by Vanessa Kier
The fact that the lives of Rafe and his team depended on her incomplete information terrified her. Yet Rafe seemed excited by the challenge. His dark mocha eyes snapped with the same excitement reflected in every one of his men.
She didn’t understand the pitying glances the men threw her way, as if she wasn’t really living because she didn’t think risking her life was fun. What was wrong with a quiet, orderly life? A life without violence?
Nothing, that was what. But these maniacs would never see it her way, so it was time she left them to their final preparations.
“There’s nothing more for me to add. Good luck tomorrow gentlemen.”
She took one last look at each of Rafe’s teammates, seeing their strength and their confidence. Wishing she could tamp down this choking fear for them.
Finally, she allowed herself to look at Rafe, and instantly regretted it. She felt singed by his heat and vitality. It wasn’t fair. She finally met a man who brought her feminine side to life and he could end up dead before she’d even had a chance to explore the attraction.
An icy hand curled around her heart. No, she wouldn’t picture Rafe dead.
Feeling tears threaten again, she spun on her heel and practically flew from the room.
“Gabby, wait!”
She heard Rafe’s footsteps behind her in the hallway, but she didn’t stop. The last thing she needed was to break down in front of him. She didn’t want him pitying her or thinking she wasn’t professional.
Dammit, she should have run the other way when he’d ordered her to pack her things and go with him that night. Her only excuse was that she’d still been off-balance from his interrogation and seeing the two dead bodies on the floor of her bedroom.
She wasn’t used to violent death. Another difference between her and Rafe that should send her fleeing as fast as possible in the opposite direction.
She warned herself not to glance over her shoulder. Even though Rafe called to some feminine need she hadn’t even known she possessed, she was damned if she’d give in to it. He was way too charming. Too dominant. Too accustomed to getting his own way.
And she’d been so lonely for so long that she soaked up Rafe’s flirting like a dry sponge. The small collection of stuffed animals and figurines was a constant reminder of how well Rafe had come to know her. She didn’t think she’d ever felt such an intimate connection to anyone, and it scared her to death.
Right. She was scared. Uh-huh. That was why her nipples were tightening just thinking about Rafe. Damn him to hell.
She gritted her teeth and focused on the door at the end of the hallway. Almost there.
“Gabby.”
She slammed to a stop, frozen by the sound of Rafe’s voice at her back. She hadn’t realized that while she was thinking, she’d also been slowing down. Giving him time to catch up with her.
Rafe slipped around her, blocking her way.
“Querida, what’s wrong?”
Hearing Rafe’s chocolate smooth voice draw out the endearment sent a sensual chill racing across her skin.
No weakness. Do not let him get under your skin. First, he’s leaving tomorrow. Second, Nate is dying. Keep your focus on your work.
Carefully keeping her eyes fixed on a chip in the corridor’s paint, she mumbled, “Nothing. I’m just…tired and I still have a lot of work to do. Please let me past.”
There. That sounded polite. She was pretty sure nothing in her tone gave her emotional state away. She sidled to her right, hoping he’d take the hint and move aside.
But no. Of course not. Instead, he reached out and tipped her chin up so she ended up staring into his concerned eyes.
Concern for her, when she was unable to save Nate. When she didn’t know if the work she’d done for Kaufmann had helped or hurt his friend.
Why did he have to be so nice to her? Why did she have to find him so attractive? He was tearing her apart because she couldn’t bear the thought that he was heading back to Kaufmann’s compound. Rafe was the one bright spot in her life right now. How would she put her heart back together if something happened to him?
She felt the first tear slide like hot butter down her cheek. “Damn you! Just leave me alone.” She jerked away and tried to run.
Rafe was faster. He wrapped her in his arms and set her head to rest against his chest. Within seconds his t-shirt was damp with her tears.
Rafe held Gabby against his chest and felt a lance of emotion pierce his heart. She was crying because of Nate. Because she cared so much about a man she’d only known as a rage-filled monster. Not the fierce, intelligent man Rafe had trusted with his life.
