Obsession (Year of Fire) (66 page)

“I’ve already told you a thousand times. You’re all that matters to me,” she whimpered.

“Really? It doesn’t seem like it to me,” Al-Saud objected, grabbing her roughly by the hips and penetrating her from behind. He did so with a powerful thrust that lifted her off the floor and made her dig her nails into the edge of a shelf.

“Eliah!” she cried, insane with pleasure, suffocating from the lack of air, from the saliva that was filling her mouth, from the words she wanted to say and the moans that came out instead. She screamed out heedlessly when the climax became the devastating sensation that only Eliah had made her feel and that hours later, when she analyzed it, she realized included her whole body, even her toes, which curled under her until they touched the floor. She screamed even though she knew that Al-Saud hadn’t closed the door to the dressing room and that the door to the bedroom was probably open. And as the wave passed, he whispered quickly to her, wetting her ear, and squeezed her breasts painfully, urging her not to let the pleasure between her legs go, to hold on to it, to keep moving with his rhythm, telling her that he wanted them to come together, and she, though her legs were shaking from her pointed feet, with her behind thrust upward, closed her eyes and imagined Eliah hitting her with his pelvis every time he thrust at her body, his dark hands hiding her breasts, her nipples emerging bright red from between his fingers with their pure white nails. If someone had caught them in this position, they wouldn’t have seen her. Matilde had disappeared, or rather she was entirely engulfed by his height and the back of his blue cashmere coat, which flared out with each thrust. The only evidence that she was there, on her feet, with her back to him, facing the shelves of the closet, were her moans, and perhaps even those were drowned out by Al-Saud’s hoarse bellows. They finished
together, just as he wanted, and Matilde never imagined she could feel a happiness as full as what she felt right there and then, pressed against the wooden closet by Eliah’s weight.

Sanity returned as his heartbeat slowed to normal. He looked upward and opened his eyes as if he was emerging from hours of sleep. He looked around him. He lowered his gaze and fixed it on Matilde, her little hands still tense on the shelf, her forehead resting upon them, her ribs expanding and contracting with each breath, and after the avalanche of lust that he had just experienced, his heart was overwhelmed with a tenderness so vast that he felt it bursting out of his chest. Still inside her, he embraced her and kissed her shoulders, struck dumb by emotion, something that had only happened to him with Matilde.

“Eliah?” she said quietly, and he leaned down and put his lips on her cheek.

“What?”

“I wanted our reunion to be different.”

“Different? Why? You didn’t like what we just did? On a scale of one to ten, I’d give it an eleven.”

Matilde’s giggle ran through his body like a soft, warm electric current.

“I mean I didn’t want you to find me here, in a bad mood, packing my suitcase. I didn’t want to reproach you or demand anything from you. I had been dreaming of your return since the second you left, I got too worked up, I was thinking about you the whole time.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” he persisted with a certain hardness in his tone.

“I didn’t want to bother you. You’re a very busy man, and don’t think that I don’t know that you’ve neglected your businesses for me.”
On that subject, what exactly is your business, Eliah? What do you keep behind the door that Leila sneaks by and needs a password to open? And that garage on Rue Maréchal Harispe that I see cars entering and exiting? How is it that you earn so much money?
She didn’t dare to utter the questions out loud; she was afraid of the answers.

“You’re lucky that I’m in a good mood from what we just did. If not, I’d be furious by the stupidity of what you’re saying.”

“I thought that you had gotten tired of me, that you had gotten sick of the problems I bring with me.”

Matilde gritted her teeth at the ferocity with which Eliah encircled her with his arms.

“Tired of you? What have I done to make you think that? Tell me, what have I done?”

“You were strange after Roy’s death.” Al-Saud snorted to show that he had heard enough and made to move away. “No!” Matilde burst out and, with a desperate movement, she put her hands under his jacket and dug her nails into his ass to keep him inside her. “Don’t pull out of me, please. Not yet.”

