No. Don’t say anything. Some shock that I should be the one to think that, huh? My hand slipped behind his neck and my tongue plunged back into his mouth, effectively silencing him. There was urgency and desperation now in our caress. I could taste the slightly sharp tang of his saliva, could feel his strong fingers gripping my good arm. When he leaned even further into me, I fell back on the bed quite willingly, pulling his body down on to mine.
He felt so good! He’d lost weight I think, same as I had; at least, I felt the definition of his muscles much more sharply under the thin fabric of his shirt. He wriggled to avoid my bandaged arm, but I grabbed him back against me. His mouth snatched at my lower lip, his teeth grazing the skin, and his tongue pulled out of my mouth to run down my jaw and neck. I bared my throat, pushing my head back on the thin pillow. My nipples were hard, sensitive nubs, spiking through the fabric of my own shirt, brushing painfully against his chest.
Hold me…. Touch me….
It was the return of that hungry, unadulterated lust I’d known and loved so well. There’d never been any doubt that Niall was the only one who did that to me, the one who made my head swim and my body leap with both greed and need. But it felt different this time, as if there were some other demand inside me that I’d never heeded before. His hands ran down and under my body, tracing the tight lines of my straining thighs, kneading the flesh of my ass as if to memorize the knots and valleys of the muscles. My back arched up to meld myself against him. The sweats were tight across my groin; it had been a very long time since I’d had such a fierce erection. Every nerve I possessed screamed out to be touched by him; every whorl of my fingertips remembered the sensual feel of his dusky, hot skin.
But then my hands braced themselves against his shoulders and I brought it all to a halt.
He responded immediately. His hands stilled on me, and his tongue lifted its damp trail from my throat. A small groan slipped from his mouth. I was just panting loudly, unable to restrain it.
“No,” I gasped.
“No?” His murmur was a question, but his eyes met mine in the darkness, and I hoped my expression spoke eloquently enough for me. I was aiming a fairly shameful plea for his understanding. This couldn’t be. This was what always got me into trouble, what had always obscured everything, distorted everything, enchanted everything. If I opened this rich, ecstatic treasure chest again, I’d never be able to get him out of my system.
Never be able to hate him again.
He reared above me for what seemed like long moments, his chest heaving with deep breaths, his plumped lips glistening with moisture. There were emotions flickering in his eyes that I couldn’t make out, thoughts and questions alike. I thought he might ignore my protest—that he might just lean back down and strip away my pathetic opposition with his mouth and hands. Let’s face it. I’d not have put up much of a fight. My resistance was all intellectual. My true reactions sprang from the pure, delicious instinct of desire.
But he didn’t ignore me. The mattress complained again as he clumsily climbed off my legs and stood up beside the bed.
“Do you want me to apologize?” he said hoarsely.
I shook my head, dumbly. Of course the fuck not. I wanted to protest that I’d been a willing partner in it—I really was! —but my mouth seemed too dry to work properly.
“Good,” he said. “Though I realize that was an appalling loss of control. It won’t happen again, I promise you.” He pulled his shirt back down over a tantalizing glimpse of his tight belly, and he ran a hand back through his messed hair. “I never felt any differently about you, Tanner, even when our behavior was so disgraceful, so destructive. I don’t expect you to believe that, but I want to say it. I think I should have said a lot of things, actually, and a hell of a lot earlier than now. But that’s another regret I’ll live with.”
He turned and walked to the door, and he didn’t turn around again. He took his magnificent body and his rare, astonishing new openness, and—fuck—I let him go. His silhouette filled the door, blocking the fractured light from the next room’s windows for another brief second, and then he passed out of sight.
I calmed my breathing; I adjusted my sweats. I cursed to myself in every language I’d ever picked up.
And then the cell phone rang again, a shrill buzz in the distant corner of the trailer.
