Code Name: Daddy

by Marilyn Tracy

  He pressed the doorbell, making her jolt two inches when it went off directly over her head. He winced and looked behind him, as if afraid the sound of the bell would wake the neighborhood. She bit her lip in reaction. Surely ghosts wouldn’t wince or ring doorbells in the wee hours of the morning. He craned his neck to look at the empty street in front of her house. He didn’t have a car, at least, none that she could see.

  She understood several things in lightning succession: Alec was really alive. However improbably and impossibly, he was on her doorstep. He had apparently arrived by taxi, which accounted for the screech of tires. And the whine she’d heard was probably feedback from the taxi’s radio. That was why the sound had seemed familiar— she’d heard it on television a thousand times. She perceived all this, but could make no sense of it; all of it, everything, was simply incomprehensible.

  “Cait?” he called again softly. Staring at him, seeing him mouth her name, she realized she recognized his voice.

  He pressed the doorbell again. This time, despite her convulsive start, she was galvanized into action. She yanked back the locks and jerked the door open, wrenching at the knob with cold, shaking hands.

  This was no dream, no nightmare. He was really there.

  “Alec,” she breathed.

  He stared at her blankly for a moment, as if he hadn’t expected to see her on the other side of the door, or, making her quake inside, as if he’d forgotten what she looked like, then he pushed her back into the house, following her only to swiftly shove the door into place.

  As if it were his home, he tossed an overnight bag to the floor, slapped the locks into place and, with two long strides, crossed to her front windows. He stood with his back to the wall and pulled the curtains back a mere inch to peer outside.

  Only then did Cait see that he held a gun in his hand.

  She felt as if her feet had grown roots and she was firmly planted to her living room floor. “You’re... dead,” she whispered.

  The outside floods, timed for the minimum setting, abruptly cut off, plunging them in shadow. The only light in the room filtered down from the stairway.

  “I came as soon as I knew. I suspected someone might not want me around, but I didn’t dream they’d follow me here.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “God, Cait, I’m so sorry,” he continued, ignoring her interruption, still looking out the window.

  “What?” Like his presence in the middle of the night, like his very existence, his words carried no meaning for Cait. He might as well have been speaking Latin for all the sense he made.

  “Get some things together. I’ll find us a place where we can be safe tonight.”

  “Safe,” Cait repeated, frowning. She still stood in the exact same spot where he’d thrust her upon his entry. She stared at him, grappling with the realization that he wasn’t dead, was in her house in the middle of the night—two years after she’d gone to his funeral—and was talking to her as if he’d run into a little trouble while going to the corner grocery for a pack of cigarettes.

  She hadn’t seen him for two years. Two years, filled with hard work, tough times, lonely wakeful nights, and a million unanswered questions. She’d last seen him shot and bleeding on the cloth they’d used as a bed.

  But she didn’t say any of this, couldn’t have spoken if her very life depended on it. She only looked at him, seeing a gray streak in the hair at his temple, his dark mane longer, curling at his collar. Had he always seemed so imposing? Had his shoulders been so broad two years ago?

  She thought she’d remembered every single detail about him, but staring at him now, she found she’d forgotten how square his chin was, how chiseled his cheeks. He had an odd tan line across his cheeks, as if he wore a mask on the lower half of his face during the day. He looked harder, as though an anger had blossomed in him somewhere, a quiet, rough fury that he’d learned to take energy from rather than letting it go.

  Maybe that illusion came from the gun he held so purposefully in his steady hand.

  Something in the grim set of his mouth stayed her thousands of questions. She clamped her quivering lips together, trying so hard not to let him see how thoroughly his return from the grave unnerved her.

  “What—?” she managed to whisper.

  He didn’t answer, his attention focused intently on the street.

  The impossibility of his presence warred with a peculiar sense that some corner of the world had righted itself, that a dreadful mistake had been corrected. Alec had come back.

