by Gayle Wilson
Claire had refused to think about that. About the kidnappers’ reactions. There was nothing she could do about those things. And there was a lot she could do for Griff.
It had been surprising—and a little frightening, knowing Griff—how much he had let her do. Supporting him across the deck. Undressing him. And now this.
Never before had she taken care of Griff Cabot. Not as long as she had known him. Of course, he had never before been in a position to need her care. She suspected that Griff had never really needed anyone. Right now, however, no matter how much he might hate this dependence, he did.
“Enough,” he whispered, turning his head.
A drop of the liquid fell on her arm, still wrapped around his chest. She took the ginger ale away, leaning forward enough that she could see the side of his face. With her thumb, she wiped off the small trickle that had escaped the corner of his parched lips. Beneath her fingers, she could feel the growth of a two-day beard, rough and somehow very pleasant. Thankfully, the skin under it was beginning to warm.
“Better?” she asked softly.
She waited for his answer, but his eyes were closed, as was his mouth—a little too tightly closed. After a moment, she set the bottle on the table beside the bunk and leaned back against the pillows she’d stacked behind her. He didn’t have to talk. She was content to hold him, to feel again the strong, steady rhythm of his heartbeat, lying just above hers.
“Why didn’t you go back?” he asked. “Jake should have tried to make the call. Tried to do something.”
“Go back without finding you?” she questioned.
“Of course,” he said.
“It didn’t seem like a good idea at the time,” she answered, allowing a hint of gentle mockery to color her denial.
She didn’t confess that she hadn’t known it would be as hard as it had been to locate him. Then, once they had stayed long enough to know they would miss the deadline for the call, it didn’t seem to make much sense to head back without finding him.
And they had found him. Eventually. Now Griff was safe. And maybe, while they had been looking, Hawk and Jordan had done what he was suggesting she and Jake should have tried. To make the call. To try to exchange the video for Gardner.
It had not been a conscious decision on her part to choose to look for Griff rather than make that call on time. They had been in the midst of the search when Jake first told her about it. And Jake had thought the kidnappers would deal only with Griff. He surely knew more about those things than she could.
But she had known that to leave Griff out there would have been a desertion. And a decision that would almost certainly have condemned him to death. She hadn’t been capable of making such a decision, and she was glad Jake hadn’t suggested it.
She resisted the urge to put her lips against Griff’s still-damp, darkly gleaming hair. She would only need to lower her face an inch or two to press a kiss against its softness.
Griff might not even be aware that she had. He might not feel the tenderness of the gesture she longed to make. And after the kiss she had invited, the one which he had deliberately broken off, she had no idea how Griff would react to her touch. No idea how he felt about her. About the unforgivable things she had said to him. All of them.
“What about Hawk and Jordan?” he asked into the silence.
“Jake’s trying to reach them by radio.”
“Trying?”
“The last I heard, he hadn’t gotten an answer.”
There was another silence, this one even longer.
“Why was it you in that plane?” she asked, remembering the fire flickering over the surface of the dark water. And the frightening hours she had spent scanning the empty expanse of ocean that stretched in front of the prow of the boat. “Why the hell did it have to be you who took that plane up?”
She waited through the silence, listening to the soft thrum of the cruiser’s engine.
“Griff?” she said, finally leaning forward again to see his face. Trying to determine if he had fallen asleep.
But his eyes were open, focused on the opposite wall, or on the black, featureless porthole that looked out on the sea and the night.
“Why you?” she asked again, and watched a muscle at the corner of his mouth tighten and then slowly release.
“A macho bull-crap exercise in self-aggrandizement,” he said softly.
She wondered for a second if he could be drifting into incoherence. Dehydration could do that. As could shock. And then, although she didn’t really understand what the phrase meant, she laughed at the sheer absurdity of it.
Her breasts moved against the hard muscles in his back, and a wave of desire seared her lower body. She was breathless with the force of the memories it brought. Griffs hands. Her body moving against his. Under his. Things she couldn’t afford to think about. Especially not here. Not now.
“What does that mean?” she asked instead.
“I wanted to prove I could still do it,” he said.
“Still fly?”
“Still do this. Plan an operation. See it carried out.”
She thought about why that might be so important to him. Important enough to risk his life for. And then she realized she had never once considered what his disassociation from the CIA might mean to Griff. His disassociation from the team, she amended.
That was a much more important disruption. A break in the bond of brotherhood these hard men had formed through the years. A bond that had, for most of them, taken the place of family. The place of love.
Once that bond had been broken by Griff’s death, it seemed that for the first time some of them had become aware of the lack of those other things. Hawk had uncharacteristically rescued Tyler Stewart and then married her. Jordan had taken care of Rob Sorrel’s small, vulnerable family and eventually made it his own. And Griff...
For the first time, she wondered what Griff had done during the long months she had existed without him. Apparently, none of his friends had known he was alive. His parents were both dead, and he had been their only child.
