by Misty Evans
A pipe dream, that was. Nothing but a fucking pipe dream.
Charlotte shifted, waking and stretching. Fingernails trailed over his chest and he went rock hard again.
God, how many times had they done it? It was like they couldn’t get their fill. The sheets smelled like sex. Charlotte’s hand glided down under the sheet and tickled his morning erection.
“Hmm. Look what I found,” she giggled.
And that was all it took. He flipped both of them over, pulling her underneath him. Her legs parted without hesitation and she cupped his ass cheeks, slamming him home with no warm up. Didn’t matter. She was wet and ready.
Although she wanted him to take her fast and hard, he slowed things down, keeping the rhythm smooth and steady. She begged him to speed up, but he wouldn’t. He wanted the moment to last this time. To etch fresh memories of her under him in his mind.
When they were done, panting and boneless once more, he collapsed on top of her. She wound her hands through his hair, down his shoulders, and traced the line of his spine with her cool fingers. “I don’t want this to end.”
Relief that she felt the same way he did flooded his exhausted body. Relief plus something more. Something he didn’t want to name that had hit him during the night. No matter how many times he fucked her, it wasn’t enough. He would never get her out of his system.
His chest felt tight and he distracted himself by nibbling her ear and listening to her lighthearted giggle. “We’ll come back after you clear your name and Nicolae Bourean is behind bars.”
They stayed tangled in each other’s arms for a few more blissful moments, then got up. Miles stoked the fire. Charlotte heated water for them to wash with. He enjoyed her graceful movements as she cleaned herself, then went to work on him. She’d removed the blue contacts during the night and her brown eyes glittered with flecks of gold in the morning sunlight coming through the window. He tried not to stare at the scars on her back, tried not to let anger work its way back under his skin.
He failed.
When Charlotte finished washing him and he was hard once more, she went to her knees and took him in her mouth. His vision went white from the sensation. As she expertly worked him over, he tangled one hand in her hair and used the other to grab onto the fireplace mantel. He mentally vowed he wouldn’t lose her this time.
Never again.
They eventually managed to dress and repacked their backpacks. Breakfast was protein bars and coffee they’d brought from the plane. “We’ll need the bag of silverware from under the truck seat,” Charlotte said, washing out the mugs that had worked for soup the night before and coffee that morning. “Could you grab it?”
They would be heading to the caves on foot since the truck was stuck halfway down the winding lane. From what he understood, they wouldn’t have gone far before having to ditch the truck anyway. There was no other way to get into the mountain that deep except on foot.
“What do we need the bag for?” he asked.
She rinsed her mug and set it on a towel to dry next to his. As if they would be back in a few hours. “The same reason we needed it on the road into this area.”
“For bribes? There are outlaws in the caves?”
“Not exactly. There are Gypsies who travel the tunnels and can make passage difficult if you don’t pay their security fee.” She made air quotes around the last two words. “They’re harmless, really, but they’re also the caretakers of the caves we’re going to. They protect the property left there, sort of like the goblins at Gringotts Wizarding Bank in Harry Potter.”
Fictional goblins seemed almost preferable. “I’ll get the bag.”
When he returned, bag in hand, Charlotte was sticking The Chamber of Secrets in her backpack. He glanced at the bookshelf. He’d forgotten to look for the note in the other books there.
“Just so you know,” Charlotte said. “I now believe someone was here in the cabin after we left.”
“Who?”
“I’m not sure, but possibly my handler.”
“You said everything was the same as when we left it.”
“It is, almost.” She pointed at her backpack. “That Harry Potter book? It’s not mine.”
“What do you mean it’s not yours?”
“I didn’t notice it until now.” Her gaze darted to the window, back to him. She grabbed her coat, suddenly all business and making Miles’ internal radar go on high alert. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll tell you on the way.”
Chapter Fifteen
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Washington, D.C.
BEATRICE WAS HALF a mile into her walking workout in the SFI training center when her playlist was interrupted by an incoming call.
“Zebulon,” she greeted him. “Any update on CB Norris?”
“I ain’t calling you to give you an update on my hemorrhoids, girlie.”
Zeb’s coarseness made him infinitely likable in her book. “Good, because I’m not interested in those.”
He laughed. “Norris could be trouble, but then you already knew that, didn’t you?”
“Correct. That’s why I asked you to look into him. What did you find?”
“Nothing.”
Beatrice slowed her pace. Her walks were becoming increasingly more challenging with the weight of the baby. “What do you mean nothing? You just said he could be trouble.”
“Exactly. He’s being a good boy, doing the Queen’s bidding, and keeping his nose out of trouble in Romania. He only has one operative, but from my calculations, he has over a dozen assets he’s running in that area. Lots of HUMIN, not a lot of action.”
Human intel. Old school spy craft, but important even in this day and age.
Zeb went on. “His mission is to take out Nicolae Bourean, but in two years, he’s done little more than keep an eye on the POS.”
“What do you believe he’s doing? Is Bourean bribing him off?”
