Girl Gear 6: Indiscreet (3 page)

“Is this about your Delilah complex?”

“You’re not exactly Sampson,” she said softly. “Your hair isn’t a source of strength. It might put off more people than you know.”

Now he was getting irritated. “What people? The ones who are supposed to be considering me for work?”

Not that there were many of those—and there wouldn’t be until he decided what he wanted to do with his life. He had money to live on for the moment, thanks to a combination of reward and bounty money, and it seemed a waste of time and energy to take a job for the sake of saying he had one. He’d learned a lot about priorities during the last few years, and doing for himself mattered a lot more than trying to please all of the people all of the time.

Annabel nodded. “Them. My neighbors. Little children on the street. Elderly ladies with heart conditions. Puppies—”

“Yeah, yeah.” He shook back his hair, which suddenly seemed burdensome, if not a reminder of the savage life he’d known. “It’s not my hair that’s the problem.”

It wasn’t even the piercings or the tattoos. It was the expression in his eyes. And that he wasn’t sure he could change.

“Not completely, no. But you do look like a thug. And if you want to cater the New Year’s Eve showing at Devon’s gallery, I can’t have you looking like one.”

He sobered completely. “Cater? Me? Are you out of your mind?”

Annabel’s dark brows lifted. “Oh, that was another Patrick Coffey seducing me earlier with promises of grilled salmon and crème brûlée?”

“Seduction and catering are two completely different animals.” Catering meant putting his work out for those
other than family, appearing in public, behaving accordingly. People pointed out too often that his behavior mirrored the don’t-give-a-damn look in his eyes.

“It’s cooking, Patrick. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

“The serving? The presentation?” She was handing him a silver platter loaded with a legitimate reason for her to keep him around. And all he could think about was the exhaustion of maintaining a civilized veneer despite the rude stares and speculation.

His survival skills told him he’d be borrowing trouble should he accept. His protective instincts quickly took charge.

This wasn’t about him. This was about Annabel.

“I’ll handle the arrangements,” she was saying. “I have the menu already approved. All you’ll have to do is prepare the food.”

“And the back side of the deal?” The side he figured he would like even less than putting his passion out to be judged by strangers.

Annabel’s closed expression confirmed his suspicion. “After the showing on New Year’s Eve, we’ll say our goodbyes.”

Yeah, he’d had a pretty good idea that was going to be it, and it still sucked that she wasn’t wanting to keep him around.

Annabel was the only one with the guts to tell him about his potential. She never treated him as a pariah. Whether or not she truly believed in him didn’t matter. She’d given him reason to harbor a remnant of the same hope he’d held on to for three years.

He huffed. Maybe one savior per lifetime was all he deserved. And he sure didn’t want Annabel suffering Soledad’s fate.

Draining his bottle, he lazily pushed himself to his feet
and dug into his pocket for his knife. With Annabel looking on, he flipped open the blade. He stared at her for a long moment, looking for even a hint of apprehension, seeing nothing but a mild curiosity.

He wanted to damn her for being unflappable, but damned himself for letting her get to him instead.

As he raised the knife, the flame of a lighter on the street below caught his eye. His heart bolted; his blood raced. His muscles contracted, and he froze, watching the first bright glow of a cigarette catching fire. He couldn’t make out any of the smoker’s features—

“Patrick?”

—only dark clothing, dark hair. It could be Dega. It could be anyone, except the balcony seemed to be in the smoker’s direct line of sight. Another long draw and the cigarette fell to the ground. The smoker turned and walked away, swallowed immediately by the shadows.

“Patrick?”

If he hit the fire escape, he could be on the street in seconds. He could make sure. He would know—

“Patrick!”

Annabel grabbed his wrist. Adrenaline shot him in the heart; he flinched. It was a long, tense moment later before he was able to force enough of a smile to put the both of them at ease.

With a roll of her eyes, Annabel released his wrist and shoved him away. “I hate it when you do that.”

