Page 9 of Endless Love

“I’ll be right back,” he says, and holds the keycard up to the door, opening it before slipping out and letting it slam shut behind him.

I flinch at the sound, sinking down onto the foot of the bed, trying not to think about what we did there less than a half hour ago. It’s useless, and I get up instead, pacing to the armchair in the corner of the room and trying not to look at the bed at all.

It won’t happen again. No matter how many hotel rooms we stay in. It won’t happen again.

By now, Jaz will know I didn’t show up for work. She will have tried to call me, texted me, and gotten no answer. She might even have left work early, used her spare key, and gone to my apartment to find out that I’m not there. My boss will know that I didn’t show up and didn’t call in, something that I never do. They will have alerted authorities. The cops.Someonewill be looking for me.

Ivan said the apartment will be watched.My stomach clenches, thinking of his brothers watching my place and seeing Jaz go in there. Of what they might do to her instead. My stomach drops again, nausea flooding me, and I blurt it out as soon as Ivan walks back into the room, shutting the door heavily behind him. His face looks grave, as if every bit of humor hasleached out of him, but I can’t bring myself to care why. I’m too worried about Jaz.

“You have to call Jaz and tell her not to go to my place. If you don’t want me to call her, that’s fine, but you?—”

“Why?” he interrupts me, and I stare at him for a moment.

“You just told me that your brothers would be staking out my place. Waiting for me to come back. She has a key—once she realizes I didn’t come to work, and she can’t get ahold of me, she’ll try to come check on me. And you said they traffick women—” I trail off, the reality of what might happen to her too horrible for me to even say out loud. But Ivan is already shaking his head.

“They won’t take her.”

I stare at him, uncomprehending. “Why not?”

“Because she means nothing to me.” He says it so bluntly that my mouth drops open, and he lets out a heavy sigh. “I don’t mean that I wouldn’t care if they did take her. Of course, I would. I care about any of the women that my father is trying to sell. That’s why I’ve been risking my life working with the FBI.” He gives me a long-suffering look. “But I wouldn’t put you in danger to save her. And they know me well enough to know that. So they won’t take her, because it wouldn’t serve their purpose of getting to me.”

My mouth clicks shut abruptly. “I would want you to risk me in order to save her.”

“All the same.” Ivan takes a deep breath, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I wouldn’t. And while she’s beautiful, I doubt she’s a virgin, and she doesn’t have an influential family, as far as I know. So they wouldn’t be able to get a high enough price to make it worth it, not with the other concerns they have right now. Namely, dealing with me.”

The way he says it is so flat, so matter-of-fact, that anything else I might have said flies straight out of my head. It feels like a shock, like cold water thrown in my face, and I think Ivansees that, because he holds out a hand. “We need to go,” he says gently, and just like that, I can feel the intimacy, the hunger from earlier fading away. I can’t remember how we got there, how I let this man touch me like that. He doesn’t seem like the same Ivan, passionate, heated and vulnerable. This version of him seems cold and closed-off, and I stand up without taking his hand, resigning myself that I’m going to have to go along with his way, for now.

“Fine,” I tell him, every bit as flatly. “I’ll follow you.”

He leads me out to a car that isn’t the black Mustang I expected. “My brothers would have known to look for the Mustang,” he says, seeing the surprised expression on my face, and I hear the hint of regret in his voice. “I couldn’t risk taking it. It’s a rare car.”

The car that’s waiting outside for us is a burnt orange Acura RSX. Ivan opens the door for me, and I hesitantly slide in, wondering if I should make a break for it while he’s going over to his side. But he’d catch me before I could get far; I feel fairly certain of that. By now, I feel sure that he’s already thought five steps ahead of any escape I might try to make.

“Is this one yours, too?” I ask as I click my seatbelt, looking over at Ivan. “Or did you steal it?”

He pauses, taking in a slow, deep breath. “Whatever you’re thinking of me right now, Charlotte,” he says slowly, with that same hint of regret and a tinge of bitterness in his voice, “I promise, you don’t know the half of it.”

And then he puts the car into drive, as we pull away from the hotel.

5

CHARLOTTE

“Where are we going?” I ask him, as he pulls out onto the highway. “What’s this plan of yours?”

Ivan is silent for a long moment. “If I don’t answer, is the next question going to be,are we there yet?” he asks finally, that same hint of bitterness still in his voice, and I flash him an angry look.

“I’m not a child.”

“You listen like one.” His hands tighten on the steering wheel, all of his earlier desire and humor gone. He feels remote now, cold, and I wonder if I could reach him now at all, if I wanted to. I wonder who usually sees this side of him, and I have a feeling that I don’t want to know.

That what he said was true—that I don’t know the half of it. I doubt I ever will.

The small flicker of disappointment, ofsadnessthat I feel at that thought, startles me. I shouldn’t feel that way. I shouldn’t want to know anything more about him. All that I already do know should be enough—he’s a criminal, a man willing to kidnap a woman under the guise of rescuing her, a man who will fuck a woman even though he knows it’s wrong.

You knew it was wrong too,I chide myself as I stare out through the windshield, at the rapidly rolling empty fields and highway ahead of us.You can’t pretend he was running the whole show.

“I’m listening now.” I knot my hands together in my lap. “The uncertainty is killing me, Ivan.”

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