The Art of You

“You really think one of her security guards helped the kidnappers?”

I glanced over at Bella in the passenger seat. “Just a hunch. Hopefully, I’m wrong.” Eyes back on the road, I merged onto the Bronx River Parkway to head into the city and get Bella home.

I’d let Callie walk Bella to her bedroom so she didn’t trip in her dress, but I’d be parking my ass on the couch downstairs for as long as it took until I knew everything was good.

I rested my free hand in my lap, curling my fingers into a fist. At least now I had the comfortable weight of my Glock at my back, hidden by my suit jacket.

Bella tapped at the screen on the dash, turning on music. If that put her at ease, I was all for it. “Oh, Teddy Swims. I love this artist.” She leaned back in her seat, drumming her nails on the skirt of her dress, seemingly more at peace.

“So, your nerves from before are gone?” I couldn’t help but press.

“Mmmhmm.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Close enough to one,” she chirped.

The challenging little hitch in her tone had me easing up off the pedal. She was still hiding something from me, and I was fairly certain that something had to do with the reporter.

“I can’t let this go, and you know it. First, you mentioned being watched. And then that thing happened with you and Kit. What’s really going on?”

After a few moments of only Teddy Swims’s voice between us, she finally gifted me with hers. “How about you start first? Something had you distracted at the party beforehand, too. What’s the story there?”

There was only one person in all of human fucking history who could turn the tables on me and get me to bend to their will, and it was the woman parked next to me with pouty lips and expressive light brown eyes.

Not today, though.

“Okay, okay. To be honest, running into Kit tonight made me feel better.”

I faked a laugh. “Didn’t look that way.”

“Realizing she was behind it . . .” She let her words trail off, leaving me hanging.

I gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary. “Behind what?”

She looked away from me. “We should save this conversation for later. But if you want to talk about your issues, then by all means, go ahead.”

“The mission was a success. Lola’s alive and safe. And, hopefully, all the bad guys in connection to her kidnapping are now either in custody or dead. If not, we’ll deal with it.” I shook my head. “So, the only immediate issue I need to deal with is sitting next to me.”

We didn’t need to talk about my problems when she was the problem. Testing me at every turn since our op in Rome. And I was failing miserably at keeping my mind from going there. To all the fucking theres that could ever be involving this woman naked and in my arms as I made her come.

“Seeee.”

Whenever she elongated a word like that, I couldn’t help but wonder how a breathy and dragged-out yes would sound coming from her mouth instead.

“If you were okay, you wouldn’t be snapping at me.” She pointed at the front window. “And you should have your eyes on the road and not on me so you don’t kill us, thank you very much.”

I pinned her with one of my signature looks—the kind I used to get criminals to talk during interrogation. Somehow, the dark expression seemed to have the opposite effect on her.

Did she realize she was tracing her thumb along the line of her mouth? A mouth I’d thought about doing some problematic things with. I was getting close. Really, really damn close to actually snapping, and not in the way she’d said I’d done.

I was on the verge of begging my best friend’s sister for just one night. One hard, hot fuck. One opportunity to get whatever this was clear from my system so I could stop wanting her all the damn time.

I mean, God help me, how much more could I put up with from her and not give in?

I still had no clue how she’d spent a weekend at my place a few months back without her winding up beneath me in my bed. Without me tearing off that fucking string bikini she insisted on strutting around in. She even went so far as making us grilled cheese sandwiches in those two little triangle scraps of hot pink, like it was the most normal thing in the world. The number of times I had to stroke my cock in the shower so I didn’t ask her to sit on my face was⁠—

“Hudson.” She reached for the hand on my lap and patted it, too damn close to discovering the bulge that’d formed while I was lost in memories of that weekend. “You seem tense.”

“You’re making me that way.” Double meaning fully fucking intended. “Just tell me what’s going on.” I did my best to wrestle the conversation back to her issues and away from mine. Maybe I really did have more than one. There was no discounting the fact I’d have sworn I saw someone I used to know at the party. No way it would’ve been him. And he definitely hadn’t been on the list. But that uncertainty lingered, pulling at my focus, and my sanity.

“Eyes on the road, not on me. Remember?” She returned her hand to her lap, thank God. “The weather is shit⁠—”

“The weather is just fine.” That was a lie. I could feel a storm coming, not that I’d admit it. “Now talk.”

She peeked out her side window, searching for something that wasn’t there, like my patience. “Well, it feels like rain is coming.”

“It does, does it?” I finally relaxed my grip on the steering wheel, realizing I was white-knuckling the thing.

She straightened in her seat, hands now chasing up and down her arms as if cold.

I reached out to turn on the heat as she shifted in her seat again, the slit in her dress parting and exposing her entire leg. My hand went still on the control panel, and I momentarily forgot about the road and the heat.

“Hudson. Where are your eyes supposed to be?”

