Outlaw Derek

by Kay Hooper

  His ex-partner smiled at him. “Of course not.”

  “All right, dammit,” Derek said, and sighed. He rose from the kitchen table and gently pulled Shannon to her feet. “We’ll leave in a couple of minutes, Zach.”

  “Right.” The big security expert headed for the garage, while Raven and Josh began clearing the dishes.

  Puzzled, Shannon followed Derek into the living room. “What do you have to do?” she whispered.

  He shook his head a bit as he stood looking down at her. “I’ll tell you later. Do you mind staying here with Raven and Josh, honey?”

  “No.” She felt vaguely uneasy. “No, of course not.”

  Derek’s hands lifted to hold her shoulders gently, and he bent his head suddenly to kiss her. It wasn’t a light kiss, and there was nothing at all casual about it. It was hungry, urgent, and more: there was something else, something Shannon sensed but couldn’t define.

  But her body didn’t care. She melted against him, forgetting all her reservations, forgetting that she had rationally decided this explosion between them had to be defused. Nothing mattered except the radiant warmth of him, the desire in his kiss, the urgency of his body.

  And when the devastating kiss finally ended, she could only stare up at him dazedly. “Derek—”

  He touched her cheek lightly with his fingertips, his dark eyes hot and restless. Then, abruptly and in a grating voice, he said, “I love you, Shannon.” And he was gone.

  She sat down in the chair behind her, hardly aware of moving. Dimly, she heard the grinding sound of the garage door opening, heard the car start. The distant noises faded, and she sat feeling more shaken than ever before in her life.

  “I love you, Shannon.”

  She looked up as Raven and Josh returned to the living room. “What did he have to do?” she asked softly.

  Raven looked at her for a moment, as if weighing something. “There are still a couple of wild cards in the game, Shannon. Those two assassins. They have to be put out of commission.”

  “How?” The question was unnaturally calm.

  Josh lit a cigarette and expelled smoke in a brief, hard burst. “Any way possible,” he said bluntly.

  The remainder of the afternoon and evening dragged on. Shannon was grateful to her companions, who were casual but friendly, and made it possible for her to be the same. And she envied them their love; it was obvious in every glance, something deep and utterly certain.

  It must be a wonderful feeling, she thought, that certainty. To be certain of each other. To be certain of love.

  Shannon’s own unleashed emotions were turbulent. She felt as if some giant whirlpool had caught her, snatched her from a calm sea, and carried her inexorably in dizzying circles toward—something. And she was afraid.

  Love? He loved her? No. No, that wasn’t possible. Men like Derek didn’t love women like her. She believed in his desire only because it was impossible to deny. But, love?

  The hours passed, and she talked to her companions with surface calm. When it grew late, she yielded to Raven’s gentle suggestion and took a shower before sliding into bed. In her room. Derek had rather pointedly put their bags in two different rooms this morning after she had …

  After you told him it had all happened too fast.

  Shannon lay in the big, lonely bed and stared at a dark ceiling. But it had happened too fast, she assured herself. And he was a man outside her experience.

  A good thing, too, or you’d be dead.

  She tried to ignore the little voice in her head, but it was impossible. There was no one, she acknowledged, she could have gone to who would have been better for her that first night than Derek. He had, without hesitation and apparently without feeling it a burden, simply begun taking care of her.

  And, not content with merely protecting her from a threat against her life, Derek had also insisted, gently but firmly, that she accept herself, that she stop thinking of her flaw. He had asked for her trust, openly, had moved closer and closer to her until she couldn’t back away from him, couldn’t withdraw. He had never attempted to hide himself from her. He had tried to protect her even in the face of the explosive passion between them, had tried to give her the room and the time she needed.

  But there hadn’t been time. There wasn’t time now. And this caring man with the old eyes, this man who made impossibly tough choices and decisions without apology, this man who had taught her to feel shattering desire … this incredible man had said that he loved her.

  And now he was out there, somewhere, putting two hired killers out of commission—any way he could.

  Shannon felt cold. She rubbed her silk-clad arms beneath the covers absently, all her senses straining, hearing only the low voices of Raven and Josh Long in the living room. The coldness was numbing. Derek’s absence brought home to her just how much she’d grown to depend on him … in every way.

  But he won’t always be here.

  Was that it? Was she so certain of being alone again soon that she was trying to protect a part of herself from that pain? Was that why her feelings seemed muffled, oddly distant?

  Shannon stiffened suddenly, hearing a door open, hearing two more voices added to the murmurs in the living room. She lay gazing up at the ceiling, her heart pounding, aware of a profound relief that wasn’t distant at all.

  After a few minutes, the voices died with the closing of a door, and there was silence. She turned her head to stare at the open doorway of the bedroom, and within a moment, Derek’s large, powerful silhouette appeared.

  “Shannon?”

  “I’m glad you’re back,” she said steadily.

  It seemed for an instant as though Derek would have come into her room; he took a step inside the doorway, then hesitated and moved back out into the hall. “Good night, honey,” he said.

  She couldn’t see his face. “Good night.”

