Hard to Hold

by Incy Black

  Being in love should not have caused her pain. He’d tried to make her happy. Where had he gone wrong? “I liked you when you were vulnerable. It made me feel I made a difference. Don’t shut me out again, Anna. There’s too much history between us.”

  “And it’s because of that history that I do shut you out. You hurt me, Nick. I’d be stupid to let you do so again.”

  “What makes you so certain I’d do so again?” God he wanted to obliterate that word “again” from every known language, it was like a condemning finger pointing the blame straight at him.

  “Intuition.”

  “Never thought I see the day when Anna Key Marshall turned her back on a risk.” Because that’s what he was, what he would always be—a risk. To her. And a fatal risk to anyone who threatened her. Something he’d accepted and taken steps to minimize. But that didn’t mean he didn’t revisit the night he’d chucked her out every goddamn day with guilt slamming into his gut.

  He hated that he’d hurt her. Wished he could tell her the truth. But that sure as hell wasn’t a risk he was prepared to take.

  Not meaning to, he thumped the steering wheel in frustration before shooting Anna a sorry-I-was-having-a-moment look.

  He sensed the sudden tension that gripped her. “Can you not do this, Nick? My life is complex enough as it is.”

  “What exactly am I doing?” No way was he withdrawing from this conversation; her barriers were fracturing and he wanted in.

  “Being reasonable. Listening. Trying to be nice. I don’t recognize you like this, and it scares me.”

  “You’re scared, because you’re in over your head, and you’re pissed off, because you’re having to rely on me to get you out of trouble, just like in the old days.”

  “Now, that’s more like the Old Nick I remember. I didn’t think Mr. Sensitive would hang around for too long.”

  He snorted. At least she was speaking to him. Pity, but he had a feeling he was about to piss her off again. “Anna, you do know I can’t take you back to your warehouse, don’t you? Bombs going off in central London tend to attract attention, so I’ve got orders to take you to a designated safe house.”

  “I don’t like this, Nick.”

  Tension cut deep into his shoulders, and then he shrugged. “I know, sweetheart, but neither of us has a choice.” No way was he raising the subject of witness protection with her. Not until she’d been seen and given the all clear by a doctor. And even then, he’d probably insist on having medics on standby. Not so much for her. For him. For what she’d do to him.

  “Does the Commander know about Antila?”

  He shot her a sharp glance. He recognized that tone, casually innocent, but deceptively so. The last thing he wanted was Anna haranguing his boss over the phone, or worse, barging into the man’s office and letting him have it with both barrels. “No. He trusts my judgment enough not to question me. To the best of my knowledge only Will and I know, and for the time being, I want to keep it that way.”

  “You’ll be discharged if they find out you withheld information.”

  Yeah, and he’d probably be shot if she decided to take on the Commander. “Maybe. But this isn’t about the Service. It isn’t about me. It’s not even all about you. It’s about your daughter. She’s innocent in all this, so why should she pay the penalty? The fewer people who know the truth about her biological father, the more secure her future.”

  “There you go getting all sensitive on me again.”

  His lips twitched. Sensitive wasn’t a description that sat neatly on his shoulders.

  “Um, Nick…thanks. It helps to know you think she has a chance.”

  He had to strain his ears to catch what she’d said and as her words sunk. “Don’t you dare cry on me again, I don’t need the guilt. We create our own chances. You know that better than anyone. But until that baby is able to do that for herself, I guess it’s down to you and me to do our best for her.”

  “That sounds dangerously as if you’re getting involved, that you may even be planning to be around a little while.”

  “Never could resist a pretty smile, and I’m damned sure that’s what she gave me during the scan.”

  God, he’d missed her laugh. So full of mischief and trouble it was impossible to resist. A little more of the tension straining his muscles ebbed away. How hard could it be to get her to trust him again? Just until he knew for a fact that she was safe. Then, somehow he’d find the strength to walk away.

  “Keep this up, Nick, and you may even thaw out completely.”

