Pretty Little Lion by Suleikha Snyder
16
“Stay put” and “sit tight” were bits of advice that Elijah was brilliant at handing out and absolute shite at taking himself. The itch of having to wait things out spread from the back of his neck and along his shoulders as he parked the company car in the riding school’s employee lot and hopped out to swap the license plates. Or maybe that was just the weight of Meghna’s gaze on him, coolly assessing his every move. The plate switch took mere minutes, as did the walk to the members’ clubhouse and cabanas where Jackson kept his secret suite, but Elijah was aware of every excruciating and arousing second of her study.
He’d mostly left her alone with her thoughts after word of her places going up in smoke came in. He was learning that giving her space, not pushing her to open up, actually brought her closer. Funny how he’d figured that out, picked up her cues, the changes in her scent that signaled her comfort or her lack of it. They’d only really known each other a few days, but it already felt longer. Maybe him studying her all that time had led to this strange shorthand between them. Maybe it was the fucking. Maybe it was something else—the bond between two people working toward a common goal. No. Who are you kidding, mate? It was probably the fucking. Meghna might’ve turned sex into a transaction, into a job, but he wasn’t nearly so mercenary about it. He could count the number of women he’d slept with in the past decade on one hand—the last someone he’d met at his cousin’s wedding in East Ham. He and Janice had kept up emails and texts for a short while, but Third Shift came first for him. He’d ghosted her without meaning to…earning a blistering lecture from his mum about “breaking a nice Jamaican girl’s heart.” “Maybe I’m not cut out for ‘nice girl,’ Mum. Ever think of that?”
Meghna was not a nice girl, by her own definition. By his…she was a fascinating, infuriating, beautiful woman. One who slipped off her shoes just inside the door of Jack’s suite, subtly pushing him to do the same. She wandered ahead of him into the space, taking in the floor-to-ceiling murals that distracted from the lack of windows and the track lighting along the ceiling that illuminated the art and the sunken living room. The king-size bed was off to the left, raised up a few steps, decorated in shades of bronze and silver. The furniture was in similarly muted metallic hues. Because the walls…the walls were Jackson’s soul. Vivid splashes of red and blue and purple telling a story that only his best friend could interpret.
“What do you think?” he asked as Meghna walked the perimeter of the room, a mimicry of what she’d done that night at Aston’s party, except barefoot and in a far more conservative outfit.
And just like that night, she came to stand before him. “I think it fits him,” she said simply. “The leather couches, the boring knickknacks, the bronze and silver and gold…that’s who he shows the world. The paint? That’s who he is inside.”
She’d taken Jack’s measure effortlessly. Like some people took a breath. Bloody brilliant. It made Elijah wonder… What did she make of him? What had she learned from their time together? How many layers of his skin had she peeled back so far? Did she know his weaknesses? Would she exploit them? He wasn’t sure he cared.
Somewhere, Danny Yeo was laughing at him. Last month, in the middle of the tangle with JP and Aleksei Vasiliev, the junior operative had warned him of—or maybe cursed him with—the devil of this thing growing inside him. “You’re always doing things for the greater good. But have you ever, ever done something for just one person? Risked it all for them? Have you ever loved someone that much?” He was risking a whole hell of a lot right now for this woman. He wasn’t about to call it love—not yet—but it was obsession and passion and hunger and need. “Who am I inside?” he wondered hoarsely. “You know yet, Meg?”
She brought her hand up to his cheek. Her touch was cool, but her eyes…oh, her glorious eyes were on fire. “Give me time, Elijah,” she purred, like the cat he could’ve sworn she was. “I’ll know every inch of you.”
He couldn’t say who kissed who first. Him. Her. They came together as equals. Closing the inches, the centimeters, the kilometers, and the miles. Her palm skated up behind his head to cradle his skull. He enfolded her in his arms. It was every bit a dance, choreographed by forces he couldn’t have named on pain of death. Her mouth led, his followed. Fuck, she tasted so sweet. Not like a quick fuck in a closet or a hot shag in the car, but something almost honest. Elijah groaned and leaned into it, deepened it, chased it, and held it.
