Midnight Kiss

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Black interrupted. “She is Lucy Benson’s daughter?”

  Luke glanced at her then turned back to the screen. “Yes. This is confirmed by DNA.”

  Black didn’t seem to be listening. “Let me see her,” he demanded. “Right now.”

  Luke glanced again at Hope and when she nodded, turned the cell to her, framing her face.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Black breathed. “I don’t know your name, but you are the spitting image of Bard. He has no idea you exist, none at all. Lucy was the love of his life and he never had a serious affair after her. She just blew him off after he was wounded. He never got over her and he thinks of her to this day. If it’s money you want, Bard will give you the shirt off his back.”

  Hope’s voice turned cold and crisp. “I don’t want money, Mr. Black. Not a dime. I’m fine. But I do want to know if my father tried to have me killed.”

  Jacob Black seemed like the very epitome of an unflappable man but his features went slack for a moment. “Have you killed? Bard?”

  He was surprised? The idea of a warrior, a man who’d been a soldier all his life and had served in war zones, being an actual killer wasn’t an impossible stretch, she thought. In essence a soldier was a professional killer. But Hope had two soldiers right before her — Luke and Jacob Black. Luke technically wasn’t a soldier any more but he was about to become a security expert for a company made up of former soldiers like himself. Jacob Black too wasn’t a government soldier but was the head of a highly successful company made up of former warriors. Telling both of them that Bard Redfield was already a killer anyway wasn’t a smart move.

  “Unlike you, Mr. Black, I don’t know him. I only know that I had a DNA analysis done and it pinged on the Redfields. The next thing I know, the friend who did the DNA analysis is dead. I have remote access to my surveillance system, and masked, armed men broke into my apartment that same day. Luckily I was able to escape. I don’t like to think of what they’d have done to me if I’d been there. Someone doesn’t want me around. And for the record, I have been told that Lucy Benson, my — my mother, thought Bard Redfield had died. Court Redfield went to see her to tell her Bard had been killed and that she should never contact any of the Redfields again. She was pregnant with me but didn’t know it yet. Five years later, she read an article and discovered that Bard was alive. She tried to contact him with photos of me and a few days later she was dead and I was in a coma.”

  Black frowned. “You remember all of this?”

  As if. “No. I remember nothing and this was as much of a surprise to me as it is to you. Luke and I watched a video recorded by my uncle, Frank Glass, who told me the story.”

  Black’s face changed. “Frank … Lucy’s brother was Frank Glass?”

  “Half brother, apparently, but yes. Did you know him?”

  “Bard told me about his affair with Lucy once when he was very drunk. He said she had a half brother named Frank, a real nerdy guy. I had no idea we were talking about Frank Glass.”

  “I don’t think he was the Frank Glass at the time. I think he was just a bright kid with good ideas.” Hope wanted to bring the conversation around to what she needed. “So — twenty-five years ago someone had my mother killed, tried to kill me and would have if my uncle hadn’t acted quickly. He had me taken to a hospital far away from the scene of the accident, had me declared dead and relocated me under another name. When I tried to find a match of my DNA and it was found by a good friend of mine, someone killed him and sent what looked like a team of hitmen to my apartment. They also killed the doorman. That someone might be my father. That’s why I called. You know him and know what he is capable of. Is he capable of this?”

  Black’s face tightened. “Never. Never in a million years would Bard have been capable of hurting Lucy in any way. And hurting his own daughter? There’s just no way. But I’ll bet you anything his father would be capable.”

  Luke shot her a quick glance. “Court Redfield?”

  “Yeah. God, Bard hated his father’s guts, still does. The old man is a psychopath.”

  “That psychopath is gearing up for a run for the Presidency,” Hope said dryly. “And he just might win. If he’s the one responsible for all of this, he does not want anyone to know about me and he’s shown that he is willing to kill. But I refuse to lie low, in hiding, because of him.”

  Suddenly her shoulders were taken in a strong grip. Luke’s arm around her. He was a warm wall of strength by her side. She leaned into him.

