by Tawny Weber
Jake glared at her. "Let Doc do his job."
She swiped her hair back from her face, leaving a bloody smear on her cheek. The bottom fell out of Jake's stomach. "On your hand, is that my blood or yours?"
Blankly, she stared at her hand, her voice hollow when she answered. "It's your blood."
Ash stepped into the doorway behind her. He raised an eyebrow at Jake, a silent question. Jake gave a clipped nod indicating he was okay.
"But she needs cleaning up."
"No. No, I'm fine," Bliss protested, her bloody hand shaking. "I just need to find my cell phone so I can answer it when Robbie calls."
Jake and Ash exchanged another silent message. They both knew the odds of her brother still being alive were slim. They also recognized what coming down off an adrenaline rush was like, and Bliss looked like she'd been through an egg beater.
Hell, he'd accused her of helping her brother set them up when her shout had likely saved their lives. Another few yards and they'd have been outflanked and no better off than ducks in a shooting gallery. Any minute now it'd hit her that her brother was probably already dead.
Jake jerked from the prick of Doc's needle as the medic numbed the wound site for stitching. That he'd even felt it told him his adrenalin high was fading. But that's all the longer he let his focus stray from Bliss—Bliss with his drying blood crusting her hands and staining her shirt.
"Bliss," he said more harshly than he meant but needing to snap her out of her shock. "Go shower."
Ash placed his hands on her shoulders and guided her from the room.
As soon as Doc stitched him up and redressed his wound, he went to his room. Ash leaned against the wall outside the bathroom from where the sound of running water could be heard. Ash gave him a nod and left.
Jake entered the bathroom. He could hear her crying. Much as he'd like to have left her to drown her sorrows in his shower, he had a bunch of men heading to their showers and a limited supply of hot water.
He reached past the shower curtain, turned off the water, and handed her a towel. She took it from him and sniffed, her voice small and quiet. "Is there news?"
About my brother, he finished silently for her.
"No. We don't take long showers around here," he said, trying to keep his eyes off the thin plastic curtain separating him from a naked Bliss. "Too many men, not enough hot water."
"Oh. Sorry." She stepped out of the shower wrapped in the towel, peering up at him through red-rimmed eyes.
"What do we do now?"
Water dripped from her hair onto her naked shoulders. She looked too young, too innocent to be facing this kind of grief. Yet she knew far more than her share of such loss already. He grabbed another towel off the shelf.
"Right now," he said in answer to her question, "we dry you off."
"And then what?" she asked, her voice still hollow.
He couldn't bear the resigned anguish in the eyes peering up at him as he toweled her hair. He dropped his gaze, delaying answering, and noticed the scraped knuckles of the hand clutching the towel to her breasts. He had an answer.
"Then we take care of your injuries."
"I'm not injured," she said. "Just a little scraped up."
He draped the towel over her shoulders, flipped the lid down on the toilet, and told her to sit. She obeyed without argument. There was also a gouge in her knee.
He took a bottle of peroxide and a stack of sterile pads from the medicine cabinet and set them on the edge of the sink beside her. "Insurance against infection."
He lifted one hand from where it gripped the knotted towel, patting her scraped knuckles with a peroxide-soaked pad. Her fingers were too clean, too soft for his world. Yet he yearned to know their touch.
Never going to happen.
He glanced up and found her eyes following the movement of his hands. Their naked sadness sliced at the hardened wall he'd built around himself through tours in Afghanistan where children had lifted war-traumatized eyes at him, African missions where displaced refugees stared through him with hollow eyes, and South American jungle ops where poverty-stricken poppy farmers couldn't even raise their gazes from the tips of their frayed sandals.
He should stop touching her. Leave before he could resist no longer taking her in his arms and comforting her. But her knee still needed tending.
He squatted in front of her, muttering, "How'd you manage to gouge your knee this bad when I dragged you back to the truck on your butt?"
"I tried to get up."