This time he knew what she was talking about: the way his feral instincts kicked in anytime he sensed danger. He glanced back down to the street, only to see that his hesitation had cost him what edge he might’ve had. Shit. A lot of protection he was going to be. Shaking his head, he turned away, slid his free fingers into his hair close to his scalp and pulled.

Only then did he use the blade.

He watched Annabel look on as the hunk of hair fell to the balcony floor. She watched as he sliced off another and another until he stood there with nothing but choppy tufts on his head. He returned the knife to his pocket. She returned her gaze to his face.

If asked, he would’ve denied the pleasure that rushed through him at seeing the encouragement in her eyes. When it reached her mouth, he couldn’t help but tighten his grip on that one last remnant of hope. Maybe, just maybe, he deserved to have survived.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, and when he inclined his head in answer, she turned on her heel and motioned for him to follow. “I’ll get the clippers from my makeup case. You get the broom.”

S
HE COULDN’T TEAR
her gaze away. She’d tried, truly she had. But he was entirely too compelling, making the task an impossibility when she’d thought herself impervious to his physical allure.

After she’d repaired the mess he’d made of his hair, they’d made love with the lights on. For the first time since he’d bought her at auction, she’d wanted to see his face while their bodies were joined. Until now, she’d imagined him as a fantasy, a mystery, a lover that came in the night when her defenses were down and her body an open book.

Their encounters were purely sexual, a disassociation from the rest of her life, an entertainment, recreation, an indulgence. Tonight that glass bubble had broken. He was real, a man, a beautiful male specimen of whom she couldn’t get her visual fill.

Her sheets were fine white Egyptian cotton, the headboard an extravagant Victorian piece in dark wood. Pat
rick lay sleeping in the center of the bed, an arm beneath his head in lieu of a pillow, the barest edge of a sheet draped over his groin.

Dark hair tufted in the pit of his raised arm, ran in a line from his navel down beneath the sheet. His chest was bare, his legs lightly covered, while the thatch that cushioned his sex grew thick. Yet the lack of hair on his head was what drew her attention.

She’d clipped him close so that no more than a dark fuzz remained. That darkness served to highlight the deep bronze glow of his skin. The silver hoop in his ear matched the one piercing his nipple, and both looked as if they were simply an extension of his skin.

It was his tattoo that caused her to shudder. Not the intricate tribal art ringing his biceps. That one she’d discovered beneath more than a few white dress shirts on other men. Never in her life, however, had she seen anything like Patrick’s snake.

The design was inked in multicolors: black, blue, red and green, with sharp highlights in yellow. The snake wound its way around his right thigh—she counted four coils—before arcing over his hipbone to end above the swell of his buttocks. With Patrick lying on his back, she had to visualize the fangs and the wicked, wicked eyes.

But even the remembered image was more than enough to cause her to shiver. She reached for the comforter, which had ended up on the floor earlier, and wrapped it around her shoulders. When she glanced again at Patrick, his eyes were open, even though he remained perfectly still.

“I hate the way you do that.” His uncanny ability to come awake on full alert made her crazy. She hated the idea of him watching her while she slept, when she was vulnerable….

“Watch out or you’ll give me a complex.”

“
Give
you a complex? What about the dozens you already have?”

She’d lost count of the number of times over the past seven weeks she’d tackled one or another, hoping she could offer him more than memories of great sex to take away from their time together. She hated how he seemed to ignore his amazing potential. Especially his ability to adapt and survive.

A slow, sleepy grin spread over his sinful mouth, though it never reached his eyes. Using no more than his abs, he lifted his upper body off the mattress while stacking pillows behind him. It was only when he finally leaned back that she remembered to breathe. God, but he was beautiful.

“Dozens, huh? Guess I’ve never counted.”

He was cocky and cute and too much of both. She’d determined that their time would be limited. She had even set the date for their end. None of that meant she couldn’t continue to dig into his psyche while she had him here—though, knowing Patrick, she easily imagined him walking out stark naked.

She considered him critically. “Why do you never stay and eat what you’ve cooked?”

The expression in his eyes gave nothing away, even as his smile seemed to freeze. “I always eat what I’ve cooked.”

