had I been in Liam’s room: bedding and pillows, as well as enough paper
products, plastic utensils, kitchen items, and basic hygiene products to last
me days. The list goes on, with a hair dryer, hotel slippers, and a robe, and
my kitchen is stocked with canned sodas and a coffee pot with supplies,
including cups. I am truly doubting my decision to stay here rather than go
to his room, and not just because he’s likely spent a pretty penny on me.
Because I am surely the talk of the hotel now and Liam is exposed by his
connection to me.
Dragging a hand through his thick, dark hair, looking tired but
incredibly sexy, Liam walks back into the room. “The pizza smells good.”
“Yes,” I agree, but my mind is elsewhere and I hold my hands out to
indicate the apartment. “Liam, this, all of this you did, is too much.”
“It isn’t even close to too much.”
“It had to have cost you a small fortune.”
“I have a fortune, Amy.” And he sounds almost…bitter? About being
rich? He grabs the pizza boxes that are stacked with a couple of sodas and
plasticware, and motions to the bedroom.
“Let’s go eat on the bed.”
Dinner in bed with the sexiest man I’ve ever known. I don’t have it in
me to complain.
“Yes. Okay, but thank you for everything. Thank you so very much.”
“It’s not your thanks I want.”
“Then what do you want?” And I don’t know why, but I hold my
breath, waiting for his answer.
He tilts his head and studies me a moment. “For you to share dinner
in bed with me.”
I let the air trickle from my lips. It is the perfect answer, even if I
sense it wasn’t what he really wanted to say. “I’d like that.”
I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and quickly change into some
shorts I purchased when I bought my t-shirt, and while doing so, I begin to
worry dinner is an opening for Liam to drill me with questions. But I don’t
let myself linger in the bathroom, where I’m dodging the mirror. I won’t like
what I see in it.
Reassuring myself that I’m good at dodging what I don’t want known,
I join Liam on the bed. With my legs curled to my side, and the pizza boxes
on the mattress between us, I dig into a slice of pizza with a hunger, not for
food, but for something no one can take from me. My love of cheese pizza
is like every little personal part of me that no name or location change can
strip away.
“Why don’t I tell you about your neighborhood?” Liam suggests,
dusting off his hands, after digging into his food with a heartiness that
beats mine by double.
“You know it well enough to tell me about it?”
“Actually, yes. I consulted on a building project not far from here a
few years back. I stayed across the street for a month. When you come out
of the building, go right a block and then left, and there are two coffee
shops and several restaurants. If you go left instead of right when you exit,
two blocks down in a straight line is a mall. There’s a Whole Foods to the
right of the mall and another grocery store to the left. You have everything
from doctors to hair salons all in a small radius. A lot like New York. Which
is good, since the city as a whole is not. Most people have cars, and I
assume you don’t have one of those being delivered tomorrow.”
My heart sinks at what I haven’t considered, and I fight the urge to
set down my half-eaten second slice of pizza, afraid I will give away how
rattled I am. Instead, I pause on a bite and say, “No. No car,” before
chomping down on more than my food. I now have one more thing I
haven’t thought about and will have to face tomorrow.
“You do have your personal belongings being delivered, right?”
On that question, I abandon eating, setting down my slice and
reaching for my soda, effectively avoiding eye contact with Liam. “Yes. I’ll
have my things tomorrow.” It’s not a lie, I tell myself. Whatever I buy will be
here.
He shuts the lid to his pizza box and I set down my drink and do the
same with mine. I’m not hungry. That’s the thing about lies or almost lies.
They make everything else harder to swallow along with them. I wonder if
that is why he ignored the second half of his pizza. He can’t swallow it with
my lies either. And now he’s just staring at me. He’s good at that, I’ve
discovered, really darn good at fixing me in his bright blue stare and
seeming to see right through to my soul. I almost think his silence is as
dangerous as his questions. He’s analytical, a smart, calculated thinker. I
see it in his eyes, and his job and his success backs up my assessment. I
have to get him to stop trying to piece together my story.
I scoot to the headboard, pull my knees to my chest, and work for
diversion. “You don’t seem like a recluse.”
“Subject of your belongings diverted,” he comments. “Check. That’s
one of the ‘when you’re ready’ topics.” Blood rushes to my cheeks but he
doesn’t give me time to reply, continuing, “I learned privacy from Alex, who
was my mentor. He lost his wife and child in a car accident a year before I
met him.”
“Oh God. How old was the child?”
He moves the pizza boxes to the floor and then sits against the
headboard beside me, and we both turn to rest on one shoulder to face
each other. “I never saw a picture. Looking back, I think seeing her hurt too
much.”
