Seth

Amanda and I sit in the lounge of the private jet carrying us from Vegas to Texas, facing each other, Amanda’s Oriental Shorthair cat, Julie, in a carrier that is buckled into the seat next to her. The end of that damning voice mail from Amanda’s dead mother lingers in the air between us now, echoing in the hum of the engines. Hours of running from our enemies is apparent on my blood-stained jeans and a borrowed T-shirt that covers the bandage on my arm, the wound beneath it left by a bullet. Amanda is not much better for the wear, having replaced her skirt and blouse for a pair of souvenir store sweats, her long blonde hair wind-blown and tangled. The craziness of the past eight hours led us here, to this plane, to that call that takes us back to the past, to three years ago when we’d both received a phone message at almost the same moment. My call had been directly related to Amanda. Her call, the one that she just played for me, was a warning about a kill order on Amanda’s head, which named her assassin as me.

“What were your orders?” Amanda asks, repeating a question she’s already asked but I have yet to answer.

I stand, and by the time I’m on my feet, Amanda is on hers as well. Our actions and skills are not what pit us against each other as trained killer to trained killer, but rather, the circumstances do. Instinctively, I know she does not want to kill me, at least not now, and I have no doubt she knows the same of me. We both want answers. We both want to fuck again, and we both wish like hell we didn’t. My hands come down on her waist, and I use my bigger body to turn her. In a few steps, I have us in the tiny hallway behind the seating area, her pressed between me and the wall.

“My orders mean nothing,” I say. “You leaving, you running instead of trusting me, does.” Her hand closes down on the butt of my gun and my hand immediately covers hers. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Don’t I? Because I’m really thinking I do. When did you accept my kill order? Before or after you fucked me night and day for three straight months?”

Anger ripples through me and I shackle her wrists and not gently, pulling them between us and pulling her to me. “If you believed we were a lie, then that’s about guilt and a crime. That’s not me. That’s not who we were.”

“My mother named you, Seth Cage. You. No one else. Just the man in my bed.”

“Someone inside the CIA leaked my identity as the intended contract holder before I ever got the call. That means nothing.”

“But you taking the order means everything and we both know you took it.”

“If I didn’t take that order someone else would have. And I would have told you I held it. You should have come to me.”

“So that you could kiss me, and make me believe you loved me, long enough to kill me?”

“I would have kissed you and proven that I loved you.”

“Love,” she says dryly. “Right. You said you loved me and that makes it all better.” She doesn’t give me time to respond. “Why did the agency tell you to fuck me? What did they want?”

“You were never my assignment. Ming was, just like he was yours.”

“You keep forgetting that I now know that you were always the Assassin. You can’t tell me that I wasn’t paired with you without the intent of you killing me.”

“Exactly my thought when I got that call. Why did the agency turn on you? And what happened to make them do it when we had Ming within a hair’s reach?”

“I have no idea. I did nothing but serve my country from the day I was born.”

“And yet, when you were in trouble, you ran from me.”

“You held my kill order.”

“And I seem to remember you once telling me you’d trust me with your life.”

“You, Seth. Not the secret assassin I didn’t know you to be.”

“If you really believed I betrayed you, you would have come at me.”

“You had months to plan my murder. I had moments to digest the fact that you not only betrayed me, and fucked me over and over, quite literally, but you also held the kill order for me and my parents.”

“I told you, I took that order so no one else would get it. And they didn’t offer me your parents’ order. I called in after I dealt with Ming, and tried to get it, but they said they were already dead.”

“Wait. You’re telling me that my parents died the night I left you?”

“Yes. They did.”

“Then no. They are not dead. My mother left me another message seventy-two hours after that order was issued. I have the recording.”

“Have you talked to her since?”

“No, but I expected that. Ghost protocol means we fake our deaths.”

“But you didn’t fake yours,” I point out.

Her chin lifts, her gaze colliding with mine. “Maybe I wanted my would-be assassin to show up so I could face him. So he had to face me.”

Something sharp and hard cuts through me. “I would have been here sooner, sweetheart,” I say, my hand sliding under her hair, to cup her neck and drag her mouth to mine, “if you wouldn’t have hidden so damn well.”