  He released her hand, not entirely sure when it was he’d curled his fingers round hers. “No, Anna, that’s not going to happen. I meant it when I said this is not about you and me. Some relationships are just not meant to be.”

  His heart tore as she withdrew, pulling her knees high, her heels coming to rest on the car seat. She turned her head and stared out the side window.

  Christ, he had to say something. With her shoulders slumped like that, it looked like she was dying on the inside. “Neither of us escaped our marriage unscathed. We both lost too much. But we survived, and the truth is, we were probably better off apart.”

  She swung round to face him. Little trails where silent tears had fallen lined her cheeks. “I didn’t feel better off.”

  “But you were, sweetheart. Look at how you soared. Look at what you achieved. Damn near world domination of the gaming market. And I haven’t done too badly either. Despite the occasional infraction, I’ve been able to concentrate one hundred percent on my duties and I’ve got a real shot at taking over from the Commander one day.” He didn’t share with her that he’d felt more dead than alive in the years they’d been apart.

  “Admit it, Anna. We’ve both been happier and more successful apart.”

  “So why do I feel like a failure, Nick? Answer me that.”

  He couldn’t.

  Chapter Twelve

  Anna shot Nick the evil eye when he strode into the kitchen, all relaxed and perfectly at home in the Service’s safe house. “I checked in on your staff this morning. They’re fine. Those three rottweilers you employ have promised to hold the fort,” he informed her casually.

  She lowered the bottle of water from which she’d been about to sip. It hit the table with a dull thud. “You have to stop doing that, Nick. Interfering in things that don’t concern you.”

  He had his back to her while he surveyed the contents of the fridge. “You were bothered. They were anxious. I sorted it. What’s the problem?”

  The problem was that while Nick got to come and go as he pleased, she’d been a prisoner for a week. Barred from making any calls, forbidden from stepping beyond the confines of the safe house, all computer access denied—it was a slow death by tedium and she hated it.

  After three days, she’d stopped trying to be civil. Now, with a week under her belt, she was ready to claw at her own skin. Scratching at others helped. “If you’d allowed me to make contact, they wouldn’t have been fretting in the first place.”

  “You know the rules. No outside communication of any kind.”

  “Well, the way you flit in and out, you may as well hoist a flag proclaiming, ‘Anna Key Marshall is here, so help yourself.’ They could be watching you too, remember.”

  She heard him heave a deep sigh before he turned to face her. He propped his hips against the counter and crossed his arms. “I’m experienced at all this, Anna. I’m also careful, something you’ve never been.”

  She’d lost her freedom, her right to choose and do as she pleased, when she pleased. The safe house was spacious and comfortably furnished, but it was still a prison, the walls seemingly growing thicker by the day. There were rules and dire warnings. She was watched, monitored, and repeatedly asked if she was okay. And the suffocating restriction was driving her insane. She had woken, ready to flare at the slightest provocation. “If that’s a dig at me getting pregnant when you’d made it clear you didn’t want children—”

  He
went rigid at her mention of children. Nothing surprising there. But it was rare for him to refuse to meet her gaze. They’d covered this territory time and time again, she realized. She needed to break the circle.

  “Why did you push me away, Nick?” she pressed quietly. “Why did you give up on me? On us? On what we had? I’ve never understood, and you’ve never explained. A couple of years ago, I wrote a private software program and called it Armageddon. I entered every detail of our relationship I could remember and ran endless models to try and make sense of what went wrong.”

  He still wouldn’t look at her, but tension coiled him so tight, the kinetic energy was so strong, she half expected the pots and plates to lift and spin.

  “Find any answers?”

  “No. I’m good, but I’m not God.”

  His sudden movement toward her, like a spring with all its trapped energy suddenly released, flattened her lungs. Leaning across the table, his fists bearing down on the wood, he burned her with his glare. “Fine. You sure you really want to know? Because, believe me, after you hear this, I won’t have to push you away—you’ll take to your heels of your own accord. Ready?”