“But you don’t eat with the people you’ve cooked for. This past year I’ve had dinner at Sydney and Ray’s at least once a month. As soon as the meal is served, you walk out of the room.”

“I’ve forgotten my table manners.”

He didn’t even flinch when he said it. He didn’t break eye contact, and he kept a totally straight face. Either he
was a hell of a liar or he truly believed that he was the savage beast he claimed to be. A part of her heart broke for him.

Another part wanted to slap him and tell him to get over himself already, that she was immune to his act. Except that would make her an even bigger liar than he.

Another few silent moments passed, moments she spent wondering what his three years of captivity had been like, if he’d had friends, if he’d had lovers, how many he’d had. If they’d appreciated his intensity in bed the way she did. If one of them had taught him the skills he so expertly plied.

Funny, the jealousy sparked by that thought. Not so funny that she recognized the full grip of the unhealthy emotion.

“And it seems you’ve forgotten that it’s impolite to stare,” he finally said, interrupting her fruitless musings.

When she realized she was doing exactly that, she forced herself to pull away. “Your facial bone structure fascinates me.”

“If that’s a come-on, it’s the lousiest one I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s not a come-on,” she said, even as her pulse quickened. “I was simply visualizing your skull’s interocular and bizygomatic breadth.”

He knew as well as she did that craniofacial anthropometry was the last thing on her mind. Yet she couldn’t find the strength to turn away when he whispered, “Show me.”

Letting the comforter fall, she moved toward him, enjoying the flare of his nostrils as he took in her nudity and her complete comfort in baring her body. She crawled up to straddle him, dislodging the sheet so that
she sat atop his thighs, settling over the softness of his scrotum, his penis tucked close to her sex.

She placed her hands on the smooth skin of his torso, sliding her palms upward until making contact with his jaw. Her fingers explored the structure of his face, moving from one point to another.

“This is the bizygomatic breadth,” she said, measuring from the most lateral point on one cheekbone’s zygomatic arch to the matching point on the other. “And this is the biocular width,” she added, moving her left hand to span the space between the far corners of his eyelids. “A forensic sculptor would use these measurements as well as others in reconstructing your face.”

She pressed her fingertips to each spot until Patrick closed his eyes and moaned from the pleasure of her touch. She wanted to moan, as well, because his cock had stirred against her belly, his shaft thickening and rubbing over her sex.

“I can see why you liked studying this stuff. Who knew the human skull could be such an erogenous zone?”

“Our study subjects didn’t feel a thing,” she countered. “They were dead, and quite unconcerned with eros.”

Patrick lay still for several moments more, allowing her to explore the fit of the skin on his face, the structure of his skull, until the room seemed to echo with their dueling heartbeats and their husky breathing.

She stopped the exploration of his jawline, her thumbs pressed to his cheekbones, as his erection began to firmly make its presence known there where her belly tingled. When he opened his eyes to catch her staring, she moved her hands to her thighs.

Strange, this nervousness making her uneasy. Yes, he
constantly surprised her, but she wasn’t used to being caught off guard. “It’s like you’re someone I don’t know. You look so different without all that hair.”

“A good different?”

“An effective different.”

“So consider me the variety spicing up your life.” He said it with a wiggle of both brows, which stood out against his perpetually bronzed skin.

That, he certainly had done, she admitted, moving her palms from her thighs to his abdomen, pressing lightly the taut muscles there. When he groaned, she felt the hum from her fingertips to her elbows.

Yet oddly enough, she wasn’t wanting sex as much as she wanted to explore his body. Considering that he was quite the randy young man, she wouldn’t be having her way completely, she mused without complaint. She had never known such intense satisfaction, and in reality would hate seeing him go.

But she had long since learned the importance of cutting free dead weight.

And behind those uncanny beautiful eyes and wickedly sparkling wit, she feared that was exactly what she would find instead of the artist’s soul her foolish heart insisted he hid. Better to die not knowing, than to know…and die a little more inside.

The older, wiser Annabel approached relationships anticipating their inevitable end. An end that was all too near for her and Patrick, giving her the freedom to enjoy his body without the guilt of self-betrayal.