by Michele Hauf
Where was Sacha?
I kicked at the first door and it opened easily. It was a bathroom. Coughing, I bent double and clung to the doorframe.
And then I heard the sound that could only mean an approaching missile. One of those small jobbies that the bad guys fire out of their handheld cannons. I dropped, flattening myself in the hallway.
“The Faction,” I said on a choking gasp.
The missile hit overhead. The explosion of flame and timbers and creaking roof joists seemed unreal, something you only see in a movie. I crawled forward and slammed my body against the next door. It was closed, but not locked. I pulled myself up along the doorframe, shoved open the door and ran inside and did a body slam with Sacha.
“What’s going on? Did you hear that?” he asked. “It sounded like—”
“Someone wants us dead. Come on.” I grabbed his forearm and dashed back out into the hallway.
Sacha trailed, lagging as he retrieved something from his room, but I kept hold of his arm. “Is that a back door?”
“Yes!” He rushed ahead and bent over before the door, obviously putting on some footwear, but it was so smoky I couldn’t be sure.
The back door swung freely and I jumped out onto a brick pathway. Moonlight competed with the frill of flame eating up the roof. Amber sparks rained over the overgrown grass yard.
“You think they’re coming in?”
“Not about to take that chance,” I shouted. “I don’t think they’ll risk entering a burning building.”
“They could be trying to flush us out.”
“And doing a remarkable job at it. Come on!”
I tugged Sacha along. The brisk night air worked to startle me completely awake. Even as I trundled along beside Sacha, coughing on the smoke, I took inventory.
“My shoes!” I hadn’t time to grab them from in front of the sofa. “And your…underwear?”
Moonlight poured through the thin canopy of tree cover so I could plainly see Sacha. He wore a thick white terry robe open to reveal striped boxer shorts. I glanced down his dark-haired legs to see a pair of rubber galoshes rising to below his knees.
“Didn’t have time to make myself pretty for you,” he said, then coughed. “You want my boots? The forest is thick. I don’t have an extra pair, or I would have offered.”
“I’m fine.” Stepping from bare foot to bare foot, I questioned that easy reply, but I didn’t want to strip the man of anything else. He must have been sleeping in his boxers. “Just…let’s get the hell out of here. You have a weapon?”
“Not unless you consider striped boxers deadly.”
Well, now that he mentioned it…
“The Glock is still in your bag,” Sacha said. “Hold my hand. There’s a trail that goes through the forest.”
Behind us, an explosion burst into a brilliant amber plume. Debris flew into the trees, and small particles of ash and leaves rained down upon us.
A coughing fit doubled me at the waist. I had inhaled a lot of smoke, and my mouth tasted like an ashtray full of lit cigarettes.
“You okay?”
“Breathing. Are you?” I wondered as I followed him away from the destruction. We’d passed through a line of tall slender birch. Behind us, the house blazed and choking smoke filled the air. “Your house just went up in flames.”
“So long as you’re safe, I’m not worried about a bit of wood and stone. Watch out, there’s a steep drop ahead. Hold on tight, and—”
“Whoa!”
The steep drop made itself known. I stumbled. Heels sliding on soft dirt and crunchy leaves, I landed in Sacha’s arms. He smelled ridiculously erotic, and I felt ridiculously, well, ridiculous, noting his scent in the middle of the night with the bad guys on our tail and ash raining upon our heads.
“Come on, no time for regrets.”
I gripped Sacha’s forearm as he walked me carefully down the rocky slope.
“The dirt path is just ahead,” he said. “I’ve been on it once before.”
“You don’t think they’ll follow?”
“Do you know what direction the missile came from?”
“That way. North, I think.”
“Then I have to guess it was fired from the road. We’re tracking the opposite direction.”
“I’m not keen on hiking, just to let you know.”
“I suppose you prefer four wheels. Wish I had a pair of ATVs, but I don’t. I’ll take care of you, Jamie. Jump over this big exposed root. That’s a girl.”
