by Nicole Helm
Maybe if she told him the exact location of the holes she’d had to dig two summers ago, Jaime could find out what was buried there. Maybe that would be enough. Surely a dead body or two would be something.
If they could get through the next two days, and The Stallion left, surely Jaime could do a little figurative and literal digging.
She could make a map, like the one they’d made when trying to figure out the locations of the other compounds. But it would be difficult without paper. It would be difficult without being outside and working through landmarks. Maybe Jaime could sneak her out once The Stallion was gone.
She very nearly laughed at herself. Yes, after eight years she was going to sneak outside and bring The Stallion down with an undercover FBI agent. That was about as plausible as getting kidnapped, she supposed. But then what? She’d go back to her life? Eight years missing and she’d just waltz back into her old life? Twenty-eight with eight years of absolutely no education or work experience. Eight years without a life.
Maybe she could add digging shallow graves to her résumé. Excellent seamstress. Know just where to hide the drugs.
This was such stupidity. Why was she even going down this road? The future had never held any appeal, and it still didn’t. Jaime was here to do a job, and she’d do whatever he needed, but she certainly wasn’t going to allow fantasies about escaping. About helping him or saving him from his gruesome undercover work.
The door opened and Gabby’s heart jumped to her throat. Not as it had the night before. That night, she’d been scared. This night she was anything but.
She scrambled into a sitting position. But instead of staying in the dark, or saying her name, Jaime turned on the light. She blinked against the sudden brightness.
“I apologize,” he said, his tone strangely bland, maybe a little tense. “I should’ve warned you.”
“It’s all right,” she replied carefully, trying to read the blank expression on his face. He was tense and not like she’d ever seen him before. Because this wasn’t his Rodriguez acting, and it wasn’t exactly the honest and competent Jaime, either.
“Is everything all right?” she asked after he stood there in silence for ticking seconds.
“I want you to know that it will be. But there is some uncomfortable information I have to share with you.”
Her heart sank, hard and sharp. She realized who this Jaime was. FBI Agent Jaime. A little aloof, delivering bad news. Probably how he delivered the news to a family that someone was dead.
“Uncomfortable?” she repeated, because surely if another one of her family members was dead it would be more than uncomfortable.
“If I could spare you this, I would,” he said, taking a step toward her, some of his natural-born compassion leaking through. “But I have to do what The Stallion asks right now.”
A shiver of fear took hold of her, with deep awful claws, and she pressed herself into the corner of where her bed met the wall.
But this was Jaime, and he wasn’t going to hurt her just because The Stallion told him to. She wanted to believe that. But for a moment she wondered if something in her would have to be sacrificed to take The Stallion down.
“It’s just a message, Gabby,” he said softly. “I won’t hurt you. I promise. No matter what.”
Part of her wanted to cry. Over the fact he could see through her so easily. The fact she could feel guilty over making him think that she thought he was going to hurt her. She wanted to cry at the unfairness of it all, and that was just...so seven years ago.
She straightened with a deep breath and fixed him with her most competent I-can-handle-anything expression. “Just tell me. Say it outright.”
“The Stallion is after your sister.”
Gabby thought she couldn’t be surprised at what horrors The Stallion could do. After all, he’d gleefully informed her of her father’s heart attack. Made it very clear she had been the cause. She knew The Stallion killed, and extorted, and hurt people.
He was after her sister. Her Nattie. There was no way to be calm in the face of it. She jumped off the bed and reached for Jaime.
“He doesn’t have her,” he said calmly. So damn calm. “And she’s with a Texas Ranger who will do everything in his power to protect her—that, I know for sure.”
“But he’s after her. He’s after her. Purposefully. Why? Why?”
Jaime took her by the shoulders, looking her directly in the eye. She could see all of that compassion and all of the right he wanted to do. No matter how she told herself not to believe in it. No matter how she told herself it was a figment of her imagination and that he couldn’t really be good, she felt it. She believed it and knew it. No amount of reason seemed to change the fact that she trusted him.
“She has something to do with the dead messenger. I don’t know the whole story yet, but I think she knows something. She’s a hypnotist working with the Rangers, and if she’s with the police... This could be... It could be a positive development. I know it doesn’t feel like that, but this could be a positive.”
“Is she...is she looking for me?” Gabby asked, ashamed that her voice wavered. But Nattie, a hypnotist, working with the Rangers? It didn’t make sense. And Gabby was afraid of whatever the answer would be. If Natalie was looking for her, Nat had wasted eight years of her life. If she wasn’t and this was some cosmic coincidence...
Jaime’s strong hands squeezed her shoulders. Comforting. Strong. “I don’t know. I don’t know why your sister was in that interrogation room with The Stallion’s messenger. I don’t know why...” He shook his head, regret and frustration in the movement. “I wish I knew more, but I don’t. But The Stallion wants you to know he’s after your sister because he wants to break you.”
