UndercoverSurrender (13 page)

“Let’s just get some sleep, Samantha.”

“Don’t you want to know what the response that came back
said?”

“Why? Could you even tell what it said? Was that one in
English?”

“No, but I used an online translator.”

“What a smarty-pants. Have you ever given any thought to
actually learning another language or do you just think everyone should speak
English?”

“I speak another language! I speak French!”

“Another language of a country that doesn’t have five-star
restaurants, I mean.”

She shook her head and the sight of her next to the bed
reminded him of what they’d shared together the night before. He groaned. If
she wasn’t going to fuck him, couldn’t she at least shut up?

“Look,” she persisted, “it said something about bugs. No
that wasn’t it. A bug. A termite. And exterminators.”

“Your online translator probably just fucked up the
translation.”

“Well, we’ll never know since you broke my laptop. Unless of
course we go to the main computer in the wheelhouse. Can you read Taiwanese?”

“Yes. But I’m not going to.”

If Santiago sent out a message, that must mean they were
close. And he had yet to figure out what to do with his lovely
sometimes-bedmate-and-all-around-general-aggravation. He was half surprised a
rescue team hadn’t shown up for her already. Maybe Chaps had held off her old
man. Or maybe Crenshaw had intervened. But even Crenshaw probably didn’t have
enough muscle to hold off Damien or Michael Reynolds.

He thought of Samantha’s aborted email.
Am being held
prisoner…
He should be more sympathetic to her than he had been today. She
was
being held prisoner, and why shouldn’t she try to free herself? God knew he
would. She couldn’t know he didn’t want her to get out a message because he
knew her father and brother were undoubtedly already planning her rescue.
Besides, he couldn’t risk having Santiago or one of the others catch her trying
to contact the outside.

“I don’t want to go topside right now, Samantha. I don’t
know what Santiago pounding on the door means, but I don’t like it. We stay in
here for the whole night. Now come to bed.”

She pursed her lips, but then seemed to accept his verdict.
She went to the bureau and extracted a pair of what were apparently her normal
pajamas, like the kind she’d had on when he found her in the locker, and put
them on in the bathroom after a lightning-quick shower. The pajamas were short
shorts and a camisole. He’d half expected the nighttime equivalent of her
buttoned-up sundress or at the very least a reappearance of the knee-length
shorts.

He wasn’t sure she was so wise to let down her guard.

He was one of the good guys, he reminded himself.

But still…

All clean and soft and in her scanty clothes, she slid into
bed beside him, even turning toward him after switching off the light,
pillowing her cheek on her hands. “I think I might like cooking,” she said
after a while.

“Oh yeah?” he muttered, on his back, staring at the ceiling.

“Yeah. I think I might even be a good cook.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

She laughed and swatted at him and he caught her hand midair
as she leaned slightly toward him.

The feeling was electric, for him at least. And maybe for
her as well as she didn’t pull away.

“What did I tell you about treating me like I don’t have a
cock?” he finally whispered, not relinquishing her hand.

She took a deep breath. “Believe me, I’m well aware of the
fact that you have a, ah…”

He brought her hand to his lips, kissing her palm, just the
palm, a half a foot of space still between them on the bed, and yet he was hard
as rock.

“A cock,” he finished for her.

“Mmm,” she said noncommittally as he brought her hand down
slowly, ever so slowly to the evidence of it. He wrapped her fingers around the
throbbing length of it, through the shorts.

“See, Samantha, my body’s doing that thing where it prepares
for sex. What do you say? You want to feel powerful again tonight?”

When she hesitated he rolled over on top of her, noting with
a surge of satisfaction that she didn’t fight it. He stretched her arms up over
her head. “Or maybe you want to feel what it’s like when
I
feel
powerful? I promise you’ll like that too.”

He bent to kiss her neck.

“I said it was a one-time thing,” she murmured.

