She met his eyes—something she once wouldn’t have been capable of doing—and extended her mug in a two-handed grip. “Thanks.”
He poured in silence. As he’d cooked in silence after he’d heard her stirring in the bedroom and decided that if he was hungry—which he was—she was probably hungry too.
Besides, it had given him something to do other than think about her long, slim legs sliding between his sheets. Something to do other than wonder what was up with her or pressure her for answers or wish to hell he’d had the good sense to take Ethan and Darcy up on their offer to take her home with them.
Instead, he’d held solitary vigil beside her bed for an hour or so after Ethan and Darcy had left with orders to call if he needed anything.
He hadn’t called. He’d just sat there. Elbows on his spread knees, chin propped on his clasped hands. Watching her sleep. Cataloging her delicate features in the pale bedroom light. Resisting the urge to run the back of his fingers across her cheekbone just to touch the freckles scattered there. Feeling the weight and the whoop of his heart kicking up every time she made a sound, whenever her eyelids flickered, when she jerked restlessly in her sleep.
He’d finally made himself leave the bedroom. Made himself shut the door behind him after he’d gathered her wet clothes to toss in his dryer.
What he’d discovered when he’d emptied her jeans pockets had his heart double pumping—and wondering, What the hell? On a hunch, he’d gone outside, searched around his shrubs and found a backpack soaked with rain. He hadn’t thought twice about rummaging through its contents. What he’d found inside had set him on his ass.
And there he’d sat. In his dark living room.
Where he’d brooded and wondered and worried about more than the possibility of Amy waking up alone and scared.
Well, he thought, watching her over the steam ring above the lip of his coffee mug, this woman wasn’t scared. A little on edge, maybe, but not scared. Free of whatever demons had haunted her sleep, she gave every appearance of being strong, together and composed.
And yet…
Can’t let them find me here.
She hadn’t yet uttered a word of explanation about her sudden appearance at his door. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Or maybe he was. He realized, as he watched her, that in the rare moments when he’d let himself entertain thoughts of seeing her again, he’d still seen himself in the “savior” role. Pictured her needing him. And against all things reasonable, he’d liked the picture.
Which was crazy because he didn’t now and never had wanted anyone needing him. Relying on him. Depending on him. Not on a personal level. Professionally, yes. It was the nature of the job. Emotional dependence, however, he’d wanted no part of it. And yet inexplicably he wanted it from Amy.
Didn’t matter. Now that she was rested, he wasn’t so certain she needed anyone now, anyway. Him included. And that knowledge spurred one more reaction he didn’t want to explore: disappointment.
“More eggs?” he offered, placing the glass coffee carafe back on the burner and tried to deal with the undiluted truth that she could stand on her own two feet this go-round.
Which still didn’t clarify why she was here. Or explain the contents of her jeans and backpack.
“No. Thanks. Those were great. I really appreciate it.”
Yeah, he thought, a different woman from the one he’d dragged out of hell.
Now that she’d had some shut-eye, some food in her belly, it seemed she didn’t need to be handled with kid gloves.
Which was a good thing. Because the gloves were about to come off.
Call it relief. Call it worry. Call it shock at her appearance out of the blue. Call it anything you wanted, but after several hours of concern, he felt mean suddenly. After six months of uncertainty and unknowns, he felt mean and mad and torn between worry and frustration.
She was about to bear the brunt of it.
“So,” he said, as an anger that had simmered below the surface for almost half a year peaked to a slow, rolling boil. He started with what had been eating at him the longest. He’d get to the rest of it later. “You just forgot to say good-bye, or what?”
He gave her credit. She didn’t flinch at the acid in his voice. She didn’t pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about either. And he didn’t regret the bite in his tone nearly enough.
“I am truly, truly sorry for leaving like that.” She looked at him through blue eyes brimming with apology.
“Oh, well.” He nodded sagely. “Then that makes it all better, doesn’t it?”
She heaved a deep breath, looked away from his bitter smile to her coffee mug. Hugged it with both hands. “No. It doesn’t make anything better.”
His first raw burst of rage—and yeah, hurt—spent, he settled himself down. Regretted that he’d sniped at her. He softened his tone. “You didn’t think I’d worry about you? That we wouldn’t all worry about you?”
She closed her eyes, tipped her head back. “I had a choice to make,” she said then met his eyes again. “I could stick around, become more and more dependent on you and your family for support—and believe me, you all made it so easy for me to stay…and I will always be grateful for that—” She paused, gathered herself. “Or, I could do the right thing and leave.”
“The right thing?” he repeated, concern now running tandem with a stubborn and lingering anger. “The right thing for you? For me?”
Sometime before she’d wandered out of the bedroom and shown up in his kitchen and found him cooking, she’d finger combed the tangles out of her hair. Silky blond strands draped past her shoulders, fell across a face that was as beautiful as it was sober. She dragged them back with a steady hand.
“Look. I owe you…you and your brothers…Manny and Darcy…I owe you all more than I can ever repay.”
He worked a muscle in his jaw. Hard. “When did any of us ever give you the impression we expected payback?”
“Never,” she said with a slow shake of her head. “And that’s why I had to leave.”
