Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
Mike wheeled in Chloe’s suitcase and parked it against the wall. They’d stopped by her apartment so she could get some things. She could go back any time she wanted for things she might need, as long as he was with her. Or Barney. And only for about ten minutes.
Otherwise she was going to stay in his apartment until they figured out what was going on.
Because his apartment had a steel-reinforced door with steel panels extending either side and security cams outside.
His gun locker had two Glock 19s, two Glock 23s, a Colt 1911A1, a Browning High Power, a Sig Sauer P-226, an HK USP Compact Tactical four, a Colt AR-15A Carbine, two M-4 rifles exactly like the ones he carried in the Marines, an enormous Mossberg 590 Combat Shotgun, good for killing anything including bears, a Remington 700, a Barrett M92, a Barrett M95 and his baby, a Barrett MRAD which could probably take down a bad guy on the moon. And fifty thousand rounds of ammo.
Two scopes, combat helmets and night vision googles that fit over the helmets, two sets of specially-made body armor tailored for his extra-wide frame.
All his weapons were spotless and oiled.
A hundred feet of cable, four grapples of varying sizes.
Ten flashbangs. Fourteen ounces of perfectly illegal C-4 with a mile of det cord.
Five pairs of combat boots. Two combat vests.
Five prepared syringes of an animal anesthetic, guaranteed to put a man down in seconds.
And knives. He loved knives. He had a black titanium SOG Aegis, a Zaccara Bowie, a Garrison Fighting Knife, a Gerber Fast, a Balisong and a Kerambit.
So if the zombie apocalypse ever came? Mike was so prepared.
Chloe stood on the threshold of his door, looking at the ground. In these past six months in which Mike had been her shadow, she’d been in his place exactly twice, for two minutes each time. That was probably because there wasn’t much there.
He’d lived here almost five years and it wasn’t as welcoming as Chloe’s place a week after she moved into her apartment.
His place was an upscale bachelor pad with a place to sleep, a place to eat and a place to watch TV.
That was it. In six months Chloe had made her small apartment up on the same floor as Harry’s apartment a little haven, the kind of place where you heaved a sigh of pleasure just as soon as you crossed the threshold.
Everything there was soft and colorful and smelled great.
Maybe with Mike’s place you could heave a sigh of relief that you’d be safe against just about anything except an RPG launched from a boat on the ocean, but no points for softness or color coordination or even nice smells.
His Moldavan cleaning lady was a big believer in zapping germs with Lysol. No wimpy lemon polish for her. His place had no germs. They’d be too terrified of Alina to thrive.
No warmth either.
Once the door closed behind them, Chloe looked around carefully, as if she’d never seen the place before. Just as carefully not looking at him.
Mike should offer her…something. What? He had plenty of beer and chips. Full array of liquor, including every whisky known to man. Frozen fries and pizza. Frozen steaks. Nachos and cheese. Some chorizo.
Christ. No milk or tea. Come to think of it, no vegetables or fruit or even bread and jam, either. Nothing that could even remotely be considered comfort food or drink.
What was there for Chloe here? Nothing.
They looked at each other, then looked away.
Man, this was so not how Mike had planned it. Because plenty of nights, awake, with a massive hard-on and nowhere to go with it, he came up with a lot of different scenarios.
First, of course, he had to somehow get Harry to lift The Curse. He had no idea how that could work so in his day dreams and even night dreams, it just happened, like magic. Whoosh, curse gone.
Then, he’d charm her.
Except Mike had no fucking charm in him at all.
His day dreams didn’t go very far. Usually, he skipped the entire beginning with the complicated negotiations with Harry and just shot straight to imagining Chloe naked in his bed. That was always his starting point.
Now there was a real starting point and words just died in this throat.
“I’d, ah, offer tea, except I don’t have any.”
That made Chloe smile. Jesus, he liked seeing her smile. Her face just glowed, even when it was a small smile, like now.
She rummaged in one of the side pockets of the suitcase and came up with a number of small packets. “Well, I must have sensed that, because I took along a selection of teas from my flat.”
She might be looking lost, but man she also looked so fucking beautiful. Worn and weary, with a bandage on her arm, all her makeup worn off, she outshone any woman Mike had ever set eyes on, including Nicole, which was saying a lot.
There was just something so…so golden about her. The soft gold hair, the gold eyes, that beautiful pale skin now sun-tanned the lightest of golds. All together, she glowed, as if lit from within.
