“You already know something about me.”
“Yes, let’s see. You’ve been a soldier, a rescue ranger and a bounty hunter. You climb rocks and like to jump out of airplanes for fun. But now I’d like to hear about your childhood.”
“I wasn’t a child when I joined the service, Kaitlyn. I was a grown man on my way to becoming a convicted felon.”
She drew back in shock. “What? What did you do?”
“When I was nineteen, some of my friends and I decided to boost a car. We took it for a joy ride, wrapped it around a light pole, and two of my buddies died in the crash, another in the hospital two weeks later.”
“Oh, my God,” Kaitlyn whispered.
“Yeah, I was lucky, although I didn’t think so at the time. Going to those funerals and facing those families…” He broke off, and Kaitlyn knew that the shame and guilt from that tragedy had probably shaped his en tire life. Was that why he felt such a need to rescue people? Was he still trying to making amends?
“I wasn’t driving or I could have been charged with vehicular homicide,” he said. “As it was, I was looking at some pretty stiff charges, but my father had some pull with the judge who heard my case. He had the guy give me an ultimatum. I could either serve time in San Quentin or serve my country. I enlisted the next day.”
“So you went from Beverly Hills to boot camp,” Kaitlyn said. “Talk about culture shock.”
He gave a little laugh. “Yeah, it was a real eye-opener. But it was also the best thing that ever happened to me. Gave me discipline, focus, a sense of self-worth.” He shrugged. “Old story. You’ve heard it a million times.”
“Okay, that explains why you joined up. Now tell me why you left.”
“It was time to move on. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“Sure. But was it really that simple?”
“What do you mean?”
Kaitlyn rolled over on her back and stared at the ceiling. “Last night, right before Murphy called, when we were on the floor…you know…” She smiled. “I reached for your wallet, remember? I saw a picture of a woman inside.”
He turned to stare at her.
“I wasn’t snooping. It just opened up to that picture.” Kaitlyn hesitated. “Who is she, Aidan?”
He refocused his attention on the ceiling. “Her name was Elena Sanchez.”
“Was?”
“She’s dead.”
Kaitlyn exhaled slowly. “I’m sorry. Was she…someone close to you?” Of course, she was. Why else would he carry around her picture?
“We were engaged for a while.”
She turned to prop herself on her elbow as she stared at him. “Aidan, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. If you don’t want to talk about her, I understand.”
But she wanted him to talk about Elena Sanchez, Kaitlyn realized. She wanted him to say that he’d known her a long time ago. That he was over her. She was nothing but a memory to him now.
“I met her five years ago,” he finally said. “It was right before Colonel Murphy resigned his commission and our unit broke up. Elena and her family were from Colombia. Her father worked for one of the drug cartels, but he was also a CIA informant. When his cover was compromised, we were sent in to get him and his family out.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. We brought them back to the States and Elena and I began seeing each other.”
“You fell in love,” Kaitlyn said.
“We were together for two years, and then it was over.”
Kaitlyn looked at him in surprise. “What happened?”
“I was away a lot. She was lonely.” He paused. “She’d been a medical student at the National Academy of Medicine in Bogotá. She’d had a brilliant future ahead of her, and then suddenly her whole life was ripped apart. She had a hard time adjusting and I tried to compensate. But I finally realized that the engagement was a mistake for both of us because I was never going to be able to give her back what she’d lost. And she was always going to resent me for that.”
“Were you still in love with her?”
“I don’t know. The relationship was complicated. I felt a lot of things for her…but love? I’m not so sure anymore.”
What had he felt for Elena? Kaitlyn wondered. Had he felt protective of her? Had he felt responsible for her because he’d saved her?
Those same emotions he seemed to now have projected onto Kaitlyn.
The notion made her more than a little uncomfortable.
“Just over a year ago, I found out she’d gone back to Colombia to find her brother. He’d joined a group of rebel insurgents somewhere in the mountains, and Elena had heard from a friend that he’d been badly wounded. She went to find him.”