“That’s what you said.” He made it to her ear and bit one
lobe. “Did you mean it? Because I kind of got the feeling from last night that
you don’t have all that much experience with sex. Even though you’re all hot
and part of the jet set and everything.” He dug his hips into the cradle of her
sex, the jolt of it a bit more electrifying than kissing her palm, he had to
admit. “I don’t know the kind of guys you dated in the past, but I think maybe
you could use a lesson or two.”

She groaned as he dropped a kiss on her lips. Then she said
in a rush, “My father said they were more interested in my money than anything
else.”

He kissed one of the ribbonlike straps of her camisole, then
farther down to the soft white skin peeking out from her neckline. “Now those
guys must
not
have had a cock if they weren’t interested in this
gorgeous body.”

She declined to comment, but she still wasn’t stopping him.
“So did these fucking crazy wimps go down on you much?” he whispered.

“Ah, no. Not much.” Her voice sounded strangled as he kissed
his way down to the waistband of her short shorts. “Actually, no, they never…”

“No? So why this beautiful bare pussy?”

He tugged the shorts down, along with her panties, ‘til they
were bunched up at her thighs. And then he blew on her exposed clit. She sucked
in a breath.

“Because of my, ah, my bikini line.”

“Oh, you so were not getting your money out of your wax job,
baby, if nobody was kissing this sweet, soft, pussy.”

Her fingers gripped his hair as he delicately licked one
soft, pink petal and she groaned.

He brought her to orgasm, tasting how sweet she was, and
then slid up her body. His cock was pounding and he cursed himself for not
locating the condoms before he climbed into bed. But truth be told, he hadn’t
really expected to be able to seduce her so easily. What they had between them,
though, whatever it was, was powerful and it seemed neither of them could
resist it.

Or maybe he was deluding himself and she was just a rich
girl eager for a good fuck. She was panting beneath him now, her legs still
slightly opened. He turned impatiently to the nightstand, feeling around for
the few condoms left, and upon locating them, ripped one open and put it on.
Rather than mounting her, though, first he flipped her over and then quickly
pulled her to her knees. She looked back at him in surprise, but he didn’t keep
her in suspense very long, slipping inside her from behind.

Oh, he could go so deep this way. He tugged her closer. So
very deep.

It was hours later before they had had enough of each other
and fell into an exhausted sleep.

The agency training had come naturally to him. After
years of living on the streets of Singapore, there wasn’t a dirty trick he
wouldn’t employ in a fight or a deception he couldn’t perpetrate with absolute
sincerity if need be. Crenshaw had plucked him from his petty life of crime to
offer him what turned out to be the perfect career fit for him. His facility
with languages—not just the English he had somehow known, but the half a dozen
other languages he had picked up from his foster mother or tourists or just
somehow—was an added bonus. The only sticking point seemed to be his origins.
Interpol was inordinately interested in where he’d come from, and since he
didn’t know himself, he couldn’t help them out on that score.

Crenshaw in particular seemed obsessed with it. Even
after they had become friends of a sort, the aristocratic Brit continued to
grill Vik on it, as if there was something he just needed to remember or
realize. It was wasted effort as far as Vik was concerned. All he knew was that
he was raised by Nirwasha, who spoke to him in Tamil and Mandarin Chinese,
depending on her mood, and sometimes English. He knew she was not his real
mother—for one thing, she was of Indian origin and he did not seem to be—but
she loved him and she protected him, and she had always told him that when her
husband was taken from her, he sent Vik to comfort her, a little boy, barely
walking, who did not know where he came from. Then when Nirwasha died, he was
left with nothing, with no one, until Crenshaw took an interest in a petty
thief who had divested him of his wallet and pushed a purpose on him.

It was really gratitude to Crenshaw that made Vik submit
to the DNA test when the older man urged it on him. He didn’t see what good it
would really do, but Crenshaw intimated that Interpol had access to DNA records
of a wide swath of people—something they probably weren’t entitled to
maintain—and they might tell him who he was.

