Confidence Tricks (21 page)

“We should have stopped along the way so I could take this thing off,” she offered by way of explanation as she tossed the hair into her bag. “Wearing it feels like someone is trying to shove my brain in a jar.”

“Here. Let me.” Asprey reached up and began extracting the remaining pins—dozens of them, it looked like, picking them off one by one and tucking them into his pocket. When he was sure they were all out, he moved his hands gently through her hair—her natural hair, those dark, loopy curls that ran through his fingers like silk.

She let out a low moan. “Let me guess—scalp massage was part of your advanced Eastern training?”

He let out a chuckle, the intimacy of the moment catching him off guard. “Nope. General life training.”

“I see.” She stepped away. “Lots of experience helping women to relax?”

Shoot.
That wasn’t what he meant. He just knew what it was like to feel trapped in a vise, pressured on all sides. But it was too late to retract so he just smiled good-naturedly. “Any time you want a personal demonstration, just ask.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said drily. “So…you want to see where I learned to fight?”

He perked up. “Here? In the middle of the woods? Please tell me there’s a hidden cave and a secret ninja brotherhood. I’ll give you anything you want if there’s a secret brotherhood.”

She laughed and shook her head, her hair regaining a little bounce with each movement. “I think you watch too many action movies. This is Aberdeen, not some Tibetan refuge. Come on. I’ll show you.”

On foot, they wound up a long driveway about a quarter of a mile in length, the deepening dusk making it difficult to discern any details other than lush greenery in all directions. Asprey would never have admitted it out loud, but there was a moment when he realized this would be the perfect place for her to lure wealthy, unsuspecting marks to be tied up and ransomed.

The possibility that Graff might be right—that Poppy was indeed playing a game so twisted it was impossible for a guy like Asprey to see his way out of it—settled uncomfortably in the air, blanketing him as much as the darkness.

He fought it. Asprey might not have Graff’s natural leadership abilities and innate sense of justice, and he might not be as valuable in a heist as someone with Tiffany’s computer skills, but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew people, and, more specifically, he knew Poppy.

Or he was trying to, anyway.

The line of trees broke to reveal a crumbling house slumped in the distance, the rustic décor set with an overgrown yard and a broken-down car in the dirt driveway. It had obviously never been a grand building, as evidenced by the decaying boards of negligible quality, and the roof, which sagged under layers of moss and poor craftsmanship. But there was an underlying charm to it just the same, like x-raying a mediocre painting to reveal a masterpiece underneath.

Poppy took a deep breath. “Here it is. The secret ninja training center.”

“You’re right. That isn’t at all like the movies. I expected there to be at least one giant stone staircase for me to run up.”

“To where? The top of that hill?”

“No,” he corrected her with a grin. “To a wise old man who smells like incense and has the answer to the question buried deep inside my heart.”

She snorted and cast an incredulous look at him over her shoulder, playing along. “When you find out what that is, I’d love to hear it.”

He paused, watching her. Poppy’s brown eyes were warm and expressive, miles from what he expected of someone with a criminal record. Her crooked smile made it even harder to believe she possessed the ability to knock a man flat.

Or did it?

“Sometimes,” he said simply, “I think I might already know.”

Her smile faded, and she quickly turned away. “You’re only looking at the outside,” she said. Asprey couldn’t tell whether they were still talking about the metaphoric wise man or the house. Or her.

“Am I?”

“Of course.” She snapped right back into Poppy mode, efficient and cool, and thumbed at the house. “The real training ground is out back. I used to spend quite a bit of time inside there, though.”

“Does that mean I get the grand tour?”

“Ew—no way. It’s a local hangout for teenage kids, probably full of discarded condoms and used needles and a dead body or two. I haven’t gone inside in years.”

“Sounds lovely.”

“You’re in the backwoods of Aberdeen. This is as good as it gets.” She nodded toward the side of the house. “Come on. I’ll show you around the back.”

If the front of the house was in disrepair, the back was even worse, with decades of undergrowth taking over what must have once been a serviceable porch. Again, the underlying appeal was there, what with the breathtaking views of the trees set against the deepening twilight sky in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree rotation. Poppy brought his notice to the ground as she pointed out a huge concrete hole in the shape of an Olympic-sized pool.

Into which she promptly dived.

Okay, she didn’t exactly dive—it was more of a jump, but Asprey was still taken aback. He got closer to the edge and peered in. It was exactly what one would expect from an empty, decaying swimming pool, cracked and dirty, with huge chunks of concrete broken off the edges. But the area had also been recently cleared of debris, and there were spatters of rust near the drain in the center, which didn’t showcase the usual collection of leaves and dead things.

Poppy shrugged out of her jacket and tossed it up onto the pool’s edge, shaking her limbs and falling into a fighter’s stance. “Welcome to the Pit. Hands up.”

Asprey laughed for a few seconds before he realized she wasn’t smiling back. Once again, he tamped down the niggling voice telling him that Graff was right about Poppy and her true motivations. He wondered if that feeling would ever go away—if he would ever be able to let go and truly trust this woman.

“You want me to get in there and fight you?” he asked warily.

“Calm down, Asprey. I’m not going to take advantage of you.” Was it his imagination, or was there a note of disappointment in her voice? “You wanted to know where I came from. Well, this is it. No ninjas. No secret brotherhood. Just a bunch of lower-class kids with too much time and aggression on their hands—and not nearly enough adult supervision. Throw in a few cage-fighting DVDs we stole from the video store in town and this is what you get. Me.”

As if on cue, the clouds overhead broke open, dumping huge splatters of rain on them both. The rust, which Asprey suspected now might actually be blood, swirled before beginning to move down the drain. He lowered himself to the pool’s shallow end, taking it all in.

