by Sydney Croft
And why the hell did she care? Jesus, she was losing it. She needed an assignment—a gritty, bloody one that would give her back some perspective.
“Do Haley and Remy have any animals?” Kira asked, as they headed down the road to Haley’s farmhouse five miles away.
“They have a cat.”
“Good.” Kira wrapped her arms around herself and stared out the window. “Good.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-six
Haley’s house turned out to be the opposite of Tom’s. Ender’s. Whatever the heck his name was.
Where his was newer, with modern decor and appliances, Haley’s renovated farmhouse could have graced the pages of a country living magazine. The mingled scents of line-dried linens and banana bread permeated the air, and antique furnishings completed the charm.
Annika had been right: Kira had instantly liked Haley, and Remy had been at work when she arrived at the house. Annika had stayed long enough to ask about some kind of weather machine, and then she’d taken off with a brisk nod of good-bye.
Yesterday Kira did nothing but lie in the guest-room bed with Haley’s cat, Geordie, curled up behind her knees. Haley brought food and always offered to lend an ear, but Kira didn’t feel like talking. Or thinking. Or eating. But she had someone else to consider now, and for the baby, she choked down the vegan meals Haley prepared.
“My parents were vegetarian hippies,” Haley explained when Kira asked about the complicated dishes that went well beyond the salads most people believed vegans ate exclusively. “I’m an expert in this kind of cooking.”
On the second day, Kira could no longer hang out in bed. Wearing a pair of Haley’s blue silk pajamas, she migrated to the living room, where the other woman sat on the couch and plugged away at a monstrous laptop computer. As Kira watched, Haley sighed and dragged her hand through her long, caramel-brown hair.
“Do you always work from home, or are you babysitting?”
Haley looked up and smiled, a sunny contrast to the gloomy, overcast day outside. “Babysitting.”
“Well, at least you’re honest.”
The thump of boots on the stairs startled Kira, and she turned to see a dark-haired man in ACRO BDUs coming down them. “Bebe, I can’t find my jacket. Oh, there it is—” He froze as he reached for the leather bomber draped over the couch next to Kira, and she realized she’d been growling. Snarling, really.
“Sorry.” She scampered to an overstuffed rocking chair across the room. “Dr. Lavery said it’s some sort of weird instinct.” She smiled weakly. “Who knows what other strange instincts will emerge once the baby gets here.”
The baby whose father had been sent to kill its mother.
Raw grief ripped through her insides, and she burst into tears. It was humiliating, crying like this in front of an audience, but she couldn’t stop.
“Kira?” Haley moved close, kneeled at her feet, while Remy eased into a chair at the kitchen table. “What is it?”
“I’m going to have to raise this baby alone,” she sobbed. “What will happen when my season comes, and I can’t take care of the child because every four hours I need, um, you know?”
“That’s one of the best things about ACRO. You’re never alone. Everyone will help. And I’m a great babysitter.”
“ACRO? You can’t be serious. They wanted me dead. They sent Tom to kill me.” Palming her belly protectively, she shrank back into the recliner, but her mind was already working on a way to get out of there—not that she knew where she’d go. “They aren’t getting near my baby.”
“No one is going to touch either one of you if you don’t want them to. I promise. But I don’t think you know the whole story.” Haley and Remy exchanged glances, and Haley rested a soothing hand on Kira’s knee. “Do you know why Itor wants you?”
“At first, Tom said they wanted me dead. It was a lie.” The acid in her tone bled through loud and clear, and Remy cocked a dark eyebrow.
“He told you what he needed to in order to get you out of there and to gain your trust.”
“Whatever,” she muttered. “In the infirmary, he said they’d wanted to engineer my pregnancy. God only knows what they want my baby for.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and Haley handed her a box of tissue from the end table. “It’s all insane and horrible, but not something for ACRO to kill me over.”
Remy shifted in his chair, but when she bared her teeth at him, he held up his hands. “Easy there. I’m not moving.” He stretched his long legs out in front of him, more slowly this time. “I interrogated the Itor agent Annika captured in Idaho. What I learned…” He grimaced. “Kira, I was a Navy SEAL before I came here. My specialty was interrogation. I’ve seen things, done things, heard things, and shit, I thought I’d experienced it all. But I’ve never been more sickened than by what that Itor bastard told me.”
She was afraid to ask, and didn’t have to, because he pierced her with a stare that sent chills ricocheting up and down her spine.
“What ACRO was afraid of turned out to be the case. Itor was going to use you, and possibly your child, as a biological weapon.”
Okay, she’d run a lot of scenarios through her head, but that one hadn’t come close to crossing her mind. “A biological weapon? How?”
“Something to do with your physiology. They planned to introduce a deadly animal-specific virus into your body in order to mutate into something humans could contract. Something that would take scientists years to develop a vaccine for because they wouldn’t recognize the disease or be able to locate the source.”
“But why? Why would they want to spread something like that so indiscriminately?”
“Profit. Itor would develop a vaccine, but the rest of the world would be vulnerable. They could have used you to infect huge populations, millions of people. Then they could have sold the vaccine for billions. Or they could have sold you to the highest bidder as a WMD.”