She gasped his name into his tongue. “Elijah.” Music to their steps. To how they stumbled together toward the bed. Meghna pulled at his locs. He tugged at her jeans. They got naked and tangled and tripped. Not a smooth number, but something chaotic and clumsy. Modern dance, not a sodding waltz. He kissed behind her thigh. She licked under his sac. He damn near put his fist inside her. She damn near swallowed him to the root. She was a fucking goddess when it came to sucking a bloke off. And he understood it, even as he was helpless against it. There was power in how she licked his cock. In how she played with his balls. He would give up the security code to Fort Knox, the key to the Crown Jewels, the location of the Holy Grail, just to keep her mouth on him.
But he wanted more from her. And he wanted to give her more, too. So he wrapped his fingers in her hair and urged her up, face-to-face. Where she was just as vulnerable as he was. No games. No lies. No power plays. Just the two of them with everything laid bare. Everything except one thing. He broke away just long enough to rummage in the silver, steel, and glass nightstand, sheath himself in a condom, and slick up his cock and his fingers with lube. She was wet already, but their fuck in the car had been none too gentle. He wanted this to be easier in every way possible. She sighed and gasped under his preparation, bucking up to take his fingers, to help spread the lubricant he drizzled from the small bottle. “You don’t have to be careful with me,” she murmured, even as she accepted and opened to the contrary.
“Yes, I do, Meg,” he whispered, sinking into her inch by precious inch. “And I want to take care with you. I want to take my time.”
They had nowhere else to be. Nothing else to do but wait. Everything to lose. Everything except, at least in this moment, each other.
* * *
It could’ve been hours that she spent in Elijah Richter’s arms being kissed and caressed and brought to repeated orgasm. It could’ve been minutes. It was so consuming, so dizzying, yet so strangely fleeting. Meghna only confirmed that they’d managed to while away most of the day when he left the bed to wash and she went looking for her purse and her various devices. There were three missed calls from her assistant on her business phone. A slew of frantic text messages and emails from sponsors and industry friends. She ignored the latter and listened to the former. The first two were professional but slightly passive-aggressive inquiries on her well-being and whereabouts. The third was to inform her that Em had taken the liberty of sending out a press release about Chase’s shooting and how “Ms. Saxena-Saunders appreciates your thoughts and prayers in this difficult time.” Unspoken but heavily implied was that Em would appreciate actual correspondence from her employer at some point in the next twenty-four hours. Meghna made a mental note to give the PR wunderkind a substantial raise while she thumbed out a quick “thank you” and a vague implication that she was in hiding from the paparazzi.
Em had been with her since before Chase. The formidable fortysomething from Montreal was a former publicist for one of the CBS soaps. She’d begun representing individual celebrities and athletes after her show got canceled, like so many of the grand old daytime dramas over the past two decades. Meghna had wooed her away to exclusive personal assistant work with a hefty paycheck and a promise of more autonomy than most famous clients gave their people. It more than served her purposes to have Em in charge of all her non-Vidrohi affairs, freeing her up for her real commitments. Not like the commitment you made to Chase, right? Who needs that? Her conscience, usually muted for her own sanity, managed to land a vicious blow before slinking back to its cave in the back of her mind.
Meghna shuddered, tossing her phone onto the nightstand and trying not to consider that it was symbolic of how she’d tossed her husband aside. She reminded herself again that their split had been entirely mutual and entirely amicable. He didn’t expect her to rush to his side in the ICU. For one thing, as per Joaquin’s reports, his newest girlfriend was already there. For another, she couldn’t make him, or herself, more vulnerable than they already were. Mirko had targeted Chase because of their past relationship. What damage would he do if he thought there was a present bond? Who else would he go after? Em? Her father? Her social circle?
Meghna was on a text chain with several other media personalities and celebrities of color. It had been running for years. Back when the most controversial topic was how many towels somebody owned. Before 2016. Before 2017 and 2018 and 2019. So many years where the messages became how to get out the vote, how to stay positive, and “How political is too political in your Instagram stories?” Among this chain were journalists, two TV actresses, and an Oscar-winning movie producer. People she knew had her back if scandal broke. People whose careers she would always support. People who had no idea that she was an apsara and even less of a clue that she was actively involved in rebellion and sedition. Not just voter mobilization campaigns and fruitless fundraising to flip the Senate seats they hadn’t gained in 2020. They’d cried together after the presidential election went red in 2016, making the Darkest Day the Drunkest Day, too. And then, two days later, Meghna went out and made sure a Republican lieutenant governor with a taste for beating up sex workers had a heart attack in his bed. If it also appeared that he’d fallen out of bed and hit his face a couple of times before finally croaking…so be it.
