Written on Your Skin by Meredith Duran Read Free Book Online Page B

of urgency did not bode well. Sicker than he’d realized, with the dizziness coming in waves; cocaine did not combine well with morphine, no. How many grains had she given him? How far apart? The white curtains were glowing with the blue light of dawn. His heart felt as though it were battling through quicksand. In another quarter hour, he would be flat on his back again. Dead or very near it. All her efforts in vain.
    She was looking back at him steadily. She was startlingly beautiful. He had not allowed himself to acknowledge the full extent of her beauty until now; her effect on him had been his greater concern. But she was small. He did not like how small she was. Collins could break her with his fist.
    She cleared her throat. “You’re gawking, sir. It’s unoriginal.”
    “Forgive me. I am…not at my best, half dead.” He realized that he no longer knew how to speak to her, for he had no bloody idea what she was about. “You shouldn’t be doing this.”
    “Why not?”
    “Collins won’t like it.”
    She retrieved the knife from the ground. “Probably not. Try to stand.”
    Yes, he should be on his feet. He felt curiously remote from his own concerns. “What say you? Will I be dead in an hour?”
    She put a hand to her mouth, considering him clinically. “Do you know, Mr. Monroe—I have absolutely no idea.”
    “Well,” he said, for want of any other reply; and this time, when she began to laugh, he surprised himself by laughing with her—a slow, rusty noise that hurt his chest and left him slightly breathless.
    She cupped his elbow and helped him to his feet. Slowly they walked toward the window. He could not make his mind grasp it: he was nearly dead, and his savior was a half-wit with a vice for giggling. But clearly, she was something more than that. He had not been the only one pretending here. How well she had fooled him.
    The answer came to him with sudden clarity. She would not risk herself so flagrantly for a stranger. She must be part of the game. That knife sat in her hand as though she were accustomed to wielding one.
    As she unlocked the bottom shutters, using the blade to break off the latches, he touched her shoulder. “Whose are you?”
    She looked up. “My own, of course.” Straightening, she looked deeply into his eyes, and then startled the hell out of him by pressing a kiss to his mouth. When she drew back, her lips held an odd smile and his own had awakened; they felt full and sensitive from the lingering sensation of hers. “Remember that,” she said. “Remember whom you owe.”
    He forced himself to look away, to the tree outside. It was not an impossible escape route, although most of the branches looked unlikely to hold his weight. But the doctor was coming, Collins’s special friend. If she was telling the truth, if she had no experience in this business, then he couldn’t leave her here undefended.
    “And what else would you do, Mr. Monroe? You’re trembling on your feet.”
    Sloppy. To have spoken that aloud—he was very bad off. “You’ll be alone.”
    “Is there any choice?” She sounded genuinely curious.
    There was never a choice. But the repercussions of his helplessness had rarely tasted so bitter. Running with his tail tucked between his legs might count as a far milder offense than murder, but he had never been so slapdash that someone else was left to face the consequences of his mess. Much less a slip of a girl. “I’m indebted to you,” he said roughly. Such empty words. God help her if she thought it would serve her to have the favor of a man who was not even allowed to make his own decisions.
    “Yes, you are,” she said. She gently urged him onto the windowsill. He paused there to locate his balance; his legs shook, and the dizziness was gaining on him again. She touched his arm as though to aid him—her skin was softer than silk, and he had shoved her away earlier, thinking her useless, a nuisance, an inconvenience he did not need—and then,