Rafe admired Gabby for not giving up despite the odds, but this crying totally undid him. Her tears didn’t just touch Rafe the leader, they touched Rafe the man.
Rafe accepted the risks of his job. Each mission had the potential to end in death or disability. Just because he had no problem with the danger didn’t mean he wanted those he cared about to worry. So he shielded them as best he could.
His heart ached because he couldn’t protect Gabby from the pain of Nate’s death.
She sniffled and started to pull away.
“It’s okay,” Rafe told her in a voice he hoped would soothe her into staying right where she was. “Just let yourself cry. Let it all out.”
Christ. He sounded like some talk show shrink. But bottom line, he didn’t want to let her go. It felt too right having her in his arms. Like she belonged here.
Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell Gabby that. After maybe another minute of crying into his shirt, she pushed away firmly enough that he had to let her go.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled as she pulled a tissue from her pocket. She blew her nose, keeping her eyes down. “Things have just been a bit…much lately.”
“Hey.” He tipped her chin up and nearly staggered under the impact of her hazel eyes. More green today than brown, they glittered brilliantly through the magnification of her tears. He totally forgot what he was going to say. Poof. It was just gone. All he could think about was comforting her. Making her smile again.
Which is how he found himself leaning forward, kissing her wet cheeks and tasting her tears.
He felt her body go rigid, heard her sharp little inhale of surprise. He pulled back long enough to see her stunned expression. To confirm that she wasn’t offended or scared. Then he leaned in again and finished drying her cheeks with his tongue.
Then, God help him, he moved lower and kissed her mouth.
Rafe’s closeness, his tenderness, threw Gabby completely off balance. The rasp of his tongue against her cheeks warmed her in places that should have been completely unaffected. Once again proving how dangerous he was to her equilibrium.
Then his lips settled over hers. He kept the kiss light. Tender. Yet her entire body jolted into awareness. When his tongue slipped between her lips she thought she made some husky sound of approval, but wasn’t sure. All her senses were focused on the feel, the taste of his mouth against hers.
God, the power of his kiss. She felt it in her soul. Felt that if she didn’t get more of his taste, she’d die. She pressed into him, sucking his tongue deeper into her mouth. Never wanting to let him go.
When Rafe raised his head, she whimpered and leaned forward, trying to recapture his mouth. He stared into her eyes, his expression clouded with desire. She was certain her own expression must be the same.
“Christ,” Rafe whispered. He slid one hand to the back of her neck, the other to the small of her back and pulled her against his body as his mouth came down on hers.
Rafe nibbled softly at her lips and Gabby opened her mouth, eager to have him back inside. She gave a purr of approval when his tongue probed deeper and Rafe answered with a growl. The kiss flared, turning ravenous as they tried to devour each other.
Gabby lost her sense of self. The rest of her body simply ceased to exist. She became nothing more than a starved mouth, desperate not to let Rafe leave until this hunger f
or his taste, for the warm spice of him, was satisfied.
“Jesus, mate, get a bloody room will ya?” a sardonic Aussie voice drawled.
Gabby jerked away from Rafe, mortified. She didn’t recognize the man standing in the corridor, leering at them. About Rafe’s height, he had spiky, white blond hair, a surfer’s tan and a grin that said he enjoyed her discomfort.
That was all she had time to notice before Rafe turned and put his body between her and the stranger. She put her hands between Rafe’s shoulder blades and rested her forehead on the backs of her fingers.
“Playing voyeur again, Larson?” Rafe asked in a voice so chillingly polite, Gabby shivered. “Isn’t it time you found your own lady?”
“Why? When it’s so much fun stealing yours.”
Gabby felt Rafe’s muscles tighten underneath her fingers. “And yet I hear you’re single again,” Rafe responded.
Gabby heard Larson’s sharp inhale. But before he could reply to Rafe, the beep of a cell phone interrupted.
“Ah,” Larson murmured. “Duty calls. Dear lady, do keep me first in line when this oaf grows tired of you.”
