There were so many things he would like to do for her, tasting her, thrusting her over the edge of endurance long before his own rush to that precipice. But Cait’s legs parted and she begged him, her voice husky and raw, to come inside her, to join her, to take her over that cliff while holding her close.
Alec could no more have resisted that plea than push her off a real ledge. He raised himself above her, poised, gazing into her eyes, needing her, wanting her, afraid of losing the past, terrified of the future, but aching for her now.
“Please,” she murmured, and reached her hands to his hips, drawing him forward, guiding him.
There was something he had to do, something he needed to think about. But he couldn’t think with Cait arching up to meet him, capturing him, drawing him into her.
He groaned aloud and shuddered with exquisite painlike ecstasy. And remembered what it was he needed to do. He pulled free, up and out of her, reality washing him like icy water.
“What—?” Cait called out, reaching for him.
“Allie,” he said.
“She’s asleep.”
He turned and lowered his forehead to his hands, thinking. “No. I know that. But last time... we didn’t... and you had Allie.”
“Oh, I see,” Cait murmured, but Alec could have sworn he heard a note of amusement in her voice. He felt her wriggle across the bed and fish in Allie’s diaper bag. She held out a wrapped condom and waited until he reached for it to drop it into his nerveless fingers.
he looked at her, not even beginning to know what he felt.
“I was a Girl Scout,” she said.
A smile tugged at his lips. “I thought it was Boy Scouts who were supposed to be prepared. My hands are shaking too much to open the damned thing,” Alec said.
“And mine aren’t?” she asked.
“How about if I open it and you put it on?”
“Do you trust me?” she asked.
And with her question, any awkwardness was past them. “Yes,” he said, and though he couldn’t have begun to let her know how much he truly trusted her, what all that implied in his life, he lifted the plastic covering to his teeth and gave a little tug to rip it open.
She wasn’t smiling as she took the condom from his fingers and lowered her hands to carefully, slowly roll it on. He groaned as she turned the prosaic necessity into a sensual experience.
With a low growl, he grabbed her and shifted her deeper onto the bed. He lowered his lips to hers, recapturing the moment, seizing the present with all the newfound trust and gratitude he could show. He wanted her so badly he ached, but he needed her to match him in that want, to crave his touch, to dig her fingers into his shoulders, drawing him closer, ever closer.
Cait thought Alec’s eyes were nearly glassy with longing, flawless in their unalloyed delight in her. As near to drowning as she’d been, his longing sank her even deeper, leaving her gasping for breath.
“Alec...” she whispered into his ear, arching to him, reveling in the naked feel of his flesh against her bare skin. In this rare and poignant present, she felt the scars of his wounds and no longer found them painful to think about; they were only another facet of him.
This was the moment, this was their time. The night could bring some new disaster, the morrow a terrible twist and the future an unknown blank, but now, his hands roaming her body with the sure touch of a sculptor, his kisses sending her places she’d only dreamed of traveling, she seized that time with nearly frantic need.
Alec cupped her breasts and flicked her hardened nipples with his teeth. He traced the curves of her body with his hands and followed the trail with his moist, hot tongue. He drove her crazy, effortlessly, endlessly, making her body shake and her fingers splay on the bed and her legs tremble with longing to wrap around his.
“Oh, please...” Cait begged him again, raising her hands to dig her fingers into his shoulders, drawing him up, pulling him closer.
Through lowered eyes she met his equally entranced gaze. Like her, he was lost in a world of passion, a universe of feeling, of sensation, touch, smell.
He slipped into her and she all but growled, arching to meet him fully. He plunged deep within her and stilled, holding her tightly against him, his eyes locked with hers, his body throbbing, thrumming.
Alec didn’t speak and she was grateful for the absence of words. At this moment, during this perfect endless moment, she felt no need for words. They were communicating on some profound, primal level, a place of absolute integration. For however brief and vague a time, they were literally, wordlessly and figuratively one.
He ground his lips to hers as he began to slowly move within her. Pulled back, then in. She lifted her hips to meet him, finding a rhythm that was as natural as heat in the summer and snow in the winter. Rocking with him, captured in his arms, locked with him, she lost all thought, kept in this world by his touch alone.
Cait thought she would like the moment to last forever—the feel of his naked body against hers, the feel of his ragged breathing against the curve of her neck, the slow, rocking rhythm, atavistic in its command. But her own breathing grew more and more shallow, and her body began to thrum as forces gathered to propel her over that precipice only he could take her to.
Her hands held on to him as if she would lose him, and he clung to her with matched ferocity. He began rocking faster, driving deeper, thrusting against her. His hands grasped her shoulders from behind, and his hips ground against her. He was liquid fire and solid steel. Swift, hard, a steady, dizzying meeting.
She felt herself slipping over that edge and clung to him, unwilling to go yet, but unable to stop herself. He cried out suddenly, driving deep within her, calling her name, and freezing, hot, molten against her. He stopped all movement, his body utterly rigid, not even breathing. And plunged her over that precipice, sending her reeling into a universe of shattering splendor.
And was there to catch her and slowly, achingly tenderly gather her back into his arms.