  Shannon knew he wouldn’t force the issue. He wouldn’t slide into her bed in the middle of the night. He wouldn’t demand a vow of love from her in return for his own.

  She closed her eyes, trying to relax. But she couldn’t. Her body was tense, restless. She was cold. It would be over soon, really over. She’d have to start all over again with her life. That, curiously enough, didn’t frighten her. The thought of a new job, a new apartment, was just a matter-of-fact realization in her mind.

  Shannon was sitting up before she realized, sliding to the edge of the bed, throwing the covers back. She paused there for a moment, trying to think.

  He wouldn’t come to her. He said he loved her but he wouldn’t pressure her. He wouldn’t make love to her again unless she went to him, unless she chose consciously to forget her own determination to have more time.

  Would time really make a difference?

  EIGHT

  DEREK WANTED TO sleep, and he certainly needed to. Unfortunately, he had found that his own weariness had little effect on either his body or his worried thoughts. He couldn’t stop thinking. He was losing Shannon, he felt that like a cold lead weight in the pit of his belly. Too much had happened too fast for her.

  He couldn’t blame her for that. Couldn’t blame her for wanting to just get away from all of it—including him. She hadn’t said it, but he knew that was what she wanted.

  He couldn’t be rational about it, even though he tried. It was no good understanding that she needed time, that he should just back off for a while. He was simply afraid that the bond between them was too fragile, that, once away from him, she’d be lost to him for good.

  She had come alive in his arms last night, caught up in the wildness of passion between them. If they had not been torn so abruptly from their bed, perhaps … but they had. And the situation around them, so foreign and threatening to her, only compounded her uncertainties.

  If only—

  “Derek?”

  He sat up quickly, looking across the darkened room, suddenly aware of his heartbeat because he could feel it throughout his entire body. Her silk pajamas cau
ght the faint light as she crossed the room to the bed, and he was afraid to move when her slight weight settled beside him.

  “Those two men—what happened?” she asked softly.

  Derek cleared his throat. “They’re being held by a couple of Zach’s security men. They’ll be turned over to the police.”

  “Then it will be over, won’t it?”

  “Most of it,” he said steadily. “But we won’t be over, Shannon. I don’t want to lose you. I love you.”

  Still in the same soft, distant voice, she said, “It’s an illusion, you know. They do it with mirrors and lights.”

  He felt his jaw aching, realizing only then that it was clenched. “And what about what happened between us last night? Was that an illusion?”

  “No.” She hesitated. “I never wanted to need anybody. I never did. But I need you, Derek. I don’t seem to have much of a choice about it.”

  Derek reached out slowly and touched her face, aching inside at the reluctance in her voice. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, that reluctance. But at least she admitted need, and that was something to build on. He hoped. “Honey …”

  She came into his arms instantly, naturally, no hesitation or reluctance in that. “Make love to me,” she whispered against his throat. “You make me forget, and I want to forget.” She lifted her face for his kiss, and a sound of stark need tangled in the back of her throat as the kiss detonated desire.

  It swept over them even more powerfully than before, carrying them both in a surging tidal wave, an unstoppable force. As if the memory of that brutal interruption of before haunted them both, they were frantic, driven. There wasn’t enough time, there could never be enough time for them. They were greedy, their bodies ravenous for each other.

  And when that shattering wave crested and Derek hoarsely whispered his love for her, Shannon held him and cried out wildly. But not of love, never of love, because she couldn’t love him. She couldn’t.

  In the peaceful aftermath, Shannon was troubled by a niggling question, and even as she reminded herself silently that she didn’t have the right to ask, she heard her voice emerge. “Did you see Gina tonight?”

  Derek shifted a bit to pull her even closer. “No. I just talked to Alexi.” His voice, like hers, was hushed. After a moment, he added, “We were never lovers, Shannon.”

  She wondered if he could read her mind, or if her jealousy was so obvious. Jealousy? No, not that, of course. “It’s none of my business,” she whispered.

  “Yes, it is,” he told her. “You have the right to ask any question you want and expect an honest answer.”

  Shannon was silent, not agreeing or disagreeing. But his statement left her free to ask something she had wondered about, and she wasn’t sure how to phrase the question. Even in the frantic necessity of their passion, Derek hadn’t forgotten to take precautions, and she wasn’t sure whether to be warmed or appalled by the fact that, in equipping all his burrows, he had apparently thought of everything.

  “What is it?” he asked softly, aware of her slight tension.

  She thought about it, discovering somewhat to her surprise that the darkness did indeed make her feel different—at least when she was with him. The question wasn’t as hard as she’d expected it to be.

  “Um … did you plan to have a woman hiding out with you in your burrows?”

  There was a moment of silence, and Derek chuckled. “Hardly. But the kind of training I’ve had teaches you to be prepared for anything, and I believe in being responsible for my actions.”

  It was, she thought, a very important part of this man. And she didn’t believe another kind of man could have lived the life Derek had lived. The simple truth was that he was too much a caregiver and too responsible a man to allow anyone else to make the tough decisions for him.

  “Shannon?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “I love you.”