Wednesday 00:05
I STUMBLED up from my bed, but Niall had already switched on the lamp in the living room and had the cell to his ear. “Brad,” he mouthed to me, his eyes bright and wary. I nudged my way up against him, all previous touches forgotten as I struggled to hear the call for myself. Niall flipped on the loudspeaker on the handset so we could both listen.
“Where are you? Brad? Are you safe?”
Brad’s mumble stuttered through a fair amount of static interference and was at uneven volume, like he was out of breath. “Niall? Where are you?”
Niall’s eyes flashed to my face, far too close to his for anyone’s comfort. “I’m with Tanner.”
“With…” crackle “…ackay?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God.” That bit was as clear as if he stood beside us. “Have you spoken to… dith?”
“No, we—”
But Brad’s voice hurried on. “…tell her I’m on… way back now. I found the address, I found where our communica… have been… iverted to… week or so, maybe. But it was… danger… apped….”
“What?” I grabbed at the phone, trying to wrest it from Niall’s steel grip. “What’s happened?”
“… booby-trapped,” came Brad’s familiar voice, still mangled through the poor reception. “The place was booby-trapped.”
I glanced at Niall. His narrowed eyes looked back at me.
“For God’s sake, Brad,” he snapped. “My home’s been blown up and Tanner’s been shot. Tell us how you are, and where you are!”
There was an exclamation from the other end of the line, though it may just have been the coughing of a chronic connection. Then a pause. Next time Brad spoke, his words were much clearer. He’d obviously stopped in his mad flight and found a place of better reception. With the loudspeaker on, we could both hear him well. “Sorry guys. That’s better.” He gave a short laugh. “Never thought we’d need to use these numbers, did we?”
Niall didn’t sound like he was in the mood for Brad’s dry humor. “You said booby-trapped. Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m fine.” Brad sounded dismissive. “Fairly amateur stuff, some loosened floorboards on the stairs. An electrical cable run across them, to catch me if I hadn’t watched my step. Definitely a deliberate action, so it looks like I found the right place.” I could see Niall itching for more details, but the specifics of a trap wouldn’t have been of interest to Brad. It would’ve just been a hurdle to overcome, not a source of professional fascination. His voice became more excited as he described the trail he’d been following. “I guess no one had the time to follow my notes, which is a little surprising, but anyway, I knew it’d be quicker if I went myself. I tracked the address down through the ISP and it looked like someone hid out there quite recently. The computer equipment had been smashed, but it had probably been used to divert all our e-mail, as well as hacking in. But I’m afraid there were no other clues. I’d caught the communications breach fairly quickly, of course, but it also looked like they cleared out pretty fast.”
“Where was the address?”
“It was out by the airport. It’s an empty house we’d considered ourselves for surveillance during the early stages of Mission Dove. I remember Simon asking me to look into the local communications network. It’s near that club where Niall was hurt, where that politician got his kicks until we outted the sick bastard.” Brad had a refreshing lack of respect for public figures who misused their position.
“So the details would have been on file?” Niall asked. “On Simon’s files?” I glared at him, but I was hanging on Brad’s reply, just like he was.
“Yes,” ca
me the answer. Brad sounded cautious. “Hey, are you guys on to something? Because if you are—”
“No,” I said swiftly, leaning further towards the mouthpiece so he could hear me more clearly. “Nothing specific. We’ll talk it through with you when we’re all together. What’s important now is that we’re all safe.” I felt Niall shift awkwardly beside me, but he didn’t add anything.
“There was a smashed laptop there too.” Brad sounded puzzled. “Like the ones we issued for the Team. Guess it’s a popular enough model.” We were quiet, and he continued. “Anyway, I rescued some e-mail records, some of them showing that encrypted e-mail address I picked up on earlier transmissions.”
“Tanner’s working on that too,” Niall said. “So now we have a place that the attackers have been using, plus a link to their e-mail. Do you have any ideas as to an identity?”
“I want to talk to Judith….” Brad’s voice was fading again, losing both volume and clarity. “Hell, I heard about the bomb at the Westbridge block, but Tanner shot? What’s been happening?”