Gabby didn’t bother to respond, and a moment later she heard his footsteps fading away.
Rafe’s muscles relaxed. “Don’t mind him. He likes to play the prick with other guys and steal their women, but he’s a good operator.”
Gabby stepped away from him. She wasn’t sure how she felt about being classified as one of Rafe’s women. Not that it mattered. She couldn’t allow him to kiss her again. Hadn’t she just warned herself about feeling anything for Rafe? Letting the nearly orgasmic power of his mouth distract her from her work would be the shortest route to heartbreak.
“I really need to get back to work,” she said.
“Gabby—”
“No. Don’t.” She held up her hand in a warding gesture. “Just let it go. You’re leaving tomorrow. I—” She shook her head. “Forget it. The kiss was amazing, but it’s just a temporary thing.”
“Like hell,” he said with a sexy intensity that sent shivers of longing down her spine. From the look in his eyes, she was about sixty seconds from being pushed against the wall and racing toward orgasm.
He took a step toward her. Oh, God, if he touched her, she was lost.
So she took the coward’s way out.
She fled.
Rafe watched Gabby run. He wanted to go after her. To demand that she acknowledge the strength of the attraction between them.
But he had to stay focused on his upcoming mission. Letting Gabby worm her way into his emotions was the quickest way to distraction, and in the field distraction meant capture or death.
He was not going to lose another man to Kaufmann. Having Nate die was bad enough.
Rafe turned and headed back toward the conference room. He wanted another look at the mock-up. Wanted to run a couple more scenarios. Because shit happened and he was determined to be fully prepared no matter what Kaufmann’s security team threw at them.
Yet as he walked down the corridor, he couldn’t get Gabby’s passion-clouded eyes out of his head. His poor little scientist. This past week had been one unforeseen, uncontrollable event after another for her. Outside her lab there was precious little order to this new world. The crazy, overwhelming lust between them had to be scaring her to death, because sure as shit there was no way to control the fire between them whenever they touched.
As that kiss proved.
His resolve weakened. But when he glanced back over his shoulder, she was gone.
Chapter 11
Rafe stared down at the man lying motionless in the hospital bed. “Damn, Nate,” he murmured. “Guess I won’t be pulling your ass out of any more midnight bar brawls.”
He touched Nate’s shoulder. Christ, but this was hard. Nate had lost weight, and his once robustly ebony skin was now tinged with gray. It reminded him too much of when his father had died.
The pneumonia had made his dad even thinner and more haggard than Nate. Sitting by his father’s bed, Rafe had felt a burning mix of frustration and gut-wrenching grief. Even four months later, he still couldn’t stop his outrage at the injustice of his father dying from a bacteria. A fierce, proud man like his dad you expected to go down on the job. Not from pneumonia, for Christ’s sake.
But at least he’d been able to say good-bye. Niko had been deep in Afghanistan, recovering from a bullet wound, when their dad went into the hospital. Rafe had said his good-bye to Pop, then hauled ass to find Niko and bring him home. But Pop had died before their plane landed in the States. Sometimes Rafe caught the bleak knowledge of the lost opportunity in Niko’s eyes and he cursed fate all over again. If anyone should have been given the chance to say good-bye to Pop, it was Niko.
So yeah, Rafe appreciated being able to say good-bye to Nate. He understood what Gabby hadn’t said. Nate probably wouldn’t be alive when he returned.
He gave Nate’s shoulder a squeeze. “You give ‘em hell up there in heaven, Ngoro. Hear me?” He thought Nate’s breathing hitched as if he understood, even deep within his coma. Picking up Nate’s hand, Rafe murmured a brief prayer in French, the language of Nate’s people back in Senegal. Nate always recited these words, basically a request for safety while ass-kicking, just before they dove into action.
Then Rafe set his friend’s hand gently on the bed and walked away without looking back.
“There’s enough trouble up ahead,” Nate had once said when one of the men asked why he never took the rear-facing seat on any transportation. “Why look back at the trouble I left behind?”
