Chapter Nine
Arianna
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WHEN I WOKE, IT WAS to the coldness of an empty bed beside me.
It took me a second to remember exactly where I was. For a moment, I was certain I was in France – I forgot I hadn’t boarded the flight, forgot I had given up on all of that for the sake of chasing after some man who intrigued me.
But then, it all fell back into place, and I lifted my head from the plush hotel pillow and looked around the room. He was nowhere to be seen. I sighed, and flopped back down on to the bed. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but still, there was a part of me which had been looking forward to a morning session before the two of us went back to whatever our real lives had to offer.
I felt a warmth in my belly as I remembered our encounter the night before – damn, it had been good. The way he touched me, the way he had fucked me, the way he had held me afterwards as though he didn’t want to let me go...well, that had all been an act, obviously, because he was nowhere to be seen. I glanced to the bathroom, to check if he was in there, but it was silent, quiet. He wasn’t around anymore. He was gone.
And that was fine by me. I wasn’t going to get hung up on some guy I had only just met. We had both known what this was before we got into it, the way we had both avoided the questions about what we really were and why we were doing this, and I had been lucky to at least get a hotel room for the night out of it. Not that I would have minded hooking up in some back alley somewhere, but still...
I checked my bag, and saw he had left me all my money, thank goodness. Which was curious, too. I thought anyone would have taken the chance to run off with my cash, but he seemed uninterested in money. What was it, then, that had him caught up in such a mess? Was Dean even his real name? I doubted it. Just the way I had done to him, he had kept himself from me.
It was probably for the best. It was just going to be a fun memory I could hang on to, an interesting start to my time abroad. I needed something to kick off the vacation right, and this seemed as good a way to begin as any.
I tried to roll over and go back to sleep, but my mind was buzzing far too loudly with everything that had happened to allow for something as peaceful as that. I needed to blow off some steam. And, now I thought of it, a little steam might be just the tool I needed to do it...
I climbed out of bed, looked around, and tried to see if he had left any small details of himself behind, any indication that he might intend to return. It wasn’t that he had been anything more than a good fuck, but they were hard to find, and I had sort of hoped he would decide to return and spend a little more time with me.
But he was back to his life, just as I was back to mine, and I knew it was for the best we kept it that way. I didn’t need any more drama following me than I already had, and I got the feeling he came with a heavy dose of it. Making my way through to the bathroom, I turned on the taps, and started filling up the large bathtub so I could soak out some of my problems.
My body was aching a little from the time I’d spent with him; being tossed around in bed like that tended to leave a mark on the muscles. But it had been utterly worth it. After so long playing this game with the men I conned, convincing them I wanted them only to pull the rug out from under them the first chance I got, there was something relieving about feeling real, true desire – something I could hang on to, something that couldn’t be taken from me. I didn’t want to let it go.
I leaned back against the tub, letting my head rest against the ceramic lip, and closed my eyes as I tried to bring to mind, once more, how it had felt to be close to him. The way he had looked at me, the way he had taken me, the way he had filled me, as though he couldn’t imagine stopping for a moment – it was unbelievably hot, only intensified by the sureness that this was all we knew about each other. All that mattered was how well we seemed to fit together, even if we knew we were never going to lay eyes on each other again.
Not that I would have minded. And not that I would have admitted that to him, in any case. No chance in hell was I going to go laying myself out on the line like that for someone I had just met, just because my stupid hormones were telling me I should go after him. He was a million miles away by now, I would have bet, and I didn’t have a chance of catching up to him. Maybe he had been using me as an alibi, or just as a distraction, something to fill his mind as he did his best to work out what his next move was going to be.
Still. It seemed strange he had a hotel room just waiting for him. It made me wonder just who he worked for. Someone who was confident in booking out a place like this, which was a pretty mainstream joint; I couldn’t imagine that this hotel would work with a criminal or an enterprise that would bring them ill repute. But then, he wouldn’t have slept with me if he was on some government-mandated mission, would he?
My mind was swirling with questions, but I tried to ignore them. It didn’t matter, it really didn’t, all that mattered was he was gone and he’d left me the hotel room for the night. I wasn’t going to go delving any deeper into any of this. Better to just let it all go and get the hell on with my life.
I was just about to grab a washcloth and lay it over my face to try and calm down my sleep-deprived, puffy eyes, but before I could, something grabbed my attention. I snapped upright, and froze on the spot as I tried to work out what was going on.
Noise. There was noise outside the bathroom, in the hotel room. It was too early for housekeeping by far, so it wasn’t them. Could Dean have come back? Surely he wouldn’t have gone out in the middle of the night with the intention of making a comeback. I scolded myself for being so excited just at the thought of it. My ears pricked, and I tried to make out what was going on out there.
Voices. People talking to each other. Low enough that they had to be men. I felt my entire body tense as I tried to make sense of it, but I couldn’t figure it out. I thought I was safe here, but I could have been wrong.
I slipped as quietly as I could out of the bathtub, laying down a towel so that I could catch my drips and avoid making any kind of noise, and slowly made my way towards the door. I could hear footsteps, heavy, as though they had no need to worry about people hearing them. Whoever they were, they didn’t give much of a damn about being caught. Clearly, they thought they had a right to be here.
I crept towards the door and pulled back the latch I had pushed across on autopilot when I came into the room. The pressure in my chest was starting to build, and I did my best to ignore it. I needed to keep my head. I had no idea what was happening here and I couldn’t let the fear in my stomach get the better of me. I had dealt with worse than this, whatever this was.
Pressing my face to the door, I bit back a squeal of terror when I saw what was going on in the room beyond me. The men from the airport, the ones who had been looking for Dean, they were here – I had no idea how they had tracked me down, how they had managed to find out where he was staying, how they had even worked out that he’d come to Chicago, but here they were.
Here they were, and I was the only one left in this room to take the heat. Shit! Dean must have known what he was doing when he got up and left me here. Maybe that was his plan all along, to leave me behind to ensure there was someone here when these guys caught up with him.
My purse was still over by the bed, the only chance I would have had to grab a weapon; I had managed to stash a gun in there, the one I had taken from Dean, and they hadn’t taken it off me at the airport, for reasons I was still trying to work out. Maybe he had some kind of clearance I didn’t know about? But then, would he really have left me here to take the punishment for whatever crime he’d been caught up in?
Okay. Okay. I needed to keep my head, work out what I was going to do next. There had to be a way out of this, didn’t there? I had found myself in plenty of messes in my life, and none of them had been enough to take me down. My mind was racing, my brain running a million miles an hour as I tried to work out what I was going to do next, and I clung onto what little sensible thought I had left.
I moved back to the door, peering out once more, trying to get a better look at who was waiting there for me. And then, in a split second, one of them turned – and made eye contact with me through the crack in the door.