And then he wetted it again as he scrubbed down one arm and then the other. He was gentle but thorough over the scrapes on her wrists. And when he ended at her hands, the scrap of cloth between their fingers, he pressed, almost too hard, on each finger, on her palm. He rubbed life back into her stiff joints.
Iris shivered as the warm water over her skin cooled and she felt a warm, dry towel lightly dragged over her. She shivered again, and she felt a warm jacket shrugged over her shoulders. And then she was guided back to the bed. She perched on the edge and sniffed at the air as she scented a burst of citrus. And then an orange slice was pressed to her lips. He fed her half of an orange, a cheese stick, two peanut butter crackers, the rest of the orange and a cup of tea that he’d made from the kettle in the corner.
At that point, he led her back into the bathroom, put toothpaste on a little travel-sized toothbrush. Iris watched his Nikes as she slowly, stiffly brushed her teeth. Then, over the sink, he put ointment on her wrists and lightly bandaged them with gauze. When he led her back to the bed again this time, he flipped the covers back and she gratefully crawled under them. Next, he had her take a few painkillers, a little more water and he cracked an ice pack to lay over her eye. She shivered against the cold of it, but relieved, deeply relieved, her eyes fell closed and she was asleep.
CHAPTER TWO
Morning light kissed Iris’s closed eyelids. Without opening her eyes, she knew exactly where she was. As out of it as she’d been, she remembered everything that had happened yesterday with startling clarity. She could rewind any part of it back and watch it in high definition in her mind.
The only thing she didn’t know was where that man had slept. The FBI agent. She felt like she was alone in the bed, but she refused to move to find out. She prayed that he wasn’t lying next to her. She couldn’t handle it if he were. She winced, eyes still closed, when she remembered how he’d washed her last night. Thank god he hadn’t undressed her. Or actually bathed her. The washcloth thing had been intimate enough. Pretty much the most intimate thing she’d ever done with a man. And she hadn’t even seen his face yet. The thought made her feel like a little crab dragged out of its shell. She wasn’t a closed off person by nature, but she’d been so completely destroyed yesterday that she just didn’t think she could handle another second of vulnerability.
Iris cracked her eyes and was immensely relieved when the first thing she saw was a pair of socked feet propped up on the desk across the room. He hadn’t gotten in the bed with her. The relief was immediately swamped with guilt as she realized that he’d slept the night with his head leaned back against the wall, his ass on the crappy little desk chair and his feet propped up.
As uncomfortable as the position must have been, he appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Without moving so much as a hair, Iris let her eyes sweep over him. She started at his large feet, clad in crisp white socks. Up his long, muscular legs, the dark stylish jeans cupping him in all the right places. And then at his chest she blinked. He wore just an undershirt, his tan skin exposed from his shoulders to his fingertips. His hands were clasped over his stomach and dark chest hair peeked out under the startling white of the undershirt.
Finally, she brought her eyes to his face. He looked softer than she’d thought he would. Almost teddy bearish. He had a wide, sort of flat nose, as if it had been broken at some point, and an equally wide, serious mouth. His brow was dark and prominent. His heavily lashed eyes were closed and had an appealing slightly lavender tint to the skin, it was lovely against the toasty tan of the rest of his face. And then that haircut. Severe and perfect, short at the sides and just a touch longer at the top, Iris realized that there was a bit of a wave to his midnight black hair.
He was really just…Ha man. It was almost as if he sucked all the oxygen out of that half of the room. Did she feel safe with him? Iris had no idea. She felt the hairs on her arm rising up as she laid completely still in the bed. She didn’t know if she was getting goosebumps because of him or in spite of him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
Her eyes on his face as if he were a sleeping bear in the corner, Iris began to slowly stretch and test her body. Her shoulders hurt even worse than yesterday, but her hands were much better, thank god. The rest of her body was achy, but not terribly. She felt vaguely as if she were getting over the flu. She realized that it must be all the adrenaline and fear that had pumped through her body on full blast for the last 24 hours.
Slowly, pillowing her hands under her, Iris pushed herself up to sitting. The blankets barely made any sound as they slithered off her shoulders to pool around her waist, but suddenly, without even looking, she knew that the agent had awoken. She could feel his gaze on the side of her face the same way that she had felt it the night before. The intensity of it burned her, exposed her. Even though she’d just been looking at him, studying him, she found that she couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. So she watched her own feet as she slid out of the bed. Something forest green fluttered into her line of sight and she eyed her clothes with confusion. She realized that she was wearing the man’s button-down shirt that he’d worn last night. She remembered shivering in the bathroom, remembered an item of clothing being put over her shoulders, but she hadn’t realized that it was his shirt.
Slowly, as if she didn’t want to startle the wild animal in the corner, Iris slid the shirt off of herself, folded it very neatly and set it on the corner of the bed. Still, she avoided his eyes as she walked around the bed and into the bathroom.
The second she closed the door behind her, Iris breathed out a deep sigh of relief. She’d cut off the line of his vision and it was like having a bright light clicked off. She avoided her reflection as she stripped out of her clothes. Her shoulders practically screamed but besides that, she was able to slide out of all of it. Thank god.
