no other after you.”
Asia couldn’t decide if that was a threat or a deadly promise. Still, she had to force herself past her knowledge of the game he was playing with her. She was pushing him too hard. She needed to be his choice, just as he was promising. She needed him to take her with him, and she prayed he would try to do to her what he had done to Kenya. She didn’t have an exact plan per se because she didn’t know exactly what it was he had done, but she was not going to leave him until he told her where her sister was. He would pay, one way or another, but above all else she had to know what had happened to Kenya.
Large hands slid over her hips and waist, and she shuddered at the sensation. It was horrifying, how a caress could be so logically repulsive and yet physically compelling all at once. In truth, she felt the crawling of her skin because she knew what he had done, but it was almost as if…as if the rest of her body was disavowing that knowledge just so it could respond on a purely molecular level. Without her permission, she felt the draw of him that so many other women must have felt. But that was okay, she told herself. She wanted to feel everything exactly as they had. She wanted to do everything exactly as his other victims had.
She had already made mistakes, like avoidance and cringing when his touch had so sharply reviled her. When he had reached in offer to get her to dance, she had been flooded with the irrepressible rage of wanting to hurt him in an act of vengeance. Asia needed to control that fury. She wouldn’t allow herself to destroy her opportunity with wild emotion.
So now she took slow, even breaths and let him press his prodding erection against her pubic mound as they swayed in a rhythm contrary to the music around them. He seemed oddly out of control, like his patience was worn very thin. Was it because he was off schedule and he was eager for his latest kill? His words promised her he wasn’t just looking to get laid. He wanted to get it all off. Whatever it was, he wanted to use her completely to satisfy his needs—both carnal and homicidal, if that was his goal. She could feel it in the desperation of his touch and the way he wouldn’t let her move away from him again.
“That’s quite an unbelievable promise,” she whispered with a sly grin as she snaked two fingertips down the back of his neck in a meandering path of stimulation. “I could be the worst lay in town.”
His laugh of disbelief was flattering and resounding. He was convinced otherwise and he made no bones about it.
“If this was only about sex, I might be worried,” he conceded, “but it isn’t.”
A stupider girl would have taken that charmingly accented phrase as a promise of depth and romance. Many of them probably had. Thirteen of them at the very least. It disturbed her to think her sister had fallen so foolishly into such candied promises. Kenya was not so naïve to be swept away in such ways.
“Then what is it about?” she dared to ask.
“Oh, much more than the physical. Even beyond the spiritual. Once you learn the truth of that, perhaps you will not be as harsh and jaded as you are.”
“You call it jaded; I call it having my eyes wide open.”
“I call it a shame. The pain you American women suffer at the hands of your foolish men only proves to me how lacking they are as a sex and species.”
“You are of their sex and species,” she reminded him with a laugh.
“I am something very different than you have ever known before. This is another promise I can make. In my culture, you would be quite treasured. I would treasure you.”
Yes, of course you would. You would kill me, stuff me, and mount me, getting off on the memory of my screams and death throes again and again as you treasured some trophy from my body.
Asia smiled in contradiction to her poisoned thoughts. “You haven’t even asked me my name,” she noted.
“Nor have you asked mine. I imagined you would ask when you were interested, and you would give when you were ready. I am in no hurry. I don’t plan on losing track of you anytime soon.”
Asia suppressed a shiver and simply smiled up into his pine green eyes again, rather creeped out by her own morbid thoughts. She wasn’t afraid that she couldn’t handle him, it was just how wretchedly sincere he sounded just then. It made her want to scream inside and out. But Asia Callahan, renowned as one of the very best bounty hunters and martial artists in the biz, always got her man, and this one was the most important catch of her life.
Maybe even her sister’s life.
“Let’s go,” she said quite suddenly, her fingertips trailing slowly down the back of his neck in a sensual invitation. “If we’re going to party, I want to get started. Now.”
Julian raised a brow at her sudden and swift change of gears. There was no denying how genuine the invitation was—she did indeed want to get going—but he also sensed she had a not-so-hidden agenda, and it made him hesitate. Oh, had he been anyone else he would have believed the bold beauty he held against his body and her invitation to play, but he wasn’t just anyone else and she wasn’t just any woman.
The question was—who exactly was she?
It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter, he thought fiercely. He had to have her and he would do everything to see that he made her his.
“My place or yours?” he asked roughly as her touch powered through him in racing spears of energy. It could all sound almost normal. Almost real. Julian craved what she offered so artfully, his heart racing to know her and how she would feel in the throes of lusty, energetic screams. “Never mind. You’ll come with me,” he told her in the very next breath.
She gave him another of those enigmatically simple, shallow smiles that never quite thawed the icy calculation in her eyes. Julian did not pay that any mind. She was voluntarily allowing him to take her somewhere private, and that was all that mattered.
He swept her outside of the club, keeping her tight and close to his body. He ignored Vincent’s leer and thumbs-up and hastened his prize to the rental car he had chosen a month earlier. He knew the racy design earned him status in the eyes of some women, and he also knew it would make no impression on this woman in particular. He rather enjoyed that idea. It was indicative of a woman who, for all her fine embellishments, was not dependent on material things. He thought of how useful that would be as he ushered her into the vehicle and hurried to get behind the wheel.
“I need to stop at my car for my purse,” she informed him quickly, leaning her warmth against the length of his arm and trailing fingertips against his chest. He nodded curtly and threw the metallic beast into gear.
Asia snagged her bag from her car, not bothering to check what she already knew was ready and waiting for her within it. Even if he hadn’t stopped as she had requested, she was prepared for that, too. This was just added insurance.
Julian Sawyer was going to regret the day he’d ever laid a hand on her sister.
Chapter 2
Asia was quite familiar with where Sawyer lived and lurked. She knew the entire layout of his rather classy apartment, from the broad living room to the wood-paneled kitchen, and especially the roomy back bedroom where he had taken so many of his nightly conquests. Of course, they hadn’t always made it that far into the apartment. Julian did have the annoying habit of keeping all his shades tightly drawn, so it was only with parabolic microphones that she had learned as little as she had. Tonight that privacy was a deeply felt blessing. If there were newly aware Feds out there watching, she was going to keep them forever guessing over what was really going to happen. She might have preferred the anonymity of her own hotel room, but any agents worth their salt would have followed them there just as easily. At least she knew exactly how well versed he was in sealing his privacy.
The door closed and she tossed her purse down on a nearby chair as she turned and fully confronted the enemy. She wriggled a little slink into her carriage, reminding herself that she was supposed to be there for a good fuck and she needed to keep up that image until she was able