Nick watched as Goodie’s eyes opened again, and searched for the panic he could have sworn was there before she closed them, but her ice-blue gaze was now blank, all emotion wiped from her expression. She moved quickly, her mouth crashing down on his and her hands going up into his T-shirt.
‘I want you,’ she told him, her voice husky and unbearably sexy as her hands traced over his abs and the muscles of his chest. He sucked in a sharp breath – he could tell something was off, there was an unnatural desperation about her; but with the woman he had been obsessing over finally touching him, he became incapable of rational thought.
‘Christ,’ he rasped as one of her hands moved down to his crotch and all his ability to think was obliterated. He drove both his hands into her soft hair and took control of the kiss, pushing her back to lie on the duvet he had dumped on the floor. He pulled her hands from him and unzipped her hoody, revealing the black bra beneath. Her body was more amazing than he had imagined (and he had a good imagination and had invested a fair amount of time on this endeavour when it came to her, so that was saying something): she was all defined, toned muscle, combined with softer curves. She was magnificent. She rocked against him and her hands went to his belt, frantically pulling at the buckle. Something about her movements jolted Nick out of his lust-induced haze. He dragged his eyes from her breasts and stomach to her face and he almost flinched. Her expression was blank and her jaw was clenched.
‘Goodie?’ he whispered, and her gaze flew from his belt to his face briefly before focusing just over his shoulder. ‘Hey … hey,’ he muttered, grabbing her hands to still them in her frantic attempts to undo his belt.
‘What is problem?’ she asked sharply, her Russian accent thicker than normal and a frown marring her beautiful face.
‘Where did you go?’ Nick asked, his eyes roving her face. He gathered both her small hands in one of his and reached up to cup her cheek, stroking across her cheekbone and up to her crescent scar with his thumb.
‘I am here,’ she said, jerking her head to the side, away from his touch.
‘No,’ Nick told her, ‘no you’re not here. Where have you gone? Why are you so scared?’
‘Scared?’ Goodie spat, wrenching away from him, and then scuttling back against the units next to Salem, who raised his head in surprise.
*****
Goodie was breathing hard, her exposed chest rising and falling. She desperately wanted to zip her top, but knew that would show yet more weakness. She had perfected the type of meditation that took her out of her own body many years ago. The fact was that there were times in her life that she needed to be able to separate from herself; torture situations being one example, any form of intimacy being another. But nobody, nobody had ever called her on it. Nick made a move forward and she flinched – fucking flinched. What was wrong with her? Salem could feel her tension and flattened his ears against his head, letting out a low growl. She stroked his head and muttered to him that everything was okay in Russian – Salem could smell fear and the only other times Goodie had been as tense as this was when they had been in mortal danger, so she didn’t exactly blame him for his reaction. Nick continued to move towards her, his palms up like he was approaching a terrified wild animal. When he was inches away he reached down to her zipper and surprised her by hooking it together and pulling it up, covering her to just under her chin.
‘Are … are you okay?’ he asked softly, and for the first time since Goodie was eight years old she felt her eyes sting with tears. She blinked rapidly and gritted her teeth. What the fuck was going on? Nick turned and sat next to her on the floor up against the units leaving just a little more space than before, which she was grateful for. They sat in silence for a few minutes.
‘Um, Goodie?’ he asked.
‘Yes?’
‘Look, I don’t want to pry or anything –’ Goodie sucked in a breath preparing to have to explain her reaction to him ‘– but … well, you don’t seem to have the full complement of toes.’
Goodie blinked, letting out a short bark of laughter in her relief (but unusually for her not noticing Nick’s body jolt at that rarity) and staring sightlessly down at her bare feet. Yes, she was two toes down – both her little toes were missing and part of her third toe on her left foot; ugly scars marked where they had once been.
‘I have never noticed this before,’ she deadpanned, curling the few toes she did have into Salem’s fur so that he would settle back down to go to sleep.
