by BJ James
“You’ll still go.”
“—it will only be harder,” she finished as if he hadn’t interrupted.
“But you’ll go.” Rafe would be as relentless as she.
“I have no choice.”
Raking a hand brutally through his hair, he stared at her. A long, slow perusal. “Then,” he began grimly, “perhaps it’s time you told me what terrible sin you committed.”
“Perhaps it is.”
With a gesture, not daring to touch him again, she led him to a cluster of chairs circling a small table. Once seated and committed, she discovered she couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t risk the contempt she feared would be in the eyes that had once looked at her with desire. Scrubbing her hands over the rough fabric of her shorts, she attempted a rueful smile and rose to pace in restless agitation. “It’s funny, I’ve known for so long that this day was coming. I’ve gone over what I would say, time and again, until I knew exactly how it should go. And now, I have no idea where to begin.”
“Begin with David. He is the first and last of this, isn’t he?”
“Of course, he would be.”
“David and you.”
“Yes. David and I, and a sultry day in August.” On that beginning, one painful increment at a time she drew the story from her mind and heart. “We were a team, the best of the unit. David was usually the front man and I stayed in the background.” This time the smile she tried for was cold and hard. “You could say he was the decoy, and I the hunter.”
“The best shot.”
“To my grief.”
“And mine, Valentina?” Going to her, staying her with a touch, Rafe ignored her startled recoil. “Will you let a phenomenal ability, perhaps a God-given gift, destroy my life, as well? All because something went wrong on a sultry day in August all those long years ago?”
At her look of shock that he should say this now, he said quietly, “None of this should come as any surprise. I love you. I’ve told you in every way I knew, except with the declaration. But even then there were the words. I’ve called you my love. Because it’s true. I think it was inevitable from the moment I heard you talking to that great beast of a horse, taming him, soothing him, coaxing the impossible from him and from yourself in return.
“On a barren mountaintop I discovered I needed you. And yes, that need was love. I love a lady of honor and integrity. An amazing lady who rides like the wind and talks to horses. Nothing you’ve done, nothing you tell me now will change that. Nothing, Irish.”
Her heart pounded in her throat like a trip-hammer, her knees threatened to buckle with the weight of grief for what couldn’t be. “Nothing?” she asked gravely. “Not even that I killed the one man I’ve loved before you?”
His expression didn’t change so much as a flicker. “Not even that.”
“I had a shot!” She was almost desperate to make him understand her fatal error. “For one split second there was an opening. I hesitated. In that second the crazed creature who had taken David hostage fired instead. While I sat there in my safe, protected cubbyhole watching David die, I knew it was as much my fault as if I’d pulled the trigger.” She hadn’t been able to hold her gaze to his. Suddenly it seemed imperative that she did. “Now, do you see?”
“Better than you realize.”
“What does that mean?”
Ignoring her demand, Rafe tried again to assure her. “I didn’t need to hear this. I never wanted to hear it.”
“But you listened.”
“Only because you needed it. Not I.”
“That’s what Hattie said.”
“A wise woman, Hattie. You could do no better than to listen to her.”
“You don’t understand,” Valentina protested. “Neither of you understands.”
“I understand better than you think. So does Hattie. You’re afraid to love again. Afraid to take a chance on having the life of another man in your hands and your heart. For a little while you fell under the spell of Eden, and this morning you saw hope for a better life. Then the call.” A muscle rippled in his cheek, his lips were rigid, his words tight. “A reminder of the real world. And now you’re trying to drive me away.”
“I’m sorry.” The whispered words nearly choked her.
“So am I, my love, and because you need for me to go, I’m going. But only for now, only to leave you to make your plans and prepare for your last mission.”
“My last!”
“Yes, your last.” Rafe made no other response to her abrupt outcry, and continued in a decisive tone. “When it’s done, we have a score to settle. No third party, no baggage from the past. Just you and I, O’Hara.”
