by Gayle Wilson
“Then why do this? Why go to the Half Spur?”
Because some hotshot implied I wasn’t up to it.
“Colleen needed an operative,” he said.
“That’s what you were? An operative?”
“Whatever I was, I’m not any longer.”
“Just…my bodyguard.”
“For the time being.”
“To protect me from Gettys?”
“To protect you from anyone who might want to harm you.”
“Believe me, there isn’t anyone else who would want to do that. I’m not the kind of person who has enemies. Frankly, I’m not all that interesting.”
It was as if she’d forgotten what he’d told her about the call-girl ring. He wanted to believe that was because it wasn’t true, but a splinter of doubt still festered in the back of his mind.
At least now that he was back at the Royal Flush, he could use his own contacts to check out that story. They were far better than those Colleen had been relying on.
“You were interesting to someone,” he said.
“Gettys,” she insisted. “It has to be. And despite those endless months on the Half Spur, I’m no closer to knowing why than I was then.”
“If Gettys is involved in any of this, it will come out. Colleen is sending the blood samples we took to the CDC. We should have their report in a few days. The lab we found will be on the CIA’s satellite photographs. If no one’s investigated it before, they will now. There’s too much concern about bioterrorism these days for them not to.”
“Is that what you think is going on at the Half Spur? Some kind of…biological weapons research?”
“Not judging by the caliber of the hired help.”
That reality provoked another smile. This one displayed amusement rather than the unspoken invitation he’d seen in the first. “Don’t tell me you doubt Charlie’s intelligence.”
“Among other things.”
“He was smart enough to keep me from figuring out what was going on,” she said with a touch of bitterness.
“I know it’s hard not to know why you became a target. And probably harder to have to trust someone else to get to the bottom of it, but I hope you will.”
“Do you trust them?”
It was a fair question and not easy to answer. Colleen was the only one of the team he really knew. He had no doubt his sister had been a good cop. No doubt about her dedication or her intelligence or her competence. What he couldn’t know was whether or not her agents shared those attributes.
“All I can tell you is that if they don’t get to the bottom of it, I will,” he vowed.
Nothing like making a promise you aren’t sure you’re capable of keeping.
Despite his having left the Half Spur with a lot of things unresolved, the experience had at least assured him that physically he was recovered enough to do whatever he had to. He might be slower, and the aftermath might be unpleasant, but there hadn’t been a single time when his knee had kept him from doing what needed to be done.
“That’s good enough for me,” Nicki said softly. “Thank you.”
Another silence, this one stretching long enough to become awkward. Of course, he was in her bedroom. Uninvited. Probably unwanted.
“I’ll let you rest,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Just checking to make sure I was still breathing?” she asked, her lips curving again. Almost teasing. “All part of the job.”
The reason he was here had nothing to do with “the job,” and everything to do with his confusion over his feelings for her. And until those had been resolved—
He should warn her of what he intended to do, he realized. The people he wanted to call to investigate those stories about Nicola Carson would leave no stone in her past unturned. She should be made aware of their thoroughness.
In case there’s some little something she hasn’t told you?
“I’m going to ask a couple of former associates for help in identifying the people who targeted you in Washington. You should know that they’ll also delve extensively into your private life. You may not be comfortable with that, but it will be almost impossible to figure out who sent your assailant that night without considering everyone you know as suspects. Unless, of course, the attack was random.”
“It wasn’t. I told you that. And it wasn’t a robbery.”
“Then somebody had to have a very good reason to want you dead.”
The blue eyes lost focus for a moment. She seemed to be thinking about what he’d said. Or maybe she was trying to come up with someone who fit that description.
“Tell them to delve away,” she said after a moment, meeting his eyes. “While they’re at it, tell them I’d like to know who started the rumor you heard.”
His stomach tightened reactively. This wasn’t territory he was ready to deal with again. “About the videotapes?”
“All of it. Everything you were told. Every sordid detail. That has to be connected to the attack because none of it’s true. If they’re going to be examining my acquaintances, that should be uncovered pretty quickly.”
He nodded. “I’ll tell them. Sorry I woke you.”
He had already turned to leave when her question stopped him. “Have you slept?”
He had driven the entire way back to the ranch. For most of the journey Ralph had leaned against the passenger-side door, softly snoring as the miles rolled by. Nicki had stayed awake, but they hadn’t talked, each lost in their private reflections about the events of the night.
“I’ll sleep later.”
“Are you working?”
“Right now?” He shook his head.
“Then…” She took a breath, her eyes holding his. Before she formed the words, he knew what she was about to say. And his gut knotted in anticipation of hearing it. “Could you stay here?”
The silence was again strained.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said truthfully.
