Cruel Paradise (Beautifully Cruel Book 2)

When I merely sit and gape at him in horror, he says, “Swanky neighborhood you live in.”

His smile grows wider. Light from the theater marquee glints off his perfect white teeth. “I guess that old saying ‘crime doesn’t pay’ is wrong.”

The cab pulls away from the curb into traffic. I manage to detach my tongue from the roof of my mouth and sit up straight in my seat. Then I level him with a look that attempts withering disdain, but probably falls miles short of it considering how many of my body functions are on the verge of complete failure.

I say tartly, “You should know.”

“Ah. Sass.” He chuckles. “I wondered what you’d go with. Most people in your situation choose denial. Then the bargaining starts.” He pauses, smile fading. His voice drops an octave. “Then the tears.”

“You won’t get tears out of me. And if you think you intimidate me, think again.”

He arches his brows. “Have you had a recent head injury? Because that’s the only logical reason you wouldn’t be intimidated. I have to assume you know who I am, considering the dramatic exit you and your friends made from the restaurant.”

He waits, watching me with those laser beam eyes and that small, smug smile, radiating danger and masculinity in equal doses.

I hate him.

I’ve known men like him my entire life, and I hate them all.

Holding his gaze, I say, “I don’t have a head injury. And I know exactly who you are. And you should know that no matter what you do to me, how much you hurt me or how long you make it last, I won’t tell you anything.”

A strange look crosses his face. Disgust or disappointment, I can’t tell which. But then the cab goes over a bump in the road and the look disappears, as if it were never there in the first place.

“Are you so eager to meet your maker?” he murmurs, dark eyes glittering.

“I’m eager to get away from you,” I snap back. “So hurry up and shoot me or strangle me or whatever it is you’ve got in mind, so we can be done with it already.”

His strange look returns.

The driver has a strange look now, too, sending a startled glance to me in the back seat as I demand his other passenger kill me.

“Why the hostility?” Liam inquires, sounding as if he’s actually interested. “After all, I’m the victim here.”

A harsh laugh bursts from my chest. “Victim? You’re as much of a victim as I am an orangutan.”

He looks me up and down, his gaze razor sharp as it rakes over my body. His Irish brogue thick with sarcasm, he drawls, “Where could you be hiding your tail, I wonder?”

I stare at him in astonishment.

He’s toying with me. He’s laughing at me. He’s going to kill me, but has decided to have some fun with me first.

The nerve!

I say through clenched teeth, “Orangutans don’t have tails.”

“I thought all monkeys had tails.”

“They’re not monkeys. They’re apes.” Since I’ll be dead soon, I decide to add a little zinger for good measure. “Like you.”

“An ape? I’ll take it. I’ve been called much worse.”

He doesn’t look offended. On the contrary, he seems to be enjoying himself. He’s smiling again, the psychopath.

We ride in silence for a while, staring at each other, until I can’t stand it anymore. I demand, “At least tell me how you’re going to do it.”

His gaze drops to my mouth. He moistens his lips. “Do it?” he repeats, his tone gravelly. His gaze flashes back up to mine. Now his eyes are burning. “Do what?”

“Kill me.”

The taxi driver swerves then overcorrects, throwing me against the door. Liam remains undisturbed in his seat, staring at me with the scorching intensity of a thousand suns.

He says, “I’m curious—”

“You’d like to have a sexual encounter with another man? Good for you. More men should admit they’re heteroflexible. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

A muscle slides in his jaw. His gaze drops to my mouth again. His tone deadly soft, he says, “Oh, I’m crystal clear on my sexual preferences, little thief.”

His dark lashes lift, and now he’s incinerating me with his stare. “I’d give you a demonstration if I didn’t already know how much you’d love it.”

I refuse to break eye contact with this arrogant bastard, though I’m pretty sure I’m going to have PTSD if I somehow make it out of this cab alive.

Liam Black is the kind of violent jolt to the system that takes years of psychotherapy to unwind.

I say, “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I’m not. And stop playing with that knife in your pocket. If you stab me, you’ll only succeed in making me mad.”

I stare at him for a long moment, debating whether or not to go ahead and pull the knife out and lunge at him like I’d been planning.

He presses his lips together. I suspect it’s to stop from laughing out loud.

“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, I’m curious: why donate what you stole from me?”

“I didn’t steal it from you. I stole it from a warehouse.”

“I own the warehouse.”

“No, a shell corporation owns the warehouse.”

“I own the shell corporation.”

I say drily, “One of many.”

“Aye. Too many to keep track. To be honest, I didn’t even know about it before you pulled that stunt.”

“Your minions set it up for you, huh? Just one more way to wash your dirty money?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, in case you’re wondering, you’ve got ninety-six of them.”

“Diaper factories?”

“Shell corporations.”

He pauses, examining my expression. His own reflects deepening interest and what I’d think was a glimmer of respect, if I didn’t know better.

“Have you been studying up on me, little thief?”

“Something like that.”

Ignoring how I threw his own words back at him, he says, “Why?”

“As a general rule, I do my homework before a job.”

He studies me with the same ferocious focus I felt at the restaurant. His attention is like a physical force. A whisper of electricity zinging along my nerve endings. A finger reaching out to tap me on the shoulder.

A sledgehammer crashing into my chest.