The memory came back to him, bullets flying at them, his focus on getting her out of harm's way as fast as he could. He'd cursed her for twisting against his grip. He might even have shouted at her to stop rolling around. As regrets go, he had far worse.
She touched the dressing visible below his t-shirt sleeve, a touch light as a feather, a caress he wished would linger. "I'm sorry I got you and your men involved in this."
"We've dealt with worse."
She covered her face with her hands and began to sob. "What if they have Robbie? What if he's already dead?"
He wanted to gather her into his arms and tell her everything would be okay. But Jake knew better—about things being okay and that it'd be a mistake to take her into his arms.
He placed a hand on her knee, intent on giving her some words of hope. A mistake. Just that little contact, a battle scarred hand on a pale, scraped knee and she had her arms around his neck.
Her tears soaked the ribbed neckline of his tee, her sobs warm puffs of breath against the curve of his neck. He didn't know how to do this; it'd been too long since he'd comforted anyone.
Wrong. Just three days ago he'd held a sobbing niece and soothed her through the trauma of getting knocked down by her cousins. But the toddler's tears had been about wounded pride. Bliss O'Hara's tears came from her soul.
Against his better judgement, he wrapped his arms around Bliss. Her arms tightened around his neck. Though he knew he shouldn't, he drew her closer, pulling her into his body, absorbing her grief.
She wept in his arms until there were no more tears to shed, until she sagged in his arms. Keeping one arm across her back, he slid the other under her knees and lifted her, ignoring the pull of his stitched wound. Hers went deeper.
"I…can…walk," she said through hiccups.
"Sure you can," he said, carrying her into his bedroom.
"I need to help Robbie," she protested weakly as he laid her on his bed.
"Leave the strategizing to the professionals."
Soft fingers snagged his wrist. "Don't leave. Not yet."
He looked into her eyes, saw the raw need to escape her worst fears. His gaze strayed to the knot gathering the towel over her breasts and below where the towel had separated, the opening angling off-center under her breast and down her torso, exposing a tapering waist, a rounded hip, and a pale thigh.
He looked up, met her gaze, saw that she had seen where his eyes had strayed. She shifted, making room beside her on the narrow bed, her hand stroking the mattress. Her invitation was clear. He could accommodate her with mindless sex. But…
"If I accept your invitation, come morning you'll regret it," he said, easing his wrist from her fingers.
Hell, he'd regret it.
She shook her head, her eyes pleading, her hand reaching.
He pulled the bedding up over her. "Take that wet towel off. You can't sleep in it."
Resignation dulled her eyes. Her hands worked under the bedding, unknotting the towel, her body arching as she slid it out from under her. Damn, but he wanted to feel her arch like that beneath him.
She handed him the towel without meeting his gaze. He swallowed hard, partly because he was envisioning her naked between his sheets, but mostly because he wanted to know what it felt like to comfort her as she wanted to be comforted. He wanted that kind of intimacy—normalcy. She deserved normalcy. But he was not normal. He never would be.
Chapter 8
Bliss woke in a tangle of
sheets, the deep golds of sunrise slanting through the shutters and slicing across her eyes. Sleep had been fitful. She hadn't been able to stop thinking of Robbie, whether he was dead or alive. If he was alive, what might be happening to him? Was he being tortured?
When she would drift off, her sleep was full of unsettling dreams. Snippets of steamy sex with a hunky Alpha male who knew how to thoroughly please his lover. Jake St. John.
No. She meant Nick Savage…or anyone of the countless heroes of her romance novels. She fell in love with each one as she wrote his story. Though none had ever captivated her as thoroughly as Savage had, and now Savage's face had become one and the same with Jake St. John's.
But they weren't the same, Jake and Savage. Savage was fictional perfection. Jake was real and imperfect.
Though, last night, Jake had held her in his arms as she'd sobbed…and refused to take advantage of her when she was at her most vulnerable. It was the sort of thing Savage would have done.
