by Calista Fox
“What on earth makes you think I’d agree to this?”
“Because, Nikki, don’t forget…” He pinned her with a deathly serious look. “Agent Garcia knows exactly whose laptop she inserted this device into. She—and her very dangerous people—will come looking for it… And you.”
6
Damen felt like a huge ass.
This woman’s life had nearly been destroyed when she’d lost her husband. And here he was, taking possession of everything she considered to represent that life.
It gutted him to have her sitting beside him, grinding her teeth, fighting back tears, clearly wanting to rail at him some more…but not being able to do so, given they were on an airplane. Her hands were as tied as his were.
She couldn’t demand he return her laptop, because he could officially force the issue. She couldn’t physically try to reclaim it from him, obviously.
And what was worse than all of that, was that Damen suspected Nikki Kane would never, under normal circumstances, hinder or disrupt an investigation of this magnitude.
Well, even though these weren’t normal circumstances, she might actually—in the back of her brain—realize that she absolutely could not withhold information in this instance because she knew how severe, how grave, all of these evil machinations were. She’d been involved in the bombings, after all. She’d been a victim—had suffered a minor injury and, very likely, she’d had the hell scared out of her when she’d had to evacuate her hotel during the melee and violent rumblings from the eruptions.
In addition, she’d treated survivors and their families. Their children. Her friend and colleague, Dr. Kate McMillan, was even in the process of adopting one of those orphaned survivors, and Nikki had looked after that child for Kate when she and her then-fiancé, now husband Jude McMillan had gone to New York for a quick trip.
Damen knew all of this, given the research he’d conducted on Nikki. Naturally, from the beginning, he hadn’t wanted to believe she was working for a terrorist cell. He didn’t want to believe it now. And he was almost convinced it was true—he was almost certain she was innocent.
What he couldn’t piece together in his mind, however—what he couldn’t rationalize or resolve—was how the information he’d been hoping to intercept when he’d started this mission had ended up on her laptop.
If Nikki wasn’t working with terrorists, if she wasn’t an accomplice in any way… Why had Garcia targeted her and used her computer as the transportation method to smuggle the information out of Mexico City and into the States?
She could have used Kate or Jude for that, if Garcia’s primary intent was to get the data into someone’s hands in New York City in a timely fashion. It would have reached the intended destination quicker, since Kate and Jude had just been in the city, according to Damen’s sources.
In fact, any other mule, particularly within the terrorist network, could have been used to carry the information to its end point.
More interestingly, Damen ruminated over how Nikki hadn’t actually planned this trip to New York. It’d been spontaneously booked. At first, she’d been researching the Maldives.
Damen suspected—if he investigated this motive further—he would discover that, indeed, the Maldives was where her mother was spending the holidays.
He had to also concede that her reason for an impromptu journey to Switzerland was a highly valid one. Her job was to provide counseling to survivors, family members and first responders during times of crisis. She’d built an entire organization around these disaster-relief efforts and had “attached” herself to a specific search and rescue team. She wasn’t currently working with that particular outfit while taking what was supposed to have been a hiatus in Mexico City, but further research on Damen’s part had confirmed that she did know the leader of this alternate SAR group. He led a team that had already been dispatched to Switzerland, immediately following a horrific train wreck.
Damen couldn’t deny Nikki’s story checked out.
Granted, that didn’t mean she couldn’t have been provided some additional funding for her organization, or been offered some other invaluable incentive, if she’d agree to serve as a courier of the intel.
But, damn… As reactive as she was to Damen holding her computer in his hands while he sat right beside her…? Why would she ever willingly consent to allowing her laptop to be the vehicle that carried this sensitive information that others would potentially hunt down and take from her?
She wouldn’t.
That photo of Nikki and her husband on the screensaver had said it all, in Damen’s opinion.
There’d been a spark in Nikki’s eyes. In Conner’s as well. She’d been blissfully happy. And Damen believed her when she’d said all of the photos, letters and memories of their life together were contained on the hard drive.
She most definitely wouldn’t let this laptop out of her sight.
That actually worked to his advantage, in a respect, for it forewarned him of the imminent peril she was currently in.
The computer was being tracked. That meant Nikki was being tracked. Which put her in danger.
Knowing this made Damen infinitely more prepared to protect her.
In fact, he could very well have the upper hand on Garcia and her network. If they didn’t know Damen was sitting beside Nikki at this very moment, that he’d been tracking the device before it’d been activated and they’d subsequently become the trackers. They could merely be working under the assumption, at this point, that she’d been the one to inadvertently trigger the homing beacon.
Just her.
Not him.
It wasn’t a wholly likely scenario, of course. But he latched onto it for the moment, hoping he might have the element of surprise working in his favor.
Reaching for his phone, he contacted an ops assistant who coordinated logistics for Damen and a few other agents he worked in tandem with. He emailed instructions to set up the hotel suite with two bedrooms…disappointing though it was to have to request separate sleeping accommodations in this instance.