“And you went to find her,” Kaitlyn said. “Did you?”
“Yes, finally. Her brother had died, and Elena had had to go into hiding. I found her in a remote village in the Andes. She was in bad shape, emotionally and physically, and it was risky to move her, but more dangerous to leave her. I’d arranged for a helicopter to pick us up, but I had to get her to the rendezvous point.”
He took a deep breath and Kaitlyn couldn’t help noticing how his hands were trembling ever so slightly. Whatever he was about to tell her, she sensed it wasn’t going to be easy.
“We were crossing a rope bridge over a ravine one night. She was terrified of heights, and she slipped. I caught her and I could have pulled her to safety, but she panicked and started to struggle. I tried to calm her, but she was too scared. And every time I tried to pull her up, she became even more frantic. I could feel her slipping away from me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. She fell, begging me not to let her die.”
Kaitlyn closed her eyes and shuddered. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. It sounded lame, but what else was there to say?
“Guilt is such a funny thing.” She put out a tentative hand to touch his arm, then drew it back. He seemed so remote at the moment. So lost in his own pain that Kaitlyn wasn’t sure he’d welcome her comfort. “You can see it so clearly when someone else is beating themselves up needlessly, but when it comes to your own guilt—” she shrugged “—reason doesn’t seem to matter. You can tell yourself a million times that it wasn’t your fault. She was a grown woman. It was her decision to go back to Colombia and put herself in that kind of danger. You did everything you could to save her, but…”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“It wasn’t enough.” Kaitlyn stared at the ceiling for a moment. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told myself that what happened to Jenny wasn’t my fault. I didn’t make her join the MMFAFA. She was a grown woman. She made that decision on her own. But when she came to me for help, what did I do? I sent her back in.”
Aidan turned to face her. “That was her decision, too. She could have refused.”
“But she didn’t. And I’ve had to live with the consequences. So…I guess what I’m saying is that I know about guilt, Aidan. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, or how much you try to convince yourself otherwise, until you’re ready to accept the fact that there wasn’t anything more you could have done to save Elena, you’ll have this burden. You might never get over it. But you will eventually get past it.”
She saw him smile in the fading light. “Not only brave, but wise. You really are quite a woman, you know that?”
Kaitlyn didn’t feel so brave or so wise at the moment. What she felt was a bit foolish. She cared about Aidan. She cared about him a lot. If she wasn’t careful, she could easily fall in love with him, and what a mistake that would be. Because whether he wanted to admit it or not, what he felt for her had rebound written all over it.
AFTER THAT CONVERSATION, Kaitlyn began to put the brakes on their relationship. She tried to do it subtly, but she had a feeling Aidan knew exactly what she was doing.
So be it. She had to protect herself because the longer they stayed together, the harder it would be for her to leave him. And she would have to leave him eventuall
y. For one thing, she had a career to think of. And for another…the man was still nursing some very deep and complex feelings for another woman. A dead woman. And there was no way Kaitlyn wanted to compete with that.
And why should she have to? She had a full life without Aidan, and she needed to get back to that life and forget about losing herself in his arms…just one last time.
They stayed at the cabin until Monday morning, and then Kaitlyn told him that she wanted to return to Ponderosa.
“I can’t hide out forever,” she’d insisted. “I have a job. Deadlines. Responsibilities. I’d have to go back be fore the weekend anyway because I’m covering the governor’s ball at the Denning mansion on Saturday night. After that, it’s the governor’s whistle-stop tour through the state.”
Aidan frowned. “Whistle-stop tour? When did that come about?”
“It’s been planned for a while. The train is scheduled to leave sometime after the ball, and Eden has asked me to ride along in the press car. I can’t back out now. I owe her. And then, of course, the election is coming up….”
“Okay, I get your point,” Aidan had said a bit testily, but he’d called Powell anyway to come pick them up.
