by Lora Leigh
He sat at the table alone, a file in front of him, his expression bland despite the gleam of amusement in his brown eyes.
Angel looked around the room slowly before letting her gaze meet his once more.
“Bliss and her parents are currently in the basement with Duke,” he told her, his tone cool, unaffected. “There seems to be a glitch with one of the security monitors that they’re going over.”
She gave a little roll of her eyes. “I wonder who glitched the monitor,” she muttered, closing the door behind her before moving to the counter, never taking her eyes from him.
He smiled back at her with a hint of the glee it seemed he was known for.
She’d expected him to make an appearance, though she hadn’t expected to face him without Duke present, she realized.
“You can let them know you’re back if you like.” He nodded to the hall that led to the basement door. “I’m sure all of them would be properly horrified to realize you’re here alone with me.”
She was properly horrified herself.
“Do I need a chaperone?” she asked him instead, one hand resting on the hilt of her knife as she faced him.
Satisfaction gleamed in his eyes.
This sucked, but dammit, she should have expected it. Timothy Cranston wouldn’t have let her presence there pass without interrogating her himself.
He sat back in his chair and regarded her silently. This man who had trained her mother in military intelligence, had ordered her to Iraq then pulled her into DHS with him, didn’t trust her and he damned sure wouldn’t take anyone’s word on her identity.
“It was my department that did the DNA tests on little Jenny.” He surprised her with the flash of regret and pain in his voice. “I’m sorry for that. I dropped the ball when I didn’t keep Chaya’s sister in my periphery. I used to be sharper than that.”
She remained silent, uncertain of what he expected from her. Hell, she didn’t know what to expect of herself at the moment. She was wary of this little man, his reputation and his influence over Chaya. He could convince the other woman to send her away, to refuse to let her protect Bliss. Angel knew she couldn’t bear that.
“Nothing to say?” he asked then, his head tilting quizzically as he watched her.
“About what? How sharp you used to be? I imagine you had to blink sometime.” She shrugged, trying to restrain the smart-ass she knew she could be.
He stared back at her somberly. “It was the wrong time to blink.”
Angel glanced away from the sense of despair that flashed across his expression. It might have been the wrong time to blink, she thought, but the man was human, wasn’t he? Despite the stories she’d heard about him, she rather doubted he was somehow paranormal.
“Well, it was lovely to meet you.” She forced a smile to her lips and took a step toward the hall. “If you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Are you here to somehow make Chaya pay for a past she wasn’t responsible for?” His question stopped her cold. “Because if you are, then we’re simply not going to get along, girl. . . .”
“Don’t call me ‘girl’!” She turned on him, glaring, fighting against the emotions and the anger she was trying so desperately to keep contained.
Didn’t they understand? She didn’t want to hurt Chaya; she didn’t want to see Bliss hurt. She just wanted to keep another sister from dying, to keep from losing someone else she loved.
A frown creased his brow as those penetrating brown eyes stared back at her, seeing too much, she feared, and perhaps not enough.
“And don’t look at me like I’m a bug under a damned microscope either,” she demanded, fists clenching at her sides. “I don’t need your approval of me and I damned sure don’t need you judging me. I’m here to make certain Bliss is safe. No more. No less.”
Make Chaya pay for the past? She didn’t want to make Chaya pay for anything. She’d wanted her mother to come for her and Jenny. She’d wanted to go home and be safe again. When she’d lost all hope of that, she’d just wanted to forget. And that was exactly what she’d done for far too many years. She’d just forgotten.
“And what about your mother?” he demanded.
“What about her?” She wished to hell everyone would stop with the “her mother” crap. She was tired of hearing it, tired of having it thrown in her face as though the past were somehow her fault. “What the hell is your problem anyway and how am I suddenly any of your business? Mister, you need to get a damned life and stay out of others’ business.”
Men like him should be locked up somewhere.
“You refuse to acknowledge her,” he accused her then. “You’re breaking her heart.”
“Oh God, give me a motherf—” She bit off the word, breathed in deep, and tried again. “Just stop, okay? This is none of your business. I’m none of your business. Once this is over, I’ll be gone. . . .”
He laughed at that.
Angel clamped her lips closed, her breathing harsh as she fought the cauldron of emotions she didn’t want to let free.
Like Pandora’s box, once that door was opened, it would never close again, she feared.
“You really think you’ll just disappear on her, and the Mackays will give you a cheerful wave good-bye?” The smile on his face was frighteningly knowing. “Girl, Duke will be the least of your problems if you try that one. Natches will surround you with so much protection you won’t be able to breathe without smelling a Mackay invading your personal space.”
Yeah, she was ready to put her faith in that one. Natches was a true family man, she’d give him that, but she wasn’t his daughter; she was just the grown-up child his wife hadn’t wanted. Once he realized that, he’d let her go easily enough.
It would hurt when Duke walked away, though, she knew that. When he wasn’t in her bed, wasn’t touching her, holding her . . . That one would cut deep. Deeper than she’d imagined until the night before.
