Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Her betrayer of a brain kept flashing pictures of him naked in her bed, of his face above her, his eyes heavy-lidded with desire as he . . . as they . . .

  Oh, God.

  If she was remembering that more times a day than she would ever admit aloud, what must he think about whenever he looked at her?

  Although it was quite possibly worse to think that he never thought about their night together at all. It was depressing to consider that it was something that simply never crossed his mind, completely unmemorable and forgotten.

  “I’m sorry about before,” Nash said, just as she asked, “Is Deck back yet?” They had to stop doing that—both talking at once. People did that when they were uncomfortable with each other, when they had to work to think of things to say.

  “No,” he said. “He’s not. He’s . . . You shouldn’t worry about him, he’s—”

  “I’m not worried about him.”

  “Okay. That’s . . . okay.”

  More silence as he glanced at the bed, at the filmy curtains blowing gently in the breeze from the windows. “I guess we’ll have to move into this room then, huh?”

  “And what? Rivka and his wife will sleep in the pantry?” Tess snorted. “I don’t think so. I know I wouldn’t if—”

  “They won’t have to sleep in the pantry,” Nash told her. “There are other rooms in this house—Guldana’s law offices.”

  Rivka’s wife was a lawyer? Had been a lawyer was more like it—under the current regime, women weren’t allowed to practice law.

  Unless they did it behind not just closed doors but . . . Suddenly all those locked doors made sense.

  God, Tess couldn’t imagine having her career—everything she’d worked so hard to achieve—taken from her. Simply because as a woman, she was no longer permitted to do such work.

  Like Guldana, she’d probably keep on working, and just pray she didn’t get caught.

  “It’s dangerous for them, isn’t it?” she asked. “Having us stay here?”

  “They don’t know who we are,” Nash said, “or what we do. But yeah, it’s definitely a risk for them. It’s a risk for us, too. If they found out what we’re really up to, they might turn us in—to win some look-the-other-way points from the local warlords, you know?”

  They might also win some sort of reward money. Like nearly everyone in K-stan, they could probably use it.

  “We should clear out of here,” Nash continued. “It’s one thing if they offer us their room, another entirely if we ask for it. That’s just not done. And if they find us in here, that would be thought of as shockingly rude.”

  Because it was rude to be in here without their host’s permission. But as far as asking went . . . Tess narrowed her eyes at Nash. “You’re somehow going to make them offer us this room?”

  “Yeah,” Nash said. “Actually, we are.”

  We. Oh, no. “I’m not going to like this very much, am I?” she asked.

  He laughed. It was rueful, and she knew she wasn’t just going to dislike his plan, she was going to flat-out hate it. “Definitely not.”

  Great. Just great.

  “I’m guessing Rivka’ll get here about twenty minutes after sunup, after the curfew ends,” Nash told her as she followed him back down the stairs, back into the kitchen. “That gives us a couple of hours. But we should probably be ready for him in case he returns earlier.”

  Tess turned to look at Nash, but he purposely wasn’t meeting her gaze.

  “So,” she said, trying to be brisk and matter-of-fact. And trying to inject a little humor into the situation. “Which side of the bedroll do you like to sleep on? The right or the left?”

  Ah. Eye contact. For all of his shortcomings, the man certainly did have pretty eyes. “I’m not going to make you do that,” he said. “It’ll be enough that I’m in there with you.”

  “Sleeping where?” she asked. “Have you been in that pantry? Because we’re either spooning, or you’re sitting up. Which is no way to sleep.”

  Nash looked behind the curtain and swore softly. “I didn’t realize . . .” He turned back to her. “Okay. No problem. I’ll be out here until I hear Rivka coming home. But then I’m going to lie down next to you, make it look like we’ve been together all night, okay? Be aware that’s going to happen. Don’t be on autopilot and go into self-defense mode on me, all right?” He reached up gingerly to touch the back of his head. “Believe it or not, I’ve already had enough pain for this entire mission.”

  “So you’re going to just . . . stay awake?” He’d told her they had several hours to wait.

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “I’m not,” she countered. “I’m worried that you’re going to fall asleep out there and Rivka’s going to come back before you wake up. I really need to be upstairs in that room, James. Or I need to figure out a way to get phone service down here. I mean, I could put a sat-dish right on the roof but—”

  “No.” They both knew that that would be the equivalent of flying an American flag overhead, and then wearing FBI windbreakers over CIA T-shirts. Hello! Here we are! Notice us!

  But if she could get a dish way up high, higher than the church down the street, way up on the roof of the Grande Hotel . . . She didn’t say it aloud, but Nash certainly knew what she was thinking, because “No,” he said again. “Nuh-uh. I’ll get you that room. I’m not going to fall asleep.”

  “But if you do—”

  “It’s not going to happen.”

  “But—”

  “Look, I don’t sleep much when I’m home in my own bed. And after a day like—” He stopped. Swore.

  “After an awful day like today,” Tess whispered.

  Nash—Jimmy—actually looked embarrassed.

  “I had nightmares,” she told him. “When I fell asleep in the wagon.” Her dreams had been a terrible montage of dead and injured children, of grieving and frantic parents, of pain and sorrow and fear, and the persistent, ever present stink of death.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and really meant it. Probably because he knew what it was like to wake up sweating, heart pounding . . .