And I wish for a picture every day of those I’ve lost, and it terrifies me
that I can no longer remember their faces. It terrifies me that Liam is so
near, so able to read what I feel. It terrifies me that he won’t be tomorrow.
“To lose a child must be the worst kind of pain.”
His lips draw into a grim line. “I’m told it changed him, though I have
no comparison. I didn’t know him before he lost them. He didn’t talk about
them and he didn’t do press or make public appearances. When I began
getting my prodigy architect buzz, he told me the hype could go to my head
and ruin me, thus forbidding me any press as well. I deviated from his
no-press policy one time, and one time only, when he was still alive. It was
a hard lesson I’ve never forgotten. My ego and desire to share my success
with the world was at Alex’s expense. His personal story ended up in the
papers. He went crazy on me and then crumbled like I didn’t think he could
crumble. That day changed me forever. I forgot about my ego and to this
day I rarely grant interviews and I rarely do appearances.”
A little part of me softens for Liam, and I don’t know what overcomes
me. I reach up and touch his jaw. “Now I know why you’re so tight-lipped
about your accomplishments.”
He grabs my hand and I am somehow more complete because he’s
touching me. “I keep my private life private and I let my work speak for me
elsewhere.”
I want to tell him how much I envy his confidence and sense of
identity that he doesn’t appear to need anyone else to validate. But if I do,
he’ll ask me about who I
am and who I want to be and even if I could freely
talk, I couldn’t tell him what I no longer know. “That still doesn’t spell
recluse to me.”
“That started a couple of years ago when a particular reporter
hounded me about an interview. When I wouldn’t give it, she wrote a
scathing piece about me.”
His thumb begins stroking my palm and heat is radiating up my arm
and seems to have set my vocal cords on fire. “Scathing?” I choke out.
“It read pretty much like ‘he’s rich, talented, and good-looking, but
the man is a recluse with the social skills of an ant.”
I gape. “An ant? No, she didn’t?”
“I assure you, she did.”
My lips curve and I fight my laughter, and lose. He leans in and
brushes his lips over mine. “You think that’s funny, huh?”
I curl my hand on his jaw and I am charmed at how easily he shares
his story, how wonderful it is to talk to someone, to touch someone. To
touch him. “I don’t mean to laugh.”
“It just happened.”
I nod. “Yes, but not at you. That description is so over the top it’s
comical. And it’s not you.”
“Not me,” he repeats, his hand sliding to my hip. “Are you sure about
that?”
I’ve spent my whole adult life reading people, sizing them up,
weighing them by degree of potential threat, and I’ve trusted him from the
moment I first found myself captured by his presence in the terminal.
“Yes,” I confirm without hesitation. “Yes. I’m sure.” The air shifts around us,
crackling with electricity, and I am empowered by how comfortable I feel
with him despite my situation and the disparity of my experience to his.
“You are rich, talented, and good-looking, but I forgive you all of those
things because you’re charming and funny.”
His eyes shadow, turbulence waving through the heat. “You were
right earlier,” he says, and he pulls me close, molding our bodies together,
his hands spread wide on my back.
My hand lands on the hard wall of his chest and his heart thunders
beneath my palm, telling me he is calm and cool on the outside, but I’ve hit
a nerve and I don’t know why. “Right about what?”
“When you said that I let you see—but Amy, I see more than you
want me to see.”
But not more than I wish he could see. “Then stop trying.”
“That’s not going to happen.” He brushes his lips over mine, his
tongue licking into my mouth in a slow, seductive caress. “We’ve already
gone too far to turn back.”
My hand is on his cheek, my legs intimately entwined with his,
neither of which I remember doing. “Yes,” I whisper. “We’ve gone too far,
Liam.”
“And yet not far enough,” he replies, stroking the hair from my eyes,
his voice rough sandpaper and masculine heat.
The intensity of what I feel in this moment and for this man hits me
like an earthquake exploding from somewhere deep inside, a deep, dark
crevice of my soul. My emotions are all over the place. I do not know where
this man is taking me, and I am as desperate to find out as I am to stop him.
The need to run and hide or stay and fight is equally intense. He must read
this in me because he softly orders, “Turn out the light, Amy.”
Turn out the light. I do not question his command. I act on my need
for self-preservation, and I turn over and flip out the lamp on the
nightstand, relieved at the sanctuary that is the darkness. Even more so in
the sanctuary that is Liam’s arms as he pulls my back against his chest, his
hand splaying possessively on my stomach. My lashes lower and I relax into
him. I do not know how this man is both the refuge I run to and the reality I
am running from, but in this moment that is exactly what he is to me.