“Oh, my God.” She was going to be sick.
After a long silence, in which she thought she heard a distant rumble, Remy spoke again, his voice quiet, deep like the thunder. “I know what you’re feeling. Itor wanted to do something similar to me.”
Shell-shocked and not a little bitter, she cut him a hard look. “And did ACRO send someone to kill you too?”
“They sent someone for another reason.” He slid Haley a secret smile, and then he made it disappear. “But that was a different situation. I was military. My background gave me an edge when it came to Itor. And I was willing to do whatever I had to do to make sure they never took me alive. You’re a civilian, with a major distrust of the government, if what Ender told me is true. If you wouldn’t join ACRO—”
“I couldn’t be left for Itor to take.”
“Exactly.”
Somewhere deep inside she got that. She may never forgive whatever bastard handed down the order, but she also wouldn’t have wanted to be responsible for the deaths of millions.
Tom, though…that was a betrayal that drilled into levels of emotion she hadn’t known existed.
“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” Haley asked, and Kira dug her fingers into the arms of the chair instead of answering.
The jingle of metal swirling on wood as Remy played with a set of keys on the tabletop startled her. “He didn’t know you.”
“Oh, he knew me,” she ground out. “I assure you of that. And he still planned to kill me. Even after…” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Even after all the intimacy. “How can I get past that?”
“Kira,” Haley said, “he’s not my favorite person in the world, but you need to know that to save you, he disobeyed about a thousand orders.” She tucked her legs beneath her and got more comfortable on the rug. “He risked his career and his friendship with Dev, who is pretty much the only person at ACRO he calls his friend.”
Remy shrugged. “He just won’t admit how much he likes me.”
“He’s sort of stubborn that way,” Kira said, her ch
est constricting because, dammit, she loved Tom so much.
And yeah, okay, he’d done a few things he didn’t have to do. Like call the refuge to arrange for her animals to be brought to New York. And he’d saved her from being serviced by strange men at the training facility. He’d risked his life to keep her from the Itor agents who were after them. He’d stopped eating meat for her.
God, she could go on and on, but doing so made her miserable. She couldn’t imagine life without Tom, but she didn’t know if she could ever look at him without seeing the face of the man people called Ender. The man who had gazed at her with such uncompromising calculation as he held his hand over the gun he would have used to kill her.
Everything about him screamed warrior, from the way he moved to the way he took in the world around him. And she’d been around predators long enough to recognize the deadly focused look in one’s eyes before it took down its victim. So how could she have been so naïve?
But she knew. Desperate for love and acceptance, and under the influence of a sexual pull, she’d been blind.
So stupid.
Her stupidity alone made her a danger to herself, to her animals, to the entire damned world.
“Can I get you anything?” Haley gripped Kira’s hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Tea? Water? A bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a beer chaser?”
That got a smile out of Kira, the first in what felt like forever. She shook her head as the low, rolling sound of thunder rumbled outside, closer than the last time. Inside, a strange pressure built, a tangible thickening of the air. Haley swung around to her husband, her hand absently rubbing her hip. When Kira looked over at Remy, she nearly gasped.
Lightning flashed in his eyes—not the reflection of lighting, but actual lightning. And he was fixated on Haley. Leaning forward in his chair, he dropped his head low to stare at his wife, utterly captivated in a way that took Kira’s breath away. Holy cow, she’d known he was a handsome man, but now she saw more than that, saw the animal intensity, the single-minded focus of a predator that hungered, and hungered now. But what did he…? Oh.
Oh.
Then he was up, taking the stair steps two at a time. Haley stood. “Will you be okay for a few minutes?” she asked, sounding breathless. “Yes, fine. Thank you.”
Haley hurried up the stairs, and thirty seconds later, the muffled noises that drifted from above left no doubt as to what was going on up there.
The storm picked up, mercifully masking the sounds from upstairs—and what had the crashing noises been? She and Tom hadn’t broken anything during even their most vigorous lovemaking, though a couple of bathroom sinks had been in danger.
Tom.
She couldn’t stop thinking about him. Heck, she still smelled him on her skin, even though she’d showered. Twice. It was like he was a part of her now, inside her.
She touched her belly. Yes, he was inside her.
Damn him. She hated him for how easily he could have followed his orders. Even after having sex with her, he could have done it.
Sure, he’d eventually changed his mind, and she supposed she should be concentrating on what he had done, rather than what he could have done. But she wasn’t ready to do that yet.
Didn’t know if she’d ever be ready, no matter how much she loved him.
Time drifted away with the thunderstorm, and eventually Haley appeared, wearing a different outfit than she’d worn earlier, and Kira suspected that Remy’s enthusiasm might be as hazardous to clothing as Tom’s.
The phone rang, but Remy must have picked it up, because it stopped after two rings.
“Sorry about disappearing on you like that,” Haley said. “I don’t know what Ender told you about Remy, but—”
“Bebe?” He clomped down the stairs and grabbed the keys off the table. “The ACRO jet’s on approach with Akbar and Sheila coming in off a mission. Sheila’s hurt, but there’s a storm over the runway and the plane can’t land. ATC wants me to move it.”