“I wish I could tell you,” Niall said tersely. “We’re sheltering here for the moment. Tanner’s fine now, anyway. Who told you about the bomb at my place?” I frowned at him—who the hell was he to say I was fine? —but it took a few more seconds for the penny to drop as to why he was questioning Brad like that. When Simon visited the trailer, he’d told me that Brad left the Department shortly before the explosion, and implied they’d lost contact with him soon after that.
Brad was already replying. “I spoke to Simon just after the attack. I thought I’d better check in, and I caught him just after it happened. He told me Joe was injured, and he was planning to take Niall to a safe place. I haven’t been able to reach him since—his normal cell’s been cut off for some reason—and then I lost touch with Judith as well. I’m on my way back to base to discuss it with her. Is Simon still there with you two?”
I looked across at Niall. He seemed reluctant to answer that one, and I took the cell off of him. “No,” I said clearly. “Simon’s not here. He left after dropping Niall off. We haven’t heard from him since, either. The last communication we had was with Cissy. There’s been trouble at Judith’s office, and both Judith and Simon….” I paused briefly. “…weren’t around.”
The words were still coming through, but from the shaking of his voice, we could tell Brad was on the move again. “I didn’t realize… must find her, then. Look, Tanner, follow my notes, okay? Have a look at… which files were hacked into, which… e-mails. There was a… attern… no time to… ollow up befor… had to leave….”
“Tell me more,” I urged. “Brad?”
“Got to go… can’t say… kind of… ifficult to explain right… now, not sure… don’t want anyone… wrong idea….”
“What?” Niall nudged at me, trying to get the cell back off me. “Are we losing him?”
“We’ll call the Department if we have to, Brad.” Simon had always laughingly called the Team office the “melting pot” where all information started and finished, all plans were cooked up, and all resource ingredients combined. But if he and Judith had had to leave, I’d escalate it up the line. Someone there must know what was going on. “We’ll get another number for Simon, find out where he is—”
There was no mistaking Brad’s response to that. His voice burst from the cell with a kind of explosive ferocity. “No! Don’t call Simon!”
Huh?
“Don’t call him!” came the cry again. “Mustn’t alert…”
“What? Alert who?”
“Not sure ye…watch who…talk to….”
We stared at each other with astonishment. Niall spoke urgently into the phone. “Brad, it’s someone who knows us, isn’t it? Maybe these attacks aren’t in their area of expertise, but they know enough to be dangerous.”
There was nothing but crackle on the line. Then suddenly it ceased, and Brad’s voice trickled through. “Underpass… losing connec… where’s Joe?”
Startled, I replied, “In the hospital.”
Brad gave a bark of a laugh, clear as day. “Then that’s where Judith will be, won’t it? Watch… rselves….” Then the contact broke completely.
That’s where Judith will be?
I clipped the cell shut. Niall swore softly.
I stood there beside him. The lamp flickered, as it sometimes did, and clicked itself off. We were back in the semi-darkness and silence. It was some godforsaken hour of the early morning, our friends and colleagues were scattered God knows where, and we were plunging ever deeper into this mess and confusion.
And, depressingly, I was still half-hard from the mere thought of Niall’s body next to mine.
NIALL TURNED back to me. His eyes were shadowed, and not just from the loss of light. “There’s nothing we can do until we can contact Judith.”
“Right,” I said. “We’ll try again in the morning.”
“Yes, that’s best.”
I stepped away from him as casually as I could, but the loss of body warmth left me feeling bereft. I realized we were having one of those coded conversations where the sentences appear to make sense but no one says exactly what they mean.
“What did Brad mean about Simon?” I blurted out the words without thinking. It was a while since I’d had someone to talk things through with, and it was worrying the hell out of me. “I still can’t believe Simon has anything to do with it. Surely Brad wouldn’t believe it. He must be beside himself with worry about the guy.”
“No one bothered following up on Brad’s notes,” Niall said. “He said himself that was surprising. If he hadn’t gone out after the hideout himself, it would’ve stayed hidden for who knows how long.”