She simply stood there, looking at him, taking her cue from him. And he was just standing there, staring at her.
Willing his hard-on down.
Okay. Well, hard as it was to understand and hard as it was to do, Mike was going to go against every single instinct he had and be a perfect gentleman. Harry might have tacitly lifted the Curse on touching Chloe, but the fact was she’d been through violence and had been sexually assaulted.
Jesus, every time he thought of that he wanted to go to the morgue and revive the guy he’d killed and whack him all over again. Then go to SDPD where the other fucker was, and whack him, too.
He was used to violence. He’d been a soldier and a police officer and now was a security expert. He thrived on violence. You could say he was a violence expert, always had been, as of five minutes after his family was killed. He’d made it his life’s work to understand it and to master it.
Violence was a language, the only language bad guys understood, and Mike was really fluent in it.
But the kind of violence Mike believed in had a purpose. To protect people like Chloe, who weren’t supposed to be touched by it.
And yet, Chloe had been touched by it all her life.
He’d trained since boyhood for violence and he still couldn’t wrap his head around it.
How Chloe’s mom’s boyfriend could take a little girl, break her arm and slam her violently against the wall.
How her adoptive father could break that same arm and want to rape her.
And how those two Russians fuckers could try to rape her and then throw her across a room.
How could men do that? How could any man do that to Chloe? Just look at her, he thought, standing quietly in the room, sad-eyed and nervous, unspeakably beautiful, a spirit so gentle you instantly felt better the minute you saw her.
Everyone felt better when she was around. Gracie and Merry, with the sure animal instinct of the very young, gravitated to Chloe like a plant to sunshine. Everyone loved her.
Including him.
Jesus.
He rubbed his chest.
Get this back on ground you understand. Get her into your bed.
But instead of one of his usual smooth lines, what came out was…“So…you want some of that tea you brought?”
She was looking more and more lost. “Yes. Please.”
He didn’t move. Neither did she.
Something had happened to Mike’s brain. It had ground itself into a new gear he didn’t recognize.
Over the years, he’d perfected his seduction patter. He had whole bits of dialogue memorized, little logic trees he followed like a bot. If she said this, he said that. But if she said that then he’d say this.
He also had it timed perfectly, and within half an hour, tops, he could get any woman he wanted naked and into his bed. Or hers. Actually he preferred hers, so he could leave as soon as it was over.
Often it only took a few minutes to close the sale. It was all so familiar it had worn a huge groove in his brain, so he didn’t have to actually think about anything.
Put the mechanism into gear and it rolled along all by itself, while he was thinking of where to leave his clothes and where was the exit, for after.
None of this was any help with Chloe. There was no script here, none at all, because, well…because this was Chloe.
Mike knew he should be heading for the kitchen because she wanted…what did she want? He couldn’t remember. Didn’t make any difference, because he didn’t want to leave a room she was in.
Say something.
“And, uh. We’ll get you settled in my room. Just dump my stuff out of the drawers and there’s plenty of room in the closet. Towels and..ah, stuff are…”
Fuck. Where did he keep his towels? The cleaning lady took them away from the bathroom, did something with them, and brought them back to the bathroom. He never saw any of it.
“In the closet in the hallway,” Chloe finished for him. “That’s where Alina keeps them.”
Oh. Okay.
Mike felt awful. Awkward. Hands and feet and tongue too big. He couldn’t move, could barely speak.
“So…I guess I’ll just…bunk down on the sofa. No problem. I’ve slept on a lot worse, believe me.”
Chloe took a step toward him, then stopped. Her eyes searched his, looking for something. “Is that what you want, Mike?” Her voice was low, barely above a whisper. “To sleep on the couch?”
Hell no!
The words were on his tongue, the tongue that wasn’t working. He opened his hands helplessly, unable to speak.
Chloe took another step forward, and another. She was so close he could smell her now. Seeing her like this, so beautiful and soft and golden, feeling her body heat, smelling her…it was sensory overload. He couldn’t take it and closed his eyes.
A gentle hand landed on his shoulder. “Mike? You didn’t answer my question. Do you want to sleep on the couch?”
Mike’s eyes popped open to find her face so close to hers he could see each individual eyelash. The question wasn’t teasing. She wasn’t being coy or playing games. It wasn’t an idle question. She was dead serious.