By the time they got back to Kaitlyn’s apartment, everything had changed between them. Before, Kaitlyn’s intense attraction to Aidan had been the elephant in the room that kept her on edge, but now it was the ghost of Elena Sanchez that had become the intruder.
That night, Kaitlyn said good-night to Aidan, went into her bedroom, closed the door and didn’t come out again until the following morning. He didn’t question her decision. He didn’t say a word about the wall she’d erected between them, but his silent acquiescence told Kaitlyn everything she needed to know, and then some.
“IF I CAN’T TRUST YOU to carry out one simple task, how can I have any faith that you’ll be able to pull off the next phase of the operation?”
Boone Fowler shrugged. “What choice do you have?”
“We always have choices, my friend.” The man smiled thinly. “You said you would take care of Kaitlyn Wilson, and yet my sources tell me that she’s returned to her apartment in Ponderosa, apparently without so much as a scratch. How is that possible?”
“I’ll tell you how it’s possible.” Fowler rose slowly, his hand tightening around the knife he’d been holding under the table. Now he lifted it to the light to make sure his companion saw the gleam of the blade. “She has a bodyguard…one of Cameron Murphy’s men. And she has the full protection of Murphy’s outfit behind her. I say we take them out first.”
“And have the whole operation explode in our faces? I don’t think so. You had your chance, Fowler. Now it’s my turn.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What I should have done from the first. Take care of the problem myself.”
The man never got his hands dirty. He had something else up his sleeve. “You’re going to kill her yourself,” Fowler scoffed. “That I’d like to see.”
“Well, then, stick around, my friend. The arrangements have already been made. After Saturday night, Kaitlyn Wilson will be nothing more than a bad memory.”
Fowler almost smiled at that. The pompous fool had no idea that the same fate he’d planned for Kaitlyn Wilson…also awaited him.
Chapter Fourteen
Saturday, 2000 hours
“Cook has picked up some interesting chatter from the Internet,” Murphy told them late Saturday afternoon as they assembled around the conference table in the war room. “And my FBI contact has reluctantly confirmed that the terror threat level has been raised, not just in Washington but here in Montana as well.”
“Is this the result of the hit on the German ambassador?” someone asked him.
“Why don’t you explain what you’ve been hearing?” Murphy told Cook.
Owen nodded. “I’ve been monitoring a lot of the same chat rooms and bulletin boards that the feds keep an eye on, from what I’ve been able to tell, it seems that the hit on the ambassador was nothing more than a decoy. Something bigger is in the works.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Cook said. “But today’s date keeps popping up, and the only thing I can come up with is the governor’s ball. I haven’t come across anything concrete, but with Petrov in attendance, it makes sense it could be a target.”
Aidan’s heart thudded against his chest. “Are you talking about an assassination attempt or something more than that?” Because Kaitlyn was going to be at the ball…she was probably already there by now.
His fingers itched to grab his cell phone and call her, but he needed to hear Cook out first. He had to know exactly what he was dealing with here.
“I’m talking about a bomb,” Cook said bluntly.
Aidan swore.
“We think that’s why they needed Fowler,” Murphy said. “We couldn’t figure out why Boone Fowler would get involved in an international plot, but this could be our answer. Who better to blow up a building filled with innocent people than an old pro like Fowler?”
Aidan sat forward, the adrenaline rushing through his veins making him almost light-headed. “We have to get that building evacuated immediately.”
Murphy frowned. “Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done.”
“There must be some way. Call your FBI contact.” Aidan jumped to his feet. “For God’s sakes, we can’t just sit here. We have to get those people out of there.”
Murphy shook his head. “It’s too late. The place is packed, and they’re not going to evacuate because of some conjecture on our part. The feds have agreed to increase security, but that’s it. The rest is up to us. I’m sending a couple of you inside, and then I want the rest of you surrounding that building.”