The hot shower she stepped into was the truest heaven she’d ever experienced in her entire life. She scrubbed and scrubbed at her skin and hair, using the little travel bottles that he’d bought last night. The water began to run cold before she convinced herself to get out.
Iris got dressed, finger brushing her hair and braiding it back off her high forehead before she convinced herself to look in her reflection.
She winced. She looked terrible. The black eye was a deep purple. She tested it with her fingers. It was sore, but not sharp, so she was confident that nothing was broken. Her eyes were big and baffled. Like she was just barely understanding what the hell had happened over the last 24 hours. She brushed her teeth but her lips were dry. She basically looked like she could use a few days at a restorative spa. Not that she’d ever indulged in something like that before, but she’d seen Owen when he’d come back from the retreats that the record label treated him to and he’d always looked like he’d backwards aged.
Iris took another deep breath. She was going to have to go back out into the room with the grizzly bear. Knowing she was being rude with hogging the bathroom was pretty much the only thing that had her gently opening the door and slipping back out into the main room.
She instantly felt the heat of his gaze, but her eyes were on the floor. She heard him rise up from the chair.
“Stay here,” his gruff voice said. “Shout, loud, if you need me. I won’t be a few minutes.”
Iris nodded and sat on the bed quietly while he showered and got ready in the bathroom. He came back out and picked up his green shirt from the corner of the bed, buttoned it back on.
“We need to get going,” he said as he toed into his shoes. “We can talk on the road.”
“Alright,” Iris agreed. She rose and followed the man out toward his truck. She stiffened and almost tripped when his hand came to her elbow at the passenger side door. He practically lifted her right into the high truck.
It wasn’t until he’d slammed into the driver’s side that Iris realized that she’d slid all the way over to the middle seat of the truck again. She considered sliding back over to window, but when h
e didn’t say anything about it, Iris decided to stay where she was. If she was sitting this close, she would have an excuse not to look right at his face.
So she buckled in and he brought the truck roaring to life.
“It worries me that you’re not asking questions,” he finally said as a few minutes later he merged onto the highway.
Iris cleared her throat, one hand found its way to the tail of her braid. “I don’t know where to start.”
The agent made a humming noise. “Alright. Well. My name is Agent Marcus Marinos. I’ve been assigned to protect you. You were on your way into my custody last night when you were abducted by a faction of the Kutros family.”
Iris furrowed her brow. Kutros. She knew that name. But she didn’t say anything about that. Not yet. “How did you find me?”
Her brain flashed to the freezing cold basement, the warehouse that the masked men had dragged her into.
“The agents who collected you from your home slipped a tracking device into one of your pockets.”
She frowned and brought her hands to the pockets of her jeans, lifting her hips to dig through them.
He cleared his throat. “I took it out and destroyed it last night.”
Iris frowned. She didn’t remember him reaching into her pocket.
“Right before I washed your hands. You were pretty out of it. I didn’t want to freak you out.”
She could feel his gaze on the side of her face again, but she still didn’t look. She really didn’t have a thing to say about how out of it she was. Or the fact that he’d gone through her pockets without her knowing. “Where are we going?”
“We’re going to a prearranged pick-up point. My handler at the FBI left supplies for us there. Everything we’ll need to go dark for a little while.”
Iris’s mind blanked for a second. “What?”
The agent shifted in his seat, the hard line of his thigh pressed against Iris’s for just a second before he shifted again. “You’re supposed to be in FBI custody right now, but the fact that you were intercepted so easily yesterday implies that Kutros might have a man on the inside. So my handler and I decided that we’re going dark while she figures out how to keep you safe from them.”
“What does,” she cleared her throat when the words came out far softer than she’d wanted them to, “what does going dark mean?”
“It means that we are off the grid completely. We’re going to disappear for a little while. Just use cash, not be seen anywhere.”
“Like, what, a cabin in the woods or something?” Iris suddenly had a picture in her head of some dilapidated horror show of a wooden shack.
The agent chuckled. “Not quite.”
“Where can we go that’ll be safe enough?”
“You’ll see.” His voice was as gruff as before. But somehow, this time, Iris felt soothed by it instead of alarmed.
She was quiet for a minute. Very quiet. Clearing her throat, Iris turned just enough to look at the buttons of his shirt. “Have you… have you ever done something like this before?”
She felt his gaze on the side of her face again and she instantly slanted her eyes down and away from him. “I’ve been an agent for a decade.”
She furrowed her brow. “That’s not what I asked.”
He was quiet, and she wondered if she’d pushed too hard. Either he didn’t want to talk about this or he couldn’t talk about it.
“You’re asking if I’ve ever been assigned to protect one person in particular?”
She nodded, her bottom teeth between her lips.
“No. I haven’t. I’ve been in the field for years. Working cases.”
“So why now? Why me?”
The agent stiffened, infinitesimally. But Iris felt it. There was something that he didn’t want to talk about and Iris had the feeling that it caused him pain. He said nothing.
