Hard to Forget

by Incy Black

  He made a move toward her. To hold? To comfort? To shake? Hell, he didn’t know. He just wanted her tears to stop.

  “Not another step, Ballentyne,” she warned, swiping at her cheeks. “And don’t you dare follow me. Because I won’t be answerable for my actions if you do.”

  Before he’d had time to blink, she’d dashed up the stairs and was out of sight. He listened to the muffled thud of her sprinting above. Only releasing his breath when he heard her mount the staircase to the upper floors. From the sounds of it, she was taking them two at a time. For a moment there, he’d feared she’d head for the front door.

  “And to think I once envied you for your skill with women. Not such a lucky bugger now, are you, Jack. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, not even when she calms down.”

  Jack glued his arms to his sides to stop from ripping his brother’s head off. “Thanks for that, Gid. Just what I needed to hear.” He snagged his brother’s shoulder hard with his own as he moved past him to follow Lowry. To say what, when he caught up with her? He didn’t have a clue.

  Richard rolled forward to block his path. “She didn’t mean it, Jack. What she said. She was upset. Frightened. Give her some time. And for God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid like going after Patient Peter on your own. She won’t be impressed.”

  “I’m not looking to impress her. I just want her safe…and with me. Goddamnit.”

  It had been one thing to have that stray thought skirting elusively the darkened corners of his mind, quite another to hear himself admit it, out loud. And in front of witnesses. It felt like a trapdoor dropping away beneath his feet. Shocking, breath-thieving, heart-stopping. And terrifying. Because he couldn’t tell when his fall would finally bottom out.

  “Then tell her that, bro, or if you can’t find the words, show her, because if you don’t, you will lose her. And, though you’re the most stubborn, hardest bastard I know, I doubt even you could survive that.”

  Jack looked at his twin. “That had better not be pity I can read in your eyes.”

  “It isn’t. It’s incredulity. For a supposedly intelligent man, you can be amazingly thick sometimes. She’s more than halfway in love with you, Jack. Any idiot can see that. The question is, are you brave enough to see if you can take her all the way?”

  He wasn’t. Sure that is. About his ability to take her “all the way,” but that poke at his courage hadn’t sat well. Which is why, hours later, and wounded from the mental lashing he’d given himself, he now stood dithering outside her room, Richard’s dig still ringing in his ears, and his hopes of resolving things with a woman it choked him to admit he might care about, slowly ebbing away.

  He’d undertaken lethal missions in the past, faced down and lived shoulder to shoulder with the most brutal terrorist cells before rendering them stone dead, but his gut had never clamped this tight. He’d never tasted uncertainty and hesitated before. He’d never felt so damned exposed.

  Sucking in a breath, he raised a knuckle, deliberately forgetting he’d planned a softly-softly approach, and rapped sharply on her door. He’d intended to wait for her permission to enter but…to hell with that. He wasn’t about to give her any opportunity to send him away. He pushed through into her room, ditching the charm offensive he’d had planned. He’d used it on other women, and it had never failed. But Lowry wasn’t “other women.” She was…more. Besides which, it would only make her suspicious.

  Lowry, her eyelids too worryingly tinged pink for his liking, unfolded herself from the bed and went to stand in front of the window. Just about as far away from him as she could get. “What do you want, Jack? If you’re here to start another fight, then—”

  He held up both hands, palms facing her. “How about a truce? No more fighting. I even have a peace offering for you.”

  Those impossibly long lashes of hers fluttered like a moth trapped. “Now I’m really scared,” she confessed, her eyes darting to the door he’d left open. “What’s going on?”

  “Get some shoes on, and I’ll show you.”

  She held herself absolutely rigid—not even breathing, as far as he could tell—while she took a moment to consider his offer.

  The tank parked on his chest, dug deeper with its solid metal tread. A bead of sweat tricked between his shoulder blades.

  “Okay, I admit I’m intrigued,” she finally conceded, slipping her feet into a pair of sneakers. “Lead on.”

