He teases the entrance to my lips, the seam of them, and it feels like every sensation at once—hot and cold, pain and pleasure. As if every nerve ending has centered on that line. Then he slips his tongue into my mouth, a firm invasion, and my mouth opens. This is what it would be like. Sex. It would feel like him coming inside me, becoming part of me.
He finds a rhythm that makes me ache, makes my whole body clench.
Slowly he pulls back. He keeps his hands around my wrists, forming a kind of prison. I clench my fists and yank them, but he doesn’t let me go. Somehow that makes it more delicious.
“How does it end?” he asks, nuzzling my cheek.
“How does what end?”
“The book. I need something to distract me from your mouth and all the ways I want to use it.” He drops an almost-chaste kiss onto my lips. “Or I’ll never be able to leave.”
All the ways he wants to use it?
I don’t even know the possibilities.
I’ve heard whispers, jokes on TV that never quite made sense, but it’s too far away to imagine. “I don’t know. I got grounded. But it was probably a boring ending. The mermaid queen probably found some way to defeat the dragon. Instead of doing that, she would show mercy and thus prove that she was better than them all along. And there would be peace.”
A soundless laugh. “That’s the ending? It doesn’t sound lame.”
“Oh yeah. If I wrote it, it would be totally different.”
“I want to know your ending.”
“In my head the mermaids and the dragons, they’re the same. I mean they’re actually the same species. One female. One male. They live for so long they’ve forgotten the lore, how their children are made.”
He pulls back with a question in his eyes.
“They destroy each other, you know. The dragons start, but the mermaids fight back just as fierce. They’re made of the same things, after all.”
“There’s no happy ending in your head, is there?”
I shake my head without breaking eye contact. Those green eyes burn with hunger. “Only when the last few dragons are left, when the mermaids are scattered and hiding in the depths of the ocean, do they discover what they lost. But by then it’s too late.”
“Christ,” he murmurs, pressing his face into my neck. It’s not a sexual move. Not to kiss me or consume me. Instead he rests his head there as if seeking comfort. I hold very still so as not to disturb him. I’ve thought many things about my body—that it’s too short or too soft. That it’s too weak, but I’ve never realized how it can provide solace until now.
He drops my wrists, and I fold my arms around his neck, pulling him all the way in. He smells the way I remember from last night. Except now it imprints somewhere deep inside me.
This is what a man should smell like. And impossibly, this is what safety smells like.
“Holly!”
The call pulls me slowly from my languor. I blink into the sunlight, unwilling to let go.
Someone rounds the corner and comes to a hard halt. My sister. London stares with her dark eyes wide. Elijah looks up. His hands tighten on me, putting his body between us, as if he can keep me to himself or maybe protect me.
“I’ll buy you a few minutes, but we’re leaving,” London says before disappearing.
Green eyes meet mine. “You should go,” he says.
I don’t bother asking about the future. There is no future between an ordinary girl who lives in the suburbs and this diamond thief who’ll be on the run.
Sometimes there is no happy ending.
I try to think of something good to say. Something meaningful. Stay safe. Remember me. Don’t get caught. Instead I speak in the language we’re most fluent with. I reach up to place a small kiss on his cheek. It means that I care about him. He’s a stranger to me in every single way, except the most important one—a soul recognizing another soul.
Then I turn to leave, except he stops me. His eyes are full of something dark and sad. Regret? He tugs at my backpack. Confused, I let it slip from my shoulders. He digs around inside until he pulls out a black velvet pouch. It disappears into his jacket.
Then he hands back my backpack.
I stare at it, not sure what I just saw. “Was that the diamond?”
“They search us going out the employee entrance.” He sounds faintly apologetic. “Every time. I made the switch, but I couldn’t have gotten it outside the museum.”
“And I walked out the front door.” The champagne has turned to acid in my stomach. He used me. That’s what happened. He must have planted it on me from the beginning.
“I told you, Holly. I take what I want.”
I spin around and run out to find my parents.
They’re already by the SUV, where the tour guide is saying something about war.
“The cathedral has been threatened many times, damaged during the French Revolution and almost destroyed by the Germans during the first World War.” He points to a green metal statue of a figure on horseback. “Its existence today is in large part credited to Joan of Arc, who turned the tide of the Hundred Years’ War.”
“I’m hungry,” London says.
We pile into the SUV, and I look out the back as someone in a black leather jacket with his head down emerges from the stone enclave. He puts his hands into his pockets as he blends into the crowd. I follow him with my gaze until he’s gone. My fingers feel tingly even as the rest of me is numb. That’s why he asked me on a smoke break: so he could sneak the diamond out.
That’s why he pretended to be interested in me.
Even pity would have been better than this.
For a second I think about telling someone, but what would I even say? I had the Regent Diamond in my backpack all the time. I’m an accomplice. And I have no idea where Elijah has gone. Even when I can no longer see him, I keep looking at the space where he was. The SUV pulls into the street. I watch the mill of people—slightly to the right, in the place where I saw him last. The place where the diamond disappeared.
DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
I’m stepping off a nine-hour flight when it happens.
A white van. A dark hood. Every woman’s worst nightmare.
Now I’m trapped in an abandoned church. The man who took me says I won’t be hurt. The man in the cell next to me says that’s a lie. I’ll fight with every ounce of strength, but there are secrets in these walls. I’ll need every single one of them to survive.
CHAPTER ONE
Eight years later
I wake up with my face pressed into a warm, muscular shoulder. The scruff of his jaw leaves a soft ache on my forehead. My lips feel slightly moist, as if I possibly drooled while I was asleep. Oh God. Embarrassing. Everything about this is embarrassing.
Especially the fact that I don’t know this man. My hand rests on his arm, only a few inches away from his thigh. I pull back, but the belt and the arm of the seat conspire to keep me close.
“Sorry,” I say, breathless. “I’m sorry.”
A crooked smile with a hint of dazzling white teeth. Dear Lord, men have no business looking this handsome. Especially not on hour eight of a transatlantic flight. “I never mind sleeping with a beautiful woman. Not that I was doing much sleeping.”