Read Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins for Free Online Page A

love you. I don’t expect you to love me back, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to be held, to let whatever happens happen. I mean, maybe I’m awfully brazen or callous, with your wife just dead. And I’m sorry. But with the
    war coming, maybe I’ll be dead, too. Or you. I admit you’ve given it a good try, but even you’re not immortal. I’d like to have you, however you’d like to have me, John.” And she looked away from him, shook her head, seemed to force a little laugh. “There! I’ve said it.” She exhaled loudly, then barely whispered, “And you think I’m a slut or an opportunist or—”
    John Rourke snapped the cigar into the gravel beyond the porch, his hands going to her shoulders, turning her around. “I think you’re a marvelous woman. I respect you—”
    “Ohh,” she whispered, looking down.
    John Rourke still held her shoulders. “That’s not what I meant,” he told her.
    Her face turned up toward his and her grey green eyes met his eyes squarely. “Then maybe you should tell me what it is you do mean, John.”
    John Rourke almost whispered, “I don’t know what I feel, what I mean, but you were right. Being with you, I mean, uhh—”
    “Are you going to kiss me, John?”
    “I was thinking about it.”
    “Well, then whenever you’re ready.” Emma Shaw whispered.
    John Rourke, his hands moving down across her arms, to her waist, settling there, drew Emma Shaw up and toward him, lowering his face to hers.
    He looked at her.
    He folded her into his arms.
    John Rourke touched his hps lightly to Emma Shaw’s lips, then crushed her against him, his mouth hard against hers, her mouth opening beneath him, her body going limp in his arms, molding against his thighs, his abdomen, his chest.
    The fingers of John Rourke’s left hand knotted into her hair, cocking her head back. Her mouth drew out into a thin, beautiful smile. He kissed her throat. Her hands, bound within his arms, touched at his face.
    His fingers wove more deeply into her hair, the nape of her neck in the crook of his left elbow, the fingers of his right hand splayed over her, rising from her waist and across her back. Rourke bent over her, kissed her mouth, her cheek, then her mouth again.
    He let her go, but only a little.
    She lay in his arm, her breathing reduced to short rapid panting.
    John Rourke swept Emma Shaw up into his arms, cradling her there against his body.
    Wilhelm Doring watched as the old man from the little diner—Luther Haas, the ranking Nazi intelligence controller in the Hawaiian Islands—conversed with these racially objectionable persons he had hired as assassins. Doring watched and he listened. “You all know what to do, as we have discussed. Nikita, why don’t you go over it once more, hmm?”
    “Right, Mr. Haas.” Nikita was a tall, broad-shouldered expatriate Soviet, involved in the drug trade here in the islands and credited, as Luther Haas recounted it, with several contract murders on behalf of the party, and many more which he privately arranged. “We close in from both sides of the house and get the woman and anybody else inside. Just shoot ‘em
    down dead. Don’t blow the damn place up or nothin’, cause we want that son-of-a-bitch cop Tim Shaw to know he fucked with the wrong people this time.”
    “Exactly, Nikita.One thing more. You will carve a swastika on the dead body of Shaw’s daughter. Then get out of there. Now, you and your men be on your way. And remember that the man with her is John Rourke. He did not survive all these years by being inept, hmm? Heil Zimmer!”
    “Yeah, sure thing, Mr. Haas,” the very American-sounding Russian said, nodding his head and shaking his shoulder-length blonde hair as he walked off.
    Doring looked after Nikita, watching as he walked down the hillside toward the ten men waiting for him. All of them were armed with caseless projectile firearms, not a plasma energy weapon among them. The house that Commander Shaw had lay across a narrow