book?'
She shook her head no. He eased her onto the pillows, then removed her slacks, her underpants, using one hand only, while the other hand continued to touch her in new and unexplored places, and his voice whispered, 'They say there are sixty-four arts of love, and a man skilled in all of them will be a leader of other men and of women.'
This was a strange way for Donald Stevenson of Aurora, Illinois, to be talking, but she couldn’t think too much about it, not when his hands were now stroking the insides of her thighs.
'They know that love is powerful,' he whispered. 'Love is godlike, and gods have power…'
His hands moved in close to her sex and then eased away, and she knew he was teasing her again, as he had when he touched her breasts and when he kissed her. He was making her wait, making her want it, want him. She ought to have resented him for this exercise of power over her, but she felt no anger, no reproach, nothing but the ripples of warm and cold energy pulsing through her body like a disturbance in the clear waters of a pond.
He lifted a finger to his lips, as if he meant to shush her, though she was making no sound. As she watched, he lowered the finger, and then she felt it slide down her belly to the vee between her legs, parting the moist lips. He lingered inside her, gently testing every niche, while his other hand curved behind her and kneaded the place where her buttocks met her back.
She wanted him to go deeper, and because she wanted it, she knew he would not do it, not yet. But he surprised her, abruptly thrusting his finger into her depths, then just as quickly withdrawing. Another tease, and she should hate him for it, she really should.
'Again,' she breathed.
'Beg me.'
She wouldn’t. It was crazy, humiliating. Who the hell was he to make her beg for anything?
'Please,' she said.
Another thrust, two fingers this time, wet with her moistness, plunging in hard and fast, then pulling free.
'Please,' she repeated. She had no dignity. She hated herself.
Two fingers again, probing deeply, and inside her the fingers curled, pressing the walls of her inner cavity as if sounding stops on a flute, fingers that searched for something and then found it, racking her body with a sudden terrifying plunge of pleasure that nearly stopped her heart.
'Please,' she gasped, not begging, not communicating, the word meaningless.
After that, there were no more words in her mind. There was only the lightning stroke of pleasure-again- again-his hand in her, and her body shaking, writhing, wetness everywhere, his breathing and hers, a hand on her breast rubbing hard, her belly clenching, pain and joy and explosive colors flaring behind her eyelids, and at last when she couldn’t stand it any longer, he pulled his hand free and said, 'Now for the real thing.'
A brief pause, and she realized he was putting on a condom, and then his cock was in her, and she felt its stiff curvature, its bursting pressure, and she almost screamed but his hand was on her mouth, muffling the cry, and at that same moment he released himself.
For a long time afterward, Pierce lay still, fighting for control of her breath and her thoughts. Distantly she felt him pull out of her, then roll over to lie by her side. Even now he wore his jacket. A well-dressed lover.
She didn’t look at him. She stared at the ceiling and tried to remember why she was here. She’d had some purpose, a secret intention.
Oh, right.
She had to steal his stuff. And first, he had to die.
She almost regretted having to do it. The man was such a goddamn good fuck. Well, at least he would go out with a bang.
Reaching beside her, she found her discarded slacks, the belt still strung through the loops. Carefully she opened the heavy belt buckle, with no fumbling this time, and took out the knife.
She palmed it, the blade still safely retracted, and considered her options. A straight cut across the throat would be instantly fatal, but the carotid arteries would geyser. She needed a clean kill. Her best maneuver was to drive the blade into the torso below the rib cage on the left side, then angle it upward, puncturing the lung and perhaps the aorta. Even if the wound didn’t kill him at once, he would be too badly weakened to put up any resistance, and she could finish him with a slash across the back of the neck.
Pierce rolled onto her side, the switchblade snapping open, and then his wrist closed over hers, wrenching hard, his fingers exerting painful pressure on the ball of her thumb until her hand opened and she released the knife.
She stared at the dropped weapon on the sheets, at Donald Stevenson, at the cold amusement in his eyes, and she knew with sudden certainty that she had made a serious mistake.
'Let me go,' she said for no reason, except that the words seemed to come of their own will.
'Not a chance,' he said softly.
She kicked at him and at the covers, trying to gain some traction and propel herself off the bed, but the covers merely skidded under her, bunching up at her feet, and then he was on top of her and there was a knife in his hand.
Not her knife. Not a switchblade. This was a hunting knife, seven inches of carbon steel with serrated edges, and along the ragged line of the blade she saw dark flecks of dried blood.
She parted her lips to shout for help. He slapped her into silence with a blow that nearly knocked her unconscious.
Then there was only her hoarse breathing and a whirl of light and shadow and the pressure of tape on her mouth, sealing her lips, then more tape binding her wrists to the headboard.
She was naked, gagged, bound, more helpless than ever in her life, and it made no sense. Who the fuck was this guy? What the fuck was going on?
Maybe he was her contact, after all. Maybe he’d been instructed to kill her instead of paying her off. But that couldn’t be right. She hadn’t given him any information yet. And now her mouth was sealed, and she couldn’t tell him anything.
It was crazy, just crazy…
Crazy.
The word quivered through her like a twitch, and she understood.
He wasn’t her contact. He was a psycho-and probably a killer.
For the past hour she’d been playing with this man, never suspecting that all the while he was playing a subtler game of his own.
'Handy little item you’ve got,' he said with a glance at the abandoned switchblade on the bed. 'You handled it with a certain professional aplomb. But it appears you miscalculated. I’m the one who’ll cut…'
With his knife he traced a line along her left forearm, raising a thin welt.
'…and run.'
She tried to say something through the tape pasted to her mouth, but no words could get out, and she didn’t know what she could tell him anyway.
He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves from his jacket, then fiddled with her knife, clicking it open and shut.
On the desk chair across the room lay her suitcase. Pierce thought with bitter irony of its contents and what she could have done with them, the awful surprise she could have had for this man.
He noted the direction of her gaze. 'You seem awfully interested in your luggage. I wonder why.'
Getting up, he moved toward the desk chair. She saw him smooth out his jacket, adjust his collar, zip his fly.
He opened the suitcase and groped among its contents. 'Cell phone…toiletries…change of clothes…and this.' He lifted out a sealed metal canister, ten inches long. 'This is interesting.'
She watched him, trying to betray nothing with her eyes.
'There’s liquid in here,' he said. 'If it’s nitro, I’m probably in imminent danger of blowing myself up.' He tossed the canister lightly. 'But anybody can get hold of nitro. Nitro is no big deal. This is something else, isn’t it, Lucy?'
He set down the canister and rummaged in the suitcase’s zippered pocket, where he found her two wallets-