Then again…there was no way he was getting any closer to Nikki Kane than having the woman sit next to him on an airplane. For one, she still seethed beside him. Two, he was on an assignment, damn it—and it wasn’t to seduce her, he had to remind himself. It was to stop more bombings, more terrorist movements.
He tapped out additional directives as he made further arrangements, including adding his own security contingent to the top floor of the hotel he’d requested be booked for the next few days. Although he’d told Nikki he’d decipher what he could of the intel tonight, Damen already knew it would take the rest of the evening for the decoding alone to be completed. He wouldn’t be starting his work of processing the data until morning.
He also had to extend nanny duties for Mads.
Damn, he missed his niece. But a couple more days apart was unavoidable.
Now, the tricky part when it came to pulling off his mission in New York was in keeping Nikki Kane at the hotel until he was done. So that he could protect her—and so he could ensure she didn’t give him the slip, with her laptop tucked under her arm as she made a mad dash out the door or down the elevator.
The trickier part was in keeping her from interrupting or inadvertently corrupting or even deleting the data if she attempted to access her personal files and photos to upload them to a cloud environment or transfer them to a thumb drive.
This was a delicate state of affairs, for sure. A trifecta of sorts, when it came to downloading/decrypting the data, keeping Nikki safe…and keeping his hands off her.
The first two initiatives he felt confident he could manage.
The third one, however…
That was going to be a true test of his willpower.
No… It’d be the ultimate test of his willpower.
Could he stay the course when temptation was sleeping right next door to him?
7
Despite the wine she’d consumed previously,
Nikki was stone-cold sober during the last hour of the flight, and as the plane descended into JFK.
She seriously wished she wasn’t.
Her life had, once again, become a nightmare of epic proportions.
How she’d kept herself from hyperventilating or tapping her toe through the floorboards as anxiety besieged her was beyond Nikki’s own comprehension. Just seeing her computer on Damen’s lap in her peripheral vision, as she stared straight ahead, had the panic and fury swelling so fiercely inside her, it was a wonder she didn’t choke on her emotions.
She wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and concede that, yes, he fully did seem to grasp how invasive, how nerve-wracking this was for her.
At the moment, however, she just wanted to ram her knee between his legs.
Too bad they were both sitting and the seatbelt sign was on.
Too bad his intimate, whisky-laced voice nearly soothed her frayed and jagged edges as he leaned close and murmured, “This’ll be over soon, I promise. Try to relax.”
“Fuck you.”
He chuckled. “Your preferred response to everything about me.”
She glowered inwardly at how unwittingly close to the bullseye he’d come.
How could she possibly want to cause irreparable damage to the groin of the man she was so ridiculously attracted to?
What the hell would Kate say about this, if Nikki were to confide in her that, on the one hand, Damen Castillo was hot enough to light her up and make her burn to get naked with him? While on the other hand… He was turning her life upside down and making her want to cause him bodily harm?
Even Nikki wasn’t sure she wanted to psychoanalyze herself in this particular realm.
This was much too volatile a situation.
She was fighting for possession of all the memorabilia of her marriage.
At the same time, she was fighting the chemistry that seared her to the core, sizzled through her veins, made her hot and bothered. All because of Damen Castillo.
Just breathing in the man’s darkly exotic scent did things to her. So that she had to cross her legs and squeeze her thighs together in hopes of quelling the dull ache deep within her.
Maybe she was responding this way because she hadn’t had sex in years. Not since Conner. Not since that night she’d told him she was pregnant and they’d celebrated with multiple orgasms and whispered plans for their future.
She closed her eyes as she felt another prickle of pain behind them.
Here she was, lost in memories she’d learned how to not obsess over on a daily basis…while she was also obsessing over a different man. The one sitting next to her.
It wasn’t fair or right…take your pick.
She tried to convince herself this vacillation, this push and pull, meant she was nowhere near ready to move on from Conner.
And yet…
When Nikki had been reading to Nico Valdiviesio in his hospital room…when she’d been hearing about this mysterious stranger who’d saved thirteen lives and had warned countless others of the impending danger in the first building that exploded in Mexico City… She’d sensed that perhaps it was time to move on from Conner.
Especially since Nico had stirred emotions inside her and had ignited sensations she thought were so fizzled out and buried, they’d never resurface.
Now, while “Nico” sat beside her as Damen Castillo… She felt those emotions and sensations more acutely.
The sensations were easy to attribute to inherent sexual tension related to their attraction to each other.
The emotions were a bit more complex to reconcile. They were wrapped around her past and his present. Her memories and his job. Her need to cling to what she’d lost—and his need to ensure no one else suffered. Not on his watch.
Son of a bitch. Why can’t he be the bad guy?
That would make it easier to extract herself from this situation. She could hate him if he were the bad guy.
But, of course, he wasn’t.