She had had Gardner to love and to care for during those months. But Griff, she realized, had had no one. In that terrorist attack he had lost his profession—a job he valued and was very good at. He had lost his friends. And even before that, he had lost what he and Claire had once had together. She had taken that from him. Her choice. Something within her control.
And Claire thought about what that particular loss might have meant to him. Wondered how he had handled it. Wondered, for the first time, if someone had taken her place in those long months of their separation.
Although Griff had not been her first lover, he had taught her more about her own sexuality than anyone else. And she had known, of course, that his sure, unthinking expertise came from experience. She had never wanted to think about that. About the time before she had known him. Before he had known her.
And she didn’t really want to think about the possibility that there was someone in his life now. Was that why his initial approach to her had simply been an offer to help? Why he had made no attempt, other than the aborted kiss, which she had blatantly invited, to rekindle any of the physical connections that had existed between them. Was it because there was someone else in his life?
There had been for her an endless deprivation between the last time he’d made love to her and now. But maybe...maybe that had not been the case for Griff.
“I guess now I know the answer to that,” he said softly.
Her concentration had gone so far afield that she had to think about what he had said before. Dredge it up out of a mind that had been totally focused on something much more important. Griff had been wondering if he could still plan and carry out an operation. And this one...
“It’s going to work,” she reassured him softly, no matter her own doubts. “That may be why Jake can’t reach Jordan and Hawk. They may have gone ahead and made contact with the kidnappers. They may have already made the exchange.”
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She couldn’t know that, not given what Jake had told her about the arrangements, but there didn’t seem to be any point in letting Griff punish himself for what had gone wrong. The things that had happened had been out of his control. And that was all he had promised her.
He didn’t respond to her attempt at reassurance. She knew he didn’t need to deal with this right now. He needed to build back the strength those long hours he had spent in the ocean, deprived of fluid, had stolen. He needed to sleep rather than to talk about what had gone wrong in this operation. Things he couldn’t change now.
And she needed to check on poor Jake. He had had as little sleep as she in the last twenty-four hours. Maybe they could keep one another awake until they reached the rendezvous point where they were supposed to meet the others.
Griff didn’t protest as she slipped out from behind him, carefully easing his upper body down onto the pillows she’d pushed against the headboard. When she was standing beside the bed, she realized that his eyes were closed again, the black lashes lying unmoving against the smudges of fatigue under them.
His eyes were a little less sunken than when she’d found him. At least they seemed to be, so the liquids she had given him must have had some positive effect.
“I need to check on Jake,” she explained, not certain if Griff was asleep.
There was no response. She bent and pulled the blanket up over his chest. Her fingers made unintentional contact with his bare skin, but there was no reaction. She had already begun to turn away when he spoke.
“What’s she like?” he asked. His voice was low, and he still hadn’t opened his eyes. He wasn’t looking at her. Maybe deliberately.
Gardner, she realized. He was asking about Gardner. And that had been another regret, one she had thought a lot about as she and Jake searched. She had thought of all the things she wished she’d told Griff when she’d had the chance.
“Like you,” she said, her throat tightening with the realization of how true that was. Being with Griff again had reinforced what she had already known. “She’s really...a lot like you.”
His eyes opened. In the dimness they were so dark they were black. Without color. Deep and fathomless.
“Like me?” he asked, his gaze touching briefly on her hair, which she knew had been lightened even more by its brief exposure to the tropical sun. Then his eyes settled on hers, which were nothing like Gardner’s either, of course.
“Black hair. Your eyes. She’s even got your chin,” Claire said, remembering, in spite of how much it hurt, that small, determined tilt. Fighting the pull of emotion, she said, “You’d have a hard time denying she’s your flesh and blood.”
Until the words were spoken, echoing painfully in the quietness, she didn’t realize how inappropriate they were. How out of place between the two of them. Griff had never attempted to deny Gardner. He couldn’t have, because he had never known anything about her. And that was a result of something Claire had done. Her choice. Something within her control.
He held her eyes a long time, but he didn’t say any of the hurtful things he might have said. None of the accusations she probably deserved.
Claire didn’t move, waiting to hear whatever he wanted to say to her. Knowing that eventually it would all have to be said. She had denied him his daughter. And twice she had come very close to never having a chance to make that right
Finally Griff turned his face toward the wall, closing his eyes. A signal that the conversation was over, she supposed, but she waited a few seconds longer. Then she turned again and went out of the cabin, leaving him alone.
“DAMN IT TO HELL,” Jake said under his breath.
Startled, Claire looked up. She had almost been asleep, she realized. And she was supposed to be keeping Jake company. Keeping him awake. Except it seemed she was the one who was more in danger of succumbing to exhaustion.
“What is it?” she asked, her eyes moving around the small cove the boat was entering.
“They’re not here,” Jake said, expertly easing the cruiser into the shallow waters.
