Everyone treated Catherine with kid gloves. Even Nick, who liked her and respected her. But Elle—Elle trumped Catherine any day.
He didn’t give a shit about anyone’s sleep if Elle was in danger.
“Elle,” he repeated, his voice raw.
“L?” Mac asked, frowning. “The letter?”
Jon took it up. “L for link? L for lonely? L for—”
“Elle.” It was the only thing he could say. His head was going to blow up. Every single danger hormone in his body was awake with nowhere to go. He was a guy built for action, and he always knew which action to take. To be so primed, so pumped, so fucking scared and dying to race to the rescue but have no idea where was driving him bat-shit crazy.
His fingers beat a harsh tattoo against his thigh and his foot was tapping. Jon, Mac, and Catherine simply stared at him. He knew what they were thinking—Nick Ross agitated? Scared? What was that about?
Nick didn’t do agitated and scared.
“Nick,” Catherine said gently and took his shaking hand in both of hers. Mac tensed. Everyone knew Nick didn’t like being touched. But this wasn’t someone he didn’t know entering his personal space. This was Catherine, and her touch … soothed. Calmed him, just a little.
She held on to his hand, watching his eyes. After a moment she nodded. “It’s her, isn’t it?”
His head jerked awkwardly, neck stiff with tension.
Catherine had something. He didn’t know what, nobody knew what really, but she had … something. If she touched you, she understood you. And, lately, if she touched you, you felt better. Which explained why her husband, Mac, the toughest, meanest son of a bitch on the planet, was walking around with a goofy grin on his hard, ugly, scarred mug.
Nick had wondered about that. About being married to someone like Catherine. Someone who understood you inside out with a touch. Understood you and loved you.
Elle had loved him. It had been clear in her eyes, her voice, her face. She’d loved him and he’d lost her and—Oh God, she was in danger. She needed him and he didn’t know how the fuck to find her.
He shivered, turned his sweaty face to Catherine.
“Yeah. She’s the one you felt when you touched me.” A few days after Catherine somehow found them in Haven—a place three experts in security had hidden carefully away from the world—she’d touched him and understood that he’d lost someone, that he was worried sick about someone.
She never went there again and neither did anyone else.
But now it had to come out.
He grabbed Catherine’s hand, barely noticing Mac and Jon exchanging looks. “Read me,” he whispered urgently, clasping her hand hard between his trembling hands. “Tell me where she is. What’s happening to her. I got a call for help and I don’t know where she is and, Oh God …”
Nick’s throat closed tight. Nothing more could come out. He clung to Catherine’s hand as if it were a lifeline. A raging river was tumbling him over and over down an endless descent into hell and only her touch could make sense of it.
Catherine was shaking her head slowly, eyes on his, face sad. “I am so sor—” She stopped, breathed out, tilted her head. Even though she was looking straight at him, her eyes grew distant as if watching something a thousand yards away. Her grip tightened, her hand warming up until it felt red hot in his cold ones.
“Elle,” she whispered and Nick broke out in a cold sweat. He was shaking, could barely breathe.
“Yeah,” he said hoarsely.
“What?” Catherine blinked.
“Elle, Elle, Elle,” he shouted.
Mac’s jaw tightened. Nick didn’t give a shit. Mac could shove it up his ass if it bothered him that Nick was shouting at his wife. Because Catherine knew something and something was better than what he had right now, which was a shitload of nothing. No intel, no idea where she was, nothing but ashes in his hand and his head exploding from the need to get to Elle as fast as humanly possible. Wherever the fuck she was …
He had no idea. But maybe Catherine did. He stepped closer to Catherine and Mac took a step forward too. Jon grabbed Mac’s arm and shook his head.
Well, fuck.
Nick wasn’t going to hurt Catherine. If Mac used his brains instead of his dick, he’d know that. But Nick wasn’t letting Catherine walk away without finding out what she knew, however the hell she knew it.