He says, “What else did you discover about me in your studies?”

My temper—short even under the best of circumstances—snaps. “I’ll tell you what I didn’t discover.”

“Which is?”

“That you’re so annoyingly chatty. Are you gonna kill me or what? I’ve got better things to do with my time than talk to the likes of you.”

Oh, god, that feels good. Watching the expression of astonishment cross his evil, chiseled features is sweet, sweet, sweet.

I bet he can’t remember the last time someone disrespected him.

Especially a girl.

Score one for womankind.

My sense of satisfaction comes to an abrupt end when he grabs me by both arms and hauls me across the seat onto his lap.

I gasp as his arms close hard around me.

He’s huge and impossibly strong, holding me easily even as I thrash and struggle. When I scream and kick out at the door, the cab driver squawks in panic.

“Hey! No rough stuff! I’ll pull over and throw you both out!”

Liam says calmly, “Pull over and you’ll get a bullet in your skull, mate. Keep driving.”

When the sputtering driver turns the wheel and slows, headed to the side of the road, my captor adds, “I’m Liam Black.”

Thirty seconds later, trapped and seething in his arms as the cab drives straight down the street at top speed, I say through gritted teeth, “Boy, that must really come in handy.”

“It has its uses.” He gazes down at me, helpless in the cage of his arms. “Answer my question.”

“No.”

“No?”

Judging by his tone, he can’t decide if he’s frustrated or amused by my flat refusal. He stares at my profile for a moment, then says suddenly, “You’re not afraid of me.”

He says it like he just discovered the lost city of Atlantis. With surprise and wonder and—weirdly—a touch of pride.

“Let’s just say I have a healthy respect for your ability to make people dead. Now let me go.”

“So you can break into another unsuspecting victim’s business and steal infant care products?”

“So I can jab my thumbs into your eyeballs.”

He clucks. “So violent.”

“I’m not the one who just threatened the driver’s life.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

“Especially not you, the guy who’s about to sink my feet into cement blocks and throw me into the Charles River.”

He bends his head to my ear. His voice drops to a husky whisper. “It would be the reservoir, not the river. But you already know I’m not going to hurt you. Now answer my goddamn question about why you donated what you took from me before I turn you over on my lap and give you something to really be snippy about. Which, let’s be honest, both of us would enjoy.”

Then he inhales deeply against my neck and makes a low sound of pleasure in the back of his throat.

I’m speechless.

My face is flaming, and my heart is pounding, and I can’t get my mouth to form words.

Me, the girl who can talk straight through anything from a root canal to a funeral, cannot find the ability to speak, simply because a cold-blooded killer sniffed my throat.

There must be some kind of mind-altering agent in his cologne.

“I…I…”

He skims the tip of his nose against my earlobe, causing my entire body to break out in gooseflesh.

“Hmm?”

My voice choked, I say, “Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

He’s all feigned innocence, the heartless SOB. “Let me go!”

“If you answer my question, I’ll let you go.”

That surprises me. He doesn’t seem reasonable that way. “Really?”

His chuckle is low and full of self-satisfaction. “No.”

At times like these, I really wish I had super powers. It would be so lovely to manifest a pair of poisonous barbed tentacles to wrap around his thick, smug neck.

“So in addition to being a general, all-around bad guy, you’re a liar, too.”

“Aye. Comes with the territory. But people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, my mouthy little thief.”

His lips move over the sensitive skin beneath my earlobe as he speaks, raising the hair on the back of my neck and sending my pulse haywire.

Then I realize he said “my” thief, and my heart stops altogether.

Because there are far, far worse things he could do to me than throw me into the Charles River. Catching the attention of a man like Liam Black doesn’t have to end in blood.

If he decides he likes me, it could end in something worse than death.

“Easy,” he says gruffly, pulling back to look at me. “What just happened?”

I can’t look at him. My face is on fire, I’m as stiff as a board in his arms, and I can’t risk looking into those dark, burning eyes, because I’m afraid of what I might see reflected back at me.

“Take a breath. Then unsheathe your fingernails from my arm. Then tell me why you’re freaking out.”

I blurt, “Because you’re the most dangerous man in Boston—”

“In the world,” he interrupts mildly.

“—and I’m about to die—”

“We’ve already been over this. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“—and you admitted you’re a liar—”

“Hmm. There is that.”

“—and you’re holding me in your lap and sniffing my neck and…and…”

“And?”

I swallow hard, still not able to look at him, my pulse flying at a breakneck speed.

Then his body tenses.

He deposits me back onto my side of the seat with an expression like he just smelled something rotten and barks at the cab driver, “Pull over.”

The taxi screeches to a stop at the curb. Liam turns his head and pins me in his burning, unblinking gaze.

He growls something in a language I don’t understand, then continues to glare at me.

I say, “Um…”

“Get out.”

My mouth drops open. “You’re letting me go?”

“No. I’m throwing you out.”

Reaching around me, he opens the door and pushes on it, so it swings wide on its hinges. Then he retreats to his side of the car and stares straight ahead, his jaw hard and his energy that of barely controlled thermonuclear rage.

I have no idea what’s happening.

But this isn’t the time to wonder about a notorious gangster’s unexpected mood swings.

This is the time to run the hell away.

I launch myself out of the cab and do just that, disappearing into the night as if it swallowed me.