“And Simon holds all the information,” I said. A miserable thought, but how could I ignore the facts? “Brad knows that, too, of course. He didn’t want to tell us anything before he speaks to Judith. There’s something on his mind.”
“Watch yourselves, he said. Watch who we talk to.” Niall was looking at the cell nestled in his palm, but his gaze wasn’t truly focused. “We’d better get some sleep now.”
Neither of us moved.
“Niall. About earlier….”
“Yes?” He pursed his lips.
I remembered their taste and groaned inside. “Look, there are things I should have said, you know.”
“Really?”
It jolted me a bit, to see him smiling, but the nagging inside me insisted I continue. “So, okay, I mean that there were better things I should have said. I know I talk a lot, but often it’s shit. Most of it’s hiding the real stuff. And the fight… well, it wasn’t the first time we fought, was it? I always pushed at you, way too much. Then never gave us a proper chance to see it through.”
He looked at me warily, as if I might suddenly turn aggressive like Dylan and bite him. As if he didn’t entirely believe I could carry on a properly controlled personal conversation. I didn’t like to admit he might be right.
“Tanner.” He sighed. “You just never seemed to believe anything I had to say. When I finally gathered my thoughts into words, it was as if you listened with only half an ear. And then you’d be gone before I could elaborate. You never told me what the hell things were really about—what you wanted from me. Never gave me enough to go on.” He didn’t sound as accusing as he might have done. Just a bit bemused. Sad.
“Yeah. And of course, that’s exactly what I accused you of.” I guess I’d known I was doing it, even at the time. We’d argue, and then if he didn’t come back immediately with what I wanted to hear… well, I went out to nurse my own conclusions. I’d thought him the withdrawn one, but then I rode roughshod over whatever he came up with anyway.
Fucking mess it all was.
“Didn’t give us a proper chance,” I repeated dully. “I just wanted you, too, Niall—at any cost. Didn’t think we needed more than that.”
We were silent for a moment. I yawned, wondering if I’d be able to get back to sleep,
wondering if I could persuade my newly awakened libido to take a virtual cold shower.
“We worked well enough together.” His voice broke into my thoughts, slow and careful. “We respected each other, admired each other. Enjoyed each other’s company. It was always a hell of lot more than the sex.”
Startled, I stared at him.
“As far as I was concerned, anyway. I didn’t think it needed saying.” He looked defensive. “Of course, that was the problem. I know I’m too introspective for your liking. I was never a match for you.”
“What?”
He shifted his feet. I wasn’t used to seeing Niall Sutherland uncomfortable. “I’m not going to admit I bored you, Tanner, but it felt like it sometimes. I just dealt with things a different way, handled the pressure differently. It was increasingly obvious that you hated that.”
“Stop right there,” I said. “That’s crap. I was the boring one. I was the bleeding sore on the skin of your self-contained world. I was the one demanding all the attention.” I was the burden. I drew a deep breath. “I was the one who got careless and saw you nearly killed.”
He shook his head impatiently. “You’re still going on about that.”
“It’s been a long three months, you know? Given me time to think things through. Beat myself up some more.”
“Don’t.” He moved a step toward me. He looked pretty angry. “Now that’s crap! I couldn’t stand that self-pity, that blinkered view you had of it all. The business at the club was never your fault. We were working together, it could have happened at any time, to any of us there. But despite all the words you spewed out, all the fights, all the jokes—you never talked properly to me about it. We never got anything clear. And I didn’t know how to start that conversation with you, Tanner. It seemed every time I thought about trying, you were on your way out partying and the opportunity was lost.”
Another brief silence.
“They were shit,” I said. “The parties.”
“I know they were.” For a moment we wore matching, rueful smiles. “Tanner, I could tell when you were enjoying things and when you weren’t. But if you preferred to be elsewhere, I wasn’t going to beg for your time.”
Dreamspinner Press Year Four Greatest Hits Page 88