I landed on what felt like firm, flat ground, and once again, managed to end up wrapped in Sacha’s arms. He bowed his head and pressed his cheek alongside the crown of my head. Such a comforting, utterly un-villain-like move. I reacted by hugging him. And when I did so, my arms slid inside the open terry robe and clung to hard, male muscle. He felt so good. Warm, and…safe.
Yes, safe. It had been a while since I’d felt this way. And what a strange time for me to feel it, with bad guys in tow and a fire burning up my wake. Maybe it was the adrenaline coursing through me that cried out for a moment’s respite. Maybe I’d just realized that sometimes good things come in surprising packages.
“Thank you,” I murmured against Sacha’s neck. I nuzzled close. Stubble tickled my cheek. “You feel right.”
“You feel frightened. You’re shivering. Are you sure you’re okay, Jamie?”
“Just a little freaked. It’s not every day I wake up in the middle of a fire.”
“Yeah. But you saved my life.”
“You were on your way out.”
“You think so? I was disoriented from the smoke. If you hadn’t been there to lead me out…”
Twice now, homes had burned because of me. Who really set my apartment building on fire? The Faction? That would prove how Kevin even knew to tell me about the fire in the first place.
“You’ll survive,” I murmured. “Just, let’s get going. I’m not keen on taking one of those missiles in the back.”
The forest was thick, as Sacha had warned. The path was littered with jutting rocks and loose pebbles, and was no wider than a man’s shoulders. Lining the path, thick brush and the occasional prickle bush popped out from the dense cover of trees.
I thought I’d like to have some shoes—even a pair of oversize men’s galoshes—right about now, but didn’t say anything. He’d offered, but Sunday bloody Sunday, his house had been blown up. And it might not have been because of him. The Faction was after both of us. The fire was as much my fault as it was Sacha’s.
Correction: it wasn’t our fault. We were targets.
Sacha stopped on the trail and pushed aside a thick swath of evergreen that blocked the path. I hadn’t smelled the clean scent of pine since leaving Scotland. I hadn’t bothered to check out the parks in Paris, preferring to surround myself with asphalt, brick and steel. Not right, I knew. But the only thing the great outdoors did for me was to bring on homesickness and a longing I hadn’t felt for decades.
Like now.
“We’re close,” Sacha said.
“Close to what? Hell? I thought we left the fires of hell. Shouldn’t we be surfacing soon?”
His chuckle felt wonderfully exotic in the midnight darkness. Strange night insects chirped and chirred somewhere within the surrounding vegetation. The air smelled of smoke and grass and moist bark. Yet I was compelled by the huskiness in the man’s voice and his constant checking to ensure my comfort.
“There’s a road up ahead.”
“Really?”
“It’s not used at all anymore, except by the locals, but it will take us to the main road. The cell phone I gave you is in your bag.”
“I don’t think I get service out here. And if I did, what, do you want me to call for help? Who’s going to come? It’s not like I’m looking forward to a conversation with the authorities. We’re on our own, Sacha. Let’s just hope we don’t walk right into the Faction’s lap. They could be anywhere.”
“I wish I’d taken along my night
goggles.”
“You’ve got all the fancy gadgets, eh? Come in handy when you’re kidnapping princesses?” I breathed out heavily. “I’m sorry. I’m just…sorry.”
“You have every right. I’ll never win citizen of the year, that’s for sure—yeow!”
Sacha disappeared in front of me. Literally. There, then gone.
Between yelps and crunching branches, I heard his body tumble. The urge to spring forward and grab him was stopped by my healthy sense of survival.
Gripping the trunk of a skinny tree, I saw the demarcation in the soil where it suddenly stopped. The earth must have shifted, leaving a good four-foot drop. Sacha lay below. I couldn’t tell if he was moving, or even alive.
“Don’t be dead,” I whispered. “You’re not going to check out of this relationship like that.”
Stepping over the edge and using the tree trunk to hang on to and lower myself, I managed to scale the short drop, then jumped to land on a crunchy bed of leaves just before the skinny tree snapped.