  “It’s a natural reaction,” she said. “Having nightmares, or even being unable to sleep after seeing . . .”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.” But it was clear that he believed that while having a nightmare was acceptable for her, such rules didn’t apply to him.

  “You’re allowed to be human, too,” Tess told him quietly.

  He nodded. “Yeah,” he said again, but again she knew he didn’t believe it. “I’ll be in in a few hours, when Rivka gets home.”

  He turned his back then, focusing on the contents of his bag.

  Tess had worked at the Agency long enough to recognize when she’d been dismissed, but she still hesitated before going behind the curtain.

  Because Jimmy Nash was in trouble. She’d worked at the Agency long enough to recognize that, too.

  “I’m here if you need me,” she said quietly.

  He turned to look at her, one elegant eyebrow raised in a perfect “Oh, really?” look, loaded with innuendo.

  “To talk,” she repeated, and, cursing him for being a jerk and herself for being a fool, she pushed past the curtain, all but scurrying into the pantry.

  Sophia climbed through an open window into a room that was sparsely furnished. It was obvious that the woman living here could ill afford a thief stealing her second-best burka.

  But she was trapped in this neighborhood with the sun about to rise, and she didn’t have a lot of options. She had to steal this robe and veil—it meant the difference between life and death.

  Taking the faded and carefully mended garment from the hook, Sophia dressed quietly, praying that its loss wouldn’t create unimaginable hardships for its previous owner.

  She knew she couldn’t delay—she still wasn’t convinced she’d lost the American. Still, before she went back out the window, she took the ring from her finger—the ring that she’d hoped would hel
p her pay for the falsified papers and passport she’d need to get out of the country—and left it dangling from the hook that had held this robe.

  She quietly hit the street, keeping to the shadows, noting the lightening of the sky in the east.

  There was no sign of the American. But that was nothing new. Sophia had been running away from him for hours now, and from the very moment she’d left the factory, there had been no hint that he was there—no footsteps behind her, no movement in the shadows. She didn’t even have that uneasy sense of being watched.

  But it had been so laughably easy to get away from him, she was sure he’d let her go.

  And why else would he have done that if not to follow her—to see where she went, whom she was working with, where her loyalties lay.

  She was not—was not—going back to her hiding place in the Hotel Français until she was certain he was no longer watching her. Having a safe haven with a source of water was beyond valuable. She would keep moving, keep running for days if she had to, before she returned there.

  But she wouldn’t have to.

  She’d led the American in circles in this part of town, moving not just through alleys but also across rooftops, wanting to keep as close as possible to the Saboor Square marketplace.

  As dawn approached, the city awoke. With the sun came the end of curfew, and people—mostly women—poured onto the street.

  Within minutes the stalls in the square were unlocked and opened, lines already queuing up for bread and fruit.

  Sophia stepped out of the alleyway and into the stream of similarly clad women, one of whom nearly knocked her over—blasted veils.

  Blasted veils—blessed veils. The apprehension she’d been carrying for hours faded as she blended with that crowd, as she became one of many—anonymous and unidentifiable beneath her robe and full veil.

  She knew with certainty that she’d finally lost the American.

  Because when it came to following someone, no one could possibly be that good.

  Tess had fallen asleep.

  It seemed almost criminal to wake her. Of course, maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe all Jimmy had to do was allow himself to be “caught” tippy-toeing out of Tess’s pantry, wearing only his boxers and a very satisfied smile on his face.

  He’d already stripped out of his clothes—the heat tonight was nearly unbearable. He messed up his hair as he heard the kitchen door open and Rivka and Guldana quietly came inside their house.

  “Where are they?” he heard Guldana whisper.

  “Maybe up and out, early?” Rivka replied.

  “Maybe,” Guldana echoed skeptically.

  The sheet Tess had used to cover herself had slid down off one arm. She was wearing an oversized T-shirt, and her short hair was neatly arranged.

  “Or maybe not yet even gone to sleep,” Guldana said, as sharp-eyed as always. “Those pillows over there are undented. And look—someone’s gone somewhere without his trousers.”

  Rivka would be fooled if Jimmy stepped out from behind this curtain right now. But Guldana would take one look at Tess—and she would look—and she would not see a bride who’d just shared a night of passion with her new husband. She would ask questions, watch them closely, whisper to Rivka, wonder what they were up to. . . .

  Tess wanted that upstairs room. Jimmy tried to convince himself that that was his only motive as he stripped off his boxers and crawled beneath that sheet.

  She stirred as he tried to nudge her over. There just wasn’t enough room for the two of them. He was practically on top of her.

  But maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

  And indeed, she reached for him, pulling him closer, warm and sleepy and soft and sweet-smelling and . . .

  Oh, yeah.

  “Rivka’s home,” he breathed into her ear, hoping she wouldn’t take his expanding response to her too personally, but before he could apologize or even shift back, away from her, she kissed him.