She didn’t deny what he’d suggested. She reached for his hand instead, and seemingly paralyzed, he let her lift it as she had before. She held his fingers a moment before she ran her thumb across the back of it, right above the knuckles, lightly touching the burns.
“I can’t help thinking about what would have happened if you hadn’t come for me,” she said.
“Someone would have.”
She shook her head. “You know that isn’t true. Even if it were, it doesn’t make the nightmares go away.”
“Neither can I.” Not even my own.
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take,” she said.
It would be sheer stupidity, even given the charge Colleen had handed him only minutes ago. That argument, however reasoned, didn’t have any effect on his body’s reaction.
He wanted her. He had since the night he’d first kissed her, furious over the allegations she’d just given him permission to have investigated.
He pulled his hand from hers. Watching the change in her face as he did, that was as far as his resistance went.
That’s a chance I’m willing to take.
He was the risk taker. The adrenaline junky. This was just another kind of risk. Far less dangerous than those he’d taken in the past. Far more tempting.
Maybe she meant what she said. Maybe all she wanted from him was someone to keep the bad dreams at bay. He couldn’t fault her for that. If that was as far as this went…
He had nightmares of his own. And enough lonely nights to last a lifetime. He wasn’t looking forward to another.
Chapter Sixteen
Eyes open, she lay in the twilight, listening to the comforting sound of Michael’s breathing. Relishing the slow, steady rhythm of it. It was all that had allowed her to sleep through the long afternoon.
She knew what he’d thought when she asked him to stay. And she wouldn’t have objected had this turned into something other than what she’d suggested. After all, she hadn’t been the one who had pulled away before.<
br />
Although she no longer bothered to deny the depth of her attraction to this man, she couldn’t begin to explain it. She had never before allowed anyone to treat her with the kind of disrespect he’d shown her. The only rationale she could come up with for her willingness to forgive his behavior was that she knew he’d been operating under a lot of misconceptions.
And maybe the fact that he’d saved her life at the risk of his own had something to do with it, too, she acknowledged ruefully.
It hadn’t taken her long to figure out that his sister must be the one who’d told him that garbage about the videotapes. “The people he worked for” had been a convenient euphemism for Colleen Wellesley’s agency.
Michael would never dream of questioning his sister’s word. Or taking a stranger’s over it. That Nicki was telling the truth about her life in Washington was something he was going to have to verify for himself.
She had already discovered he wasn’t someone who trusted easily. Neither was she. Not anymore. Present company excepted, of course.
Besides, if Michael’s sources were as good as he claimed, it wouldn’t take them long to clear her name. She wasn’t a complete innocent, but her life had been so far removed from the kind of things that had been suggested to him that it shouldn’t take much of an investigation to prove it.
All she had to do was be patient. Something at which she’d had a great deal of practice during the past few months. More than she had wanted.
There was a subtle change in the pattern of Michael’s breathing. Although she had discovered during the long afternoon what a dangerous temptation looking at him could be, it was one she didn’t try to resist.
She turned her head to find that he was lying on his side facing her. In the faint light she could see smudges of exhaustion beneath the long dark lashes.
She wondered if the lines that furrowed his brow, even while he slept, were signs of pain or anxiety. Maybe both. Along with the day-old growth of beard that covered his lean cheeks, they should have detracted from his looks. They didn’t. Not in any way. Not to her. After all, those signs of exhaustion had been acquired on her behalf.
Suddenly his eyes opened, almost as if in response to her unguarded scrutiny. He said nothing, simply looking back at her. In the room’s near darkness, his irises were luminous, their color the clear blue-green of an ocean far beyond the breakers.
She wanted to reach out and touch him. To put her hand on his cheek. Or to take his fingers into hers again. To reestablish some physical contact between them.
That’s why she had responded so quickly to him that night in his trailer. For days as they’d worked side by side, she had wanted to touch him. To have him touch her. And when it had finally happened, it had felt so right.
Until he pushed you away.
He had. And for that reason she couldn’t make the first advance tonight. Not beyond what she’d already done in asking him to stay. The next move would have to be up to him.
Fool me once…
Now she was waiting, in near breathless anticipation, for him to do that again.
He pushed up onto one elbow, raising his torso so that he was looking down at her. His eyes considered her face a long time, studying her features as if he had never before seen them. Then he leaned forward, his mouth slowly lowering toward hers.
She raised her hand, putting her fingers over his lips. “Don’t,” she said softly.
His forward motion stopped. His head tilted slightly. Questioning the command.
“Not if this is going to be like before,” she said. “If what your sister told you is going to make you treat me as if I’m guilty as charged, then we stop now.”
“Stop what?”
He lifted his chin enough to take her fingers into his mouth. He held them a moment and then released them, leaning back again to drop kisses along the tips. There was a shift in the bottom of her stomach as something molten, hot and liquid, stirred to life.