  Swallowing thickly, she nodded slowly, not at all certain. Her spine felt as brittle as uncooked spaghetti, likely to snap if he breathed too heavily in her direction.

  “When I first started with the Service, I was an assassin. More an exterminator really. I shot men, bad men, who thought themselves beyond the law. Killed them in cold blood, fast and clean, always in control of my emotions…except for one time. The last time. Then, I killed for the sheer pleasure of watching a man die.”

  His expression was savage. She forced herself not to recoil.

  She wasn’t completely naive. She’d suspected killing fell within his job description, but she had tucked that little horror away in the dark recesses of her mind where it could lie ignored. As long as he’d always returned to her safe and undamaged, as long as he’d still wanted her, she hadn’t given a damn.

  Only he hadn’t escaped undamaged, and she hadn’t noticed. He’d kept his wounds hidden, buried deep on the inside, and she’d been too pissed at him for shutting her out to stop and wonder why. Ignoring the knots in her stomach, she tried to keep her voice level “Why?” Oh, God, she sounded like a mouse—being squelched beneath a paw.

  Nick didn’t answer. She watched in quiet fascination as myriad emotions—anger, resistance, disgust—sweep his face vying for supremacy, her blood chilling when resigned loathing won.

  He tipped back his head and stared at the ceiling. “Because he threatened you, Anna. Said he knew who you were and where you lived. He described how you’d die, how he’d play with your body before you did. I saw red and beat him to death with my own hands. Happy now?”

  More swallowing, more nodding, nausea rising, her voiced dropped to a whisper. “Who was he?”

  Nick scrubbed at his face with open palms. “A fellow agent who’d been on the take for years. You met him a few times. Sam Belington. Tall, red hair.”

  She couldn’t help it, her eyes drifted to Nick’s hands. Hands that had never been anything but protective with her. She vaguely remembered Sam as an outrageous flirt, his ever-present smile just slightly off. She’d still liked him though. He’d been fun. “Dear God, Nick.”

  “He can’t help me. He never could. I’m no different from my father, just as he was no different from his father before him. Killing’s always run in Marshall veins. A family trait. Still need me to spell out why I didn’t want kids or to be anywhere near them? Temper. A temper I’d managed to control until that day. How could I have come anywhere near you after that? You brought out the best in me, Anna, but you also brought out the worst. The bit of me I despise. The violence, the complete lack of control. A gift from my father, Mad Mickey Marshall. I take it you’ve heard of him.”

  She had. And shuddered. To get her to behave, one social worker had delighted in whispered threats of Mad Mickey coming for her the dark of the night. That he’d steal her away and drown her like a kitten in a sack tossed out to sea. Too scared to tell, she begged Nick for his penknife and had slept with it open, clenched in her fist beneath the covers, through her innocent years.

  Aged twelve, a silent victim of too many nightmared nights, her first ever Google search had been for Mad Mickey Marshall.

  And she’d gotten a bigger knife.

  Only relinquishing it years later, the first time she’d slept with Nick. The first time in her life, she’d felt safe.

  Nick quit the kitchen, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the mugs on the shelf and clang the copper pots and pans hanging above the stove.

  Her lips the texture of wood shavings, she scraped her hand across her brow, the thin film of sweat, icy beneath her palm.

  Hot. Cold. Hot. Cold. Her body couldn’t make up its mind. Nick’s father had been notorious. He’d been a gun-for-hire, or a knife, bomb, monkey wrench, his own hands if need be. That’s how he’d been caught. He’d strangled his wife, Nick’s mother, before going on the run with his young son. Nick had endured six years of vicious physical abuse at the hands of his father.

  She’d been there through the early years to watch the external scars heal. It broke her heart that those he bore on the inside never had, and she hadn’t realized.

  Mad Mickey Marshall had only been stopped after an anonymous call, shot dead by the armed police who had surrounded him at the scene of his latest crime—a postman beaten to death for daring to deliver an unwanted bill.

