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He felt like he’d kicked a kitten. “Oh, Christ. I’m sorry.”
Her chin went up. “Forget it,” she said haughtily. “This is crazy. I’m out of here.”
“Thank God,” he muttered.
He rubbed his stinging eyes, opened them—and she was gone.
He put his hand over his hot face. His whole damn body shook. His eyes leaked. Nick, the ice man. Melted down. What the hell had just happened here?
It occurred to him that Becca was naked in the woods, at one in the morning, with no flashlight. Shit. She had the walkway for a guide, he told himself. But in that moonless dark, she was going to have a painful, unnerving time creeping back to the Sloane A-frame. She wouldn’t die of exposure in the ten minutes that it would take her to get there. But still. Christ.
He went to the control room and grabbed the thermal imager.
He winced when he saw the red, rainbow-edged image moving on the boardwalk stumble. She crouched down to feel her way, walking almost on her hands and knees. He was tempted to follow her with the infrared goggles to make sure she got back safe.
But following a beautiful, naked woman through the dark woods with a raging hard-on like the one he had now didn’t strike him as intelligent. He didn’t trust himself. He’d probably end up carrying her over his shoulder to the Sloane house and nailing her there on the first flat surface that presented itself.
She was right. This was crazy.Hewas crazy.
He did the next best thing: climbing the spiral staircase to look out the window of one of the back bedrooms, from which the Sloane house could be seen. He stood there, and waited, like a statue, for-fucking ever…until he saw a light flick on.
Home safe. Good. Air finally hissed out of his compressed lungs.
Let her go. Fucking forget about it. He hadn’t done anything against the law and she wasn’t likely to report him to the local cops for not having a goddamn condom. But the gun, the cuffs—fuck it. Too late now. They would ask her a lot of rude questions about why she was swimming naked in the neighbor’s pool in the first place. No, nothing would come of it.
He sank down onto the bed, humiliated. Goddamn it, he had wanted her, though. With all his heart.
Being alive again felt truly weird. To think he’d maneuvered, begged, pleaded, cheated, schemed, for a chance to get closer to that psycho vermin Zhoglo. He would have laughed, if he had the energy.
Nobody could pay a guy enough money to do shit like this. He was dickbrained enough to do it for free. Jesus, look at him. The most important solo op of his life, deadly dangerous…and ta da…a beautiful naked girl waltzed in out of nowhere and made him forget who he was, what he was doing. Made him drunk and stupid with her clumsy kissing.
He wasn’t a hugging sort of guy, but her arms had felt so damn good. And his finger tingled, thinking of her tight, hot, clinging—
Stop.He buried his face in his hands, and let out a sound like a wolf’s howl. If he lived through this, he was done. He would spend the rest of what passed for his life building birdhouses.
Becca’s spell was potent. While it lasted, he felt like a man again. Interesting to know that his tackle still worked. He tried to shove his cock into his pants, but it wasn’t ready to face reality. Like a raised fist at an activists’ rally, it stayed up and stayed high. He wondered if he was going to have to jerk off to get some relief. It had been months since the urge to masturbate had even crossed his mind. Let alone the thought of sex.
He’d been too busy, too focused. Too depressed. The last time he’d had sex offered to him was at an icebound way station for human traffickers in the armpit of Russia, three months ago. Posing as a buyer while he looked for Sveti. Stone cold afraid to find her there.
One of the traffickers had offered him the use of a piece of his merchandise. Ivana. From Belarus. Couldn’t have been fourteen. Even terrified and traumatized, she was a pretty girl. Destined to be chained to a bed in a brothel, in some sex tourism hot spot in Thailand or the Philippines, until she got used up and sent off to the boneyard.
He’d given Ivana his bed to spare her having to turn any other tricks that night and slept with the rats on the filthy floor, wrapped in his coat. The cargo had moved on the next morning.
It had put him off sex ever since. He’d barely managed to eat afterwards, it had made him so fucking miserable. He could have saved Ivana, if he’d been willing to break cover, give up his search.
But he’d made a promise to Sveti’s mother. To Sergei’s ghost.
It made him crazy. Thousands of women and children, bought and sold, used and tossed like garbage so that Zhoglo and men like him could get richer. So that sleazy sex tourist assholes from all over the world had a constant supply of fresh meat. Thousands of Svetis, of Ivanas. And he couldn’t do a fucking thing about it.
Except for this. He would keep it simple, focus on one individual. Just Sveti. If he thought about them all, he’d go nuts.
He knew in his gut that trying to stop Zhoglo and his kind was a useless effort. Even if he took out one kingpin, a thousand wannabes would hustle to fill his shoes. But he could try to find one single stolen girl and take her back to her mother. Just one. That wasn’t too goddamn much to ask.
He patted the various pockets of his cut-off cargo pants until he found a lighter and the battered pack of Turkish cigarettes that his alter ego Arkady favored.
He took a deep, grateful drag of the harsh smoke. He’d acquired the habit when he was a freaked-out, fucked-up teenager and tried to quit several times. Now that he’d wrapped his mind around the fact that he wasn’t likely to be needing his lungs in the long term anyhow, it seemed pointless to deny himself.
He struggled to remember what Sveti looked like, but after six months, the finer details were gone. He remembered obvious things: long dark hair, hazel eyes, a big smile like Sergei’s. A port wine birthmark on her neck. But when he tried to see her face, a vision of Becca got in the way. All grown up but somehow just as innocent.
