Written on Your Skin (15 page)

“Then why,” he asked softly, “do I find you in my desk?”

Because I was stupid enough to get caught, she was tempted to say. But the rapid beat of her heart warned her that she should not answer flippantly. “I want to know where Tarbury is. You wouldn’t tell me.”

He prowled around the desk toward her. One hand landed on the desktop, positioned in precise alignment with hers, ring glittering in the moonlight. Her fingers curled into her palms as his other arm came around behind her shoulders, his right hand bracing beside hers on the opposite side of the blotter. He had caged her in truth now. How charming for him. “This is not necessary,” she said.

“I didn’t think it was. But apparently I was wrong.” He leaned over her head, inspecting what lay on the desktop.

“I was worried for Tarbury,” she said stubbornly.

His breath touched her neck, causing goose bumps to rise along the backs of her arms. “I don’t believe you.”

Out of nowhere, she remembered the caution that had touched her in Hong Kong. Spies were dangerous, and she was small; in his shirtsleeves, the breadth of his shoulders had not escaped her. Maybe her confidence in her own safety was misplaced. While his body touched her nowhere, she could sense the mass and energy of him all along her back, like a storm cloud threatening to unleash lightning. One did not linger in a storm that threatened violence. “I was worried,” she whispered. “He’s my responsibility.”

“And you are a responsible girl.” He spoke slowly, as though he enjoyed the feel of the words rolling over his tongue. “You take great care with the tasks you’re given.”

The phrasing confused her. It seemed to hint at something beyond her knowledge. She trained her eyes on the pens, and their ordered arrangement took on a bleaker significance. Collins had relied on others to maintain an orderly household. Even his anger had been sloppy. Until the end, she had always been able to find loopholes in it. But this man would not provide her with such easy escapes. “Surely…” She cleared her throat. “Surely, with such a great household at your disposal, you can understand an employer’s concern for her staff.”

His soft laughter ghosted over her ear, heating her temple. “Flattery?” It took a trick for him to press so closely, yet not touch her at all. Forget the pens; his own body was subject to a discipline of exacting precision. “I think you overestimate me,” he murmured. “It’s becoming more obvious by the hour that there are a great many things I don’t understand. You, for instance. How did you get out?”

His tone was casual, almost playful. But her survival instincts were well honed; she knew better than to doubt them when they told her he was furious. “Someone left the door unlocked.”

Hot, dry fingers threaded under her unbound hair, taking her neck in a gentle grip. They tightened slightly, giving her brief insight into what it would be like to be strangled. And then they slid around to her chin, yanking it up to an awkward angle that directed her face toward the ceiling. “Look at me,” he said curtly.

She drew a hard breath through her nose to channel her sudden anger. He manipulated her with the same rude economy that a farmer used when trussing an animal for slaughter. Was this her repayment for saving him?

“Look at me.”

She slid her eyes to his. The angle at which he stood required her to glare from the very corner of her vision, and the muscles in her temples stabbed protest. His pil-lowy lips looked hard in the moonlight, chiseled from marble. “How,” they said. “Did you. Get out.”

“Very easily.” Her voice emerged hoarsely, by virtue of the awkward bent of her neck. “I picked the lock.”

His face revealed no opinion of these tidings, but his thumb skated down her cheek, pulling a shiver from her. Loathing, fear, she could not name it. “I see.” The pad of his finger was rough and warm; it stroked her skin like the touch of a lover, as though to suggest that he saw a great many possibilities and was considering each of them. “Is this a skill particular to American girls? Or are you…unique?”

She thought it a rhetorical question, but as the silence lengthened, his fingers firmed: he would require an answer. Collins, too, had liked to demand answers to questions that did not puzzle him at all. “No. It’s not a common skill.”

Now his thumb fitted into the corner of her mouth. She tasted the salt of his skin. He was wrong to tempt her. If she bit it off, he’d have a harder time holding her gun. “And where did you learn it?”

