Eagle's Heart (12 page)

“They must have been excellent teachers,” Salomeh said.

“My little sister, Ryli, wanted to be a teacher too. She couldn’t wait to be old enough to leave home and go to school in another country so she could experience the world,” he said. A memory ambushed him then. How Rylinda had always followed him and Bardhyn around, trying to join their gang and embarrassing him. She had even made a game of it:
“Kush mendoni ju zgjidhni, vëlla?”
she would call out to him in her sweet voice, jostling Bardhyn out of the way.
Who do you choose, brother?
He had chosen Bardhyn every time. He was a stupid teenage boy who couldn’t have known just what a terrible choice he was making, but the memory still pained him.

He recovered himself. “Now there’s just me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, clearly at a loss for words.

Julian nearly kicked himself.
Now
was the time he chose to get all sentimental about his family? He should have just ignored his urge to overshare and charmed Salomeh like he would have anyone else.

“I haven’t spoken about them to anyone in a very long time,” Julian said, more to himself than to her.

“Why are you telling me?” she asked. “Is this a ‘you show me yours, I’ll show you mine’ situation?”

The words were said gently enough that he knew she wasn’t trying to hurt him.

“You want the truth?” he asked, looking down at her.

“Always,” she said, her eyes wide and unblinking.

It was too late for that, but he could try to give her some semblance of it.

“I don’t know why I told you that,” he admitted. “There’s something about you that short-circuits my brain. I find myself saying things I shouldn’t be saying and doing things I shouldn’t be doing.”

Her brow creased in confusion. “Like what?” she asked.

“Like this.”

He angled his mouth down over hers then. Her lips parted in shock, and he slid in his tongue, hungry for her taste, needing to savor it one more time. For a moment, she was stock-still in his arms, as though unsure of how she should react to this sudden change in the conversation. Then her arms dropped away from her chest, and she grabbed at his shoulders, moaning into his mouth as she returned his fervent kiss.

He inched his free hand up between them, pulling at the sheet that hid her breasts from his view. She shivered against him as the material dragged over her skin, and he felt the tremor pass through him as well, making his cock jump with need.

“My behavior hasn’t exactly been typical either,” she murmured between kisses as she pushed him back into the pillows and straddled him, her face never more than a few inches away from his.

“Thank goodness for small mercies,” he said, running his hands down her sides and encircling her waist, holding her in place as he rocked up against her. He could feel the heat of her through his sweatpants, and he pumped against her again in a fruitless endeavor.

She kissed him hard as she met his motion, the small kisses that she placed on his brow pulsing through him like an erotic benediction. Julian clenched his teeth when she wrenched herself free from his hold and moved down his body, kissing his neck and then his chest. He closed his eyes against the jolt caused by her warm tongue running over his nipple. Her lips grazed over the raised skin on his arm, and he shuddered. The nerves there had been deadened to most sensation, but Salomeh’s soft kisses still triggered an intense pleasure. She was now moving in a steady line across his hipbone. She inched his sweatpants down, and he raised his hips to help her, leaning forward and impatiently tugging at the material standing between him and Salomeh’s luscious mouth. She glanced up at him as his cock sprang free, the heat in her eyes nearly undoing him.

“Eager, aren’t we?” she said, her words breathed on an exhale that caressed his cock only slightly before the tip of her tongue did. She swirled her tongue around his head once, twice, three times before taking as much of him as she could into her mouth. She sucked deeply as she moved up and down his shaft, and the twin sensations of tight suction and his cock meeting the back of her throat had Julian whimpering. His response seemed to spur her on. Once again his earlier fantasy had failed to live up to reality. Salomeh’s mouth was slick, her tongue agile, and she pleasured him with fervor as if it turned her on as much as it did him.

Julian bucked, trying not to forcibly fuck her mouth, which was an actual struggle given how amazing the warm suction felt. Her tongue stroked at the underside of his shaft as she fed more of his length into her mouth with each downward motion, unfurling a desperate lack of control in Julian, one he hadn’t felt since his first experiences with women. She looked up at him as her head bobbed on his cock, her cheeks hollowing out as she tried to drain him dry.