  She had to force air to make her voice loud enough for him to hear. “What...is...going on?”

  He turned to look at her and did a slight double take, as if he was only just then seeing her. His eyes roamed her face, her satin ensemble, as if she were the person—not he—who had mysteriously come back from a grave.

  Then his look changed from the rough are-you-the-same-person ? appraisal to a longing she’d never seen on his face before. Not once during those three days. It was a hunger that didn’t address the chemistry that had flared so naturally between them. The look encompassed broken promises and lost dreams and a well of bitterness so deep it couldn’t possibly be plumbed. She suspected he was unaware how fiercely he stared at her.

  She shut her eyes. Surely she was asleep. Dreaming as she had so many times before that Alec had come back to her, that he’d lived, that the reports of his death, the shots she’d seen lodge in his chest, had been an incredible, colossal mistake: No, no, he’s fine, someone’s kindly voice would say, just a little scratch. Alec, dead? Heavens, no.

  And in her dreams he would touch her face in that distinctively tender way, caressing her with the backs of his fingers, trailing the line of her cheeks with his thumbs.

  “Ah, Cait...” he would say.

  “Cait... ?”

  She opened her eyes. He wasn’t beside her, hand lifted to stroke her face, but was standing beside her window, watching her warily, gun pointed toward her new carpet. She wasn’t sleeping; she was awake and Alec MacLaine was alive.

  “I saw you s-shot in the chest,” she said raggedly. “I saw the bullets hit you three times.” The exact number of times he’d been shot suddenly seemed very important.

  She saw a muscle flex in his jaw. She remembered feeling it jerk beneath her hand two years ago. It happened when he was angry. Or when he was cresting the tide of passion. She felt a wave of heat rush through her body at the memory. A feeling that was followed by cold confusion.

  “I know, Cait. I’m so sorry,” he said. His voice held a jagged note. She couldn’t read his expression; it carried too many nuances. Regret? Apology? Something else. Anger?

  She persisted with her own thoughts, needing to understand the paradox apparently confronting her in her own living room, “I saw you lying on that c-cloth. Bleeding to death.”

  “I know,” he said, his tone raw, the way it had sounded that last morning. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “Doesn’t matter?” she asked, aghast.

  He let the curtain twitch back into place and stood perfectly still, not two yards away from her, staring at her as if she were a keg of unstable dynamite. His shoulders flexed and Cait knew he would move forward. Still struggling to understand, to fathom this incredible miracle, she held her hand to stop him from coming any closer. If he touched her, her confusion would be total.

  Part of her ached to have him close the distance between them so she could slip into his arms and stay there forever, clinging to the dream that had sustained her for two long years. But another part of her, a wholly unfamiliar rock-hard self, held back, afraid, not of him, perhaps, never of Alec, but of whatever he represented with his lowered gun—a gun—and his incomprehensible talk of people following him to her house.

  Even as she desperately tried thinking of him as the “old” Alec, the man who drove terror from a dark closet, who had held her in his arms and kissed away fear...she suddenly remembered, coldly recalled that this was also
the man who hadn’t told her he was with the FBI, that she’d had to discover that little tidbit after finding out he was dead. This “new” Alec was a perfect stranger to her, and a lot less than perfect at that.

  “Ah, Cait...” he murmured, holding out his free hand.

  “Alec,” she whispered, agonized. Confused. She unconsciously slid forward a step.

  Yes, and he’s danger walking, that other part of herself cautioned.

  But he’s back! He’s here.

  And he left you alone once before, didn’t he? He allowed you to think he was dead.

  “You have no idea how very good it is to see you,” he said slowly and with unsmiling, heavy irony as if he really had come back from his nonexistent grave. He slid his gun beneath his jacket.

  She couldn’t say anything. Was it good to see him? How could she answer her own inner question? Was it good to see the sun after two years of darkness? Was it good to see a dead man alive again?