“That’s the name you said.” Nick ground his teeth at her blank look. “Just now. Just now you said Elle. That’s the name of my— The name of the person I need to find.”
His throat was so tight. Just hearing her name after so many years—he couldn’t think straight.
“Elle,” she said softly.
Nick nodded, like some big dumb animal that couldn’t speak. Elle.
Catherine was focusing on him again. Her other hand came up to clasp his in a tight grip, warm and soft. Something to cling to in the painful darkness of his terror.
“That’s the one I felt, right, Nick? The one you lost?”
He nodded again. Tried to speak. Failed.
“You care about her.” It wasn’t a question.
Oh God, yes. He nodded again, jerkily. Found his voice. “Where is she? She needs me. Now. I have to get to her, right now.” He was vibrating with tension, ready to take off anywhere Catherine said.
There was sadness on Catherine’s beautiful face. She tightened her clasp. “Oh Nick. I’m so sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”
An icy chill worked its way through his veins and he realized he’d been subconsciously counting on Catherine to do her woo-woo stuff. Point him in Elle’s direction so he could race to her. “Then how the hell does it work? Can you tell me that?” He stepped even closer to Catherine, right in her face, his voice rising.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jon grab Mac’s arm again. Not even Jon could stop Mac if Mac didn’t want to be stopped, but Mac got himself under control. Nick wasn’t going to hurt Catherine, but he was going to question her.
He was staring wildly down into Catherine’s eyes, as if he could will the information on Elle’s whereabouts out of her, drag it out of her through her skin if necessary. But staring was an act of aggression. They’d been taught that, at the beginning of their careers as soldiers. Body language had been a big thing. How to silently threaten, how to pass unnoticed, how to reassure.
He didn’t want to scare Catherine.
With a wrench, Nick turned his gaze away from Catherine and stared blindly at the room. Their war room, they called it. With everything you needed to go on an op. Just as long as you knew where you were going, of course.
As soon as he knew where to head, Nick was going to grab Jon, drag him to their ultralight stealth helo, and take off.
Nick was the team driver. If it was anything that traveled over land, Nick could drive it as fast as it could go over any terrain. Jon was the pilot. Their little helo could make it anywhere in the Continental U.S. It was the dead of night. Little Bird could silently land in any private airfield without detection. They could fuel up and be gone before anyone knew they were there. They’d done it before.
Nick didn’t even want to think what would happen if Elle were OUTCONUS. Didn’t want to go there. Couldn’t.
She’d called out to him. That had been a distress signal he’d heard in his head, loud and clear. Surely there was—was a range for that sort of thing? Surely he wouldn’t have heard it if she were in Europe or Africa?
The signal he’d got was loud and absolutely urgent. She was in danger right now, and if she was across an ocean she was fucked and, oh God … He couldn’t wrap his head around that thought.
Elle dead, Elle dying … he couldn’t do this. Simply couldn’t.
Catherine’s sympathetic face—he couldn’t look at that either. His eyes roamed the big room, partly to distract himself from that awful panicky desperation that gripped him, so he could function on some basic level, and partly to see if something in their gear-packed room could help.
Huge holographic monitors ringed the walls. They had tiny drones of their own hovering 24/7 over a ten-square-mile radius surrounding Haven, and thus had a 360-degree IR view of everything. Highly sensitive motion sensors and sound sensors. If a fly farted anywhere near them, they knew about it. Their computers were illegally hooked into the Keyhole 15 satellites and they could get real-time intel on more or less anything happening in the world, particularly in the Fucked-Up Latitudes.
All Nick needed was a location and he could zoom in on her.
A location he didn’t have.
So the holograms, the satellite feeds, the vast crunching power of their servers—their server farm was bigger than the Pentagon’s, bigger even than Amazon’s—couldn’t help. Behind the titanium door on the left-hand wall was an armory that would do a Delta team proud. Nick had been Delta, and there were a few extra goodies in there that even Delta hadn’t had.
If there was an enemy, they could take them out, no question. They had the tools and the determination to protect what they had.