Maybe if it had been her and The Stallion alone delivering his message, it would have succeeded in breaking her. But something about having Jaime there, something about feeling his strength and his certainty that this could work out...
“He won’t break me,” Gabby said firmly.
Jaime’s mouth curved, one of those kind smiles that tried to comfort her. It made her feel as though...as though there was hope. That was dangerous. Hope was such a dangerous thing here.
“You’re an incredibly brave woman,” Jaime said, giving her shoulders yet another squeeze.
The compliment warmed her far too much. Much more so than when the girls gave it to her. Then it felt like a weight, a responsibility, but when Jaime said it, it sounded like an asset.
“It’s not exactly brave to survive a kidnapping. You don’t get much of a choice.” No, choice was not something she had any of.
“There is always a choice. And the ones you’ve made have made this possible, Gabby. The things you remember, the theories you’ve come up with... You’re making this all the more possible. I know you don’t believe in endings, or maybe you can’t see the possibility of them, but I am going to end this. One way or another, we will end him.”
We. It was that final straw, a thing she couldn’t fight. To be a “we” after so long of feeling like an I. Like the only one who could do something or be something or fight something.
“I believe you,” she whispered. Too much. She shouldn’t feel it, and she shouldn’t say it. She should feel none of the things washing through her at the way his face changed over her saying she believed him.
She shouldn’t want to kiss this man she’d known for two days. She shouldn’t want to feel what it would be like for him to kiss her for real. Without weapons and fake identities between them.
But there was something kind of beautiful about being a kidnap victim in this case. That she had no life to ruin, no self to endanger. Nothing to lose, really. There was only her.
What choices did she have? Jaime thought she had a choice, but he was wrong. She was nothing here. A ghost at best. What she did
or didn’t do didn’t truly matter.
Even now, with The Stallion after Natalie, there was nothing she could do except hope and pray the Texas Ranger with her was a smart man, and a good man, and would protect Natalie the way Jaime was protecting Gabby right now.
Because no matter that he shouldn’t, she knew that was the decision he’d made. He would protect her above himself.
Tentatively she touched her fingertips to the vee of his chest between the straps of guns. She could feel underneath her fingertips the heavy beating of his heart. A little fast, as though he had the same kinds of swirling emotions inside him that she had inside her. She glanced up at him through her lashes, trying to read the expression on his face. A face she’d memorized. A face she thought she would always remember now.
There was enough of a height difference that she would have to pull him down to meet her mouth.
It was such an absurd thought, the idea of wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling his lush mouth to hers. She smiled a little at the insanity of her brain. And he smiled back.
“Thank you for that,” he said.
She had lost the thread of the conversation and had no idea what he was thanking her for. All she could think about was the fact he was stepping away from her. Letting her shoulders go and making enough distance that her fingers fell from his chest.
“I should let you sleep,” he said, backing slowly away and toward the door.
Gabby should leave it at that. She should let him go and she should sleep. But instead she shook her head.
“Please don’t go. Stay.”
* * *
IT WAS WRONG. It would be wrong to stay. It would be wrong to let her touch him. It would be wrong to let her belief in him change anything. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was doing his duty. His duty included protecting her, not...
“There are things I could tell you,” Gabby offered, for the first time in all their minutes together seeming nervous without fear behind it. “More things to help with making sure we can end this.”
It didn’t escape him the way she halted over the word “end.” Like she still didn’t quite believe a life outside these walls could exist, but she was trying to believe in one. For him? For herself? He had no idea.
He only knew that everything he should do was tangled up in things he shouldn’t. Right and wrong didn’t always make sense anymore, and it would take nothing at all for him to lose sight of the fact that anything more than a business partnership with her was a gross dereliction of duty. It was taking advantage of a woman who had already been taken so much advantage of.
But she wanted him to stay. She wanted him to stay. Not the other way around.
“I was just thinking before you got here that if I could tell you where the holes were that we dug two years ago, you might be able to connect it all together. If The Stallion does go in a few days, you’d be able to dig it up or something, and... Maybe that would be... Surely finding a body would be enough. Your superiors would want to press charges at that point, wouldn’t they?”
The way she cavalierly talked about digging holes for bodies scraped him raw. It had always been hard to accept that there were people in the world who could hurt other people in such cruel and unusual ways. He’d always had a hard time reconciling the world as he wanted it—with law and order and good people—to the world that was with people who broke those laws and that order and had no good intentions whatsoever.
He didn’t know what to do with the kinds of feelings that twisted inside him when he knew that nothing should have ever happened to her. She had been a normal girl, picking her father up from work, and she’d been kidnapped, measured and emotionally tortured into this bizarre world of being hidden away. Not touched, but put to work digging graves and hiding drugs.
“Don’t you think?” she repeated, stepping closer to him.
