Dangerous Illusion

by Melissa James

  The late afternoon chatter of cockatoos and galahs taking flight and kookaburras finding their nests was raucous, but Beth barely noticed. She stayed crouched in front of him, so lost in thought she barely felt the cramping protest of her legs.

  What could she say? Horror filled her, but for him, for all he’d had to suffer with no one to help him, to bind his wounds or tell him they loved him no matter what.

  But it was too late for trite phrases. He’d seen the problem all along: there was a yawning gap between them, and not just in birth. All her life she’d been adored and flattered, so much so that she’d run free from the stifling atmosphere of being constantly in such high demand. She’d been worn out in spirit because everyone wanted a piece of her.

  Brendan probably would have given his left arm to have one person love or want him the way everyone had loved her. He’d probably give his life to have her pristine, clean background.

  No wonder he’d never told her any of this before, when they were together. She now understood why he didn’t feel good enough to lead a normal life. Even with all he’d done for the greater good in his years with the SEALs and the Nighthawks, all he saw in himself was a street fighter with a license to kill. Trained only to see the worst in himself and to try harder, reach higher, all he ever saw were his flaws. He had no idea what a wonderful, magnificent man he was…because when he looked in the mirror, all he could see was his father’s reflection.

  She knew how desperately he needed redemption, to forgive himself in a world that demanded perfection of him, but how could she help him find it? “W-why did you join the gang?”

  His face twisted in self-mockery. “Because I’m a jerk, like my dad. I didn’t care who my friends were. I found my level.”

  In agony, Beth closed her eyes. How could she make him see the man he was, the courageous, honorable man who’d risked his life for her when she hadn’t deserved his help, had come from the boy he’d been? “You said you joined before your dad died. He died when you were fourteen?” He nodded. “So you were that young when you joined the gang?”

  “Yeah,” he growled, letting his hair fall over his face. Hiding the self-hate. Lost in the eternal night of self-recrimination, living and reliving his mother’s words. “I was already a badass punk by then. On the road to damnation.”

  “But you got off that road. You finished school, went to college, joined the SEALs, and now the Nighthawks. Can’t you see it?” she cried when he shook his head. “You were a child. You didn’t hurt Casey, you tried to save her! Do you think I don’t have parts of my life I wish I could live over? You’ve spent the last twenty years proving who you really are. You’re a man of courage and honor. Rising above your past—”

  “Don’t tell me you understand.” McCall lifted a tired hand. “You can’t. How do I atone for the things I’ve done?”

  “Don’t tell me I don’t understand! I know what haunts you. It’s with me, too, day and night.”

  His head snapped up, and Beth raised a shaking hand to her mouth as she realized what she’d said. But she couldn’t take it back, and if she was honest with herself, she didn’t want to. “I watched someone die.” She let out a tiny sigh. “Someone who was too young and should have lived. I was also responsible for the death of a dear old man who helped me. Can I give them their lives back? I wish to God I could, but all I can do is thank them by keeping Danny and myself alive. I can’t forget the things I’ve done, but will sacrificing my life make my past go away? Will it make me a better person to constantly hide beneath my mistakes, making it an excuse not to move on? All either of us can do is what we’re already doing. Learn from the past, and do the best you can with your life from that point.” Finally the cramps in her legs became stabbing bursts of pain, and she slowly rose to her feet. “So how is your life different from mine, except by accident of birth?”

  Again he wouldn’t face her, but only shrugged. “I’d bet yours were accidents you couldn’t change, right?”

  “No,” Beth said quietly. “I have as much guilt to carry as you do. Maybe more.”

  He only shook his head, and Beth ached with tears unshed for the child led to believe that nobody could ever be worse than he was. Sad little Brendan, neglected and abandoned and abused, was still alive, tortured inside a man who wouldn’t allow him to find absolution. A boy desperately needing to belong somewhere had done some stupid things, made some bad decisions. The boy had left that world of his own free will, made something better of himself, yet the man he’d become refused to see it.

  After decades of self-hate, how could she show him the way to forgiveness when she barely knew the path herself?

  She bit her lip, knowing that if her anguish couldn’t make him soften, a simple reassurance wouldn’t go anywhere near what he needed to know. Her hands started to shake, and she didn’t know what to say, what to do. She’d given him all she had, and he still didn’t believe. “I want to be with you, Brendan.”

  “Don’t, Beth. Don’t make the sacrifice because I did what I had to do for you.” He reached for an untouched bottle of Scotch on the old-fashioned walnut cabinet beside the dining table he’d been working at. He now sounded only weary as he dropped his face into folded arms. “If you’re going to run again, damn it, take Danny and go while you can. I hate booze, but I promise to get too stinking drunk to chase you!”

  He was willing to give up his entire career to ensure her freedom—he’d said it all. He could be charged with treason—again—by letting her go…

  She no longer needed to ask why he was dismissed from the SEALs. No matter what reason was given on paper, Brendan McCall was a decent and honorable man, upholding every code the SEALs lived and worked by.

  Papa, you were wrong about Brendan…and your loving snobbery has caused him—and me—ten years of terror and pain.