Nick sighed. ‘You won’t give anything away, will you. You are the most closed person I’ve ever met. It makes me crazy – do you know that?’ Goodie shrugged. ‘Can’t you just tell me this one small thing? Give me that at least – you know everything about me.’ Goodie rubbed her temple and closed her eyes slowly. After a few silent moments Nick puffed out a frustrated breath and she felt him start to push up to stand.
‘Frostbite,’ she blurted out. She had no idea why, as his questions annoyed her to death, but the idea that he would give up asking them made her stomach clench with actual pain. He eased back down and turned his body towards her. She could feel him watching her face closely.
‘How did you get frostbite badly enough to lose actual bloody toes?’ He sounded incredulous, and weirdly furious, about something Goodie considered relatively trivial. She had been lucky to come out of what happened that winter alive, leave alone largely intact.
‘I lay in the snow for a long time,’ she told him.
‘Why did you do that for God’s sake?’
‘I had to be still, and I had to wait.’
‘Well, that’s just goddamn ridiculous. Whoever ordered you to –’
‘Nobody orders me to do anything,’ she told him. ‘I had a job and I was going to complete it. I knew the risks.’ And she’d finished the job too. The cold had driven her nearly insane and she’d thought she would go blind if she had to stare down the sight of her rifle any longer. Even now she could still feel the surge of excitement as her target finally came into view after so many hours waiting, and the internal battle she had to fight to remain in control of her heartbeat and breathing. She’d resisted the urge to just fire immediately, taken three deep breaths, and on the respiratory pause at the end of the last breath she’d taken her shot. Adrenaline was pumping through her system but she still had to make sure that even after the shot had broken she maintained a slow steady squeeze on the trigger; follow through is everything. So despite the cold and the pain, when she did get her shot she took it; she finished it.
Just like she always did.
Just like she was trained to do.
‘Do you still take jobs like that?’ Nick asked, his big body tensing next to her. She turned to look at him and saw he was scowling down at her toes.
‘I no longer take jobs in the cold.’ She told him the truth. Didn’t matter what the money was, there was no way she’d get that cold again. Anyway there were plenty of jobs to do in the blistering dry heat of the desert or the suffocating humidity of the jungle. Maybe after enough of those she’d be happy to go back to Siberia or Alaska, but she felt it best not to tell him that.
‘What … what exactly do your jobs involve?’
Goodie looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath. For some reason she didn’t want him to see her true nature, to know what she was. But that was stupid. Why should she care what he thought? She balled her hands into fists and made a decision.
‘Sometimes I am asked to acquire information, sometimes I am providing protection or performing an extraction, and sometimes … ’ She trailed off, losing her resolve for him to know what she was capable of. She felt an almost disabling wave of tiredness come over her, and her eyes closed again in a long blink.
‘I’m sorry, honey,’ she heard Nick say softly, his voice sounding far away as she slipped further into unconsciousness. ‘You sleep. I won’t ask anything else. I’m sorry you had to wear those clothes tonight. If I’d known … well, I know I can be a selfish prick and my family can be pushy. You can wear whatever you want from now on. And I’ll call Mum and my sister off, give you some space. ’ His voice had the strangest soothing effect on her; it made her feel safe.
I’m losing my mind, she thought as she finally let herself drift. But she wasn’t fully asleep when she slumped onto Nick’s shoulder, or when he gently lifted her like she was made of bone china to lay her on the duvet. She felt his breath on her cheek as Salem snuggled in next to her on the other side, and then she felt his feather-like kiss on her temple. Finally, before everything went black, she felt her head lifted and rested on his chest, his heavy arms wrapping around her. She didn’t know why she was allowing it. Nothing about the situation made any sense, but for the first time in twenty years she felt a tear slide down her face as she drifted off.
