He reached for her, and then it was too late. He couldn’t change his mind if he’d wanted to. She was in his arms, his mouth was on hers, she was under him, and he was inside her again. Thrusting. Pounding. Loving.
Over and over. All night long. Telling her with his body what he could not with his words.
I want you.
I need you.
And then sometime near dawn when her legs were wrapped around his neck and he was pinned deep inside her making her come for the last time, I . . .
Shit.
I can’t.
• • •
Annie thought she’d won. Somewhere in the middle of the night, the lovemaking turned from fierce to gentle. The hard, powerful thrusts grew longer. Slower. More rhythmic. His hands caressed . . . cradled . . . lingered. The heat in his eyes softened, his gaze never leaving her face.
He cared about her. He couldn’t make love to her like this and not care about her. It was in every gentle touch, every tender kiss, every deep stroke as he laid claim to more and more of her heart.
The swell of emotion in her chest was too powerful to deny. Too clear not to recognize. She was falling in love with him. And he was falling in love with her, too. He couldn’t turn his back on this now.
Her fingers gripped. Clenched. Dug into the unyielding muscle of his shoulders, his arms, his back. Pleading—no, demanding with every stroke.
Don’t go.
His body was pressing down on her, solid and heavy. And hot. So incredibly hot. She arched. Pressed. Her body needing to absorb every thrust.
Stay here . . . right here.
It was so perfect. If she could just hold on . . .
He was inside her. Stretching her. Filling her. Each thrust touching a deeper and deeper part of her until she couldn’t hold on any longer. Until the sensations were too much. The pleasure too intense. The feelings too powerful.
She felt his final thrust. This one deeper. More forceful.
Mine.
Yours.
She couldn’t hold on any longer and let go. He gave her what she wanted. Everything. Holding nothing back. The guttural cry that tore from his lungs was so acute, so overwhelming and all-encompassing, it almost sounded of pain. But it wasn’t. She could feel the force of his pleasure, the raw power of his climax, as it reverberated through them both. She let it fill her, join with her own as the shuddering spasms intensified.
When it was all over, there was nothing left to be said. Nothing that needed to be said. It was all right there in the sated collapse of naked bodies and entwined limbs.
She hadn’t been wrong. She knew it with every fiber of her being. This meant something. They meant something. He’d told her in every way that mattered except for words.
She just hadn’t heard what else he was telling her.
• • •
Annie woke to emptiness.
She knew even before her hand reached to the side and landed not on a warm, naked chest, but on the cool, crisp cotton of a sheet that hadn’t been lain on for a long time.
He was gone.
She opened her eyes, shying from the light as much as from confirmation. But the evidence was as plain as day: she was alone. Her things—what she had of them—had been removed from his backpack and were stacked neatly on the dresser next to the TV.
She sucked in her breath. Cold and sharp, the air pricked her chest like needles in a pincushion. The pain was oddly welcome. She was surprised that she could feel at all. The rest of her was numb.
So this was it? This was how it ended? Waking up alone in bed after the most amazing night of her life?
The cruelty of reality overwhelmed her. All she could do was lie there, the sheet pulled up to her chin as if she could hide from the truth, blink back the pain, and fight the tears that rose up the back of her throat in a fist of tightness and heat.
Last night had been so perfect she’d thought . . .
God, she was such an idiot. She’d completely misread what he’d been trying to tell her. He hadn’t been making her promises; he’d been telling her good-bye. It had been there in every lingering touch, every sweet stroke, every poignant kiss—she just hadn’t been listening. She’d only heard what she wanted to hear.
She thought that if she forced him to confront his feelings, he wouldn’t be able to walk away. But real life wasn’t a romance novel. He might care for her—and might have given in to their passion temporarily—but it hadn’t changed anything. Whatever he was involved with, it was bigger than her. Bigger than them.
He was right. Maybe she did live in Fantasyland. At her core, Annie was an idealist. She thought that if two people cared about each other, they could find a way. That there were no problems too big to be overcome. That if he cared about her—maybe even loved her—he wouldn’t be able to walk away, no matter what kind of trouble he was in or mission he was on.
But that wasn’t the way the world worked. He’d been telling her that from the start. Mr. Tell-it-like-it-is, not how she wanted it to be. She just hadn’t wanted to believe him.
She believed him now.
She wiped angry tears from her cheeks. She was angrier with herself than with him. She had no right to be hurt. No right to be disappointed. He’d never made her any promises—the opposite actually. He’d told her exactly how it was going to be.
She was the one who’d let herself get carried away. She’d tried to keep her distance. Tried to keep it casual. Tried to keep her feelings under control. But just because she’d done a horrible job of it didn’t mean he owed her anything.
Not even a good-bye.
She lay back down and curled up in a ball on the bed. If she didn’t get up, maybe it would just be a bad dream.
But the dampness on her pillow told her the tears were real.