Sacha moved and groaned. He was still alive.
I bent over him. Don’t move an injured person, I remembered from safety classes we’d been required to take in school. Yes, I’d paid attention in school. What else was there to do? “You okay?”
“Somebody get my mommy,” he murmured, and I had to force myself not to laugh. He was obviously trying to make the best of an awkward, and likely painful, situation. “I’m fine. But I think I landed my ass. Ouch.” He tried to sit up.
“Don’t make any sudden moves.” I squatted, and the muscles in the back of my calves pulled, but it felt good.
“I’ll survive,” Sacha offered.
“Keen. ’Cause I wouldn’t know where to find your mommy.”
“I said that, didn’t I?”
“You know it. And I’ll never let you forget it.”
“Wouldn’t expect you to.” Shuffling his feet through the crunch of branches and leaves, he then wiped away clods of dirt that peppered his shoulder and legs. “My mom’s in Brooklyn.”
“New York?”
“Yeah, she’s a nice chick. Settled down with a physics professor and just had another baby a year ago.”
“You’ve got a tiny sibling?”
He pressed a hand to his back, stretching and grimaced. “Ava doesn’t know about the baby.”
“You and your mom are still close?”
“I call her once a week. I love her. She bugs me to move back to the States and marry a nice Brooklyn girl and have babies. I visit, for, you know…events.”
“Seals?”
“How did you—” He winced. “Oh man, this is gonna hurt in the morning.”
Sounded nice, having a mom who cared about you. I offered him a hand to stand. “So, when are you moving?”
“I’m not leaving Europe until I find my sister.”
He was dedicated and possessed fierce integrity. Sacha Vital was ten times the man I’d thought Kevin to be. Stupid dimples.
“Tell me what Max knew,” I prompted Sacha as he tugged my hand and forced me to settle beside him on the dirt.
He stretched his bare legs before him, galoshes heeling the path and dirt-smeared robe parting to reveal striped boxers.
If we hadn’t had missile-wielding maniacs on our tail, I might have smiled at how ridiculous he looked. But the best I could manage was a grimace.
“I told you already, he hadn’t time to give me details. Whatever the Faction thinks Max might have told me, he didn’t. But that won’t keep them from killing me. Or you.”
“You’re such a comfort, Vital.”
“Yeah? You impress the hell out of me, la lapine.”
“That I’m still alive? Not for lack of your trying to kill me.”
“I don’t kill people, Jamie, get that into your head.” Frustration was evident in his clipped tone.
So maybe I had formed assumptions about the man, and not the conclusions I’d tried to convince myself were a higher calling. He did deserve my disdain for kidnapping the princess from Spain; that was fact, and he’d admitted it. But that was all the solid evidence I really had on the man.
And since when had I ever detested the criminal ilk? They had been my ilk until very recently. Hell, they still were my ilk because the good job I’d thought I’d taken hadn’t exactly gone down all roses and ribbons. I’d never found fault with them before. Had never thought myself so high and mighty that I was better than anyone.
“How many murderers have you driven from the scene of the crime?” he prompted in the still silence of the night.
“Well…” I’d never thought about that one.
Okay, truth? I have considered it, but it was a brief kind of thought one shoves away. Usually, I drove getaway from robberies, smash-and-grab jewelry thefts or some other getaway scheme. But to drive a killer away from the scene of the crime? Did killers do that? Hire getaway drivers?
“What about the freak who tosses a bomb and uses you to drive him away?” I countered. “Ever thought about how many dead were left in our wake?”
“Sorry,” Sacha said. “I’m not trying to throw stones.”
“You have every right to throw stones.” I pressed two fingers into the soft cool dirt heaped near my thigh. “I’m not pristine, and I’ve never claimed to be. But I am trying. It’s not as easy as I thought it would be.”
“Driving for the good guys? What led you to believe the Faction are the good guys?”