  That inner voice she was beginning to despise spoke up again. He lied to you. He abandoned you. You didn’t mourn a man, you mourned a fantasy. This man is a total stranger. He always was.

  “I’ve thought about you every day for two years,” he said.

  An icy sensation trickled through her body as that mysterious other self surfaced, the self born two years before at the precise moment she witnessed his murder, and nurtured in the dark nights in between that day and now.

  “Cait—?”

  The chill working through her coalesced to a freezing, frigid anger. She waved her hand to halt his words. She advanced another single step, leaning forward slightly, suddenly furious, terrified and implacable in her deep sense of betrayal.

  “I went to your funeral. I cried at your funeral. I cried every damned day for six months. I thought I would never stop crying.”

  With each word she slid forward another notch, as if her anger propelled her and not her feet.

  “Darling—”

  “Don’t call me that!” she snapped. “You don’t have any right to use endearments. You’ve let me think for two years that you died trying to save my life! Died. Do you know what that does to a person’s head?”

  “I know, Cait. Believe me, I know.”

  “You don’t have the slightest inkling of what that feels like! You couldn’t or you wouldn’t have put me through it.”

  “Cait, I do know,” he said, his voice harsh.

  “I still have nightmares, Alec. Nightmares. And fantasies, my God, the torture I’ve gone through wondering, asking myself over and over if we could have had something together if only you’d lived...”

  Aghast at her own words, at the raw admission of her pain, and at the look of stunned guilt on his face, something in Cait snapped, broke like a brittle twig.

  Tears sprang from her eyes like pellets. Without conscious thought she closed the last few inches separating them, her fists raised and her arms flailing. She beat at his chest with each word, “You... let...me...think... you...were...dead!”

  For a moment, as if accepting the guilt, Cait continued to ineffectually slap at his rock-hard chest, then he clamped both his arms around her and held her still against him. As she’d wanted. And as she hated herself for wanting.

  She struggled against him, wriggling and thrashing her head.

  “damn it, Cait, stop it!”

  Holding her with one arm, he raised his other hand to press her head against his thundering heart.

  “Cait. Sh-h-h. I’m sorry, Cait. It’s not what you think. It’s not at all what you think.”

  Cait felt the anger slipping from her with each stroke of his hand against her hair. Her tears, born of a deep well of anger, were stymied by his gentleness, his apology, his assurance that she wasn’t aware of cause, reasons or facts.

  “Sh-h-h. It’s okay, Cait. It’ll be all right, now.” He held her, soothing her, gentling her, stroking her hair, her shoulders, taking her back in time with his touch, bringing her back to the present with his palpable, remarkable reappearance.

  His hand caressed her hair, her neck, her shoulders with exquisite tenderness, an almost studious lack of passion, betraying how deeply the closeness affected him, as well. How many times she’d longed to be held just this way, stroked, gentled, reassured. And how many times had she wanted this melting sensation of pure contact, not just contact with anyone... with Alec.

  To touch Alec, to feel that muscle in his jaw leap beneath her sensitive fingertips, to feel his heart hammering against her ear, his hands tangled in her hair, these all could comprise a two-year definition of paradise.

  Beneath his touch, pressed tightly against him now, confused but quiescent, Cait felt the last of her sustaining anger drain from her. She reluctantly stirred in his arms.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Alec. Tell me why you’re here, why you let me believe you were dead.” Her voice was steady now, even if her tone was flatter than usual.

  He met her gaze with slow, questioning intensity, as if gauging how much she was ready to take, not as if she were volatile any longer, but as though she might sink to the floor in a parody of an old-fashioned swoon.

  “Just tell me, Alec. I have a right to know. More right than you can guess.”

  He frowned at this, but didn’t pursue it. “I never meant for you to be hurt, Cait.”

  She didn’t try to pull all the way out of his arms. It felt strange to stand within his grasp, drawn to him, yet oddly aloof. “What is going on, Alec? Where have you been?”