Hell, Mac had a wife and a baby on the way to protect. Mac all by himself was a war machine.
So they had the stuff to get there, wipe out the opposition, and come back in stealth.
He, Mac, and Jon were really good at slipping into places and extracting things and people. They hadn’t been Ghost Ops for nothing. They were Ghosts because everything about their past had been erased. Wiped clean. They didn’t exist anywhere on earth. And they were Ghosts because they had been trained to move with stealth. When they didn’t want to be found, they weren’t.
Even here, creating a community of geniuses and misfits, they hadn’t been found.
Taking stock of the war room calmed Nick, just a little. When he found out where Elle was, there’d be firepower and the will to use it. He didn’t care if she had a fucking army after her.
But where was she?
It was a male operator’s paradise, full of high-tech gear and comms. With a woman’s touch in the far corner. Catherine had been a researcher before going on a mission to find a man she’d never met, Mac. She’d been sent on that mission by their former commander, Captain Lucius Ward, the man they thought had betrayed them.
Ward hadn’t betrayed them. He’d been betrayed himself and had lost his health and his sanity after a year in the hands of monsters. They’d gone to the rescue of the captain and been astonished to find three of their comrades who had been experimented on until they were nearly dead.
Romero, Lundquist, and Pelton had lost almost a third of their body weight, had been crisscrossed with surgical scars, and had lost the ability to talk when they’d been brought back to Haven.
So Catherine was caring for them, bringing them back to life, while trying to figure out what had been done to them. That something was very, very bad.
She was a neat woman so her corner wasn’t the mess that their space was, but she’d obviously been interrupted. Maybe by her husband Mac carrying her off to their cave. They disappeared together a lot.
A big briefcase had toppled on Catherine’s desk, paperwork spilling down out of it like a glacier’s moraine. She was researching what had been done to their teammates and the captain. A series of glossy company brochures and prospectuses cascaded down. He stared at the pile of documents.
Catherine’s soft voice cut in.
“What? What is it, Nick?”
She repeated whatever it was she’d said before. Nick saw her mouth move but couldn’t figure out the words. He was staring at Catherine’s corner of their war room. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. It was as if a spotlight had lit up her briefcase.
She said something else and Nick tried really, really hard to concentrate. But it was useless. He’d focus on her, then his mind and his eyes would wander.
A slap to the back of his head nearly sent him spinning to the floor. “Focus, you dickhead,” Mac growled. “Catherine’s trying to help your sorry ass.”
Nick breathed in, breathed out. Without moving his head, his eyes slid back to Catherine’s corner. Catherine’s arm snaked out and it took him a second to realize that she blocked her husband’s arm.
“Wait, Mac,” she said, tilting her head to look at Nick. “Is something happening?”
Was something happening? Fuck if he knew.
“Why are you staring at my briefcase, Nick?”
“Huh?” He felt so stupid. Usually he was quick. His usual response to things was at lightning speed. He was on alert, always. Nothing ever took him by surprise. He was reacting to danger before most other men even realized it was there.
Now he felt slow, sluggish. Thoughts occurred to him slowly, as if they had to take a huge trip to get to his head. It was as if his head were taken up by a computer virus slowing everything down.
Soft warmth on his cheeks. Catherine’s hands on his face. “Look at me, Nick.”
He looked at her, though his eyes swiveled. She shook him lightly. “Look at me.”
Reluctantly, he tore his eyes from the corner and looked into her eyes, fiercely focused on him. “There’s something over there that is sparking something in you. What is it?”
He shrugged. “Dunno,” he mumbled. And he didn’t. He had no idea what was in Catherine’s briefcase and he didn’t care. And yet, his eyes slid back to the corner.
Another slap to the back of his head he barely felt. “Nick,” Mac growled.
Catherine rolled her eyes. “Stop that, Mac. You’re not helping. Step back.”
And Mac stepped back.
