Infinite Possibilities (The Secret Life of Amy Bensen #2)(17)

“Who is they, Amy?” Liam asks, a command to his voice, his expression grave. “Talk to me so I know what I’m dealing with.”

“I told you, I don’t know.” I grab his hand. “Please, Liam. Let’s go somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

His lips thin and his jaw sets hard. “We’re here tonight. I know we’re safe. We’re staying.” He taps Tellar’s seat. “Go.”

Adrenaline and anger surges inside me and I yank my hand from his. “So there it is. Proof my opinion matters only when I agree with you. I’m a prisoner.”

“Proof that we’re sitting ducks under a streetlight, Amy, and that we have no plan beyond this one. We need a plan. I have private parking at my home and the windows are tinted dark both in the car and my home. No one will know. And once we’re at my apartment, I have the best security money can buy.”

“We can’t stay locked up in your apartment forever.”

“And you can’t keep running forever either.”

“I left everything behind and got out of New York for a reason. What part of that do you not understand?”

“And that reason was what? What spooked you that night I met you?”

I open my mouth and snap it shut as his words replay in my mind. I can handle Amy. The coldness of that statement bites back any confessions about my handler’s existence. “Safety,” I reply simply and still honestly. “I left because New York isn’t safe for me.”

Liam’s eyes harden, his jaw tenses and I sense rather than see, his frustration. “You do know, the more you tell me, the easier it is for me to protect you, don’t you?”

“I was living in New York and I left. That should tell you all you need to know.”

“All that tells me is what I already knew. You need my protection.”

“Why do I keep feeling like that word means captivity?”

He pulls me close, his fingers a tight vise on my arm, his body warm, hard like his voice. “Because that’s what you’ve been in for six long years and I know you want it to end. I want it to end, too.”

“I need my life back, Liam. That’s true, but you taking it over isn’t going to do that for me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, baby. Because that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to get your life back, which means keeping you alive to enjoy it. Even if you hate me in the process.”

He lets go of me and settles back in his seat, staring straight ahead, his body as stiff and unyielding as his declaration. I stare at him a moment, a million things I want to shout at him racing through my mind while I wish away Tellar. Somehow, I force myself to fall back on the seat and stare forward. The next few seconds of silence ripple with tension and electricity, until I’m about to boil over with emotion.

“You are making me crazy, Liam,” I say, twisting in my seat, pressing my hand to his chest. “If we were alone, I would--”

“You would what?” he challenges, tangling his fingers in my hair and dragging my mouth a breath from his. “Because I can think of a lot of things I would do if we were alone right now.” And before I can catch my breath, his mouth slants over mine and he is kissing me, a deep, passionate, emotional kiss, that is anguish and pain, and everything I haven’t said but I feel. “And alone,” he adds softly when his lips gently lift from mine, “can’t be soon enough for me.”

Nor me, I think, my breath coming out in a pant. My body is on fire, nipples aching, a low throb between my thighs. I want him to kiss me again as much as I fear he will and I’ll forget Tellar is here this time.

Somehow I force myself to lower my head to Liam’s chest, to discover the wild thrum of his heartbeat, the proof he is on the edge of the proverbial cliff with me. With me. I like how that feels. I am not alone when I am with Liam.

His hand comes down on my head, a gentle but somehow seductive touch, and my lashes lower. My body relaxes into his, and for the first time in months I’m not thinking about Godzilla. I’m not thinking about lies and trust. There is just Liam.

***

Considering Liam is a brilliant architect who inherited a fortune from a brilliant architect, it’s no surprise that his home is in New York’s ritzy Greenwich Village and resembles a stone castle on the edge of the Hudson River with a tower next to it. But what does surprise me is that in a city where parking is non-existent, we enter through a double metal gate that allows us entry to private parking under the ‘castle’.

“You designed the building didn’t you?” I ask, glancing at Liam as automatic lights flicker to life in what appears to be a four car garage.

“It was Alex’s brilliance I inherited when he passed,” he replies, Alex being his father figure and mentor. “There’s the main house where I live and a fifteen-floor building next door that houses twenty-five luxury apartments.”

“Is this where he mentored you?”

“Yes. It is.” And there is a wistful sadness to his voice that tells me he still misses the man who’d come to mean so much to him.

I wonder what it must have been like to be only thirteen, living in poverty with a single mom and an absent father, and being suddenly pulled into this world of wealth and power. “He changed your life.”