But while she was unable to see the way forward, she had to cling to the dangerous illusion that she had some control over her world, by clutching at the only escape route she had. “M-my name is Beth Silver. You—you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know Danny’s father. Please go.” Even I can hear the tremors in my voice, she thought in disgust. I give more away every second.
So it appeared. His gaze was too knowing as he rasped, “So you can run again?”
His hooded gaze remained locked on her, keeping her pinned and still like a butterfly in a specimen case. Her only movement was in her heart, beating like a wild thing, intent on escape. Keep your secrets. Keep control! “Who is your group?” she demanded, still shaking. “W-what is their name? To trust you with my son’s life, I have to know who they are. Who sent you here? Does the government know you’re here? Will the local police back up your story?”
“No to the last. Almost nobody has heard of us, but the prime minister of Australia or New Zealand will confirm my story, and I’ll take you to Parliament House to prove it if I have to. Come with me,” he whispered, so tender, so understanding. Not judging her for the things she’d had to do to stay alive and free. “I just risked my career—all the stability I’ve worked my whole adult life to achieve—to tell you the truth. You know what we want from you, and why. We know you took the tape as insurance against him. I was in Amalza trying to infiltrate his fortress. We’d only just discovered the tape was in existence. In return for your trust, and the tape, I will keep you safe—and I’ll take Falcone down. You’ll be free of him forever.” He moved closer, filling her shivering spirit with heat and fire and the unerring force of his inner strength. “Lean on me. I swear, you will not be left alone. I’ll be with you every moment until you have the safety and freedom to choose your own life.”
She couldn’t make her throat work to answer. A dark web spun around her, terror and death and the fear of trusting anyone, enmeshed with tiny whispers of tenderness and hope and faith.
Was McCall the real deal, or a master spinner of lies?
She wanted, oh, how she needed to be able to trust him, but where Danny’s life was concerned, could she take the risk? She looked down and away, shamed and foolish, made stupid by her own hidden hunger. “I can’t afford to believe you, McCall. Just go.”
“Is that really what you want, Beth?” His lush, graveled words, like knife-edged dark satin, unlocked a floodgate of desire inside her body she hadn’t known until McCall strode back into her life, making her feel like a woman again with a single, searing look. “It’s your call. I can go, and leave you alone. I can sleep on the sofa, be here to protect you. Or I can come to your bed and give you what your body’s telling me you need so badly you can’t think anymore.”
The heat his words evoked left her nerveless, breathless and wanting. “I—I don’t know you.” A flimsy defense even to her own ears, but like flotsam after a shipwreck, it was all she had left to cling to.
“Need like this doesn’t follow convention. It just happens, and when it comes, it explodes. It’s happened to you and me. I could control it, if it were only me—but it’s not. You want this as much as I do.” He turned her body so she faced him, and tipped up her face. She trembled at the touch and his hot, hot eyes, so much that her knees almost gave way. “You need the release from unbearable stress and fear of change—the emotional and physical freedom I can give you, even if it’s only for a night. You can’t be alone anymore. You’re aching for me. You need me inside you as bad as I need to be there.”
Helpless for the first time in years, mesmerized by his eyes and his words, she couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. Her trembling hands reached up and brushed the fall of midnight hair from his dark, rebel face. Maybe she would never know this man, but oh, she needed him tonight. “Isn’t it against all your spy rules?” The words came out raw, filled with the craving that burst to life inside her. The greed for all he was offering.
He turned his face and kissed her palm. Then, slowly, he ran his tongue over her heated skin, and her body’s need exploded. She swayed toward him, and he smiled against her palm. “I’m breaking so many rules with you, I’ve tossed the book,” he growled seductively. “That rule book was all that kept me from crossing the line a thousand times since I became a man. But I can’t remember what the rules are anymore. All I know is I need you like hell.”