“It’s gruesome. Kind of like the Colosseum at Rome.”

“A fight to the death.” She paused thoughtfully. “That’s not too far off. I broke a total of three bones in the Pit. Lost my virginity here too.”

“Not at the same time, I hope.”

She laughed. “No one would have dared. I was a fast learner.”

“So…are you some sort of mixed martial arts specialist?” he asked, not moving as the rain dripped down his face, obscuring his vision. That would explain the
MMA
magazine subscription—as well as his inability to stand his ground whenever she was around.

“Not even close. You’ve watched me teach yoga, seen me deep in the con—I know a few basic principles, and the rest I make up as I go.” She shrugged, but it wasn’t quite the nonchalant brush-off she was obviously going for. “I never learned how to learn. I just
do
things.”

Asprey wasn’t sure what came next. When he’d asked Poppy where she learned to fight, he’d expected a flippant reply about prison weight rooms, maybe a website address for a Jiu-Jitsu class somewhere in the Greater Seattle area. Not this. Not an intimate slice of her past.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle the truth. He just wasn’t prepared for it.

“Is this the point where you school me in the ways of the street?” Asprey asked, only partially kidding.

“It probably wouldn’t hurt you to have a few lessons,” she admitted, wiping some of the rain from her mouth and leaving a grin in its place. “You know, in case you need to take down a rogue woman in the middle of a necklace robbery.”

“Oh yeah?” Asprey was more amused than annoyed. He was man enough to admit that he preferred peace to combat. Graff and Winston were the fighters in the family, always grappling when they were younger, an assortment of black eyes between the two of them as they fought over things that mattered to no one but them. They could have that dubious honor all to themselves. Asprey had learned early on that it was just as effective to diffuse a tense situation with humor as it was with his fists. “What would you teach me?”

She cocked her head and studied him. Asprey did his best not to move or breathe or otherwise mar her appreciation of what she saw. The rain was doing wonders for her—her sports-bra top clung even tighter to her breasts, the outline of her nipples too taut and conspicuous to ignore. Even her yoga pants seemed to grip tighter, clinging to the curve of her hips as though they might slide off if they let go for a second.

Vanity compelled him to hope he stood up just as well to her scrutiny, though he doubted such a thing was possible.

“You have unnaturally long limbs,” she finally said.

That wasn’t exactly the approval he’d been going for. “Thank you?”

She laughed and dropped into a fighter’s stance, legs spread with one in front of the other and hands in fists at chin level. “That’s a good thing—it means you can use reach to your advantage. If you do it right, reach can be better than strength.”

“Are you saying I don’t have any strength?” he asked playfully, mimicking her movements.

“I saw you showing off at yoga today. Don’t worry. I’m appropriately in awe of your physique.”

“That’s better. Now what?”

“A sweep kick. You’ll like that one—it’s showy. Turn on your front foot so that you face your opponent, and then drop like this.” She twisted her body around and fell into a squat, bringing one hand down to stabilize her body, the other reaching under her right leg.

He knew Poppy was flexible—the yoga class had pretty much confirmed that suspicion and provided him with enough fuel to fantasize for a lifetime. But the way she bent and twisted now? She was practically a contortionist, all bendy and open limbs. Despite the rain, Asprey’s mouth went dry.

“Then put all your weight on your right leg, push the left one out and pivot.” She demonstrated the move, her leg sweeping a wide arc before she rose effortlessly to her feet again and bounced back into fighting stance. “See? It’s easy. Try it.”

He did, and, as promised, the move was fairly simple, though it felt a bit like break dancing. He wore his regular clothes, so he didn’t sweep nearly as fast as she did, and his hand slipped on the wet concrete once or twice, but it wasn’t all that different from a squatting yoga position, except that his goal was to maim.

“You’re a natural,” she said, watching him. He expected her to be smiling, but her face had taken on an intent look, and she licked her lips as he stretched his arms up, preparing to do it again.

He paused, lowering his arms with infinite slowness, sucking in a sharp breath when her eyes shot down to the line where stomach met the waistband of his jeans. He
knew
that look. He felt it down to his cock.

“We should do a defense technique too,” she said, her voice coming as if from the end of a long a tunnel. “So you can throw off your attacker long enough to flee.”

“That’s what you think of me?” Asprey asked, his own voice raspy and low. “My only hope of survival against you is to run away?”

In retrospect, Asprey should have been prepared for it. They stood, after all, just a few feet from each other in a rain-slicked pit that had probably seen its share of loose teeth and looser morals. But the strangely confiding atmosphere of the moment caught him off guard, and Poppy had his feet out from under him before he had a chance to do more than notice a blur of movement as she closed the gap between them.

He hit the ground with a thud, his back flat, his lungs sucked free of air. There was probably pain involved, but all he noticed was the sudden lack of everything. He lost focus and the ability to breathe, the sensation of both the cold and the wet. All that remained was a supremely freeing sense of nothing.

“See?” Poppy’s face appeared above him. Sensation came roaring back then, primarily because she straddled him, her hands pinning his arms to the ground, her thighs clamped on either side of his body. “You don’t have a chance of escape now.”

A small part of him—the proud, manful part—wanted to show her just how wrong she was. Even though he wasn’t a fighter by nature and she seemed trained to kill, he wasn’t weak. He’d been in this position enough times in his life to know that he could flip her expertly beneath him, take all the strength of her and reduce it to a feminine pliancy.

Not because he was a man and she was a woman, but because he began to suspect that her toughness was a kind of protection. Some women hid behind outrageous flirtation or a succession of crappy boyfriends. Others, like Tiffany, immersed themselves in an alternate universe made up of complex layers of code. Poppy’s cover seemed rooted in this strange, archaic place, where past battles had to do with a lot more than the outcome of a single fight.