More Than Gold (Capitol Chronicles Book 3)

by Shirley Hailstock

  He cared about her. Tears clouded her eyes. She closed them. Morgan hadn't cried in years, but she couldn't stop herself. Scalding hot rivers flowed from her eyes and rained down her cheeks. Her shoulders shook. Jack turned around.

  He'd washed up in the small lake. His hair was wet and he wore no shirt.

  "It's all right," he assured her. "We're safe."

  "Jack," her voice broke. "This is all my fault. You would be safe if it weren't for me. You could be in Montana looking at your mountains, enjoying the life you want. I'm sorry."

  Jack pulled her into his arms. "Being on that mountain isn't going to mean anything if I didn't do everything I could to get you out of this."

  "I'm not your responsibility." Morgan burrowed into his arms. She breathed in his scent, mingled with coal dust, sweat and rubbing alcohol. He was warm. She felt his heart beating under her ear, a strong, steady, slightly elevated tempo.

  "You've been my responsibility since my off-handed comment landed you in this situation. We're going to get out of this."

  He lifted her face, wiping her tears aside with his thumbs, then, cradling her face between his hands, he kissed her with such tenderness, Morgan thought she would die. His lips brushed over hers as his arms circled her. He didn't crush her to him, but held her gently as if she were fragile and needed careful handling. Morgan thought the only thing holding her together was Jack's arms. If he released her, she'd scatter into molecules, microscopic, invisible, floating into the atmosphere, never to be reconstituted, never to be seen again. Jack's mouth teased hers, his tongue swept lightly over her inner lip. She moaned as passionate emotions pumped in her bloodstream.

  She wanted to press her body into his, show him how much she loved him, show him that in all the years they had been separated her love remained intact, shining, bright and hopeful. She wanted him inside her, his body joined with hers, his life completing hers. Morgan leaned into him, forgetting his swollen skin. Her arms raised and her body pressed into his as the kiss changed. His mouth grew more passionate, carrying her into the storm that built around them until it was raging, warring with her feelings and her need of him.

  Somewhere in her consciousness, she knew this was not the time or the place, but she forced her mind away from that thought and let her hands smooth over Jack's heated skin. He felt great, hot to the touch, and his mouth was doing things to hers that sent signals to other parts of her body. Her hands couldn't stop moving, just as her mouth couldn't stop caressing his. Morgan felt her feet leave the ground as Jack lifted her. Only slightly mindful of his sore face, she deepened the kiss, waving her head from side to side as she kissed him over the good places of his face. Her legs wound around him as strong arms supported her. Morgan felt the moans in her throat join with those in Jack's.

  "I need you, Jack," she stated, unmindful if she spoke aloud.

  "You're driving me insane," he said, his voice laced with need. Setting her down on the available space in the back of the vehicle, Jack pushed her back, following her onto the floor of the SUV between sleeping bags, food supplies and guns.

  Morgan's hands went to the snap on his jeans and pulled it free. She unzipped them, keeping her eyes on his face. She could see the pleasure of her hands written on his features and she skimmed them across his body. Back and forth she continued the effort until his hands grabbed hers and stopped the action.

  He wasn't hurting her, but she could feel the effort it took for him to hold back, control himself. Morgan didn't want control, not tonight. She wanted the rules suspended, forgotten. Above them was a brilliant sky. Around them the forest primeval. They were Adam and Eve before the fall. Alone, together, in love. This might be their last night in Eden. Tomorrow. . .she wouldn't think about tomorrow. Instead, she ran her hands up Jack's chest, circled his nipples with her flattened palms.

  In seconds they were dragging each other out of their clothes. When they were naked, he stopped and looked at her. Morgan didn't feel the need to cover herself. She wanted him to look at her. She wanted to stand and dance and walk and let him view her from all angles.

  He touched her shoulders, his rough hands lighting fires wherever they roamed. When he kissed her again, she raised her arms and swung them around his neck. His hands came to her breasts. The shock of pleasure that raced through her pierced her core. Her head fell back and guttural sounds came from her throat, primitive cries, mournful moans that told him what he was doing with his hands and his mouth was pleasing. More than pleasing. It was sinful. And she didn't want it to ever stop.

