Breaking Point

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “Gina.” Max stopped her before she reached the door. He motioned for her to come back.

  She held out the green shorts, but instead of taking them, he took her arm, pulled her close.

  “I love you,” Max said, as if he were dispatching some terrible, dire news that somehow still managed to amuse him at least a little.

  Gina had been hoping that he’d say it, praying even, but the fact that he’d managed to smile, even just a bit while he did, was a miracle.

  And then, before her heart even had a chance to start beating again, he kissed her.

  And oh, she was also beyond ready for that particular marvel, for the sweet softness of his mouth, for the solidness of his arms around her. There was more of him to hold her since he’d regained his fighting weight—and that was amazing, too. She skimmed her hands across the muscular smoothness of his back, his shoulders, as his kiss changed from tender to heated.

  And, God. That was a miracle, too.

  Except she couldn’t help but wonder about those words, wrenched from him, as if it cost him his soul to speak them aloud. Why tell her this right now?

  Yes, she’d been waiting for years to hear him say that he loved her, but . . .

  “Are you . . . Did you say that . . . Do you think we’re going to die?” Gina asked.

  Max laughed his surprise. “No. Why do you . . . ?” He figured it out himself. “No, no, Gina, just . . . I should’ve said it before. I should have said it years ago, but I really should have said it, you know, instead of hi.” He laughed again, clearly disgusted with himself. “God, I’m an idiot. I mean, hi? I should have walked in and said, ‘Gina, I need you. I love you, don’t ever leave me again.’ ”

  She stared at him. It was probably a good thing that he hadn’t said that at the time, because she might’ve fainted.

  It was obvious that he wanted her to say something, but she was completely speechless.

  “Okay,” Max said. “Now I’m terrified that I, um, said it too late?”

  His uncertainty turned his words into a question. “Am I too late?” he asked again, as if he actually thought . . .

  As much as Gina enjoyed watching him squirm, she forced her lungs and vocal cords to start working again. “Are you . . . ?” She had to clear her throat, but then it really didn’t matter what she said, because the tears in her eyes surely told him everything he wanted to hear.

  She saw his relief, and yes, he was still scared, she saw that, too, but mixed in with that was hope. And something that looked a heck of a lot like happiness.

  Happiness—in Max’s eyes.

  “Are you really asking me for a second chance?” she managed to get it all out in a breathless exhale.

  He kissed her then, as if he couldn’t bear to stand so close and not kiss her. “Please,” he breathed, as he kissed her again, as he licked his way into her mouth and . . . God . . .

  She could’ve stood there, kissing Max forever, but the man on the megaphone just wouldn’t shut up.

  Besides, she wanted to be sure that this was about more than just sex.

  “Do you want me in your life?” Gina asked him. “I mean, need is nice, but . . .” It implied a certain lack of free will. Want on the other hand . . .

  “Want,” he said. “Yes. I want you. Very much. In my life. Gina, I was lost without you.” He caught himself. “More lost, or . . .” He shook his head. “Fuck it, I’m a mess, but if for some reason you still love me anyway . . . If you really meant what you said, about . . .” There it was again, in his eyes. Hope. “Loving me anyway . . .”

  “I don’t love you anyway,” she told him, her heart in her throat. “I love you because.” She touched his face, his smoothly shaven cheeks. “Although now that you mention it, you are something of a mess, and I’m probably entitled to . . . compensation in certain areas. I mean, in any relationship, you need to negotiate a certain amount of compromise, right?”

  He actually thought she was serious. “Well, yeah.”

  “So if, say, I were to point out how incredibly hot you’d look wearing that thong—”

  Max laughed his relief. “Shit, I thought you were serious.”

  “Shit,” Gina teased, “I am.”

  He cupped her face between both of his hands, and the heat in his eyes made her knees week. “I’ll wear one if you’ll wear one . . .”

  He kissed her again, and this time it was pure sex. His lips were no longer soft as he claimed her mouth, as he dragged her close, closer, as she in turn clung to him, her fingers in his hair. She wanted to touch all of him—this incredibly healthy Max, with his muscular arms and broad back, with that hint-of-a-six-pack that had surprised her that very first time she’d seen him naked—in her motel room in Florida, what seemed like at least a lifetime ago.

  Or if not quite a lifetime, it was—for Max—two bullet wounds ago. And Gina wondered, as she kissed him, if FBI agents actually measured the passage of time by their various injuries.

  She wondered, too, if he knew that the hot bod so didn’t matter to her. Skinny or fat, buff or flabby, she didn’t give a damn. She wanted him healthy and alive, and preferably happy enough to smile at her—that was all she cared about.

  Still, she couldn’t get enough of touching him. His back, his arms, his shoulders.

  And oh, he smelled so good.

  Gina lost herself in his kisses—desperate, hungry, possessive kisses that she answered in kind. She lost herself in the touch of his hands, in the feel of his chest, hard against hers, as he pushed between her legs—more hard against her soft.

  She felt the kitchen table against the backs of her thighs, felt his fingers on the button at her waist, and then, God, she was helping him. Peeling off her pants so he could lift her up and onto the table, so there was nothing between them. She wrapped her legs around him and he . . .

