Chapter 7
ZINAIDA
I wake long before dawn.
If wake is the right word.
I really haven’t slept a lot.
I pull on sweats and head for Hyde Park, which is only a ten-minute walk from my rooftop apartment in Lowndes Square. Instead of my normal path around the Serpentine, I turn right, taking the wide tree-lined way toward Buckingham Palace. I need space to think.
I start jogging, inhaling the scent of damp earth and autumnal leaves like a welcome relief. The chill of coming winter is calming after last night’s frantic heat in the Quartier.
Be honest, Zinaida. You mean the heat of that little game you lost in the Viewing Gallery.
Anger, and more than a little frustration, lend wings to my heels, and I pick up speed.
Phone Mak and call it off.
After all, I still haven’t officially offered Luke the job.
Calling it off is definitely the smartest call to make.
I’ve reduced the hardest criminals in London to quivering little boys with my naked body and dead-eyed stare.
Luke Macarthur didn’t turn a goddamn hair.
Oh yeah, Zin. That’s why you want him gone.
Nothing to do with the way his eyes made me come undone faster than loose stitches.
Or the fact that he haunted every moment of sleep last night.
I round the bend, mist damp on my face and wet leaves underfoot. In the distance, Big Ben chimes the Westminster Quarters: it’s five fifteen a.m.
Tell Mak to find someone else.
Only I know I won’t.
No matter what excuse I give Mak, changing my mind now would be a tacit admission that Luke beat me at my own game.
I might not like the fact that Luke got the best of me last night.
Correction: I might really fucking hate it.
But that doesn’t change the fact that so far he appears to be exactly what Mak promised me: the best man for the job.
I asked Mak to find someone to infiltrate my world. Someone who can fit into it like they belong there but stay detached from it. Who can uncover whoever is betraying me and not be at risk of being bought.
And much as it hurts to admit, Luke Macarthur has game. He can hold a poker face even better than me.
That motherfucker has more game than anyone I’ve ever met.
I pick up pace, rounding the Mall and cutting into St James’s Park, breathing easily as I head toward Westminster Abbey. I’m going to need more than a mile or two to run off the tension buzzing through my body, not to mention answer the questions racing around my head.
The most important of those is whether I’m inviting a snake into my house.
Is Luke Macarthur dangerous in the way I need him to be? Or is he the kind of danger that will turn against me?
I lengthen my pace along the path by the lake, going through my mental pros and cons.
Pro: He’s Mak’s recommendation.
Inasmuch as I trust anyone, I trust Mak. Especially when it comes to security. The man didn’t build the world’s biggest private security operation without knowing how to pick his people.
Con: He looks like he just climbed off a surfboard somewhere.
My world is full of hard men who only respect other hard men. Luke’s brilliant turquoise eyes and sun-kissed curls are not going to work in his favor, at least not at first. He will look like exactly what he is: an outsider. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if we can pull it off.
Pro: My people won’t know what to make of him.
That much is true. If he were Russian, or a member of any criminal organization, my people would know within a day that they were being investigated. The criminal world is a small one. Everybody knows someone. Hiring from the outside will at least delay everyone’s suspicions.
Con: My team are still going to suspect they’re being watched.
That’s a legitimate concern. Then again, they’d think that no matter who I brought in. At least when it comes to Luke, I can tell them he’s one of Mak’s men, which is as good a cover as any.
So we’re at the point of considering how this is going to work, not if?
I hit a sprint down past Duck Island Cottage, then leave the park, heading for the statue of Boadicea on the Thames. I could do with being inspired by the ancient Celtic queen this morning. And I’m nowhere near done running. Not yet.
I’m also painfully aware that I’m considering every concern except the one that actually matters.
You want him, Zinaida. You want him so much you nearly lost it completely last night.
Luke’s clear turquoise eyes chase me along the path, their crystalline detachment cutting through the early-morning mist and heating my skin like rays from an August sun.
Like he’s crawled inside my body and taken up residence there.
I put on a burst of even greater speed, my breath coming in hard rasps.
Luke balanced perfectly on his feet, his enormous body lethal and controlled as a goddamn predator in the jungle.
I race toward Westminster Pier, my body cutting through the mist like an arrow shot from a bow.
Luke’s cock filling me until I can’t fucking breathe.
I jerk to a halt so abruptly I almost fall, and drop forward at the waist, my breath searing my lungs as I stare out over the water.