“Have fun.”
He winked at her. “I already did.” With a nod at Kira, he sauntered out the door.
“What does he have to move?”
“The storm.” Haley sank onto the couch. “He can control the weather. And sometimes, like you just saw, it controls him.”
“I can understand that.”
“I know. Just think about what we said about Ender and ACRO. Both are demanding and tough, but there’s a lot of good there too.”
Before the tears began again, Kira stood. “Thank you, Haley. I’m going to try to get some sleep.” She headed toward the stairs, but before she mounted them, she said over her shoulder, “Oh, and Geordie promised not to scratch the furniture anymore.”
KIRA COULDN’T SLEEP. Her mind reeled with the new information and old memories, and fear for her future kept butting in. And she knew it was a bad idea, but she wanted to talk to Tom. She loved him, hated him, wanted him to suffer like she was, wanted him to be okay. Basically, she was one big mess.
He, on the other hand, had probably already moved on, could even now be rolling around with someone new.
Sitting up in bed, she reached for a tissue on the nightstand, but her hand went to the phone.
Not a good idea.
But once again, her heart overruled her head, and with trembling fingers, she dialed the number for Tom’s cell phone, the one he’d given her when he’d cuffed her to his bed. She nearly hung up on the second ring, but when she heard a gruff “What?” on the other end, she froze.
“Goddammit, what?” Silence, and then a soft “Kira? Kira, is that you?”
“Yes,” she croaked.
“Are you okay? Where’s Haley?”
“Haley’s downstairs. Everything’s fine.” If the fact that she was dying inside was fine. “I just…I guess I just wanted to know…when did I become more than a job? Was I ever more than a job?”
For the longest time, she heard only the sound of his breathing, and her heart sank lower in her chest with every passing second. Then she heard a strange sound on the other end, almost like a sob, and when Tom spoke, his voice was gravelly.
“You were special from the beginning.”
“And yet, you could have—”
“I’d have paid for it, Kira. I’m paying for it anyway.”
God, she actually felt sorry for him, which pissed her off. “You aren’t the only one, Tommy.” She squeezed her lids tight to keep from crying again. Her eyes were already aching and swollen, and she didn’t want to make it worse. “Do you even miss me?” The question was out of her mouth before she could stop it.
“More than you know.”
“But you still don’t want me.” She let out a strangled sound of horror at the way her mouth kept falling open and saying stupid things. Even if he wanted her, could she get past her issues? Or was she clinging to them like a shield because it would be too painful to know that the only reason they weren’t together was because he didn’t want her and his child?
When he said nothing, she had her answer. Furious, hurt and shaking, she hung up the phone without another word.
Now she could sleep, and with any luck, she’d wake up and find out that this was all one big nightmare.
CHAPTER
Twenty-seven
Ender had been severely light-headed for two days. He’d blamed the stress of the situation with Kira and his lack of protein but hadn’t rectified either situation. When he collapsed on his kitchen floor, he wasn’t surprised as much as he was pissed at suddenly being rendered helpless. He was even more pissed to be discovered lying there by Remy.
“What the hell is up with you?” Remy drawled, having walked in like he owned the damned house.
Rescued by a motherfucking SEAL. What a way to go.
“You do realize you said that out loud, asshole.” Remy’s drawl floated somewhere above Ender.
“I can’t get up,” he murmured. God, his eyes were heavy.
He stared up at the ceiling, which he knew w
as white but now looked like a hazy shade of dark gray. He blinked twice and wondered if the lights were on or off and then realized that it didn’t matter.
“Are you shot or did you break something?” Remy asked, standing over him. Ender felt the SEAL’s fingers on his pulse.
“No,” he managed.
“You need a doctor.”
“Just leave me alone, SEAL. I’m fine.”
“Yeah, you’re about as fine as Kira is,” Remy said, and Ender grunted as he struggled to sit up.
“Is she all right? Is the baby—”
“The baby’s fine, man. She’s miserable without you…she just hasn’t come to terms with everything yet.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Ender thought back to the phone call—his chance, probably the last chance, to tell her that they could make things all right somehow.
“You didn’t do something to yourself because of Kira, did you?” Remy asked, a note of concern tingeing his thick Southern drawl.
“Yes. Not what you’re thinking, though,” Ender muttered. “Long story.”
“Well, you can tell it to the doctor.”
“Private,” Ender said.
“Yeah, yeah, I wasn’t going to parade you through the halls, even though I know that’s what you’d do to me.”
Well, yeah, that was definitely true. Good thing Remy was a hell of a lot nicer than Ender could ever be. Fucking frogman.
“You said that out loud too, asshole,” Remy said. “But don’t worry—I always knew you liked me a lot more than you let on.”
Ender wanted to give him the finger, but didn’t have the energy for even that small task. “Just tell Kira…” he started.
“Tell her what?”
Ender shut his eyes. “Nothing.”
Instead of helping him up, Remy slid down to the floor next to him. “It’s all right to have baggage, you know.”
Ender cut his eyes toward the dark-haired man. “Now you’re a shrink? I thought all you were good for was creating thunderstorms.”
“How the hell were you ever a team player?” Remy asked him.