“Amen, mi amigo,” Rafe said as he let himself out of the room. “Amen.”
Rafe headed down the corridor, wondering what to do next. He’d finished briefing his team. They’d run over their plans until they were confident they’d planned for every contingency. He’d said good-bye to Niko and Jenna. Sleep would be good, but there was a low hum in his body that meant sleep was still hours away.
Knowing this restless, almost melancholy mood wasn’t good for his pre-mission preparation, Rafe decided to head down to the gym and work himself into his usual optimistic state of mind.
Instead, he found his feet leading him toward another hospital room.
“About fucking time,” Kai Paterson snarled when Rafe pushed open the door. “Thought you were going to take off without saying good-bye, asshole.”
Rafe laughed, relieved to find his friend awake. “Some of us have real missions to prepare for. None of this lazing about in hospital beds, flirting with the nurses.”
He looked Kai over and frowned. While it was great to see Kai awake, his skin was almost cadaver pale and his amber eyes glittered with a touch of fever within his sunken sockets. His brother-in-law almost looked worse now than he had over three months ago when they’d pulled him broken and bloody out of Jaime Alvarez’s dungeon.
“Christ, man, you still look like shit. I thought those new anti-malarial drugs were working.”
Kai narrowed his eyes and shot Rafe the finger. “I’m alive, right? That’s good enough for me.”
Rafe studied his friend. Kai looked like an academic, but he had a core of steel most people didn’t catch when they first met him. Rafe knew what his brother-in-law had been through since the attack that killed his parents and the twins. In fact, thanks to a late night drunken confession, Rafe thought he was the only one who knew not just what Kai had done to the assassins, but what it had cost Kai in terms of self-respect.
Rafe supposed that compared to Kai’s inner struggle to keep his rage and newfound thirst for violence under control, malaria would seem like a walk in the park. Even if the mutant variety Kai had picked up continued to threaten his life.
For Rafe, it was unsettling to realize how close he’d come to losing another friend. There had been too many losses in his life lately. First, Pop had died. Then the aunt he’d thought was dead had turned up alive, only to sacrifice herself in an attempt to kill Alvarez. Now Nate was on the brin
k of death.
It was almost enough to make a guy nervous.
An hour later, Rafe knocked on the door of the cabin Gabby had moved into after accepting Ryker’s job offer.
Gabby had spoken the truth when she said that taking their relationship farther made no sense with him leaving tomorrow, but Rafe didn’t care. He had to see her again. This attraction between them was special. Too powerful to ignore. He had every intention of jumping right back in when he returned from the mission. So she’d damn well better wait for him.
He’d just raised his fist to knock again, when the door opened. His jaw dropped. Gabby stood there in a short cotton robe. Her hair was messed up, as if he’d woken her from bed. His eyes flicked to the clock hanging above her kitchen sink. Almost two in the morning. He winced, knowing he probably had woken her.
But he wasn’t sorry. She looked too good blinking up at him with her eyes slightly unfocused.
“Rafe?” God. Just the sleep-husky tone of her voice was enough to bring his body to full alert like a randy teenager.
“Is something wrong?” Her eyes sharpened and her brows drew together as that super-computer brain of hers started calculating probabilities. If he didn’t say something fast, she’d worry herself into a panic over nothing.
But his tongue had frozen in place. Stunned by how much he wanted her, all he could do was stand there like an idiot, memorizing the way she looked so he could carry the image with him on his mission. Strands of golden hair clung to her cheeks and eyelashes, making him itch to reach out and smooth it into place. The sleepy look in her hazel eyes made him wish he was watching her from across a pillow after a long night of loving. Her lips were slightly parted, an invitation he didn’t think she was aware of. Then her teeth worried her bottom lip and her gaze sharpened.
Knowing he had to say something before she concluded the world was at an end and raised the alarm, he stepped toward her. She instinctively moved back to let him into the cabin and he took full advantage, herding her inside. As soon as he’d cleared the doorway, he reached behind him and shoved the door shut.