“I don’t have time for this.” She tried again to extricate herself from the confrontation she could feel rising inside her. “And you don’t want me to make time for it. Because as intimidating as I’m sure you can be, mister, I can be a pure bitch on speed if you piss me off enough. And neither one of us needs that, right? We sure as hell don’t need Bliss or anyone else walking in on it, now do we? I for one would prefer not to take that chance.”
And she didn’t want to let the bitch out to play; she really didn’t. She’d put that person behind her years ago. That scared, broken young woman who couldn’t accept her past or find a future to look forward to. The drinking, cursing, and fights hadn’t quelled the fury; they had only made it worse.
“Yeah, you weren’t a nice person when you were younger,” he agreed. “Dirty little gutter fighter, weren’t you?”
It was the “dirty” that got her. Angel felt herself tense. The memory of how Chaya had looked at her the day Bliss was nearly abducted, as though she were something dirty, sliced through her defenses.
“Oh, I was,” she assured him before she could stop herself. “A real war-whore. Ask anyone.” She spread one hand out as though to encompass the room. “Sold myself to the highest bidder, I’ve been told. Anything else you need me to agree to, Mr. Cranston, or are we finished now?”
They had better be finished. She could feel herself unraveling, feel the memories of the past as well as the present rising to push against her determination to rein in the impulses that used to see her searching for a bottle of whiskey and a fistfight. And she’d been far too young for either. A child. A child whose mother had left her, deserted her, and forced her to learn to kill.
“How much would it cost a person to convince you to put aside the war-whore and become a daughter for a change?”
Angel felt the breath slam from her lungs, felt an agony so deep, so white-hot, it instantly seared her insides with blistering pain. Her throat tight
ened until she wondered if she was going to choke on the emotions spilling through her, threatening to break her.
“Good-bye, Mr. Cranston. . . .” She moved for the hall and tried to escape.
“I’ll pay it. A hundred thousand? Two?” He rose from the chair, watching her with cool interest, his expression unconcerned, uncaring.
She turned back to him slowly, pain shredding her insides as she faced this too-perceptive, too-cunning little old man. “I held my sister in my arms as she died. Her blood stained my hands, and her screams live in my nightmares. I walked the streets of Baghdad that night,” she whispered. “And I cried for my mother. I was a daughter then. Now I’m just the war-whore,” she sneered. “And you can’t come up with enough money to buy me for anything. Or anyone. What you can do is fucking go to hell and leave me alone before you really piss me off.”
She didn’t move for the hall again. She turned back to the door and, jerking it open, escaped outside, where the remembered scent of betrayal and blood wasn’t nearly so thick, so wretched. Where she could breathe without the need for more than her mother had wanted to give her, more than Duke could give her, tormenting her soul.
• • •
Duke stepped into the kitchen slowly, aware of Natches and Chaya behind him, thanking God they’d found a way to convince Bliss to remain downstairs when Natches had seen Timothy and Angel in the kitchen on the security monitor. The fact that the two were involved in a confrontation hadn’t been missed by any of them.
“If she doesn’t kill you first, I’m going to,” Duke warned the older man as he took his seat slowly, his expression marked with grief.
“Piss a woman off and she’ll reveal far more than she would otherwise,” Timothy said, the low tone emphasized by the lined weariness of his expression. “God.” He wiped his hands down his face before he shook his head. A tight, sharp movement, as though he was trying to shake what she’d said from his memories. “I read the report. I saw the hell she lived in. Seeing it in her eyes . . .” He broke off and breathed in deeply. “She doesn’t hate.” He stared back at Chaya now. “She hurts. And she’s terrified of hurting more.”
“Timothy, you’re a menace,” Chaya bit out between clenched teeth, the anger in her expression in no way matching the anger Duke felt roiling through her. “A goddamned menace.”
• • •
Duke wondered if he should have pushed Angel as hard as he had since bringing her to Natches and Chaya’s home. The shadows in her eyes were darker and her expression more solemn than he’d ever seen it. The days spent treading warily around her mother and holding in the anger he knew burned inside her were killing her. Hence the reason he’d tried to push her in Chaya’s direction. What Timothy had done was strip her to the bone, though, he realized that evening.
Angel wasn’t one to restrain the anger. Other emotions, yes, but the anger she tended to give free rein. It was the only thing men understood, she’d once snapped when Tracker had dared to call her down for it.
So it was more than a little surprising that she’d not just restrained it, but managed to hide it from everyone in the house, except him, after Timothy left.
He knew her. He knew her better than he’d once realized. He knew what the stormy gray of her eyes meant, and the emotions threatening to swamp her when the color softened, lightening to that of a dove’s wing.
Today, though, the color was neither that of a storm cloud nor that of a dove’s wing. Her eyes were an in-between color that warned him she was hurting inside and had no idea if she was angry over it or not.
Standing in the doorway after dinner, he watched her on the patio as she lifted the bottle of expensive Irish whiskey to her lips and sipped at it. She rarely bothered with a glass and she hadn’t drunk enough to do more than relax in over three years.