  And okay, all right. That was good. It no doubt looked freaking realistic, because it felt unbelievably real. Jimmy tried to project himself out of body, to look down and see what Rivka and Guldana would see when they peeked behind the curtain.

  They’d see a man who wanted to get laid more than he wanted to keep breathing.

  They’d see a woman who had spent all of the night, right up to that point, completely untouched.

  He quickly tousled Tess’s hair and pulled her T-shirt—not the sexiest of nightwear for a new bride—up to her neck.

  She stopped kissing him long enough to yank her shirt up and over her head—after the Gentleman’s Den that shouldn’t have been such a surprise, yet it still was. Because there she was, the Tess of his dreams, lying naked beneath him, with that slow, sleepy smile and those freckles on a nose that was almost too cute to describe, and he was so totally gone.

  He was male, he was human, and it was a classic example of cause and effect. Breasts in the face—Christ, she was even more beautiful than he remembered—caused a definite physical response he could no longer hide.

  He’d been mostly holding his own up to that point, but it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Or rather, it made the camel, so to speak, impossible for either of them to ignore.

  And yet Tess didn’t seem to mind. She kissed him again, or maybe he kissed her—Jimmy wasn’t sure. But either way, she wrapped her arms around him in the most convincing embrace. She even rubbed up against him, making a sound that was unbelievably sexy. It was a sound that even Rivka, who was nearly completely deaf in one ear, had to have heard.

  “What was that?” Jimmy heard him ask his wife. He didn’t hear Guldana’s response because—hey now!—Tess had reached between them, wrapped her fingers around him and . . .

  No condom, no condom! What the hell was she doing? The sheet was covering them, they didn’t actually need to . . .

  But he couldn’t pull away from her. Not while Rivka and Guldana were sneaking up to the curtain-covered doorway.

  It was right then, as she guided him down and pressed her hips up, as he slid deeply inside of her with nothing between them, groaning aloud at the sensation—soft, wet, hot, it was sex with the volume cranked up to a hundred and eleven—that he realized she was still half asleep.

  Or rather, he realized this at the very moment she finally and fully woke up.

  “Oh, my God!” she said.

  From Rivka and Guldana’s perspective, as they pushed aside the curtain, it surely seemed as if Tess were reacting to the sudden appearance of an audience.

  But Jimmy knew better.

  He leapt off her as Rivka roared, “What’s going on in my house?”

  Jimmy scrambled for his boxers even as Tess yanked the sheet up and around herself. “I’m sorry,” he said in both English and the K-stani dialect Rivka and Guldana spoke, as he thrust first one leg and then the other into his shorts. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I just . . . I thought . . .” Come on, Jimbo, stop babbling and stick to the script! But oh, Christ, what was the script?

  His entire brain was scrambled, and all he could think about was Tess and how badly he wanted to finish what they’d started. What he’d started, because, damn it, she wasn’t even awake when she, when they . . .

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, but Tess wasn’t looking at him.

  “We didn’t expect you home so soon,” she said to Rivka and Guldana.

  Rivka looked at her, looked at Jimmy, his face stony, his eyes cold. “I must ask you to leave my house immediately. All of you.”

  Guldana touched her husband’s arm. “They’re American. They’re young. Don’t you remember being young?”

  Tess reached for Jimmy, her fingers warm and solid against his leg, as Guldana murmured, “Besides, we need the money,” to her angry husband.

  Jimmy looked down into Tess’s face, into her eyes.

  “James,” she said as she squeezed his leg, sending him a silent message with her eyes. Come on, Nash, get back in the ga
me. “Honey. I think you better introduce me.”

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  She sensed him before she saw him, as she was washing the sweat and grime of the night from her face.

  Or maybe she smelled him when she turned off the water.

  Not that he smelled bad. Just different. Warm. Male.

  American.

  There was no way he could have followed her through that market. No way. And yet . . .

  Sophia slowly turned from the sink, her face and hands dripping with water, half hoping that fatigue and fear were playing tricks on her, making her sense and smell things that weren’t really there. Maybe this old hotel still played host to the spirits of guests from the past. She’d heard once that Leonardo DiCaprio had stayed here, en route to some on-location movie set in the Far East—was it Thailand?

  Maybe . . .

  But no such luck. He really was standing there. The American from the factory, from Lartet’s bar.

  He was leaning against the pink-tiled wall of the ladies’ room, arms folded casually across his deceptively slight-looking chest.

  Fear crashed sharply through her, but she was completely cornered. Even if she could reach the windows before him, even if she could get them open, they were too high up and too narrow to squeeze through. There was nowhere to run—nothing to do but stand there, looking back at him.

  He’d somehow gotten through the locked door in the outer room without her hearing him come in.

  He’d somehow followed her all the way back here, to the hotel. . . .

  “How did you—”

  He cut her off. “I’m pretty sure I get to ask the questions first.”

  It took every ounce of willpower she had to keep her eyes on his face, not to glance toward the pallet she’d made of stolen blankets—her bed—under which she’d hidden that second little gun. What she wouldn’t give to have it right now, in her hand.

  Instead he handed her the clean rag that she was using as a towel, and she dried her face with shaking hands.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.

  Sophia nodded, but she didn’t—couldn’t—believe him.