He knew who he was. Vikram Pillay, foster son of Nirwasha
Pillay. What more did he need to know? Certainly not that it turned out he was
the biological son of somebody named Victor Haverford, sixth earl of something
or other. When Crenshaw relayed this to him, Vik actually laughed. “I don’t
believe it.”

“Yes, yes, that’s it!” The old man was as excited as he
had ever seen him. “That’s why you seemed so familiar to me when I first saw
you on the street. I was at school with Victor’s father. You’re the spitting
image of him!”

Vik took the old man’s word for it. He wanted nothing to
do with any supposed grandmother still alive or long-dead father. The explanation
Crenshaw had pieced together didn’t interest him either. Something about a
diplomatic mission to Singapore gone wrong when this Victor was killed and his
tiny son disappeared. The only thing he was interested in was making sure
Nirwasha’s memory wasn’t tarnished. “She had nothing to do with anything like
that. She couldn’t have.”

“I’m not suggesting anything of the sort, my boy. She
undoubtedly did find you, just as she said. But why she didn’t take you to the
British Embassy—”

“Enough. I’ve taken your damn test. I’m done with it.”

“But your grandmother—”

“Not another word, Crenshaw. I mean it.”

Vik jerked awake and this time it wasn’t because Samantha
was draped all over him. In fact, she was curled up into a little ball, facing
away from him and sleeping peacefully. He concentrated, trying to discern what
he’d heard. And there it was again. A slight footfall in the passageway outside
the room. If that was Santiago or one of the others, they were being too quiet
about it to signal any good intentions. He sat up quietly and padded to the
door as lightly as he could. When he put his ear to it, he couldn’t hear a
thing. Maybe he had imagined it. Samantha stirred a bit, drawing his attention
back to her, and it was then that he heard it. Just a few whispered words, but
in Czechoslovakian, a language none of the crew spoke. He doubted any SEALs
come to rescue Samantha did either, at least with no accent.

“
In there,”
was all whoever it was had said, but Vik
didn’t exactly feel like making their acquaintance under the circumstances. The
door was locked, but wouldn’t hold against an automatic weapon. Making as
little noise as he could manage, he went to Samantha’s side, cupping his hand
over her mouth and picking her up out of bed. She came awake just as they got to
the bathroom, struggling at first, ’til he pulled her close, slipping her legs
to the floor and whispering in her ear as he closed the bathroom door quietly,
“There’s someone out there, coming in to kill us. You have to hide down here.”
He opened the cabinet beneath the sink, which was just big enough for her to
squeeze into, and tried to urge her down. Just as she was resisting, the first
round of bullets flew through the door connecting the suite to the hallway. He
shoved her down and in, closing the cabinet swiftly, and then turned the shower
on, all the way to the hot end, leaving the shower door open. He could just see
the steam rising as they kicked in the bathroom door and he dove out of the
way.

Samantha was absolutely terrified. More terrified than she’d
ever been in her entire life—which was really saying something given what she’d
been through in the last forty-eight hours. Burying her head in her hands, she
heard a mixture of noises that blended together to let her hear everything and
yet give her absolutely no clue as to what was going on. Thuds and kicks and
volleys of shots played out against the background of the pounding of the
shower as she crouched in her hiding place. This was sickeningly reminiscent of
being shoved into the locker by her father. Was she forever just hidden away
while others tried to spare her from whatever fate awaited her?

She wished she could shape her fate for once and not hide
like a coward where some man had pushed her.

And yet she found she could not move. Literally could not
move. It could have been an hour or a minute. It felt the same to her. Then the
noise of the shower disappeared and a guttural staccato of what sounded like
commands replaced it.

Oh my God
.

A separate voice in what sounded like the same language
responded. The shot that came next felt like the end of her own life.
Oh my
God
. Vik was dead and she was left to whoever had burst into the room, soon
to be dead herself.

Unless they were her rescuers…but the language…

The cabinet door opened and gentle hands urged her arms to
loosen from where they had been protecting her head in a futile gesture.

“You can come out. They’re dead.” His whispered words were
in English and she opened her eyes to see the deep-green eyes she’d come to
know.