A strong man does not need to blame a woman for his failures or his needs and weaknesses, encantador. Papa’s voice came to her, a shadow of the past, from one of his heart-to-heart talks with her. She almost smiled, remembering how he’d call her encantador, a little fairy who enchanted him. He does not need to hit her, or hide behind her when things go wrong. Trust a man who shoulders his own faults. Lean on him when you need strength, for he will need you, too.
Until now she had never met a man who had fulfilled Papa’s standards. Until McCall, who didn’t blame her for his need for her, or even for breaking his rules, which could land him out of his spy group on his bad-boy ass. He took it on himself. He had lost control over her, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it.
His arms held her up when she fell into him. She leaned into his chest, her head on his shoulder. She breathed in his skin, his need, his heat, his fire and innate strength, knowing he wouldn’t let her fall tonight.
“Say it, Beth.” Jagged and hot with hunger, his voice rasped into the sensitive skin behind her ear. “If you say nothing else, tell me you need me like hell, too—at least tonight.”
But she couldn’t make the words come, and she was too far gone to care why. Her hands tangled in his hair and pulled his mouth down to meet hers.
Was there a word to describe what McCall made her feel? God help her, his touch made her drown in need until she had to taste him, inhale him, shed his clothes and hers, and be with him, skin to skin. Whatever this was, she felt dreaming and awake at once, in despair and in bliss, wanting to die and more alive than she’d ever been. And craving, craving…
You need me inside you as bad as I need to be there.
“Yes, yes,” she whispered as he grabbed her by the waist and hoisted her onto the kitchen bench. He nipped at her throat with his teeth; his hands left her waist to fill his palms with her breasts. His thumbs found achingly hard nipples, and rubbed them with exquisite tenderness. And oh, the weakness of anguished desire filled her, body and soul, aching, pounding for release…
“Wrap your legs around me,” he uttered hoarsely. “Do it, Beth. Show me you’re as hot for me as I am for you.”
She gasped at his blunt words—nothing pretty or tender or sophisticated for McCall—but they flicked a switch in her femininity she’d never known existed. More aroused than she’d ever been, she hooked her feet over his butt, her thighs around his hips, dragging him to her…skin to skin, hardness to her soft, hot dampness, if only these clothes weren’t on…
She moved against him, moaning. Filling fingers and palms with that dark, muscled skin. Impatient, she tore at his shirt, pulling it away until she could see him, feel him. Gorgeous, so unutterably male, burning-hot and dangerous, so brilliantly alive and blatantly masculine, he terrified her, drew her irresistibly.
Come to hell, baby…
He ground against her, making a low animal sound of satisfaction when her body replied in kind. He flipped her T-shirt to the floor. “Beautiful,” he mumbled between scorching kisses and a touch burning her alive and making her throat ache with the need to drag him to bed, take his body, right here and now. “Let go, Beth…yes, baby, that’s it, let go…”
She couldn’t outrun this desire, so she threw it on the fire he’d made between them, shuddering in the dark power of his words and touch, her mind and body screaming out a primitive chant, more, more, more. She barely knew what she did as she ripped, tore, dragged and drank him in.
McCall was no polite lover—he was a barbarian who would take her and give it all back again with that hard, savage want. Feeling raw and u
ntamed, burning alive and aching, she wanted to let go—to be a bad girl for once. She wanted to be wild, to be the one to take him, to throw him on the floor, straddle him and ride him. To stake her claim on him, and oh, McCall would let her own him, chain him body and soul tonight—
What am I doing? Danny’s father is coming closer by the hour…
“No!” She jerked back, shocked by her own wanton desire, by what he made her feel—by what he could make her forget. “I don’t—I can’t do this. Please go now!”
Expecting an argument, he stunned her again by moving away, but he didn’t go far. He stood one pace back, folding his arms over his tight-muscled chest, still panting and flushed and hard. Half-naked, with his jeans unzipped—had she done that?—he watched her through that wild fall of dark, mussed hair, making no effort to hide his aroused state.
But why should he? He knows it’s no different for me.