Denesha kickboxed to blow off steam. Waheed did yoga and meditation, though he insisted on calling it “mindfulness” so as not to culturally appropriate. Hallie and Honey, who were sisters, loved their Wino Wednesdays. Meghna killed in the name of Vidrohi. She was always going to be two steps removed from the Text Chain of Doom, from the friendships it should have strengthened for her. No one in her life saw her real face. Not even her father.
They talked once a week. A perfunctory call with occasional prodding for her to find a nice man and settle down. As if such normalcy was even achievable in this hellscape of a world. As if he and her mother had given her a rosy view of the institution of marriage. Daddy had no idea that her rebellious phase had lasted far longer than the protests outside his munitions factory. That she no longer had to dye streaks in her hair to feel like an edgy outsider, because she’d found something so much edgier. Her knives.
But none of the distance between her and her celebrity text buddies or the awkwardness between her and her father would matter to Mirko Aston. He would use those connections, destroy them if he could. She couldn’t allow that. But she couldn’t stop it either. Not right now. Not without putting her own safety in jeopardy. So that meant compartmentalizing. That meant locking the memory of Chase’s sunny smile and dirty jokes in the vault next to her conscience. It meant focusing on what was immediate and present and closer than everything she regularly pushed away. Like Elijah.
She watched him emerge from the bathroom and pull on his boxers, tugging the soft cotton plaid over the frankly glorious globes of his ass. It was a shame to cover up a butt like that. It deserved a billboard next to hers in Times Square. “Why did you choose me as your entry point to Mirko’s organization?” she wondered, tucking her arm behind her head, hoping he hadn’t noticed the tension of her clenched fist, of her clenched jaw. “Because women are easy?”
“Because sex is easy,” he was quick to reply, as if expecting her to level him with a well-deserved feminist diatribe. “Or at least it’s supposed to be. You’ve said it yourself. It’s the job. And it’s a way in that doesn’t involve bloodshed. Low risk, high reward, innit?”
“Normally,” she agreed. “But I’d say we’re risking quite a bit now, aren’t we? We’ve compromised ourselves and our missions.”
That was when sex became the most complicated thing in the world. Not a slap of bodies for transactional purposes, two people using each other to get off and get ahead. There was nothing remotely easy about her and Elijah Richter choosing to go to bed together again and again after that initial bout of dalliance and deception. About getting used to it. Finding it…comfortable. It had only been a handful of days, but she already knew how the lines of his body felt under her palms. And how biting the meeting place of his neck and shoulder made him moan. She knew blow jobs wrecked him entirely and that he was never satisfied by fucking until she was wrecked, too. And she craved that gentle intimacy of waking up with him. Those early hours in the car where they weren’t operatives, they weren’t running a play, they were just Elijah and Meghna. Two lovers striped and warmed by rays of the rising sun.
Yes. She was most definitely compromised.
“Do you regret it?” He climbed back under the covers with her, turning on his side and propping his head on his hand. “You’re the one who pulled us over on the road, love. I wouldn’t’ve laid a hand on you again without your say-so. No matter how much I wanted it.”
That was novel. Most men she dealt with were not predisposed to keeping their hands to themselves. Especially if they’d already been given the go-ahead once. “Ongoing enthusiastic consent” was a foreign concept to the bulk of her marks. She’d buried three of them after they’d failed to grasp the nuances to her satisfaction. Unmarked graves in Mumbai, Lisbon, and Nashville.
“No. I don’t regret any of it.” Not the killings, and not the pleasure she’d found here with this man who was the antithesis of those dead ones. “I probably should. This can’t go anywhere or be anything. But I’m not sorry.”
