Hitman's Hookup: A Bad Boy Romance (16 page)

He ran his hands over my bare breasts, his fingers tweaking at my nipples. I gasped with every single touch he offered to me. I drank it up like water after a marathon. I slid the condom over his length and he picked me up and shoved my ass onto the cold metal of the car. The feeling was thrilling against my hot skin. My legs were throbbing. I needed him.

He drove himself into me with no warning, thrusting and pulling as I clenched my muscles around his thickness. He was hot and hard and I was prepared to be here until the end of time; to feel like this until the sun exploded and swallowed us whole.

It was over too quickly, my body melting into his. He pulled himself out and immediately bent over me, running his tongue across the skin of my breasts. Goosebumps erupted across my body. He sucked one nipple into his mouth. And then the next.

And then back.

And then again.

I was breathing hard, panting furiously as his fingers slipped inside of me. I urged my body against his hand, bucking and writhing. The sucking and fingering was too much for me. I came again.

He still wasn’t finished. I was gasping for air when he slipped another condom over himself and flipped me over, my ass facing him. The long grass tickled my sock-covered feet, and a cool breeze danced across my skin.

He squeezed my ass in his hands as he thrusted softly. Slowly. Gently. The control was unbelievable. I wanted to scream out into the night air but I resisted. I tightened my muscles around him, aching to hang onto this feeling as long as I possibly could.

But he knew me better than anyone else had. I wasn’t sure if it was his physicality or the fact that we shared the darkest of secrets with only each other.

Either way, he had me.

I was his. Whether I wanted him or not.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CRUZ

The sun rose, golden and bright as we drove south.

Lily dozed for about half an hour. When she woke up she had questions. “What’s the plan? Surely we’re not still randomly headed for Santa Fe, are we?”

I shook my head. “We weren’t ever going there anyway. I just needed you to make the decision because I wasn’t trusting myself and knew that you would be less predictable. Corina doesn’t know you.”

“So where are we going?”

“Kansas,” I replied simply.

Lily sipped from a disposable water bottle. “What’s the deal with this Corina woman?”

I gripped the steering wheel tighter. Lily noticed. “We used to work together,” I replied. “At the DEA. She went the same route that I did after I left.”

Lily raised her eyebrows. “Quite a coincidence,” she said.

I shrugged and bit my lip. One look over at her and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to hide. “We were engaged,” I said. “And we were sort of partners in the field. Until we weren’t anymore.”

Lily’s jaw dropped. She was a great audience for the ridiculous stories that comprised my life history. “You’ve fucked the woman who’s trying to kill me?”

I laughed in spite of myself. “Don’t forget she’s probably trying to kill me too. Actually, she’s tried it a few times, unrelated to a bounty.” My arm wound flinched as I remembered.

“Oh Christ. You weren’t lying about being tied to your chair with a knife in your arm, were you?”

I rubbed my face with my free hand. “I
thought
I’d let that slip while you were stitching up my arm. Yeah, she would be the one who did that. She likes bondage. And knives. Particularly when it involves fucking me up in any way.”

Lily shocked me by responding with near-hysterical laughter that lasted a good few minutes. It was contagious. Soon enough, I was laughing as well.

Suddenly Lily gasped. “I never gave you that bottle of antibiotics!” She slapped her forehead.

I shrugged. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll figure it out anyway.”

Lily looked at me sternly. “You’ll end up with a stronger infection this time. Does it itch? Or burn at all?”

I shook my head. That was a total, utter, and complete lie. My arm throbbed worse every single hour. “It’s fine. I’m tough. I promise.”

Lily didn’t seem convinced but there wasn’t anything she could do about it right now anyway. She finally spoke twenty miles later. “So you have no family, then?”

I nodded. “Just Matthew. We keep in touch when I can. What about you?”

I saw Lily’s face tighten with pain and sadness. “Parents dead, brother dead, grandfather died my freshman year of college. It’s just me.”

I put my hand on her leg and patted it. She squeezed my hand. “It’s okay, honestly,” she said. “It worked out well. I’ve been pouring all of my time and emotional energy into becoming a physician. And that worked out really well. Until recently, of course.”