A bone jarring ache spread through her body. Loss. Whether for Jake walking away from her or not knowing what had happened to Robbie, it didn't matter. Both felt the same.
She covered her eyes with her arm, forcing back the tears. She'd cried enough last night…and in the arms of the one man she didn't want to show any weakness to. What had she been thinking when she'd invited him to stay?
That she couldn't be alone in this world, not in that moment. Not when her brother was almost certainly dead.
Emotion clogged her throat and the tears she fought so hard to hold back slid down her cheeks. Alone. Forever.
Her cell phone chirped. In a singular motion, she swiped away her tears, sat up, and grabbed the cell off the nightstand.
"Robbie," she gasped, knowing it had to be him calling. It had to be.
"Hey Sis."
She swallowed the lump in her throat. "Are you okay?"
"I'm okay," he said, his voice quavering.
"Where are you?"
"Guatemala."
"What?" she all but shrieked, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. "You were supposed to meet us at the factory last night. What are you doing in Guatemala? We were ambushed."
"I know. I was there."
"Robbie, tell me you aren't one of those men who tried to kill us."
"I'm not, I swear. I was there to meet you. But I got caught."
"Do they still have you?"
"No. I escaped during the gunfight."
"Good. Are you safe?"
"Yeah. I knew Jake would get you out of there. I did what I could to help you guys."
"The text message. I got it. How did you get into Guatemala?"
There was a hesitation on his end. "Better I don't say."
"Where are you? We'll come get you."
There was a longer pause before he spoke again. "You can't come after me."
"Why not?"
"It has to end here."
Tears welled in Bliss' eyes. "Don't say that?"
"I don't know what these guys think I know, what they want to keep me from telling anyone else. But I can't involve you. I can't take the chance they'll think I told you any secrets."
"But you haven't told me anything."
"I know. But the more contact I have with you, the more likely they'll come after you, too. I can't let them hurt you."
"Robbie, we'll work this out. Let me help you."
"This isn't Jake's fault either. You need to know that. Jake knows nothing about what happened with Munch. He doesn't even know my real name. At least he didn't until your paths crossed."
"Robbie," she pleaded. "Jake can help you."
"No. Please. I can't involve Jake and his team, not after last night. No one else gets hurt. I have to leave."
"Robbie—"
"I love you, Sis. Goodbye."
"Robbie," she screamed into the silence.
Ripping the sheet from the bed, she gathered it around herself as she charged from the bedroom into the kitchen. Jake stood in the doorway between the kitchen and common area, filling the arched opening, an oddly apologetic look in his eyes.
She wagged the cell phone at him in one hand and held the trailing sheet around her with the other. "Robbie called. He's alive. He's in Guatemala. He's running again."
"No, he's not," Jake said quietly, stepping aside, revealing the dining table and the guys around it. Most standing. A couple sitting. One on the near side rose and faced her, and all she saw was…
"Robbie," she shrieked, running to him, hugging him. "You're here," she cried again and again between sobs of relief.
"Not so tight, Sis," he said. "My ribs are bruised."
She eased back, gulping air and absently gathering the slipping sheet as she touched his split lip and brushed the hair back from his swollen eye. "Oh Robbie, how badly did they hurt you?"
He flexed a grin that held no humor. "Just enough to get me to tell them who was coming to get me."
He cast a sheepish glance Jake's way.
Jake came to her side and she peered up at him. "I don't understand. Is he saying this was all about ambushing you after all?"
"Not exactly," Jake said. "Saint Security was just a happy coincidence to these guys. Doing away with my operation would make business easier for a lot of bad guys in this part of the world."
Her heart swelled with gratitude. "Yet you went back to the factory for Robbie."
"I got away from the factory during the gunfight, like I told you," her brother said. "When I figured I was clear, I called Jake from a different location."
She looked from Jake to her brother. "You called Jake instead of me?"
Robbie looked at Jake.
She glanced between the two. "What?"
Jake met her gaze. "We think your phone is bugged."