  Black nodded sharply. “Understood. I’m going to call Bard. Right now. He’s Stateside, the last I heard. He’s going to be absolutely stoked at your existence and enraged at his father.”

  Luke glanced at her and she gave a small shake of her head.

  “Absolutely not.” Luke’s face hardened. “Not going to happen. Hope will decide when and how she contacts her father. Not anyone else.”

  Jacob Black was immensely powerful and rich. His company essentially had the resources of a small country and Black was its king. Luke had no money and no power. And yet there was no question who would win this. Luke was like a force of nature.

  Black held up huge, calloused hands. “Okay, okay. But tell him soon. That guy has missed Lucy almost all his adult life. He needs to know about his daughter. About — what’s your name?”

  “Hope. Hope Ellis. That guy — or his father — had my mother killed,” Hope said sharply. “I’m not going to expose myself to him until I’m certain who is responsible for my mother’s death and my friend’s death.”

  “Well, it wasn’t Bard. You need to talk to him soon.” The force of Black’s will seemed to come through the screen. Hope could almost see magnetic lines of power emanating from him. Man, this was one powerful dude.

  “Fuck that.” And then Luke stepped forward and it was like the battle of Jedi warriors because she could see his lines of male power meeting Black’s halfway and there was almost a shimmer in the Force. “Hope will talk to him when she feels safe doing so. And not a second before. I’m not going to risk her safety because you think Bard Redfield is a good guy. A lot of good guys go bad. You know that as well as I do.”

  There was a male staring contest, like an elk battle only without antlers, and Black stood down. “Bard would be incapable of hurting Hope, and I know for a fact that he’d welcome her with open arms. But I respect that you can’t take my word for that. Not when her safety is at risk.”

  Luke nodded and his taut body language relaxed. “I have your word you won’t say anything to him?” Luke asked.

  Black bent his head slightly. “You have my word. But I’d like to give you two his private cell. It’s a number he will always answer and only he will answer it.”

  “Yes.” Hope surprised herself by how much she wanted that number. A portal maybe, to another world. Or the engine of her death. But a number that would at least end this feeling of being a molecule lost in space that had accompanied her for her entire lifetime. “Please. I’d very much like his number.”

  “I’m texting it to you,” Black said. “And consider me at your disposal. If you want to arrange a meeting, I can be there as a sort of guarantor. Say the word and I’ll be there as fast as I can get there. I owe it to him.”

  Considering he was in the field, and was a very busy man, it was quite an offer.

  Hope glanced at Luke and ran a quick finger across her throat.

  “Okay then.” Luke brought the screen back to his own face. “Thanks for your time, sir. We really appreciate it and we’ll be in touch. Thanks for sending Redfield’s cell number.”

  “Call him,” Black urged.

  “We will. We just don’t know when.” Luke broke the connection.

  Silence. Hope was trying to assimilate all this information. Jacob Black was known as a powerful man but she had never heard a word against his character, unlike some of the contractor types she’d worked with at the NSA. He’d never cheated or corrupted, that she was aware of, in a business rife wi
th corruption. It seemed like every month a contractor went to jail for trying to game the system. Which made sense, because the PMC business was huge.

  No one ever so much as breathed a word against Jacob Black, which meant he was either clean or so ruthless no one dared open their mouths.

  But Luke was easy with him and that counted for a lot with her.

  She must have looked like a dork, standing there, lost in her thoughts because Luke took her gently by the arm. “Come on. I think this calls for alcohol. We’ll talk it over and do what you think is best.”

  What was best? Her thoughts were such a jumble.

  She made a living, and a good one at that, by thinking clearly. Her thinking was usually linear, rational, logical and she was capable of keeping a lot of data in her head while making decisions. But now there were all these elements and she didn’t know what relationship they bore to each other. Her mother wasn’t the mother she’d known but a woman she didn’t remember, Lucy. Her father was a warrior and the son of a man who was immensely powerful and might become the most powerful man in the world. He also might have killed her mother and tried to have her killed. Or maybe it was his father. Her uncle was Frank Glass.

