Wanted by a Dangerous Man Read online

  “Is that the kind of guy you think I am? Not at all. Just the bare necessities. Whips. Chains.” He reached over and pulled my hand into his. Instant sparks yet again.

  The drive to the mountain house only took an hour, and the time flew. Much better to be in Corbin’s smooth car, looking out the window, than driving through a blizzard in my elderly vehicle. As we drew close, it felt like we were on a whole new planet. I hadn’t appreciated the beauty of the area before due to the blinding nighttime snowstorm, and when I’d left, in the daytime, I’d been nervous, driving Corbin’s unfamiliar and enormous SUV, worried about what might happen to a woman who withheld knowledge of a fugitive.

  I noticed several signs where cross-country ski trails intersected the road. The white stick figures glowed briefly in Corbin’s headlights. “Do you ski?”

  Corbin shrugged. “Sometimes. I’m more of a cross-country skier. You?”

  “Downhill, and not often.” Lift tickets were expensive. “Never tried cross country.”

  “I’ve got extra skis in the garage. Snowshoes, too.”

  “Now you tell me. I could have trudged out of there during that blizzard!” I slanted a look his way. “So where’s the guy who owns the house?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “If I worked for you, would I get answers?”

  Corbin’s smile practically illuminated the car. “About the house? Absolutely. After a negotiation and a trial period, of course.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  The house itself looked different without a mountain of snow covering it. I saw now that it was designed to look like a ranch crossed with a ski lodge. The interior had been thoroughly cleaned; the candles that we’d used during the power outage had been stowed, the fireplace looked like it had never been used, and the house smelled fresh.

  “Welcome back,” Corbin said. He hurried to the car and returned with our things. “First things first. Hold this.” He pushed my paper bag into my arms, then disappeared upstairs with his suitcases. He came back a moment later with a smaller bag, something halfway between a satchel and a duffel. It was unisex and classy, a soft shade of brown with an intricate and muted golden logo repeated across the sides. “Now take this,” he said, handing me the empty bag and taking the paper one.

  He unzipped the satchel-duffel, and I caught a glimpse of a designer label.

  “Corbin—”

  “I bought it with my newspaper route. Anyway, it’s just a loan. Until you’re eighty.” He stared into my bag, then shook his head woefully and dumped the contents into the designer bag. “Ever hear of folding your clothes?”

  “What did you say? I recognized the words but the sentence didn’t make sense.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  I shook my head, but it wasn’t quite true. There were other things on my mind. Corbin was about to see me naked. Before it had been different, but now we had all the time in the world to play with and explore each other.

  “I’m making us sandwiches. It’ll be fast.” He peeled away the knit hat and tossed it onto a table. His dark hair was plastered to his head. I stood on my toes and fixed it as best I could, lingering when the magnetism of his body pulled me closer.

  “Better,” I said.

  He kissed me slowly, pressing his tongue along the seam of my lips until I softened under his request. Then he pulled away. “After dinner,” he said to my moans of dismay.

  I followed him into the kitchen and leaned up against a counter while Corbin opened the refrigerator. It was packed with food. He pulled out a head of leafy, bright green lettuce and set it on the counter. It certainly looked fresh. “How did you know there’s food here?”

  Mayo, mustard, cheese, tomatoes… the pile of things on the counter grew larger. “Because I arrange for it to stay stocked,” he said as he pulled a loaf of bread out of a fabric bag on the countertop.

  “You keep your bread in a bag?”

  He smiled. “Little trick I picked up. Chef, remember?”

  It was funny how I’d forgotten that detail of his life. He’d been a chef, had studied in New York and Paris. Compared to what he currently did for a living, it was rather mundane. “Your classy joint in Manhattan. How long were you there?”

  “Classy joint?” He rolled his eyes, then began mixing mustard, mayo and some seasonings in a small bowl. “I’ll have you know that royalty ate there, so show some respect.”