She’d showered, changed into one of his shirts. Her pretty, tanned legs shimmered beneath the tails of the garment, several buttons still undone, the edges falling away from her legs. The dark gray shirt emphasized her peach-toned flesh and delicate build and clearly showed the bandage on her leg that he had yet to ask her about.
A knife wound, Tracker had told him when he called, demanding to know what she’d done to herself. A bastard determined to kill the little girl he’d abducted had taken exception to Angel’s determined efforts to keep him from his goal. Angel’s prowess with a knife was exceptional, but she had the girl to worry about and she’d been distracted. His knife had buried in her thigh even as she’d cut his throat.
Tracker had sewn the wound up and he was a damned fine medic, but nowhere near as good as Ethan.
The leg didn’t seem to be giving her problems, so he hadn’t called Ethan to the house. Yet.
For the past five years, Angel had been a magnet for near-fatal wounds. She’d nearly died more than once and Ethan swore she had a death wish.
She lifted the bottle to her lips and tipped her head back, taking another drink of the whiskey.
His shaft throbbed, so engorged with lust it was pathetic. There was just something about watching Angel enjoy that whiskey that made him hard as hell. Made him want to grab her to him and ride her through the night.
Tonight, the drink was being enjoyed along with one of the thin, fragrant cigarros her foster grandfather hand-rolled and doled out with miserly impatience. Sprawled back in the cushioned swing suspended from the crossbeam roof of the enclosed patio, one leg bent, the other stretched out, eyes closed, she gave the appearance of complete immersion in the liquor and tobacco.
He knew her, though. She was strung as tight as Uncle Ray’s banjo and ready to explode into action.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked softly.
Leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest, he wondered how she managed to keep all those emotions so tightly contained all the time.
Tonight, they were beating at her, though, and he knew it. It was the knowledge that the quieter Angel became, and the more somber her expression, the greater her inner turmoil. Being in the house with her mother, feeling that Chaya hadn’t wanted her as a child and didn’t want her now as an adult, was breaking something inside her.
And that was killing him as well.
“Nothing to talk about,” she mumbled, never shifting position or opening her eyes. “Besides, talking to you just makes me crazy.”
“That’s why you’re doing something you only do when you’re upset? Because you’re not upset?” He didn’t bother to hide the mockery in his tone. “Come on, baby, I know you better.”
The tension increased at the statement.
“Yes, you do.” Her eyes opened, the gleam of anger unhidden as she focused on him. “Because you spent five years spying on me.”
He chuckled at the accusation. “I’m an investigator, that’s what I do. But Natches really wasn’t too serious about it until you showed up in Somerset again nearly two years ago. I didn’t have enough info to give him and I wasn’t going to give him fairy tales. Or hurt you worse than I knew you already hurt.”
Yeah, he had known. The nightmares the night they’d pulled her from the debris of that hospital had bred the suspicion, but he was just supposed to ensure the team wasn’t a threat to the Mackays, not dig into their pasts. And for the first time, he hadn’t wanted to dig.
There had been no escaping the need, though. That was why he and Ethan had joined the team, why they’d gathered the information needed to start peeling back the layers of a woman that some of the hardest men Duke knew hesitated to confront.
“I wanted to kill you when I learned you were a Mackay,” she whispered before lifting that bottle to her lips again. “And I wanted to kill Cranston this morning.”
He didn’t reply; he just watched her, knowing better. She hadn’t wanted to kill either of them. She’d been hurting too bad at the time and trying too hard to figure out why it hurt.
“You should have known it was coming.” He watched her face, saw the knowledge in it, and knew she’d been aware she was living on borrowed time, so to speak. She’d known it was only a matter of time before she’d have to face Chaya and all the baggage that came with it.
“I was always careful.” She stared up at the crossbeams over her head for a long moment. “We stayed out of Kentucky and away from the Mackays. We made sure our paths never crossed with Natches and Chaya.”
He nodded at that. “And that was damned suspicious. Suspicious enough that when Rowdy first heard how diligent Tracker was in his efforts, he became very curious and asked Natches about it. That was all it took. When he caught you in town that same summer, Natches got real curious.”
That was literally all it took. When Natches became real curious, he tended to stick his nose in real deep.
Or Duke’s nose, whichever the case may be.
“You couldn’t keep hiding, Angel,” he reminded her softly as she put out the cigarro in the small ashtray on the table beside her. “It was catching up with you, if only emotionally.”
He’d become just as ensnared by her, though.
She rose slowly to her feet. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do,” she warned him, eyes narrowing on him as he dropped his arms and straightened from his relaxed stance. “You want to believe you do, but you don’t.”
But he did. He knew her even better than she knew herself.
The challenge in her gaze and in her tone wasn’t to be discounted, though. It was a dare, a dark need to pour all that pain and anger, hunger and need into something more than the bottle, the night, and her own wounded heart.
“Don’t I?” He grinned, letting her know he’d take that challenge any day. “Baby,” he crooned, “I know you so well it terrifies you.”
He knew her so well he could feel her pain, and yet she was still just as much a mystery to him as ever. Hell, it terrified him.