by Dana Marton
She threw a pillow at him. “Did I get permission?”
“Oh, that.” He started to shake his head as he picked up the pillow, but then a huge grin burst across his face. “You did.”
She wanted to jump on the bed like a five-year-old. “Thank you,” she said as dignified as she could, regretting her earlier outburst. She grabbed the clothes that were meant for her and walked by a foolishly grinning Mike with her head up. She closed the bathroom door behind her, then locked it, needing to be in separate airspace if she was to keep from throwing herself into his arms.
She was in, officially in, on the action.
“I found out about the smugglers, too.” Mike’s booming voice came through the door right next to her, startling her into moving away.
“Did we miss them by much?”
“Just barely. They had some rough weather up here, too. The men and the crates shipped out this morning.”
“How soon can we follow them?”
“At daybreak tomorrow. Two boats are headed out for Uelen, one Russian, one American. Well, the Russian for sure. The American captain is still thinking about it. There’s a lot of ice in the strait. They’re saying in a normal year shipping would be closed by now. It’s only because of the mild weather they’ve been having that the harbor is still open.”
“Will Shorty be here by morning?”
“No,” he said. “But he knows to follow.”
She stripped out of her clothes, glad to be done with the garments she’d worn for the past week without change. The bathroom was still steamed up from Mike’s shower, soothing and comfortable. Hot water came at once, and she stood under it soaking up the heat as her muscles relaxed.
She was going on a top-secret commando mission. She grinned. This was what she’d wanted to do all her life. She was going to be so damned good, they’d never want to let her go.
Tessa lathered shampoo into her hair and rode a wave of blissful optimism.
By the time she was done, Mike was lying on the middle of the bed, palms under his head, eyes closed. He still wasn’t dressed, the thermal suit stretched over his muscles. Lord, but he had a fine body. At that moment she wanted it so badly it bordered on the pitiful.
“Are we staying in?” She would have felt much more comfortable if they went out scouting the harbor and the town, anything really that got them away from the intimacy of the small room and that bed.
“Until nightfall. The place is crawling with CIA.”
“Do you think they know the smugglers were here?”
“Hard to say. They might just be covering all their bases. Looks like their search had been extended to the whole of the state.”
“Do you think they know we’re here?”
“Unlikely.”
She looked at the small, uncomfortable-looking armchair in the corner. “Are you going to sleep in the bed?”
“Unless you object.” He opened his eyes. “Yer a bonny lass, but I’m a mite too tired for mischief just now,” he said in the Scottish brogue of his grandfather.
His eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion. He was worn-out by their trek through the wilderness, and so was she. The hot water had relaxed her muscles and they were begging for the bed.
Who was she kidding? Her body was begging for Mike’s—especially when he talked like that—but, unlikely to get him, it was willing to settle for the bed.
“Fine.” She sat on the edge of the mattress, and he scooted over giving her more than sufficient room.
She stayed as far from him as possible without falling off.
“Now who doesn’t have any trust?” he remarked dryly, and the bed shifted as he came up on his elbows. “Come to think of it, for someone who demands unconditional trust, you are awful stingy with it.”
She was not. She turned to set him straight, but he cut her off before she could say anything.
“You don’t trust me to know when you need help and to give it.”
Was he right? Even as she asked herself the question, she knew he was. “It’s dangerous to trust someone. What if they let you down?” God knew, she’d been let down before.
“What if they won’t? You don’t have to be strong every second. It’s great that you are, but wouldn’t you feel better knowing that someone was there to catch you if you fell?”
She wanted to believe that. But she couldn’t. “I never had anyone I could trust that much in my life.”
“Of course you had. At least your family.”
Especially not her family. She shook her head as old memories crept in and heat stole into her face. “Just drop it.”
“Tessa?” His face turned serious, his gaze searching hers.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She hadn’t, not once, to anyone.
He reached out to cup her hand that lay on the cover between them, but she pulled away.
“You can tell me anything.”
Not this. It was too embarrassing. “It’s not a big deal.” Her father had told her so. She felt like such a wuss and a big sissy for still feeling hurt over it after all these years. “It’s nothing.” She had to let it go.
“The hell it is if it puts that look in your eyes.” His voice came hard and clipped.
Oh, hell, she couldn’t tell him, now that he’d made such a huge issue of it. He would think she was nuts for letting something so small bother her. He would probably laugh.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Don’t cut me down like that. However colossal an ass I’ve been in the past, I do care about you. I always have, from the beginning, you have to believe that.”
She felt something loosen inside her as she nodded.
“It happened a million years ago.” She took a deep breath. “I was twelve.” She fell silent. She couldn’t do it.
A few seconds passed.
“Oh, man.” His face darkened, and she could see in his eyes a hesitation that maybe he didn’t want to hear this story after all. But then he reached out and took her hand again, and this time she didn’t pull away.