  I dipped my finger into the sauce and sucked it. “Yum.”

  “Do that again and the finger goes into the sandwich. Two years.”

  “Will you ever tell me the whole story?”

  “Hope so.”

  I waited for him to follow up, but he didn’t. “Let me see your driver’s license.”

  “You don’t like my driving?” He added a few grains of sea salt to the sauce.

  “Come on. You know my real name. You went through my wallet when you rescued me. Let me see yours.”

  He turned to face me, and the kitchen became very quiet. “You know my name.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a shiny black wallet. He twisted his wrist, pulling it away from me. “Don’t suppose I could distract you with a high-limit credit card and the password to my computer?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking. “How high limit?”

  “Half a million.”

  “Nope. Wallet.” There wasn’t any amount of money in the world that would entice me to forget that wallet if he was seriously offering.

  “Million?” His eyes drilled into mine, and when I crossed my arms and tilted my head, he nodded a little. “Audrey, I need to know something. Can I trust you?”

  My eyes narrowed while I tried to decide if I should be offended. I settled for neutral. “I can’t believe you would ask that after everything we’ve been through. You do realize that I could go to jail for abetting a criminal!” My voice had gotten louder, so I forced myself to smile. I didn’t want to fight with Corbin.

  “First, you haven’t abetted me, nor are you an accessory after the fact. You don’t have an affirmative duty to turn me in. You’re a fugitive recovery agent, not a police officer. Second, in case you forgot, you did threaten to deliver me to the police about a hundred times.”

  Good point. “But I didn’t do it. Yet…” I smiled. He didn’t. He wasn’t playing around. This was serious. I swallowed.

  “You couldn’t have done it before, Audrey.”

  I started to protest, but he cut me off. “We can debate this all night, but I know that you couldn’t because I know my tricks and I know what tools you have to work with.”

  I swallowed again as that sank in. Assuming he was correct—and much as it pained me to admit it, he probably was—that meant that we were reaching a point where I could harm him. It made me nervous. “I’m not going to pretend I’m ok with how we met, and what you are, but… I would never betray you, Corbin.”

  “Why not?” His face was closed, unreadable.

  Only an idiot would have told him that I was falling for him, so I did the next best thing. I shrugged. Yeah, real clever, Audrey. Not.

  He stepped closer. “Why not? I’m still a murderer, right? There’s still a bounty on my head. Right? So what changed?”

  “I don’t know,” I said miserably. “I hate it when you bring that stuff up. It’s one thing when we’re kinda joking, but… why can’t we agree to not discuss that aspect of your life?”

  “We could, but if I’m going to spend any significant time with you, it’s going to be almost unavoidable.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s part of who I am. Because I’ll sometimes disappear for weeks or even months at a time. It feels dishonest to pretend that I’m not a—”

  “But you aren’t a bad person.” I had to cut him off because if he had said murderer I would have started screaming. “I don’t understand why you do it. You could be a chef again. You could get a job doing a million other things.”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t.”
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  “Is it about money? Are you afraid to be broke, Corbin? Addicted to the nice cars and the houses? Or maybe you like the power. Or maybe you’re a psychopath.”

  The shocked look in his eyes made me feel about two inches tall. I expected him to come back with something equally cruel, but instead he gently touched my chin. “I’ll never be safe. Believe me when I say that I didn’t start this fight.”

  I jerked away from him. “You kill people for money. What does that have to do with staying safe?”

  “I never said that I kill people for money. My exact words were that I’m an assassin and I kill people who get in the way.”

  “Yeah? And what happens if I get in the way?”

  A muscle twitched in his jaw. “You won’t. Not unless you put yourself in the way.”

  “Once you hand me that wallet, it’s possible that one day I will. Once I know, I can’t un-know.”

  His face froze into an impenetrable mask. He slid the wallet into his pocket and turned his attention to the bowl of dressing or sauce or whatever it was.