  And then there was Luke.

  There was nowhere to put these thoughts in order. No way to draw conclusions and no way to understand what to do next.

  Luke walked her over to a cabinet with some high-end liquor bottles and cut glass tumblers turned upside down to avoid gathering dust.

  How do you keep a safe house where no one lived clean? Did regular cleaners come in, say, twice a month? Or just after it had been used as a safe house, to clear out the pizza boxes?

  It was an organizational issue, she thought as he poured out a glass with a finger of amber liquid. But surely a safe house was used on an irregular basis so there’d have to be a data base that —

  It happened all at once, in slow motion. The pretty cut-crystal glass on the sideboard blew up in a cascade of red. She turned to Luke but he — he wasn’t there. He was diving to the floor and taking her with him. She landed on her back, the breath driven right out of her by his heavy weight on top of her. He looked so lean yet he was really heavy. It was hard to breathe and she tried to push him off but her hands kept slipping in something red …

  And time, which had slowed down, suddenly rushed back in like a tide held back. Someone had shot at them! And she’d been hit! She looked at her red hands but couldn’t figure out where she’d been hit.

  She hadn’t been hit. But Luke had.

  “Luke!” Hope tried to get him to lift up a bit to see him better but he pushed her down, arms over her head, protecting her. “You’ve been shot! Let me see!” she cried. Pushing hard, she couldn’t budge him. Her hands were bright red and sticky with blood. “You need medical care!”

  He wasn’t listening, focused on his cellphone. Of all the times … but then she saw what he was looking at. It was a view of the surrounding area around the house, in windows on the cell screen. It looked similar to the app she had for security for her apartment.

  She frantically searched his screen but it was empty of people. The images were a greenish ghostly tint which she recognized as night vision. “Who shot at us? I don’t see him.”

  “Neither do I, damn it. And I don’t understand how he could aim and hit me, we were away from the windows and the curtains are drawn anyway.”

  She was studying the static images carefully. “Thermal?”

  “Fuck,” he said. “Yeah. We don’t dare stand up. We’re relatively safe on the floor but we can’t stay here forever. Listen, stay here for a second while I go get thermal blankets, that will hide our thermal signature. You’re okay here behind the couch. The shot came from the front.”

  Her throat tightened. She didn’t want Luke to leave her, there was safety while she was touching his strong lean body. But there was someone out there and they were sitting ducks as they were.

  Luke planted both hands on the ground in front of her and lifted himself off. His left arm was shaking and as he rose behind the couch, she gasped. His entire left side was soaked in blood. He’d been shot in the back and the exit wound from his left shoulder was a bloody hole in his flesh. It hadn’t hit an artery and it didn’t look like it had gone through bone, but it looked dangerous and immensely painful.

  There was no expression on Luke’s face, but his skin was grey and clammy.

  “Let me go! Tell me where the blankets are and I’ll get them.”

  “No.” His face tightened even further. “Stay right here, don’t move.”

  Before she could answer he was up in a deep crouch, hiding behind furniture. Across the room was a closet and he headed right for it, crawling along the ground, leaving a horrible trail of blood.

  In a second, he was wrapped in the foil blanket which would mask his thermal signature and he was armed, holding a sleek black pistol in his hand, and dragging a small duffel behind him. He crawled back, wrapped her in the other foil blanket and sat up with his back to the couch.

  “Even if they have the house surrounded, there are two rooms between us and the outside walls in this direction. Fuck! How did they get past the guard?”

  “I’m sure there are security cams at the guard station.” Hope picked up his cell, ignoring the streaks of red, scrolling through until she found what she was looking for. “Nope. They are all offline. Though, I think — here. This must be the security cam from under the eaves of the roof of the guardhouse. But there’s no one there.”

  Luke was breathing heavily. “Impossible. It’s guarded 24/7. That’s the point of having a guard.” He studied the image of a brightly lit, empty cubicle. “Fuck. Look at that.” He pointed to the bottom of the small window. Hope squinted but could only make out two small dark blobs.