She would worry about the future later, she told herself firmly. Aunt Margaret would join them, Allie would need feeding and changing. The world, with all its duties and dangers, could come crashing in then. But for now, she would rest on Alec’s shoulder, her naked body pressed against his, feeling his breathing, listening to his steady heartbeat.
In his arms, her legs tangled in his, she could forget the chasm between them, ignore the past and disregard the future. All trouble would come soon enough. She no longer needed dreams or fantasies about Alec; this single moment with him was fantasy enough.
“Alec?”
“Hmm?”
“What’s your middle name?” she asked.
He chuckled slightly, then his breath caught and his arms tightened around her, holding her fiercely to his side. “How did you guess?” he murmured.
“Guess what?”
“That of all the things I regretted about that morning, not telling you my middle name was the one I regretted the most.”
“Well?”
“Francis,” he said. “Alec Francis MacLaine.”
Cait smiled and pressed a kiss to his chest. “No wonder you didn’t tell me,” she said. “That’s perfectly dreadful.”
And he laughed out loud, his body thrumming against hers. He rolled over her, pinning her against the bed. “Dreadful?”
“Perfectly,” she said.
“And this?” he asked, running his hands down the curve of her waist and lower still.
“Perfect.”
Chapter 12
Monday, November 12, 9:45 a.m. EST
For Alec, forty-one hours had passed in a halcyon haze, a sweet blur made all the more poignant by its imminent ending. Every moment spent holding his newfound daughter was etched with diamond clarity on his heart, implanted in his memory. Each glance at Cait’s smiling face, every meeting of her green eyes with his lent a rare vibrancy of color to the gray that had become his world.
Locked in the safety of their motel room in Sterling
, Virginia, he could afford the luxury of ignoring the future and reveling in the absolute present. Patty-cake and horsey rides took precedence over danger and nebulous futures. Busy-busy bee and itsy-bitsy spider brought laughter and wrenching heartache both and he played the games over and over and over again until his daughter’s laughter outweighed the fear of losing her tomorrow.
While Alec bounced Allie on his knees or learned that holding her high above his head wasn’t going to result in permanent brain damage for his daughter or heart failure for himself, Cait pored over his copious amounts of data inside his laptop computer, catching up on all the information he knew, searching for a motive, a single connection that would give them any clue as to why everything had happened.
In unspoken and unacknowledged agreement, he and Cait hadn’t talked about the FBI, separatists, terrorism, or next week. He had only to look for those topics in the shadows beneath her lovely eyes or hear it in the rapid clicking of the computer’s keyboard and the silence with which she stared at the data on the screen. And she could see the effects of all of it in his tension every time room service knocked on their door or whenever a fellow guest’s silhouette crossed their window.
And they didn’t talk about the past, those three days they’d shared staving off fear and death. They didn’t share reminiscences about their passion, their tension, or their broken dreams.
They talked about movies they’d seen and liked, books they’d read and loved or hated, places one or the other had seen, visited, or had once upon a time wanted to visit in the pipe-dream days of their youth. He discovered her favorite color was burnt sienna, which struck him as rich in contrast as her pixie face and siren voice. She learned his preference for abstract reality over the purely abstract in the paintings they discussed at length.
And during the night, with Allie in her little bad, the lights low but not completely doused, they pretended they had forever and memorized each detail of the other’s body lovingly, tenderly and in absolute harmony:
And if their laughter sometimes seemed forced or their smiles slipped and an unwary slack fear would steal across their features, neither commented on the lapse, for these were stolen moments, time without an anchor. And if neither slept very much, too aware that Monday marked an end to their strange and beautiful present, they at least held each other close, curving into each other like silver spoons in a precious case.
It seemed to Alec that the cruel fate that had brought both of them such pain in the past had taken a kinder turn and was, for the moment, content to allow them peace and privacy. No policeman found the stolen car in the parking lot. The tips he’d given the press weren’t headlines or top stories on the local news channels. Even the message he anticipated from Jack King hadn’t made its way into the personals yet.
Alec didn’t wonder what he’d done to deserve such a miracle of the time; he knew. He’d spent the past two years teetering on the very brink of hell. He’d lived with bitterness and pain so long they had become companions. To set that dreadful pair aside for Cait and Allie seemed a gift beyond price, and he would have given all promise of heaven to extend their time of peace one more day, one more hour.
But all too soon tomorrow morning was Monday and they were taking Allie to Cait’s aunt Margaret for safekeeping. With only hours to go before he handed his daughter to what was for him a complete stranger, he had to break their unvoiced ban on discussion of plans, details and the future.
“Cait...” he murmured, drawing her more tightly within his arms. Her warm back nestled against his chest and he had to will his body to be still. “Are you absolutely sure about leaving Allie with your aunt?”
She didn’t answer for a long time and he racked his brain for thoughts she might be considering.
“How can I be sure about anything, Alec?” she asked softly and, he thought, sadly. “All I know is that I don’t want her with me if someone’s trying to kill me. I don’t want her hurt.”