Matilde’s plea and the feeling of her fingers through the fabric of his pants excited him. He bent over to nestle her in the hollow formed by his torso and restarted the caresses, to invite her to repeat the experience they never seemed to tire of. He took off his coat and jacket, which fell behind them, and guided Matilde to the floor, where he made love to her again, inside the cashmere coat, on top of the jumble of clothes, inches from the suitcase. With his arms tense, Al-Saud raised his torso above her, as if he didn’t want to touch her. They stared at each other in silence, the moans Matilde made every time Al-Saud drove into her barely audible. She saw an unusual fire in the depths of the green eyes that bored into her with desire and a sensation of ownership that weakened her, obliterated her, made her curl up in fear. Those eyes spoke of an immeasurable power, one that was capable of destroying her, and yet she wanted to submit herself willingly, motivated by a primitive feeling that both drove and shamed her, because it conflicted with the idea of the modern, independent woman she wanted to be. She could even sense his power in the ferocity with which he expressed his relief, in the energy of his roars and the way he pounded into her in the final seconds, and she, held tight in his arms, encouraged him, begged him for more, yes, more, Eliah, my love, don’t stop, don’t stop, deeper, my love, more, and paradoxically, with these words, delicate little Matilde tamed the wild beast inside him, which endeavored to please her the way a mortal strives to appease a goddess.

“Matilde, Matilde…” he said, almost breathless, with his lips plastered all over her forehead. “You have no idea what these days away from you were like. I bought you so many gifts.”

“Yes? Really?”

“Yes, lots of gifts, even though you might not want any of them.”

“I want them all! Because you bought them for me.”

“Even if they’re expensive designer products that you consider unbearably frivolous?”

“Yes, I’ll want them anyway. To me they’re proof that you thought about me. What did you buy me?”

“I bought you a dress for my mother’s birthday party. It’s tonight.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Yes. Do you want to go?”

“Yes.”

He smiled at her tiny “yes.” It sounded like the chirp of a little bird.

“Shall we take a bath together?”

“Yes,” she chirped again.

CHAPTER 18

Al-Saud gave Juana money so she could buy a dress for Francesca’s party. They planned to do their shopping at Galeries Lafayette, where they would also have lunch and then go to the hairdresser on the second floor. Although they were excited about their plans, they looked at each other in silence. They were thinking about Ezequiel.

“It isn’t the same to go to Galeries Lafayette without Eze,” Juana said.

Ezequiel, like his family, had left the day before for Córdoba, with Roy’s coffin in the hold of his grandfather Guillermo’s plane after a week of bureaucracy that had gone much more smoothly than they had expected. Both the French police and the employees at the Argentinean consulate had been very solicitous and made the paperwork easier for them.

“Juani, I don’t think Ezequiel is ever going to forgive me for not going with him to Roy’s funeral.”

“Was he angry with you yesterday when you talked on the phone?”

“No, but he did seem strange. He asked me again to go with him. Jean-Paul wasn’t going because his grandfather forbade it. I left him alone, Juani, at a moment like this.”

“In any case,
we
left him alone.” Since tears were flowing from Matilde’s eyes, Juana clucked her tongue and hugged her. “The funeral is the least of it, Mat. He’ll be surrounded by lots of people. You were with him when he called you desperately from the hospital. And you stayed and took charge of the situation.”

“What’s going on?” When she heard Al-Saud’s voice, Matilde broke away from her friend’s hug and swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Are you crying, Matilde?”

“Our darling Mat is sad because she thinks Ezequiel is never going to forgive her for not going to Córdoba for Roy’s funeral.”

Matilde didn’t dare to look at him, though she could see he was approaching out of the corner of her eye.

“Don’t cry, my love, I don’t want you to suffer anymore. Can’t we forget everything, even if it’s just for today?” Matilde nodded, and Al-Saud put his thumb under her chin and pushed gently to make her lift her face. “Aren’t you going shopping?”

“Yes, we’re going now.”

“You’re not coming, stud?”