  God.

  How she’d missed him, missed this, and she tried to tell him but he was kissing her as if he were trying to touch her soul with his tongue.

  It was possible he succeeded.

  And all she managed to say was, “More . . .” and “Please . . .”

  He was holding her up, so her backbone wasn’t grinding against the hard wood of the table and it felt so good to be held like that—so unbelievably good as he kissed her and kissed her, as he drove himself hard, harder into her.

  It was Max and it was sex, but it was unlike any sex she’d ever had with Max because he wasn’t being overly careful. Not of his broken collarbone that had long since healed. And not of her.

  She wasn’t on top.

  Gina knew he’d liked her on top because he knew she would be in control. Even when his injuries had healed enough to allow for other possibilities, he’d always been too tense, too hyperaware that she might feel pinned down if they had sex any other way.

  Gina also knew he had been trying to make things easier, not more difficult, but unless she’d closed her eyes, more often than not she’d end up reminded of the hijacking, of the rape. It was there in his caution, in his constant checking to see that she was okay, in the way that he tried to hide the fact he was thinking of it. He was always thinking of it.

  Always.

  But it wasn’t there now, between them. There was nothing between them.

  There was only Max. Not pinning her down. Instead, anchoring her, holding her safe.

  “Gina,” he breathed as she strained against him, wanting him closer, even closer. “Are you . . .”

  Don’t ask if she was all right. Please don’t ask . . .

  “God,” he exhaled, the word ripped from him. “It’s too good. I can’t . . . not . . .”

  His sudden release was an incredible turn-on, and Gina came, hard and fast. It was a rush of blinding pleasure, made even more intense with the knowledge that he was feeling it, too.

  “I love you,” she gasped over the pounding of her heart, as he just held her there, still so tightly, as they both struggled to catch their breath. She couldn’t remember if
she’d told him that yet.

  “Shit! Sorry!” That was Jones’s voice.

  Oh, God! Gina turned toward the very open kitchen doorway, the one that led to the hall, the one that didn’t even have a door to close, should privacy be needed.

  Max leapt into action, trying to cover up her nakedness with the bathrobe, with his own body.

  But Jones wasn’t standing there.

  At least not anymore.

  “Not looking!” he called from the hall. “Sorry, it’s just . . . we could really use you upstairs.”

  The voice was still droning that same message over and over on the bullhorn. Funny how she’d stopped hearing it after a while.

  “Although, Jesus, Bhagat, I better use some of that thread to stitch you up properly if you’re going to . . . What?”

  Molly’s voice murmured, her words indistinguishable, as their footsteps faded away.

  Gina started to laugh, completely, thoroughly mortified. “Oh my God,” she said. “Did we really just do that?”

  And—holy shit—they’d also done it without a condom. It was such a totally non-Max thing to do.

  It was possible that he’d been lying when he told her that he didn’t think they were going to die. Such things as protection and birth control were moot if they only had a few days—or hours—left to live.

  As Max pulled on those hideous green shorts, he had both guilt and apology all over his face. He opened his mouth, but she stopped him.

  “Don’t you dare tell me you’re sorry,” Gina said, “because I’m not. Yes, our timing was . . . off, and we probably should have—”

  “I love you, too,” he said. “Is that okay to say? And yes, you’re right, I was probably going to add that I’m sorry—”

  “Yes, it’s okay,” she said, “but I’m not listening to the rest. La la la—”

  “—that it happened like this, instead of someplace more, I don’t know, romantic or at least private—”

  “Are you kidding?” Gina said. “Doing it on the kitchen table is one of the big, all-time female romantic fantasies—right down to potentially being discovered by Fred and Ethyl. With the exception of actually being discovered, of course. Oh my God.” She had to laugh.

  Max was laughing, too, but as he checked his bandage, he winced.

  Crap, she’d actually forgotten all about his latest bullet wound. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?” she asked anxiously.

  “Not even close.” He kissed her as he grabbed one of Emilio’s shirts from the pile of clothes. “I’m not going to wait for you, okay?”

  She nodded. She definitely needed to get cleaned up. It was amazing that he wasn’t freaking out about not having used protection—that postcoital shock and regret wasn’t kicking in. “I’ll be quick. I just have to . . .”

  “Gina!” came a shout from upstairs. It was Molly. “I’m am so sorry, but we really need Max. Right now!”

  Max kissed her again, and headed for the door. But before he went out of the kitchen, he turned back.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, “there was one other thing I was going to say. I want you to marry me.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  It was unbelievable.

  Absolutely unbelievable. Molly was furious. “Whoever’s idea it was to use a child this way—they ought to be strung up.”

  The people who lived in the neighboring houses had all been evacuated. Many of them stood back behind the line of soldiers, watching the drama play out.

  Or not play out, as the case had been for the past several hours. But now one of the soldiers who spoke English had manned a megaphone, calling out for Jones to surrender.

  And another of the soldiers had snatched one of the children—a baby of maybe eight months—out of the arms of her mother. He was using the child as a shield as he crossed the square, toward them.

  The baby was screaming and reaching for her mother, who was also wailing, held back by several older women.

