Deep Under (Tall, Dark and Deadly #4)(33)

“I let it show,” I confirm. “Just in case you wanted to tell me. Clearly you did.”

“Now you know.” She glances at her watch, also a Louis Vuitton. “I need to get to my meetings. I need to get this over with.”

I arch a brow. “That doesn’t sound like someone excited about living a dream.”

“Please stop analyzing everything I say and do. I’m nervous.” She steps around me and heads toward the door, and I’m at the door when she is, pressing my hand to the surface at the same moment hers goes to the knob.

“Myla,” I breath out, that sweet scent of hers teasing my nostrils.

“What?” she whispers, without turning.

“Turn around.”

“No. I-”

“Turn around.”

Her shoulders flex as she inhales, and then rotates, leaning on the door, our bodies close, and it’s all I can do to keep my hand on the wood by her head, instead of on her. “Remember our plan.”

“You act like a cold-hearted bastard and I act like…I don’t notice.”

“Like I’m just another one of the *s around you.”

“But you aren’t just another one of the *s, now are you, Kyle?”

“No. I am not.”

“When are you going to tell me who you really are?”

“When you tell me who you really are.”

“I’ll have to figure that out first,” she says. “Can we go now?”

I am not pleased by this answer that says she’s lost herself while she tried to survive, which is what my father did. It infers that Alvarez has messed with her head more than I wanted to believe. I don’t believe she has an allegiance to him, but I need to be certain. I push off the wall, and she turns, opening the door and exiting our suite. Running from the wrong person, and proving that Alvarez has a hand on her even when he’s not here. I need to step things up before he shows up and make sure the only hands Myla wants on her are mine.





Chapter Nine





Myla





I make a beeline down the hallway toward the elevator, trying to gather my thoughts, but Kyle’s perfectly fitted gray suit, and cool, way-too-interested green eyes are making that impossible. It’s making logic a hard to gather resource, even though logic and a steady handle on everything around me has been my salvation. There is so much adrenaline surging through me, fueling my body where sleep has not, that I can feel my hands and knees trembling. I never tremble. Thus why I spent hours pacing my room last night, trying to understand how Kyle so easily stripped away all my many, carefully erected layers, and then had me crying. Crying of all things! Worse, I have some innate need to trust him and touch him and let him touch me. I mean…the man is pure sex, so what woman wouldn’t want him to touch her? That part I get. It’s the gut instinct to trust, that I’ve tried to lend a reason to and I just can’t. There is no question in my mind that there is more than meets the eye to Kyle. That he might expose this is true of me as well, though, is the immediate problem I’d thought to address by shutting him out.

But as he joins me, falling into step, the way I feel him in every part of me, the way I know exactly how perfectly that gray suit fits his big, muscular body, pretty much says that plan was destined to fail before it began. I should have taken the lusty thing we have going on into consideration with that plan. Right now, every moment I’m with him, actually, I feel a push and pull between us, the pull fighting to win, and in the morning light, I think this is partially about his connection to my past, to Kara. Add to that the fashion line that forces a collision of the old and new me, and it makes sense that the combination proved volatile last night. But today is a new day. That is over, and I cannot blink or it will be noticed by someone other than Kyle, and that could destroy me, and the plans that have kept me pushing forward.

We round the corner, and without looking at Kyle, I punch the elevator button, relieved when the doors open instantly. He places himself in front of the entrance, his broad shoulders and big, delicious body successfully blocking my entry. “Wait for the next car,” he orders, punching the button again.

My brow furrows, and when I’d ask why exactly we’re waiting, another car opens and he nods. “This one’s fine.” He immediately steps toward it, holding the steel doors for me to enter.

Confused, and a bit concerned, by the musical chairs elevator routine, I step into the newly arrived car and head to the left wall, leaning on the hard surface, my hands on the railing behind me. Even as I wonder what just happened, a bit of clarity comes to me in other places. My past coming into the light is what is shaking me up. And why is that when it should be a reminder of why I have to be strong?

Kyle joins me, and as the doors begin to close, I swear the man sucks all the air I was just breathing out of the tiny space. He punches the button for the garage level, and I’m a crazy person because I notice how strong his hands are, how expensive his black Gucci watch is, to which my fashion-adoring mother would have given a thumbs up. He moves then, and when I think he will step away, he places himself in front of me, and all six feet four inches of hot, hard man are a mere lift of a hand from touching me again. One step from making me forget everything I was thinking or might have been about to think, and there lies another part of his power over me and the source of his danger. Just as he consumes the tiny car, and the space we’re sharing, leaving room for little else, he does this every moment I’m with him, no matter where we are. He could make me forget, of this I have no doubt. He could make me let down my guard. He could give me an escape I crave, but at what price?