“What about the future?” I asked tentatively.

Lily gave me a knowing smile. “I’ll probably have a better idea about that when you can promise me my odds of living longer than twenty-four hours have increased substantially.” She laughed as she said it.

“Okay, fair point. But before the last few days. Did you think…that maybe you’d have a family again one day?”

She shrugged. “It might have occurred to me once or twice. But I’m much more of a fan of living in the moment.” She stared out the window. “What about you?”

I wanted to reply that I’d already pictured her barefoot and pregnant with my child more than once in the last day. But I kept that to myself. “I live in the moment, too. You know you’d make a great assassin, if it ever comes to that.”

Lily laughed loudly. “I’ll be sure to submit my resume.”

There was rapidly-melting ice coming off of the trees in Missouri. The roads were wet but the gleaming puddles were nearly ghosts by the time we drove through the state in the mid-afternoon.

We made it to the outskirts of Kansas City in time for an early dinner.

“Pull over here,” Lily insisted, pointing at an old-fashioned diner that had clearly seen better days. The chrome roof was more gunmetal than shiny silver, and the hand-painted, fading yellow sign was missing half of its letters. “I love diners,” she said in response to my stricken face. “You’ll be
fine
, Cruz. I promise.”

She had to drag me inside, but once the smell of omelets and bacon hit my nose, I was a goner. We’d only been stopping long enough to get gas station food: corn chips, powdered donuts, and Gatorades.

“I think it should be a national law that every restaurant serve breakfast all day,” I said as a smiling, middle-aged waitress with deeply tanned, wrinkled skin walked over to our booth.

“What can I do you for?” she asked with a grin.

“A bucket of coffee,” Lily said. “And do you have cinnamon rolls?”

“Sure do,” she said, smacking her gum.

“Great. I’ll take potatoes, a Denver omelet, bacon, sausage, and two cinnamon rolls. Wait! Actually. Four cinnamon rolls. To go.” Lily put down the menu.

I smiled at her. “I’ll take the same,” I said, handing the menu to the waitress, my eyes still on Lily.

“You two newlyweds?”

Lily’s eyes went wide and she threw her hands up in panic. “Oh God, no. No.”

The waitress smirked. “The only time my husband looked at me like that was on our honeymoon.” She gave me an appraising look, one eyebrow raised. “Of course, if my husband looked like
him
, we’d probably still be married.” She chuckled to herself and shuffled away toward the kitchen.

I gave Lily a challenging look.

She balled up the paper from her straw and tossed it at my face. “Don’t give me that look, Cruz.”

“What look?” I asked, faux-innocently.

“The look that says ‘I took you five times last night while you squirmed on the hood of our rental car.”

“But I
did
do that. My face is only being honest.”

Lily squirmed and bit her lip. She was happy. I liked that. I moved my knee against her thigh from across the table. She leaned into it, putting her hand on the tabletop. I covered her tiny hand with mine. She grinned.

“This is the most ridiculous fucking thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “But I can’t get away from you.”

“I wouldn’t even want you to try,” I replied with a flirtatious smile.

“If you weren’t so hot I probably would have taken my chances alone,” she quipped.

“I would have found you soon enough,” I retorted.

Our food arrived; heaping plates of breakfast foods that smelled incredible. “Oh, I didn’t order this,” Lily said, picking up a plastic, foil-covered Jell-o container and handing it back to the waitress.

“Sorry, sweetie,” she replied easily. “Must have grabbed it by mistake.”

“No problem,” Lily said, digging into the food in front of her. “It’s funny,” she said, her mouth full. “That’s actually my favorite snack food when I’m about to scrub in for operating. I hide a few extra cups on the top shelf-“

“Of the supply closet,” I finished for her, the words flying out of my mouth before I could shove them back in there.

My heart fell through my feet.

Oh fuck.

Lily tilted her head and furrowed her eyebrows. “How do you know that?”

I opened my mouth and closed it. “Flea must have told me.”

“Nobody knows that. Not even Ally,” she insisted. She put her fork down. Her eyes were doing that x-ray scanning thing again. This wasn’t good. At all.