Claire glanced at her watch, but since it was dawn, she really didn’t need to. They were hours late, and apparently Hawk and Jordan had given up waiting.
“Maybe they’ve taken the film and arranged the exchange on their own.”
Jake didn’t bother to answer. His eyes searched the tangled undergrowth that lined the narrow beach against which the aquamarine water became slow-breaking, cream-white rollers.
“The inflatable’s not here,” he said.
It wasn’t until he said it that she understood what he’d been looking for. If the boat wasn’t here, then neither were Hawk and Jordan. They wouldn’t attempt walking out through that nearly impenetrable tangle.
“What do we do now?” Claire asked, glancing at Jake’s set face. It was a question she had had to ask too often in the last few days. Now she was simply looking for something positive to hang on to. Some comfort. Reassurance.
“We contact the kidnappers,” Griff said, his voice coming from behind her.
He had come up the steps while their attention had been focused on the cove. Neither she nor Jake had heard him. That might be explained by the fact that Griff was barefoot. He was wearing nothing but the same faded pair of Levi’s he’d worn the night they’d stood together by the rail and watched the distant lights of Miami.
“Without the film?” Jake asked. “What do we tell them if they ask for proof?”
“We bluff,” Griff said, moving carefully onto the bridge, his hand against the wall, using its support. “We pretend we have proof. And we set up a meeting to make the exchange.”
Jake held his eyes a long heartbeat, and then, obeying Griff Cabot, just as he always had, he put the engine in reverse and began to back slowly out of the cove.
“YOU NEED TO REST,” Claire said.
Griff looked over his shoulder and found her behind him. He had thought she and Jake were both still asleep, but it was obvious she’d been up long enough to take a shower. She had changed into fresh clothing, a pair of white shorts and a navy tank top, but she was barefoot.
Her hair was damp, and he could smell the soap or the shampoo she had used, its fragrance stronger than the hint of brine the morning breeze carried. He fought the images it evoked. They had showered together a few times. Washing one another’s bodies. Slowly. Erotically. An act of love.
Without speaking, he turned back toward the front of the boat, the remembrance of Claire’s naked body too strong in his head. He looked out through the bridge windows instead, fighting memory. He had thought about Claire Heywood almost every day of the last eighteen months. Every day since she’d told him she never wanted to see him again.
And he had thought about her, and his daughter, almost constantly throughout these last few days. Days when he and Claire had finally been together again. And during those long, lonely hours he’d spent in the ocean, he’d had far too much time to think. About everything that had happened between them.
One conclusion he’d come to, sometime during the course of that ordeal, was that despite the argument he’d made about their agreement being no different than letting Claire believe he was dead, he knew better.
He had known she would have been devastated by his “death.” He had known it, and yet he still hadn’t contacted her to tell her it was a lie. Not until he’d sent her that single bloodred rose. A message that obviously hadn’t meant to her what he had thought it would.
And as he had floated in that dark, cold water, finally forced to face what he had done, Griff had also come to the realization that there was only one explanation for why he hadn’t. Somewhere inside, in a cold, bitter place in his soul, he had wanted to hurt Claire as much as she had hurt him.
When she had broken off their relationship, she had rejected who and what he was. And she had made some pretty damning accusations. Eventually he had retaliated, in the cruelest way imaginable. But he hadn’t known about the baby, which would,
of course, have changed everything.
“Where’s Jake?” she asked.
“Still sleeping.”
“He needs it,” she said.
She was standing beside him, but Griff resisted the urge to look at her. Now wasn’t the time or the place to try to make amends. He had a job to do first. A job that had been badly botched. And he could only hope that in spite of all that had gone wrong, he could somehow manage to get her daughter back. Their daughter.
When they had docked again this morning in Miami, he had gone ashore to contact the kidnappers, leaving Jake to see to getting the yacht ready to go out again, and leaving Claire asleep. Surprisingly, despite the missed call, whoever had answered at the number he’d been given agreed to a new rendezvous, giving him precise navigational directions. Which was where they were headed now.
He had bluffed his way through their questions about the delay by fabricating a mechanical problem. And he had lied about having the proof he’d promised them, just as he’d suggested to Jake they should do.
It had all been easier than he could have hoped for, probably because Diaz’s name had already been released to the media. And that should also tip the odds of success a little more in their favor, despite the fact they didn’t have the film he’d promised.
He was increasingly worried about Hawk and Jordan, however. According to Jake, they hadn’t been heard from since the Citation left the airport two nights ago. They hadn’t been at the prearranged rendezvous. And it seemed obvious from his phone conversation that they hadn’t tried to contact the kidnappers on their own.
“When we get there...” Claire began, and then hesitated.
“We play it by ear,” Griff said.
“Will they accept that Diaz is dead?”
“Would you?” he asked. It wasn’t a trick. It was the same question he had been asking himself.