He heard a low, throaty chuckle. “Are you all right?”
“Eyes,” his daughter said, struggling to free her hand from his grasp so she could undoubtedly press her point.
“Blind in one eye, but otherwise fine,” Alec offered, fending off his determined daughter’s fingers.
“She was trying to tell you she was hungry.”
“That’s what that word was?” he asked, risking opening the poked eye. Tears spilled down one cheek. He turned to see a blurred Cait sitting up on her bed. He squeezed the hurt eye shut, unwilling to stop looking at her, however single-focused.
Her short hair was mussed, spiky again. She looked rakish, ready to tackle the world. At the same time he sensed a caution in her, a wariness that made him immediately aware of their unusual circumstances. A small, bittersweet smile played on her lips as she looked at her daughter, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze.
She swung her legs over the edge of her bed in a fluid, graceful motion. Her feet arched naturally and for some odd reason the sight stirred him.
She said, “Allie... eat.”
Alec groaned. “Al eat. Two words. I get it now.”
“Aleet, Aleet,” Allie said happily, squirming to get free of his restraining arms.
“Well, of course you want to eat,” he said, then turned to Cait. “It’s going to take me a while.”
Cait didn’t say anything to that, though her refusal to look at him and her expressive face spoke volumes. Alec wished he could snatch the words back into his mouth. At the very least they implied a future interaction as if bit by bit, slowly but steadily, he would learn to understand his daughter. And nothing Cait had said or done could possibly lead him to believe that time was something she might offer him.
At the most, his words underscored the very real possibility that time was something she didn’t even have to offer. Because the plan he’d concocted on the road that morning seemed utterly futile when he stared at her lovely face. Unless he made like a magician and pulled a miracle from his nonexistent magic hat, one of his friends was going to find them.
Cait took Allie from his arms, and while a part of him was relieved—he didn’t have a clue how to go about feeding his daughter—another part of him keenly felt the loss of that small bundle of warmth, eye-prodding fingers and all.
“She needs changing,” Cait said, swinging a giggling Allie into the air and flopping her down onto the other bed.
Alec wondered how long it had taken Cait to feel that natural with Allie. He was practically dripping with sweat just from the few minutes of holding her, sure in some deep recess of his mind that he’d inadvertently crush her. And Cait casually, even laughingly, flipped her in the air and let go. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to do that trick. He felt queasy just trying to imagine it.
While Cait was busy changing Allie, he slid to the edge of the bed and reached for the sweatshirt he couldn’t even remember removing. It was neatly folded atop his equally smoothed pants, and his socks were folded across his loafers. A glance at the top of the television cabinet proved that sometime between sitting at the table and waking up to his daughter’s delicate touch, his gun had also been restored to its place of safety.
And he knew full well that he hadn’t done any of those things.
He must have done a regular striptease for her, though he couldn’t remember anything beyond finishing breakfast. Great, MacLaine, he thought. Give the literal woman of your dreams a heart attack by showing up on her doorstep when she thinks you’re dead, rush her and her baby that you didn’t even know about out of the house, let her be sure to understand someone’s trying to kill her and then pass out on her. Smooth.
He dragged his sweatshirt over his head and his pants up his legs. And he couldn’t look at Cait when she rounded the bed carrying a happily chattering, wholly incomprehensible Allie to the table.
“How did she get out of that crib?” he asked. “Did she climb out?”
Cait chuckled. “No. She woke up earlier and I got her out. She was willing to be quiet as long as I lay down with her.”
Alec didn’t know why the words tugged at his heart. Nor did he want to analyze why the notion of lying down with Cait should make his loins suddenly ache.
“Here you go, sweetie,” Cait said, depositing Allie in one of the chairs.
Alec thought of their make-believe house, the large kitchen with the butcher-block island and the scent of herbs, and added a high chair to the blank wall beside the fireplace. Except the kitchen in that house didn’t exist. The tense woman bending over the child she’d scooted close to a Formica tabletop in a roadside motel represented both the dream and the reality.
Watching her break the remains of their shared breakfast into small pieces for Allie, Alec realized that he’d drifted for two years on the illusion of a life they could have shared. He’d survived the lonely nights, the long grueling hours of physical therapy, the seemingly endless pursuit of her murderers, on the fiction that if only Cait hadn’t been killed, his life—their life—would have been normal.
He’d have worked missions by day and come home to that two-story country house at night. They’d have raised kids and dogs, and eaten fried chicken and high-cholesterol picnics in the summer beneath oaks, maples and spreading chestnut trees, and burned fragrant wood in the fireplace in the winter, holding each other, describing their respective days.
“There’s more,” Cait said. “You don’t have to go so fast.”
Though he knew the words weren’t meant for him, he felt flayed by them nonetheless. There wasn’t more. That was the illusion, this was the reality.
And they had to do something very fast or Cait and Allie might be hurt.
He was the FBI agent. The danger came from his friends. So it wasn’t really a case of “they” had to do something—he had to. He had to call the press, stage a showdown.
He had to save Cait. And Allie. He had to save his family. Even if they weren’t really his.