She inched her head away, freeing herself of his taste. “My neck is starting to cramp.”

“Then you had better reply,” he said coolly.

“I hired someone to teach me.” She ripped out of his grip and slammed back her elbow, aiming for his gut.

He caught it and snapped her around. Her face smashed into his chest; she jerked back, and his hands caught hold of her wrists, pinning them at the small of her back. “Disappointing,” he remarked, as she gave a furious pull. “All the lessons went to locks, hmm?”

“Let go of me!”

“What were you looking for?”

Kick him. But he must have felt her muscles tense; his lower body twisted away and his hands yanked her into a backward arch, forcing her to bend at the waist. Her shoulder blades banged into the desktop. His grip on her wrists changed, transferring them to a single hand; his forearm, freed, settled lightly over her throat.

She froze, her breath scraping loudly against her ears. He loomed over her, a dark silhouette, his wild hair haloed by the light coming in through the window behind him. “Answer me,” he said very softly, and all at once, she felt herself blush. There was a terrible intimacy in the way his lower body pressed against hers, and his whisper seemed better suited to hot, hushed secrets, the sort she had once wanted to extract from him. “What did he set you to find?”

She realized suddenly that there was far more to this interrogation than she understood. “Who? Who do you mean?”

His forearm slipped away; for a miraculous second she thought he had come to his senses. Then he set a finger to the underside of her chin, rubbing teasingly. “Last chance,” he said. “Then I find some other more entertaining way to amuse myself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“No?” He sighed. “What a pity they know I have you.”

“And to think I actually liked you,” she muttered.

“Seeing me clearly now, are you?”

“Maybe I am.”

His hand lifted, resettling on her arm; with impersonal thoroughness, it skated over her breasts and waist, then down to her hips, sliding briefly between her thighs, moving away too quickly for her to get out a protest. He was looking, she realized, for a weapon. “You already took my gun,” she said breathlessly.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her upright. Not letting go of her, he leaned away toward the wall. Light rose. His square jaw was clean-shaven now, the white shirt a startling contrast against his golden skin. His cold regard seemed no more reassuring for the new clarity with which she viewed it. “I should have known when I saw your nails.” An unpleasant smile tipped up the corners of his mouth. “He always did have an eye for beauty.” He flicked a finger at the trailing ends of her hair where it fell past her breast.

Such a small touch. But the hairs lifted on her skin, and a shiver broke over her. Even in this terrible moment, her body was attuned to him. She loathed it.

He noticed. His brow lifted, and he made a low, interested noise. With two fingers he caught up the lock of hair, winding it around his knuckles, until the pull at her scalp forced her to step toward him, her lips coming within a hand’s width of his chest. “Miss Masters,” he mused. He spoke her name as though testing a new interpretation of the syllables. “Mina Masters, damsel in distress. How sweetly you do play that role.”

Hearing her own phrase from his lips made her feel horribly obvious. She was glad for the return of her anger. “You’re wrong,” she said. “You think you’re being clever here, but you’re mistaken.”

“That makes two of us, then. What did he tell you? That I’m clawless now?” The idea seemed to amuse him; his gaze unfocused, looking through her, and he laughed beneath his breath. His eyes were such a dark brown that they bordered on black. Shadows for eyes, made deeper and more mesmerizing by those long, almost girlish lashes, which lured one into trusting them against one’s better judgment; she should have known better than to try to enlist his aid, or to mention him to Ridland. “No,” he said, and his attention dropped down her body. “He chose badly for this job. Unless the task was to seduce me? What did he tell you, that I’d inherited my father’s taste for trollops?”

“No one told me anything,” she said stonily.

He did not seem to hear this. His eyes lifted now to her face, roaming across her cheeks and lips. “Well, and perhaps you could have managed it. I’ve always thought you a sweet little package.” His hand lowered, pulling down her hair and her head along with it, so she had no choice but to watch as his knuckles skated across the upper slope of her breast. “You can still give it a go, if you like. All this hair…” He laughed again, a low, distinctly sexual sound. “I could tie you up with it.”