  “Corbin, why can’t you—”

  “No. It’s done. This conversation. We’re changing the subject or we’re being quiet.”

  “I don’t appreciate being talked to like that. Why do you get to decide when this conversation is over?” I crossed my arms and went into the living room—mentally stomping, because if I’d actually done it, that would have undermined my whole point—where I dropped onto the couch like a sack of bricks. I liked to think I was a reasonable person, that I avoided bad situations and didn’t make stupid decisions, yet here I was, having a fight with some guy who was probably a monster deep down.

  How had it even gotten to this point?

  My mistake had been falling in love with the man who saved my life. I couldn’t help that he was what he was.

  And you can’t control who you fall in love with, right?

  So maybe that was my weakness. Maybe I should have cut out that part of my heart and burned it, searing the tissue around it so that nothing could ever grow there again.

  Corbin was suddenly standing next to me, a glass of white wine in his hand. I stared at his beautiful fingers wrapped around the glass’s stem. Anything to avoid looking in his eyes.

  He set the glass on the coffee table. “Grilling the bread now. Sandwiches will be done soon,” he said quietly. “You want to eat out here? Dining room? Kitchen?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said neutrally.

  He left, and I picked up the wine and took a long, deep sip. The fresh liquid cooled my throat. I took another sip, and another, until I was holding an empty glass.

  Like that was going to help me think more clearly.

  I wished I had someone to confide in. Someone I could trust to keep my secrets and to give me good advice. But I had no one, not since Veronica moved away. And I could have talked to her about this, obscuring the details and the magnitude of the obstacle, of course. But I would never be able to talk openly about Corbin.

  And that really sucked.

  I realized with a start that I was admitting that he was going to be around. As my boyfriend. He wanted to spend “significant time” with me. He wanted to explore this impossible relationship. He wanted to trust me. I needed to trust him.

  Time to be an adult.

  I tried to trick a final sip out of my empty glass, then found Corbin setting the table in the dining room. Rather than arrange the place settings across from each other, he put them on the diagonal so that we’d be closer together.

  I looked around the room. I’d only passed through it when I’d been at the house before. It was every bit as rustic-chic as the rest of the house, the walls done in a burnt sienna that could have been horrible but worked nicely with the solid furniture and the series of framed vintage spaghetti western posters.

  The table, chairs, buffet, and china closet matched in style if not color. Reclaimed wood, the kind that artists got for cheap, fixed up, and then sold to rich people at insane markups. There was an enormous Southwestern-pattern rug on the floor.

  Corbin touched my shoulder, and I turned to look up into his eyes. How could I be falling in love with this man… and how could I not? “I’m sorry,” I said, simply and sincerely.

  He smiled. “Don’t be. This can’t be easy for you. It’s difficult for me, too. I’m… doing things I probably shouldn’t. As are you.” He took my glass, then pulled out a chair. “Sit.”

  “You don’t have to wait on me.”

  His smile widened. “I enjoy it.”

  I closed my eyes when he left. Whatever happened between us, there was no happy ending. It wasn’t like he’d amassed thousands of dollars in parking tickets or had built an addition onto his house without the appropriate permit. Even the least of his crimes carried a significant prison sentence.

  He returned with two glasses of wine and two plates balanced along his arm. The sandwich was so stuffed that I would have had to unhinge my jaw to bite it.

  “If you don’t like it, I’ll make something else,” he said, sitting.

  “How can you be so nice now and so stern later?”

  “Oh, so you assume I’m going to sleep with you?” He shook his head in mock outrage. “Insulting.”

  I smiled and took a bite of the sandwich, doing my best not to get sauce and sliced tomato all over my face. It was delicious. “You make a sandwich taste fancy.”

  “It’s all about good ingredients,” he said.

  We ate in comfortable silence. Corbin wasn’t the type to hold a grudge or stay mad, apparently. Really, he was very much the perfect man for me. Well, except for that one, not-so-little thing.