Cait felt Alec’s tension from where she hovered over Allie. He hadn’t looked at her from the time Allie poked her finger in his eye and she’d involuntarily laughed, not at his pain, of course, but at the stunned expression on his face. And at his complete lack of knowing what on earth Allie so adamantly demanded he provide.
She didn’t say anything to him now, not knowing how to bridge the tremendous gap that stretched between them. They were past the point where wonder over their respective survival was anything but old shocking news. They’d eaten together, slept in the same motel room, stolen a car together. Those things alone, ordinary and bizarre, should have drawn them closer somehow.
Instead, each minute together seemed to solidify the chasm between them. Instead of feeling steadily more at ease, more comfortable in his presence, she felt greater and greater alarm, her limbs governed by awkwardness, her heart pounding in unsyncopated rhythm.
She tried telling herself it was only natural to feel confused by seeing him. She tried reassuring herself that any woman would feel disoriented encountering a man she’d thought dead and buried, but she knew what she felt wasn’t just off balance. She felt completely turned inside out.
Too aware of him, she discovered she was afraid of the very chemistry that flared so seemingly effortlessly between them. That electrical, positive-negative charge crackled and snapped with his every move, and her entire body jangled in response.
And yet, that very chemistry seemed destined to fuse them to those three days so long ago, making the present impossible, rough, uncertain. Then, with nothing to lose and everything to gain, the chemistry had seemed a miracle. Now, with everything to lose, it was difficult to understand how attraction could provide anything but trouble.
Their imminent death had provided the fragile foundation between them two years ago. Now, nothing but one sweet and helpless little girl seemed to offer such a bridge.
Still...Cait’s lips burned with the memory of his kiss and her fingers trembled with the need to trace
the planes of his face, the strength of his jaw.
And her mind clamored for stability, for surcease from her restless thoughts.
She felt a wave of gratitude when he clicked on the television set; the noise, the cool, impersonal voice-over for a shampoo commercial pierced her thinking, demanding she listen to exhortation for things outside her unusual life, her uncertain present. He roamed the channels until he found a local all-news network.
Allie ate while the two adults watched the latestbreaking stories in the Washington area. Cait only half listened to both the television and her daughter. The announcer related the latest developments in the New York hostage situation—negotiations were still under way to secure the hostages’ release—and Allie loudly described the taste of the orange and apple slices.
“And in a quiet neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland, neighbors and police are puzzling over the disappearance of a software designer and her infant daughter.”
The scene cut to a reporter standing in front of Cait’s town house garage. Behind her police officers were interviewing neighbors, measuring the dimensions of the demolished garage door and stringing yellow crime scene tape across her driveway.
“Oh, my God,” Cait said, staring at the television. The damage looked far worse in the light of day than it had by night. Her garage door hung at a crazy angle, black skid marks were clearly visible on her otherwise blank driveway.
The reporter said, “Police are still searching for clues to the disappearance of Cait Wilson and her infant daughter. Alerted by neighbors that something was amiss at this quiet address in Bethesda, police responded to the calls at shortly after four o’clock this morning to find both mother and child missing, the garage door torn apart and signs that Wilson and her daughter may have been taken from her house by force.”
The camera cut to a prerecorded clip of a police officer describing the condition of Cait’s garage. “One of the neighbors who called in a report said she’d seen a man with a gun at Miss Wilson’s door about a half an hour before Wilson’s car burst through the garage door. A second unknown male was also described as arriving just prior to Wilson’s car leaving the area.”
“Jack,” Alec said.
The reporter came back on the screen. Delia from next door stood with her. Her neighbor gulped back a sob and said, “Cait and I were really close.”
Cait groaned.
“She was a really quiet type. And shy. I knew something was up. I mean, she just never had late-night visitors. I should know, I mean, living next door and all. And here were all these people coming to her house in the middle of the night. I told Sean, my husband, to call the police when I saw the first one show up in a taxi. But he said it was none of our business if Cait had midnight callers. I wish I hadn’t listened to him. I might have been able to save her. But when the car crashed through the garage...even Sean decided something was wrong. What a terrible noise. Oh, I’m just so worried about her.”
Delia gulped again—for air, Cait thought, since Delia had managed that entire speech in less than twelve seconds flat—and held a finger beneath her eye as if crying. “I just hope they’re still alive.”
Cait suffered a veritable flood of mixed emotions watching her neighbor relating the early-morning escape. “Delia is a twit,” she muttered at the same time Alec said, “What a ditz.”
Cait felt unable to drag her eyes from the television. She wondered if Aunt Margaret had heard any of this. And irrationally, she worried that people would be tramping through her house, tracking mud on her new carpet, speculating about her emerald nightgown trailing off her bed.
The reporter continued, “Cait Wilson was seen on television only last evening, describing a new software package to be used in the crisis intervention field. Wilson is also a survivor of the terrorist takeover of the World Health Organization two years ago.”
The screen faded to black and revealed Cait as she’d appeared on television the night before. Cait glanced over at Alec’s still form. His jaw had tightened. “This is what I saw,” he said hoarsely. “Last night. When I realized you weren’t dead. I thought I was going out of my mind.”