But McCall didn’t look down at her half-undressed body, and she felt illogically threatened by his control, even by the respect for her she sensed in his self-command. He knew he didn’t have to say a word. He could make her want to get it on with him, have wild, untamed sex right here on the bench, because the scratching of this heated itch they had for each other couldn’t be called making love—with a single touch. But he gave her the choice. This man, who could have it all from her without a word, was waiting, giving her the dignity to choose her way and time. If she wanted him she’d have to come to him, walk straight into his dark, scorching-hot fire…
And oh, she felt so cold without his touch.
He turned to the bench, took the half-drunk mugs of now-cold chocolate and emptied them down the sink. He bent to the floor, tossed over her T-shirt and pulled on the tattered remains of his shirt, pulled his sweater on, zipped up his jeans.
She only just held in the cry of protest.
Only when they were both dressed did he turn to her, his eyes intense in raw truth. “I won’t be far. I’ll be watching.”
Unable to control it, she shuddered.
“I loved your curls. I loved touching them.” Slowly he reached out and touched her hair. A possessive gesture by a man who thought he was in control.
Control.
The illusive vision of budding trust vanished like a mist over the Bay below. She dropped from the bench—even just sitting on it seemed shockingly intimate to her now. She tried to make her face and eyes flat, though her lips and body still throbbed molten-hot from his touch. “This is my natural hair, McCall. You have the wrong woman.”
“Tell me the truth, Delia,” he whispered, and it sounded to her like a bomb ticking—and the explosion was the truth. And though he might get a promotion or commendation from it, the real consequences would only come to her and to Danny.
Yes, the term collateral damage seemed all too real now. And she might have to face the words in Danny’s dying eyes….
“Delia again. A pretty name,” she remarked, calm and cold. “You seem to be fixated on it—or on the woman who owns it. But she’s dead, McCall. You say you want the truth, then look at it yourself. Delia de Souza died in a car crash years ago. You’re chasing a ghost.” Hating herself for the shadowy world of half lies she had to tell to survive, she told him as much truth as she could. “I’ve had to deal with too much obsession in my life because I look like her. I’m already trying to save my son from a man who’s violent and unbalanced when it comes to us—do I deserve another one?” She sighed and shrugged, palms up, telling him the truth. “I’ve never met this Falcone person in my life. Accept it—I am not the supermodel who married that man, and gave birth to his child.” Tired of the intricate, stiletto-sharp dance over a ravine as dangerous as the one that had caused Ana’s death, she said wearily, “And if that was all you ever wanted from me, don’t bother coming back. I’m tired of being a Delia substitute.”
The heat and need she’d felt moments before snapped off like a broken light switch. He was all business now, cold and ruthless and dark as sin. “We got the original birth records for your year. The only Elizabeth Anne Silver in New Zealand is fifty-four. She lives five hundred miles away in Christ-church. And no Daniel Silver was born in New Zealand seven years ago, or either year around it.” He threw the words in her face like a curveball.
She gave him a quick, bland smile. “I guess my mum and dad forgot to register my birth, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to register Danny legally, with his father after us. The facts you have don’t make me your girlfriend.”
“Maybe not, but it does make you and Danny both illegal immigrants.” He folded his arms across his chest. “You aren’t on the naturalized list, either.”
She shrugged. “So arrest me, and take me to your leader. I feel it’s only fair to warn you, you won’t find a thing to prove your theories as to my identity, and you won’t see any of this so-called evidence I’m supposed to have, no matter how long or hard you search for it.”
He sighed as if he had the weight of the world already on his shoulders, and she’d just added to it. “You know I’ve given you enough classified information to destroy me tonight, and we both know that you know where to use it.” His voice was quiet and yet terribly harsh, as if she’d been the one to betray him.
She shrugged. “Our definitions of destruction are a little different. Your ‘destruction’ is your career. Mine is the life of an innocent child, and sacrificing my life or freedom to a violent and obsessed man…whether the man is Danny’s father or this Falcone person seems immaterial to me right now.”