“Max. He knew I wanted to go legit, and was keen on it.” And yet, I had never officially gotten the all clear from Max regarding the Faction. He’d been meaning to meet with them, feel them out and then give me a report. It had been Fitch who’d ultimately hooked me up with the Faction.
No, I wasn’t going to go there right now.
“Surprising. I didn’t think the Network prided themselves on living the hard way.”
“Well, I was never issued the handbook,” I said. “What I know is only what I’ve been able to assume. Why don’t you tell me what you know about the Network?”
“They’re exclusive, and if you need a specific job done with discretion and accuracy, you call on them.”
“You ever call on them?”
“Nope. But my father might have.”
“How’d your sister get involved?”
“That’s the thing. I’m not positive she is, though I have my suspicions she was cozying up with someone in the Network. The guy’s name is Simon Quinn. Ever hear of him?”
I shook my head, genuinely having only just heard the name right now. “Names are not my thing. If you know the guy, why don’t you go directly to him?”
“The Network isn’t listed in the Yellow Pages. It’s not like tracking down someone who does not mind being found.”
“So you thought Max could find Quinn?”
“I knew he could. It was a matter of gaining Max’s trust. That’s why, in exchange for him digging up info on Ava and Quinn, I’d suggested I might be able to get the goods on the Faction for him.”
The goods being, checking them out to see if they were worthy of my time. Had Max died by exposing himself to unseen dangers all for me?
I swallowed back a thick clod of smoky bile and tried to keep from vomiting. Please, don’t let Max’s death be my fault. Please.
I searched the sky. A thick black cloud from the smoke seemed miles away. Had we trekked miles through the forest? It felt like it to my calves. I craved a hot shower and a huge plate of steaming spaghetti. Sardegna a Tavola served up some amazing marinara sauce and they flaked their parmesan so finely over the top it made me want to cry just thinking about it.
“What are you thinking about, Jamie?”
I sighed and stood to stretch my cramping legs. “Spaghetti.”
“Sardegna a Tavola? On the rue de Cotte?”
“You like the place?”
“It’s a favorite.”
“Mine, too.”
“Tell you what. After this is all done, I’ll meet y
ou there for a big plate of meatballs marinara and some chilled Sardinian wine.”
“You tempt me, Vital.”
“Even sprawled like a freak and wearing rubber boots?”
“Even.” I offered my hand to help him stand up. The dirt that covered him sifted over my bare toes. “So what makes you think we’re going to make it out of this alive?”
“I suspect the Faction may believe we’re toast. You think anyone should have gotten out of that fire alive?”
“So how did we?”
“I don’t know. I’d been sleeping for a while. Finally settled to sleep after checking on you.”
“Checking on me?”
“You know, making sure you were tucked in.”
“Looking at me?”
“Oh, sure. But I wished you were still wearing that sexy little skirt you had on the other day. It would have rode up your thigh, just to about there.”
“Pervert.”
“I confess! I’m sorry, I’m feeling a little vulnerable here. Where else does a man’s mind go when he’s in a freaky situation like this?”
“To sex?”
“Why not?”
“Come on.” I started forward, spying the moon through a spiderweb of thin branches high in the sky. “You said there was a road nearby?”
Chapter 20
The trail did indeed eventually end at a gravel road lined with trees. I winced as my feet, which had become accustomed to the soft dirt trail, stepped onto gravel. My soles were tender—I don’t think I’d ever had a blister on my feet before—but they were forming. Oh yeah, this was grim.
I eyed Sacha’s boots covetously. Well, he had offered.
“Surprisingly, we’re not far from the suburbs,” he said. “I believe the freeway is about three kilometers off.”
“Joy. A walk through the countryside.” Forcing myself to wobble past him, I trudged onward, arms swinging lightly and head held high, unwilling to drop in an exhausted mess before the big handsome bad guy.
Correction: Was he really the bad guy? I believe his status had recently been upgraded to somewhere-in-the-middle guy.
Was it because I’d developed some twisted attraction to the man and wanted him to be good so I could act on that attraction?