With her back to the portrait of the woman she admired more than any other, Valentina watched as he spun about to leave. “There’s nothing to settle,” she called after him. “Nothing more to say.”
Halting, Rafe smiled, thoughtfully, indulgently, as if she were a well-loved child. “You’re mistaken, my love. There’s much to be settled. and much more to be said. Another side of this discussion. Another opinion.”
“Another opinion?”
“Exactly.” His smile didn’t change as he turned away to complete his exit. As he disappeared into the cool shadows of the hall, a single word drifted back to her. “Mine.”
The helicopter arrived at dawn. As it descended to the helipad, airfoils setting tree and plant into frenzied cacophony, a very different Valentina was waiting. The gaze she shielded from flying debris was cool and steely. Her moves were exact and confident. She was a professional, returning to the world she knew. One she should never have left. Her night had been spent poring over plans and sketches faxed by Simon. And as the dedicated professional, she’d let nothing intrude in her study.
Her goodbyes to Hattie had been made at the breakfast the caretaker had insisted on making for her. She knew she was more than honest when she’d admitted she would miss that handsome, smiling face.
The lie she told herself was that she would not miss Rafe. That she had not in the long night. That it didn’t hurt when he hadn’t come to say goodbye.
Her meager luggage was loaded. The pilot of the helicopter waited and watched expectantly. Time had already been lost, and was of the essence, but still she loitered. Waited. Watched. Hoped.
Nothing. No one.
“Miss O’Hara, ma’am.” Though he seemed oddly uncertain, the pilot called over the roar of engines, “We have to go.”
“I know,” she responded without moving. “Just give me a minute. I’m going to miss this place and the people.”
“Even me, O’Hara?” Rafe stepped through the fog of dust and sand.
“Rafe!” Only a resolve of iron kept her from throwing herself into his arms. From kissing his beloved mouth. “You came to say goodbye.”
“Not just yet.” He tossed a bag into the open door of the chopper. “I’m going with you.”
“You’re what? Why?” Then, realizing that he looked tired, she exclaimed, “You look exhausted. Is your head bothering you? Have you slept?”
“My head’s fine, healing right on schedule. As for the rest of your barrage of questions, we’ll have plenty of time to discuss them later.” Taking her arm, he led her to the chopper. A second after he joined her on board, he tapped the pilot’s helmet. “Any time you’re ready, Tommy.”
“Yes, sir.”
In a surge of engines and a bluster of sand the helicopter lifted to the sky. For a time, conversation was impossible. Her questions would have to wait. Amid the clamor, as they climbed, Valentina looked down, saying a private farewell to Eden, mourning for the end of the dream she’d only dare to dream by its shore
“Wrong again, O’Hara.” As the engines quieted, Rafe took her hand in his.
She looked from his face to their joined hands and back. “How can I be wrong when I’ve said nothing? Playing the clairvoyant again? Reading my mind?”
“No need.”
“I haven’t said anything, and you aren’t reading
my mind, yet you know I’m wrong?”
“You got it!”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah! You’re thinking this is the end.” With his thumb he stroked the back of her hand. “When it’s really only the beginning.”
“Rafe...”
“Shh.” He silenced her with a kiss. A fleeting brush of his lips that stole thought and reason away.
“What about David?” She struggled back on track.
“What about him?” Before she could answer, he growled, “Forget I said that. Let’s not talk about David. Look, sweetheart, you’re right, I’m tired and I didn’t sleep last night. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll catch a nap.”
Sliding down in his seat, he slipped on a cap and tipped the brim over his face. With his fingers twined through hers, and his hand heavy on her lap, he slept, or pretended to sleep.
Valentina’s mind was in turmoil, her heart in a quandary. Why was Rafe here? What did it mean? Why, even in sleep, did he grip her hand as if he would never let her go?
Questions beat at her with the chop-chop rhythm of the helicopter. Unsettling, frightening questions with no answers.
Questions that opened door to dreams she’d put aside.
