by Skye Warren
He doesn’t wait for an answer. Two fingers tilt my chin up. His other hand holds my face up for his focus. His thumb brushes my eyebrow. My cheek. My jaw. All entirely ordinary places on a body, somehow lit by a thousand lights. There’s no reason a man can’t touch a young woman he considers his daughter, when he’s worried that she’s sick. It doesn’t mean he wants to have sex with her, never that.
Except he looks a little shaken when he’s done with his perusal, his eyes blinking as if surprised to find himself touching me, his throat working as he swallows. “You would tell me if something were wrong.”
Not a question. It’s a statement. “Yes.”
I manage not to add sir, but only barely.
When I first moved here, I called him sir like the young recruits he trained. Yes, sir. No, sir. He inspires that kind of respect. The people from his company would raise their eyebrows when they heard me say it. You run a tight ship, they would say, sounding impressed and a little intimidated.
He told me not to, but it still slips out when I’m nervous.
You’re not under my command, he muttered in a rare show of impatience, even though it feels like I am. Who else would I be under?
He’s the one who gives me orders. I’m the one who obeys. We both know who’s in charge.
It’s like he can hear the unspoken sir anyway. His jaw tightens. “Go,” he says.
He doesn’t take a step back. Instead he watches while I bend to place my violin and bow in the case and close it. I stand up, but there’s no room to stand or walk or breathe. He’s filling every square inch of the room with his broad chest and dark eyes. Logically I know that I can walk around him, that he’s waiting for me to do that, but somehow I’m standing here, one inch away from him, my small breasts almost brushing his chest when I breathe in and out.
There are foreign mercenaries and five-star generals who walk through these hallways. Large men. Muscled men, but none of them compare to Liam. There are a few sets of weights in the gym downstairs, but he doesn’t use them. You practice the way you perform. That’s what he taught me about the violin. It’s the way he approaches his work, spending hours a day in the obstacle course that takes up a few acres in back.
Soldiers ten years younger than him can’t keep up.
I know he’s a large man, but it still feels impossible to look up far enough. When I meet his gaze, awareness sparks from him to me, every place on my body that’s an inch away from his.
“Tomorrow,” he says, his voice somehow lower. “You’ll be yourself again tomorrow.”
God, I want that to be true. I’m not sure who that is anymore. The obedient girl who practices her violin for hours every afternoon? Not exactly. No matter how much he wants that to be true. Something is going to happen tonight. I’m not sure whether I’ll become more myself—or less.
His scent suffuses my lungs, my mouth. There’s hard, sterile soap and something earthy from working outside and the elusive musk that is Liam North. My lips part, as if to draw in more of him. His eyes darken to deep sage, though I’m not sure what it means.
My heart pounds in my chest, and I skip around him in a frantic bid for safety, a rabbit scampering away from a fox. The only reason I reach the door is because he lets me.
I race up the stairs even though no one’s following.
Inside my room I lean against the door, eyes closed, panting like I ran a million miles to get here. I need to fix whatever’s happening inside me. No more stopping in the middle of practice. No more imagining Liam losing control.
Whatever I do for the rest of the afternoon, it has to be the end.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bach and Handel were both blinded by the same ocular surgeon.
LIAM
I watch Samantha flee up the stairs, looking scared enough to make me uncomfortable, lithe enough to make me ache. What the hell’s going on with her today? You’ll be yourself again tomorrow. I know that’s not true. She won’t ever be the timid little prodigy who landed on my doorstep, eyes wide behind her glasses, fingers impossibly nimble across the violin strings. She’s still a genius with the instrument, but it’s no longer a little girl who plays. It’s a young woman, and I’m the one who can’t go back to the way things were. I can’t unsee the flush of arousal on her cheeks. Fucking hell.
I return to my desk and try to focus on the field reports from my agent.
After reading the same sentence five times, I have to push the reports aside.
Footsteps approach the office, and I tense, fighting the impulse to stand up and close the door. Josh is second-in-command for North Security. He also happens to be my brother. He’s whistling and stomping and generally being a pain in my ass. The man can cross a South American jungle without disturbing a single tree frog, but he makes enough noise now to wake the dead. It’s a harsh contrast to the sweet violin that usually fills the air.
“Problem?” I ask, raising a brow.
He pauses with an exaggerated tilt of his head. “Why is it so quiet?”
I glare at him, but it doesn’t shut him up. “You’re fired.”
A hand to his heart, the dramatic bastard. “Where’s our beautiful Disney princess making music and drawing all the little woodland creatures to the window?”
“It was one squirrel.” One squirrel who pressed its little hands against the window every day for almost two months, listening to the music as if he could soak in its beauty.
Strange, feeling a kinship with a rodent, but there it was.
It’s not an accident that Samantha’s music room is right next to my study. The house has thirty thousand square feet. I could have put her anywhere, but I wanted her near me. I’m soaking up every goddamn second until she leaves for good.
Josh leans against the bookshelf and crosses one ankle over the other, the very picture of casual disinterest. I know my brother well enough to see right through his exterior. Unfortunately he also knows me well enough to see through mine. “What’s up?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t go out tonight.”