“You’re right.” He withdrew inside himself; the blazing heat inside him vanished, and she shivered with sudden cold, and a tired kind of loneliness. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll lie down for you to walk on me. You either trust me by now or you don’t.”
Trust? With her baby’s life and freedom on the line? With the possibility of her ending up dead? Trust?
The fury filling her must have shown on her face. He nodded. “I guess that’s it, then.” His deep-forest gaze roamed her, face and body, and she shivered again, hot and needy. God forgive her for giving him the right to look at her with such intimacy—and God help her for the purely feminine reaction to everything about him, for wanting to drown in his dark, hot temptation.
Drawn to a man who would only betray her.
Judas with his silver. It seemed appropriate, since she’d been standing in a field of blood the past five years.
“I’ll be watching,” was all he said. Then he left.
Chapter 10
“M cCall! McCall!”
The scream froze him in his tracks, barely out the door. “What the—?” He turned back as the door autolocked behind him.
Damn! He bolted around the side and vaulted straight through the security-screened dining-room window, boots first, ripping the guts from the steel mesh and setting off the alarm system. “Beth!” he yelled, landing upright in a half tangle of ripped netting and mangled metal.
She skidded into the dining room from the hallway, her eyes wild. He heard her wounded cry through the shrieking alarm. “Somebody was here. He grabbed me, put a knife to my throat, but I slammed my elbow into his solar plexus and he dropped the knife and ran when I screamed your name,” she panted, her face white and terrified. “I think he escaped through the manhole. I heard sounds coming from the laundry.”
He had to recon the house, search for evidence; but he found himself holding her a nanosecond later. “You okay, Beth?” he asked gruffly, feeling the thumping of her heart against his chest as he smoothed her hair with the soothing touch reserved for the gentling of wild animals. For a man who had long ago accepted that he’d always be a loner, holding this woman in his arms felt so damn right…
She nodded against his chest. “You did this to me. You came here and my quiet, safe life blew up in my face.”
One of life’s grimmer ironies—he’d come to save her, but he’d merely landed her in greater danger. “I’ll make it right again,” he murmured against h
er ear. “I’m going to make life better for you and Danny. I swear it.”
The slight shaking against his body worried him, until he realized it was soft laughter, dry and edged with the hysteria of released fear. “You know, McCall, you should try to get that God complex of yours under control. You can’t fix my life, or anyone else’s. You’re only human.”
He looked at her with wry humor. “Believe me, I know I’m not God…sometimes I wonder if I rank as human.” The moment shattered with his words; he could feel her withdrawal. “I’ll check the house. If someone got in here, they have to have been an expert.”
One quick recon of the house confirmed it. And with her security system and his on top, this had to be the work of a pro. Hell, yeah. Through the roof and into the manhole—and back out again the same way—and all without setting off the intricate system he’d put in place for Beth’s protection.
How? He’d covered the whole perimeter, every contingency planned for. How the hell did they disable no less than three sets of four-way systems with him in the house?
Suspicion confirmed. This had to be the work of an expert sneak thief—or a Nighthawk who had intimate knowledge of the system he’d set up.
Why would an expert who’d done such elaborate work to take Beth run at the first sign of trouble? Why not take her?
Danny. They were after Danny.
He didn’t waste time with expletives. “Arm yourself. Lock this window, and everything else. Do it while I’m still in the perimeter. And stay away from the windows.” He vaulted back through the window and bolted for his high-tech, full-throttle motorbike. He punched in a number on his cell as he ran. “Break-in at subject’s house—attempted abduction. Professional job—suspect rogue is in the perimeter. Target’s son safe at another location. Will locate suspect and follow to be sure he’s not after the boy. I’m moving the entire team in ASAP—two to subject’s house, two to where the boy is.”
“Roger that, Flipper,” Ghost replied tersely. “We’ll leave Australia tonight, as soon as we get clearance and call in the full team and equipment. We’ll be in the vicinity by 0800.”
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