“Possibly, but my guess is, he’s biding his time with the little fish while he goes after the whale.”
Beatrice stopped, and used the towel around her neck to wipe perspiration from her forehead. “The ulterior motive you mentioned the other day?”
“Bingo. He likes big game. Terrorists. One of the men who came up through bin Laden’s ranks was a guy known only as Blackwater. The kid joined bin Laden when he was fifteen, became one of his commanders. Norris had a boner for him back in the day too.”
“Blackwater. I remember his file crossing my desk at NSA. He’s a recruiter now, correct? Setting up terrorist cells all over Europe, with no single affiliation to any group.”
Zeb coughed and cleared his throat. “You got it. The man’s allegiance isn’t to al Qaeda or anyone else. It’s simply to destroy the West, America. Any group who agrees with that mission, any radical who believes in that cause, he helps them.”
“Norris missed bin Laden,” Beatrice mused. “He wants Blackwater.”
“Bet you can’t guess where the latest human intel suggests Blackwater is hiding out?”
Beatrice started walking again, but this time, she was headed to the locker room. “Romania,” she sighed. “The Carpathian mountains.”
“Give the lady a gold star.”
“You might want to clear your schedule, Zeb.”
“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”
She hit the locker room door. “I’ll be in touch.”
Romania
THE FOREST WAS primordial, ancient. Like the magical forest in a fairytale.
The Southern Carpathian Mountains were often referred to as the Transylvanian Alps. The entrance to the cave Charlotte sought was only a few miles away, but required a steep, uneven climb up the mountainside through a forest that had been untouched by man. There were no hikers here, no tourists, or castles turned into day spas. Only virgin forest, wild animals, and the leftovers of the Ice Age.
She’d added a layer of clothing from her trunk
at the cabin; found a pair of woolen socks for inside her boots. Miles had brought hand warmers from the plane and they’d broken them open and slid them inside their gloves.
He walked behind her, letting her lead the way. She put her foot up on a rocky outcropping, grabbed a tree trunk to help her leverage over it. “There’s a harmony here, don’t you think?” she asked him. “A sacredness, pure and beautiful.”
A bird trilled in the canopy of trees hanging over them. “Sure,” he answered, not sounding like he cared much. His hand landed on her lower back, steading her as she climbed onto the outcropping. “Tell me about the book.”
“Ah, yes, the book.” She tried not to sound out of breath, but it was difficult. The cold air, mixed with the high altitude and the difficult climb, left her feeling winded and they’d only been going a mile or so.
“It was my cheat sheet for a code system CB Norris and I used to communicate.”
“A cheat sheet?”
“The closest village is small but has a solid tourist base coming to see their castles and old-world charm along the river. It’s part of Nico’s chain of towns where he runs his business dealings all the way down to Bucharest and where I first made contact with him.” She crossed the rocky plateau and hopped off the other side. “There’s a library inside one of the restored castles that has a sizable collection of books and documents dating back to Medieval times. They carry classics as well. No one checks the books out, mind you, but you can go in and sit at the tables and read whatever you like. Modern classics, like the Harry Potter series, are also on their shelves.”
A black squirrel chattered at them from a nearby tree. Another sat off to their left, digging in the snow, probably looking for an acorn he had buried. “When I had a message for him, I would leave it in that library’s copy of The Chamber of Secrets by circling letters inside the book with a pencil very lightly, thus creating my message. I would leave a bookmark inside the book containing the numbers of the pages where the message was. He would go to the library and retrieve it by finding the letters I’d circled. It was slow, but effective, since I never knew when he was in town and cell service was so unreliable. Plus, he’s very old school. Doesn’t like cell phones or in-person meetings. Someone is always watching, according to him. Always listening.”
“Slick,” Miles said, jumping down from the outcropping as Charlotte continued on toward the next one. As they gained elevation, they also gained more snow. “So you would create the message in your copy of the book first, then use it when you got to the library to transfer it.”
“It was much more efficient that way. He would erase the marks in the library’s copy after he read the message, and I would do the same in mine to prep it for the next one.”
“So how do you know the book in your backpack isn’t yours?”
“The contact information—a phone number—for Emit Petit is missing.”
“You wrote that in the book?”
Her fingers were stiff. She stopped and cupped her gloved hands, blowing on them for a moment. “In code. After the initial time I had to call him, I coded the number into the book just in case I ever needed it again, using page numbers and number references in the manuscript. In this copy,”—she patted the backpack—“those marks are missing. I didn’t notice it last night when I thumbed through the pages, but the book felt different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and then we got a little…sidetracked…before I had a chance to really go through it. This morning, I took a closer look. I’ve had the same copy of The Chamber of Secrets since my, uh, incarceration as a young girl. I know my book; the weight of it, the feel of the pages I’ve read hundreds of times. The copy that you pulled off the shelf is worn like mine, and I can see past pencil marks on the pages that have been erased, but this copy is not the one I’ve owned since I was eleven.”