“No. Diana and Sándor will accompany you. Matilde, I’m going to work all day at the George V. If you need anything, you call me there or on my cell phone.” He took her arms and pulled her toward him so that Matilde ended up on tiptoe. “Be careful,” he warned her. “This isn’t over just because Blahetter is dead. You may still be in danger. We don’t know who assassinated him or why. Juana,” he said, glowering at her severely, “do I have your word that you won’t do anything that puts you at risk?”

“You have my word, stud. Didn’t we behave well in your absence? Did you receive any complaints about us?”

“No,” he admitted.

“Can we bring Leila?” Matilde asked.

“No. I want Diana and Sándor’s attention to be on you without any distractions. We’ll take Leila to my mother’s party, if that would make you happy.”

“Yes, that would make me very happy.”

“Everything makes you happy,” Juana teased her.

Mike, Tony, Alamán and Peter were waiting for him at the George V offices, anxious to share their news. Over lunch in the conference room, the ambush in Beirut was the main topic of conversation.

“As soon as Peter told us about what happened at the Summerland, we put the five who took part in drawing up the plan under surveillance.”

“What happened with Masséna?”

“We did as you told us. We called Zoya and explained our plan. She booked a trip to the Caribbean and invited Masséna. He asked for two weeks of vacation. He left on Wednesday.”

“Who did you assign to trail him?”

“Derek Byrne,” Ramsay informed him. “We worked together in The Firm. He was in the Belfast unit. He’s one of my most capable men.”

“Did you tell him to ensure Zoya’s safety?” Al-Saud worried. “Masséna could hurt her if he finds out about the role that she played in all this.”

“When he went in to put microphones in their hotel room, Byrne checked it for weapons. He assured me that Masséna didn’t have one, not even a razor blade.”

“All the same, I want Byrne to be alert.”

“He’s in the connecting room in the hotel. He listens to them constantly and follows them when they go out. We’re doing everything we can.”

“In any case,” Mike added, “we put Stephanie”—Masséna’s head assistant—“in charge of systems. If she was surprised when I asked her to change all the access passwords for the entire staff and to restrict Masséna to the level of an ordinary user, she didn’t show it. That girl is made of ice.”

“We know that Masséna could hack our system from any beach in the Caribbean,” Al-Saud declared. “We should improve the security measures.”

“Stephanie is monitoring the system twenty-four-seven,” said Tony.

“We don’t even know for sure that it’s him,” Mike Thorton reminded them. “Masséna, I mean. There were four other suspects that participated in the plan for the ambush in Beirut.”

“It’s him,” Tony reckoned. “I never liked that rodent.”

Peter’s cell phone rang, and he moved away to answer the call.

“Have you found anything out about the death of Matilde’s ex?” Tony wanted to know.

“Nothing,” said Al-Saud. “I think the police have reached a dead end. I’ll talk to Edmé de Florian later, we’ll see what he says. Did it show up in the news?”

“Not a word. What they did at thirty-six Quai des Orfèvres to stop it from leaking to the press is beyond me.”

“It’s a delicate subject. It could just be some nut who’s acting alone or we could be facing—”

“Eliah!” Peter interrupted, looking worried. “It’s Amburgo,” he said, and handed him the phone.

“Amburgo,” pronounced Al-Saud.

“I’m somewhere in Seine-Saint-Denis,” he said in a whisper, “in an abandoned factory. I intercepted a call that one of the Iraqis received this morning.”

“Did you record it?”

“Of course,” he said, still whispering. “A guy with a distorted voice summoned them here. He spoke about this location in Seine-Saint-Denis as if they knew it. I followed them here. I don’t think I’m far from Le Bourget Airport. They went into the factory and I went after them. They met this guy, he’s huge. I have photos. They argued. He knocked all three of them out and, when he had them on the ground, put on a gas mask that he had hidden under his jacket and sprayed them with something. He watched them as they struggled and left once they were unconscious. I didn’t dare to go near them because I didn’t want to inhale whatever that son of a bitch sprayed on them.”