He played on the same team she did—helping people, especially in times of extreme emergency. In this case, even dedicating himself to thwarting a traumatic crisis or an international catastrophe.
She took a deep breath, tinged with his cologne. And suddenly tingled from head to toe.
Nikki fought a sigh of exasperation.
This was soo inconvenient. Soo inappropriate. And soo…inescapable.
And why for the love of God had she not backed up her hard drive to an external source or uploaded it to a cloud environment?
Ugh!
She’d only been reminding herself once a week, at least, to do something to ensure that if her computer crashed, all of her files and photos would still be preserved. Yes, she had photos on her phone. But certainly not all of them. And not Conner’s love letters to her, which she’d scanned and loaded onto her laptop for posterity. Also so that they were always with her.
She stamped her foot as she lamented her procrastination. If she’d followed through, she wouldn’t be nearly as twisted up over Damen having possession of her laptop!
“Wishing you’d gone to the Maldives instead?” he quietly mused, his warm breath teasing the shell of her ear.
And didn’t his deep, evocative voice alter her entire disposition? Making her conjure an image of her lounging on a sandy white beach at the water’s edge, Mai Tai in hand, as she listened to the gentle rolling of waves onto the shore and his sexy voice murmuring suggestive comments that would make her nipples tighten and her breath catch. Sexy suggestions that would lead to her unraveling the strings of her bikini top and tossing it aside. So he could massage tanning oil over her breasts and—
Whoa.
Wait.
What?!
Nikki’s eyelids flew open.
You have got to be shitting me!
She was fantasizing about Damen Castillo?
The man who held her entire life in his hands at this very moment—literally?
The man who’d confiscated from her the one thing that meant the most to her?
Nikki fumed as her head whipped in his direction.
But as they stared into each other’s eyes, she merely gaped, unable to say a word.
He was so devilishly handsome. And so close in proximity, all she’d have to do was raise her arm from the console separating them and her fingertips would graze his set jaw.
His deep-blue eyes glowed hypnotically and for a few suspended moments… Nikki was lost.
He knew it.
And quietly said, “We’re both trapped. Admit it.”
8
Nikki couldn’t breathe.
Holy hell, what sort of twisted game is this?
She had no idea.
All she could say was, “I want my computer back. It’s like losing a major organ, Damen.”
“I understand. And you will get it back,” he averred. “Completely intact, I assure you.”
She gazed at him a moment longer, then asked, “Why should I trust you?”
“Because you have incredibly good instincts and sound judgement.”
She swallowed down a lump of emotion. Those were actually true assessments.
Still… She was in a bit of a quandary.
“In which direction are you actually trying to sway me?” she carefully challenged.
“I think that’s obvious.” One dark brow crooked. “I want to believe you know nothing about this device in your computer. I also want to believe… You’re as captivated by me as I am by you.”
“You can’t be serious,” she said on a wisp of air—as everything inside her quivered.
His gaze didn’t falter. “Then tell me I’m the only one who’s feeling something. Convince me. That’s the only way to put things back into perspective and right this particularly skewed axis. For both of us.”
“It wasn’t skewed when you were unconscious,” she told him. “It was—”
His brow crooked further, cutting her off.
She let out a sho
rt breath.
He said, “I was informed you came back night after night at the hospital, to my room. You’d finish with your other patients and then sit alongside my bed until visiting hours were over. They actually had to ‘kindly’ kick you out a few times.”
“I was just being polite,” she casually commented.
His eyes darkened, indicating he hadn’t missed the hitch in her breath. It was clearly a tell-tale sign there was nothing casual about her visits…or hers and Damen’s association with each other.
“I visited a lot of patients,” she added, hoping to cover her tracks. Not seem so…interested.
He snickered. Low and seductively. Nikki felt ripples of desire through her body.
His gaze dropped to her lips, and he said, “I heard your voice as I was coming out of the coma. It was sultry, sensuous…soothing. I kept willing my eyes to open.”
“Why?” she asked on bated breath, unable to stop herself.
“Because I was desperate to see you. Desperate to get a glimpse of who this angel—”
“I’m no angel,” she was quick to say, though her voice remained at a soft decibel.
“Says you.”
He leaned just a centimeter closer, and yet…it felt as though his body was pressed against hers. She felt the melting sensation low in her body, the heat along her skin. Her chest rose and fell slowly…in time with his.
Their eyes remained locked.
In the far recesses of her mind, Nikki willed herself to look away. To move away.
She couldn’t.
She was riveted.
This man riveted her.
He was darkly complex. Drowning in emotions as ragged and razor-sharp as her own.
Some of those barbed emotions had to be wrapped around the incident in Mexico City, she suspected. He’d been undercover, trying to collect information by infiltrating a community of elderly residents, helping them with their estate planning. Pro bono, she’d heard. Then, when he’d feared something diabolical might be in the works, he’d stuck by those people. He’d tried to ferret out the danger…while saving as many as he could from it.