Miles caught up to her, took her gloved hands and rubbed them between his. The sun was bright overhead, but filtered where they stood underneath the canopy of trees. “You think it’s your handler’s?”
“That’s exactly what I think, only I don’t know why. Why he would change them out? He probably came to the cabin looking for me when I disappeared, but why exchange the books? And why didn’t he tell me when I contacted him after I escaped Nico?”
Miles looked up. Sunlight and shadows dappled his face. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, dark stubble lining his jaw—stubble that had tickled her skin last night in the most erotic ways.
He stopped rubbing her hands, but still held them inside of his. “I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but…”
A tightness crept into Charlotte’s stomach as his voice trailed off. “But what?”
He sighed, tilted his head back down to look at her. “I left you a note in that book before Petit took me away.”
“A note?”
His eyes shifted to the right. He released her hands. “I didn’t understand why you’d left me there without saying goodbye. Petit gave me the song and dance about how I should just be grateful you’d saved me and contacted him. That people, especially my family members, were going to be thrilled to know I was still alive. They all thought I was dead. He said you weren’t coming back to the cabin—that you’d told him little, only that you had to leave and wouldn’t be back. It was time for me to go home.”
Snow crunched under his feet as he took a step away, stared up at the mountain they were climbing. A few miles farther east, on the other side of the ridge, was the spot his helicopter had gone down. “I didn’t think of America as my home so much anymore. I didn’t want to go. I was angry, confused. I wrote you a note and stuck it in the book, believing if you ever did come back, you’d find it.”
The tightness in her stomach moved up to her throat. “What did the note say?”
“That I… I hoped you’d change your mind about us. And if you did, to call me. I left my contact information in the note, along with some details about our time together. What it meant to me. How I didn’t want to lose you, and, well, you get the idea.”
A love note? He’d left her a romantic, if upset, love note?
Had he told her he loved her? Her heart thrummed in her ears. “I’m sorry I never got it.”
He met her eyes. “Me, too.”
They stayed that way for a moment, lost in the quiet of the forest and each other’s gazes.
The moment passed too quickly when a bird overhead squawked at them and a shadow moved over the sun. “We better keep moving,” he said.
She wanted to call him back, to hold onto that moment. Her heart hurt inside her chest watching him walk away, and she put a hand on a nearby tree trunk to steady herself.
The tree trunk was solid, enduring. She looked up at the leaves fluttering overhead. You should have said it. I love you. It’s three words.
Three words she hadn’t said to anyone in years. The last person had been Lanny, her brother.
Patting the tree trunk, she wished something in her life would endure with the same tenacity these mountains had. Hauling herself up the embankment, it was hard to think about her missing book and why CB would have taken it when all she could think about was the words Miles had written in that note. He couldn’t bring himself to say he loved her now, what made her think he’d actually said it then?
Words, she learned a long time ago, didn’t matter. Actions did.
They trudged on, the snow beginning to slow their steps as it got deeper, but they were close to the cave entrance. She checked her map again. The tunnels went through this part of the mountain from one side to the other, but they also went deeper down, where the safe was hidden.
“My younger sister, Cricket, is a Harry Potter fan,” Miles said a few minutes later, breaking the silence between them. “She grew up on the books and movies and was totally in love with Harry. She dressed up as Hermione every year at Halloween and slept in robes.”
An invitation to talk about something except their current situation—an olive branch? Charlott
e wasn’t used to talking about the past, but talking passed the time and made the climb less daunting. “When I was in the mental hospital, I dreamed Hagrid would show up and break me out. I wanted to believe I was special, like Harry, and someone somewhere would see the good in me like my mother had always done before she was murdered. That they would take me away to a new life.”
He grabbed one of her hands, clenched it as they climbed side by side. “You are special.”
If only that were true.
“The magic of Harry Potter is in that belief,” she said, enjoying his steadying presence on the rocky path. “That each of us is the chosen one, and no matter what happens in the real world—the Muggle world—we know there’s another enchanted world out there where magic is real. We want to believe we’ve been chosen for a great purpose, and that love will keep us safe in the end, no matter what evil we face. I clung to that idea all through my childhood.”
The forest thinned and they walked into a clearing. Her teeth were chattering and her toes felt numb. “There.” Charlotte pointed.
Miles followed her outstretched finger, squinted, and sounded baffled. “There what? I don’t see anything but brush and rocks.”
Her lips were cold, but they could still form a smile. “Exactly,” she said, a buoyant feeling invading her chest. There was still the next daunting obstacle to get over, but she had a plan to ensure success. “That’s the cave.”
Chapter Sixteen
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HE’D NEVER REALIZED when they were snowed in at the cabin, just how far it had been from the helicopter’s crash site. “How in the world did you get me through these tunnels all the way down to your cabin when I was unconscious?” Miles asked.
Charlotte was a few steps ahead of him, her flashlight’s beam bouncing over the walls. The tunnels curved and twisted, intersecting here and there like snakes slithering over each other. At points, veins of ice ran through the walls and stalactites hung down, while at those warmed by nearby hot springs, moss covered the walls.