by Addison Fox
“That’s just like my sister. Like my whole damn family, you know.” He kicked back the chair he was sitting on, knocking it to the floor as he got to his feet.
The outburst was so sudden, Isabella wasn’t sure if she should sit back and let him vent or reach out so she went with instinct and stood up to meet him. “What has you so upset?”
“You’ve just nailed my family in a freaking nutshell. Ask questions. Ask different questions. Push and push and push. It’s all right. It’ll be okay. We love you anyway.”
“Liam?” She whispered his name but he was too far gone to hear.
“They refuse to acknowledge what we are. What’s made us. What makes us willing to do what we do. Two men died out front of our house a few hours ago and we’re all downstairs, running scenarios and simulations and my brother is fidgeting away on that damn wall of computers and none of it changes the fact that two men are sitting in the morgue right now.”
Another wave of helpless tears filled her eyes at the image he painted, but she knew the root of the tears went even deeper.
Here was pain. Raw and real and present.
Swallowing hard, unwilling to deflect the moment with a crying jag, she pressed him. “I thought you liked your life and what you did. The work you and your family do is important. You help people.”
“We also stand by while a hell of a lot of people lose their lives, too.”
His shoulders stiffened and he turned, pacing a small path beside her bed, his gaze on the floor.
And in that moment she knew.
Knew something terrible had jaded him, bottled up so deeply inside he’d forgotten who he was. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“When did this nothing happen?”
He stopped midpace to look up at her, his face drawn in a mask of bleak angles, awash in misery. “A few years ago.”
* * *
Don’t tell her. Don’t tell her. Don’t tell her.
The instructions echoed over and over in his mind, warning him of the very real truth that if he told Isabella what had happened—if he soiled her with the darkness—she’d never be clean again.
Would never be free of the knowledge, just as he’d never be free.
“Please tell me.”
Liam was surprised to feel the hot wash of tears fill his eyes, the hard sting of a knot in his throat as he fought to swallow around them. “I can’t spoil you.”
Her movements were so fast he blinked at the speed with which she crossed the room. She pressed her hands to his face, the pure green of her eyes boring into him with passionate fire, still innocent. Still free of the truth. “There’s nothing you can’t say to me. Nothing. Don’t you understand that?”
“No. You don’t understand.”
“Then everything. The last week figuring out who’s after me. Last night together. Everything we’ve shared. It’s all for nothing if you won’t tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“You won’t.” She stepped back, her hands dropping to her sides. “I meant it when I told you I loved you. I would like to hear it in return, but I don’t expect it. When a man tells me he loves me, I want it to be freely given. But understand me well. I love you. Nothing you say will change that. Nothing.”
That fire snapped in her eyes, arcing pure heat and wild, all-encompassing acceptance toward him in a wash of sparks.
As the embers settled over him, he knew he was loved. And he knew love in return.
“Please sit down.” He gestured her toward the bed, then took the seat next to her. He kept his hands fisted at his sides, preparing himself to tell her. She reached out and took both of them in hers, a gentle promise of understanding.
“Now tell me.”
With succinct bullet points for words, he tried to tell her all about the failed mission in Prague. His responsibilities managing security detail for a diplomat scheduled to testify in a war crimes trial for a small country in the former Soviet Union. The increasing sense that something was off despite the fact that every member of the man’s staff was fully vetted and cleared.
“But you still sensed something was wrong?”
Her fingers tightened around his and Liam nodded at the simple understanding. “I knew there was. But I couldn’t find the hole. Who knows—” He exhaled on a hard, bitter bark of anger. “Maybe I didn’t ask the right questions.”
“So what happened?” Her voice was gentle but he knew the deflection for what it was and knew he was being a bastard about his sister.
“The man’s brother-in-law. He was working undercover for the group being testified against. They’d turned him with enough money and promises of power, even though he was nothing more than a pawn to them.”
“How’d you find out?”
“When I watched him slaughter his sister, her husband the diplomat and their two children. Mikhail and Irina.”
Her fingers tightened once again as the blood drained from her face. He sensed she wanted to say something, but he pushed on, unwilling to hear her put words to the sympathy he saw in her eyes.
“It happened so fast. I didn’t even get my gun out until he’d mowed down all but the baby.” He stopped, the words sticking in his throat as he tried to get them out as fast as possible. “I was already firing at him when he shot her in the head.”
She wrapped her arms around him and pressed her cheek to his. “You did what you could. You tried to stop him.”
“Did I?” The truth ate at him, boring holes of regret into his soul like cigarette burns. “I had drinks with the man the night before. The family had thrown a party, celebrating that the trial was coming to an end. I had vodka with all of them, at their insistence. Clinked my glass in toast with a traitor.”
“But you didn’t know.”