The vision formed with startling clarity in her brain. The day she let a man tie her down was the day she died. She would bite his throat out if he tried it.

It seemed unwise to share that intention. Besides, if he thought she was a blushing virgin, then the advantage was all hers. She pitched her voice very low. “Let go of me, and I’ll do my best.”

Now his hand rose, to nudge up her chin and force her eyes to his. His regard narrowed on her. In the silence, she heard the distant chimes of the clock again. Only a quarter hour. It felt like a century. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t leave knives unsheathed.”

Silence fell. She did not know how to break it, but she could see the calculations working through his expression, and it came to her, strongly, that it was better he not be allowed to finish them. Heart drumming, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

He held perfectly still. It disconcerted her. She ran her tongue along his upper lip, and he exhaled, his breath coasting across her mouth. His lips were much softer than they appeared. She set her teeth onto the bottom one, very lightly. If he did something dislikable, she could bite it clean off him.

His fingers brushed against her neck. The gentle touch startled her; she let go of his lip and he spoke against her mouth. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Mina.”

Her face prickled. She could not believe she was flushing, that some base part of her was suddenly warming to this charade. Bodies were so stupid. “Let go of my hair and I will.”

He leaned forward and kissed her. His tongue opened her lips and forced itself inside, touching and tangling with hers as his hand loosed her hair and came around her waist. He bent over her and knocked her off balance so she fell backward, relying on his arm alone for support.

He tasted hot and dark, and his kiss was like the onset of a fever; the angle, the stroke of his tongue, and the dig of his fist into her back left no role for her but submission. He held her in such a way that her instincts kept telling her she was about to fall. She found herself grabbing his shoulders to offset her dizziness, and his mouth pressed harder into hers, forcing her to a new awareness of his knuckles digging into her spine, the solid density and thickness of his shoulders, how easily he was overwhelming her.

Nothing in her should have responded to it, save that his strength was somehow not hurting her. His grip on her was brutal in its absoluteness, but it caused her no discomfort, and his kiss pulled her into pleasure despite herself. He kissed as gracefully as he moved; she could not predict it. His mouth sucked at hers, his teeth caught her lip. He spoke into her mouth. “What were you meant to find?”

“Nothing,” she gasped.

Abruptly, she was standing on her feet again; he had set her away and stepped back. His chest was moving more rapidly than normal, but as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, she realized it was not arousal that made his eyes so heavy-lidded. A muscle ticked at his temple as he stared at her. Why, he was not enjoying himself at all.

All at once, she felt a weird urge to laugh. His action said everything: he had no intention of hurting her, or of ravishing her, either. How badly he’d scared her—and for what? “You’ve cooked up this drama yourself.” Her voice sounded only a little unsteady. He kissed as well as she’d remembered. “Yes, I was an idiot to come in here. But you took me from that cellar in the rudest manner possible. You can’t blame me for trying to figure out if I’m safe with you. Locked up here, at your mercy—what would you do in my situation?”

His brow lifted. “The same thing, perhaps. But not so clumsily.”

Stupid to feel stung by his criticism. “Yes, well, I have little experience in spying, and not much interest in acquiring it, I must confess.”

His mouth thinned. “One thing you will remember,” he said. “I am not, and have never been, a spy.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “you are a tycoon, I forgot. You trade in coca, when you’re not jumping out windows.”

“I am a mapmaker,” he said sharply. “Raised ludicrously high, which is cause enough for interest, believe me. Once you leave this place, your imagination will be counted as running wild if you claim anything more extraordinary.”

That he mentioned her departure as an inevitability moved her to smile. Maybe they could get along, after all. “Oh, I’m no more imaginative than you,” she said. “Perfectly boring, really.”