  A few minutes later, though to his mind it felt like the passing of millennia, she paused long enough on the threshold of the French doors leading onto the terrace to throw him a questioning look.

  He tried to shrug, but his damn shoulders had frozen. “Thought you’d appreciate a stroll in the Walled Garden, a chance to re-acquaint yourself with the great outdoors.”

  Her face lit up. “Seriously? On my own?”

  Jesus, not yet one foot outside and he already faced disappointing her.

  “No. Thought I’d tag along.” Grimacing, he rubbed his lower sternum with the heel of his hand. Bet she’d given him an ulcer.

  “For protection?”

  She did not sound happy.

  “Not exactly.”

  She did that rolly thing with her eyes. Once, way back when, it had triggered his temper faster than a lightning strike. Now, he found it oddly…cute. Cute? Fuck. Should have brought his gun. The way his mind was misfiring he might need to shoot himself. “Got a couple of things I need to say. Come on, we’ll probably both find this easier if we walk.”

  They’d almost reached the farthest corner of the Walled Garden, the silence between them far from companionable, when she heaved a sigh deep enough to scatter the last of the evening songbirds into the dusk. “For someone with something to say, Jack, you’re not exactly chatty.”

  “It’s complicated, and no matter which way I try and shuffle the words, my brain flashes ‘prize A-hole.’”

  “Smart brain,” she muttered.

  “Smart mouth,” he countered before he could stop himself. Shit. Some peace offering. He softened his tone. “Don’t give me a hard time, Lowry. I’m following up on something Richard said, and it isn’t easy.”

  “You spoken to him yet? You know what about.”

  He pursed his lips and shook his head. Disappointment number two.

  The look she gave him suggested she fully endorsed his brain’s A-hole assessment. “I’m going back.” She went to sidestep him. His arm shot out across her front, his hand coming to rest on her far hip.

  She stared at his hand then raised her head, eyebrows arching.

  “Please… Just hear me out.”

  The pressure against his arm didn’t increase, but then nor did it lessen. Slowly, cautiously, he inched sideways until fully in front of her then, shoving his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, he took a step back. “Drives me crazy. The thought of you being in danger. Makes me say things and behave in ways of which I’m not exactly proud. Like ruining your moment when you’d just found out you were in the clear for Wainwright’s murder. Like making damn sure you got kicked out of the Service, because I was so bloody pissed at you for putting me in a position of having to shoot you. That moment: me squeezing the trigger, watching you go down, my hands slick with your blood, your eyes dulling, your pulse barely flickering, it’s on permanent loop up here.” He tapped his temple. “Never stops. Same with Richard’s fall. Two short clips of time that never leave me the fuck alone.

  One corner of her bottom lip disappeared behind a nip of white ivories. He noticed her hand twitch as if to reach out, then fist tight at her side. Neither signals of uncertainty because her chin stayed high, but more a suppression, he guessed, of the urge to interrupt.

  The tightness in his chest eased a little. She was giving him a chance.

  “You survived six months of physical and mental annihilation on one of the toughest selection processes ever devised, Lowry, and there wasn’t a commanding officer at the Cube who didn’t respect the hell out of you for doi
ng so. But that didn’t mean a single one of us wanted you on their team. Not after the instructors had already flagged you as a handful.”

  Oh fuck, he recognized that scowl. He pushed on quickly before she could protest the label and they ended up in a fight.

  “And you and I didn’t exactly get off to the most auspicious start, remember? Still riding the glory of having survived basic training, and a bare couple of hours into your induction day at the Cube, you decide it’s time to meet your new commanding officer. So you track me down to the male locker room, sashay in, slam your papers against my chest and, smile wide as the sky, proudly announce that your request to join the Assassins has been accepted. My very naked chest, I might add, given I was still toweling off after a shower, having just got back from a truly horrendous mission in Pakistan. I yelled at you to show a bit of respect. You yelled right back that I’d have to earn it first. Our first public fight. In front of six other commanding officers, all splitting their sides with hilarity.”