He threaded his fingers through her hair, gently pulling her away from his cock.

She looked up at him in consternation.

“Take it as a compliment to your excellent skill,” he said, panting. “But I need to be inside you right now.”

He handed her a condom from the bedside table, watching her as she struggled with the foil, loving the wanton desire in the way her hands shook. He leaned back on his elbows, staring at her over his painfully erect member and then bucking beneath her hands as she rolled it down over him.

She chuckled, the sound low and resonant, before retracing her path up his body, positioning her opening above his cock, and slowly taking him in.

They both cried out, Julian reveling in her smooth tightness. He had wondered if he had overblown their first rendezvous in his mind, but somehow she felt even better now, moving above him, her hands splayed on his chest as she choked back wild sounds of pleasure. He thrust up hard into her, wanting to hear that sweet wail he’d encountered the previous night.

She threw back her head, whispering his name as she stretched her arms behind her, placed her hands on his thighs, and rode him even harder, the new position giving him deeper access and causing her pussy to sheath him even more tightly. Tingles ran up and down his spine and through his hands and feet, pleasure building up, gaining power from the ever tightening vise of Salomeh’s pussy as she neared her own orgasm.

“Salomeh,” he gritted out, his voice desperate with need. He grasped at her hip with one hand and ran the other over her breasts and stomach, all exposed to his ministrations by the arch of her back.

His touch spurred her on, and she rolled her hips, swiveling over his groin in a serpentine pattern that milked his dick even harder as she sought to bring them release. The rapid clamping of her inner muscles shot him through with shards of bliss, and just like that he lost control, pumping madly into her as his orgasm overtook him. Salomeh followed him over the ledge with a surprised shout that sounded distant, drowned out by the clamor of Julian’s own rapid heartbeat.

She collapsed forward onto his chest, and he held her there, both of them breathing heavily, lost in their thoughts.

He placed a lingering kiss on her temple, completely unprepared for the fierce possessiveness that surged through him when she dropped a kiss on his scarred shoulder in return. He wondered what she was thinking as she lay against him, her legs still trembling slightly from her exertion.

“I have to go home soon,” she said quietly.

Ouch. That wasn’t what he’d hoped for. Because sometime between waking up with the certainty that it could never work out between them and collapsing to the bed in sheer bliss, he had realized something: things
had
to work out between them. He had helped take down some of the most ruthless gangsters in the world. He could figure out how to make Salomeh forgive him for lying to her.

“Traditionally, I should be the one making awkward pillow talk right now,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said, rolling away from him. The cool breeze from the air conditioner chilled the length of his body where she had lain. “I have a lot of things to deal with today.”

“Is there anything I can help you with? If you tell me, I can try,” he asked, running a finger over her back since she wouldn’t face him. He wondered how she had pulled away from him so absolutely in such a short time. He couldn’t even stop touching her, let alone think of letting her go alone into a world where men like Bardhyn meant her harm for reasons unknown.

She didn’t respond for a long moment.

“Salomeh, please. I can help you more than you know if you’ll just tell me what you need.”

She turned and assessed him, hope warring with despair in her tentative gaze. He thought she was going to tell him. All it would take was
So I was set up in the media, and I don’t know who did it
, and Julian could start the process of clearing her name. He would do it regardless, but this way would be easier for him. She wouldn’t have to know he had behaved like a total asshole. And then maybe one day when they were married and divorce would be too messy, he could tell her the whole truth.

“I need you to get me my purse so I can text Marta and let her know you’re not a serial killer,” she said, feigning a casual tone.

Dammit. Of course that would have been too easy. He silently rolled out of bed and brought her the purse he had seen lying in his spartan living room. He knelt beside the bed and dangled it in front of her. “If I give you this purse, will you hold off for two minutes while I shower? I want to walk you home.”

“Why?” she asked.

