“Ah, I see.”
He turned to a page in the middle of the book. “Here’s a rule you might be interested in. It refers to pressure points.” He read the text in perfect French, an experience I found insanely erotic.
“Um…”
“In the corresponding illustration”-he pointed to the facing page-“you can see how the woman’s anxiety has been eased.”
“Oh… yes.”
“Let’s try that.” He took my hand and rubbed a spot between my thumb and first finger. At the same time, he pressed his leg against my thigh.
I couldn’t breathe.
“Do you feel that?” he murmured.
“I feel… Oh…”
“Yes, you do.” He moved in and covered my mouth with his. His lips were firm and his intention was clear. My heart thrummed against my ribs as he softened the kiss; then his lips moved along the ridge of my jaw to my ear. It was pure instinct that made me stretch to accommodate his every move. I felt a twisting and turning in the pit of my stomach and I heard myself moan with need. The sound and its unfamiliarity brought me back to reality, if slowly.
Derek stood and pulled my chair back and I slid off it. His mouth hovered within reach of mine and I didn’t hesitate. I stretched up and pressed my lips to his. He enclosed his arms around me and deepened the kiss, just as someone battered their fists against my front door.
The door flew open and a man burst into my house, waving a gun.
I screamed.
“What the-” Derek shouted, then shoved me behind him. “Get back.”
I watched as Derek boldly slapped the man’s gun hand, then grabbed and shook it. The gun went flying as the man fell to his knees.
He was big with a pockmarked face. Big and ugly. Was this Tyler’s bad guy?
“Who do you work for?” Derek yelled as he grabbed the man’s shirt and tie and shook him.
From where I was crouched, I could see blood dripping onto the floor. “Derek, he’s bleeding.”
Derek took hold of the man’s jacket lapels and whipped them apart. A large splotch of blood was seeping through his white shirt.
“Who did this to you?” Derek asked in concern. “Who are you?”
The man blinked up at him. He was heavyset, and his eyes were red rimmed.
“Who sent you?” Derek asked again, then spurted out a flurry of words in a foreign language. Russian? Ukrainian? I didn’t know, but the man nodded quickly and replied in the same language.
Derek barked out one more sentence.
The man sighed deeply, muttered something else, then crumpled to the floor.
Chapter 11
“Call nine-one-one,” Derek said brusquely as he slammed the front door. “Get an ambulance here.”
I scrambled for the phone on the desk as he checked the man’s neck for a pulse, but within seconds, he swore under his breath.
“Never mind the ambulance,” he murmured in resignation. “He’s dead.”
I continued holding for the operator. “We still need to get the police here.”
After reporting the break-in and telling them about the dead guy in my house, I called Inspector Lee. She answered the phone on the first ring.
“Why am I not surprised to hear from you?” she said.
I gave her a brief rundown of what had just happened and she assured me she’d be there shortly.
As I spoke on the phone to Inspector Lee, I watched Derek check the dead man’s pockets and clothing labels. I assumed he was looking for identification and any telltale clues as to what Mr. Big had been doing here and why.
In an inside pocket, he found the man’s passport. Taking out his phone, Derek snapped a picture of the open passport, flipped the page, took another picture, then slipped the passport back in the man’s pocket. I figured he would be sending those photos to his pals at Interpol.
In another pocket, he found the passkey to my building as well as a key to my loft. He held them up for me to see, then raised a brow in amusement as I bared my teeth at them. Damn, I was willing to accept that a shady locksmith had been paid to make a copy of my new key, but how had the guy obtained a key to the building? It was aggravating in the extreme.
Derek slipped on a thin rubber glove-where in the world that came from, I had no idea-and picked up the man’s gun, examined it, smelled it, held it at arm’s length, and aimed it at the wall, then lowered his arm. He extracted the thing that held the bullets, then counted the bullets. Placing the gun on the worktable, he snapped another picture. It was as fascinating a routine as anything I’d ever seen him do, and that was saying plenty.
After I ended the call with Inspector Lee, I wrapped the Kama Sutra in its layers of protection and stuck it back in its hiding place at the bottom of the hall closet.
As I walked into my workroom, I noticed that Derek was slipping the man’s shoes off to study the brand.
“What in the world just happened here?” I muttered, rubbing my scalp with both hands. My life just kept getting more and more bizarre. Strangely enough, that wasn’t really a complaint.
I brushed my hair back from my face and went to check my front door, just to make sure there was no damage. I hadn’t locked the dead bolt because I always liked to do it just before I went to bed. But from now on I planned to keep the door bolted at all times.
There was a sudden pounding at the door and I jolted.
Derek grabbed me from behind and held me, calming me as though I were a scared kitten. “It’s okay. It’s someone at the door. Probably a neighbor. You’re fine.”
I breathed in and out, then shook my head in self-disgust. “Thank you. You’re right; I’m fine. I’ll just get the door now.”
I opened the door and saw Suzie. With one strong hand, she clutched the arm of-Minka LaBoeuf? Wearing a black trench coat and a beret? What in the world was going on?
Minka squirmed and tried to pull away, but Suzie was much more powerful. It took some heavy-duty muscles to operate a chain saw every day.
“Suzie?” I said in a daze. “Why… What… Huh?”
“This one was skulking around your door,” Suzie said, jerking her chin toward Minka. “I asked her what she wanted and she said she knew you. I said, ‘So what’re you doing out in the hall?’ and she tells me to go fuck myself.”
“Minka, what the hell are you doing here? And how did you get inside the building?”
“I followed that big guy in,” she said in a huff. “Then this bitch grabbed me.”
Suzie winked at me. “Just watching out for you.”
“Thanks, Suzie.”
“You know why I’m here, Brooklyn!” Minka cried. “I’m sick of you stealing my jobs. I want that book.”
“And you thought breaking into my building… Wait a minute. Were you standing outside the other day when that crazy screaming woman attacked Robin?”
Minka’s eyes widened. “Uh, that wasn’t me.”
“You’re such a liar. Why do you think I would ever hand the book over to you?”
“I have powers of persuasion,” she said with a toss of her overprocessed hair. “I’m Russian, you know.”
If I thought my life was bizarre before, it had just become seismically weirder. “Okay, first of all, Minka, the book isn’t Russian. There’s nothing Russian about it. You overheard something completely unrelated to the book.”
“Well, the book is French and I’m French, too.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I closed my eyes and prayed for strength, then said, “Look, I got the book from a client of mine. Ian didn’t give me the book. That day you saw me at the Covington, I was just showing it to him. So there was no way he was going to let you work on this book, because it wasn’t a Covington project. If you’d bothered to ask a question or two instead of assuming the worst, you wouldn’t have wasted your time and mine. And Suzie’s.”
“Well, why didn’t you just say so in the first place?” she said with a sneer, as though this were all my fault. I’d once likened her curly-lipped sneer to that of a snarling dingo, and the description still fit her.