  Oh, she remembered. Her hand flew to her mouth, but not fast enough to cover a spurt of laughter. He was even less successful at hiding a reluctant grin. “Never had a recruit give me as much trouble as you did, Lowry. There I was, supposedly the hardest bastard in the Service, having rings run round me by a sexy as all hell subordinate who alternated between finding me either amusing or annoying.”

  “That’s because you made me feel a little hysterical, Jack. You’d glower at me, even when I hadn’t done anything wrong…but had I known it was because you found me sexy—”

  He shook his head. “Don’t go there, Lowry. Not when we both know that if I’d set aside the fact I was your superior officer, crooked my finger, and beckoned, you’d have been on my lap faster than a scorched cat.”

  Her lips pushed into a pout, her cheeks glowed a pretty pink. Both had an atrociously instant effect on his groin. “We’re getting somewhat off topic here,” he muttered, sobering, at the same time removing his hands from his back pockets to ease the tight strain of his jeans.

  “And my sanity might just have survived you, Lowry, had you not started kicking over rocks and poking in dark places with a too-short stick. Yeah, you heard the laughter and suffered the ridicule of demanding answers to questions no one wanted to hear. But you were deaf, dumb, and blind to the anger and fear you were dredging up which, given the type of men you knew worked out of the Cube, was just plain stupid.”

  Oh. She did not like that. If he didn’t rein it in, and fast, he’d balls this up and his apology wouldn’t be worth shit.

  In a pincer like movement, he squeezed the tip of his forefinger toward the tip of his thumb, the gap he left barely able to fit a cat’s whisker. “You were this close to taking a beating, Lowry. But for my protection, and the reputation of the Assassins when I was in the field, woman or not, you’d have found yourself hauled down a dark alley and taught a lesson.”

  Eyes suddenly wide, her lips parted. A barely-there gasp escaped. No, she’d been unaware of the danger. Oblivious to the smoldering animosity, the raw resentment of increasingly scared men whose lives depended on trust, not wanting to look in the mirror she’d held high. Thank fuck he’d done something right during the months she’d gone through hell.

  “You were protecting me?”

  He rubbed his jaw with his fist. “Someone had to.”

  “So you believed my warnings that rot had set in at the Cube?”

  He wouldn’t lie to her. “No. Incensed, I went to your father and demanded an investigation to prove you were wrong. His response was to ground the Assassins in London indefinitely with the order that I look into the possibility of you being right.”

  She blinked. Slowly. “My father believed in me?”

  She sounded so damn bewildered, so damn lost all of a sudden. Not trusting himself to find the right words, he just nodded.

  Even nature held its breath in the long pause that followed. He resisted the urge to reach for her as she struggled to assimilate what he’d said, her fingers clenching and unclenching, her rib cage visibly going through an extreme work out. “One of you should have told me,” she whispered hoarsely, then more strongly, several octaves higher. “It would have made a difference. Just to have known one goddamn person was on my side—” She slammed her fist into his chest. Followed it with the other.

  The only way to stop the pummeling was to wrap her in his arms and hold her tight. “I’m sorry. So fucking sorry.” Odd how easily those words rolled off his tongue once he dared voice them. Eyes closed, he kept up the litany while she sobbed against his chest, his mind reeling at how the hell they could have moved at whiplash speed from awkward silence to blunt truth, dangerous flirtation to fury and heartbreak, over the course of a bare fifteen minutes.

  What he didn’t time, because he didn’t care to, not with the weightiness of his own heart threatening to crash through to his boots, was how long it took for her crying jag to slow into a series of little sniffs and hushed gulps. But when she did eventually quiet and he felt her settle more deeply against his chest, he relaxed his arms from around her and, taking her by the shoulders, gently eased her to arms length. “Not done with everything I’ve got to say yet, Lowry. You okay to go on, or do you want to head back?”

  “Best get it over and done with,” came a somewhat thick, muffled reply from behind the heavy curtain of hair. “But maybe we should make our way back at the same time.”