“Maybe I wasn’t ready for you. Maybe I am now and I sent you an invitation.”

“Invitation accepted, Poison Princess. I’m right here. What are you going to do with me now?”

“Nothing until Franklin’s dealt with. Then, we face off. Then we conclude our story.”

“Until then?”

“Until then, we tolerate each other.”

My mouth lowers, lingering a breath from hers. “And how do you suggest we do that? By fucking?”

Her fingers curls around my shirt. “As long as you know your kisses will never make me trust you again.”

I kiss her, a deep stroke of tongue against tongue before I say, “And your kisses will never make me trust you again.”

I kiss her again, the same deep stroke of tongue before I pull back, letting the taste of her linger on my lips, our breaths mingling. “Did we ever trust each other?” she whispers.

I pull back, my gaze meeting hers. “Yes. We did.”

“And now there is none. Now we’re enemies. And you—”

“Loved you,” I say, my lips brushing hers. “I loved you, Amanda.” And with that gut-wrenching confession, my mouth closes over hers once more, and while I don’t normally allow myself the dangerous luxury of anger, or hate, I feel those things now. I kiss her with those things in my mind, and on my tongue. I let them bleed into her mouth, bitter and harsh. She betrayed me. She betrayed Danny. She may well have betrayed her country and still, I fucking love her as much as I hate her.

And what I taste on her lips is accusation. She kisses me like I’m the man who betrayed her. Like I’m the man who would have killed her, and it just pisses me off all the more. I tangle fingers roughly in her hair, pulling her head back, forcing her gaze to mine. “It didn’t have to be this way. I didn’t say I loved you. I did. And you loved me.”

“Yes,” she whispers. “I did and that kind of emotion is dangerous. I realized that when I heard your name on that recording and didn’t know what was real or fake. And if it was real, if I was wrong to leave, then you are asking the same thing. There’s no coming back. We will never trust each other again.”

“You’re right. There isn’t. So we focus on the one thing neither of us can fake. Pleasure. Fucking.” I lean back, my legs shackling hers, and reach for my holsters, unhooking them. Shrugging out of both, I set them on the seat around the corner to the left. “No guns. Just us.”

“Fucking,” she says. “Not fucking each other?”

“I’m damn sure going to fuck you, sweetheart. And I’m perfectly fine with you fucking me as long as you do it naked.” I snag the hem of her silk tank she’d hidden under a hoodie earlier. “Just remember. Poison me too soon, and my tongue will never get to all the places you like it.”

“I’m not going to poison you,” she says. “At least, not yet.”

I believe her. She won’t poison me. Not now. She might try later, but that works for me. And even if it didn’t, I still want to fuck her and I’m going to. I tear her tank over her head, my attention shifting to the swell of her breasts in her lacy black bra, my fingers shoving down the material and teasing her nipples. She pants out a breath that I swallow, brushing my lips over hers. “Now we fuck hard and do it again.”

“Yes,” she whispers and then we’re kissing, crazy-hot kissing, drinking each other in, like we’re never going to get a drink again. And maybe we won’t. Maybe one of us will die before this night is over. But that’s how we always fucked and loved. Like there would be no tomorrow.

Her hands shove under my shirt, soft and warm, in that way that I am only warm when this woman touches me, and I tug my shirt over my head, tossing it aside. Her hand comes down on my bandaged arm, her eyes lingering there, the plane shaking around us.

“Amanda,” I say, her gaze lifting to mine.

“You aren’t invincible. One day one of those bullets will hit the wrong spot.”

“Is that another threat?”

“No. It’s another reason not to love me.”

“I didn’t think you needed another reason.”

Her hands move to my shoulders, her eyes darkening, unreadable, as her palms flatten on my shoulders. “Let’s get back to fucking.”

“Yes. Let’s get back to fucking.”

I reach up and unhook the front clasp of her bra, and she shrugs out of it, my gaze raking over her high, full breasts, her rose-colored nipples puckering with the cool air and my hot stare. My gaze lifts to hers, the collision of our stares electric, but a sudden jolt comes from turbulence that sends my hands to the wall above her head, and her hands to my waist. It’s then that I feel the rasp at her finger, which I know to be a film of poison she keeps there. From watching her work, I know that she could use it to kill me with one quick move.