  Society had repaid Nick for his “tip off” by throwing him into an impersonal foster system, and that’s where she’d found him. Angry, tormented, and every bit as determined not to care as she. The alliance they’d formed had been instantaneous, if a little one-sided on her part. It had taken her years to win his trust, but she’d never given up. Not until the night during their marriage when he’d gone nuclear, wrecked their flat, and then chucked her out.

  Lightning struck. So that was Nick’s darkest torment—he believed he’d inherited his father’s uncontrollable predilection for violence.

  She lurched to her feet. Christ, she had to find him.

  He was behind the fourth door she flung open. And for once in her life, she couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

  She stood silent, chest heaving.

  He stood silent, glowering.

  Platitudes rushed her mind. She knew he wouldn’t accept a one of them. She’d forced a confession from him, invaded the most private part of him, and he would never forgive her the intrusion. But she had to give him something.

  “The Service would not have accepted you if they’d believed you were anything like your father.”

  “Oh, they recognized what was inside me all right, and turned it to their advantage. I was the most efficient assassin they’d ever had, until the need for blood, the need to punish, consumed me. Violence is a sickness, and suddenly I had it bad. I was better off behind a desk…and I was better off without you. Pushing, testing, undermining what little restraint I had left.”

  That had never been her intention. She’d known the moment he’d severed the link between them. She’d felt it. The coldness. The distance. And she’d fought back the only way she’d know how. Loudly, colorfully, outrageously. The harder he’d pushed her away, the tighter she’d clung, terrified of losing him. She’d have laughed at the irony if she hadn’t feared it would kill her. In trying to save him, save the connection they shared, all she’d done was make things worse. Until he’d resorted to accusing her of adultery to get her to leave.

  By the time she had her breathing under control and was able to open her eyes, Nick had brushed passed her and had gone again.

  …

  Long days and even lonelier nights went by, and still Nick stayed away. Not that he wasn’t constantly on Anna’s mind. It was like a bloody haunting. She hadn’t asked for his damned confession. Why’d he have to take it out on her?

  Suddenly bored witless by thoughts
of Nick, and even more with herself, she killed the drone of the TV with the remote and kicked free of the sofa. What she needed was a distraction to stop from sinking further into the mire of self-pity. Her security detail would do. She’d challenge them to another game of poker. She owed them the chance to recoup their hefty losses from where she scalped them in the last game. Especially Rob Bates. Her favorite agent. Who fiercely policed her health and well-being by plying her with vitamins and gifting her exorbitantly priced anti-stretch-mark skin creams and shampoos rich in precious minerals. He’d even drafted out a surprisingly thorough fitness routine for her use in the safe house’s small multi-gym. And insisted she follow it—twice a day.

  The thought of someone actually caring about her, rather than just protecting her, filled her with a warm glow. Yes, she’d let Rob recoup his losses and do her best to ensure he won big. Very big, with the bets she planned to throw down.

  She rounded the corner of the long, wide corridor leading to the kitchen. Four pairs of eyes immediately swiveled in her direction. Nick was obviously as surprised to see her as she was him. The fact that he’d frozen mid-gesture didn’t faze her, but his eyes, so chilled and accusing, had her spinning on her heel and fleeing, no longer in need of entertainment.

  He was gone again by the time she next dared venture out of the study, which was probably just as well considering she’d pick-locked her way into the small operations room and “borrowed” a laptop while the men were distracted. Someone had to break the stalemate. She couldn’t stay secreted away for the rest of her life. All she needed was a lead. Something to bring down Antila and whoever it was who was trying to kill her.

  Hours and hours later, she tossed the laptop aside and slumped back against the headboard of her bed. Her lower spine ached, her corneas felt like dried leaves, and her retinas had collapsed from staring at the screen for too long. She hadn’t let the suspicion that she was probably covering territory already well marched by the every known law enforcement agency on the planet discourage her. She been determined to find something they’d overlooked.