“Alright,” Iris cleared her throat and tugged at the end of her braid. “I guess there’s some things you can’t tell me, Agent Marinos.”
She turned her head in time to see the bottom half of his face, just a blink of pearl white teeth and that wide mouth as he grinned, just for half a second, smile lines flashing.
“If I’m calling you Iris then you’re calling me Marcus.”
Iris immediately faced forward, her hands pressed flat over her thighs. She tried to calm her racing heartbeat. That smile. Damn. That smile.
A tempo started behind her temple, a tightening in her chest that had her swallowing hard. Not now! Iris thought to herself as a frantic, insistent melody tried to work its way out of her. Her entire life music had been this way for her. Persistent, in her face, working its way to the surface when she least expected it. The only thing that Iris knew was that this was not the time. She swallowed against the song and tried as hard as she could to forget that smile. That burning white smile that had made her feel like she was on the last part of a boat going down fast.
“Stay in the car,” the agent said as he pulled the truck through a residential neighborhood about an hour from where they’d started. This was the secret pick-up point that he’d arranged with his handler? It just looked like a subdivision. He paused as he opened his door, like he was about to say more, but then he just slid out and closed the door firmly.
Iris watched his back as he jogged down a sidewalk and tipped through a yard, ducking behind a hedge.
He moved like a bear. Inexorable, unstoppable, not graceful per se, but natural. He moved exactly like he was supposed to. The song swelled inside Iris, pulsing at her temple. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. And then she jumped damn near out of her skin when she heard the door open beside her again.
“Oh!” she clutched at her chest and simultaneously out at the agent’s arm as he slid into the seat next to her. “You scared me!”
She stared at the steering wheel as she said it and she could feel his eyes again. If anything the intensity behind the stare was growing, not waning like she wished it would.
“It’s just me,” he said as he tossed a black backpack over her lap and onto the seat next to her. He paused, and she could feel something large behind it. Those tan fingers floated through the air, rested firmly on the back of her hand for just one, blazing second. “I’m going to keep you safe, Iris.”
She nodded, unable to tear her gaze away from where he touched her. Even after he took his hand away, pulled the truck back on the highway, she stared at that spot on her hand that burned, burned, burned.
“It’s only a couple of hours or so until we’re there,” he told her a few minutes later, when the cloudy February day started to give way to the sun. They were driving south and Iris could tell by the greening of the landscape that when they got out of the car, it was going to be considerably warmer than it had been before. Where had they spent the night again? All she knew was that she’d started in Pennsylvania, where she lived. Then she’d been driven by the FBI agents, and then abducted and then… rescued? She realized that she didn’t even know what state she was in.
Maybe that was why she outright gasped when the sparkling, silvery ribbon of ocean first revealed itself out of the driver side window. She hadn’t realized they were that close to the ocean! She craned her neck to the side, but relaxed her body back.
“That’s nice,” Marcus said, startling her a little bit. It wasn’t until her body stiffened that she realized that she’d been leaning her shoulder against his. She straightened up and the absence of his heat against her made her feel awkward.
“What’s nice?” she asked, her eyes firmly on the ocean out the window.
“What you’re humming. It’s pretty. What song is it?”
“Oh.” Heat flooded her face, a hard stripe of embarrassment swallowed her. She couldn’t tell him that she’d been accidentally humming a song that had hatched inside of her the second she’d first seen his smile. He’d think she was nuts. “I hadn’t realized I’d been humming,” she answered truthfully and evasively.
She felt his e
yes on her again but he didn’t press her. They didn’t speak again on the drive. Not even when her pulse began to race as they left the populated highway and started swinging through backcountry. Big, graceful trees lazed overtop of the road, some of them with branches long enough to drag along the windshield of the car. The sun blazed through the canopy, turning the light into a dozy, deep sea green. Her stomach flipped as she shifted in her seat.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, out of the blue, and had her jumping in her seat again.
Iris cleared her throat. Her voice was small, but she was proud of herself for saying what was on her mind even so. “It, uh, it occurs to me that I should have asked you for identification of some kind.”
She watched as the trees thickened and pavement on the road they were driving gave way to gravel. He slowed the truck accordingly.
“Ah.” His voice was deep and understanding. Iris watched from the corner of her eye as he lifted his hand from the steering wheel. She heard the raspy scritch of his hand over what she assumed must be his five o’clock shadow. “Here.”
He lifted his ass up from the seat and fished his phone out of his back pocket. He opened it with his fingerprint and handed it over to her.
Iris took the phone and stared at it blankly. What was this all about?
“Call somebody in there. Ask them about me. Don’t give any information about our whereabouts, of course, but you know, use somebody as a character reference.”
Iris, perplexed but in need of reassurance, opened up his most recent calls. As far as she could scroll, there were only the same four names over and over again. Eli, Jay, Mama Kat, and Ryan. Those were the only people he called. Iris tapped one at random and held the phone up to her ear while it rang.
“Hey man,” a deep, friendly voice answered on the third ring. “You alright? You left so fast last night I didn’t get a chance to say bye. I assume it was for work?”
Iris paused. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
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