Perfect Strangers

His beautiful blue eyes harden. “Not the kind of men you’d enjoy spending time with as they smuggled you back to the States.”

So they were Chris’s hired hands. Mercenaries. He made good on his threat. “How did they find me? The hotel clerk checked me in under an assumed name.”

“Did you use a credit card?”

Shit. Note to self: next time you’re running for your life, use cash. “Why would he hire them if he couldn’t trust them to treat me well?”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“I don’t understand.”

He pauses for a moment to gaze at me, his expression unreadable. “It doesn’t matter now. They’ll never find you here. No one will ever find you here. This is the only place on earth you’re truly safe.”

I take another swallow of whiskey, watching him over the rim of the glass. When I lick my lips, he follows the motion of my tongue with burning eyes. I inquire calmly, “Am I your prisoner?”

His tone turns suggestive. “Only if you want to be.”

“So I could walk out of here right now and you wouldn’t stop me?”

“Of course. But you won’t.”

His confidence sends a flare of irritation through my stomach. “I might.”

He huffs out a small, amused laugh, then rises from his chair to go stand at the windows. Dusk paints him in a palette of purple and gold. Looking out over the lavender fields, he says quietly, “You might…if you weren’t in love with me.”

He turns his head and stares at me. There’s a challenge in his look.

When I don’t respond, he strolls back toward me, his sharp gaze never leaving mine. Then he sits beside me on the sofa, takes the glass from my hand and sets it on the coffee table, and drags me onto his lap.

I don’t fight him. There’s no use in denying I’d rather be here than anywhere else, even if he is what he is.

The killer that he is. The man who takes money to end lives and makes himself feel better about it by drawing portraits and giving the proceeds to charity.

I close my eyes and rest my head on his shoulder. His arms come around me and cradle me tight. I whisper, “This is madness.”

“It’s the opposite of madness. This”—he squeezes me—“is the only thing that makes any sense.”

As I listen to the steady thump of his heart, I wonder if he’s right. Has the world gone so insane that I’m safer in this killer’s arms than anywhere or with anyone else?

“Tell me about that night, when I walked in on you and Chris in my apartment.”

“He didn’t know who I was when he opened the door, because he’d never seen a picture of me, but I recognized him instantly.”

“You talked about me with him?”

“I informed him who I was. He assumed I’d been hired to finish the job the other hitter failed at. When he discovered that wasn’t the case, it didn’t take him long to figure out what was really going on. And to freak out about it.”

I recall how enraged Chris was when he asked if I was fucking James. Sadness pierces my heart like the tip of a spear. All those years I believed my marriage ended because my husband didn’t care enough, all the pain I suffered believing I wasn’t loved, and the truth is that he cared so much he walked away instead of selfishly staying.

He left me to save my life.

But he wouldn’t have had to if he wasn’t facilitating the trade of chemical weapons from one bunch of savages to another. If he hadn’t been doing that, there would have been no need to walk away.

And our daughter would still be alive.

No matter if his motives for leaving me were good, I can never forgive him for what happened to Emmie. For all the terrible choices he made that led directly to that.

After a long time where we just sit quietly, twilight deepening to gloom around us as shadows creep farther and farther up the walls, James says, “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I was just wondering how one gets into your line of work.”

His laugh is a pleasing bass rumble passing through his chest. I close my eyes, letting myself be lulled by it. “Through a long series of strange occurrences. It started when I was in the Army. Apparently my test scores showed a certain moral flexibility that the government found interesting. I won’t bore you with the details.”

“The Army? Was that before art school?”

A smile creeps into his voice. “I never went to art school. That’s just part of a carefully crafted bio in case anyone takes too close a look at who I am.”

I don’t realize my mistake until several moments later: there’s no way I’d know about his phony art school education unless I took too close a look.

He whispers into my ear, “I get a notification whenever someone investigates my background. Someone, for instance, named Mike Hanes who works for the FBI.”

Fear for Mike and Kelly makes my entire body turn cold. “It wasn’t his fault,” I say quickly. “I asked him to do it as a favor. He’s the husband of my best friend, and I was only trying to protect myself—”

“It’s all right,” he reassures me, tipping my head up with his fingers under my chin so we’re gazing into each others’ eyes. “I know why you did it, and they’re not in any danger from me. They didn’t discover anything I didn’t want them to know.”

He pauses briefly to run his thumb over my lower lip. “What I’m really interested in is why you chose to keep seeing me after you discovered what’s in my medical file.”

I’m about to answer him truthfully when all of a sudden it feels as if the floor has dropped out from under me. Because if his education was manufactured…

“Oh my God. You’re not dying of ALS, are you?”

He chuckles. “I’m as healthy as a horse. But every five years or so, I kill myself.”

I stare at him, not understanding the words he’s speaking.

“As a change of cover,” he explains, as if this is a commonplace thing. “It’s a normal precaution in my line of work. It’s much harder to track a dead man. I shed identities like a snake sheds its skin.”

I can’t decide if I’m furious or relieved. My brain throws its hands in the air and gives up, leaving me to fend for myself in this mosh pit of craziness that is my life.

I climb out of James’s lap and stand staring down at his handsome face.

Then I slap him across it as hard as I can.