“I should have known. It was my job to know!” He leaped off the bed, unwilling to sit still any longer, no matter how good it felt to sit pressed against her, wrapped up in each other. No matter that it meant all the difference to finally tell someone the story of what really happened. To tell someone about the toast.
To a long and fruitful life.
He shook his head, the events as clear as if they’d happened the day before. “All my intel. All my prep. None of it mattered as the man took out his entire family twelve hours later.”
“A risk of the job. And proof that you’re not infallible. Intel’s not infallible.”
“I knew something was wrong.”
“And you righted it as best you could.”
No matter what he said, she had an answer.
“You avenged that family, Liam, by keeping the monster who lied to them and manipulated them from ever doing it again. You honored them.”
“There’s no honor in a mistake that cost four innocents their life.”
“It’s a hell of a lot more honorable than someone who hides in the shadows, biding their time. Like the brother-in-law. Like the person after me. There’s no honor in a life lived in the shadows, waiting to strike like a snake in the grass.”
She moved toward him, her arms outstretched, and welcomed him as he wrapped himself around her. The images of that dark day still swam around him, swamping him with their power, but as her lips met his, he felt the light shine through the shadows.
* * *
Darkness surrounded him and Daniel fought to get his bearings as pain radiated down his legs in spiky bursts.
“Edward?” His voice came out on a croak, quiet and lonely.
What had happened?
Daniel struggled to make sense of his surroundings from the pool of darkness that weighed him down. He couldn’t see anything but even without his sight, the darkness felt familiar. The scents around him—like a dank basement that had been disinfected with the harshest soaps—fill
ed his nostrils.
Why did it feel familiar?
A quiet panic gripped him. He knew he should be upset about his lack of sight, but he couldn’t quite summon up the energy.
Odd.
He shifted on the bed—cot?—he lay on, the movement bringing the metal frame in contact with a wall. Again, his senses took stock of what he knew.
The ring of metal echoed through the room, low and hollow.
The only smell he could parse out was that dank, industrial mildew, but if he tried, he could also get the barest hint of stale coffee.
The air felt heavy with moisture and his palms were damp.
He was a man who’d spent his life contextualizing his surroundings as he attempted to navigate them and, for the first time, he realized how much he understood at a sense-based level.
Slowly, consciousness, the pain in his legs and sheer curiosity pulled at him, dragging him out of the abyss. He reached for his eyes, abstractly cataloguing that his hands weren’t tied.
And when he finally pulled off the blindfold shielding his vision—his hand trembling at the effort of his still-sluggish limbs—his confusion vanished.
He knew this place. Had spent years of his life here.
The harshest bark of laughter filled his throat, the irony of what he’d wrought filling him with shame. He was in his old office.
Where all his folly had begun.
* * *
Isabella pressed her lips to Liam’s temple, then his cheek, then over his jaw, whispering nonsense words as she trailed a path of kisses. His body still trembled with the aftereffects of adrenaline and the emotional exposure of his experience in Prague, but she sensed a calming in the deep breaths that blew against her neck.
She’d never been a big believer in love at first sight or instant attraction, the scientific part of her mind too steeped in numbers and research and facts to accept something so fanciful. Yet here she was, so emotionally invested in this man she’d known less than a week.
Their circumstances might have heightened their emotions, keeping everything close to the surface, but these feelings for Liam were so much more.
As if sensing the direction of her thoughts, his arms tightened around her waist and he pulled her even closer, shifting them so they were stretched lengthwise on the bed. He pressed his lips to hers, his tongue seeking entrance to her mouth. She opened for him, the move natural as breathing, and welcomed him within.
Liam gently pushed her onto her back, then propped up beside her on one bent arm. He ran his hands over her breasts, down her stomach then over her hip as if sculpting her body. Heat rose up wherever he touched, a sensual brand that had her lifting into his touch.
And then her breath suspended, trapped in her lungs.
His long, sensitive artist’s fingers fluttered at the waistband of her slacks before slipping beneath the material. With long, luscious strokes, he swept lazy fingers over her already-sensitized body. Sparks shot before her eyes and a helpless mewl echoed from the back of her throat when his index finger slipped beneath the waistband of her panties.
How was it possible to feel so vulnerable yet so alive?
“Liam!” His name fell from her lips as she fought the sweeping arc of passion that had the world fading around her.
“Give this to me.” The gentle lover morphed almost instantaneously, a delicious taskmaster determined to take her over the edge. His touch consumed her, controlled her and forced her beyond the edge of madness.
But it was his last word—half demand, half plea—that had her world exploding into a million bright, shiny pieces.
“Please.”
Chapter 19
“No fair! I’m ticklish.” Liam swallowed a handful of water that splashed in his face as Isabella pushed his head under the shower spray.
“I’ll show you fair.”