  “What?”

  “Shoes.” Luke’s voice was grim. Yeah. If they’d killed the guard to get in there’d be a body, and she was looking at it.

  Blood from Luke’s shoulder wound was dripping onto the tile floor.

  “We need to call 911 and an ambulance!” Hope tried and failed to keep the fear and anxiety out of her voice. Luke himself seemed the picture of thoughtful calm, though he’d been shot. With a bullet. Out of a gun.

  God.

  That wound needed packing. It would need surgery and IV antibiotics but right now, the most important thing was to stop the bleeding. Presumably there were tea towels in the kitchen she could use or she could rip up a sheet, but the kitchen and the sheets might as well have been in Siberia or on the moon. The Mylar foil blanket around her shoulders was completely unrippable. Mylar was used as cladding for space capsules reentering the atmosphere.

  Wait …

  The jacket of her sweat suit! She shucked it off quickly and rolled it into a ball, leaving the sleeves free. Luke watched her out of the corner of his eye but said nothing. She rose on her knees, facing him.

  “This is going to hurt,” she warned.

  He nodded. Set his jaw. His face was grayer than before.

  Hope gently tried to lift his long-sleeved tee but he gave an involuntary moan and beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. “I’ll need to cut this off you,” she whispered. The thought of sprinting across to the kitchen to get scissors was daunting. Impossible.

  Luke bent a little, jaws clenched and lips white, to slide a knife out from his boots. Hope’s eyes widened. She’d had no idea it was there. He handed it to her. It was a stiletto, the edges honed like a razor blade. Exactly what she needed.

  “Hold still.” He became a rock, even though his nerve endings must be screaming with pain. She did her best to slit the heavy cotton as quickly as she could without jostling him. When she sliced through the collar, the tee fell open. No point in trying to get it off him, all she needed was access to …she saw his shoulder for the first time and swallowed heavily … the wound. God.

  The wound was awful. The worst thing she’d ever seen. Worse than the time her neighbor’s German shep
herd had been run over by a truck and reduced to a sack of blood and broken bones.

  The wound was open, the size of her fist, butchered flesh flayed away from the terrible exit hole. Blood was seeping out fast. It had to stop. She didn’t know much first aid but this she knew. The bleeding had to stop and it had to stop right now. There was nothing to stitch him up with, even if she knew how, which she didn’t. No idea how to put a tourniquet around a shoulder.

  No, the only possible thing was to put pressure on the wound and bind it until he could receive medical care.

  And that would hurt like crazy.

  Hope was holding the sweat suit top. She met Luke’s eyes. “I’m going to have to do this. Pack your wound. And it’s going to hurt.”

  He held her gaze. If possible, his face was even grayer than before. “Now might be a good time to say that I think I love you. No, scratch that. I know I love you.”

  Hope nearly lost her hold on the soft material. Her mind turned entirely blank with shock. “What? I —”

  But he looked so awful, in such pain, that she couldn’t continue. First priority here was to staunch his bleeding so that this wonderful brave man who’d just crazily said he was in love with her would not die on her. After declaring his love. That would really suck.

  “Hold on,” she said shakily as she mapped out in her head what to do. Place the folded up material directly over the wound — thank God the jacket was clean — and wrap one arm of the jacket over his left shoulder and the other around his chest and tie the two arms together across his back. Good thing the material was super stretchy otherwise the two arms would never have met across that broad back. “Ready? You’ll have to hold still.”

  He nodded and she pressed the wad of material over the terrible wound. Luke held rock steady but a hissing moan escaped him and he turned a color she’d never seen on living flesh.

  Hope took his hand, pressed it over the material and grabbed the two arms. She shuffled until she was behind him, stretching the two arms until she could tie a tight knot over his back. Every muscle in his body was taut and quivering. She pressed a kiss he probably couldn’t feel over the shoulder blade and shuffled back around to look him in the face.