“And skip Hassan’s bachelor party? He would never forgive us. I would never forgive us either. We haven’t had a break in weeks.”
“She said she wasn’t feeling well.”
He frowns. “Samantha?”
“No fever. No cough. I could call Dr. Foster.”
“Is it the tour?”
I make a growl. “Maybe. It’s a hell of a lot of pressure. She wants us to think she’s all grown-up, but an eighteen-year-old has a lot of growing up to do.”
“We enlisted when we were eighteen,” he says.
“And I’d take a battle zone over Carnegie Hall any day.”
“She’s more mature than you were at eighteen.” He pauses. “Well, maybe not. You were an old fucking soul even as a kid. But so is she. You have that in common.”
The press will be all over every conference. Press with interview questions about her father? Red carpets. Meet and greets with VIP guests who are heads of state and A-list actors. And then there’s Harry March, the celebrity tenor headlining the tour, known for being volatile.
I hate that I can’t protect her from any of it. “There’s no way I can make her stop the tour. She’s got her heart set on it.”
“And you can never say no to Samantha.”
That makes me scowl. “I said no to concerts if they interrupted school for the past six years. She deserves to make her own choices now.”
“Not to mention she’ll be eighteen by then.”
My heart thumps against my chest in useless protest, but I make sure not to show any sign of it to my brother. Christ. I ignore the way my pulse thrums. It would be too easy to rise to the bait. Too easy to take the stairs two at a time and prove to myself that Samantha’s still there, if only for a short time more. “Kiss my ass.”
“You’re really worried about her.”
“Is there actually a reason why you’re here, or do you just love to annoy me?”
“Annoying y
ou is reason enough, in my opinion, but I do actually have something work related. The Red Team has gone dark.” He stands almost at attention, as if we were both still in the navy.
That makes me pause. Three highly trained operatives could handle themselves in the frozen tundra. There were reasons they might go dark in order to maintain cover. “How long?”
“A week.”
Of course. For all that Josh acts like he doesn’t give a shit, he manages the daily operations of North Security with sharp intelligence.
He wouldn’t have brought me this unless it was serious.
“What did their last report say?”
“I’m sending you the full file now, starting with the last entry, but it doesn’t indicate a problem. We have their coordinates to the south of the Ural Mountains. No injuries or major setbacks.”
“And the target?”
“Local intelligence indicated he might be hiding in the wilderness.”
That left a lot of terrain to cover, but that’s why I sent the Red Team. They’re the best. Efficient. Skilled. And goddamn discreet, though that is really a job requirement here.
I stand and pace across the marble floor, something I do when I’m faced with a problem. It would be better if there were music being played by a world-class musician, but she’s not feeling well. Why isn’t she feeling well? Focus, North. “What’s your read on the situation?” I ask because Josh has been with me through a hell of a lot of campaigns.
Those blue eyes are a little darker today. “It’s a long time for what should have been a straightforward task, but they know the stakes.”
The stakes, meaning detection by the local law enforcement agencies. Identify a traitor to the United States with enough survivalist tendencies to last ten years in the forest. All while remaining invisible to Russia’s police and military. Straightforward? Yes, that’s one way to describe it. Fucking dangerous, too. That’s what we do.
“The Red Team is the best,” I say, sitting down again. “We trust them. And if they went dark to stay off the grid, sending in another team could risk the entire operation.”
Josh nods, looking about two percent relieved. He’s a genius at operations, but it takes something different to be in command. The hard truth is that it takes heartlessness. I care about the men and women under me, but I still send them into the line of fire. I still risk their lives so we can all make a few bucks.
That’s the cold and utterly honest reason why I’m the one sitting in this chair.
Neither of us mention that our brother Elijah leads the Red Team.
The three of us are related by blood, but it would be a stretch to call us a family after our upbringing. I’m the one who founded North Security, but I gave both my brothers a stake when they joined the company. Elijah insists on leading the Red Team, with its dangerous missions and its near-constant deployment.
“Oh, and Josh?” I say as he turns to leave. “Put the other men on standby.”
I’m responsible for their lives, which means I’m also responsible for their deaths. It might be a bullet from the traitor or even local military taking umbrage to American mercenaries. It might be tomorrow or in five years, but whenever it happens, their blood will be on my hands.
CHAPTER SIX
A violinist burns about one hundred seventy calories per hour, almost twice as much as masturbating.
SAMANTHA
Zero. That’s how many times I’ve stopped practice early.
I’ve never been someone overly interested in breaking the rules. A people pleaser, that’s me. Especially if the person is a hard-ass. My dad wanted me to play the violin perfectly to impress his diplomat friends? I did that. He wanted me to clean our little apartment and cook dinner? I could make roast chicken with a side of green beans by the time I turned five. He wanted me to follow him around the world without uttering a single complaint. Done.
When he died, some part of the twelve-year-old girl thought it had to be my fault. My mother was from Indonesia. She met my father when he lived there—and she died a long time ago. My older brother had no interest in coming back to take care of me.