“My father lost his job and couldn’t get another. My mother tried to get some work, but she was always a stay-at-home mom, so people said she didn’t have any skills. We were so poor, Mike.” Their meals consisted of macaroni and cheese, spaghetti with sauce that had never seen meat, hotdogs wrapped in stale bread.
Then things got even worse when her father’s unemployment ran out. “He drank a lot, especially in the evenings. Then even more when Greg died.”
“Operation Desert Storm.” He squeezed her hand, and she felt touched that he remembered.
She nodded. “Then my father’s old boss came over one night and talked to my dad about going into business together. He’d gotten laid off, too, finally, but he’d gotten severance because he’d been a manager. It was enough to start something, and he knew my father was a work horse.”
God, even her mother had come out of her stupor of grief for a while. She’d smiled for the first time in months.
“They started a landscaping business. Mr. Soniak bought the equipment, my father provided the facilities. Mr. Soniak lived in a condo in Pittsburgh. We lived on a farmette with a bunch of outbuildings. He knew the fancy neighborhoods where people paid big bucks for making sure their lawns looked as spotless as their neighbors’.”
The business had taken off almost immediately. She could hold up her head in school again; kids no longer teased her about never bringing lunch and wearing clothes that were too small.
“The equipment was housed over at our place, so Mr. Soniak spent a lot of time there. He was single, probably bored at home, my mother used to say. I loved watching him and my father work on the machines.
“Sometimes he got back from his list of houses before my father did and he waited for him in the barn, oiling up the mower, filling the tank for the next day. My mother would send out a cold beer or a snack.”
She closed her eyes, not wanting to go on. Why the hell had she started? Would Mike, like her father, tell
her she’d been imagining things?
“Trust me,” he said, and she nodded.
“He would pat me on the head sometimes, then on the shoulder. One day I was sitting next to him and he patted my thigh and left his hand there. I was too young. I didn’t think anything of it.”
She watched a muscle tick in Mike’s face, focused on that.
“It was May and I was invited to a pool party at a friend’s house. Mr. Soniak was in the barn. My father wasn’t home yet. My mother was finishing dinner. She gave me a beer to take out to the man before I left. I was in nothing but a bikini.”
Had it been as much her fault as anyone else’s? If she hadn’t run around half-naked, if she hadn’t sat to stay awhile when he’d asked her.
“It was hot, too hot for that early in the year. He told me how much I’d grown and offered me a sip of cold beer, and I took it.”
Maybe if she hadn’t taken the drink, if she hadn’t wanted to look older and sophisticated in front of the man who was half her father’s age and so full of charm and amusing stories, the man who was the very salvation of her family.
“I had a bottle of suntan lotion with me.” That and a towel. “He told me he would put it on for me before I left.”
Mike’s hand tightened on hers.
“It felt funny having his hands on me. My mother put suntan lotion on me sometimes, but it didn’t feel like that. He took too long. He sat me on his lap and I squirmed.”
That was it. She really couldn’t say more now. Tears burned her throat, constricting it to the size of a needle.
A hoarse sound escaped from Mike and brought her gaze to his. “Did he rape you?” He was holding his breath for her answer.
“No,” she forced out the word. “But he put his fingers inside my bikini. He hurt me,” she said, wanting him to hear all of it now. “It was nothing. My father said it was nothing. He didn’t take my clothes down and he didn’t rape me. My father said I must have misunderstood an innocent gesture.” The last words came out in a whoosh, rushing to reach the end of her embarrassing confession.
There. She’d said it now. She lifted her gaze to Mike’s face, expecting to see confusion and the question “That’s it?” in his eyes.
But his face was tight and dark as he swore and gathered her to him, held her in an embrace that was so infinitely gentle, it took her breath away.
“It was nothing,” she said, echoing her father’s words.
“It was everything,” he said in a voice that allowed no argument. “He took your innocence. Your father should have killed the bastard.”
“Our family depended on him.”
“It shouldn’t have mattered.”
And to her mortification, she felt tears roll down her face. “My mother understood. She made sure I was never alone with Mr. Soniak after that.”
“But she didn’t call the police?”
She shook her head. “She would never contradict my father. It just wasn’t her way. He supported us. He made the decisions. My mother would have been lost without him.”
He swore again. “No wonder you don’t trust anyone.” He pulled back and brushed his lips over her forehead.
“I want to.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. “God, I’m such a sissy.”
“You’re as tough as nails. You’re so tough, sometimes it scares me.”
It was strange to hear those words come out of his mouth. She wouldn’t have thought anything scared Mike McNair. She relaxed into his warmth and inhaled his scent, and when her eyes fluttered closed she fell into a deep dreamless sleep unlike the nightmares of helicopters and ill-mannered grizzlies that had plagued her short nap earlier.
HE KNEW WHERE THEY WERE. Being able to use the CIA’s resources was a thing of beauty. Once he knew the warheads were out of the country, he had made sure the search switched its focus to the northeast. Every suspicious movement was reported back by the agents in the field, and he had access to the reports.
The Boss took his first easy breath in days. Everything would be fine now. Nobody else had enough knowledge of his various activities to finger him but those two, if they put things together… He couldn’t afford to let that happen.