God, how had she let this happen? How had she let herself think it could work? She knew better. The mission always came first with men like him. But she’d convinced herself it would be different—that he would be different. She’d relaxed her guard. Made herself vulnerable. Let herself need someone. She’d let herself rely on him—something she hadn’t let herself do since she was a child.
Which was fine when they were in danger. But it wasn’t so great when they weren’t.
For the second time in her life, a bigger-than-life, I-can-do-anything man she thought she could count on had left her. Ironically for opposite reasons. Her father because he’d turned out to be only too human, and “Dan” because he’d turned out to be too strong. Too much the cold, hard professional “machine” she’d accused him of being. The operator who could turn off his emotions for the sake of the mission. He might care for her, but he wouldn’t let that interfere with what he had to do.
She wanted to hate him for it, but how could she hate the very qualities that made him the man he was?
She’d been right about him in the beginning. Guys like him were good at coming to the rescue. They were who you’d want by your side when the shit hit the fan. But when it was over, they moved on to the next one just like superheroes. There was a reason it took Superman sixty years to finally marry Lois Lane. Batman was still single.
So now what?
Annie wiped the tears from her cheeks and sat up. This puddle-of-tears, abandoned girl wasn’t her. She was devastated, but she wouldn’t lie here in misery.
She had to pull on her big-girl panties and suck it up. Face reality. He was gone and not coming back.
She might feel weak and helpless at the moment, but she wasn’t. She was a strong, capable, grown woman who knew how to be happy on her own. She might have wanted a life with him, but she didn’t need it.
But the “girl power” pep talk wasn’t helping right now. Right now she was too raw. Too fragile. Too hurt. But tomorrow she would hone her inner Scarlett and maybe feel a little better, the next day a li
ttle more, and so on.
She hoped.
She needed to talk to the one person in the world who would understand. She picked up the phone and put the collect call through.
“Hi, Mom. It’s me.” Even before the last two words were out, tears were choking her throat. She was that heartbroken, disillusioned teenage girl again who’d had the rug pulled out from under her feet.
Ten minutes she would allow herself. Then she would be an adult again. But there was nothing like a mother’s love and understanding to make it feel safe to be a kid again.
Thirty-one
It took an hour. But when Annie finally ended the phone call with her mother, she was feeling considerably better and lucid enough to make a few decisions.
The first was a shower. When she was done, she would begin making preparations to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak.
After bursting into tears and choking through a truncated version of the past few days—and assuring her mother a hundred times that she was physically unharmed and safe—Annie had spent the last half of the conversation talking her mother out of hopping on her stepfather’s private plane to come get her.
Annie loved her stepfather, but his kind of wealth embarrassed her. It embarrassed her mother, too, except—apparently—when it came to her daughter. Annie wasn’t surprised to hear that a private search team had already been mobilized. Her mother agreed to call that off, but stopping her from jumping on the plane was like pulling a meaty bone from a pit bull.
When pointing out the number of wasted and unnecessary carbon emissions from taking a private plane across the ocean didn’t get through to her, Annie had to risk hurting her feelings. She loved her mother and promised to come home soon, but she needed some time on her own, and she wanted to finish what she’d started. She’d come to Scotland to protest exploratory drilling in the Western Hebrides, and she wasn’t going to leave without doing that. She promised no more Lucy Lawless, but she could join the protests and marches that were being planned for the next week.
Besides, she needed to pick up her stuff and talk to the police. There was a stack of twenties—about two hundred dollars—and a ferry timetable on the bureau beside her clothes, presumably for her to do that.
He’d thought of everything.
Annie had kept her comments about “Dan” brief, not telling her mother any of her suspicions, only that he was in hiding and in some kind of trouble. Her mother had as many questions as she had—none of which she could answer. Annie did tell her that she was almost certain that it didn’t involve anything illegal.
Then had come the one question that Annie was still thinking about. “Do you want me to have Steve try to find him, sweetheart?”
Steve was Annie’s stepfather. As she’d told “Dan,” he was a powerful man with lots of connections.
Annie had hesitated, but only for a minute. “No,” she’d told her mother. She’d already held her heart out on a platter once. She wasn’t going to let it be chopped in pieces again. He’d left. She wouldn’t go chasing after him. Besides her pride, she didn’t want to cause him any more problems. She owed him that for helping her.
Annie was putting the finishing touches on her eye makeup—a salvage effort—when the phone rang. Her mother had said she would call back to check on her. Annie wasn’t surprised to hear “that everything had been arranged.”
She groaned. “Oh, Mom, what did you do?”
“Don’t use that exasperated tone with me, missy. If you aren’t going to let me fly out there, I’m going to make sure you are taken care of any way I can. All I did was call the concierge. You have the room paid for as long as you need it, food will be on its way as soon as you are ready, since I know you forget to eat when you are upset, and I’m having money wired to a local bank. The concierge has already agreed to arrange to have it brought to you. There is a plane ticket waiting for you at the airport to Lewis for this afternoon’s flight. It must be a small plane because there weren’t any first-class or business seats. By the time you show up, Steve should have the passport issue taken care of.”
