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She held up a hand. “Elle.” Her voice was hard, imperial. “That’s who I am now.”
So stubborn.
“As you command…Elle.” The name tasted sweet on his tongue, like a secret dipped in honey.
“What happens if I walk out the front door?”
As if he’d let that happen. “The Fjende will find you and, eventually, kill you.”
Pondering this bit of information, she twisted a long strand of silky reddish hair around her finger as she stared at him. It was as if she could see something inside him that he didn’t know was there. The idea was touchy-feely, weird, and completely unshakable. He didn’t like it one bit.
Elle crossed over to him, stopping well out of arm’s reach before walking a half circle around him and putting him on the spot. She inspected him from top to bottom, her gaze lingering for a couple of beats on his pants, where his cock lay against his thigh. Blood rushed to it in response, but he refused to move or adjust his stance. She knew what she did to him. She’d felt it as he’d slid against her firm, high ass outside, a moment of blissful agony he’d no doubt jerk off to soon. But he knew the score. She was trying to exert control over the situation by making him hard with just a look. Well, she wasn’t going to get it. Control was his. Always.
With deliberate care, she scraped her teeth across her plump bottom lip, sending a shot of hunger through him that took his breath away. “What happens if I stay?”
“I’ll keep you safe.” He would. No matter the cost.
“Why?” she asked, a huskiness invading her tone.
“It’s what I do.” It’s how he’d get his revenge. Finally.
She stepped closer, her breath warm against his ear. “Who are you?”
“Dominick Rasmussen.” The lie came out smooth and soft, despite the way his body had hardened because of her nearness and the line of questioning.
“Bullshit.” Her laugh teased his skin, and then she was gone, striding across the library to her phone lying on the seat of an oversize leather chair. She bent over, giving him a heart attack–inducing view of her ass encased in that tight green skirt of hers, and picked up her phone. Turning, she scrolled through whatever was on the tiny screen. “I still get cell coverage up here in the snowy boonies of these mountains. Eight years ago you appeared out of nowhere, one of the wealthiest men in the Western Hemisphere, with a mysterious past and a never-ending supply of cash.”
“Everyone comes from somewhere.” For him it was a place he’d never see again because it no longer existed, not the way he remembered. Pain pinched his lungs as the memories flooded. The blood. The severed limbs. The blank stares of the dead.
She flung her cell back onto the chair. “Tell me.”
This needed to stop—the questioning, the wanting, the hunger that nearly dropped him to his knees. Stalking across the sixteenth-century Turkish rug, he trapped her between himself and the chair. “It has no bearing on today or what we’re going to accomplish in the days ahead.”
He let his frustration boil close enough to the top that she should have wilted in the heat. She didn’t. He was beginning to realize that she burned just as hot as he did. Underneath the expensive clothes and their arctic Elskovian exteriors, a blue flame flickered in them both. If he wasn’t careful, that heat might end up turning a decades-long dream to ash.
Her gaze grew hooded, and a pink flush ate its way up her ample cleavage, but her questioning continued. “You live in London, but you don’t have an English accent. Instead, you have the slightest hint of Brooklyn and something that”—she narrowed her eyes—“sounds a lot like home.”
“I thought you were a woman without a country.”
“I am,” she whispered.
The loneliness in her voice tore a hole through him. The Resistance had watched, but always from a distance. What kind of life had that been for her? He’d spent the last ten years surrounded by fighters readying for battle. She’d lived those years alone; it was all there in her file on his hard drive.
She lifted her small hand to his chest, setting it over his fast-beating heart and sending shock waves through him. With the barest pressure, she pushed him back as far as her arm would go. He allowed it even though every instinct in him was screaming for him to wrap her up and tell her she would never be alone again.
“What will it take to convince you you’re wrong, that you have a country, a home?”
The lost look in her brown eyes gave way to a wary determination. “A good place to start would be the truth.”
Now, that way lay trouble. “About what?”
“You.” She brushed past him, putting half of the rug between them, as if that would minimize the awareness he had for her. “According to the internet, you’re a total player with the Midas touch when it comes to business deals. According to you, your only mission in life is to get my ass on the Elskov throne. So which is it?”
They stared at each other as the silence stretched between them, holding them in place. Talking about his past had been forbidden for so long, he wasn’t sure he could speak the words out loud. He took a deep breath, the smell of tear gas and the echoes of horrified screams escaping from some dark place in his memory. She didn’t know. How could she? The Fjende had covered their tracks too well. The international community had accepted the state-sanctioned stories of the king’s sudden heart attack and a grieving nation temporarily broken apart by rival factions as an explanation for the riots, the murders, and the chaos following the coup.
Telling her everything wasn’t an option. Success depended on her never findin
g out the truth about her father, but the rest? That he could give her.