Amazing. Even with everything roiling inside him, Nick marveled at Mac’s obedience. Nobody gave Mac an order, ever, except their former captain, Lucius Ward. Ward was still too sick to give orders so Mac was still God. He was 6’4” of pure muscle and meanness who turned into a house pet when his wife spoke.
Catherine didn’t stop to savor her victory. Mac had more or less rolled over for her the instant they met, so she didn’t fully appreciate having a killing machine like Mac obey her. She walked to the corner, stuffed everything back into the briefcase, and brought it over to Nick.
His eyes followed her every step of the way.
She replicated the spill of documents on the table in front of Nick.
He greedily eyed everything, unable to take his gaze off perfectly ordinary pieces of paper and some glossy brochures.
“Nick.” Catherine put her hand on his once more. It was a deliberate move and not even Mac objected. Catherine had some kind of secret power, some woo-woo thing that scared him and everyone else because it wasn’t woo-woo. It was fact. If she touched you, she knew what you were feeling. And lately, terrifyingly, if she touched you, she knew what you were thinking.
Must be scary shit to be married to someone who could walk around inside your head but Mac looked pretty happy about it.
“Nick.” Catherine’s hand tightened and Nick tore his eyes away from the briefcase. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened. What has you so upset?”
“Upset.” A sound came from his throat that was more an animal sound than a human one. “Upset is spilling soup, missing a train. Elle’s in danger. I’m not upset about that, I’m scared out of my fucking mind!”
He was sweating like a pig, heart pounding erratically. He felt like a machine that was broken and shaking to pieces.
“Okay. Okay. Calm down. You’re not helping her by panicking.” Catherine put her other hand around his. Nick wanted to snarl at her, but with his hand encased in hers he actually felt his heart rate starting to slow. Something was working. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
His heart gave a huge pump. His voice rose. “She’s in trouble. She somehow contacted me after all these years and she’s in trouble! In danger!” His gaze slid back to her briefcase. It glowed, as if in a spotlight.
“No, Nick.” Catherine’s voice was soft but firm. “You’re not telling me what happened, you’re telling me your reaction. You were sleeping? Nick!” Her voice sounded like a slap. “Look at me!
”
He slid his eyes to her, reluctantly.
“You were sleeping?”
“Yes.” He had to force the word out through a tight throat.
“Something woke you up?”
“Elle! She woke me up! Oh God, she …”
Catherine gave his hand a shake. “Focus hard, Nick. You’re not helping Elle at all. She’s in trouble and she might die because you can’t focus on anything but your feelings. I can feel you—you are one big wave of panic and fear. That is not going to help Elle. You can only help her if you remain calm and focused. Forget your feelings. Focus on the situation. Focus on helping Elle.”
Fuck. She was right.
Focus.
Nick took in a huge gulp of air.
He hardly recognized himself. He’d been a Ranger, he’d been Delta, he’d been Ghost Ops. No one had ever had to tell him to focus. He was nothing but focus. Brutal and unyielding. On a mission, he was pure cold steel.
Now he was trembling, sweaty, mind flying into a million tiny pieces.
“Come on, Nick.” Catherine looked serious, frowning. “Help me here. Help me help you.”
His eyes slid back to the briefcase. It gave him something. Some sense of calm, a point to focus on.
“Let’s go back to the beginning. Look at me, Nick.”
Damn. His eyes swiveled. “Looking.”
“You were sleeping. Were you dreaming?”
Had he been? Yeah. He’d been dreaming of Elle. Of the last time he’d seen her. And goddamn if it hadn’t been a wet dream. He’d woken up with a hard-on that he lost the second he got the danger message. No way was he going to say he woke up with a hard-on. Not in front of Catherine. Or Mac or Jon for that matter.
“Nick? Dreaming?”
“Yeah,” he muttered.
“Of her? Of Elle?”
“Yeah.” His jaws clenched.
“Was there something different about the dream?”
He was checking her briefcase, but swung his head to her at the words. “Different how?” He couldn’t help himself, help his suspicious tone.
Lisa Marie Rice - [Ghost Ops] Page 13