  Every inch of her ached for his touch, craved the tease of his fingers. Morgan moved closer to him, hampered by the confines of the small space. Jack reached into one of the containers over her head and came back with a foil square. Morgan smiled when she saw it. Taking it from him, she broke the seal. A slight hissing noise accompanied the tear as she opened it. Reaching between them, Jack gripped the vehicle's floor when her warm hands caressed his erection.

  "Hurry," he said, his voice dark and strained.

  Morgan slipped the protection over him. For a moment she smoothed her hands over his hair-roughened legs. She felt the muscles contract where she touched. Jack's face told her he was in agony, but the agony was from the pleasure she gave him. She knew how much her touch pleased him and she continued.

  She kissed his shoulders, working her hands around his body, and her mouth across his torso, feeling the subtle changes in him as rapture enclosed them in a cocoon of fiery need. Hooking her fingers about his neck, she pulled him down as she lay back, giving him access to her body.

  "I love you," she whispered as Jack entered her. Morgan couldn't hold back the throaty moan of pleasure that accompanied his penetration. She felt as if it were their first time, although she was familiar with him. The sensations running through her were different. She felt her blood and Adrenaline coupled with TNT to cause an imminent explosion.

  Losing all sense of time and place, she felt Jack move inside her. They were alone. The world didn't exist outside their surroundings. She loved Jack and wanted him to know it. She gave herself, all of herself, all she had to give flowed through her and into him.

  Jack cupped her hips and she raised them, giving him greater access. She felt him totally inside her as huge waves of love caught her in their glory and lifted her to a sea of sensation that prior to this she had not known, would not have believed possible.

  With Jack, she knew everything was possible.

  Anything was possible.

  ***

  Hart Lewiston tries to regain some of the ground he's lost in a recent trip to Atlanta, Georgia. The television announcer droned on with the lead story. Carla Lewiston curled up in her hotel bed and pulled the covers up to her neck. She watched her image on the screen standing next to Hart, smiling for the cameras and looking out over the crowd as Hart spoke into the microphone.

  He looked tired, aged, she thought. In a matter of weeks he'd gone from a strong, robust man to someone she hardly recognized. They'd been married for twenty-three years, had traveled together, done everything with the same goal in mind, yet on the screen, emerging through the electronic wizardry of some long-dead inventor, was a man she hardly knew. When had that changed? Where had she been when Hart had become intent on family?

  They'd never wanted children. They hadn't discussed children when they got married. It was to be just the two of them. They didn't need children to complement their lives. They had their careers. Their lives were full, busy, satisfying, but she never thought she was too busy for Hart, or he for her. Yet they were different. She knew no one could ever completely know another human being, but she thought she and Hart came as close as any two people ever would to accomplishing that.

  But he'd proved her wrong.

  The news story on Hart ended, replaced by Hart's daughter. Carla felt her anger rise. She frowned at the child, the nineteen-year-old Olympic winner. Didn't they have any current footage, she wondered? This twelve-year-old film of her a
t the Seoul Olympics was getting tired. She wasn't a nineteen-year-old any longer. She wasn't America's sweetheart vying for her place in the light. Her place had come and gone, but Hart saw fit to thrust her back onto center stage.

  Carla sat forward, staring at the screen and the girl on it. Was she the trump card? This child was America. She represented us to the world. The international posters Carla had seen so often as the Director of the Children's Relief Program flashed into her mind. Germany was represented by a blonde woman with pig tails and a printed dress over which she wore a white apron. The Japanese wore kimonos. Carla knew the world thought of the United States as represented by a cowboy, complete with chaps and boots, wrangling a steer to the ground or of some jeans-clad young man with a two-day beard. But that image had been replaced in the international mind by this child, Morgan Kirkwood, astride her chosen steer, a gymnastics beam.