It’s exactly the same mental image that undid me last night, and it hits me with the same unexpected savagery now as it did then.
There’s something about Luke Macarthur’s huge, silent bulk that obliterates decades of hard-won self-control as if it never existed.
And that right there is the problem.
The only con that really matters, no matter how many pros there are.
I put my hands on the low stone wall overlooking the river, breathing deeply to get myself under control.
Out on the water, a lone rower powers toward me in a single scull. His back is to me, every corded muscle clearly delineated beneath the tight-fitting rowing tank.
It’s only when his head turns briefly side-on that I realize the rower is Luke.
I shrink back from the stone wall, flattening myself against the flat block at the base of the statue of Boadicea, knowing I should leave but unable to take my eyes from him.
Luke slides forward in the set and explodes backward, the scull leaping in the water like a living thing. There’s a controlled intensity to his movement that is mesmerizing, a raw power only barely contained.
He pulls a particularly vicious stroke, with such explosive force the boat’s balance is upset.
His oar catches in an eddy, and for a precarious moment the scull teeters on its side as if it will upturn.
His muscles bulge under the strain as he holds the oar in the water, forcing the scull into submission with a ruthless strength that takes my breath away.
Luke glides closer to me, barely fifty yards from where I’m standing.
He’s so massive it seems impossible that he can even fit into the narrow scull, let alone be capable of the deft, perfectly executed strokes that send it flying through the water.
The early-morning moisture runs in rivulets over his shoulders and arms, snaking down the fiercely sculpted bulk.
Just as he draws level with where I’m standing, he eases oar and draws his knees up, resting his elbows on them, his whole body heaving as he catches his breath.
I’m frozen in place, terrified he will see me.
There’s a strange vulnerability in his posture.
I feel like I’m seeing behind the control Luke showed last night, to a private part of himself that I sense is carefully guarded.
There is something both disturbing and electrifying about the intimacy, like catching a covert glimpse of a dangerous predator at rest in the wild.
I could watch him forever.
He runs an impatient hand through the unruly thatch of hair, shaking the moisture from it like a great beast coming out of the water.
Turning the scull decisively, he slips the oars back into the water and draws them at a more leisurely pace toward his body, clearly setting a slower pace to home.
Even from a distance, it’s clear his eyes remain on the river in front of him, his face set and focused, like he’s seeing something inside that I’m not party to.
I want, more than anything, to be inside his head. Inside his body. Part of whatever that intense focus is.
Or better yet, be the object of that focus.
Christ.
What the fuck, Zinaida?
I put a hand out, reaching for the cool, damp reassurance of stone.
You need to get control of yourself. Right now.
Luke’s scull disappears around a bend in the river, and I feel the snap of the broken connection like it’s a physical thing.
Heart still thudding, I turn to look up to Boadicea looming above me in her chariot, spear in her right hand, her left in the air.
Neither Boadicea nor her bare breasted daughters are making any attempt to rein the horses in.
I suppress a sudden urge to laugh.
The statue feels like as clear a sign as I’m going to get.
I take out my phone and hit Mak’s number.
“Zin.” He answers immediately, despite the hour.
“Brief Luke Macarthur.”
“Already done, darling.”
I grip the phone hard enough to leave marks, wishing I could throw it into Mak’s smug face.
“A little premature, don’t you think?”
“I’m never premature, darling.”
I hear a feminine giggle in the background.
“And I told you. Luke’s the best man for the job.”
“Is that one of my fucking dancers I can hear?” I ask frostily.
“She’s quite spectacular. By the way, Sienna—it is Sienna, isn’t it, darling?
—won’t be in tonight. Bill me whatever you like.
But since it’s six a.m. on a Sunday,” Mak drawls, “and I didn’t leave your club until four, let’s pick this up another time, shall we?
Luke will be at your Mayfair office tomorrow, nine a.m.”
The phone goes dead in my ear, leaving me smiling despite myself.
Then I think of Luke Macarthur’s poker face, and my smile disappears.
But keeping a poker face for half an hour is one thing.
Living in the murky darkness of my world for months on end is quite another.
Sure, Captain Macarthur has game.
But he’s going to fucking need it, because if the men of my world smell one hint of weakness, not even the raw ferocity of the man I saw on the water this morning will be any match for the kind of hell that will come for him.