She reached out to touch him and he sidestepped. He was too afraid if she touched him again, all of the certainty inside him would simply disappear and he would do something he would come to deeply regret. Something that would go against everything he’d been taught and everything he believed.
He was there to protect her, and that meant any deeper connection—physical or otherwise—was not ethical. It was screwing with a victim, and he wouldn’t allow himself to fall that low. He had to keep a dispassionate consideration for her own good, not develop a passionate one.
“It’s possible that evidence would be sufficient,” he finally managed to say, his voice sounding raw. “But even if The Stallion goes to another compound, Layne and Wallace will still be here. Me doing any kind of digging is going to be hard to explain.”
“Not if you told them that The Stallion ordered you to do it. He stays away for three months. So you’d have time before they’d tell him, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know how they communicate with him when The Stallion isn’t here. I’m sure there’d be a way for them to keep tabs on me, and we both know that’s exactly what Layne will be doing whether he’s supposed to be or not.”
“What about Wallace?” Gabby demanded.
Jaime scratched a hand through his hair. “I don’t think Wallace is the brightest, but he’s the most loyal. Layne is out to get me. Wallace will do whatever it takes to protect The Stallion. Either way, I don’t think I have much hope of getting anything past them. At least, not anything tangible like digging.”
Noticing her shoulders slump, he hurried on.
“But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful information. Maybe we can’t use it right this second to shut this whole thing down, but every last shred of evidence we have when we finally get to that point is another nail in The Stallion’s coffin. Men like him—powerful, wealthy men with connections... They’re not easy to take down. We need it all. So it’s still important.”
“Right. Well. What else could I tell you that would help?” she asked hopefully.
A million things, probably, but he thought distance might do them both a bit of good. Too close, too alone, too much...bed taking up a portion of the room. “Don’t you want to sleep?” Because he wanted to convince himself sleep was why he was thinking about beds.
She looked at him curiously. “I haven’t had much to do in eight years except sleep. Day in and day out.”
“Right, but...” He struggled to find a rebuttal and failed.
The curious look on her face didn’t disappear and he couldn’t exactly analyze why he suddenly felt bizarrely nervous. He’d been prepared for a lot of things as an undercover FBI agent, but not what to do with nerves over a woman.
A woman he’d known for all of two days. Who knew his secret now, and was thus her own dangerous weapon, but even in his most suspicious mode, he couldn’t believe she’d turn him in. They were each other’s best hope.
“Is it hard to switch back and forth?” she asked earnestly.
“Switch back and forth?” He’d been so lost in his own thoughts he was having a hard time following hers.
“Between the real you and this character you have to play?”
“Are you sure they’re so different?” He’d tried to say it somewhat sarcastically, or maybe even challengingly, but the minute it came out of his mouth, he knew what he really wanted to hear was that she could tell the difference. That she absolutely knew he was two separate people. Because if she could see it, if this stranger could see it, then maybe it was true. Maybe he really hadn’t turned into someone else altogether.
“I’ve been nothing but Rodriguez for two years. You’re the only one who knows any different. I don’t know if it’s easy. I only know that... This is the first time I’ve had to do it.”
She stepped toward him again and he should sidestep again. He knew he should. Everything about Gabby called to him on a deep cellular level, though, and he didn’t know how to keep fighting
that call. There was only so much fighting a man could do.
She brushed her fingertips across his chest again. “Do you always wear these?”
Jaime looked down at the weapons strapped to his chest. “I try to. Not a lot of trustworthy men around.”
Her fingertips traced the leather strap, which was strangely intimate considering the fact he never let anyone touch his weapons. It was a part of the persona he’d created. Slightly paranoid, always armed and always dangerous. No one touched his weapons.
Yet, he was letting her do just that. Touching them in ways she couldn’t begin to understand he was touched.
“You could take them off in here.” She looked up at him through the long spikes of her eyelashes.
It was tempting enough to lose his breath for a moment. “Wouldn’t be smart,” he rasped, surprised how visceral the reaction was to the thought of not being strapped to the hilt with guns and ammo. What would that feel like? He’d forgotten.
“Right. Of course not.” She offered him a smile, something he supposed was an attempt at comfort, and that, too, was out of the ordinary. Something he didn’t remember.
“I have to go.”
“Why?”
He should lie. Tell her he had important henchman duties to see to, but the truth came out instead. “I can’t stay in my own skin too long. It’s too hard to go back otherwise.”
Then she did the most incomprehensible thing of all. She rolled up on her tiptoes and brushed her lips across his cheek. His cheek. Soft and sweet. A soothing gesture. She came back down to be flat-footed and gave him a perilous smile.
“Then you should go. Good night, Jaime.”
That, he knew, to be a challenge. He should correct her. Tell her that she absolutely had to call him Rodriguez. Lecture her until she wished he’d never come into her room.
Instead he returned her smile and said, “Good night, Gabby,” before he left.