“You know, Marta told me that you were the smartest person she knows. Perhaps you can figure out why I’m reluctant to leave the side of the beautiful and mysterious woman who’s trying to escape my bed.”

She gazed at him, something unbearably sad in her eyes. “Maybe the mysterious part is something you don’t want to know about. Maybe it’s something out of your depth. Ever think of that, secret agent man?”

“No,” he said firmly. “Text your friend. I’ll be done in a minute.”

Julian rushed into the shower, and it was only when the cool spray hit him in the face that he realized he had been making a miscalculation in getting Salomeh to tell him her troubles. Even if she did like him, even if he could charm her, he was expecting her to just willingly tell someone she might be interested in that she had been accused of molesting children. The thought of how terribly alone she must feel spurred him to action.

He stopped the shower, barely toweling off as he headed back to the bedroom. He had to tell her, now, not at some hazy point in the future. She wouldn’t be thrilled, but she would have an ally. That would help mitigate her anger, he hoped.

When he stepped into the bedroom, he already knew from the unnatural silence that she was gone, but he said her name aloud anyway, feeling like a fool.

“Salomeh?”

Silence.

You really are getting soft, Tamali, he thought as he pulled on his underwear.

Chapter Ten

Salomeh lay in bed and held her purse to her chest, staring after Julian, although he had already closed the bathroom door and started the shower.

It was absurd, but she wanted to tell him everything. Even before she had mentioned betrayal, he had seemed to sense something was very wrong. He hadn’t presumed or pushed too hard. Instead he had listened. And shared a bit of himself. Maybe he wouldn’t judge, and the way he had said he could help… It didn’t just seem like idle talk. She knew there was something he wasn’t telling her, something beyond his family tragedy. Maybe they both had secrets they thought they couldn’t share.

And maybe she was romanticizing a one-night stand to deal with her problems.

She sighed in frustration.

It wasn’t as if she had ever needed a man to help her deal with anything. In fact making men feel superfluous was kind of her thing. Was now really the time to change the status quo? She should just leave while he was in the shower before this situation veered any more out of her control.

A subtle vibration in her purse startled her out of her reverie.

Probably Marta looking for juicy details, she thought as she bought the phone to her ear, not checking the number despite it having become second nature over the past few weeks.

“Hello,” she chirped.

The voice that replied knocked any lingering trace of happiness out of her, sandwiching her heart between guilt and fear.

“I’m sorry.”

A young girl’s voice. Yelena’s voice. It was low and slurred, an ugly caricature of her regular tone. “I wanted to tell the truth…but they said they’d kill me if I didn’t tell Watkins and the police what they wanted.”

“Yelena? Where are you? Please tell me where you are.” Salomeh fought to keep suppress her panic. She held the phone to her ear with a shoulder as she jumped out of bed and frantically pulled her clothing on.

“I don’t know,” Yelena said, whispering now. “I’m with some other girls and they’re making us…” Yelena let out a shuddering breath ending on a hiccup—the sound of sobs being held back.

“Give me any details you can think of about the place they’re holding you,” Salomeh urged. “I’m going to come for you, okay?”

“Alexi brought me—”

There was a sudden clattering as if the phone had been dropped. A female voice, cold as ice, asked, “How did you get in here?”

Yelena cried out sharply, and then there was silence.

Salomeh’s stomach dropped as she slipped into her shoes and ran out the door. She tried reverse-dialing the number as she pounded impatiently on the elevator button, but it showed up as “unknown” in her call log. Finally the elevator doors opened, and she rushed inside, angrily shoving her phone in her purse.

All her guilt from earlier in the morning came blasting back full force. While she had been wallowing, Yelena had been held somewhere against her will. While she had been partying, who knew what Yelena had been experiencing?

At this point she only knew three things for sure. One, Yelena was not the only person in trouble—other girls were apparently being held captive as well. Two, Alexi had something to do with it. Three, the woman who had taken the phone from Yelena was unmistakably the same woman who had called and threatened Salomeh a few days earlier. She could never forget that razor-sharp voice.