People in Alaska went missing all the time. Nobody would make much of it. The weather, as ruthless as it was, had a way of surprising unprepared tourists. The bodies wouldn’t be found until the spring thaw. Unless, of course, the wildlife found them first, in which case the bodies would never be recovered at all.
This one last task he had to see to the end, then he would be on his way to Belize.
He let his eyes drift closed. Belize. There was a party by the pool. The young woman coming up to the veranda swayed her hips seductively, the sun caressing her breasts as he would caress them soon. He reached an arm out and she came to him with a smile.
THE CIA WAS THERE all right, not glaringly obvious, but not quite blending in, either. Tessa pulled her fur-trimmed hood deeper over her face as she passed a rental car parked in front of a shoe store, the man behind the wheel talking with lips that barely moved. If she wasn’t specifically looking, she would have thought him a tourist, as no doubt many of the locals did.
The sky at 6:00 p.m. was as dark as in the middle of the night. She made her way toward the harbor without hurrying but walking as if with a purpose, blending in with the few people outside who were coming from or going to work.
She kept an eye out for her dogs and spotted two huskies peeking out of the back of a pickup. They weren’t hers.
A lot of the boats were already put up for the winter. It wouldn’t be long until the harbor closed altogether, waiting for spring breakup. Looked as if it was under construction now. She eyed the giant seawall of granite boulders she assumed were there to protect the city, then she saw the two shipping vessels Mike had told her about and walked toward them. The dock was a short one, reaching into the sea no farther than an eighth of a mile. She wondered if in the summer months, when there was more boat traffic, ships had to wait their turn to come in.
To her credit she didn’t jump when Mike suddenly stepped out of the shadow made by a giant pile of crates right next to her. They’d decided to come separately, taking different routes, being able to survey a larger area that way.
“Any trouble getting here?” He appeared relaxed, but she knew from experience that he was alert to the smallest detail around them.
“No.” They fell in step. “I saw two possible agents. Can’t be sure.”
Another car sat at the end of the harbor. She could make out one person behind the wheel.
“That’s another one.” Mike confirmed without looking that way. “Walk slow. We won’t be able to come back this way again without drawing notice.”
So they had one chance to survey the two boats and decide which one to trust their lives to tomorrow—if the American captain decided to go, thereby giving them a choice. They’d better make note of everything. She skimmed her gaze over them. Both vessels waited in the back of the harbor, near the car. They wouldn’t get a chance to stop and gawk for long.
“Which one is the Russian?”
“The smaller one,” he said. “It got caught on the water in that storm two days ago and sustained too much damage to reach home port. They had to pull in here for repairs.”
They were almost at the boats, their pace slowing to a stroll. Mike reached out his hand in a tentative gesture. She took it. A couple seeking a romantic moment by the water might appear less suspicious.
The boats were right in front of them, the surveillance vehicle not fifty feet ahead. They needed time, a few more minutes for a careful look. She stopped and took Mike’s other hand, as well, turned her face to his, moving so her back was toward the boats and he had a perfect view. She knew nothing about ships; Mike would have to be the one to make a determination.
A cold breeze came off the dark waters behind her. It would be a perilous journey, her first time on a ship. She squeezed Mike’s hand to help keep her doub
ts at bay. She glanced toward the car. The man behind the steering wheel was watching.
“Look like I’m saying something romantic,” she said.
His gaze flickered from the boat to her as he pulled her a little closer and gave her a few moments of undivided attention. “I’m out of practice with romance,” he said.
She gave an impolite snort. That would be the day, when Mike McNair couldn’t get a different woman every day of the week. Then the petty jealousy slipped away as she thought back to when they were still together, the nights they had spent under the stars, how little they had needed for happiness back then.
“Help me out. In another time, another couple— What would she say?” He interrupted her thoughts.
His breath fanned her face, ridiculously warm, visible in the cold air, tangible like a touch.
“I missed you.” She swallowed. “A woman might say that.”
His gaze hesitated on her face before slipping to the boats behind her. “He missed her, too. I’m sure he would tell her.” He waited a beat. “What else?”
The stars above them seemed to shine with new brilliance.
“If they had fought before, she might tell him she’s sorry.”
“Does she still care for him?” He pulled her into a full embrace, but kept his attention on the task at hand.
“Maybe she’s scared to.” Her heartbeat doubled.
His parka was soft, but she could feel the hardness of his body beneath it, the steel core that drew her and scared her alternatively. He was a strong man, the strongest she knew. Could she ever keep her own strength, stay independent next to him, when leaning on him seemed so natural? Would she lose herself if she gave herself to him? And if she lost herself and he let her down, what then?
“I’m thinking he does. Care for her.” He focused on a point behind her, the familiar line of his jaw covered with the beginnings of a stubble. “No need to apologize for the past then.”
“Maybe he’s sorry, too?” she whispered.
“More than words could say,” he said.
“Sometimes people fight about stupid things.”