Why?
“Fuck it,” I muttered. I was glad the train car was mostly empty and there was no one to hear the crazy guy talking to himself. “Now is not the time to play psychologist.”
It wasn’t. It was time to see what this Ania wanted. See what her play was, because that’s what it was sure to be. Some kind of play.
Right?
I walked into The Drake and glanced around the lobby in as casual a manner as I could. I didn’t see anyone I recognized. No one seemed interested in me, even if I was a little under-dressed for their regular clientele. Of course, maybe I fit right in. We live in a casual age now, where billionaires wear blue jeans and their heirs wear flip-flops.
The Latino at the front desk wore a name tag that read “Jorge.” He looked up at me with a practiced smile. “Welcome to The Drake, sir. How may I serve you today?”
“I’m Mr. Pierce,” I told him. “My wife checked in a little earlier.”
“Of course,” Jorge said, his voice betraying only a hint of his native accent. He tapped the keys of the computer to his right. “She is in room 1789, sir. The elevator is right over there.” He pointed.
I thanked him and made my way through the lobby to the elevator. Another scan of the area came up with the same results. Nothing suspicious. No one seemed interested in me.
I stepped into the elevator and pushed the number seventeen.
Every meet has a feel to it. A vibe. It doesn’t matter if it’s on the dark side of the law or if it happens in a corporate board room. There’s always a character to each meeting, a tone. I didn’t feel like I was being set up here. At least not for something bad to happen to me at this meeting. I had no clue what Ania wanted, but I didn’t think it was to hurt me.
But could Jerzy have sent her? Did he want to eliminate me? Hell, would Ania even be the one to answer the door?
Only one way to find out.
I got off the elevator, headed down the hall and stopped at room 1789. The numbers on the door were ornate and stylish. The hotel spared no expense. Was this someplace a guy like Jerzy would set someone up to be killed? Somehow, I doubted it.
I stood to the side of the door, anyway. No sense in abandoning caution entirely. I gave the door three solid raps with my knuckles. My right hand closed around the grip of my pistol.
A few seconds later, the door swung open. Ania’s head poked out. When she saw me, her features lit up. “Good! You came.”
I released my hold on the gun.
“Come in,” she said, pulling the door the rest of the way open.
I walked past her into the hotel room. As I brushed close to her, I could smell perfume. It was light and airy but had a musky hint to it, like walking in the forest on a bright day where you could smell the earth beneath you.
She closed the door, then stood leaning against it. She took a deep breath and let it out. I stared at her, waiting. My entire body zinged with electricity, almost as if there had been a chemical reaction when I walked into the room with her.
Jesus, what was going on?
“I’m glad you came,” she said.
“So am I.”
“It’s asking a lot.”
“Not a lot,” I said. “It’s a short train ride, that’s all.”
She smiled, and looked away for a second. When she looked back, her eyes had an intensity to them that reached out and grabbed me in the chest. “No,” she whispered. “It’s more than that. And we both know it.”
I had no answer to that.
Ania pushed away from the door slowly. She walked toward me. No, flowed toward me is a better way to put it. Her eyes, those ice blue daggers, remained locked on mine with fiery intensity. She didn’t stop when she reached a comfortable talking distance. Instead, she slipped inside that range and kept going. Right up to me. She wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled me to her. Her body pressed against me as her lips reached for mine.
I kissed her. It was the most natural thing I’ve ever done and the most powerful. The passion that blasted out to every corner of my body wasn’t like anything I’d ever felt before. Those previous times were pale shadows.
She was the sun.
She was -
Fuck!
I broke away and pulled out of her embrace. Her expression was full of surprise and hurt. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. My heart was pounding. My body was alive and aching for her. “It’s all just…sudden.”
“Sudden?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I shook my head, trying to clear my mind.
“Sudden,” she repeated to herself, looking away. She shrugged. “Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe I made a mistake.”
I wanted to scream that she hadn’t made any mistakes, that everything was very right, but I forced myself not to answer.
She looked up at me. Now her pale blue eyes were rimmed with sadness. “I guess what I felt at the church, and at the bar, I guess that was just me. I thought there was some kind of connection between us. Something different, something I couldn’t quite explain, but…” she trailed off. Her eyes watered, but she looked away before any tears fell. “Maybe I was wrong.”
I stood in the entry way of that hotel room, my nerves jangled, my heart pounding, my cock raging and my voice stuck in my throat. All my life, I’d hoped for what she described. That magical connection. Didn’t everyone dream of that? Even those of us who refused to admit it? How else do all those romance books sell, if not to feed into that basic human desire?
And here it was. A beautiful, mysterious woman that I felt that immediate connection with. And she was standing in front of me, professing to feel that same connection. Was she lying?
No. Every fiber of my being told me she was sincere. All my street smarts and cop smarts told me the same thing. She was for real. And if I pushed this away because I didn’t have the guts to trust it, I’d spend the rest of my life regretting it.
I reached out and slid my hand along her cheek, resting it at the back of her neck. She needed no more encouragement than that. Her lips found mine again, kissing me without reservation. I felt heat from every direction and I poured that heat into her.
It was an hour later before we spoke another word. In the interim, only the moans and cries of pleasure and then the silence of satisfaction afterward filled the room. My clothes lay strewn across the pathway to the bedroom. She gave no reaction to the thudding sound my gun made when I dropped it to the carpeting at the side of the bed. Her eyes were alight with hunger and she’d pulled me onto her.
Lying beside her now, I listened to her breathing. The smell of her perfume, our sweat and sex, drifted in the air. She was tucked in next to me, her head on my chest, my arm draped over her. I felt like I could lay there forever.
“I wanted this,” she finally whispered, stroking the finger of my hand where it hung near her breast. “From that first moment I saw you in the church, I wanted this to happen.”
“Me, too,” I said softly.
“Is that horrible?” she asked. “To want something like this so badly at a time like that?”
“No. It is what it is. We’re human.”
“Some of us are,” she said. “Others, I don’t know.”
I felt my chest tighten a little. “You’re talking about-”
Her hand covered my mouth. “Don’t say his name. Not here.”
I waited until she removed her hand. Then I said, “But you’re with him. Why?”
She didn’t answer me for a long time. Her breathing was even and steady. I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep.
“I was afraid,” she finally said.
That didn’t make sense to me. “Afraid of what?”
“I see a lot of things in that bar. People meeting people, you know? The kind of people who didn’t want to be seen with the people they were meeting. And I heard things. Dangerous things.”
“So quit. The money can’t be that good.”