He grunted. “Is that supposed to make sense to me?”
She looked miserable.
He didn’t let it waylay him. He wanted answers. And he wanted them now.
“Okay, let’s try something I can make sense of,” he suggested when she held her silence. “You left because you thought if you stuck around, you might drag us into something more dangerous than the trouble you were in on Jolo—does that about sum it up?”
Ah. He’d jarred her. He saw uncertainty now. And shock. He’d surprised her. He was about to surprise her some more.
“So…if that was the case then, why isn’t it the case now? Why are you here, Amy? Why did you come back?”
She drew in a bracing breath, looked him in the eye and seemed to make a decision on the spot. “You know what? Chalk it up to a really bad decision, okay?” She stood. “I’ll just get out of your hair.”
“Right.” He grunted. “That’s gonna happen.”
Her gaze flashed to his; his anger had surprised her. So did his next question.
“Who can’t find you here?” he asked point-blank.
She blinked slowly. “What?”
“Before you passed out. You said: ‘Can’t let them find me here.’ Who can’t find you?”
He could see her mind racing a hundred miles an hour behind her eyes. She was going try to lie to him. Tell him she must have been delirious. That wasn’t going to happen either. He was about to make certain of it.
“Your grandfather? Is this about him? Yeah.” He nodded when panic flickered in her eyes. “I know about the family you said you didn’t have.”
In the depths of the rain forest, hiding out from the Abu Sayyaf terrorists who were hunting them like dogs, she’d lied when she’d told him she had no family waiting for her back in the States.
Dallas had known the truth shortly after they’d flown back to West Palm and he’d caved in to the call of the Web and done a backg
round search on her.
“How?” He preempted the question forming on her lips. “Because I’m good at my job,” he said flatly and reached for the coffee carafe again.
While she stood in stunned silence, he filled his mug and sat back down on a stool opposite hers so the countertop was between them. It felt better that way. It kept him a safe distance from all her blond hair and soft skin and…Jesus. This wasn’t about his unwanted attraction to this woman. This was about something much darker…although the outline of her soft breasts pressing against his t-shirt made for thoughts of the darkest, most carnal kind.
“E.D.E.N. is a security firm,” he reminded her when she reluctantly sat back down at the counter and gripped her coffee mug in both hands as if she needed it to hold on to. “Background searches are part of what we do.”
And what he’d found out when he’d conducted a search on Amy Walker was that she had a grandfather whose name repeatedly popped up in conjunction with some very serious, very scary shit. She also had a mother. A resident of a mental institution in upstate New York.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he added quietly, and still felt like an ass because he’d purposefully gone for the shock value by mentioning her mother.
Only her eyes betrayed her reaction to his words. And he saw it all there. Pain, panic, then a concentrated bid to mask her emotions. It wasn’t working. She was too shaken. Good. He wanted her unsettled. He wanted her talking to him.
Her continued silence and the rhythmic tap, tap, tap of her thumbs on the rim of her coffee mug gave away of how hard he’d jolted her composure. He was going to rock it some more.
“Jesus, Amy. You disappeared six months ago. Now, here you are again. Out of the blue. Running on fumes. Call me crazy, but I’ve gotta figure there’s a tie-in to your abduction in Manila, the fact that you lied to me about having a family and the reason you showed up at my door. I’ve gotta figure there’s a damn good reason.
“Which means, sweetheart,” he added, more gently but in a tone leaving no room for doubt, “I’m not even close to letting you go.”
He could see her struggle. She wanted to leave. She wanted to stay. What she didn’t want to do was talk.
So he broke the silence for her. “How about we start with this? Your grandfather, Edward Walker, popped up on some pretty dicey sites—sites like PARCVRAMC.”
Again, her silence told him she knew all about the nonprofit organization set up to educate the public about sadistic abuse, ritualized torture and invasive nonconsensual mind control experimentation.
“He was referenced several times on the site,” he continued ruthlessly, ignoring the guilt slicing through him when her face drained of color. “Along with a list of German scientists and physicians who found refuge after World War II in any number of countries—the U.S. included—and were granted funding to conduct ‘medical’ research.”
Medical research, hell. They were talking Manchurian Candidate shit. And when he’d discovered it, it had made Dallas as edgy as hell.
Watching Amy’s face now, he fully understood the reason. He’d struck a vein. And he intended to mine it until she gave him the goods or the vein played out.
“Amy. Talk to me.”
She closed her eyes, lowered her forehead to her palm. “I shouldn’t have come.” The agony in her voice broke his heart. “I never intended to involve you in this.”
He didn’t back off. “Involve me in what?”
Silence.
He dragged in a breath, then went for the throat.
“Let’s go back to something you said earlier. You feel the need to repay me for saving your life on Jolo? Okay. Fine. Here’s what you owe me. An explanation. A good one. And I want to collect right now.”
His anger built when she remained stubbornly silent. “Can’t find a place to start? Okay. I’ll break the ice. Let’s talk about these.”
He dug into his pocket for the IDs he’d found in her wet jeans. Gaze locked on her face, he tossed them on the counter in front of her. There were five in all. All fake, all with her picture. All with different names, different hair color.
