“No, thank you,” she replies, in a voice like brandished swords.
“Okay. I’ll surprise you then, how ’bout that?”
“For a change,” she mutters under her breath.
Now who’s the sarcastic one?
I set about making brunch and ignoring the waves of hostility pulsing at me from all angles. I’m whipping eggs and milk with a fork when I hear, “So where are you keeping the diamond, anyway?”
“Ha! Wouldn’t you like to know?” I keep on whipping, then am struck by an idea. I turn to her with a smile, which she curls her lip at. “I’ll make you a bargain.”
Tap, tap, tap goes her index finger on my kitchen table. “This should be interesting.”
“Tell me your last name and where you’re from, and I’ll tell you where I’m keeping the diamond.” When she hesitates a moment too long, I remind her, “You decided to trust me, remember?”
“That was before I decided I wanted to kick you in the balls,” she shoots back.
I lift a shoulder like I could care less either way, and turn back to the eggs. “Suit yourself.”
Muttering in Spanish crowds the air like colorful birds. I think I hear curses involving my mother and a few imminent threats on my life, but I’m not proficient in the language, so maybe I’m imagining it.
“My last name is Lora. L-O-R-A.” She spells it out like I’m too dense to guess, her tone loud and condescending. I swallow a chortle.
“And where do you live when you’re not traveling the world in search of booty, Ms. Lora?” I glance at her over my shoulder. “The jewel kind, not the other kind. I wasn’t implying you travel the world in search of men.”
“How gallant,” she deadpans. “Thank you for clarifying.”
I send her a wink. “No problemo.”
She appears to be doing deep-breathing exercises for several moments, complete with closed eyes and pursed lips on slow exhalations. Then she opens her eyes. “My home is in Morocco. But that’s not where I’m from.”
I instantly lose interest in the eggs.
Morocco.
I slip through a basement door in my memory to a place I visited once and never forgot. A place teeming with life, color, noise, and scents, so many exotic scents assaulting the nose, it was dizzying.
Orange blossom and cardamom, mint tea and jasmine oil, roasting meat and sweat. Dusty markets called souks filled with tourists and snake charmers, food stalls and laughing children, henna artists and musicians, a labyrinth of alleyways leading in like tributaries from the mazelike medieval city beyond. Lush gardens shimmering amid golden desert sands. Quiet riad courtyards adorned with mosaic-tiled fountains. Lapis lazuli glittering on ancient tomb walls.
Opulence and poverty and beauty; such beauty everywhere, you could drown in it and be grateful for such a glorious death.
I look at her with fresh eyes, this exotic creature regarding me with disdain at my kitchen table, and feel the sharp, painful throb of my heart.
“What?” she asks, nonplussed.
“I can picture you there, among the date palms and veiled women. I can picture you stealing into a locked room at dawn with the morning call to prayer echoing over the empty medina, the sun on red-tiled rooftops already hot.”
By her expression, I can tell we’re both surprised at the thickness of my voice.
After a moment of stillness, she murmurs in Arabic. It’s the opening recital of the Adhan, the call to worship that rings out from minarets atop mosques five times a day in Islamic countries.
I listen the way an alcoholic drinks wine. Her singing is like the song of angels. It inspires the exact same kind of dumbstruck reverence in my heart.
“Do you practice Islam?” I ask over the roar of my thrumming pulse.
She shakes her head. “But the prayers are beautiful.” Looking at her hands, she adds more quietly, “And so are the people. Morocco is the most beautiful place in the world.”
I’m struck with realization. “You miss it.”
Her shoulders round the way they do when you’re bent with exhaustion or remorse, your body unable to hold itself upright any longer. “Like someone chained to the wall of a cave for a hundred years misses sunlight,” she says in a voice so low, it’s almost a whisper.
I take a breath that feels like inhaling fresh-fallen snow.
This.
This is why I answered Reynard the way I did when he asked me why I didn’t turn her in to the police. This feeling of awe, for lack of a better word. This powerful, mysterious force that makes my chest ache with yearning, though I don’t even know its proper name. This magic of hers that drew my eye and held it from the second I caught my first glimpse.
For me, Mariana holds an allure I’ve never encountered, something elemental, a pull as strong as gravity, and just as impossible to resist. She makes me wish I had a talent for sonnets or sketching so I could capture the essence of it on paper, put it down for others to marvel over the way I do, the way people marvel over the magnificence of the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal.
She makes my pulse quicken, my blood run hot, and every cell in my body and soul come alive.
She moves me.
And I’d move mountains for her.
Our petty game of tit for tat abandoned with the next beat of my heart, I stride over to the table, bend down, and take her startled face in my hands. I give her a kiss, firm and potent, letting all the joy singing in my veins leach through my lips. When it’s over, I pull away and stare into her lovely brown eyes, the rich hue of fine, barrel-aged bourbon.
My voice all gravel and sandpaper, I say, “All right. I’ll show you the diamond and I’ll tell you the whole plan. Then you’re gonna tell me everything I want to know. Your life story, where you grew up, everything you love and hate and are proud of and regret. Your favorite music, your favorite food, the name of the first boy you ever kissed. And I’m gonna tell you mine.”
Mariana laughs breathlessly, her eyes alight. “You kissed a boy?”
“Smartass,” I growl, falling, falling, falling, head over heels and around again.
Twenty-One
Mariana
I once heard insanity described as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That was Albert Einstein, a much more intelligent person than myself. I’m thinking of him now as Ryan drives me to wherever he’s keeping the diamond. I’m in the passenger seat, mulling all my life choices that have led me to this moment as the cityscape of Manhattan flashes by outside the windows, a silent movie of color and light.