  She stood poised on it, her uniform, not jeans, but a white leotard with the stars and stripes on her right arm. The front of the torso held huge slashes of red and blue. She was perfect, young, golden, her hair in a ponytail that bobbed with each movement. Her arms extended as if in a dancer's pose and her eyes, the eyes of innocence, the face of vulnerability, epitomized all that was good and right in America. A poster child for patriotism, Carla thought. Was that it? Was that why Hart had seen fit to suddenly pull her into the picture?

  Carla shook her head and fell back against the plushness of the pillows in the suite's king-sized bed. He didn't need this girl. His ratings in the polls were miles ahead of his competition. All he needed to do was wait out the time. But he'd chosen to do something stupid and now he was trying to backpedal.

  And Carla had to stand beside him, her smile carefully in place, and help.

  ***

  Jack bolted upright. Stiff muscles protested his sleeping in the cramped space. Forgetting his discomfort, he checked over his shoulder, searching. He was covered with one of the sleeping bags. Morgan would have put it there. When he fell asleep, he was covered only by her radiance and the afterglow of a love that blanketed them under a bubble of warmth.

  Yet where was she? "Morgan," he called, already knowing she wouldn't answer. Listening for a moment, his suspicions were confirmed. "Damn!" Jack cursed. She was gone. His heartbeat escalated. She wouldn't be far. She couldn't have risked her life to save his only to leave him during the night. And especially after the night they had just shared. But she knew better than to go off alone. Or she should, he corrected. They were too close to the mine and its inhabitants, ready to kill them, for her to go off on her own.

  Discarding the sooty clothes from yesterday, he grabbed a clean shirt and jeans and shrugged into them. As soon as he pushed his feet into running shoes, he weighed the most obvious direction she might have headed. Then he remembered the small body of water where she'd cleaned his face. It wasn't far, only a few steps. He went toward it with the speed of an agile cat.

  Jack stopped short when he saw her. It was barely dawn. The air was still cool. Dew wafted off the water like a celestial mist. She swam in the dark pool, gliding through the liquid like a water nymph. Her hair, loose and darkened by the wetness, floated on the surface of her shoulders. Jack remembered it falling over his hands last night, thick and soft, dark as velvet. His body tightened, reacting to hers with all the remembered love of a few hours ago and a lifetime of forevers.

  She swam away from him, her head above water, her arms coming together in front of her, and pushing the water away, slicing a path which she pulled into, only to repeat the action. He heard her humming one of the country music tunes she liked, her cares momentarily forgotten. Her body was nude, hidden by the concealing water, teasing him as parts of her surfaced while others went under. He saw her naked legs, her breasts, the soft curve of her hips peeking in and out of the mist. Jack stood rooted to the spot, unable to move or call to her, unable to do anything but watch her dance for his eyes only.

  He'd never seen anyone swim like her. He swam with purpose, laps up and back, methodically, rhythmically, his only goal to get from one side of the pool to the other and repeat the action. Morgan swam without purpose, with a grace and elegance that made her one with the medium in which she'd immersed herself. Jack was caught up in her motion, watching with awe as something invisible but tangible took hold of his heart and squeezed it. He could only stare. He couldn't move, couldn't call to her. He only wanted to stand in this virgin land and watch her gentle ballet as misty ghosts banked off the surface. Ethereal and cloudlike, Jack felt as if they were alone in the world. This was their private Garden of Eden and Morgan was his Eve. The setting was perfect, the surface clouds ushering in the morning and Morgan warm and naked in his arms.

  He was about to go to her and make his thoughts reality when she called to him, "Hey." She turned, facing him, treading water in her steamy setting. "You should come in. It's a little cold at first, but you get used to it."

  Jack was lost. She disarmed him. She'd always done it, but he'd been able to control it in the past. When she was only a figment of his dreams, he could keep it at bay. With her this close, he couldn't. He wanted to get into the water. He wanted to scoop her into his arms and let the formless liquid buoy them. He wanted to join her in the erotic ballet, slide into her with the sloshing comfort of the liquid about them and make love until neither of them had a brain between them.

  Jack looked away. Suddenly he was uncomfortable. It had nothing to do with Morgan, more with himself. He knew better than to get involved. He also knew he had no choice.

