Page 24
THANE
Gray light pushes through the reinforced windows and I lie still, counting the seconds between her breaths.
She's on her side facing me, dark hair spilling across the white pillow in loose waves. One hand is tucked beneath her chin, the other resting on the mattress between us with her fingers curled loosely around the edge of the sheet. Her lips are parted, swollen from my mouth, and the slow rhythm of her breathing fills the safehouse with the only sound I want to hear for the rest of my life.
My hands ache to touch her. Instead I watch the way I've watched a thousand targets in a thousand rooms, cataloging every detail with the precision that has kept me alive for two decades. The rise and fall of her chest. The flutter of her lashes against her cheeks. The small, sleepy sigh she gives every few minutes that wraps around my cock and squeezes.
I watched those people to learn how to end them. Her, I watch because I can't stop.
The sheet has slipped to the curve of her waist, exposing the smooth line of her shoulder and the swell of her breast. Goosebumps prickle across her pale skin from the cool air and my fingers twitch against the mattress. Not yet. Not when the sight of her peaceful and bare in my bed is rewriting every cold truth I've accepted about my life for twenty goddamn years.
My gaze traces the slope of her shoulder, down the dip of her waist, across the flare of her hip beneath the cotton. Back up the length of her spine to the delicate curve at the base of her neck where a strand of dark hair clings to her skin. A small bruise blooms on her collarbone from where my mouth spent too long last night. Faint pink marks stripe her hips from my fingers. Evidence of my touch mapped across her body in colors that will fade by tomorrow.
Every single one, I want to put back.
My hand lifts from the mattress and hovers above the dip of her waist. Close enough to register the warmth rising off her skin. Slowly, I lower my fingers and trace the curve from her ribcage to her hip with a touch so light it barely qualifies as contact. She shifts, a soft murmur escaping her lips, and the sound goes straight to my groin.
She doesn't wake.
My palm flattens against the smooth plane of her stomach and my fingers spread wide. Warm skin under callused hands. The contrast guts me. These hands have taken lives across three continents. These same hands are resting on the belly of a woman I want to fill with my child.
The thought hits hard and digs in deep.
Her round with my child. My palm against the swell of her belly. Proof that I built something instead of only destroying. Twenty years of contract work, empty apartments, untouched bank accounts and a brother I cut from my life to keep the poison from spreading. Every second of that cold existence means nothing next to this woman breathing softly in my bed.
I want mornings like this. Her heartbeat against my chest. Her warmth anchoring me to a life I stopped believing I deserved.
Ryth figured it out. My brother found people willing to love him despite the violence threaded through our blood. He built a home and brought life into the world. I told myself I was too far gone for any of that. I’ve put too many bodies in the ground.
Then a green-eyed girl in a red dress sat down three stools away from me in a bar and blew my entire existence apart with the scent of vanilla and warm apples.
She stirs again, her brow creasing, her fingers curling against the pillow. A small sound escapes her lips, not quite a word, and I pull my hand back from her stomach.
The loss of contact is immediate, sharp, wrong.
Her eyes stay closed but her hand reaches across the mattress, searching. Her fingers find my wrist, wrap around it with a grip that surprises me from a woman still half asleep, and she pulls my hand back to her hip. She settles against me with a sigh, her breathing deepening, steadying, and my palm rests on the warm curve of her body like it belongs there.
My jaw tightens. My throat works around a swallow that takes too long.
She trusts me. In sleep, when every defense drops and the subconscious takes over and the body responds to what the mind won't admit in daylight, she reaches for me. She places my hands on her body and lets the weight of them pull her back to sleep.
Neve Castellano trusts the man hired to kill her. She doesn't know it, and the weight of that truth sits on my soul heavier than a loaded gun pointed at my heart.
I press my mouth to her bare shoulder and close my eyes. The taste of her skin mixes with vanilla and warmth and something uniquely her that I will carry in my lungs until the day I'm in the ground. The contract sits on my encrypted phone in the other room, a digital death sentence with her name, her photograph, and a price that would make most men pull the trigger without a second glance.
She asked me what I do for a living last night. I answered her with my body because the truth would have sent her running into streets full of people looking to collect ten point five million for her corpse.
For now, I keep my hand on her hip and my mouth against her shoulder and I breathe her in until the gray light shifts to pale gold. Until the safehouse feels, for one impossible hour, almost like a home.
Neve
Ifind a dusting of flour at the bottom of my bag and almost cry.
My fingers brush against the grainy residue coating the inside pocket while I'm digging for my phone charger. I pull my hand free and stare at the white dust clinging to my fingertips. The smell hits a second later. Flour, butter, the ghost of cinnamon and brown sugar baked into the fabric from a thousand early mornings hauling bags and rolling dough.
My bakery. My ovens. My life. Everything my stepmother has touched is in ruins.
My throat tightens and I press my fingers to my nose, pulling the scent deep. For three full seconds the safehouse disappears and I'm standing behind my counter with coffee brewing and the timer ticking down on the first tray of apple tarts.