His hot breath fans my neck and his lips brush my ear, the delicate
touch sending a shiver down my spine. I expect him to kiss me again. To
touch me and to fuck me, as he’s vowed. I want him. I even need him
tonight and I inhale, savoring the now-familiar spicy male scent of him, and
this time there is no memory splintering through my mind. There is just the
darkness I hide inside, the soft bed, and the hard man holding me.
***
I blink into the light and don’t move, trying to process where I am
and what is happening.
An unfamiliar closet door becomes the first focal point I manage to
identify and my brain processes where I am. New apartment. Denver. Liam.
I jerk to a sitting position, searching the room to find he is nowhere to be
seen. My heart twists in several painful knots. He’s gone. I glance at the
digital bedside clock the hotel brought me last night and note the time of
eleven o’clock. Of course he’s gone. I was one of his many flings and he has
work to do. How have I slept this late? How did I sleep at all in my state of
mind, and without any nightmares?
I’ll keep Godzilla at bay, Liam had said on the plane . It had been the
truth. He had.
Somehow, some way, this stranger had given me enough peace to
get through the night. And while I should be freaked out that I didn’t hear
him leave, I’m pretty sure my mind used Liam as we had used each other
for sex. For an escape. He had given me something else to focus on instead
of my situation, and clearly allowed me to shut down mentally and hold
myself together.
Liam had been an unexpected gift. Who was gone.
Standing up, I ignore the gut-wrenching feeling of being alone. I’ve
done this for years.
There’s no reason I can’t do it now. Besides, I was never alone or my
handler wouldn’t have known when I was in trouble, but where the idea of
his existence has comforted me in the past, it doesn’t work this time. I can’t
go through this again. I have to have an exit strategy of my own.
One that gets me off everyone’s radar, including my handler.
I walk to the living room to assess the rest of the apartment in the
daylight and my breath hitches as I spot a package sitting on the kitchen
table with a note. I reach for the wall to steady myself, an icy chill sliding
through me at what this means. My handler has a key to the apartment.
Chapter Eight
The air feels thicker, my breathing more labored, and I barely
remember walking to the table. I am simply there, staring down at what has
been left for me. The box is white with an Apple logo on the top, and this
does not seem like good news to me. Is the new phone I received last night,
and haven’t used, already compromised in some way? Am I moving again?
Is this location unsafe? My adrenaline spikes and I grab the small white
envelope and pull the card from inside out.
Amy -
It’s not safe to be without a phone. This is yours to keep and the
service is paid for a full year. And don’t say “no” when I’m not there to
argue the many reasons you have to say “yes”.
Think about your safety and convenience. Besides, I selfishly do not
want to wait to hear your voice until I see you again. My number is
programmed in the pho
ne. Text me when you get this and I’ll call you at a
break from my meeting.
Liam
A sense of relief washes through me and I become aware of my free
hand balled at my chest, where my heart is beating like a drum. I inhale and
will it to slow. I’m okay. Everything is okay. The note isn’t from my handler.
I am not leaving another city. I am not running. I am only hiding. Or maybe I
am running. I don’t know how to define what I am or what I do anymore,
and suddenly I am exhausted when I’ve only just woken up.
I sit down and touch Liam’s signature, blocking out everything else.
He didn’t walk out the door today without saying goodbye. He doesn’t
intend to say goodbye at all. I’m blown away that he took the time before
heading to his meeting to go out and buy me a phone. No one has done
anything like this for me since I was still living at home. Home. The word,
the place, the past, crashes over me. Sometimes I dream of throwing away
fear and returning. Sometimes I think that facing the danger rather than
running from it is my better option. But how do you face what you do not
fully know?
My gaze falls on Liam’s neat, masculine script and my lashes lower.
For a few moments, I let myself indulge in the memories of Liam’s velvety,
warm kisses and sensual caresses. I remember the “pi” tattoo and the
numbers that formed a triangle that disappeared deliciously below his belt
line. I remember his husky voice when he’d said, “Baby, you can examine it,
lick it, do whatever you want to do to it and me, after I feed you. I promised.
I meant it.” A shiver of pure desire tracks down my spine, but my eyes land
on the envelope with my lease inside and it’s like a knife has cut open the
sultry veil of fantasy I’m hiding beneath. My handler wasn’t here today, but
he could have a key. I wonder if he’d had a key to my first place in New
York. I shiver again, and this time it is not with desire. I am creeped out in a
big way, and I’m having my locks changed.
I shake myself and stand up, setting the note from Liam back on the
table, uncomfortably aware of my circumstances. Liam is a distraction and a
problem I cannot afford. No matter how much I might want to see him
again, I cannot. I won’t. Sleeping through the sound of a feather dropping