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But I have one stipulation. One that seems terribly important, despite the circumstances. “I understand, but…” I peer up into his eyes, hoping he’ll see just how badly I need just one more concession. “I have to know your name. Your real name.”
He recoils as if struck by a viper. “That’s not part of the deal.”
“Neither is this. None of what has happened has been part of the deal,” I argue. “You and I both know that there’s something between us, an attraction that goes far beyond anything either of us has ever experienced before.”
Those cold, dark eyes turn to stone, and he narrows them at me. For just a second, I wonder if that’s how he looks at all of his victims before he murders them. “How do you know you’re not one of many, Brenda.”
“Faith,” I correct, loathing hearing the fake name come from his lips. I want to hear my name on his tongue, that deep, thick, resonant voice washing over me as we make love as many times as we can in the little time we have to spend together.
His anger mounts, visible in his every feature and the way his muscles tensed throughout his body, seeming to add to his already wide frame and inherent strength.
“And I know,” I continue, testing his patience and not caring one iota, “because you wouldn’t be here now, breaking your own rules, to be with me, if I wasn’t something special to you.”
“No one is special to me.”
I lift my chin, taking yet another risk. This time to my own ego. “I am.”
His upper lip curls back in a silent snarl. He wants to strangle me; I’d bet my life on it. But then the craziest thing happens.
“Declan.”
I have no words. I search his eyes, his face, while my brain downloads the new information and rewrites over the old. While “Cal” had seemed to fit him before, now it seems almost laughable. How could I have ever seen him as anything other than a Declan? It’s perfect. He’s perfect.
“Hi, Declan.”
“Okay, enough!” His unexpected assertion isn’t loud enough to call a shout, but it is just as startling as if he’d bellowed it right in my face. I flinch hard and take a step back, my body acting on instinct alone, as it would when faced with imminent danger.
Meanwhile, my mind isn’t at all shaken. I am steady as a rock in my belief that Cal—Declan would never raise a finger to harm me. I don’t know how I can be so sure about something like that—maybe I am just reckless with my life—but I feel it in my bones. I’m safe with him when no one else is.
That knowledge makes me step forward in a bold move that is uncharacteristic of me. I’m not going to allow any more distance between us. We’ve come so far, and now I want to collect on one last thing before we part ways, never to see each other again.
“I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to talk.” I touch his chest, a gentle pressure applied gradually until I’m sure he’s used to it, and then I move forward more, adding a caress as my hands make their way up his sweat-dampened gray T-shirt to broad shoulders that I now sense hold the weight of the world.
Has this man ever known a moment of peace in his life? True peace? I don’t think so.
“Thank you for coming here. To help me.” The gesture isn’t to butter him up, but a genuine offer of gratitude and affection. He didn’t have to come. He could have kept his promise to cut me loose and leave me to fend for myself, but he didn’t. In some strange way, I can almost call him my hero. He’d come to my rescue, and together we made my dreams come true.
“I can’t remember the last time…” Declan’s confession trails off, leaving me to fill in the blanks.
“It’s been a long since I’ve been with someone that I really wanted,” I reveal, taking the lead. “I’ve spent years just going through the motions, not feeling, not desiring.” My gaze travels over the thick column of his throat to the Adam’s apple that bobs with each swallow. He wears no cologne that I can discern, but he smells divine. A combination of the outdoors, saltwater, and something uniquely him.
My tongue pokes out to wet my lips, desperately wanting to lickhim, every inch of his skin.
“Why me?”
His question puzzles me, but then I consider everything he represents, with the chief quality among them being death incarnate. “I could ask you the same.”
In a surprisingly gentle act that he’d done only once before—in a similar moment to this that’d turned into a night of humiliation for me that I’d just as soon not remember—he reaches up to tuck the hair behind my ears. “You’re beautiful, kind, gentle. I could tell right away that you were caring and loving…”
I cock my head to the side, my heart drumming a mile a minute. “I hired you to kill Glenn, and that’s what you took away from it?” I could almost laugh if it didn’t sound so absurd. But then, who am I to judge? I want to have sex with a hitman, to claim him as my own.
“No one ever accused men of being logical.” He shrugs.
“Or thinking with their big brain,” I tease.
“I don’t know why, but I like you. I haven’t been able to get you out of my head, no matter how hard I tried. The very idea of your husband’s hands on you made me so mad…”
I feel his hands, resting on either side of my neck, begin to squeeze. His eyes are distant, off in some dark, dangerous place that doesn’t terrify me as it should, but I know I have to stop him and bring him out of it before he hurtsme.