“No,” she muttered and slammed it shut again. The Black Watch was her life and her future. Not Rafe.
For the remainder of the flight, with only the chill of her hand warmed by his, she stared with dry and melancholy eyes at the distant landscape.
Twelve
“Careful! Watch that telephone line.”
Valentina was only vaguely aware of Simon’s stern caution. In the depth of her concentration she’d blanked out the crew hovering in the adjoining hotel room. Given her choice she would have had the connecting doors closed, the lights out. If there had been functioning air-conditioning, it would be turned low, the circulating fan off. Then she would be completely isolated, without a sound, in a frigid vacuum. Not even a current of arctic air would disturb her riveting study of the room a story lower and an angling block away. The room where Bryson Lewis, electronic wizard, bankrupt millionaire, suspected embezzler and murderer, held his ex-wife hostage.
All Valentina’s choices were impossible. Her post was a flop house. Any days of opulence and prosperity it ever boasted were long gone and long forgotten. The only amenities accorded its current tenants, the recently evacuated transients, were toilets, unheated water, soiled mattresses for sleeping off hangovers from whatever drug or drink imbibed, and electricity.
In her first reconnoitering inspection on arrival, she’d seen that Lewis had chosen well in his bastion of revenge. In time, his skewed genius and thorough planning grew increasingly evident at every turn. In a dying city in the mid-South, where industry absconded like fabled rats scrambling from a sinking ship, he’d commandeered the most isolated complex of all. The one he knew best. His own.
Its derelict buildings, all that remained of his once sprawling empire, marched in tumbledown rows. Blanketing vines of twisting and coiling kudzu, creeping plague of the fallow South, drifted from them in ghostly shreds. Of the decaying facilities he’d chosen the main office. A one-story, ground-hugging structure that defied invasive approach. Had it not, the surrounding grounds were guarded by sophisticated electronic surveillance. For fail-safe measures, there were mines and traps beyond comprehension of the sane mind.
In his descent into mad-dog hatred of the world and particularly his wife, Lewis had planned well and prepared thoroughly for his grand finale.
The first plan of attack by the local chief of police had been straightforward and logical: interrupt the source of electricity. Wait him out and, under a cover of darkness, with specially trained dogs and a bomb squad, infiltrate his fortification.
Lewis was a step ahead, promising Betty Lewis would die as the first light went out. In that precedent, every option was met with the same promise.
The bottom line was that no one expected that either Lewis would survive. It was clearly never Bryson Lewis’s intent that they should.
A grave and desperate situation even more grave and desperate than anyone had realized. With every avenue blocked, only one option remained. A call went out. Simon responded.
The situation became the sole jurisdiction of The Black Watch.
A team was chosen, possibilities and probabilities weighed, choices were made. Their last recourse confronted, an agent, the only agent capable of what would be asked, was summoned.
The interval of theorizing ended. It was time to act. Drifters and panhandlers were removed from this structural detritus. Phone lines were set up, communication established with Lewis. Less than twenty-four hours after Simon’s initial call, Valentina, a specter in black, crouched by a window, alone in a room little better than a pigsty, waiting for a madman to show himself.
When he did, if he did, her opportunity for a clean shot would be slim to none. From an impossible distance, the targeted window was only partially visible through a vine covered fence and the rubble of other buildings. One desperate chance was all she would have, and Valentina knew Betty Lewis’s life hinged on that chance.
She needed a clue, an edge, something to anticipate and lead the man.
“But what?” The words were a breath, a sigh. A minor stirring in the mounting heat of Indian summer that so often followed an early autumn in the South. Her shirt had long been plastered to her body. Her hair clung damply to her neck and throat. Sweat burned her eyes, often blurring her vision. But she never looked away. Never forgot the hostage woman.
Stripped of any gewgaws to glint in the light, she wore no watch. In the passing of the day, though she had only a vague idea of the hour, judging it solely by the angle of the sun, a silent clock ticked in her head. She could feel it, time was running out.