Not on your legs.

At her gasp, I jerked my attention to the road ahead, realizing I was close to swerving into the oncoming lane. Thankfully, no one was there.

And I was done talking about the damn weather. “You’ve yet to answer me,” I reminded her, trying to get things back on topic.

“Oh, was there a question you asked?”

The sass in her tone took effort that time. I knew her well enough to know she was faking that bit of attitude to dodge whatever it was she was scared to share.

Before I had a chance to demand an answer from her again, my phone rang, and I couldn’t forward this one to voicemail. It was Special Agent Adelina Cattaneo, the one I’d called in for help at the last minute for the kidnapping case. The music stopped so the call could come through over CarPlay.

“Hey, everything good? Lola okay?” I asked Adelina upon answering, hating Bella had earned herself more time to evade our conversation.

“Yeah, she’s a tough girl. She owes you all her life,” Adelina was quick to respond.

Having moved to the U.S. later in life to attend college, her Italian accent was more prominent than the Costas’. She’d become a citizen with one goal in mind: become an FBI agent to help find her sister who’d been kidnapped when she was three. Sadly, she never found her twin, but she’d saved a lot of other lives working for the Bureau.

“Will you catch hell from your boss for not giving him the heads-up about the op tonight?” The last thing I wanted was for her to get into trouble.

“Not much he can say. Your father’s got my back. Plus, in the director’s eyes, this is a win for the Bureau. He can act like the FBI really saved the daughter of a high-profile diplomat and all that. You know how that goes.”

“Yeah, I don’t miss that shit,” I admitted. “Did my team give you a heads-up about my concerns regarding the ambassador’s security detail? It’s only a gut feeling, but we should keep an eye on them. Dig deeper into their backgrounds since we’re not under the gun to save Lola now.”

“I think it was Constantine Costa who called me. He’s, uh, an intense one, huh?”

“To say the least,” I said while glancing at Bella. She was staring out her window, making it impossible to get a read on her.

“You alone right now?” Adelina asked tentatively.

No, the sexy bane of my existence is with me.

I’d swear Bella heard my thoughts. She shifted in her seat and rolled her eyes before flicking her wrist toward the road. There was a wreck up ahead.

“No, I’m with Isabella Costa,” I finally remembered to answer. “She attended the party with me. You know, for appearances’ sake.” Thankfully, nothing went sideways tonight, and Bella had never been at risk.

“Ah, I see,” Adelina mused, probably reading more into my comment than she should have.

I got off the parkway to take a back road so I could avoid the standstill traffic.

“Well, when the dust settles from all of this, let’s get lunch. There’s something I want to tell you.”

“A good something?” I never knew when it came to Adelina.

“Definitely a good something.”

Thank God for that. The woman deserved it.

After we exchanged a few more words and ended the call, I pulled up Google Maps on the dash to find a new route.

When I was all set, Bella began scrolling the music app for another channel. “I know she’s FBI, but how well do you know her? You two sound close-close.”

Was that jealousy in her voice? Not that there was anything to be jealous about. “We were at Quantico together, then assigned to the same FBI field office here in New York. We stayed friends after I left the Bureau.” Not on any kind of deep level, though.

Adelina didn’t know my secrets, and I didn’t know hers. She didn’t even know I was running private security ops on the side until yesterday.

In truth, though, I didn’t really make it a habit of having female friends, especially after Bianca died. The only exception I’d made was sitting next to me now.

Bella and I had never been that close when she was younger. It probably had to do with our decade age difference and the fact I’d been away in the Navy a good chunk of her life. She’d wound up spending a few years in London for work also.

When we were finally living in the same city again, she’d become busy dating assholes that had me wanting to throat-punch them on the regular, which meant I had to do my best to avoid her and her boyfriends as much as possible.

But lately? Lately was a different story. With her now thirty-two, that ten-year age gap felt like it’d been whittled down to only a handful of years. The math didn’t need to math, it was just true; I no longer felt that much older than her.

The biggest transformation in our relationship started when we began working together. Side by side. All. The. Fucking. Time. I couldn’t avoid her. She was always there, invading my space. Personal and private.

I was now as close to her as I’d once been to Bianca, maybe more. And that terrified me. Bianca’s death gutted me. If I were to lose Bella for any reason, I’d never recover.

“Oldies again it is,” Bella said after adjusting the radio, settling on a new station playing “Hungry Eyes.”

“Kill me now if music from the eighties is considered oldies.” Because I am not that old.

“Okay, we’ll rebrand the beats and call them classics,” she said decisively, and I could work with that. “So, um . . . does Adelina work kidnapping cases or counterterrorism like you once did?”

“Kidnapping. Her sister was taken when she was three. They were twins. Not identical.”

“Oh God. That’s horrible.” The pain of her own past had to be crushing her now. “She never found her sister, did she?”