  He hated that she wouldn’t look at him. He tightened one arm around her, tucking her close to his side, momentarily stunned that she fitted perfectly, and that holding her like this felt so damned right. “Has it ever occurred to you that I’m always at my worst when around you?”

  “Yes,” she answered with conviction, her head rising. “And it confirms I irritate you, exasperate you, make you want to reach for your gun and shoot me.”

  He grinned, relief flooding his veins that having been knocked down, she’d stood right back up. His kind of woman. “All true, but you left out disturb, frustrate, and drive insane. But the point I’m actually trying to make is that—”

  “That you’re not the callous bastard I accused you of being. That you understand fear and doubt, guilt and regret, though it would kill you to ever admit it? I’m sorry I said you reminded me of him—Patient Peter.”

  He pulled her to a stop. Turned her toward him and waited for the sudden tension that held her stiff to ease. Then, he waited a bit longer. Until she was ready to raise her eyes to meet his own.

  When she did, he continued. “Actually, I am every bit the brutal bastard you called me, especially when someone important to me is threatened. Now do you think you could shut up for a minute, so that I can finish what I need to say? This is the really hard part.”

  God, he loved it when she nipped at her bottom lip that way, only he preferred to be the one doing the nibbling. But not until he’d said what he had to say. “The point I am trying to make is that the feelings I have for you…ah…spook the hell out of me.”

  Her response wasn’t instant, it wasn’t even fast. She took her time to consider what he’d said. He resisted the urge to take a savage kick at the pea gravel beneath his boots. Fuck, he had left it too late. Too late for what, he didn’t have a clue. Something was there, he just couldn’t get a hold on it.

  “Then I guess there’s hope for you yet, Ballentyne.”

  Had she not given a soft husky laugh, he might have left it at that. Taken it slow and settled for just holding her in his arms. But that sound, tantalizingly wicked, invitingly naughty, put paid to the caution he’d promised to show. “Don’t mock me, woman. I’d rather face down an army of raging Taliban fighters than have to make a declaration like that again.”

  This time he didn’t wait for her follow through, he chose to drink in and swallow her laughter, his lips hitting hers. He’d only take a sip, he promised himself, then he’d step back and allow her to get her head around the fact that, if he cared for her, that could mean she’d never be free of
him.

  …

  She had to admit, it was her fault things spun out of hand. He held back. She figured what the hell; it felt like she’d waited half a lifetime for this. A declaration from Jack that he felt something for her. Even if it “spooked” him.

  So she pushed past his guard.

  She poured her heart and the heat for which he had only himself to blame into the kiss. Sharing her hunger, letting all her barriers down. And, when that wasn’t enough, she climbed his body, granite hard, strong, in no doubt that he’d hold her safe.

  She looped her legs around his hips, lengthened her spine, buried her fingers into his hair, and tugged his head back. Then she used the advantage of that superior position to gift a second kiss, long and deep, giving and trusting and wanting. Wanting it all.

  And, with a grunt, he did hold her tight. His stance widened, the pea gravel scraping beneath his boots. One large hand slid down to cup the curve of her rear, the other, with fingers splayed, firm at the back of her head.

  She caressed him, her wet heat rubbing tight against his hardness, urgency whipping tender and slow into desperate gyration. His hands, all of a sudden under her skirt, his fingers slipped the hem of her panties, his thumb pressing, circling. Two fingers deep, deep in her wet heat, sliding, thrusting.

  She tightening her thighs and threw back her head to extend the vulnerable length of her throat. Wanting him to suck, to mark her. White heat flared inside her…so close, so close, so—

  He held her tight while she came down. Her body a ripple of aftershocks, not breathing—gasping.

  From a distance she heard him order her—it was a command, a simple request would not have gotten through—to unclasp and drop her legs. Hands biting into her hips, he steadied her when her feet found the ground. Her sole consolation, through the daze misting her vision, was that his breathing was every bit as rapid as hers, and as jagged.

  “Jack—?”

  “That’s Richard calling. We’d better go. Even he wouldn’t dare disturb us unless it was critical. At least, it bloody well better be critical or I’ll…”