Walking The Edge: A Romantic Suspense/Espionage Thriller (Corpus Brides Trilogy Book 1) (9 page)

“I know it was a memory,” she stated, conviction heavy in her tone. “I saw you in it so clearly. We were together, talking. Your voice sounded just the same, and I know I couldn’t have imagined it all.”

“Hence you saying at the bistro that we were lovers.” Some things had started to click, but
merde
if they still didn’t make any sense.

“I came to you,” she paused, “so you’d help me by telling me who I am.”

Silence stretched between them.
Putain
, but she put him in an awfully tricky situation. He didn’t know her. How to tell her this, when she had put so much expectation and faith into him lifting the veil for her? Everything in their situation felt too twisted to be a ploy, and some of his suspicions allayed. She sounded too sincere to be masquerading.

So, a coincidence that she came to him on the same day someone made an attempt on his life?

He stood so she wouldn’t witness the turmoil inside him. She huddled even more into herself, pulling the soft afghan over her as if it would ward off any bad tidings she expected would come her way.

He didn’t want to crash her hopes, but he couldn’t do anything more than go with the truth.

Gerard returned to the bed, where he sat facing her. Taking her cold hands in his, he rubbed his thumbs across her knuckles. After a deep breath, he looked up into her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t know you.”

Her lips quivered. She pulled her hands from his and placed her palms on his cheeks. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s the truth, and I’m sorr—”

“Stop.”

She sat up on her knees and pressed her forehead to his. The throw dropped from her shoulders, revealing her nakedness, laying her bare to his gaze. Her breaths came out ragged, her voice strangled as she repeated over and over that he shouldn’t say those words.

Right then, he hated himself for the anguish and the misery he caused her, even more so when moisture trickled from her cheeks onto his. Somehow, he knew she didn’t cry easily—she’d struck him as strong and resilient at the bistro. The waterworks thus meant serious shit, for him.

He clutched her shoulders. “Don’t.”

He shouldn’t do this to her...

With his mouth barely an inch away from hers, and, if only to quell the dreadful sounds of her sobs, he kissed her.

*

She let go and melted into him when his lips touched hers, and she sighed against his mouth. The kiss felt different from the ones they’d exchanged previously. Passion laced the contact, but not the raw and primal kind that had taken over them earlier. This kiss carried the desperate echo of need and unspoken longing.

She released his face to clutch his shirt. When his warm palms settled on the naked skin of her back, she moaned, revelling in the emotions he brought up inside her.
This feels so much like coming home
. His caresses grew feverish and frantic, making her think he grew afraid she’d leave his arms if he released her.

She couldn’t even if she wanted to. His touch scorched the cold out of her and made liquid fire burn in her veins. She needed him, craved him as much as he seemed to want her. She tore at his shirt, breaking their kiss to nip down his neck, tasting the salty heat of his skin, needing the carnal contact.

He helped her remove his clothes, and then he lay on top of her, pressing her body down into the mattress. She pulled him to her, her legs tangling with his, hips meeting, skin to skin.

His mouth found her breasts and closed on one nipple, his tongue bathing it with long, sensuous strokes. Pleasure coursed through her, making her skin prickle with anticipation and pent-up longing. How her body called for him. He trailed bold hands down along her hipbones, up against her thighs, finally coming to the sensitive inner skin where she burned for his touch.

Parting her legs, she opened up for him. His fingertips caressed her gently all while his mouth continued playing with her nipples. When his thumb found her clit, she arched off the bed and a moan tore from her throat.

The pleasure couldn’t compare to the feeling assaulting her when he parted her opening and slid first one, then two fingers inside her. Moving softly at first, they increased in rhythm until her gasps came with every push and pull of his digits into her core.

Her thighs clamped onto his hand when her climax shook her. Tingles of current shot from every nerve ending in her body, and she nearly passed out under the intensity of her orgasm.

He moved away from her when she was still coming down from her high. Turning her head, she watched him go to the bag he’d dropped on the table and retrieve a small foil packet from it. After removing a condom, he sheathed himself and walked back to her.

She opened her arms to him, sighing when he slid into her embrace. He shifted over her, his hips aligning with hers, the tip of his erection against her entrance. Lifting her body, she pressed against him, silently urging him to take her. Her legs came up, her thighs settling against his waist as he penetrated her, the length of him slowly and ever so delightfully stretching her to accommodate his thickness.

She clutched at his shoulders, her fingers splayed across his shoulder blades, relishing the play of the sinewy muscles under her touch.

He filled her with tortuously slow ease, and retreated with the same languorous stroke. Over and over, he satiated her need to have him inside her, to fulfil her body in the way she instinctively knew only he could.

She started moving her hips faster, eager to have him increase his tempo. He chuckled and kissed her, his tongue delving into her mouth in the same kind of lazy rhythm with which he stroked in and out of her body. When it became obvious she wouldn’t get her way, she allowed all her senses to become suspended in time, in a moment where the only thing to exist amounted to this man making slow, unhurried love to her.

She let herself go, giving in to the moment, letting her soul soar free and open to his gaze and to his touch. Shards of white light pierced the darkness behind her closed eyes when her orgasm rocked through her. Her back left the bed, her nails digging into his flesh to bring her some leverage, afraid she would leave her body from the sheer pleasure coursing through her and making her feel so light and insubstantial.

His mouth lay against her collarbone when he came. Spasms racked his body, and her skin and the pillow muffled his cry of release.