Her giggles faded as his lips took hers, his hands ruthless as they traveled over the wet woman in his arms. He felt his body come to life against hers and wondered how it was possible she could make him feel so good.
Or how he’d lived so long without her.
Which pulled him up short, right there in the middle of the shower in the bathroom adjoined to the room he’d grown up in.
“What’s wrong?” Isabella’s eyes were wide, her lashes a spiky rim over that vibrant green.
“Nothing. I just—” he stopped, well aware he looked like a gaping fish. “Nothing.”
Before she could question him further, he pulled her against him, determined to return to their carefree exploration of each other.
His hands stroked her wet skin, cupping the fullness of her breasts as his thumbs played over the distended flesh of her nipples. He followed the movements with his mouth, even as the vixen in his arms turned the tables.
Isabella’s hands moved on an exploratory of their own and he pressed into her palm as she cupped him boldly, her strokes over his rigid flesh drawing him closer and closer to his own release.
The daunting thoughts of commitment and forever faded from his mind as the demands of their bodies pushed each other on. The sharp green of her eyes had gone a smoky moss and he forced his gaze to stay locked on hers as the moment took them both.
But even as he felt her go over in his arms, his own release nearly upon him, he knew it was a fool’s errand.
Isabella had come to mean far more than he’d ever imagined. And as he drove his body into hers, felt her ride the thrust as if they’d been made for each other, Liam knew he was lost.
* * *
Isabella lay on the bed, an oversize towel wrapped around her flushed and well-satisfied body. Liam had gone down to raid the fridge for some late-night leftovers and she allowed her thoughts to drift as she waited for him.
The past hours with him had been a revelation.
When she’d come up to her room, she’d felt bereft of any hope, convinced the death and destruction she’d brought on the Steele family was inevitable.
And now...
She knew there was still work to be done, but Liam’s reassuring presence and sheer strength of will had restored her hope. Making love to him had renewed her. She hadn’t known it was possible, that a physical connection could make such a difference, but it had.
In his arms she’d found acceptance and support. And the belief that they would get past the demons that haunted her.
A quick memory intruded on her musings—that moment in the shower when he’d gone from attentive lover to distant acquaintance—and despite her wish to ignore it, her analytical mind processed through those moments as well.
They’d been laughing, enjoying the moment and each other, when something stopped him. The old Isabella would have believed it was her fault and that she was doing something wrong, but she knew that wasn’t the case. The same analytical mind that catalogued everything in her life had also captured the pleasure in his reactions during sex and she knew the problem went far deeper.
Fear?
The haunted glaze that had colored the normally vivid blue a dull misty gray suggested as much, but fear of what? The power of what was between them? Or something even deeper tied to letting another into his life.
His comments earlier about his family weren’t simple anger, quick to spark the flame over, or even normal family frustration. The depth of his hurt had its roots in so much more. The Steele siblings might love each other and have one another’s backs, but the loss of their parents had cut them all so deeply, their wounds still bled.
The buzzing of her phone caught her attention and she grabbed it from the end table, glancing at the readout. The immediate recognition had her breath catching hard in her throat.
Daniel.
She scrambled to sit up, her wet hair slapping against her back as she answered, lifting the phon
e to her ear. “Hello?”
“Hello, Isabella.”
The voice that filled her ear was tinny, yet oddly familiar. “Daniel?” She asked the question, even as she knew it couldn’t be.
“Try again. How about Edward.”
Edward? Her mind cycled through the name, grasping at who she might have known before she lit on the answer. “Edward Carrington?”
“Right again.”
“It’s been you?” Images of the frail scientist filled her mind’s eye. His condition was similar to Daniel’s, though not nearly as advanced, and she’d known the two men were close. “All along it’s been you?”
“Daniel’s helped.”
“He’s alive?” The breath she wasn’t even aware of holding blew out in a rush. “Where is he? How’s he doing?”
“Come see us. We’re in the old lab space.”
“The dungeon?”
“The very same. I thought it was oddly fitting we meet again where it all started. I may be a scientist but I like to think of myself as a man with a poet’s heart.”
“But how?” She broke off, the truth of what they’d believed springing to life. “The research. The lab results. They’re yours and Daniel’s.”
“Very good.”
“Why are you hiding this news from the world? It’s incredible. And where’s Daniel?”
“Daniel’s resting now but you know how his best hours were early in the morning. They still are. Come see us and then we’ll talk.”
“I’m not meeting you alone.”
“Then I’ll come to you. The Steele brownstone is quite a place. Looks like a fortress but a building that old has to have its weak spots.”
“You wouldn’t.” The words stuck in her throat and she struggled around the fear that crushed her rib cage like a boa constrictor.
“Six a.m., Isabella. And if that debonair gent who’s been escorting you since London comes along, he won’t make it back home to that swanky apartment of his.”