  She burrowed closer, silent, aware of hot tears dammed behind her closed eyelids. He’d gotten close, but not that close. She couldn’t let him get that close. When this was over and he was gone, there had to be a part of her he hadn’t touched. There had to be. She wouldn’t survive otherwise.

  Derek lay awake long after she breathed evenly in relaxed sleep, holding her and staring up at the ceiling. Pushing. He was pushing, and he knew it. He could feel her slip away from him in some elusive fashion he couldn’t even name. And he was so afraid she’d slip away for good.

  She came to him in the night out of need, but when her world was back to normal, would she still need him?

  “They aren’t being very bright about this,” Raven said consideringly. “Sending two trucks out an hour apart is just inviting trouble. At least if they were together, one couldn’t be stopped without the other driver noticing.”

  “Lucky for us it’s this way,” Shannon murmured.

  They were standing together on the edge of a clearing a good twenty-five yards away from the main road, waiting for Derek, Josh, and Zach to rejoin them. The men were keeping watch over Civatech’s entrance and waiting for the first truck to depart on schedule.

  Behind Shannon and Raven, looking peculiarly ungainly as it waited silently out of its natural habitat, sat a helicopter. The plan called for Josh to pilot the craft several miles along the expected route of the trucks, where they intended to divert the truck containing Cyrano and stop it.

  Shannon, thinking about the fact that only she and Derek were unarmed, said slowly, “He really doesn’t use guns?”

  Raven smiled. “He really doesn’t. With Derek, it’s almost an abhorrence. If you ever see him use a gun, it’ll be because the situation is so desperate, and the outcome so important to him, that he’s putting aside the beliefs of a lifetime.”

  Shannon looked at her searchingly. “You know him very well, don’t you?”

  “Not as well as you do,” Raven replied calmly.

  Startled, Shannon said, “You’ve known him so much longer, worked with him—”

  “I haven’t been in love with him.”

  Shannon moved jerkily in unconscious denial. But Raven spoke before she could.

  “It’s tough when your world is knocked off balance by a situation—or a man.” She was gazing at nothing, her expression abstracted. “Worse when it’s both. And when the situation is larger than life, something right out of a suspense novel or a James Bond movie, it’s easy to believe nothing’s real.” She looked at Shannon suddenly, her lovely face intense. “But don’t let yourself be fooled by that, Shannon. Because it’s in a situation like this that everything is real.”

  “What do you mean?” Shannon asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

  Raven hesitated, then spoke in a tone that needed no dramatics to be emphatic; the words were enough. “Shannon, from the moment your apartment blew up in front of you, you were thrown into a world where everything’s black or white. Everything. Truth or lie. There are no shades of gray in this world. Not in this world.

  “Don’t think about the life you’ve known in twenty-some-odd years. Don’t think about the roles people play, the games they play, or the ways they pretend when a man and a woman get involved with each other. There’s no room here for that. The civilized layers get stripped away, and the only thing left is truth—and instinct. Because tomorrow we really may die.”

  Shannon felt cold, but forced a small laugh. “But this isn’t the normal world. It isn’t my world.”

  “It is now,” Raven told her. “You can’t go back, not completely. Shannon, you’ll have a foot in this world for the rest of your life, because you’ve seen the reality of it. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing; because of these last few days, you’ll cherish all the future ones. And you’ll realize that what you feel is truth, because there’s no time for lies.”

  “What if—what if I don’t know what I feel?”

  “Trust your instincts. There are moments when you have to make choices, especially in this world. And it’s in those moments when yo
ur instincts will tell you the truth. Just listen to them.”

  A silence fell between them, and Shannon brooded over what the other woman had said.

  She had slipped out of bed early this morning while Derek slept, and he had found her almost an hour later cooking breakfast. He had said nothing about their night together, and neither had Shannon. It was afternoon now, and the hours since breakfast had been busily filled with preparations, with phone calls to arrange things, and conferences with their confederates, and all the other details of a plan.

  They hadn’t really talked.

  Shannon was acutely aware of her own lack of response when Derek had said he loved her. Three times, he had said it to her with calm and utter certainty, not in the heat of passion. The first time, he’d been gone too quickly for her to respond. The second time, she had called love a trick of mirrors and lights. The third time, she had said nothing at all.

  She had believed this strange new world was a thing of illusion, of deception, yet Raven said it was—the ultimate reality. And as she thought about it, Shannon slowly began to agree. Hadn’t she been conscious all along that time was something snatched, stolen from events? Hadn’t she felt smothered by the sensation of too little time with too much happening?

  It was so different from the life she was accustomed to, where time dragged and emotions maintained a steady balance between uncomfortable and puzzling extremes. Now every moment was sharply etched, every emotion poignant. Was this what so many people searched for in vain, this heightened awareness of time and events and emotions?

  Had she in fact stumbled into a world more real than anything since man was young, a place where civilization blunted nothing because this world existed on the sharp edge of what was primitive and real?

  And if that was true, why were her own instincts telling her nothing? She didn’t know if she believed that Derek loved her. She didn’t know how she felt herself, because there was something inside her she was afraid to see, something distant and protected. And she was still afraid nothing was real.