She didn’t have to add “or worse.” That terrible thought was all too evident in her tone. He held her close and pressed a kiss to her temple. “I’m so sorry about all this, Cait,” he murmured, and at her sigh, wasn’t sure if he was apologizing about the danger that awaited them or the few halcyon days they had snatched together.
“If we get out of this, Cait—”
She pulled out of his arms, breaking his vow short. She rolled onto her side to face him. A tear slowly marred the perfect line of her cheek. “Don’t talk about the future, Alec,” she said. “Please don’t make any promises.” She raised a trembling hand to his cheek as if to take any sting away from her words.
She couldn’t have known how deeply her words cut him. Sometimes a promise was all a man had to give.
“I love you, Cait,” he said quietly, and though he hadn’t intended to say it, hadn’t even thought about the reality of it, he knew, to the very depths of his being, that it was true. He did love her. The way she smiled when she played with Allie, as if the entire universe hung on her daughter’s giggle, the way she bravely faced the dangers surrounding her, her temper, her laughter, her honesty, her little turned-up nose and the way she called his name in the height of passion.
She didn’t say anything. She only closed her eyes as if his admission had brought her pain, not pleasure.
“I want us to have a future together, Cait. A real future. A home, a life—”
“Stop!” she cried out, sounding agonized beyond torture.
She shut him out by covering her face with her slender hands.
He swiftly hitched himself up to his elbow and bent over her, prying her fingers free. “Cait?”
“Stop, Alec, just stop!”
“What is it?”
She opened tear-drenched eyes to gaze up at him. The extent of her pain, and knowing he’d caused it, felt like a knife blade between his ribs.
“Cait...”
She said raggedly, “You can’t talk about a future together. We don’t even have a past, damn it. You tell me you love me, but you don’t even know me. I don’t know you! You just met your daughter for the first time two days ago. Days, Alec. That’s all we had then, that’s all we’ve had now! I can’t talk about a future when all the time we’ve shared amounts to a handful of snatched minutes.”
“Ah, Cait—”
“Minutes, Alec. Minutes waiting for doors to open and bad guys to come crashing through. Minutes knowing that every one of them might be our last. You might be used to that, trained for it, even enjoy it. But I can’t live like this. I hate it. I hate it, do you understand? Today I’m handing Allie over to Aunt Margaret because I’m afraid, I’m terrified, I won’t be able to keep her safe as long as she’s with you and me! And you tell me you love me. God, Alec, love can’t matter now. Just surviving is all I can think about now. Just hoping there will be a tomorrow for me to be able to hold Allie again. Just hoping I’m around for her.”
She gave a great sob and tried pushing him away. He felt like crying, too, burying his head in the hollow of her neck and just letting go. But he quelled her struggles by dragging her into his arms and holding her firmly, tightly, wishing he could hold on to her forever, keep her warm and safe.
Cait knew she was being unfair. But nothing about the situation between them was fair. They’d passed the time waiting for Monday in a rare and strangely beautiful denial. Alec’s wanting to talk about a future—something neither of them could afford to bank on—brought the curtain down on the act.
Her heart was breaking. In a matter of hours she would be handing her daughter over to her aunt, and no matter how loving Aunt Margaret would be, Cait would remember the pain of the necessity of leaving Allie behind every day for the rest of her life.
But it wasn’t only Allie she cried for. She cried because Alec had told her he loved her. A thousand, million times she’d imagined him saying exactly those words, had heard herself answering in kind.
She didn’t doubt he believed them. She believed them. But words of love
only served to underscore the tenuousness of their time together. He wanted a future, but they didn’t have one. Even if, by some miracle, they survived the efforts of a seemingly crazed FBI agent, how could she think about a future with a man whose entire way of life constituted danger, fear, bullets and guns?
She could see in these past two days that Alec had seemingly forgotten how dangerous he looked with his shoulder holster on, how hard he could appear when someone knocked at the door or simply got out of a car. Seeing him on the floor, flat on his back, his daughter bouncing on his chest, the two of them atonally chanting a line from a television commercial, it was difficult to remember the other Alec MacLaine—the agent in charge, the highly trained professional. With Allie he seemed much like any other good father—tender, kind, endlessly patient, affectionate and warm.
Allie had called him Stranger Man. He was that and more, he was an agent. Agent Man. Agent Daddy.
Cait didn’t have to tell him that guns and diapers wouldn’t mix. She’d seen his acceptance of her need to get Allie to a safe place while the dangers still surrounded them. And she’d seen the pain in him at the need to admit he couldn’t guarantee his daughter’s safety.
But he held her now, so tightly it almost hurt, murmuring her name, pressing his generous lips to her temple, her forehead, soothing her as if she were a child devastated by some disaster that tore a little bit of the innocence away.
“It’ll be all right, Cait. I promise, it’ll be all right.”
But Cait knew he was lying.
The drive through the beautiful Virginia countryside was quiet and uneventful, a couple taking in the scenery with their daughter, except that a tension rode along with them, breeding greater and greater amounts of anxiety with every passing mile.
For all that Cait didn’t believe that Alec really could promise things being all right, she nonetheless repeated his vow like a litany against the uncertain future. She clung to the words with every fiber of her being. And, unconsciously, clung to Alec.
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