Dear heaven! She needed a clue. Just one.
“Here, sweetheart, drink this.”
“What?” The gentle intrusion was no match for the intensity of her escalating concern.
A cool glass touched her heated cheek as Rafe knelt beside her. “It isn’t much. Only tap water, but maybe a little better than a canteen baked by the sun on an Arizona mountaintop.”
Arizona.
Valentina’s mind was suddenly scrambling to catch a niggling, fading idea.
With another light touch at her cheek, Rafe urged again, “Drink. Please. I promise I won’t make a habit of diverting your attention, but you’ve been here for hours. Soon you’ll be cramping from dehydration.”
Valentina stared straight ahead, eyes narrowed, her mind buzzing from the effort to make a connection.
ArizonaArizonaArizona.
The chanting litany seared her brain, but her most vivid impression was the telltale slide of a rattler’s scales over barren red rock.
Her hands clenched, and her teeth. Tendons in her throat pulled tight. What was it she should remember?
The first stirrings of a cramp began deep in tense muscles. A reminder that Rafe was there by her side.
“Thanks, you’re right.” She took the glass from him, grateful that he made no small talk. That he understood she mustn’t be distracted. A fast gulp, a swipe of her arm across her forehead, another sip and she had enough to suffice.
Rafe took the half-filled glass from her, but did not return to the next room where Simon and a crew plotted and planned, anticipating any circumstance. Valentina seemed so small and drawn, too fragile for the task she’d been given. The burden of two lives was too much for anyone to bear alone. He would have taken a share of it from her, damning those responsible, but he knew she wouldn’t allow it. So he did what little he could, lingering, hoping she would gather added strength from his mute support.
Her attention remained fixed on the window, yet, in another part of her mind, Valentina was keenly conscious of him. With each breath his clean, masculine scent filled her lungs, a merciful relief from the stale odors left by the last tenant. Though she made no acknowledgment she became increasingly aware that his voice still ech
oed in her mind. Something only her subconscious had perceived in her focused intensity.
Her thoughts still ranging, searching, in an absent motion she reached out to stroke the polished stock of her rifle. Taking it as his cue to leave, certain he would get her to drink nothing more, Rafe started to rise.
Her fingers closed roughly over his wrist. “Stay.”
When he glanced at her, he found she hadn’t turned from her study of the office where Betty Lewis could very well be suffering through her last hours. “Of course,” he assured her. “I’ll be here for as long as you wish.”
The beginning of a frown lined her face, her hold on his wrist grew harder. “Something you said...”
Rafe could almost feel her struggle as she tried to make some connection. “Something I said? When?”
“Now.” With a grimace she qualified, “But not exactly.”
Rafe was on track immediately, his mind working in tandem with hers. As no stranger to elusive ideas, he knew the frustration of perceptions buried too deeply to surface. Mentally retracing his steps, replaying his conversation in his own mind, he began to walk her through it one phrase at a time. “I asked you to drink.”
Releasing him, with her fingertips she massaged the painful muscles at her temples. Her eyes closed briefly; her head tilted from side to side. “No.”
“It isn’t much but...” Rafe continued his recounting.
“Better than a canteen on an Arizona mountaintop!” She finished for him and was clearly eager that he go on.
“I asked you to drink again.”
This time her head only jerked once in negative response.
“I promise not to make a habit...”
“Habit!” She turned to him then, looked at him for the first time in hours. There was incredible fatigue in her face, but her eyes were alive with hope. “That’s it. I’d only just arrived the last time Simon spoke to Lewis on the telephone. I caught a glimpse of him at the window, but I was setting up.” Then angrily, “It didn’t register.”
She paused for breath, but Rafe said nothing. He wanted to take her in his arms, to hold her, and keep her, sparing her what was coming. But he kept his own counsel, knowing how fragile a half-remembered nuance could be. How easily it could be lost.