“I’m going in,” Aidan said.
Murphy’s first instinct was to deny him. Aidan could see it in his eyes. He could almost hear the colonel gearing up for his conflict-of-interest speech, but Aidan wasn’t having it. Not this time. Not with Kaitlyn’s life on the line.
How and when she’d become so important to him didn’t seem to matter at the moment. Aidan would ponder those questions later, along with all the reasons why a long-term relationship wasn’t in the cards for them.
Right now, though, nothing mattered but getting to her as quickly as possible.
He and Murphy stared at each other for a moment, then Murphy finally nodded. “All right. You and Brown will work from the inside. The rest of you, keep your eyes peeled. If Fowler slips through our net, we could have another tragedy on our hands.”
And Kaitlyn would be right smack in the middle of it.
EDEN COULDN’T HAVE GOTTEN better weather for the governor’s ball if she’d placed a special order for it, Kaitlyn decided as she stepped out of the car and presented her ID and invitation to the security detail in charge of scrutinizing the guests. The night was cool and clear, with only a slight nip of fall in the air and not the slightest hint of the rain that had been forecasted all week.
Slipping her ID into her bag, Kaitlyn’s excitement mounted as she headed up the steps of the Denning mansion. Kaitlyn had spent the first fourteen years of her life in Washington, D.C., with a newsman father, so she wasn’t unaccustomed to lavish political events such as this. But meeting a real-life prince…that didn’t happen to a girl every day.
Kaitlyn was asked to show her ID again at the door, and then finally she was inside. She’d never been to the Denning mansion before although she’d seen lots of pictures. The photographs hadn’t done the place justice, though. It was all white marble, graceful columns and gilded ceilings—a magnificent, elegant home that belonged somewhere in the south of France, not plopped down on the outskirts of Helena, Montana.
Tonight, with the swirling ball gowns and glittering masks, it seemed even more old-world and aristocratic.
Kaitlyn felt a bit ridiculous holding up her own mask to hide her identity, but everyone else had joined in the spirit of the evening, a
nd when in Rome…
As she made her way through the crowd, she realized the evening already looked to be a success. The place was packed. Eden had to be ecstatic about the turnout. And everyone seemed to be having such a marvelous time. It was very lavish and festive, with the women laughing and flirting behind elaborate disguises and the men, all handsome and mysterious, in their tuxes and plain black masks.
Kaitlyn had only been inside for a few minutes when the governor took to the podium for his welcome address. In spite of Eden’s connection, Kaitlyn had never formally met Peter Gilbert, although she’d attended numerous press conferences and had even managed to get in a question now and then. He was a handsome man whose charm and charisma seemed to be exceeded only by his ambition.
Kaitlyn had often wondered, but never dared asked, about Eden’s relationship with Gilbert. There were rumors of an affair circulating about the state capital, and Kaitlyn had seen a look in Eden’s eyes from time to time that made her wonder if those rumors were true.
She supposed it wouldn’t be the first time that a woman fell for her boss, especially one as charming and powerful as Peter Gilbert.
As eloquent as ever, he soon had the crowd laughing and nodding in agreement as he made light of the extraordinary security hoops they’d had to jump through that evening, and then he sobered. “Seriously, I do want to thank you all for coming out tonight, for all the support you’ve given me during my campaign, and most of all for your generous donations this evening to such a worthy cause. In times like these, we all must make sacrifices….”
In times like these…
The hair at the back of Kaitlyn’s neck lifted. Where had she heard that phrase before?
Something tugged at her memory, but she couldn’t quite grasp it—
“I see Gilbert is in rare form tonight,” a male voice said in her ear.
Kaitlyn whirled. “Aidan?” She lifted her hand and peeked behind the mask. “It is you! What are you doing here? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? And how on earth did you get in?”
Even behind the mask, she could tell that his expression was serious. “I need to talk to you—”
Going to Extremes Page 15