It’s silent inside the car, too. For once, we’re not fighting or fucking. We’re just sitting side by side, holding hands.
Such a simple thing, yet so painfully tender. My whole life, I’ve felt lioness-strong, toughened by the cruelty of fate and circumstance, but meeting Ryan has taught me that my heart isn’t the fortress I thought it was.
Instead, it’s is a newborn baby bird, blind and vulnerable to predators and the elements, trembling with hunger and terror in its nest.
I want to kick my own ass for being so weak. This whole thing has disaster written all over it.
“Pretty grim over there,” Ryan observes, squeezing my hand.
I keep my gaze turned to the window when I answer, because I know how good he is at reading what’s in my eyes. “Just ruminating on the vagaries of life and how arbitrary it all is.”
His chuckle is warm. “I understood about half the words in that sentence, but my advice is not to worry. It’ll all work out in the end.”
Now I do look at him, because my curiosity is overwhelming. The sunlight treats him differently than it does other people, caressing him in a hazy, lover’s glow, gleaming the tips of his hair and burnishing his skin to gold. Before I met him, I never even considered a man could be pretty, but he’s beyond merely pretty. He’s mind-meltingly beautiful.
Yes, that’s it. He’s melted my mind. No wonder I’m having trouble thinking.
“You’re an optimist,” I say flatly.
“You say that like you’re accusing me of murder.”
“Have you always been like this?”
He glances at me sideways, the flash of dimples in his cheek annoyingly adorable. “Like what? Awesome? Amazing? Unbearably cool?”
“Guess you weren’t kidding when you said you were conceited,” I mutter.
“The only difference between me and you, Angel,” he says, squeezing my hand again, “is that you’re a plotter and I’m a panster. You sweat every detail, and I live by the seat of my pants. We both get where we want to go in the end, I just don’t waste time fussin’ over what-ifs.”
I suffer a brief but violent pang of jealousy that he doesn’t have the worry gene, but then am insulted that he’d refer to all my careful planning—for instance, on a job like stealing the Hope—as “fussin’.”
“I don’t fuss. I deliberate. I consider all the options. It’s called being professional.”
“It’s called bein’ anal.”
“It’s called being an adult!”
He sighs like every man has ever sighed when dealing with a woman who doesn’t agree with him. That “here we go” sigh. That “maybe it’s PMS” sigh.
I’d like to hear the sigh he’d use if I stabbed him in the neck.
“You’re awful dramatic for someone who’s so anal.”
“I bet your brain feels as good as new, seeing as how you never use it,” I grit out.
His shoulders shake silently. While I’m over here steaming, the bastard is trying not to laugh! When I try to extricate my hand from his, he just holds on tighter.
“Nope,” he says with infuriating cheer, “you don’t get your hand back just ’cause you’ve got your panties in a twist.”
Instead of trying to force it or argue, I just smile sweetly. “Okay. But when you get your hand back, it might be missing the rest of your arm.”
“We’re here anyway, so there’s no need for violence, darlin’.”
Pulling up to a solid steel gate, Ryan winks at me, then rolls down his window. He punches a code into a black box, then he grins up at a camera pointed down from the top of the brick wall that flanks the gate, and flips it the bird.
“Were you in a fraternity?” I wonder aloud, watching him in all his cocky, Captain America football-hero glory as he makes lewd gestures at a piece of electronic surveillance equipment.
“In?” he scoffs. “No. I was a founding father of the Kappa Alpha Delta fraternity, the coolest frat on campus.”
“It’s all starting to make sense now.” I shake my head as the gate swings open.
We pull into a large lot similar to the one at Ryan’s home and park near a building similar to his, too, only much bigger. It looks like a converted industrial warehouse. All the windows are blacked out and there’s only one entrance,
a huge hammered steel door that’s at least ten feet tall and about as wide. A fleet of hulking black Hummers lurks on one side of the lot, windscreens and chrome rims gleaming. They look like a group of metal sharks ready to feed.
The whole effect is über-masculine and weirdly threatening.
“Is this your other bachelor pad?”
“This is Metrix Security’s headquarters.”
“Oh. Yes, I guess it makes good sense to keep the diamond at the headquarters of a security company. This place must be as impenetrable as Fort Knox. Or your tooth enamel.”
His only answer is a smile as he exits the car. I undo my seat belt, but before I can open the door, Ryan is holding it open for me, his hand extended to help me out.
“Thank you.”
As we walk hand in hand toward the colossal door, he says, “The camera at the gate has facial recognition software—so nobody who isn’t supposed to get in doesn’t, even if they have the entry code—but there’s also a guy watching the camera who mans the submachine guns set into the walls on either side of the gate.”
“Machine guns?” I repeat, astonished. “Who’re you expecting, the Terminator?”
“Never know who’s gonna come knockin’,” he says darkly. “Better armed to the teeth than caught off guard.”
Our eyes meet. I think of acrid clouds of smoke over avocado fields, the rank, rusty smell of blood on dirt, and shudder. “I couldn’t agree more.”
His gaze sharpens, but he doesn’t comment further because the steel door is silently sliding open. It reveals a beast of a man, dressed all in black, a gun strapped to his waist.
“Hey, brother,” Ryan says, breaking into a grin.
In a rumbling baritone, the man replies, “Hey yourself.” His eyes, dark and flinty as obsidian, flick toward me. “Lady Danger. Nice to see you again, sweetheart. Stolen anything since I last saw you?”
“Yes. Bought any clothes that aren’t black since I last saw you?”
Ryan laughs, and so does Connor. They look at each other, something silently passing between them.
Wicked Intentions: The Wicked Games Series, Book 3 Page 18