She didn’t open her eyes afterward, afraid the moment would melt away if she did. A sigh escaped her, and she smiled when his strong, warm body pressed against the length of hers on the mattress.

Sleep found her a few moments later, and she abandoned herself to its feathery fingers, content and secure in the knowledge he was by her side. Again.

“Stay with me,” she whispered, already halfway gone.

*

Gerard froze at the softly voiced words. Memories of previous times when he’d heard that very phrase in these same circumstances burst forth in his mind, and he sat up straight. All notions of post-coital bliss shattered around him as the realization hit him hard in the gut.

He watched her sleep, a smile on her lips. She looked, and felt, familiar to his body, but he couldn’t reconcile himself to the situation and the way it presented itself. No wonder she allowed him to forget, because she seemed exactly like the one he wanted to erase from his mind and heart.

He ran a hand over his face and through his hair as he contemplated her. Even when he closed his eyes, he still saw the haunted depths of hers.

Someone could fib about anything if they proved a convincing liar. They could portray any emotion. But things got complicated in bed. You could close your eyes and have sex; you could fake an orgasm and make it sound convincing. You could fuck the daylights out of another body.

But you couldn’t hide when you made love. Feelings came through then, buried emotions that floated to the surface of their own volition and without any agenda whatsoever.

The way this woman had made love to him, the passionate desperation in her touch, in her kisses, in the way she held him and abandoned her body for his taking, felt all too familiar.

More, the words she’d said as she drifted to sleep were the same ones someone else used to tell him.

Gerard consciously allowed his thoughts to go back to
her
, letting the painful memories he’d closed off flood him again on a rush of loss and hopelessness.

Her name had been Mirka Lehmans. She’d been his lover, and also the mistress of Oleg Stepanovic, a half-Ukrainian, half-Serbian firearms dealer who was the reason why Gerard had gone on his last undercover investigation.

He’d wanted to get to Stepanovic through Mirka, and had seduced her.

In the end, the tables had turned on him, because he had come to care for her, too much. The passionate abandon in her lovemaking, and the gentle trust she placed in him, evident in her “stay with me” whispered after they made love, had needled their way into a heart he didn’t know he had. She hadn’t expected to love him, either, and every one of their encounters had spiralled to a crescendo of desperate need that belied their positions in life. They had fallen, hard.

He gazed back at the woman sleeping beside him. While her hair and eyes were of the same colour, she looked nothing like the soft-spoken, plain, and gentle Mirka.

Mirka, who had died in a car crash seven months earlier, on the day when she had left Stepanovic, left Marseille, and left him.

Who
was
the woman in this bed, and how could she remind him so much of the one he’d loved and lost?

***

Marseille.
Corniche
JF Kennedy

Sunday, December 16. 7 a.m.

Morning came, the soft light of dawn filtering through the opening in the drapes at the window where she had failed to close them last night. The sound of seagulls as they circled the coast screeched into Gerard’s ears, pulling him out of his erratic dozing. He hadn’t wanted to remain here, but the medication from the previous night had worked its toll on him, and he’d thought it preferable to stay until he felt fully functional again.

He sat up in bed, his gaze settling on her. She lay on her stomach, her back to him. He gently trailed the tips of his fingers over her soft skin, unable to deny himself the contact. If this could be Mirka...

Don’t go there.

She moaned, but didn’t awaken. She’d tossed and turned for most of the night, and had drifted into deep slumber not so long ago.

Her body looked different, taut and flat where Mirka’s had been soft and curvy. They would’ve been of the same height, though, with the same delicate bone structure.

With a sigh, he tore himself from her and the bed. He wouldn’t get much more out of her. She represented a complex puzzle he needed time and opportunity to be able to decipher. He also had more pressing things to attend to, the first one being who had tried to kill him the previous night.

The same man she’d shot dead.

Watching her asleep like that, he had a hard time reconciling her with the woman holding his Sig in her hands. But one of the first things a cop learned spelled out how appearances could be very deceptive, that nothing should be taken at first glance or face value.

Pulling on his clothes, he felt for the key card in the pocket of his jacket. Retrieving it, he placed it on the bedside table. She shouldn’t be stuck in her room, and anyway, he’d get the copy Marcel had promised him later today. The next time he came to see her, he could let himself in.

With a final glance at her, he exited the room and made it out to his car. Driving to the
commissariat
, he figured he’d order in some breakfast. First, he had some things to check. He didn’t believe in coincidences, and the fact he’d been made to think of Stepanovic on the same night someone had tried to kill him gave him a hunch that maybe, the firearms dealer could be implicated in the case he currently investigated. Stepanovic’s trail had gone cold immediately after Mirka had left, as if the man had simply vanished into thin air.

Smiling officers greeted him when he entered the
commissariat
. News of the attempt on his life must have been round and round the place already. He acknowledged their solicitude with small nods and half-smiles all while heading straight up to his office. Passing by Rashid’s desk, he knocked twice on the table, their signal for the
capitaine
to follow him.

Rashid closed the door to the office behind him. “We’ve got news—”

“Stepanovic’s case. I want the file and everything we had on him.”

His friend stared at him with wide eyes. “How did you know the thug was connected to Stepanovic?”

He didn’t, until now. “Call it a hunch.”

“Man’s name was Dragan Baroš, a small-time criminal hailing from the Czech Republic also rumoured to work covertly for Stepanovic’s ring in the Mediterranean.”

Gerard leaned back in his chair. “Apparently, from what we know so far, Stepanovic has nothing to do with the casino gangs.”

“Apparently. But we could be very wrong there.”