Annie stopped, feeling the tears welling up again. “You are a force of nature, Alice.”
“Thank you.”
Annie hadn’t necessarily meant it as a compliment. But they both knew that.
“You are my only child,” her mother said softly.
Annie sighed. “I know. But first class? Jeez, I would have looked like a bag lady—literally—showing up with all my things in a plastic hotel dry-cleaning bag.” She paused. “I had to leave the new duffel you got me on the ship. I’m sure the police have it in evidence now.”
The reminder of the pink bag brought back unwelcome memories. Painful reminders of “real men” and “girlie” colors. She’d loved how they could disagree and still find ways to tease each other. She’d never had that before.
She still didn’t have it.
“Annie?”
She could hear the worry in her mother’s voice.
“You still there?”
“I’m here,” she assured her quickly and brightly, not wanting to have to talk her off the private plane again. “Thank you, Mom. I appreciate it. Really I do.”
Her mother harrumphed. “You are welcome. Call me when you are leaving. And if you change your mind, I can be there—”
“I know,” she said, cutting her off. A knock on the door startled her. For one foolish heartbeat she thought . . . But then she realized whom she was talking to and sighed. “Your room service is here,” she told her mom.
“I didn’t order room service. I said you would call when you wanted it sent up.”
The foolish heartbeat was back. Stronger this time. Oh God, what if it was . . .
“I’ll call you back,” Annie said, and hung up, not giving her mother time to argue.
She practically ran to the door, heart in her throat, her entire body fluttery and jumpy. Did he reconsider? Had he come back to tell her he’d made a mistake?
She looked through the peephole, and her heart sank. It wasn’t him, although she had no doubt that the man standing there had been sent by him.
Resolved, heart hardened, Annie opened the door.
• • •
The LC was going to be pissed. Dean shouldn’t be hanging around, but he couldn’t leave without making sure Annie was taken care of.
He sat on one of the benches along the waterfront, facing toward the harbor while keeping his head turned just enough to watch the entrance to the hotel where the man he’d sent had gone through about thirty minutes ago.
He wasn’t hungry, but every now and then he broke off a piece of a Styrofoam-like bagel to chew on and took a swig of lukewarm coffee to wash it down. He didn’t want anyone to wonder what he was doing. But there were enough people about enjoying the clear morning to not make him too conspicuous.
Still it was a risk. An unnecessary risk, the LC would definitely say, but not to his mind. He needed to do this. He couldn’t just walk away. He had to make sure she was all right. Taken care of. Protected.
Leaving her like that, all naked and trusting and curled in his arms, had been one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. Especially knowing that she was going to hate him when she woke up. He’d abandoned her just as surely as her father had. He told himself he didn’t have a choice, but that wouldn’t matter to her. He was gone whatever the excuse.
With her too-accurate suspicions of what he did, Dean knew how hard it must have been for her to put her faith in a man like him after what she’d been through. He’d kept his word, but he’d abandoned her all the same.
Because he’d fucked up and not followed orders, because he couldn’t keep his head down and had to get involved, someone else had been hurt. He wouldn’t regret it in Annie’s case—if he hadn’t been there she could have been in real trouble—but he should have had b
etter control. He should have kept their relationship at a distance.
Right. He would have had more luck trying to sell Texans jerseys at a Cowboys game.
He looked at his watch again. Forty minutes. What the fuck was going on in there? He was anxious and doing his best to contain it, but he felt like a time bomb about to explode.
Guilt was not a small part of it.
But what else could he have done? It would never have worked out. He was supposed to be dead and he and his surviving teammates—as well as anyone close to him—could be in danger if the people who’d tried to kill them found out they weren’t all dead.
He could have asked her to wait for him, but that wouldn’t be fair to her. Who knew when this would all be over, and wait for what? Was he ready to leave Nine? The team was the only family he’d ever known.
No, it was better this way. Annie would go back home and forget about him just as he was going to do. It might hurt like a motherfucker now, but it would go away. Eventually.
At least that was what he kept telling himself.
He looked at his watch again—0835 hours. Forty-five minutes.
Fuck it. He’d had enough. He pulled out his phone, intending to call the room, when the door opened and she walked out.
The pain was visceral. It reminded him of the fiery blast in Russia that had blown him back at least ten feet. He would have staggered if he’d been standing.
She was wearing that black dress and sweater again. It looked just as stunning as it had the night they went out to dinner, but this time it made him think of mourning.
Her dark hair was slicked back and twisted into a knot at the back of her head, but the short strands were fighting confinement and a few had broken free to catch the morning sunshine around her head. She was too far away to see her face, but he swore he could see the red rims around the brilliant green.
His gaze was too fixed on Annie to pay more than cursory attention to the uniformed officer that he’d had Kate arrange by her side.
It was also too fixed to notice the woman who’d come up to stand in front of him. “Hey, you’re up early. I hope there weren’t any problems last night?” It took him a moment to recognize the receptionist from check-in. “With your room?” she added helpfully.
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