She’d felt like that upon seeing him, too. As if she were dreaming, perhaps insane. He’d thought he was going crazy but he’d obviously felt something deeply enough to send him halfway across the country to see her again. She felt a wave of rage at the person or people that were after Alec and now her.
Seen through the motel room television, the camera returned to the on-the-scene reporter then pulled back to show the destroyed garage door again. The police were talking with a clean-cut man of medium height, a bureaucrat sporting the standard gray suit. About fifty, the man with the salt-and-pepper hair held a notebook in one hand and pressed his stomach with the other.
“Cait!” Alec suddenly burst out, pointing at the screen. “That’s Jack King. He’s at your house right now.”
Cait stood up, goose bumps rippling down her spine.
“Police are conferring with FBI experts now, exploring possible connections between the incident two years ago—resulting in the death of a federal agent—and today’s disappearance of Ms. Wilson and her infant child They are asking citizens who may have any information about this case to contact Bethesda authorities or the FBI.”
The reporter turned and walked toward the off-kilter garage door. The camera followed and zeroed in with a moderately long-distance shot of Jack King. Three men stood in the shadow of her garage.
“Jack,” Alec said again as a microphone was thrust in his friend’s face.
“We’re in the preliminary stages of investigating any possible connections between Cait Wilson’s disappearance and the incident that took place at the World Health Organization two years ago,” Jack King said, facing the camera.
Alec thought the past two years hadn’t been terribly kind to Jack King. He carried about forty extra pounds, looked as though he’d slept in his clothes, and frowned as if he were in pain. His white-gray hair accentuated his forty-odd years, making him appear twenty years older than Alec, instead of the five Alec knew to be true.
“Why does the FBI suspect a connection between this disappearance and the incident two years ago?” the reporter asked, though the camera remained on Jack’s pained face.
He glanced over his shoulder, as if responding to something said off camera, then looked directly into the lens. “Sources within the bureau are letting us know we now have reason to suspect that the federal agent reportedly killed in the incident is also alive.”
“You sorry son of a...” Alec muttered.
The reporter holding the microphone seemed similarly affected. The microphone waved, then steadied. “Alive? How could such a mistake have been made?”
Jack King shrugged, though he looked uncomfortable. “Some mistakes are made intentionally,” he said without a trace of irony.
“And you believe there’s some connection between that agent and Cait Wilson?”
Jack’s face seemed to bore into the motel room. Alec felt as if Jack’s eyes, staring directly into the camera, were watching him. He felt Cait shiver and put his arm around her waist when she stepped a notch closer to him. He needed to feel her warmth, needed somehow to know she was really there with him.
Jack continued, “An informed source advised the FBI of the possibility that Alec MacLaine is still alive. This same source purports that MacLaine may in fact be responsible, in some part, for the tragic incident at the WHO and, in a more serious implication, might prove to be the engineer behind the White Separatist takeover of that building.”
Unconsciously, Cait gripped Alec’s shoulder beneath her hand. He’d been in the act of rising, a thundercloud of anger darkening his face. At her touch, he sank back down on the edge of the bed. She scarcely felt his large palm covering her fingers.
“We’re double-checking the usual sources,” Jack King said with utter seriousness.
Alec sputtered something unintelligible and his hand clenched hers pain
fully. She could feel the tension coursing through him. It matched her own.
“So, are we to speculate that this former agent—Alec MacLaine?—has kidnapped Wilson and her baby because she survived the incident and might be able to identify him?”
Jack’s face as he stared into the camera gave nothing away. “As you say, anything at this point is pure speculation.”
Alec’s hand over hers gripped so tightly it hurt, but Cait didn’t try pulling free.
The reporter stepped into view again. “Police and federal authorities will continue to monitor the situation, searching for any clues leading to the whereabouts of this former hostage victim and her infant daughter.” She signed off and the chief announcer came back on to shift to other stories.
Her hand still being squeezed too tightly, Cait remained standing beside Alec, staring at the screen as the announcer took them to another part of the country, another disaster.
Cait couldn’t think where to start with her many questions and revelations, stymied by Alec’s rigid tension. He sat on the edge of the bed he’d slept in, his body stiff, his face a study in combined fury and shock. He frowned at the set, obviously a million miles away.
Finally Cait shook his hand free and took the remote device from its precarious position on the bed and clicked off the television. She set the remote on the desk and turned to face Alec.
“Start with the day before the hostage incident at the WHO and take me through every single day since.”
He looked up at her and smiled that crooked grin of his.
But his eyes were lit with a strange fire, half hopeful, half angry. “Begin at the beginning...?”
“Yes,” she said firmly.
She listened carefully as Alec relayed everything he knew, from the start of his investigation into the Aryan Nation separatists through the White Separatist incident at the WHO and his relentless search afterward to discover who had financed and orchestrated it. He spoke without dramatic inflection, but she heard the depth of his feelings nonetheless, perhaps more so because he carefully, studiously kept his voice neutral:
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