  It would have been funny the way most of the civilians all instantly scattered. One moment they were there, the next they were gone. With the exception of the desperate young mother and her two companions, they all just vanished into the lengthening shadows of the afternoon.

  But there was nothing even remotely humorous about a baby used as a human shield.

  One of the soldiers approached the crying mother. He raised his weapon. And the woman fell to her knees—if not quite silenced, then silent enough.

  “Hold your fire,” the megaphone man said, both in English and in a dialect Molly could roughly understand. It was different from the language spoken on Parwati Island, where she’d spent several years. But it was close enough for her to recognize similarities.

  “What’s going on?” Max said as he came into the room. He was buttoning his shirt, and aside from one slightly sheepish glance at Molly and a quick attempt to straighten his hair, his attention was now fully on the situation unfolding.

  “They’re bringing us some kind of radio,” Jones said, handing him the binoculars.

  The window was one-way—mirrored on the outside. They could see out, but no one could see in. Still, Jones had told Molly that didn’t mean there wasn’t a sharpshooter somewhere across the square with a scope that was high-tech enough to see through it. Max apparently was thinking the same thing. He stood back and off to the side as he looked out through the bars.

  “A radio?” Max said, his voice heavy with disbelief.

  “Yeah,” Jones said. “Don’t get your hopes up. I think it’s going to be a single-channel walkie-talkie. Our interpreter probably didn’t know the word for it.”

  “Mmm,” Max acknowledged him, binoculars trained on the military personnel clustered on the far side of the square. “They think they’re out of our range. They must not know we’ve got some serious weaponry in here. I wonder . . .”

  “Maybe they know we’d never use it,” Molly suggested. “I mean, they must know we wouldn’t shoot at the soldier, for fear of hitting the little girl.”

  “The baby’s for us,” Max told her, still looking through those binoculars. “We’re supposed to believe that they won’t fire at us when we open the door, if the baby is out there on the doorstep.”

  The soldier with the baby was getting closer, and Molly could see that he was indeed carrying something besides the child.

  “I’m going downstairs,” Max said.

  “I am, too. I should be the one to open the door,” Jones said.

  “What if it’s a bomb?”

  Molly turned to see Gina standing just out in the hall—looking extremely worried, as if she’d already taken the return train, express, from Heaven. “This radio thing that they’re so keen to give us,” she clarified. “What if it’s not really a radio?”

  Max was shaking his head. “From what I can see, I doubt they have the technology to—”

  “But what if they do?”

  He looked at her, and Molly held her breath. But his answer wasn’t patronizing or condescending, like, Since everyone knows we just had sex, I’ll pretend to respect you by answering as if your silly question is valid.

  Instead, he was honest. “That would be bad,” he told her. “But we need to communicate with them, Gina. I don’t see how we have a choice.”

  She nodded. “At least make sure it’s really a radio,” she said, “before you bring it inside.”

  “That won’t be so easy to do,” Jones told her.

  Gina shot him a look. “Sure it will.” She gestured to the window. “Shout down to the baby-stealer, and tell him send a message to the guys in charge, with that same radio that he’s delivering. Have him tell them to repeat our message back to us over their megaphone. It should be something unusual, something that they wouldn’t just say—like, you know, the lyrics of a song. Then we’ll know it’s really a radio.” She frowned. “Unless he’s wearing a second one . . .”

  Max had the binoculars back up. “I don’t see any wires on him. And I doubt they’d have
miniatures—earpieces—when they obviously don’t even have the money for body armor.”

  “Although,” Gina said, clearly intent upon playing devil’s advocate, “what if he doesn’t speak English?”

  The soldier who delivered the radio spoke just enough English.

  Gina’s strategy worked like a charm. The walkie-talkie was a single-channel short-range piece of shit—they couldn’t use it to call for help. Max got it off the doorstep without being shot at and relocked the door.

  The baby was taken back across the square and handed over to her weeping mother.

  Everything was wonderful—including Gina’s smile because Max had used lyrics from an old Elvis Presley song.

  “Like a ribbon floats, Girlie, do you see,” the words had been broadcast over the megaphone in stilted, accented English. Like a life-and-death version of the telephone game, most of them had been seriously misheard or misunderstood. “Dolly, sowing, goats, some things are men do be . . .”

  But it was clearly close enough.

  Everything was wonderful—except for the one thing that mattered the most.

  The negotiation.

  The CO—the army commander in charge of this operation—was following strict orders, that much was clear to Max within fifteen seconds of conversation with the interpreter. The CO wasn’t a professional negotiator, and he told Max that he wasn’t authorized to cut any kind of deal.

  It was more than a lack of imagination on his part. The man clearly had a single goal—to save his own ass. There were people who played strictly by the book because they believed in the rules. But the CO did it because he was frightened.

  Max spent about thirty minutes explaining—gently, so as not to frighten him further—that he was American and that he wanted to speak to someone from the American Embassy, and that yes, he knew there was no embassy here on Meda Island. He wanted to speak to someone from the embassy over on East Timor, in Dili.

  Only to discover that the embassy in Dili had been shut down. Evacu-ated. Due to the increased terrorist threat, all personnel had been moved to a location deemed more safe.