  "It's time to get dressed," he said, trying to cover his discomfort, replacing an idyllic life together with images that talked of a future the two of them would never have. "We've got to get out of here."

  Jack turned and headed back to the SUV. He couldn't watch as she came out of the water, ascending the sea like some golden-brown mermaid sacrificing her fins for legs to walk the earth and love a man. Jack couldn't be that man. As much as he wanted it, craved it so badly he thought his heart would burst, as much as he wanted to give up everything for her, it was not to be. He didn't need Jacob Winston to read him the riot act. He didn't need Forrest Washington to explain the rules of engagement. Neither of them could tell him anything he hadn't already said to himself, but neither of them had held Morgan in their arms and they hadn't listened to her soft, breathy sound as she made love.

  "What is it with you?" Morgan asked, coming up behind him as he stood in the van's open door.

  Grabbing his arm, she spun him around to face her. Hands on hips, she looked like a predatory lion ready to do battle. He said nothing. She appeared to grow angrier.

  God, he thought, why did she have to be so beautiful? Her wet hair was slicked back off her face. It fell in spiked tendrils on her shoulders. Droplets of water soaked the ends, absorbing into her shirt with the sureness of a napkin. She wore no makeup. Her skin was tight and healthy, her nose and cheeks shiny. Ribbons of darkness skated across her midriff, proving she'd pulled the T-shirt over her head while her body was still wet. Jack gripped the door to keep from grabbing her and pulling her into his arms, smelling the freshness of the water on her skin and the cleanliness of her hair.

  "You know what your problem is, Jack?" Morgan said, although she gave him no time to answer. "You stand back when love tries to touch you. You're a strong man and you think love will make you weak, vulnerable. It won't. It'll make you human. You've been out here saving the world for a long time. A lone ranger, needing no one, wanting no one. Is that the way you want it?'' She paused, taking a breath. "To live your life having sex but not making love, touching but not feeling, meeting people but never taking the time to know them? If so, then we're much too different and life for us will never be a success."

  "It's a moot point, Morgan. When we get to Washington, if they don't kill us first, you're out of my life."

  She stepped back as if he'd hit her.

  "Wherever I stand on love, back, forward or in between, is useless to
discuss. So let's keep our minds on the problem at hand."

  She stared at him for a long moment. Jack watched her facial muscles twitch as she tried to keep them in place. She wanted to cry. She was going to cry.

  "Is that what we were doing last night, Jack? Keeping our minds on the problem at hand?"

  Not waiting for an answer, she stalked away. He moved around the SUV to where she could not see him before letting out the breath he'd been holding.

  Standing back when love tried to touch him. It was part of his I.D. as surely as his name was. She'd taught it to him, although she didn't know it. It was a hard lesson, one he thought he'd learned well. He vowed never to get involved again, never let a woman get into his blood. When he let his feelings become involved, he'd immediately walk away. He'd been good at it too. It had become his nature, but not now.

  She had touched him, reached into his soul and held him in place, refusing to allow him to walk away. She'd worked her way into his heart and anchored herself there. His father had once told him he'd know he was in love when a woman was in his blood. Morgan had taken up that station and there was nothing he could do about it. He was in love with her, but he had to let her think he could walk away without a backward glance. She would surely be wrenched away from him as soon as they set foot in the FBI. He couldn't afford to let her know how he would suffer when she was gone. Let her hate him. It was better for them both.

  He could never hate her.

  CHAPTER 15

  The silence inside the van was palpable. Morgan didn't understand what had happened. One minute they were making love and the next Jack was telling her to get lost.

  She sat stiffly next to her door as far away from him as the tiny space allowed. Desperately her mind sought a solution to their dilemma. Jack was in love with her. She was sure of it, she told herself. He'd never said it. Between them stood her predicament. They could have no life together. If she didn't accept the government's protection she surely would be caught one day. If she wanted to live, she had to look at it rationally, the way Jack had. This had to end. They couldn't run forever. Either they would be caught and killed or they'd make it to Clarksburg and she'd enter witness protection. Jack would resume his life in the CIA or retreat to his Montana paradise. In either case, it would be without her.