“Me neither.” Elijah’s eyes shone gold before melting back to their natural dark brown. She’d yet to figure out if that signified something specific. A change of mood. A change of light. His inner lion coming to the surface and then subsiding. But even with that question unanswered, he wasn’t a mystery to her. She’d grown to understand him in this short span of time. They were as alike as they were different. Goal-driven, determined. But like most shifters, he had a pack. She hunted alone.
He reached out, tracing the furrows between her brows. “Some deep thoughts in here, Meg. Reckon you’ll tell me what they are?”
“No.” She smiled her apsara smile. The one he already knew was fake. And then she shoved him down flat on the mattress and climbed atop him. He was already hard again, the boxers serving more as a wishful end to their sex play than an effective one.
But Meghna didn’t move to take them off, to take him in. Instead, she sat there, knees digging into his hips, cradled against the taut lines of his pelvis. Aphrodite’s saddle. The Adonis belt. The iliac furrow. There were so many names for the sharp cuts. All she wanted to call them was hers. He was beautiful. A dark-skinned god like the Hindu deities of old, before all the whitewashed art. There were scars marring the smooth planes of his skin. Knife slashes. Bullet wounds. Evidence of the battles he’d fought. Evidence she didn’t wear on her own flesh because it healed—on the surface at least. An apsara’s best weapon was her beauty after all. But compared to him…compared to Elijah, Meghna’s looks were shallow. A tool. Not something carved by years and experience and violence but still so fucking stunning.
She leaned over, hair spilling across his chest as she kissed his firm belly. No defined six-pack or eight-pack like some Hollywood hero but hard just the same. She pressed her mouth to one of his pecs, licking his flat nipple and appreciating the rumbled growl it elicited.
“Meghna…?” There was a question along with the arousal in his voice.
“I never get to linger,” she said softly. “That’s not the job.” Even when she’d been married to Chase—especially those first six glorious months after a PR-stunt Vegas elopement—the sex had been frantic and often drug-fueled. She had fond but hazy memories of being on Ecstasy and Red Bull, waking up hungover before he headed out for a call time and she rolled in to a photo shoot. This…this was different. This, she could soberly savor. For as long as the mission lasted.
“Have at it, love. As long as you like. I’m not going anywhere just yet.” Elijah stretched out beneath her, arms out to his sides, urging her to look her fill. To take her fill.
So she did. Learning the geography of his beautiful body, committing each point of the map to memory, traveling far and wide before landing at his lips. And she stayed there until they had to break for breath. Until he pulled back and whispered, “My turn.”
Meghna pulled back, too, muscles locking, lungs seizing in as close to a panic response as she got. No, said every protective instinct she had. If she didn’t linger, then it was a given that her lovers weren’t allowed the privilege either. To view her body as the art it was…that was fine. But to find her vulnerabilities? To kiss them and stroke them and touch them? When was the last time that had happened? With Elijah. Each previous time with Elijah, needled the same instincts that had frozen her in place. He’d already gotten further under her skin than anyone else ever had. And now he wanted to go deeper. To explore to the core of who she was.
“Meg?” he prompted, so maddeningly perceptive. So patient and kind. “Everything all right, love?” He brushed wild strands of her hair from her face—from his face, too—his touch tender and tentative. “Where’ve you gone off to?”
So many places. Nowhere at all. Both answers teetered on the tip of her tongue. In the end, she gave him neither. She simply rolled to the side and spread herself out like he had just a short time ago. Hands at her sides. Knees bent. She felt vaguely like a frog pinned out on a tray in high school biology…which was not the sexiest thing to be thinking. That he could cut her open like this.
“You look like a virgin sacrifice.” He laughed softly…which was an even more unsettling image than that of a dissected frog, mostly because she hadn’t been a virgin for more than fifteen years. “You really don’t let your guard down, do you? Not for anyone.”
“I want to. For you.” The confession was difficult. It tasted like broken glass. She remembered their last go-round, how he’d been generous with lube and with his time, wanting to take care of her, to make it sweet and hot and good. Could she be even half as generous with herself? Meghna didn’t know.
Elijah aligned himself along her side. He reached down for one of her open palms and entangled their fingers. He did the same with their legs. “Everything I find…all the things that I uncover…it’ll still be yours. I promise.”
Meghna did two foolish things in a row then. She kissed him. And she believed him.