I leaned on him and limped down the hallway. All the while, he held me tight against his body. It was terrible to think about, but it had been a long time since anyone had been so close to me, and the way that his hand wrapped around my hip... well, I couldn’t help what my body decided to respond to. The pressure of his arm around me was thrilling, in the most terrifying kind of way. I bit my lip as a new wave of pain shot through my leg.
We reached the end of the front hallway and turned into the main living room. I gazed into the house, expecting to see gleaming rows of torture weapons. Knives littering the floor. A bathtub full of body parts.
Instead, I saw a living room right out of the center page of Home & Living magazine, a log cabin that any millionaire might have owned. A leather couch in front of a huge fireplace. Brass radiators on the walls. Plush velvety rugs on top of knotted pine flooring. And, through the open door to the kitchen, a table where a man lay, bloody and groaning.
Okay, maybe that scene wasn’t in Home & Living.
He stopped at the end of the hallway in front of a closet and slid open the pine door. Inside of what I’d thought was a coat closet stood a rack of computer screens, showing every possible angle of the house and the surrounding property. The road, the gate. Three of the screens had a red blinking icon at the top that said Warning: Intruder in big block letters.
He frowned and pulled out what looked like a remote control. He opened up the back and tapped the remote. Four batteries fell out.
“Goddammit.” His voice was flat, but there was so much anger simmering under the surface that it might have been better had he yelled. He ripped open a fresh back of batteries with his teeth and replaced them, then tossed the remote control into the closet and slammed the door. Turning to me, I saw irritation written all over his face.
“Out of battery,” he said. “My audio alarm is out of battery. That’s why it didn’t go off for you. Great. Spring cleaning and I forgot to change the batteries.”
My mouth dropped open. That was it? If he’d changed a battery, I wouldn’t have witnessed a murder? Well, almost a murder, I reminded myself, as the man in the other room groaned again.
“If you let me go, I won’t say anything,” I said, my words rushing out in a flood of worry. “I didn’t see anything. I don’t know your name or who you are. I don’t even know who that guy is!”
“Why are you here?”
He stood facing me, his flat eyes accusing me. I gulped.
“I... I was curious. About the paper.”
He stepped forward so that our faces were only inches away from each other. I smelled him again, the subtle aftershave mixed now with sweat from his exertions. There was another smell, too, underneath all that. The smell of blood, coppery and bitter.
In spite of everything, I remembered the last time we’d been so close together, in the elevator. I remembered his fierce kiss, the passion that swelled up and tore my breath from my lungs. Even standing so close to him now, I felt the same terrible desire come racing through my body, turning me hot between the thighs. I knew he was dangerous, but my body didn’t care.
“Curious. You seem like a curious one.”
He looked at me like nobody else had ever done before. I was used to guys giving me a quick once-over, their eyes sweeping across my face and down my body in a blink. His eyes, though, caressed the lines of my face with a penetrating gaze that I could almost feel on my skin. He reached out and touched my chin, and I flinched at the touch, thinking of blood.
“Like a curious little kitten.”
His hand moved down trailing over the seams of my clothing. He touched my waistband, sliding his fingers around the back, over my pockets. He stopped and slid his hand into my back pocket. I held my breath, but he simply pulled out my car keys and put them in his own pocket. In my other jeans pocket he found the slip of paper.
“There it is,” I said.
“What? This?” He unfolded it and glanced down at the numbers. “Is this some sort of code?”
“That’s what I was curious about,” I said. My heart was pounding. Was he working for the government? Maybe he was a trained killer. Then there was no way he could kill me. I clung to that small bit of hope. “What does it mean?”
But he only raised his eyebrows.
“How should I know what it means? Looks like a bunch of random numbers to me.”
“It’s not... it’s not yours?”
Fabio shook his head slowly, peering at me as though I was the crazy one.
“But my friend told me—”
I cut myself off as I realized exactly what had happened.
Jules!
What did she say? Maybe you can ask him to explain it to you. Holy shit. She faked it. She faked a stupid secret note so that I would talk to him again. And it worked, better than she could ever have imagined.
Or worse than she ever could have imagined.
Jules, you have no idea what you’ve done to me.
“A mistake, perhaps?”
“My friend...” I choked on the words. “She wanted me to talk to you.”
“That makes more sense,” the man said, relief coming over his face. “Yes, more sense than you being with the police. Here I was thinking that they might be onto me! But no, it’s only... it’s only you.”
The man finished patting me down and then took my arm.