She blinked between the two of them again.
Robbie shrugged. "It's the only way they could have known where we were meeting."
She gave the team members in the room a glance and Jake another questioning look.
"I've worked too long with this team to doubt any of them," Jake said, taking the cell from her fingers and opening it, revealing the bug.
She was actually relieved they didn't have a mole in the house. "When? How?"
"It was likely planted sometime after Rob went on the run the first time. They'd have wanted to monitor your phone for calls from him, at the least hoping he'd reveal his location."
Robbie shook his head. "I thought I did everything I could to keep them away from you."
"They've been listening in on my calls for two years?" Stunned, she blinked at Jake. "And I gave you my phone when he called so he could tell you where he was."
Jake nodded.
"In other words, I led them right to my brother. Them finding Robbie and ambushing you and your team is my fault."
"No," Robbie said. "I did it myself. I started gaming again."
Bliss sucked a breath. "You went back to your games?"
"Not my old games. And I didn't use my old screen name. I created a new one. But there was this one guy who I must have played with in the past. He recognized a signature move of mine. Called me out on it in a chat." Robbie hung his head. "So I shut everything down and ran again."
"But they used my phone to trap us all last night," Bliss said.
Jake placed a hand on her shoulder. "You didn't know about the bug."
Jake's fingers were warm, consoling. Damn, she wished he'd climbed into bed with her last night and relieved her of reality, if only for an hour.
But reality was she hadn't taken Robbie's initial warning seriously enough. "I should have been more careful."
Jake gave her shoulder a squeeze. "Your phone being bugged is on the bad guys."
"Whoever they may be," she muttered.
Jake released her, the comforting heat of his hand gone along with any hope of a fantasy. Reality, as cold and hard as the terracotta tiled floor beneath her bare feet climbed through her. The reality that her brother was alive, that
he was standing in the same room with her, and that he'd called her from this very room with some cockamamie story about being on the run again.
She faced Robbie, the emotional mother now turned pragmatic. She punched him in the arm.
"Ouch," he cried out, recoiling while chuckles rippled through their audience.
"And the phone call to me just a few minutes ago a room away from me, telling me you were in Guatemala?" she all but howled. "What was that? Some sick joke? You scared me half to death."
Jake caught her by the wrist before she could inflict another blow to her brother and held her cell up between them. "It was a diversion for anyone listening."
She wheeled on Jake. "And you couldn't have let me in on the plan?"
The room went silent.
"We needed you to sound convincing," he said.
She wrenched her arm from Jake's grip and glared at him. "And of course you didn't trust I could fake it."
Her answer was in his eyes. She hadn't been able to fake her way around her grief last night…or her raw need for comfort from him. Of course he couldn't know whether she'd have been up to the challenge. And why not use all that emotion?
"You sure know how to best use the resources available, don't you?"
She was right. He did know how best to use available resources. It was one of the reasons his SEAL team had earned its reputation as being the best at extractions. He should be pleased she'd seen he lived his life strategically—that he always led with his head, not his heart. Nope, he wasn't in the least the nice guy a Midwestern woman needed, especially one who wrote about romantic heroes.
Though he would have expected, after nailing him at her brother's apartment about searching for Rob being just another mission for him, she'd have gotten that message. Yet, she'd turned to him last night for comfort.
He lurched more than rolled onto his back on his bunk, the very bunk where she'd slept last night naked. Her curved hip and bare leg exposed by the parted towel before he'd pulled the sheet up over her had scorched its image into his brain. Hell, he could still smell her sweet spiciness even though he'd chosen to sleep on top of the blankets rather than between the sheets that had touched her body.
When she'd reemerged from his room fully dressed this morning and told him she'd made up his bed for him, he'd declined her offer, figuring he'd hit one of the spare bunks as he had the last couple nights. But her, "You look like hell, Jake. Your bunk is empty. Go get some sleep," along with the draw of his own bed won out. Too bad his bed gave him no more comfort than rock-hard ground.