It was Liam North who stepped up to do that duty.
I knew, without anyone telling me, that I couldn’t mess this up. We weren’t even related by blood. He was friends with my father. Or as he’d said to the reporter, I felt it was my civic responsibility to step in. I was just a kid, but even kids understand basic math.
There was no one left on this earth to care about me.
I took every independent thought, even the tiniest shred of rebellion through my teenage years, and poured them into my music. Something safe.
Suddenly it’s not enough.
I want to do something wild and crazy like go skinny dipping in the lake down the hill. I want to ride in fast cars and parachute out of a plane. I want to do something shocking.
My room looks the way I left it this morning, everything neat and orderly, my books in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order! I can’t even blame that on my quasi-military surroundings. Liam North does not require this kind of precision from me. Well, he also doesn’t really read anything that isn’t a classified brief, but that’s beside the point.
I pull out A Concise History of Western Music with its worn spine and shove it next to The Rose That Grew from Concrete.
And then clench my hands into fists to keep from moving it back.
“Such a rebel,” I mutter to myself. “You’re the actual worst at this.” It’s going to take a lot more than unalphabetized books to fix this ache inside me, and I can’t even manage to do that much.
Rest, Liam told me.
He’s right about a lot of things. Maybe he’s right about this. I climb onto the cool pink sheets, hoping that a nap will suddenly make me content with this quiet little life.
Even though I know it won’t.
Besides, I’m too wired to actually sleep. The white lace coverlet is both delicate and comfy. It’s actually what I would have picked out for myself, except I didn’t pick it out. I’ve been incapable of picking anything, of choosing anything, of deciding anything as part of some deep-seated fear that I’ll be abandoned.
The coverlet, like everything else in my life, simply appeared.
And the person responsible for its appearance? Liam North.
I climb under the blanket and stare at the ceiling. My body feels overly warm, but it still feels good to be tucked into the blankets. The blankets he picked out for me.
It’s really so wrong to think of him in a sexual way. He’s my guardian, literally. Legally. And he has never done anything to make me think he sees me in a sexual way.
This is it. This is the answer.
I don’t need to go skinny dipping in the lake down the hill. Thinking about Liam North in a sexual way is my fast car. My parachute out of a plane.
My eyes squeeze shut.
That’s all it takes to see Liam’s stern expression, those fathomless green eyes and the glint of dark blond whiskers that are always there by late afternoon. And then there’s the way he touched me. My forehead, sure, but it’s more than he’s done before. That broad palm on my sensitive skin.
My thighs press together. They want something between them, and I give them a pillow. Even the way I masturbate is small and timid, never making a sound, barely moving at all, but I can’t change it now. I can’t moan or throw back my head even for the sake of rebellion.
But I can push my hips against the pillow, rocking my whole body as I imagine Liam doing more than touching my forehead. He would trail his hand down my cheek, my neck, my shoulder.
Repressed. I’m so repressed it’s hard to imagine more than that.
I make myself do it, make myself trail my hand down between my breasts, where it’s warm and velvety soft, where I imagine Liam would know exactly how to touch me.
You’re so beautiful, he would say. Your breasts are perfect.
Because Imaginary Liam wouldn’t care about big breasts. He
would like them small and soft with pale nipples. That would be the absolute perfect pair of breasts for him.
And he would probably do something obscene and rude. Like lick them.
My hips press against the pillow, almost pushing it down to the mattress, rocking and rocking. There’s not anything sexy or graceful about what I’m doing. It’s pure instinct. Pure need.
The beginning of a climax wraps itself around me. Claws sink into my skin. There’s almost certain death, and I’m fighting, fighting, fighting for it with the pillow clenched hard.
“Oh fuck.”
The words come soft enough someone else might not hear them. They’re more exhalation of breath, the consonants a faint break in the sound. I have excellent hearing. Ridiculous, crazy good hearing that had me tuning instruments before I could ride a bike.
My eyes snap open, and there’s Liam, standing there, frozen. Those green eyes locked on mine. His body clenched tight only three feet away from me. He doesn’t come closer, but he doesn’t leave.
Orgasm breaks me apart, and I cry out in surprise and denial and relief. “Liam.”
It goes on and on, the terrible pleasure of it. The wrenching embarrassment of coming while looking into the eyes of the man who raised me for the past six years.
My hips pump against the mattress, pulling out the last few pulses between my legs.
And then I’m lying there, wrapped tight around a pillow, unable to move, panting.
I’ve never seen Liam looking anything other than calm and cool and capable. He can handle anything with a command that’s almost terrifying in its competency. Right now he looks at a loss.
His voice is low and rough. “We should talk about this.”
I can’t think of anything in the world I’d rather do less. “Or we could just…” I hate that I still somehow sound breathy and turned on. There are little quivers in my thighs. “Pretend this never happened?”
“Come downstairs when you’re—”
The sentence hangs between us, leaving me to fill in the blank. Come downstairs when you’re done fucking yourself in the bed I bought for you. Come downstairs when you’re done humiliating yourself.