“No.” Her sister is most likely dead. My stomach wrenched, and I couldn’t help but say the first thing that came to mind. “Your nerves earlier, they have something to do with Bianca?”

She immediately looked off to the right and away from me.

“Dammit, Bella.”

“If I tell you, I’m worried you’ll slam on the brakes and turn around and go back to the party.”

That definitely had me slowing down, and I checked the rearview mirror, ensuring no one was on my ass, ready to plow into us at my abrupt change in speed.

I’d only been going forty since we’d yet to get back onto the main road, but as Bella had called it, it was now raining hard, making visibility borderline shit.

I flipped on the windshield wipers to full blast. “And why will I turn around?”

“Because you’ll want to go and yell at Kit for what she did to me. Then you’ll make a scene, and your father will lay into you, and she’ll get the story she clearly wants.” She balled her hands into fists, resting them on her thighs. “Eyes. Road.”

“What story? What’d she do?” I was on the edge of insanity, and I was slipping fast into the depths of totally losing it if she didn’t talk soon.

“Ugh, fine, but first you have to promise you won’t head back to the party.” She twisted on her seat to face me.

“Do you want me looking at you or the road?” I shot back, growing tenser by the second. “Make up your mind.” I’d meant my words lightheartedly, but they came out more demanding than I’d intended.

“At a total stop would be preferable.”

“Fine.” We were in the middle of nowhere, and according to the dash synced to my phone, we had a weak cell signal. Against my better judgment, I pulled over to the side of the road. “Okay. Now talk.” I parked, took my foot off the pedal, and turned toward her so she’d have my undivided attention.

I waited for her to talk, listening to the swishing sounds of the windshield wipers as Eric Carmen’s voice faded out.

My patience collapsed when she closed her eyes instead of parting her lips to talk.

“Bella—” I cut myself off when a call came through from Constantine. Frustrated, I turned toward the display and answered it with a harsh, “What?”

“I’ve been trying . . . reach . . .” And signal lost, dammit.

I tried getting through to him two more times but the call wouldn’t even connect. “We should get out of here. This conversation will have to wait.” I caught sight of the panic in her eyes before she faced forward, holding on to the side handle.

“I got you, don’t worry,” I promised as I shifted into drive.

I barely had time to get us on the empty road before catching sight of the soft glow of headlights coming around a sharp curve up ahead.

“Oh my God,” she cried out. “They’re coming right for us.”

“Brace for impact,” I yelled, doing my best to dodge a direct hit by aiming for the side of the road.

Avoiding a collision completely was impossible, but instead of a head-on, the other vehicle sideswiped us. With the slick roads, no amount of weight I put on the brakes or steering wheel would keep us straight, and we spun in the other direction.

From the corner of my eye, I hissed out her name, realizing she’d slammed the side of her head into the window at the abrupt movement to the right.

“Bella,” I hollered again, on the verge of reaching for her, but my intention was derailed when we were hit again.

Like hell was this a weather-related collision. Everything happened fast. The seat belt jerked my body, catching some of my weight, but my head whipped forward anyway. I turned the moment before my face made contact with the steering wheel so I didn’t break my nose.

I barely registered the fact my airbag didn’t deploy, but Bella’s did. From my peripheral view, I noticed hers had ballooned out, keeping her face safe.

My head was spinning. Blood slid down the side of my face, hitting my eyelashes. I tasted it in my mouth as I tried to understand what happened.

I did my best to look over at her as my ears rang, a feeling of nausea gathering in my stomach.

“Bella, are you—” My words died when we were hit a third time, the other vehicle slamming into my side of Enzo’s Porsche. I brought my arm up in front of my face, hoping to avoid hammering it into the steering wheel again. We flipped and slowly rolled over onto the roof.

Everything went black for a second or two as my mind tried to process what happened. It took me a moment to understand we were hanging upside down, our seat belts still holding both of us in place.

Twisting my head, fighting the violent pain in my skull, I worked to put eyes on Bella. “Are you okay? Bella?”

Her arms were hanging limp, and she wasn’t moving. She’d lost consciousness, and based on how I was feeling, it was likely I wouldn’t be able to keep my eyes open much longer, either.

I had enough experience with head injuries to know what was coming.

“Bella.” I went to reach for her arm, but my 9mm fell from the back of my pants, sending me quickly securing hold of my Glock instead.

I began to replay the last several minutes in my mind, trying to focus. Constantine was calling to warn us about something, and I had a feeling that something was now outside the car.

Fighting with every last breath I had to stay awake, I waited for the person to come into view so I could handle them.

But the dizziness from the crash had my eyes falling closed despite my resistance to stop it. Everything became a blur.

And I was no longer in the car. Not even in the country.

Fucking hell, the crash and multiple hits to the head sent me back to the last place I wanted to be. To Afghanistan.