  A sharp-edged rock seemed to be lodged in her throat, and all the tears coursing down her face did nothing to ease the pain. She’d run out of words.

  So don’t use words.

  A feathered kiss across the back of his neck was enough to get his attention. He lifted his face as slowly, gently, she trailed her fingers through his hair, bringing him up with her as she rose, turning him around to stand face to face. The next kiss was on his mouth, slow, deep, with all the love she felt for him. Her hands slid through his hair, bringing him closer, but he resisted her mouth and hands, holding back an intrinsic part of himself she craved to reach. It was as if he was waiting for some untold miracle…for words whose cadence she couldn’t hear.

  So she said the only words that came to mind, words touching the core of her own soul. “Can we get married properly when this is over? I’d love a real wedding in my local church, with my priest, standing before God and my friends. It might seem silly to you, but I’d like to be a bride walking down the aisle.”

  He drew back, his eyes searching hers, giving nothing. There weren’t just shutters up inside him, there were brick walls. “Even when it’s me you’re walking to?”

  The band around her heart tightened. “Only when it’s you. Don’t you get it?” she cried when he made no move, toward her or away. “I’m sorry I hurt you, but I was trying to save your life! If Danny’s father sent the man who broke into my house and we’d so much as kissed while we were under surveillance, he’d have had you killed for touching me! I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t bear standing at your grave when I—”

  “No.” The growl was quiet, but terribly harsh. He pulled away from her, tugging his sweater down over his aroused state. “Stop playing these stop-and-go games. I don’t know what the hell you want from me.”

  Beth shook her head, but it wouldn’t clear. He’d only accentuated his body, his ready state, by tugging down the sweater. Now a slow, delicious spin dominated her body, making her belly heat and starting a sweet pounding between her thighs. “I want you,” she whispered, reaching out to lift the sweater he’d pulled down. “Want you…”

  He froze for a moment before
he growled a particularly crude obscenity, yanking his clothes back down. “I’ve done a lot of low things in my life, but I haven’t stooped to getting lucky out of gratitude.”

  In the sweet whirling of her mind she heard the words, but couldn’t process them. With a tiny sound of distress, she reached for his sweater, but he grasped her wrists, his eyes blistering-hot with need and denial. “No,” she moaned. “No, please…”

  “Damn it, Beth, will you go? I can’t hold out much longer!” His hands still grasped her wrists, gentle but unbreakable. “We both know you’ll regret this in an hour.”

  Without warning, she started shivering. “C-cold, Brendan…I’m so c-cold,” she whispered. The words tumbled from her mouth. “Ten years of cold, without you. There’s this big empty space inside me, this pit of black ice and it hurts. Hold me, Brendan…make me warm again, like you used to when the world made me feel so small and frightened…”

  He froze. For long heartbeats, he didn’t breathe. When he spoke it was guttural, a bare growl of disbelief. “Delia?”

  Her fight was over. Secrecy had given way to the woman who only knew she needed this man so much, needed to help heal him so badly she couldn’t think beyond him. With simple relief, she nodded. “Did you get your car back in one piece after that night?” she whispered, trying to smile.

  A slow grin came to life, making his rugged, remote face warm and strong and beautiful. “Yeah, your Papa’s right-hand man got word to me about a month later that it was at my apartment.”

  She blinked and frowned. “A month? After the scandal broke, and you’d left the States? He knew where to find you?”

  He nodded, his smile slipping a little. “Yeah. I guess he did. I didn’t think about that until now.”

  So it was true. Papa had known all along that Brendan was innocent, and he hadn’t told her. You will be happier in your own world, with a man who knows where you come from, he’d said. Is that not obvious from your lack of judgment with this man?

  She didn’t want to think about it, not yet. One day she’d have to come to terms with what her father had done to her life, but this day, this moment, she could only think of one thing. “Hold me, Brendan. Touch me. The world’s been wrong too many years, since Papa threw you out of my life, and only you can make it right for me again.” She took a deep breath. “I need you—all of you. Everything that’s made you the man you are.”

  She felt the trembling in his fingers before he let her wrists fall, and at last he gathered her close, his hard warmth filling the chilled places inside her. He rested his cheek on her hair like he used to a lifetime ago, when she was innocent, and believed love was all that mattered. “I knew,” he rasped, “I knew this feeling in me couldn’t be wrong. I saw you and knew.”

  She nodded against his shoulder, her arms wrapped around his waist. The long-overdue sweetness of peace seeped into her heart and body with his touch, with the beauty of truth between them. “I hated lying to you, but after what Papa told me, and running from Robert Falcone—”

  The frown was evident in his voice. “Falcone—”

  The shudder worked its way through her. “Not now.” She moved closer to him, burrowing in. “Please, Brendan, not now. It’s been so long since I felt alive…you’ve haunted me for ten years like a ghost. You hovered around me, an unhealed wound that wouldn’t go away. I was so alone.” Her hands bunched up his sweater, and moved under it to find the heat of his flesh, caressing him in eagerness, in greed. She kissed his throat, a heated trail to his mouth. “I’ve missed touching you so much.” Her voice was a throaty rasp, flinty with need. “Touch me, Brendan. You said I could have you. You promised…”

  He lifted her face; his mouth met hers, hot and hard and needing, and she reveled in the hot-blooded glory of being with him again. “Be sure, Beth. Be very sure you want this,” he rasped against her mouth, “because if you have me, you’re mine, too. I’m a street fighter, baby, and I’ll take on the whole damn world to keep you. No man will ever come between us again.”