“Whatever that was about to be.” Her voice sounded thready to her own ears.
“A kiss?” he asked innocently.
She nodded, still holding his eyes.
“You object to me kissing you?”
“I object to you always starting something and then running away.”
“You think that’s what I’ve been doing? Running away?”
“Isn’t it?”
At least he was thinking about it. She could see the thoughts moving behind those remarkable eyes.
“I didn’t want to think about what they’d said. I couldn’t stand the thought that it might be true,” he said. “And no, I can’t explain to you why that was so important to me. It shouldn’t have been.”
“It would have been important to me.”
“If I’d had a checkered past?”
The same words that he’d used to describe his own.
“That kind of past.”
“There are worse kinds.”
She swallowed, thinking of the little he’d told her about his. Military intelligence. CIA. For the first time she began to wonder about what he might not have told her.
There were far worse things than what she’d been accused of. Things she wouldn’t want to know about if he’d done them. In her case, however—
“I’m going to say this for the last time,” she said, putting all the conviction she could into her voice. “What Colleen told you isn’t true. None of it. I swear that to you. I can’t do anything about whether or not you believe me, but I am telling you the truth.”
He nodded, his eyes serious. The lines that bracketed his lips seemed more deeply graven than they had been before; the circles under his eyes pronounced, despite his nap.
“Then I’ll say this for the first and the last time, too. Whatever you just imagined pales in comparison to the reality.”
The reality of who and what Michael Wellesley was.
He’d been a CIA operative. She had never thought about what that meant until he forced her to.
Spying? Nothing she would consider dishonorable, not if one did it for one’s country.
She tried to think what she knew about other CIA activities. Antiterrorism, which was a good thing, of course. Arranging coups to topple foreign governments? At least they had in the past. Assassinations? By law, they couldn’t do that anymore. Or did they still do it and just not tell anyone?
“All of it’s true,” he said as if he could read her thoughts.
“Is that supposed to scare me?” she asked with a hint of defiance.
“Does it?”
On some level it did, and she wasn’t sure why. She had trusted him with her life. She would again. How could it frighten her that he was both capable of and willing to do anything to protect her?
“No,” she lied.
“Then explain why the hell it bothers me so much to think about you selling your body?”
Because you can’t bear that sordidness to be the reality for someone you love.
That was the only reason that made sense. The idea that she’d sold her body wouldn’t bother him unless he cared about her. Definitely not something she could say aloud. Not now. There were, however, other things she could say.
“I don’t know why it should or shouldn’t bother you, and I don’t really care. Because that isn’t my reality. It never has been. So you can put it out of your mind. Along with whatever other gossip Colleen told you about me. Anyway, aren’t you a little old to be working for your sister?” she finished, her voice rising.
Whatever reaction she’d expected, it wasn’t what she got. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him laugh. And that was a pity, she decided.
When the sound of it had faded, another of those small, awkward silences was left behind. The kind that occurred when two people don’t know one another as well as they pretend they do. His eyes were serious again, intently focused on her face.
“So what happens if I promise no more running away?”
For a moment she was at a loss, unti
l she remembered that’s what she’d accused him of. Making a move, convincing her that this time it would all be different, and then stopping. Running away. If not physically, at least psychologically.
Fool me twice…
“Are you? Promising that, I mean?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
You’re what I wanted.
But not if it’s going to be like before. He had hurt and humiliated her, and she wasn’t going to let it happen again.
“If you can’t accept what I’ve told you as the truth,” she said, “then it would be better for both of us to have this conversation after your sources have verified my veracity.”
She watched his eyes. No trace of laughter lingered there. His mouth was set, almost stern.
As the silence built, she wondered what she’d do if he got up to leave. Would she have enough pride to let him walk out? And if he did, would she ever again be willing to have this conversation, no matter what she’d just said? Would he?
She knew she was asking him to take a lot on faith. To believe her rather than Colleen and the media. To believe her about something for which she could offer no proof.
“That wasn’t an ultimatum,” she began. “I know it must have sounded like one—”
She stopped because he was leaning forward again. She waited, lips parted on the unfinished sentence, as his mouth descended to hers.
He had kissed her before, but this was nothing like those. This was the sweet, almost tentative joining of lips she had expected the first time.
And after he had touched his mouth to hers, the pressure light and undemanding, he leaned back an inch or two. Far enough that she could look into his eyes.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
She took a breath, more ragged and revealing than she had intended, and then succumbed to the temptation she had resisted before. She put her palm against his check, enjoying the quintessentially male roughness of his beard beneath it.
She lowered her eyes, deliberately breaking that powerful contact between them, to watch her thumb trace over the fullness of his bottom lip. When she raised them again, his face was exactly the same.