*****
Nick woke to the feeling of cold at his side and sat up. The first light of dawn was trickling through the windows of the boot room and he was lying alone – no Goodie, no Salem, not even the pug was still with him. He lifted his hands to scrub them down his face, an overwhelming sense of disappointment flooding him. He’d taken his life in his hands (he was still a bit leery from the whole knife-to-the-throat experience) when he decided to lift her up and move her onto the duvet next to Salem. Luckily for him she didn’t stir, didn’t even protest when he shifted her so that she was lying tucked into his side. His gut clenched as he remembered watching the lone tear fall from the corner of her eye, over her scar and into her hair. He’d take her assaulting him with a deadly weapon any day over seeing her shed actual tears.
He pushed up to standing and winced as he stretched his back and neck. Lying on the floor of a cramped boot room was not what he was used to. Beds were very important to Nick; one of the only instructions he’d bothered his interior designer with about any of his properties (including his yacht) was: ‘No pink and a fucking good mattress.’ He’d been camping once in his life (for his Duke of Edinburgh Award) and had decided that was quite enough. He thought about Goodie sleeping on the wood floor in his flat by the door, on the tiled floor of the boot room, and then remembered her missing toes. Unlike him, it would appear that home comforts were not high on her list of priorities. On that thought he stepped over the mass of duvets and pillows (not pausing to think that maybe they needed to be tidied away – another thing that Nick was not that big on) and pushed open the back door.
She was standing in her bare fucking feet in the middle of the lawn leading down to the rose garden. The grass was stiff with frost and the temperature was below freezing. Her piercing whistle cut through the air and he saw Salem bounding towards her from the treeline, followed by a far slower and, by the sounds of the snorts and pants he was giving off, struggling Xavier. Nick’s hands bunched into fists at his sides. He was about to storm over to her and physically remove her bare feet from the bloody freezing grass before she lost yet more toes, but the site in front of him stopped him in his tracks.
As Salem ran headlong towards his mistress, Nick realized that the dog was not going to stop. He came barrelling straight at her, reared up so that his large paws fell onto her chest and took her back a step with the force of impact. Christ, he thought, the dog’s turned savage. Just as he was about to run over to intervene he saw Goodie push back against the large animal and both fell to floor, rolling over and over until Goodie had Salem on his back and was tickling his stomach. Salem managed to flip her over again, pin her to the frost-covered ground, and started licking her face. Xavier had at this point made it to them, drooling, panting, snorting and very much the worse for wear, but still able to get a few licks in himself. Then a sound that Nick would remember to his dying day drifted across the lawn to where he was standing.
Giggling.
Goodie was giggling. He blinked: if he’d ever imagined Goodie giggle (which he hadn’t – as far as he had known the woman barely knew how to smile), it would never have been in the carefree way she was now, and when he caught sight of her face in between the licks from the dogs he was even more shocked: she wasn’t just smiling, she was fucking beaming. The joy in her expression transformed her features, her face so beautiful it almost hurt to look at her. He could have watched it all day, it was only the nip in the air and his own breath steaming in front of him which brought him back to himself and out of his spellbound trance. He cleared his throat and started stalking across the lawn. Of course, she heard him; her head shot up from her dog-tickling endeavours (she now had one hand scratching pug’s tummy as well – much to his snorting, grunting, wriggly delight) and she focused on Nick, the light in her eyes and her face dimming until she had pulled back the mask of indifference she was so adept at wearing.
She wasn’t the only one to notice his approach; Salem flipped up from his back quickly as Goodie pushed up from the ground. By the time she was standing he was sitting next to her, ears forward and the picture of obedience, none of the playfulness from moments ago in evidence. Nick was guessing that was the way Salem was trained: never to let his guard down when other people were on the scene, always to maintain a controlled, guarded façade – much like his mistress. Nick focused on her feet, then back up at her face, and tried to tamp down his anger, unfortunately without much success.
‘What in the fuck are you doing out here?’ he asked, coming right up into her personal space and standing toe to toe with her.