  Even as her blood sang hot in her veins in response to his raw words, she found herself looking at him in wonder. “You called me Beth.”

  A small, lopsided smile. “You said Delia was dead. You want to be Beth.”

  “Brendan, ah, Brendan…” She gave a cry of joy, and launched herself into his arms.

  Chapter 18

  “A h, Brendan, meu querido, meu amado…” A torrent of passionate words came bubbling from her in her native tongue, between fast, hot kisses all over his face. “We are going to make love—now—and you’ll be mine,” she uttered fiercely. “My man.” She lifted her chin and faced him defiantly. “You think you’re a jealous lover, McCall? Don’t try to tell me the names of the women you’ve been with the past ten years. I’ll scratch their eyes out.”

  He gave a low, husky chuckle, and nuzzled her neck. “I’ve got a tigress on my hands.”

  “Baby, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” she said huskily. She unzipped her boots, and kicked them off; her socks followed; then, one by one, she loosened the buttons of her cotton-knit shirt. She shrugged it from her shoulders until it fell behind her, revealing her shimmering creamy bra.

  “Beth.” His voice came out strangled, harsh with hunger, watching her strip for him with eyes of a forest fire, burning alive. He reached for her. “Baby…”

  She put a finger to her lips and shook her head, giving him the little mysterious smile of an aroused woman. “No, meu-amado.” She shimmied out of her button-up jeans and let them pool at her ankles, then kicked them away. A flick of her fingers, and her bra fell to the ground. Her panties followed, and she stood nude before him, proud of her golden, lithe model’s body for the first time in a decade when she saw by his face what she did to him. “Now. Put your hands on me. I want your hands on my body. I want you to do all those things you promised to do to me that night in my house.”

  He made a strangled sound. “I might find some things hard to do with my clothes on.”

  She smiled again, and led his hands to her breasts. Her head fell back in abandon, in bliss, when he caressed her intimately. “Yes,” she murmured in a soft purr. “When—when I can think again…ah, Brendan…”

  He lifted his mouth from where he’d just gently suckled at her, with a smile. “I love looking at you when you’re aroused…it turns me on so bad I can’t think,” he growled, touching her breast’s hardened peak with his tongue—and she writhed, crying out with the amazing unbearable beauty—

  He nipped gently at her ribs, holding her up when her knees began giving way. “Say my name again, Beth.” A guttural command as he kept sipping softly at her, nipping with low, sexual growls between, saying all the things he wanted to do to her, with her, all the things he wanted her to do to him.

  She gasped, soaring higher, burning brighter than she’d ever known before, even with him. “Ah…ah, Brendan…yes, yes…”

  “Take my clothes off, Beth. I want to be naked with you.”

  She almost collapsed in a hot puddle at his feet. “Yes, oh, yes,” she muttered, and in joy, finally pulled that sweater from his body. Hunter had become prey, the tigress tangling with her mate, her master. “Oh,” she gasped, drinking in the sight of him.

  “I’ve got a few scars from the job,” he said, as if it was an admission of guilt. “The big one is ugly.”

  “Scars? I—don’t—” was all she could say. She couldn’t see any imperfection; all she could see was Brendan, her Brendan, his glorious, dark, honed body half-naked and in anguish for her. Trembling hands reached out to touch the white-hot male beauty standing before her. “Oh…” She filled her hands, her senses, with him. Her mouth caressed the ridges and curves of his strong chest. Unbearable, shaking excitement grew in her as she caressed the hard ridges of his back, his waist, and kissed the flat planes of his belly, the pounding want so rich and beautiful it almost hurt—“Want,” she whispered. She made a tiny sound of frustration when she reached his jeans and couldn’t ki
ss more of him. “Want. Oh, want…” she muttered, her stupid tongue so filled with the ache inside her, she couldn’t make any other words come.

  Seconds later his jeans were gone, his underwear shed with them, and she groaned, looking at him, drinking in the rough-edged male beauty of him. “Want…oh, want…” She curved her hands around taut buttocks, kissed his legs, making guttural sounds of need and joy and discovery. Beautiful, glorious, perfect male…

  She cried out in protest when he lifted her to her feet again. “No, Brendan…no…”

  Then she wasn’t on her feet, she was up in his arms, on the way to the bedroom. “Baby, it’s now or I’m gonna lose it. Seeing you touch me like that—”

  “No…want…” Unable to say more, she buried her heated face in his neck.

  “I want, too,” he growled. “I want to bury myself so deep in you I’ll never find my way out.”

  She looked up at him, shocked and thrilled and intrigued by those crude, blunt, intensely sexual words. “P-please.”