She stared at the IDs; her face drained to pale when he lifted her backpack from the floor behind the cabinets. He set it up onto the counter and fished around inside. Along with a cell phone, he tossed a short black wig, a pair of brown-tinted contact lenses and a fistful of cash onto the granite beside the IDs. Oh, yeah. And a fucking gun.
He pulled out the Glock 30 and an ammo pouch stuffed with two fully loaded magazines. He checked the pistol, ejected a round and swore under his breath at the size of the hollow-point cartridge. It looked like a teacup loaded on a .45 ACP case.
He extracted the clip from the grip, counted nine cartridges where there should have been ten. Balancing the magazine on his open palm, he held it out toward her. “Yeah. Let’s talk about these. And let’s do it now.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Amy had always remembered Dallas Garrett’s eyes as warm, welcoming. Like a low blue flame, a sunny day ocean swell. No warmth penetrated those eyes now. They were blue ice. Glittering sapphire. Opal hard.
He was angry. And he had every right to be.
It was aparent from the set of his broad shoulders as a jolt of thunder rocked the room. He abruptly stalked across the room to the sliders that opened on to a small deck. He pushed aside the curtain, then stared at the rain pumeling the dark. Settling himself down, she suspected.
God, what had she been thinking when she’d come here? Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she hadn’t been thinking at all. She’d been scared. She’d been hiding out for six months, relying on disguises and a low profile to keep her identity hidden. It had taken a toll. So had driving down the length of the East Coast for two solid days and the fact that she hadn’t slept in three.
She recognized now that she’d been in shock after the incident in New York. She’d killed a man. Almost died herself. She’d needed a safe place to fall. Just until she caught her breath, got her batteries recharged.
Dallas Garrett was the only safe place she knew. And no matter how hard she tried to deny it, she’d made the decision to come to him the night she’d made her first kill. It had been a wrong decision. At least it was wrong for him.
After a long moment, he turned, walked back again and stopped right in front of her. “Amy? What in the hell are you doing carrying? And talk about overkill. Christ—Corbon 200-grain Flying Ashtrays?”
She glanced at the magazine in his hand, her eyes defiant, her mind’s eye fixed on the large hole dead center in the middle of a hired assassin’s forehead. “They leave a big hole going in and an even bigger one going out.”
“And you need this much firepower, why?”
It was more than a question. It was a command that brought her head up and sent her heart pounding again.
He wanted the truth. He deserved it. But did he deserve to be dragged into the thick of this? Guilt hit her harder than his anger. Just coming here could place him in danger.
“I’m already knee deep in whatever is happening with you,” he said, as if reading her mind. “Give me something. Tell me what the hell is going on with you. I can help. You know I can help.”
Yeah, she thought, feeling equal measures of relief and defeat. He could help. And before this was over, she would probably need help. But she didn’t…she really didn’t want to mix him up in this.
So why are you here?
Because she hadn’t been able to stay away.
It was that simple. And she’d been that weak when she’d headed for Florida.
Okay. So she’d made a mistake. Well she was rested now. Could think clearly. And she knew what she had to do.
She snapped the magazine from his hand, pushed off the stool and attempted to look nonchalant. “The gun is for my protection, okay? That’s all. Just in case. After Jolo…well, after Jolo I felt the need to be able to defend myself. It’s that simple.”
He wasn’t buying it. His next questio
ns told her just how much he wasn’t buying. “And the wig? The colored contacts? Those for your protection too?”
“Fashion statement,” she lied with a shrug and started stuffing her things into her backpack. “And I really do have to go.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, narrowed his eyes. “On the off chance I’m actually going to let that happen, where exactly would you go?”
She checked her stash of cash then picked up the Glock along with the IDs. “Look. I was just passing through. I thought…well, I thought I’d stop by. See how you were. Okay?”
“For the last time, no. It’s not okay.” He gripped her upper arm, spun her around toward him. “Cut the crap. How many ways can I say it? You’re not leaving. Not until I know exactly what’s going on with you. And if you think you’re protecting me from some big bad evil, well, forget it. I can handle myself. What I can’t handle is worrying about you.”
And what Amy couldn’t handle was something happening to him. He was so ready to come to her defense. To slay dragons for her again if she asked him.
And she just couldn’t ask him. She also understood that if she told him what she was about to do, he’d be on a flight with her to Argentina.
His eyes were so blue. So troubled. So angry. So determined. And the longer she stood here, the harder it was to resist a compelling need to tell him everything. When that had changed, she didn’t know. She’d left here six months ago with no intention of ever coming back. It had hurt. Hurt a lot to know she’d never see him again. Hurt to know he must think she was ungrateful when she owed him her life.
It hurt now to look at him. His expression hard as onyx, he waited for her to start talking.
Sweetheart.
That’s what he’d called her when she’d awakened earlier in the throes of a nightmare. A nightmare that she now knew had once been all too real.
Sweetheart.
It was a throwaway term of endearment. And she shouldn’t give it import. She shouldn’t want to melt into the strength he offered.
Cindy Gerard - [Bodyguards 06] Page 5