  He drew a deep breath and raised a hand to her cheek, cupping it gently. “All this time I’ve thought you were dead.”

  Chapter 5

  Cait was grateful Alec held her; she might have fallen to her knees otherwise. “What? Why did you think I was dead?”

  He shook his head and his grip tightened on her arms. “It doesn’t matter now, Cait.” He drew her into his embrace, cradling her against his chest, lowering his jaw to her temple to press a long, gentle kiss against her sensitive skin. “All that matters is that it wasn’t true. Oh, God, it wasn’t true.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” she said, resisting the urge to press her own lips to his shoulder. It felt so right, so impossibly perfect to be in his arms again. She raised her hand to his muscled arm and felt him tense at the same moment she encountered something hot and wet on his jacket sleeve.

  “It’s just a scratch,” he said. “Someone got me just before I made it to the porch. I didn’t recognize him and he drove away.”

  Blood. He’d been shot. She hadn’t seen him for two years and he’d shown up in the middle of the night with a gunshot wound.

  She didn’t try to pull out of his grasp, and with far more calm than she felt she asked, “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I read a memorandum last week that suggests the terrorists that held us two years ago were hired to kill me,” he said, his rich voice curiously devoid of emotion.

  “I see,” she said. And she wasn’t lying to him. Despite the findings of the Senate subcommittee investigation all that time ago, she’d often wondered if Alec hadn’t been the real target. Why else would they have so coldly murdered him—correction, badly wounded him—yet let her live?

  And she had wanted to continue living, so had kept her mouth shut tight. Nothing she could have said would have brought Alec back, and she’d soon discovered other excellent reasons to keep quiet. So, she’d stuck to her “I was unconscious” story and, amazingly, no one had ever challenged her. Until that interview, and even that small challenge was dropped.

  “Do you see, Cait?”

  “I think so,” she answered, and told him why. When she’d finished he nodded and stroked her hair. “What a hell of a mess.”

  “They’re still after you, then?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Why? They could have killed you anytime in the past two years. Why wait until now?” She almost smiled at the sheer callousness of the question, but this was Alec she
was talking with; she could say anything to Alec. Or she could have once.

  “I was out of the picture. That’s the only reason I can come up with—at least for now.”

  Cait sensed there was more to his theory than he was revealing, but decided not to ask about the past, only the present. “And you’re not out of the picture anymore?”

  “Not since I saw you on the news tonight.” His arms tightened around her.

  “You really thought I was dead?”

  “And buried.”

  “Did someone tell you that?”

  “It was more a matter of not telling me you were alive.”

  Cait mulled this over and decided against pointing out a glaring parallel. “We should do something about your arm.”

  “Not just yet,” he said. “Let me hold you a minute longer. Ah-h-h, Cait.”

  She closed her eyes in exquisite pleasure. She’d never believed she would hear just those words spoken in just that way again. When he lowered his lips to her forehead she wanted to raise her face, to taste him for the first time in two years.

  Instead, for reasons she couldn’t begin to explain, she tilted her head downward, avoiding a contact she’d craved every minute of each passing day. She’d learned to trust her instincts all that time ago, and she wasn’t going to stop now. Whatever trouble cruised around with him on this November night would have to wait until his arm was bandaged and until he’d explained why he’d allowed an entire country to mourn his loss.

  He let her go easily. Too easily, she thought. She glanced at him then away. “Come on into the kitchen with me,” she said. “I’ll patch up your arm.”

  “Cait—” he said, stopping her.

  “Yes?”

  The muted lighting in the room made it difficult for her to read his expression. He didn’t say anything for several seconds, then shrugged slightly. “Look, you have to believe me when I tell you I never meant to bring trouble here. It’s the last thing in the world I’d want. I thought I’d covered my tracks. I never so much as suspected they’d guess I’d come here. Or maybe they just followed me from the airport. I don’t know.”