“I – I don’t. I don’t remember.” I was a terrible liar in front of her. I’d lost every ounce of suaveness I’d previously possessed over the last days together. She’d sucked all of my hard-won pretense out of my skin.

“Cruz. How do you know about the Jell-O in the supply closet?”

My mind flashed back to that day, when the blonde doctor – Ally – had nearly walked in on me injecting Patrick Romano with the poison. He was the only target I’d known the name of; it was because I’d had to adjust his chart, mimicking the nurse’s handwriting as I scrawled a false overdose onto record. Words that, unbeknownst to me, would nearly end Lily’s career.

But I didn’t need to tell her that. The look on Lily’s face told me that she had figured it out.

“Ally said she recognized you. Oh God,” Lily said, her breathing picking up rapidly. “You knew me before Pyre.
Oh God
. You’d been to my hospital. That’s why you were panicking. You thought someone would recognize you.”

“No, no, that’s not it,” I insisted, grabbing her hand again. “Well, that’s not
entirely
true, anyway.”

She ripped it away from me. “Do not
fucking lie to me
, Cruz,” she spat. Her voice was getting louder and louder.

“Lily, please calm down,” I begged.

She looked like she was about to breathe fire, her brown eyes glistening with rage. “Don’t tell me to calm down.” She leaned towards me. “Tell me the truth and I’ll stop yelling.”

People were turning around now to see what was going on. “Okay, okay. But please. Just let me finish.”

She bit her lip and leaned back in the booth, her arms crossed over her chest.

“I
had
been to the hospital before but I didn’t know who you were. I’d never even seen you. I didn’t know your name. But Ally did see me that day. That day that I…I killed your patient. I changed the chart to make it look like you made a mistake. I’m the reason you’re here. I was going to tell you. I was just waiting for the right moment.”

I waited for the explosion.

What came was worse.

She silently stood up and walked out of the diner, letting the creaking, rusty door swing shut behind her. I got up to follow her but was blocked bodily by our waitress, who had dropped the sunny disposition. She held out her hand. “You paying or not?”

I sighed, still watching Lily walk out to the roadside. She was clearly attempting to get some fresh air by the wheat field adjacent to the diner. I fished in my pocket and pulled out two twenties. “Keep the change,” I said.

The waitress held up her hand. “Whatever you did, just apologize. She’ll be over it soon enough.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I hissed back at her. This wasn’t a problem that more time would fix.

She finally moved out of the way just as a tour bus filled with apparently hungry high school band members double-parked across the front of the diner. I had to maneuver through shrieking teenagers sporting gold and red spirit gear. I took a pom-pom to the mouth and nearly choked on the long strings. By the time I made my way around the bus, a black slab-sided utility van was idling in the road.

I saw a glimpse of Lily’s braids disappearing into the vehicle before the door slammed shut and the van peeled off, tires screeching away from the diner parking lot.

“LILY!” I screamed, running as fast as I could, tearing across the asphalt toward her. Lines of heat rippled off of the pavement of the long, blacktop-covered, two-lane highway. The van was going so quickly it already looked like an ant in the distance. The hot prairie air filled my nose along with the acrid stench of burnt rubber and hot asphalt. I let out a primal, guttural scream as more cars zipped by me, uncaring and uninterested.

I kicked the pavement pointlessly, filled with rage. There was no way I’d catch up with them. I dropped to my knees in the dusty, over-worked soil and pounded the ground. Brown puffs of dirt and dust exploded into the air, mixing with my tears of rage and the sweat that was pouring down my face from the heat waves coming off the road.

This was all my fault. Every inch of it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

LILY

Cruz ran his lips down my thighs, showering me with kisses. The rural breeze tickled me in places that had never before felt nighttime air. His hand ran down my stomach, up over my breasts, and wrapped gently around my throat as he kissed my forehead, my cheeks, my lips.

I shuddered with pleasure. I tried to move my hands but they were locked over my head.

“Let me touch you,” I whispered to Cruz. “Let go of my hands.”

He shook his head and the hold on my wrists tightened. But it wasn’t his soft skin holding them in place now. It was rough. Harsh. Prickly. “I’m serious, let me go,” I insisted, my lust turning to ice at the look on his face.