  “I feel like I’m missing something,” I said after I’d eaten as much as I could handle. “With you. Your, uh, career. Am I?”

  He wiped his fingers, then pulled out his wallet and tossed it on the table. I tentatively reached for it, and Corbin placed his hand over mine. He leaned close to me, those gorgeous green-blue eyes grim. “I’ve been alone for a very long time, Audrey. You are the first woman to catch my interest in years. I didn’t realize how lonely I was until you fell into my life.”

  I swallowed. “I understand.”

  “You don’t. You can’t.” His gaze was fixed on a point just to the right of me, and I nearly turned to see what he was looking at. “I was married once.”

  “How old were you?” He seemed too young to be married and divorced already.

  “Twenty-two. She died three years later.”

  Time stopped, and it felt like an invisible fist had punched me in the chest. “Oh, Corbin. I’m so, so sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I put my free hand on top of his, then turned the bottom hand over so that I was cradling him between my palms. He continued to stare at that point behind me, and I realized that he was seeing something else. Someone else.

  “Her death changed everything. I didn’t care about myself anymore.” He inhaled, and it sounded like he was swallowing a word. “I swore that I’d never be close with another woman. I’ve mourned her for five years. Until I met you, I didn’t realize that my grief had become a habit that I couldn’t break. Even now… some days it tears me apart. I thought you should know.”

  “Thank you.”

  He pulled his hand back and picked up his sandwich, and I slowly opened the wallet. Then I closed it and slid it back over to him. It didn’t feel right to do it just then.

  “What was your wife’s name?”

  He looked at me with a small, heartbreaking smile. “Audrey. Her name was Audrey.”

  I insisted on cleaning up after dinner, and chased Corbin into the den. Knowing that I shared a name with his dead wife freaked me out a little.

  When I asked him why he had saved me, he’d said because he felt responsible for me. I wondered what had happened to his wife. Maybe he felt responsible for her death. I wondered if I’d be able to find anything about her online.

  Of course that assumed she’d changed her name when s
he married him.

  It also assumed that Corbin Lagos was his real name, which I didn’t assume at all. At the same time, it would be highly unlikely that the FBI would have the wrong name for someone. So what was in that wallet?

  Sandwiches didn’t create much of a mess, so rather than load the dishes into the machine, I decided to wash them by hand, hoping that a few more minutes alone would help me clear my head.

  There was something very strange about Corbin, I decided. Not the obvious, which was that he was a damaged widower ex-chef who had turned into a killer and did heaven-knows-what in other countries. He was too comfortable. Yes, he took care not to be seen, but he wasn’t paranoid. And his situation demanded paranoia.

  I thought back to what he’d said about Syre, how he’d demanded a bribe to distract him. Was Corbin trying to distract me from something?

  I shivered. What if he’d timed the earlier fight and the dropping of the bomb about his wife to distract me from his wallet? What if he’d never intended to let me look in it?

  What kind of criminal had credit cards with limits befitting a multi-millionaire?

  I braced my arms on the sink and stared at the floor, stretching my tense shoulders. There was something big I was missing—something enormous, and whatever it was would explain everything.

  Or maybe I just wanted to believe that it might be that simple.

  It took me all of three seconds to find the open bottle of wine. Not much left, but maybe enough for two half-glasses. I grabbed it and went into the den. No Corbin.

  “Sexy boy? Where are you?” I found him in front of the television, watching international news. I slid my free hand into his hair, drifted down to caress his neck, then dipped into his shirt to explore the hard curve of his collarbone.

  He grabbed my wrist. “Be careful,” he growled in a sexy rumble.

  “Or what?”

  He flipped me over into his lap, and wine went everywhere. It was worth it, though, to see the shock in his eyes. I couldn’t stop laughing, but Corbin just stared at me, trying to look annoyed.

  “Stay still.” Still laughing, I ran into the kitchen for towels.